November 4, 2014 · 11:25 pm

Fitzrovia Radio Hour presents DRACULA – Mercury, Colchester

BRAM AT THE BBC: A FRIVOLOUS FORTIES FRIGHTENER

 

 

Ah, happy memories! As an unfledged BBC techie in the ‘70s, my favourite job was “Spot Effects” in radio drama studios: a technique then still requiring a visit to the huge Spot FX Store to sign for tin thunder-sheets, rattles, and Heath Robinson contraptions with titles like “No.3 Creak” and “Rustic latch”. I tramped in gravel-pits, scrunched up old tape to make “rustling forest floor, autumn”, and if it was a whodunnit might get to stab a cabbage and throw a sack to the floor while a member of the BBC Drama Rep cried “Ooof!”. My finest hour was when a director suddenly called “Libby daaarling, can we HEAR the Alsatian running downstairs?” and I achieved this with fingernails scrabbling claw-like on planks. I always wanted to have a go at “whimpering dog” or “gurgling baby”, but that counted as Professional Acting, and was generally supplied by a jolly lady from the rep called Olwen.

 

 
It is this world which the Fitzrovia Radio Hour company took to their nostalgic bosom, camping it up beautifully in shows recreating 1940’s radio drama (unlike ours it was done live, with the cast themselves often doing the props). Contemplating a piano-organ, a microphone and a tableful of apparently random junk, we are the studio audience as our heroes attempt Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The twist in this case is that the innocent BBC has cast a real Romanian aristocrat for verisimilitude, David Benson as Count Alucard . And he is, of course, a real vampire . You can tell by the cloak, Benson’s joyfully extreme coarse-acting mannerisms, and the fact that unlike the others he doesn’t clutch a script. Around him, reading their roles and bustling with props, are the announcer/van Helsing (Dan Starkey), the matinee idol Harker (a smooth towering Jon Edgley Bond) and the two women: Fiona Sheehan as Meena and other ingenues has a lovely cut-glass delivery which makes the word “Lucy” into “Lewsee”; and a hilarious Joanna Wake is the doddering veteran thespienne in a feathered toque who has worked for the BBC since it was founded. She plays not only Lucy but others including a gloriously overdone “Cockney Paper Boy”. They all do wolves too, when necessary.

 

 
Cal McCrystal directs this most ambitious of Fitzrovia’s productions, now planning to tour, and this sharpens it no end: he specializes in physical comedy and supervised that aspect of Hytner’s One Man Two Guvnors. It shows: visual jokes come thick and fast, nicely driven by the irritable unspoken relationships between the cast (they never speak off-script), and by the melon-stabbing, footstep-crunching, Marigold-glove flapping, orange-sucking, celery-crunching, flowerpot-as-sarcophagus-lid manoeuvres . These are constantly, frantically done in the corner by anyone not speaking. Wake’s struggle with the funeral bell chime is a joy. And there is a comic innocence in the evening dress and crisp 1940’s diction (“Braahm Stoker’s tale of tirror”), and in cloudy visions of Alvar Liddell encountering the vampire beyond the studio glass. The Old BBC-ness of it makes a lovely counterpoint to the absurdity of the whole exercise and the developing disaster. Proper, silly, polished pleasure.

 
box office 01206 573948 http://www.mercurytheatre.co.uk
to 15 Nov

rating: four   4 Meece Rating

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October 31, 2014 · 9:41 pm

FIRST EPISODE Jermyn Street Theatre SW1

THE WOMEN AND THE BOYS: YOUNG RATTIGAN BEGINS…

 

 

There’s a rugby ball and a bottle of Oxford Ale, clothbound law books, pipes, a cricket bat, 1930’s clutter. There are tweeds and cricket sweaters and waistcoats and immaculate whites. And it’s not entirely frivolous to start with design and costumes (Neil Irish and Emily Stuart): for that lovingly detailed attention to a particular period and place reflects the care and significance lavished on this first revival of Terence Rattigan’s first play.

 

 

Its milieu is important: an undergraduate shared house in Oxford, a male world where best friends Tony and David (Gavin Fowler and Philip Labey) are theatre-minded, social confident pups, sharing with the sporty Philip and the nerdy, bespectacled, prim Bertie. A butler tends their needs, but Proctors and “Bulldogs” police their social lives, making guests leave at midnight and banning them from lustful visits for “Female companionship” at the King’s Head. In those days (indeed, right up to my own late 1960’s when Burton and Taylor dropped in) OUDS plays had the clout to draw down not only national critics but professional female stars: Peggy Ashcroft came to play Juliet. In this play it is the glamorous Margot, recruited as Cleopatra against the youthful director Tony’s Antony. She is given pitch-perfect actressy charm by Caroline Langrishe until – equally perfectly – she stumbles into the emotional pit and becomes, vividly, the ancestress of Rattigan’s great portraits of middle-aged women shipwrecked by wrong love: Alma Rattenbury, Hester Collyer, Millie Crocker-Harris.

 

 

Rattigan was only 22, gave a co-writing credit to Philip Heimann his friend (model, probably for the characters’ casual love lives) and he did not include it in his Collected Plays. Probably thought it juvenilia, not to be remembered. But goodness, it’s Rattigan all the way: a first strike at the great themes of his heyday, and not least evidence of his heartbreaking ability – astonishingly young – to write strong woman characters. But youthful high spirits will win through, and until its rueful darkening in the final act, it’s a fine comedy, with real student rumbustiousness (which director Tom Littler amusingly uses to create some dancing, larking scene-changes).
There’s a wonderful turn by Molly Hanson as a dim but amiably willing flapper passed between the young men with a shrug, and a fearlessly hilarious, showstopping portrait from Adam Buchanan of the prim, naive geek Bertie, with his feeble moustache and round specs.

 

 

Bertie, indeed, is a very good joke in himself. For the story has Tony and Margo becoming emotionally entangled, despite the twenty-year age difference, with what she exasperatedly calls “you screaming brawling children” and the sardonic David, with homosocial if not actually carnal jealousy, possessively resents his friend’s involvement. It sails near the wind: the Lord Chamberlain insisted on changes of language, the Public Morality Council found it “unpleasant and immoral” and one critic huffed “I cannot commend the morals of the piece, which shows a number of undergraduates a little too preoccupied with sex”. Thus the joke is that Bertie – in a series of wonderful moments when he talks up virginity and cricketing team-spirit and tries to warn the all-too-knowing Joan about the “danger” she is in if she gets kissed – is in himself an embodiment of the censors, and of all that inter-war panic about young people getting out of control.

 

 

But the remarkable thing is that this young Rattigan, despite his obvious debt to Coward comedies, is drilling deep already into the dark. Into emotional male bonding, the alien strength and vulnerability of women, and the profound sadness of impossible love. This terrific, close-up, thoughtful production does him honour.

 

BOX OFFICE 020 7287 2875 to 22 Nov http://www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk

rating: four 4 Meece Rating

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October 30, 2014 · 9:40 am

THE WITCH OF EDMONTON – Swan, Stratford upon Avon

DORAN CALLS UP DEMONS 

 

 

Devils! Not Hallowe’enily cosy at all. Obscenely beguiling, tenebrous creatures of evil, they lurk inside all human nature and they know it. Mother Sawyer’s derisive familiar “Dog” makes that clear, in one of the central couplets of this rural horror-story set in the reeds and fogs of ancient Middlesex:
“Let not the world witches or devils condemn;
They follow us, and then we follow them!”

 
This finale to the RSC’s “Roaring Girls” season is the oddest of the lot, and by no means the least. Gregory Doran directs the 1621 collaboration between “William Rowley, Thomas Dekker, John Ford&c” (who knows how many spoons in this dark pudding? ) It is a play with two centres, one supernatural and one human melodrama. Mother Sawyer is an impoverished, brutalized old woman regarded locally as a witch (common at the time, not least because of King James I’s obsession with the supernatural). She isn’t one, but in her resentment decides she might as well call up the Devil and serve her persecutors right. It is a marvellous role for an aged woman and Eileen Atkins gives it a brilliant, stroppy, beaky, sardonic presence, with just sufficient pathos to hold sympathy and enough spite to command respect.

 
The demon she calls up is “Dog” – Jay Simpson near-naked in black body paint, red eyes and a truly horrible tail beneath jagged vertebrae: a starveling rabid cur of a creature who appals and fascinates (worryingly sexy). She sends him to lame horses and ruin the butter of her main foes, but is irritated that he can’t kill the more virtuous.

 

 

Because in theology, devils can’t. They work from the inside. So the main tale of the play concerns human misdeeds: seduction, deceit, brutality, hypocrisy, eventually murder. Ian Bonar is the serving-man Frank who has secretly married Winnifride, herself pregnant by her employer. To get a dowry and please his father (Geoffrey Freshwater, all bonhomous bourgeoisie) Frank bigamously marries Susan. His journey from fool to villain is played out with tense, conflicted realism. All the performances are, as you’d expect, fine,: but Faye Castelow as Susan, in her debut RSC season emanates a calm, luminous intelligence, defying the mantra that it is hard to play straightforward goodness. Her scenes with Frank – and her death – are electrifying.

 

 

The collision of the two plots, and the local hysteria that “maids who fall” and murderers are being influenced by the Witch, makes it sometimes weirdly and rather excitingly unclear as to what the authors wanted us to believe. This is no CRUCIBLE, because Mother Sawyer does really have a horrid familiar. On the other hand, all her pet Satan can actually do is to upset horses , play tricks and lure poor Cuddy the Morris-man into a bog (nice pondweed on Dafydd Llyr Thomas’ head, I hope he has some good selfies) . Otherwise Dog merely lurks, relishing the natural wickedness of the mortals. Though in a showstopping moment at the end of the longer first act, he takes over the morris-dancers’ fiddle and causes a mass-hysterical diabolic St Vitus’ dance (respect to Paul Englishby’s terrifying score) . What with the skeleton hobbyhorse and the crazed choreography it is definitely one of the must-see sights of this Swan season.

 

 

It’s odd, it’s dark, often funny, sometimes touching, and above all it feels like a deep insight into a past moral sensibility: a post-Reformation superstitious unease. The last ten minutes of remorse, forgiveness and wordy justice disengage us, making it retreat into that past again. Unworthily, briefly, you think “Greg Doran could have cut some of that!” . But no. You then reflect that the Royal Shakespeare Company is not just there to give us barnstorming nights out and move us to tears at half the West End prices (both of which it pleasingly often does). It is also there to display, fully and respectfully, our common ancestral past. Demons, moralists and all.

 

box office 0844 800 1110 to 29 Nov http://www.rsc.org.uk

RATING   four  4 Meece Rating

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October 29, 2014 · 12:13 am

’TIS PITY SHE’S A WHORE Wanamaker, Shakespeare’s Globe SE1

DARKNESS VISIBLE:  CANDLELIT HORRORS, ANCIENT SORROWS

 

 

By the end of three hours the gilt-reflecting candlelight of this little jewel-box playhouse is flickering over a birthday party littered with bloodstained corpses. Father, son, bridegroom – plus the offstage corpse whose heart has been waved around on a sword like a kebab. And that’s not counting the one murdered an hour earlier in a terrifying total blackout, his death agonies revealed by dark-lantern. Or the plotter who died a slow, agonizing and eloquent death by her own potion. The robed Cardinal, meanwhile, being Italian Catholic and therefore a convenient satirical villain for post-Reformation England, winds up the play speaking the words of the title and coolly ordering that the matter be hushed up (by sending another victim to be “burnt to ashes”) and confiscating that the dead family’s riches for the Church.

 

 

None of these magnificent disasters, however, are the reason John Ford’s dark drama spent a couple of centuries pretty much unperformed. Its real scandal (nicely emphasised this week by Transport for London banning the poster) is sexual. The tragedy is triggered by the incestuous love of Giovanni (Max Bennett, carrying it through convincingly from touchingly young and ardent to deranged) and his sister Annabella (Fiona Button gives her a spirited beauty and startlingly contemporary assertiveness).

 
That this will lead to disaster is clear from the first tense scene in which Giovanni confesses his desires to the Friar with “It is my fate that leads me on” and then lies to his sister – who is equally inclined – that he “asked counsel of the Holy Church” and got permission. And so, with tumbling naked grace, to bed. While other suitors and side-plotters pursue their ends the knotty text – beautifully handled with clarity and pace under director Michael Longhurst – is studded with fascinating philosophical efforts to justify this incest. Though more endearing is from Morag Siller, a delight as the bawdily robust maid Putana: “If a young wench feel the fit upon her, let her take anybody!”.

 

 
Indeed an admirable pleasure of this production is in its balancing of violence, darkness and horror with earthy comic absurdity. One of the most striking performances is from James Garnon – lately brilliant in the big Globe as Dr Scroggy – who plays an idiotic lad forced by his rich uncle to try for Annabella’s hand. He delivers it as Tim-nice-but-dim crossed with a less bright Boris Johnson: larky and tactless and hilarious until the extraordinarily touching moment when he falls in love with another girl entirely with a burstingly boyish “Lass, pretty lass, come!”. Yet this lovely bearer of comic relief is doomed too: murdered by mistake. The ultimate engine of his destruction, and of much else, is a slighted hellcat Hippolyta, given a terrifying energy (and some good rude twerking in disguise) by Noma Dumezweni.

 

 

The production is particularly fine when you consider how complicated and treble-stranded Ford’s plot is: newcomers, do not read the synopsis, it’ll only scare you. Onstage there is absolute clarity and accessibility not only in the speech, but in Alex Lowde’s skilful use of costume: tweakingly updated and carefully distinctive to character, whether Giovanni’s student-casual tights, Annabella’s anachronistically wispy dresses, or the slyly absurd, ultimately horrifying presence of gold party hats at the disastrous final banquet.

 

 

And there is the candlelight. I am a pushover for the Wanamaker’s rising and falling beeswax candelabras, the handheld candles throwing alarming shadows, and the ritual gradual dowsings. When the Friar describes hellfire to a desperate Annabella, around them like her hopes the flames die out one by one at the hands of dark servants. Brrrr.

 

Box office 020 7401 9919 to 7 Dec

rating: five  5 Meece Rating

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October 27, 2014 · 11:11 pm

BUT FIRST THIS… Watermill Theatre, Newbury

RADIO FOUR THE MUSICAL?   ABOUT TIME TOO

 
Radio 4 announcers tend to have a dry, contained sense of humour, honed by years in their lonely hutches listening to that most literate of networks, observing its idiosyncrasies and reading both news bulletins and programme introductions without ever betraying their secret opinions (you had to know the legendary Peter Donaldson for decades before you could detect the undertones of satire in his bland deep-brown announcements. Even then it was uncertain.)

 
So there is a real buzz in encountering, in this tiny adventurous producing-house, a comedy musical written by Kathy Clugston, one of those announcers. It has music and additional lyrics by Desmond O’Connor, and a spirit of mischievous affection shared utterly by her first-night audience . You knew she was preaching to the choir as soon as the defunct UK Theme, axed by Mark Damazer, began its Rule-Britannia chords before the start and everyone went “aaahhhh!”.

 
In moments we were into the first number, with John Humphrys and Jim Naughtie (Michael Fenton Stevens catching the Humph with uncanny accuracy and deadly humour) and Jonathan Dryden Taylor, who actually looks more like Peter Hobday but who got the monologuous questioning style bang on. And as the weatherman (Neil Ditt) and newsreader (Helena Blackman) sparred with authentic dawn ill-temper as the romantic juveniles, we learned the engine of the plot: that the Controller (Louise Plowright) was threatening dreadful cuts to the network, reducing the pips and abolishing Woman’s Hour and the Shipping Forecast.

 
To be honest, the first number and early minutes made me wonder whether it would sink beneath the weight of insider affection (though the wealth of groanworthy punning programme titles from an invisible Alice Arnold was fun from the start “The Classic serial will be – muesli”.). It is really more of a revue for R4 lovers, sending up musical-theatre itself and disguising a slightly too-fey plot with quick changes and daft beards. But Clugston’s strength is in big numbers, and some of them are lyrically brilliant. A trio led by Naughtie sings of a sneaky male addiction to Woman’s Hour; a marvellous interlude in the Pronunciation And Grammar Pedantry department hits many grudges about language (“What’s the use of saying utilize? And impact is not a verb!”) . It should be played on the real Radio 4 daily. Another showstopper is Humphrys’ confessing his secret love for scented candles, petting zoos and Michael Bublé.

 

There are flashes of real wickedness, not least the downfall of the evil Controller (Plowright storming the role) as she accepts the standard management punishment of being “moved to a higher position in aa different department”. So I was won right round. And in the style of the Shipping Forecast, whose fate provides a running theme , let’s just say:
General situation: Plot fair, occasionally rough. Scilly, gags advancing , becoming strong. Cast good becoming very good. Intermittent puns, poor becoming adorable. Over-Forties: very happy with occasional singalong. Outlook: possibly moving Westward. Good.

box office 01635 46044 to 8 nov http://www.watermill.org.uk

rating: –    3 Meece Rating ….oh all right, musicals mouse says four Musicals Mouse width fixed

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October 24, 2014 · 10:21 pm

DON Q – Old Fire Station, Oxford: pre-tour

FLINTLOCK STRIKES A SPARK – IN A LIBRARY, TOO…

 

 

Cervantes’ story gave us a word: quixotic. From politics to artistic enterprises, it defines all extravagantly romantic, chivalrous, visionary but impractical enterprises. A middle-aged man goes off, inspired by too many knightly romances, riding a skinny horse with his despairing squire Sancho Panza alongside. He seeks adventures to place him in the annals of great deeds, and always fails or is gulled. Next month Carlos Acosta will be dancing the tale at the Royal Opera House. Meanwhile here is the quirky foursome of Flintlock Theatre – artists in residence at the Oxford Playhouse – doing their own take on it.

 
Or, at least, on its spirit. Anna Glynn’s version, designed by Robin Colyer, is set in a library at closing time where four geeky, fawn-cardiganed figures – Jeremy Barlow, Francesca Binefa, Kate Colebrook and Samuel Davies – bustle ineffectually around, excited by being amid books and stories (the set is a nice stepladder and door) and perform various slightly too long balletic mimes (the first thing to say is that the show would be sharper and more fun at a straight 75 minutes, rather than running with an interval).

 
The meat of it, and the real interest, comes when they go into character and act out the story of an old man called Norman (Davies, playing it pretty manic throughout). He is confused, causes a scene in the library and is put in a kindly but dull secure home. Assisted by his friend Sam (Kate Colebrook, in an earflap hat and nicely down-to-earth manner) he escapes. Sam has to be his Sancho Panza, as Norman cobbles up a wonderful suit of armour from a tea-tray breastplate, colander helmet and oven-gloves as pauldrons. His steed Rosinante is Sam’s scooter.

 
Once the quest gets well under way it becomes both funny (quite a bit of interaction with the front rows, watch yourself) and oddly touching, as they conflate a modern pensioner’s dwindling sense of reality with Don Quixote’s desire for exotic and heroic adventure out of old books. The best moment is when he convinces himself he has met two hooded holy friars and must confess: they are teenage hoodies (Barlow and Binefa are splendid vocal shape-shifters), and the glow of their smartphone when they attempt a selfie with the old loon has him greeting the bright light as “a blessing!”. The ultimate encounter is with a burger-shop benefactor and with a damsel in distress: an immigrant care assistant at a bus stop (Binefa again) finally realizing that if they are to help the old boy and take him home, they must join in his fantasy. It feels, at that point, oddly serious.

 

http://www.flintlocktheatre.com Touring through 2015
rating three   3 Meece Rating

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October 24, 2014 · 12:50 am

MEMPHIS – Shaftesbury Theatre, WC2

“LIKE A SAD OLD MELODY, TEARS YOU UP AND SETS YOU FREE,  THAT’S HOW MEMPHIS SEEMS TO ME’

 
“Ain’t no daytime on Beale Street, only nighttime!’ Delroy’s joint is jumping, Felicia (a glorious Beverley Knight) belting it out at the microphone. Around them, dancers hurtle and dazzle. In walks Huey (Killian Donnelly), beautifully brash and geeky in a pork-pie hat. The dancing stops, Huey wonders why. “You notice anything different?” enquires Delroy sarcastically. Yep. Everyone else is this Memphis joint in 1951 is black. The only “White folks” who call are police requiring bribes.

 
And there, neat as you like, is the core and the point of this fabulous musical, fresh from Broadway and done with honour and huge heart by a British cast. Joe diPietro and composer David Bryan have imagined the moment in the early ‘50s when rock and roll was born, or “stolen”, for white kids to share and adapt the wealth of black r & b and gospel. Huey is a composite of several radio DJs who championed the music to the horror of white society: the story follows his passion for R& B – “the music of my soul!” and his star-crossed love for Felicia (in Tennessee “miscegenation” was still illegal). She, played with glorious vigour and pathos by Beverley Knight, is another composite of the early black divas. Huey gets his first radio job by literally breaking in to the studio, becomes a star, gets on TV, and perilously – ultimately disastrously – tangles with a social establishment which even “up North” in New York can’t accept mixing.

 

 

But oh, how the staid white folks of the ‘50s needed the new music! Some wonderful comic moments show tidily dressed shoppers and passers-by seduced by the energy, hips suddenly starting to wiggle free beneath tight repressed little suits (“Everybody wants to be black on a Saturday niiiight!”). Even Huey’s grumpy racist-Christian mother Gladys (Clare Machin, fresh from Pajama Game and hilarious as ever) undergoes a conversion, slyly assisted by their new financial prosperity. One visit to the gospel church she once shunned , and she is ready to “Testify!!”

 

 

There are individual great numbers, both high-energy and plaintive, and Sergio Trujillo’s choreography is breathtaking. But the joy of the show – kept moving with neat transitions by director Christopher Ashley – is in its belief that energy and music and youthful goodwill can win in the end, despite time and tears. There is comedy (racism is always absurd, as are radio studios, and Mark Roper’s Mr Simmons the WHBC boss is lovely). There are brief shocking brutalities. There is an immensely moving subplot involving Gator (Tyrone Huntley) whose father’s lynching left him mute from the age of five but who finds his voice at the crisis.

 

 

Altogether, the balance and line of the story work perfectly: on Broadway, I hear the end is more downbeat; here despite Huey’s professional downfall here the explosive joy is restored, if only in the music. Fair enough: “Say a prayer that change is a-coming” doesn’t imply that it’ll be quick.
And on a personal note, let me confirm that the stiff-backed sexual horror of “good white Christian folks” at music crossing the race border rings absolutely true. In my year in a South African convent in 1962, the nuns banned Elvis records because he sang and moved in a “black” way. Cliff Richard was allowed because he sang and moved in a “white” manner. True! So I danced out singing the last chorus “Listen to the beat, hear what’s in your soul, let it make you whole! Don’t let anyone steal your rock ’n roll!”. Even nuns.

 

 

box office 020 7379 5399 shaftesburyboxoffice@shaftesburytheatre.com
to 28 March

rating : five  5 Meece Rating

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October 21, 2014 · 12:00 am

OUR TOWN – Almeida, N1

A STUNNING SIMPLICITY, A HUMAN HEART

 

 

Only the dead see life clearly.  In the last strange simple minutes of this undramatic drama, half of Thornton Wilder’s citizens become their own speaking tombstones, drifting towards oblivion or eternity but roused for a moment by a new arrival’s travails . “Wasn’t Life awful?” says a voice. – “And wonderful”. chimes another.  I think a third dim voice assents: or it might be one of us, sitting round and among the action in the never-dimmed auditorium, drawn in to the humdrum wonderfulness of daily doings, marriage, work, failure, success and suicide, birthdays, bereavements. Life.

 
The 1938  play won a Pulitzer and broke convention: a bare floor, a couple of tables, quotidian jobs mimed, New Hampshire small-town life, hills, homes, horsepower and starlight at the start of he 20c expressed only in description by a wry, wandering stage manager; but enacted by a cast who in fragmented scenes under his direction relive routine, a wedding and a loss. David Cromer’s production – in which he is our affable onstage narrator and guide – ran in New York, but here the universality of it is underlined by the British cast with British accents. Some have cavilled at this, because of Wilders’ US idioms and references – the ‘I declare’, the ‘ma’am’s, baseball and the rest. But after a few minutes I found any awkwardness fading into complete acceptance of character and situation.

 
That is part of the play’s low-key brilliance, because in its slight two-hour two -interval span there are no situations which a more traditional dramatist would be bothered with. Just small – yet immense – quotidian happenings: family breakfasts, kids growing up, middle aged weary parents, awkward courtship, stifled yearnings to get out of the hometown mixed with love of it. For all its dated, anchored detail – in attitudes and mores from a century ago – it evokes Everytown, every street .

 
Which feels like a magic trick, or perhaps just one of those moments of piercing universal vision, when you startle yourself by seeing in a flash humanity poised in eternity, and  the littleness and immensity of life.  It feels unlikely that something so unshowy can achieve that:  even with one brief scenic coup de theatre five minutes from the end.   But it is remarkable; and so are the core performances. Cromer himself is assured, anchored, dryly funny and unselfconsciously sincere. He draws the same quality from his cast. especially Anna Francolini as Mrs Gibbs and Kate DIckie as Mrs Webb, and David Walmsley and Laura Elsworthy as the young wedded pair. Elsworthy especially  holds the final scene with mesmeric natural intensity.

 
box office 0207 359 4404 to To 29 november

Rating.  Four.  4 Meece Rating

Supported by Aspen , Barrow Street Theatre and Jean Doumanian

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October 17, 2014 · 9:33 am

THE TRIALS OF OSCAR WILDE Trafalgar 2, SW1

A NEW EYE ON AN OLD SADNESS: THE WILDE TRIAL RECREATED

 

This is fascinating: the playwright John O’Connor and Oscar Wilde’s grandson Merlin Holland mark the centenary of the great man’s two fatal court appearances by dramatizing some recently disinterred transcripts. There is a great deal of dense verbatim recreation, notably in the first hour when Wilde has – rashly – brought a libel case against the Marquess of Queensberry for that illiterate note accusing him of “posting as a somdomite (sic)” . When he loses and is arrested for the crime itself, the second hour reproduces what it can of the criminal trial.

 
So it shows Wilde in a newish light, at first fighting flippantly (with green carnation and flippant asides) for his reputation; then more soberly, broke and disgraced, his children’s very toys sold at auction, trying to keep at least his freedom. We hear his flamboyant defence of any artist to express himself in any damn way he likes, set against the prim prosecutor’s view of ‘normal’ and ‘balanced’ discourse.   And from time to time, we catch him on edge, uncertain, suddenly aware that this is going horribly wrong.

 
The exchanges raise wide issues: of artistic freedom, of defiant individuality – constantly he pleads his right to talk in “moods of paradox, of fun” – but also of Victorian society’s revulsion from his social mixing with the young and the louche: “feasting with panthers”. Why ply a mere valet with champagne? he is asked, and scores a rare point “What gentleman would stint his guests?”.

 
But it sours: exhaustingly (for Wilde) the barrister Carson reiterates not only lines from the stolen letters  – Bosie’s “slim gilt soul”, red rosepetal lips, etc, but also detailed paragraphs from The Picture of Dorian Gray. We hear the judge’s thundering absurdity about the “worst case he has ever tried” – this in an age of frequent murders and child prostitution – and the legal pomposities of “Acts of gross indecency, against the peace of our lady the Queen, her crown and dignity”. We cheer (but shudder, knowing the end) at Wildean ripostes like “Yes, I gave Alfonso a hat with a bright ribbon. But I was not responsible for the ribbon”. We respect the desperate lofty lines about pure and perfect Platonic love, but know that regarding the carnality he was pretty certainly lying on oath. Because he had to.

 

 

John Gorick plays Wilde: the right look, and an accomplished air of self-protective arrogance, but he does not quite have the ability to deepen and nuance the interpretation in this very difficult verbatim task, freeing himself only with the rare interpolations of Wilde’s letters and other writings. But maybe he should not attempt characterization too much: we are watching for history as much as for theatre. The other two players – Rupert Mason and William Kempsell – adroitly play barristers and various witnesses, Mason particularly good switching between Queensberry, Carson, a creepy comedian-cum-blackmailer, and a myopic hotel chambermaid.

 

 

It isn’t pure theatre, but has deserved its European tour, and fills an important place in the record of homosexual oppression and of one flawed, courageous, tormented and ill-starred genius.
box office 0844 871 7632 to 8 November     http://www.trafalgartransformed.com

Rating: three   3 Meece Rating

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October 17, 2014 · 9:26 am

EAST IS EAST – Trafalgar, SW1

COMEDY, BRUTALITY, UNCERTAINTY IN  A BYGONE SALFORD

 

 

There is a telling moment at the end of Sam Yates’ production of Ayub Khan Din’s portrait of a Pakistani Muslim family in ‘70s Salford. Abdul, the eldest son, after a series of tragicomic brawls and conflicts, resolves to take over control from the bullying patriarch, defend his English mother and ensure that none of his siblings need marry by order or live under duress. Then over the cramped, bricky railside terrace (brilliantly realized by Tom Scutt) we hear an aeroplane. Bringing in another generation of migrants, to face the same challenges and confusions.

 

 

The play, first staged by Tamasha and subsequently a West End hit and film, is largely autobiographical: and here Khan Din himself plays the role of “George” the tyrannical father, creating alarming – often violent – authenticity with roars of “Why I tell you my business, Mrs?” at his English-born wife Ella. She is Jane Horrocks, returning to the stage with a drop-dead, pitch-perfect portrayal of long-suffering pragmatism and steely, competent maternal backbone. One son (like the author) has run off to be a hairdresser and is deemed dead (“He’s not dead, he’s in Eccles!” snaps Ella). To the rest the message is “I am your father! I don’t have to listen! You should show respect!”. Despite the cowed obedience of his children working in the family chip-shop and obeying at home, he gets nastier still when roused by his sons’ unwillingness to be married off, assaulting Ella with“Next time you talk to me like that I kill you and burn all your bastard family while you sleep!”.

 

 
It is a more uncompromising performance than anyone not directly, physically and authorially involved would dare, but Ayub Khan Din manages to infuse it with glimpses of insecurity and desperation. He is struggling for the status of what he thinks is a proper Muslim father, while loving an English wife and living in a suspicious white neighbourhood; on top of which there is the cheerfully jelloid Auntie Annie, forever off to lay out another corpse, and a pack of children bored with mosque, indifferent to Pakistan, feeling English. George is isolated.

 

 
The young cast are a joy, with lovely ensemble rowdiness: Abdul the sober worrier (Amit Shah), Maneer (Darren Kuppan) who wants to be a good Muslim, rebellious Tariq (Ashley Kumar), Saleem the art student whose father still thinks he’s doing engineering at college, and a wonderful blinking, troubled performance by Michael Karim as Sajit, the one they forgot to circumcise until his teens, who refuses to emerge from his parka hood and hides from rows in the coalshed. Among them dances Meenah (Taj Atwal) the only daughter, larkily tomboy, disgusted by being forced into a sari for the visit of the richer Shahs. That scene is a classic of social embarrassment, brilliantly done by all and culminating inevitably in the horror of Saleem’s art project. But beneath all the comedy throbs the reality: that this family can’t last in its present form, and must either revert to something alien, ancient and un-English, or fracture and lose the precious bits: the love which however erratically flows between them.

 

 

It would be a shame to take it as mere social history, a Pakistani Taste of Honey. There are modern parallels and contrasts. Much of George’s panic is fed by news bulletins about the Indo-Pakistan conflict and massacres; today plenty of immigrant communities endure similar tortures from the nightly news. Reflect too that in the mid-90s few would foresee that rather than flowering into English freedoms, too many British Muslims clench, close in, radicalize. When George roars that his daughter wears skirts “like a prostitute” Ella exasperatedly says “It’s her school uniform!”. Never would they have foreseen the burqa on the streets, the niqab defiance in British schools. Or the honour killings. Or the grooming scandals fed on contempt for white girls. East is East feels , dammit, almost cosy now.

 
box office 0844 871 7632 to 8 November     http://www.trafalgartransformed.com

Rating: four   4 Meece Rating

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October 16, 2014 · 1:47 pm

LOVE’S LABOUR’S WON Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford

IN WHICH YOUR CRITIC FALLS IN LOVE WITH A BENEDICK AND A DOG-BOWL

 

 

This is actually the one we know as Much Ado About Nothing – though some nifty Shakespeareology suggests that it may have had the other title, usually thought of as a “lost” play. The doubling with Love’s Labour’s Lost (reviewed below, well worth catching them in order, and reading them in the right order might help too) was inspired by AD Gregory Doran’s theory that the witty Berowne and spirited Rosaline from LLL should get together in the end, like Benedick and Beatrice in Much Ado. Hence director Luscombe’s use of the same company, the same lovely Charlecote Park set, and (not least) the way that Nigel Hess’ fine score weaves through both, moving between Crown-Imperial heroics, subtle atmospherics, and sweetly sung ballads to pastiche Edwardian tunes.

 

 

The cross-casting is not all literal (you couldn’t turn Chris McCalphy’s magnificent monosyllabic Constable Dull into a yattering Dogberry, so Nick Haverson ramps up his hectic comedy still further , to the point of mania indeed, with high-speed pomposity, verbal confusion and an unforgettable tic of outrage. As we join them in 1918, as Charlecote Park is requisitioned by the returning army. David Horovitch, still pedantic and bufferish but less absurd, is now Leonato and gives the horrified father real power in the church scene; Michelle Terry is the striding, head-girlish, scornfully witty Beatrice, who like her more delicate cousin Hero (Flora Spencer-Longhurst) has been working as a VAD nurse. That, artfully, makes her air of cynical new toughness credible. And Edward Bennett, who was lively and fun enough as Berowne, now flowers into the most likeable, funniest and most genuinely touching Benedick since Charles Edwards’ fabulous Globe performance.

 

 

The Charlecote set comes even more into its own, as does the machinery. The stage has immense depths so that distant rooms glide forward, and far beneath the sliding floor unseen subterranean stagehands (take a bow) enable fine little rooms rooms to rise on that ever-surprising platform: a billiard-room, a boudoir , a bier, and most superbly poor Dogberry’s overcrowded scullery. It is serving as a police station, where Haverson tries to iron his shirt while interrogating, teapots get in everybody’s way, the washing-up is still in progress, and nobody can get out of the room because the towel-rail is jammed against the dishrack. Dogberry gets his foot stuck in a bowl marked DOG, which is particularly pleasing.

 

 

Once again, the anachronistic period setting serves the plot just fine: intrigues and jealousies are entirely credible in a regimental setting, all mess-dress and missed promotions. Sam Alexander is a sullenly malevolent Don John, Chris Nayak an over-willing Borachio (his remorseful moment near the end is more convincingly done than I’ve seen it, happy debut-season Mr Nayak). There’s real solemnity and horror in the church scene and the grieving; and broad, beautiful comedy in the eavesdropping. Especially the bit with Benedick and the giant Christmas tree. One of my more solemn colleagues felt that the near-electrocution moment was a bit over the top, but hey – some ideas are just too good to drop.

 
And that’s a moral which applies to the whole doubling, WW1-referring enterprise. So four each, but between them, they earn a fifth mouse.
box office 0844 800 1110 http://www.rsc.org.uk
(and the CD is now released, both plays)
Rating: four 4 Meece Rating
and a fifth director-mouse for  the double…  Director Mouse resized

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October 15, 2014 · 5:44 pm

LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST – Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford upon Avon

BEFORE THE DAWN OF WAR…THE LAST LARKS 

 
This is the young Shakespeare: making his way, dazzling with wordplay, confecting improbable japes and charades, laughing at absurd elders, revelling in what his Lord Berowne calls “the kingly state of youth”. And in this improbable but finally triumphant treatment, Christopher Luscombe hijacks this lesser play to create one of the merriest, saddest, most unexpected centenary tributes to the 1914 generation.

 
He sets it in 1914, in a Simon Higlett set which is parquet-’n-portrait perfect , an artful faux-brick reconstruction of the Elizabethan manor at Charlecote Park, near Stratford. Shakespeare’s plot – in which the King of Navarre and his nobles swear a pact to fast, study and avoid the company of women for a period – fits surprisingly well with languid, earnest flannelled young Edwardians: it was, after all, the era of public school austerities, reading-parties, and cold baths to quell lust. And the lads are a delight: Sam Alexander as the slightly preachy leader, his mates Longaville (William Belchambers) and earnest Dumaine (Tunji Kasim), with Edward Bennett as the doubter Berowne, who finally agrees to sign the pact. But the Princess of France and her three gorgeous ladies are nearby, so the chaps obviously fall in love with them, and try to do their wooing without the others knowing. Light relief and confusion is added by John Hodgkinson as a comedy Spaniard with language difficulties (ramped up mercilessly with lines about “Men of Piss” ) various servants, notably a barmily rustic Nick Haverson as Costard, an even more comedy policeman Dull (Chris McCalphy, who scores two rounds of applause all for himself on his RSC debut, once for an inexplicable ballet moment) .

 

 

And there’s a wickedly mocked schoolmaster and parson, joyfully the butts of that young Shakespeare: David Horovitch is a harrumphinly, pedantically wonderful Holofernes, and Thomas Wheatley gets a particular moment as the curate which, dammit, brought tears to my eyes.

 

 
The plot – think Downton Abbey rewritten by PG Wodehouse with some terrible Elizabethan puns and sudden great poetry – is mainly driven by the men, not least when they dress up as Cossacks and attempt a Russian dance. There’s an absurd charade led by the Spaniard, and in a fabulous rooftop-eavesdropping session in Jaeger dressing-gowns which culminates in Berowne threatening to throw poor Dumaine’s teddy over the parapet. But the women get their moments too, forming a kind of white-satin-clad Girl Gang to torment their four lovers: Leah Whitaker, Michelle Terry, Flora Spencer-Longhurst and Frances McNamee sometimes moving in synchrony, sometimes breaking away to offer moments of real emotion near the end.

 

 

Which is – and this is another reason it all fits so well with 1914 – a downbeat end. In the play, the Princess of France’s father dies and they must all delay their happy endings. In the theatre – well, you only need to put the four young men in khaki, and have the civilians left behind singing to Nigel Hess’ lovely score, and you’ve made the point with gentle, appropriate sorrow. Edwardian certainties and jokes, gone forever with the kingly state of youth. Never glad confident morning again.

 

 

box office 0844 800 1110 http://www.rsc.org.uk
(and the CD of speech and music is released: for this and its companion-piece, Love’s Labour’s Won, aka Much Ado. Whose review will follow tomorrow…)

Rating: four   4 Meece Rating

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October 14, 2014 · 11:18 pm

GYPSY Chichester Festival Theatre

EVERYTHING COMES UP ROSES FOR THIS ONE. OH YES.

 
It is not often in a big musical that you remember the silences: the pin-drop, tense waits. But then, Gypsy was no run-of-the-mill musical, even in the golden age. In most shows the moment when the thwarted, ambition-crazed stage mother Rose cries “Everyone needs something impossible to hope for” should make her a feelgood heroine, a follower of her star, or at least a sad victim. Not a deluded, irresistible engine of family destruction.

 
But in Jonathan Kent’s superb, tense, funny and melancholy production Imelda Staunton both grips us in her headlong pursuit of showbiz fame for her children, and shakes us in those few deep silences. Her alarming stillness as she reads the letter telling her that the favoured Baby June has escaped her grip makes more violent the explosion when ,like a heat-seeking missile, she turns to her dowdier daughter Louise and cries “I made her – and I will make you!”. The audience actually gasps, even though as loving aficionados of this extraordinary chronicle, we knew that Mama Rose is about to launch into the enormous Act 1 closer, that hymn to dangerous ambition, “Everything’s coming up roses!”.

 

 

Staunton was last on this stage – and also singing Sondheim lyrics – in Kent’s equally magnificent Sweeney Todd. But that moment alone tops her Olivier-winning Mrs Lovett. She hurtles at it, jumps in frenzy, claps violently like an out-of-control clockwork toy, filling the immense theatre as if she was standing a foot in front of each of us, forcing us against our will to seek the evanescent goal of stardom. It’s like that all through: stubborn craziness veiling vulnerability, envy, fear of defeat. She is magnificent from the first moment when she erupts through the stalls clutching a terrier and harassing Uncle Jocko to give her daughters top billing . She’s all the Mama Rose that the show’s creators – Laurents and Styne and Sondheim – could have dreamed of back in 1959.

 

 
She is not its only jewel. Kent’s production is finely judged, trimmed a little of the show’s sprawl, staged with minimal fuss, the theatre’s new machinery delivering interiors for boarding-houses, dressing-rooms and atmospheric, looming backstage flies. Stephen Mear’s choreography is as witty as ever, expressing all the nuances: the half-baked performances of Mama Rose’s touring troupe, the cheerfully hopeless family ensembles with good old Herbie, and – when Lara Pulver’s gentle undervalued Louise emerges as Gypsy Rose Lee – her gradual transformation from terror to extravagantly brittle flamboyance. Pulver carries it brilliantly. As for Staunton’s own final enraged aria of thwarted ambition, the mixture of extreme foxy moves and sudden lapses into the diffident stumping of the middle-aged matron is both funny and profoundly moving.

 

 
What else? Everything, really. Kevin Whateley, beloved as Detective-Inspector Lewis, deploys his gift for intelligent rueful likeability as Herbie (and he can sing, never knew that),. As the child June at the beginning, Georgia Pemberton on first-night duty delivered some atrociously brilliant high-kicks, cartwheels and earsplittingly shrill Violet-Elizabeth-Bottery before being artfully morphed into her adult self (Gemma Sutton) by way of strobing lights and hurtling ensemble dancers. The three Act 2 burlesque strippers are pretty unforgettable too: Anita Louise Combe with some nicely dirty ballet moves (don’t sacrifice your sacro, working in the back row!) Julie Legrande with flashing tits and pubes, and Louise Gold towering muscular and ferocious in her centurion kit and bugle (“if you’re going to bump it, do it with a trumpet”).

 

 

Sorry, can’t stop quoting Sondheim lines it’s an illness. But if you can wrestle, wangle or seductively pole-dance a ticket off someone, this one’s well worth sacrificing your sacro for.

 
box office 01243 781312 to 8 November
rating    five 5 Meece Rating

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October 13, 2014 · 9:45 pm

HERE LIES LOVE NT Dorfman, SE1

DORFMAN DOES DISCO, HURRAH

 

 

Oh, fabulous! Nicholas Hytner could have done lots of traditional things to launch the recreated third auditorium, the jewel of “NT Future” with its great glass walls and grand public walkway over the scenery and props shops. Instead, the Dorf rocks into life with a surging, dancing, jumping, shimmying and shimmering immersive event: joyful yet serious, youthful and historical, throwing its arms out with glee and grace.

 

 
On paper, the idea might startle: a political history of the Philippines from the 1950’s to the peaceful and long-overdue 1986 People’s Revolution which sent that corrupt, extravagant, murderously brutal couple Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos packing. It centres on Imelda herself, and started life as a concept album by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim (it was first done at the NY Public Theater). All of this might suggest parallels with EVITA – another chronicle of an ordinary girl who used her beauty to marry a dictatorial leader, became obsessed with wealth and prestige, and maintained a conviction that the poor people loved her and that she loved them back, even when milking the exchequer dry. Imelda’s great cry of “Why don’t you love me?” could have been Eva Peron’s, had she lived.

 

 

But this show makes EVITA feel thoroughly old hat. It is pretty much sung-through and staged as a club night: a third of the audience on foot used as the People, on a wide and ever-changing floor down below (respeck to Times, Observer, Standard, and The Stage crits, not to mention boppin’ Baz Bamigboye of the Mail). The rest of us are galleried above, but drawn in emotionally by the racket, the wonderful catchy songs . Here Lies Love, Imelda’s anthem, stormed out by Natalie Mendoza, is tremendous, but even better is her bewildered friend Estrella (Gia Macuja Atchison) with “When she passed by”, and a solemnly beautiful lament for her son by the mother (Li-Tong Hsu) of the brave opposition leader Nino Aqino after his murder: singing how as a child he said “I wanna be a drummer” to bring people together, with the beat.

 

 

Which jerks the heart, because that is exactly what it does; this rowdy, life-affirming, fascinatingly detailed, newsreel-flashing, full-hearted tribute to a people abused and dignified and finally freed – well, nothing’s final in politics, but impressive nonetheless is the moment when the now diabolic, shrieking Imelda is drowned by helicopter sounds and the DJ – Martin Sarreal – comes down from his eyrie and quietly, with a simple guitar, sings the actual words of Filipinos on that day, with the refrain “God draws straight with crooked lines”.

 
And then as we wipe our eyes the ensemble dance – many Filipino in reality – dance crazily for us again. And we in the gallery slightly wish we’d opted for the floor tickets. But then I wouldn’t have had a notebook, to tell you about it properly.
Box Office 020 7452 3000 to 8 Jan
rating: four   4 Meece Rating and a Meece with mask tiny compressed salute to the new auditorium

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October 10, 2014 · 12:39 am

HENRY IV Donmar, WC1

BACK TO PRISON:  WOMEN WIN THE HOLLOW CROWN

 
This is epic and intimate, mischievous and macho, truthful and painful and bleak. A two-hour condensation of the Henry IV plays, set in the grim neon-lit gym of a women’s prison, is the second in Phyllida Lloyd’s trilogy of all-woman Shakespeares, in collaboration with the prison arts company Clean Break. Their Julius Caesar, I wrote last year, was one of those rare theatre moments when you feel  that something genuinely important has happened:  a seismic shift in the possible.  Harriet Walter’s Brutus shook off every preconception about gender onstage, for good.
 
I was not relying on Lloyd pulling off the same shock again. Bunny Christie’s original set, finessed by Ellen Nabarro (andI have seen drama in enough prison gyms to vouch for it’s authenticity) is familiar. So are the unsmiling warders ushering us in, and the motley cast of “inmates” in grey tracksuits and scraped-back hair. At first, Clare Dunne’s Irish-accented Hal failed to convince me, though I was rapidly drawn in by the gaunt commanding presence of Harriet Walter as the eponymous King, guilt-haunted Bolingbroke in a crown made of Irn-Bru cans, and by Jade Anouka as a superfit, gym-honed passionate Hotspur beating hell out of a punchbag. But we needed to know that this most macho of the History plays could, by being transposed from 15c monarchy to a women’s jail, show us something new.

 

 

It can. It did. What Lloyd achieves, with respect for the verse and a series of feinting, elegant scenic overlaps,  is a breathtaking double vision. These are women sometimes wholly being men, sometimes implying that they are women damaged by life, slyly aping male swagger and aggression. Ashley McGuire’s Falstaff is a delight: part natural-born market-stall virago, part cross-dressing parody; always carrying that quicksliver burden of wasted intelligence in Falstaff which fuels that essentially womanly speech despising male “honour” for its inability to heal wounds of war. McGuire does this alone under the pitiless searchlight, and achieves a seriousness as great as Roger Allam’s marvellous treatment of the part at the Globe.

 

 

Amother double vision flickers throughout: prisoners of circumstance and their own fallibilities, the cast’s status as inmates remind us of what Shakespeare compassionately knew – that Kings and princes, drunkards and whoremongers, like all of us, are prisoners of circumstance too: guilty anxious Henry, rebellious Hal doomed to change beneath the ‘polished perturbation’ of the crown, impulsive loyal avenging Hotspur, Falstaff in his prison of flesh and flippancy. Just as we forget they are playing prison inmates doing a play, twice quite shockingly they get too involved and the lights go up as warders rush in to break it up. Once it happens when the sexual taunting of Mistress Quickly becomes modern and explicit, and she screams with sudden real womanly revulsion “We agreed we weren’t going to do this fucking bit!”. And once again at the end, when Falstaff’s rejection meets a violent response, warders intervene as we see inmates mastered and wounded by the power of the tale they have enacted. As we all should be.

 
But the core moments of the play are straight, unambiguous and fine. Harriet Walter, once again, achieves depth and reality to match any of her great predecessors in the role: androgynous, gaunt, thoughtful, troubled, “Myself, mighty and to be feared”. Dunne’s Hal grows in stature, their deathbed scene together superb. Other moments startle with their virtuosity: Ann Ogbomo’s passionate Worcester, Cynthia Erivo’s mischievous Poins. It’s tremendous, a brick in theatre history. I hope they auction off the terrifying paper masks of Walters’ face which her troops wear in the battle. I’ll be bidding.

 

 

box office 0844 871 7624 to 30 Nov
Rating: five  5 Meece Rating
Sponsors: Barclays / Simmons & Simmons

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October 8, 2014 · 11:58 pm

SEMINAR – Hampstead Theatre, NW3

THE INTERIORITY OF EXTERIORITY EXAMINED..ER..

 
Theresa Rebeck’s play about a creative-writing seminar in New York, directed with pace and flair by Terry Johnson, has met some sniffy reviews. Well, I may be out on my own here, but I thought it was hilarious, touching, and sharp as a tack. Maybe it doesn’t reveal any eternal truths, but then neither do creative writing classes. Perhaps it revels too joyfully in verbal pyrotechnics and has characters in danger of vanishing up their own back-references, but that too is horribly faithful to the subject-matter . Oh yes. Having published twelve novels and then stopped, and struggled through a year’s worth of overwritten literary splodge as a Booker judge, I frankly revelled in Ms Rebeck’s crueller moments. And maybe the fact that the characters are American (though home-grown actors) distances it enough to ease the pain of recognition.

 

 
The youngsters paying $5000 for ten weekly sessions include Kate, a child of affluence who after six years of writing-classes perfecting a novel about a girl obsessed with Jane Austen, remains unable to speak plainly her love for her friend Martin. He is an earnest scruff who believes that “constructing a universe out of language is a sacred and reverential act”. There’s Izzy, who plans to write sexy novels and flash her breasts on the cover, and Douglas, who has literary connections and likes to describe “the interiority of exteriority” and “trees so present, you can feel them growing”.

 
Enter Leonard the tutor: Roger Allam, swagger-perfect in jeans and a tormented scowl. He is a magnificently bad-tempered, pretentious bully enjoying the humiliation of the young, bragging in a style all too recognizable from Vanity Fair and New Yorker journos that he “ate cabbage with a Chechen psychopath” and received confidences from Rwandan amputees, because as a Writer he is charged with the “relevant” and can despise everyone else for being insufficiently “muscular” and unlike Kerouac. Who Izzy admires and feminist Kate despises. Lovely.

 

 

 
The play has no distinct message – why should it? – but for me the intertwined hostilities, subterfuges and bafflements of the five characters (and their sex lives) create a satisfying pattern. Kate (Charity Wakefield) is particularly well-drawn, furiously consuming cookie-dough and Doritos to console herself, and succumbing to silent despair as Martin (Bryan Dick) gets off with the insouciantly vampy Izzy (Rebecca Grant) . Oliver Hembrough’s Douglas is first overconfident, then flattened, then vengeful. And Allam’s great bitter peroration about the life cycle of a literary novelist is showstopping: that hit first novel, the agony of the second, the painful achievement of the third, then the decline into editing or teaching writing-classes to “overprivileged droning children” . Meanwhile the private despair, with no skin left…

 

 
It’s a memento mori for those who trap themselves in self-regarding style, vain literary ambition and terrible metaphors (“nail polish bottles like lost and terrified soldiers”). Rather than just, for God’s sake, sitting down and writing a story they want to tell. I rather loved it.

 
box office 0207 722 9301 to 1 November

rating: four  4 Meece Rating

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October 7, 2014 · 11:33 pm

SELFIE – Ambassadors, WC1

DORIAN GRAY IS BACK. AND THIS TIME SHE’S A GIRL.

 

 

I am usually too humble about my exiguous visual gift to dare remonstrate with designers, but in this case would plead, tears in my eyes “Ditch Basil’s Act 1 beard!”. Ragevan Vasan does his best to carry it off, huge black excrescence that it is, but the effect is not lessened by the baffling fact that the artist’s friend Harry (Dominic Grove) also has one, and in the next scene yet another character is luxuriantly black-bearded. Possibly this is to indicate that they’re all Brick Lane hipsters and fashion-followers (if you hadn’t already guessed that by the fact that a chap in a girl’s gymslip and monocle is mending a penny-farthing bike). But I am sure Oscar Wilde would have something to say about one beard being a misfortune, three carelessness…

 
Sorry. But it is Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray” which inspires this collegiate creation by Brad Birch and the National Youth Theatre Rep company, running alongside their Macbeth in the annual, enterprising and wholly praiseworthy rep season at the Ambassadors’. Last year they did an excellent production of James Graham’s Tory Boyz, and there is never any shortage of enthusiasm and unruly budding talent. But this one doesn’t quite get there: though it is a neat idea to modernize the tale and make Dorian a young woman who has her head turned by her own beauty and gets corrupted into the modern equivalent of Wildean excess: modelling, wild-childing, illegal drugs, big money earned from celebrity and marketing.

 
At its core – possibly part of its very inspiration – is the promising, statuesquely tall and strikingly attractive Kate Kennedy as Dorian. Wilde’s artist Basil Hallward becomes an expert photo-shopper who beautifies people’s Facebook pictures; in her case, he has had to do nothing but light her, and treasures the remarkable result. Which, of course, in a nifty bit of projection and adjustment , appears in a screen at the back becoming harder, sourer, and eventually hideous as Dorian’s corruption develops. She becomes ever warier of her iPad as she checks it after each betrayal, seduction and murder: Kennedy carries this well, from initial naive excitement at being taken to cool parties to callousness, brittleness and final despair.

 
There are problems, though. One of them is that the script is mainly plonking – only occasional faintly Wildean lines like “Lovely is where you go when Beauty has exhausted you”. And “People love you. Can you imagine how profitable that is?”. Another is that in the first act the corrupter – Harry – is played so preposterously, such a manic, gropey, pawing little horror, that you can’t believe this tall beauty would follow him anywhere, let alone to a party in The Hashtag Bar.

 
Another is that in the second act – possibly to soak up as big a cast as possible – there is too much confusing side-plot about urban regeneration, affordable housing, and someone called Jasper going broke; and that the quite striking character of Sybil Vane’s brother (Fabian McCallum) is not used as helpfully as he could have been. On the other hand the (lesbian) seduction of Sybil herself is well done, and there is a real spinechilling thrill in creating her as a Winehouseian dark-jazz chanteuse (songs by Ellie Bryans, who plays the part with moving conviction). Stuart Wilde is good as the bastardly branding-guru who eventually – dontcha know it, this is yoof talking – gets a safe Tory seat in Parliament. And the final disintegrated face on the screen – video designs by Simon Eves – is splendidly nasty. Must give the gorgeous Ms Kennedy nightmares when she thinks about it….

 
box office 084 4811 2334 to 29 Nov
Rating: three   3 Meece Rating

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October 4, 2014 · 12:12 am

EVITA – Dominion Theatre, W1

SWEET SEDUCTION,  OLD CORRUPTION

 

 

In 1978 as a Today reporter the day editor hustled me off to the Prince Edward theatre where this chap Lloyd-Webber (“He did that Joseph thing, and the Jesus one”) was to open a show about Eva Peron (“some 1940s dictator’s moll”). I remember little about the tea-break interview, but as the rehearsal resumed, an immense dramatic voice thrilled through the stalls. “Who’s that?” “She’s called Elaine Paige” said the composer proudly. And so she was, and the rest is history.

 

 

Now EVITA is back up West again, honed by a national tour and a reminder of how very good Andrew Lloyd-Webber already was, even before Phantom and Cats. It’s operatic, sung-through, musically urgent , dramatically tight, and studded with tunes so wonderful that they have stuck in our heads ever since. A reminder too of what a lyricist Tim Rice has been in his prime: not a word out of place. Those of us whose romantic disasters of the ‘70s were accompanied by endless mournful singing of “Another suitcase in another hall” are patsies for it.

 

 
Having said that, the show’s an oddity. It prefigures the stubborn determination of the Lloyd-Webber who plunged recklessly into celebration of Stephen Ward and the Profumo scandal. There is certainly romance in the tale of Eva Duarte, the low-born actress who slept, wheedled, performed and battled through to be the wife of Argentina’s leader Peron and a national “saint” despite the cruelties and corruptions of their regime. But as a heroine any “dictator’s moll” is problematical, at times downright repellent; nor do many popular musicals attempt to make a big Act 2 number out of an international diplomatic mission by a leader’s wife. But hey, it’s all about the music, and that is still tremendous.

 

 
This production is co-directed by Bob Tomson and producer Bill Kenwright himself, with a new star, Maddalena Alberto. She is beyond fabulous: a voice like honey and rosewater which can rise to an acid scream, become breathy or belting, wild or caressing, always under perfect control. Can act, too: whether as the firecracker teen forcing her cabaret-hack boyfriend to take her to Buenos Aires, the ruthless discarder of lovers (flinging their suitcases and pants at them over the banisters), or the artful seducer of Peron (“I would be good for you”). Whether as steely power bitch salting away money, or returning to idealism on her early deathbed, she convinces all the way.

 

 

Actually, once the last hysteria about another divisive figure has died down and someone dares write it, this mistress of both breathy charm and ferocious blast-furnace numbers must absolutely star in “Thatcher The Musical: from Grantham To Glory”. You could even recycle Rice’s great lyric as the cream of Argentine society scorns her: “The shooting-sticks of the upper class/ Aren’t supporting a single arse / That would rise for the girl”. It is pleasing to think that the wincing ladies and snobbish generals here (beautifully choreographed) predate the 1979 Thatcher win by just one year. And then you can ironize all you like about the Falklands war…

 
Thus for all the vigour and tunefulness of the music, it proved impossible not to entertain wandering historic thoughts. I actually felt an (even less fair) pre-echo of another blonde people’s princess when Alberto stands in her glittering yet virginally white ballgown pledging her love of the common people in “`Don’t cry for me”.

 
The narrator – Marti Pellow of Wet Wet Wet as Che Guevara – is a bit of a problem, though his fans cheered him to the echo: the lyrics of the part need a drier, more cynical throwaway style than his over-amped, pop-starry delivery. At the start it really grates, especially next to the lovely honeyed tones of Ben Forster’s Magaldi and Matthew Cammelle’s booming bass Peron. By the second act, though, it works better. But our eyes and ears are generally on Maddalena Alberto…

 
box office 0845 200 7982 http://www.dominiontheatre.com to 1 Nov
rating: four    4 Meece Rating

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October 2, 2014 · 11:16 pm

SPEED THE PLOW Playhouse Theatre, SW1

LINDSAY, LINDSAY AND LINDSAY.   TWO OUT OF THREE DO FINE.

 
David Mamet’s angostura sharpness is not everyone’s taste , but few playwrights have such rat-a-tat rhythm and economical impetus. And this swipe at the movie business, a three-hander in three scenes, had a success with Spacey and Goldblum a few years back, and a sensation on Broadway when Madonna took the role of the gorgeous temp who nearly overturns the settled cynicism of two producers dedicated to the simple Hollywood philosophy “get asses on seats, give ‘em the one they saw last year”.
And that’s the draw here: celebrity casting gives that role to Lindsay Lohan: once a Disney moppet, lately a fading movie performer, model, pop star, and – here’s the hook – serial addict, arrestee and rehabee, a reputedly almost “unemployable” wild-child. Creditable to defy this past with a West End debut under the usually infallible director Lindsay Posner, and it is not the toughest of ingenue roles, but all the same it would have been wiser for Lindsay the younger to do some humbler spadework on her stage skills first.

 
In the first act, no problem: Bob the studio producer (Richard Schiff) and Charlie his old colleague (Nigel Lindsay) are hatching a proposal to sell their boss, the invisible Ross, a prison action movie with a big star. Bob offers Karen the temp the job of doing a “courtesy read” of another book submitted. He plans – nudge nudge – to discuss it with her in his apartment. So far, frankly, an ansaphone could do Lohan’s few yes-sir lines, and she has not the skill to seem human in her reactions when the men continue their fusillade of sexual metaphor (“We’re whores!”) over her head. Schiff and Nigel Lindsay do this with high-speed brilliance, though it is hard to care much about either of these caricatures.

 
The middle act – between Bob and Karen – is the challenge, though it does allow Lohan to keep her hand pretty firmly on the book they are discussing and sometimes read from it. She got away with only one audible prompt. But the whole point is that she is breathtakingly pretty (tumbling hair, marvellous legs, very short tunic) and that Karen’s enthusiasm for the book requires the spouting of New Age nonsense, so if some of the words fall out backwards, who cares? . The book is called “The Bridge – Radiation, half-life and the decay of sanity” , pretentious bollocks about the end of the world, A Return To The Self and mystical roundness of life. This falls, haphazardly, from her perfect lips, accompanied by an announcement that she will sleep with the raddled old baldie as part of this whole philosophy. So here is an unsubtle middle-aged male fantasy, being ropily performed by a unsubtle tabloid scandalette. Hard to know who is exploiting whom.

 
The point, of course, that Bob is so overwhelmed by this available goddess that the final scene next morning is the best and funniest. Superb horror and rage erupt from Nigel Lindsay as Charlie, thwarted of his prison-movie , while the converted Bob deploys a stunned-mullet stubbornness. Embedded within it, if you care to engage with it, is the question of whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to bumble vapidly on and earn a living (Charlie “We aren’t put here to mope!”) or to take arms for some enormous wacko principle (Bob bleats “I wanted to do good!”).

 
It could only work if the female catalyst shone, and became hypnotically real enough to convince us – even for a few moments – that this radiation-holocaust-God-redemption stuff had any value. That doesn’t happen.
box office http://www.atgtickets.com to 6 Dec

rating (no, can’t do it. Sorry. The men do their noble best, but…Dead Rat

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October 1, 2014 · 11:12 pm

ELECTRA Old Vic SE1

 PITY AND TERROR IN A HANDFUL OF DUST

 

 

There’s a great tall door, portal of the ancient house of Atreus; a blighted tree, a votive lantern, a dusty arena. Like Greeks two thousand years ago, we are a ring of witnesses to the shattering power of unappeasable sorrow and anger.

 
Electra herself is a shock, from her first paces onto the dusty court before the door. Kristin Scott Thomas, free at last from all those cool sophisticated film roles, is gaunt, lank, ragged, primitive, riven with anger and grief at the murder of her father Agamemnon by his wife and her lover Aegisthus. At first you think of her as a Hamlet: grieving a father and complicatedly enraged at a mother’s sharing a bed with his murderer. But Hamlet is a fretful modern in comparison, this raw Sophoclean emotion is something different: the irredeemiable, irreconciliable pre-Christian ethic of the blood feud, the unforgiving need for “the dead to live again, draining the blood of the living”.

 
The violence of emotion, though, is perennial, recognizable and terrifying: Kristin Scott Thomas roams and flickers like a dusty pillar of flame, distracted , angry, explosive, hurling herself to the ground in rage or grief, a tiny figure becoming the purest human distillation of all rage and misery. She speaks of her servitude in the usurped house, but is self-enslaved by her uncompromising rage ; for her sister Chrysothemis ,obediently resigned ,steps on blooming and groomed by comparison, and recoils from the injunction to murder with the helpless words “sometimes being right is wrong” .

 
Frank McGuinness adaptation of the old text is strong, simple, unadorned. Peter Wight as the loyal servant is impressive, delivering the long – fictional – account of Orestes‘ death in a chariot race with the vivid intensity of a Formula One disaster report; the chorus of women underline and counterpoint the central ferocious performance of Electra herself. Ian Rickson’s direction , however, and the utter truthfulness of Scott Thomas’ performance, allow this wrought-up intensity to ease three or four times in the hundred tense minutes of the play, to something which allows almost a proper laugh, an ironic moment: Chrysothemis’ recoil, Clytemnestra’s maternal impatience, Electra’s own screams and leaps of intensity when Orestes, the lost little brother, reveals that he is alive and there to take vengeance.

 
Ah, Clytemnestra! Another face of the female in Sophoclean tragedy: we have the headlong passionate young women,Antigone and Electra; but also the womanly, the pragmatic: vengeful infanticidal Medea and , here, the political compromiser: the damaged weigher-up of options, who knows life must move on and hopes to evade any extremism of curse. She argues that after the killing of her daughter Iphigenia and his return with Cassandra, Agamemnon had to die. “I killed him, but I did not act alone. Justice killed him, too”.

 
Diana Quick gives the role a bitter humanity: she glides out of the great door at first serene and impatient, a menacing matriarch, a queen. A sleepless queen though, and a thwarted mother riven with conflict. Her exchanges with Electra are beautifully drawn: half exasperated parent, half guilty to be glad of the supposed death of her son, who if he returned would have to kill her. “You do not hate your children, no matter how they treat you”.

 
The story unreels: Orestes is back, blood flows offstage, and the huge door opens fully at last, gaping into darkness. A final gesture by Electra, unexpected, human and hopeless. brings a lump to the throat.

 
box office (0)20 7928 2651 to 20 dec
Rating: four     4 Meece Rating

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September 30, 2014 · 11:02 pm

SINGLE SPIES – Rose, Kingston

THE SADNESS OF THE SINGLE SPY…BENNETTIAN COMIC  MELANCHOLY

 

 

These two short plays are vintage, premier-cru Alan Bennett: funny, melancholic, sparking with ideas about Britishness, personality, class, the fingers of the past that claw at the present, and the yearning, seductive, necessary hypocrisies of national sentiment. Sarah Esdaile’s direction gives them the intelligent respect they need, and the shimmering ambiguities: the latter beautifully supported by a Francis O’Connor’s thoughtful design: both plays, with economical moves of furniture, take place against a vast collage of photographs. Anyone meeting them for the first time will get all that they should.

 
The first, An Englishman Abroad, was inspired by the real experience of the actress Coral Browne, playing Gertrude with the RSC in Moscow in a period of détente in 1958. Seven years after his defection, the “Cambridge spy” Guy Burgess invaded the dressing-rooms and asked her to “bring a tape measure” so he could order a suit from his British tailor. Their conversation reveals the aching loneliness and pointlessness of the exiled traitor’s life, and the actress’ response – half fascinated, half disgusted. Browne (Helen Schlesinger, crisply irritable) claims that “actresses are excused newspapers, as delicate boys were once excused games” but once exasperated after a long afternoon reproves him in basic terms: “You pissed in our soup and we drank it”.

 
Alexander Hanson ,after lately playing that other ambiguous smoothie Stephen Ward, is perfect casting: his floppy quiff and Jermyn Street campness covering disillusioned depression. He is even tearful, to Browne’s cynical dismay, when the scene changes and Orthodox church chanting fills the gloomy Moscow air (moody lighting turns the photographs into sepia ghosts). The London cameos with Alex Blake as the complaisant tailor, and Steven Blake as the shop assistant who refuses to make him new pyjamas are dry, funny, slyly sad. And as far away Burgess hums “O God our help in ages past”, echoing the old school chapel and old certainties, one is reminded of Bennett’s line in one of his diaries, about such hymns at funerals: “All one loves and hates..”

 
The second play – A QUESTION OF ATTRIBUTION – is slightly longer and heavier going, but a richly rewarding meditation on art, reality, and value. It covers an imagined moment in the life of another traitor, Antony Blunt, when he was given immunity – and anonymity until his 1980’s outing – but remained in charge of the Queen’s pictures. The scene everyone remembers is the one where the Queen has an oblique conversation with him, supposedly about a possible Titian forgery; but this riveting interlude is framed in his routine questioning sessions with an investigator, trying to identify the “fifth man” and beyond, Blunt being the fourth.

 
The policeman Chubb (Alex Blake, a nicely chippy performance) duels with Blunt: MIchael Pennington is elegantly patrician, engaging, clever, but projecting growing unease and fear of exposure. When Chubb, who claims to be learning art history, brutally says “Giotto had no grasp of perspective, and neither did you in the ‘30s”, Pennington’s irritable frightened wince is perfect.

 
Schlesinger becomes the Queen, never an easy gig because it is too easy to caricature and too hard to find the monarch’s inwardness, especially in this play where she exists really as a disrupter of Blunt’s peace. But again there are a couple of lovely cameos, notably Thomas Coombes as a footman. “Raphael? No, school-of. I know, I dust it”. And again, that Bennettian melancholy: a sense of waste, of idealism turned to shiftiness, of conflicted loyalty and wondering how far a bygone principle was worth it.

 

Box office rosetheatrekingston.org 020 8174 0090 to 11 Oct

RATING four   3 Meece Ratingthe fourth a bow for the designer Set Design Mouse resized

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September 27, 2014 · 12:46 pm

GHOST FROM A PERFECT PLACE Arcola E8

GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES ENJOYS THE GRANS AND GANGSTERS

 

 

The heyday, the heyday. Everyone’s Gran loves to chew over the heyday with anyone they can pin in a chair. But what if the man who came through the door, who took tea, biscuits and chat, was a gangster? And the heyday was a criminal 60s East End?Philip Ridley’s play is a burning drama. A match is struck in Torchie Sparks’ elderly memory and the vicious, twisted fallout rips through her already flame-ravished flat. She loves it. Her new-wave gangster granddaughter (Rio), however, can’t handle it.

 

 

Sheila Reid (with a wrinkly face like an OS map) plays Torchie’s wide and rosy-eyed nostalgia beautifully. Ridley’s style, where reminisces are exorcised in the present like troubling dreams, struggles at first. It is emotionally confusing and asks too much too early. But the director, Russell Bolam, draws these out nicely as the play progresses and we become more involved. Good gags, neat anecdotes and juicy character finally being to trickle through. These moments breeze past you at first. But then, as when sat with any rambling pensioner, you feel yourself getting more and more involved. This is largely due to Michael Feast’s ugly yet brilliant performance as Mr.Flood. He was the Mr.Big of 60s Bethnal Green who now, like old Torchie, is living on old memories; dancing with ghosts no longer there. Wearing suits he shouldn’t be, pulling influence he doesn’t have. His Michael Cain vowels rumble, and his face works the most criminal grimaces imaginable.

 

 

An unsettling backstory begins to unfold. But it clunks around, getting mixed with the uninteresting and glib members of Rio’s girl-gang; a man-hating, knife-wielding, evangelical rebellion to Mr.Floods memory of besuited heavies and protection rackets. It fumbles around this conflict but manages to build to a real emotional kick as his links with the family become apparent. Rio’s scenes with Mr.Flood chill the room. Florence Hall’s performance is intelligent and sharp. She doesn’t slip into a rage as easily as her gang mates, opting instead for quiet anger. The dialogue she is given is a rough mixture, but she excavates through it well. This is a dark but funny look at a twisted heyday surely too scarring to forget. A production with textual problems but top performances.

 

Box Office: 020 7503 1646        TO 16th October

4 Mice   4 Meece Rating

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September 26, 2014 · 1:02 am

THE JAMES PLAYS: Olivier, SE1 QUICK OVERVIEW

Well, what a day that was. There is still in October one chance to see, in one day, all three of Rona Munro’s immense trilogy about the first three King Jameses of Scotland in the wild 15th century. I just did. But each play can stand alone, given a minimal introduction, so here before the detail are a few lines on which is which.

 

 

All three – directed by Laurie Sansom of the National Theatre of Scotland and designed by Jon Bausor – are staged in the round, the Olivier stage pierced by a great sword which will bleed and flame unexpectedly and never let you forget that the blade is everything in 15c politics. A tremendous ensemble cast of eighteen carries right through, with single stars in the first and third. The programme tells you enough to be getting on with, but Munro’s broadly true but dramatically fictionalised storytelling does the job.

 

 

The first – The Key will Keep the Lock – is a gracefully accessible tale of how the first James returns from being held hostage in England, marries his English Joan, replaces the Regent Murdac and tries to establish law, via a bit of murder and betrayal. It’s funny, wild, touching and spectacular.

 
The second – Day of the Innocents – is trickier, often surreal, as a child King is haunted by nightmare memory; some find it less rewarding. But after the interval the central relationship becomes seat-of-the-pants exciting, and I loved it.

 

 

The third – The True Mirror – is modern-dress, knowing, focused largely on the women: the least violent of the trilogy and immensely different in tone. Its resonances tickled Edinburgh audiences maybe more than it will in London, but the wit and vigour is intact. My least favourite.

 

 

Box office: 0207 452 3000 All run to 30 Oct

So here come the reviews: scroll on down…

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September 26, 2014 · 1:01 am

THE KEY WILL KEEP THE LOCK Olivier, SE1

THE JAMES PLAYS GET OFF TO A TERRIFIC START…

 

 

This one’s a stormer: thrilling, funny, vigorous, beguiling, accessible, a gripping and entertaining blend of the epic and the intimate. James McArdle (it’s his only appearance in the trilogy) appears first as the hostage of the ailing Henry V, a still, watchful, deep-felt exile after eighteen years’ captivity, a lonely poet-prince torn from Scotland at the age of ten. Henry decrees that he must marry one of his English cousins Joan, return home, raise his ransom and stop his countrymen siding with the French. He must accept the rules of medieval royalty: “You have to fuck people you don’t know and execute their relatives!”

 

 
Yet despite Munro’s mischievous demotic there is solemnity too, always a sense that these things matter, that beyond the court peasants starve. The opening tolls a great bell, over a ferocious brawl of loutish captured Scots and a chant both martial and melancholy. But just as you begin to wince at the farouche struggles of sweaty, hairy medieval manhood aflame with profanity and roiling testosterone, Munro switches the scene to the Queen-to-be, Joan.

 

 

 

Anxiously housewifely, expecting royal visitors, here is a rushed chatelaine fretting about supplies and the fact that they have no minstrel to greet the visitors -“Nobody here can hold a tune since blind Eric choked on an apple”. Stephanie Hyam is wonderful in the role; so is Sarah Higgins as Meg, a cheerful Scottish lady-in-waiting sent to persuade her that for all the primitivism she’ll love Scotland “Tall skies, rowan trees, fresh silver fish and dancing”. The awkward, compelled courtship of the royal pair is an unexpected delight: never thought I would hear gales of fond laughter across the Olivier at a dynastic wedding-ceremony. Or indeed witness the official wedding night defloration on a four-poster surrounded by louche leather-clad and seriously drunken nobles. Munro indicates that Joan takes a good while to get over this.

 

 
James’ struggle pits him against the resident Stuart cousins: the mop-haired heroic patriarch Murdac (Gordon Kennedy, a key figure in all three plays in different roles) , his ferocious sons and their mother Isabella. Their landed arrogance entails casual torture of the common people (a woman daring to complain is shod, horse-nails hammered on her hands and feet). Defying them, McArdle is a superb James, all tense national pride shot through with the private neediness of his lost childhood. His speech about Scotland’s quality and dignity is so stirring that it could have swung the referendum in moments.

 

 
This struggle, and his lonely yearning for the love of his frightened little queen creates a real story: epic but personal, suddenly solemn at times, dramatically intense as he stiffens for the final battle which – thrilling, balletic, intense – rages literally around and upon the great bed where Joan lies in labour. The seeds of his coming murder are sown by a violent necessary betrayal, the price of kingship in a savage age: Joan watches the invisible beheadings with eyes open, hoping that the fluttering of her gown in the bitter wind disguises her trembling.

 

 

Rating: five 5 Meece Rating

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September 26, 2014 · 1:01 am

DAY OF THE INNOCENTS Olivier, SE1

…AND IT GROWS DARKER

 

 

James I is dead. His small son, defaced by a birthmark, puny and afraid, in surreal nightmare sequences constantly relives the bloodshed and concealment of the days when he was seized and bargained for between his mother , the cool contemptuous regent Livingston (Gordon Kennedy again) ) and Crichton. Sometimes he is literally a puppet, a naked skinny peg-creature thrown in and out of chests while the adult James (Andrew Rothney) stands by watching his own helplessness. His childhood and youthful friend is Will Douglas (Mark Rowley) , battered and beaten son of the thuggish Earl (Peter Forbes). Indeed the first half of this second play feels more heavy-going than before: everyone seems either a weakling or a bully, and the bloodied creatures of James’ nightmares momentarily confusing. I nearly concurred with a general view expressed after its Edinburgh performance that this play was the weakest, as well as the darkest; the one to miss.
Not so. Beneath the great sword, the second half flares into something intense: James grows up, begins defying Livingston’s contempt (“Your lazy wee Majesty – sign here”). It becomes spectacular – not least because they seem by now to have invented both the bagpipes and football, with a leather sphere punted round and out into the stalls in a ferocious, biting, wrestling, snarling football match of Stuarts vs Douglases (top choreography). The unravelling of the friendship between James and the damaged, reckless Will becomes one burning focus: another – for Munro never forgets the women – is the gradual emergence of a steely nature in his tiny yellow-haired foreign wife Mary (Hyam again, unrecognizable, and a remarkable presence both comic and dramatic).

 

 

More Douglas-on-Douglas violence ends in Will’s dangerous emergence as something new, No spoilers: but again Munro surprises at the most tense moments with genuine, laugh-out-loud comic moments. I particularly treasured Will’s sullen summing-up of what Scotland offers its nobles with “I’m supposed to be a rich man because I’ve got another hundred wet sheep”

Rating: five   5 Meece Rating

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September 26, 2014 · 1:00 am

THE TRUE MIRROR Olivier, SE1

…AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT

 

If the first play began with a ragged brawl and taunt, the second with a tenebrous nightmare of childhood, this one starts with a romping ceilidh: modern in dress , with an informal James III chatting up a laundry-maid called Daisy while his cool, sophisticated Danish Queen Margaret sees off ambassadors with diplomatic finesse. When James does ascend the throne – still poised above, between the distant stalls – it is to fling one leg over the arm, pout and demand 60,000 of taxation to fund a pilgrimage to Amiens Cathedral. He is all for cathedrals, madrigals and French wine, and demands a personal choir to follow him everywhere harmonizing about gillyflowers.

 

 

The Estates of Parliament are not amused. There is poverty, unrest, invasion threatened. The petulant monarch continues with his wine-tasting, ignores the English threat of invasion and fleet-seizing, and drags his queen off to bed. Frankly, as a leader he makes Shakespeare’s Richard II look like Churchill.

 

 
The great sword still looms over the stage, but the abrupt transition to modernity – with damask hangings instead of the battered medieval planking – can be a bit of a problem. Maybe it was necessary to illustrate, in more modern style, the matter of an irresponsible leader. But appreciation is hampered by the fact that until a couple of moments late on, Jamie Sives’ monarch is, frankly, an irritating little git with no hinterland to excuse his uselessness (I cannot for a minute believe this as the child crowned on the battlefield, even when he relates it). His preening contempt for brother, sons, ministers, and wife is pure soap opera: Dynasty with a capital D this time.

 

 
However, Munro’s point is that it all hangs on Sofie Grabøl (from The Killing) as Queen Margaret, and she is terrific: authoritative, human and interesting, leading another life among the women, notably Blythe Duff’s fine Annabella, remembered from the second play. There is perhaps a bit too much ultra-modern middle-aged female-empowerment in her keen Nordic affection for accountancy and in the odd sequence when the King provides her with a new Venetian mirror , a novelty in the age we are pretending they live in despite their modern eveningwear. She croons “I like this woman!” more than twice, making a rather heavy self-help-bookish point about being “happy in your own skin”.

 

 

 

To be honest, this one runs about fifteen minutes too long, and patience is fading by the time young Jamie (a very strong Daniel Cahill) defies his Dad’s vapid irresponsible aestheticism . James III executes a curious disco-king moment in Parliament “I gave you glitter! I was the sparkle!” and vamooses; that his son, rather than seeing a therapist, goes all medieval hair-shirt about parricide drags you suddenly, unconvincingly, back into the 15th century..

3 Meece Rating

 
Not my favourite. But some have hugely enjoyed its jokes (very good ones in the bath scenes) and its deliberate modern references, notably Margaret’s exasperated up-summing of Scotland with “You lot , you’ve got fuck-all except attitude”. So, horses for courses. And overall, the James Plays are a towering achievement, a proud collaboration between two great National Theatres.

 

Rating for play No.3: three

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September 25, 2014 · 8:35 am

FLOWERS OF THE FOREST – Jermyn St Theatre, WC1

POETS AND PACIFISTS,  LOVERS AND LOSS: A ‘THIRTIES TALE  

 
Modern historical recreations are valuable in this WW1 centenary year, but there is something thrilling, a frisson of caught reality, in contemporary writing. Especially plays, and especially rendered with as much intelligent respect as Anthony Biggs and his cast give to this 1933 drama . It’s by John van Druten (author of I Am A Camera, and the recently revived London Wall. A seemingly conventional drawing-room piece about a family affected by the 1914/18 upheaval twenty years later, it is a haunting study in memory, love, bitterness and trauma: all the confusions and unhealed scars of the “low dishonest decade”.

 
Two sisters are at odds. Glacially poised Naomi (Sophie Ward) is in a cool, comradely marriage to an affluent art collector: Mercia (Debra Penny) an embittered stay-at-home daughter combining envy with contempt – “Your life’s all based on standards that mean nothing to me”. But it becomes apparent how both were blighted, their lovers killed in action but not before angry differences. Now the death of their father , a rural Vicar, reignites memory: 1934 frames flashbacks of 1914 and 1916.

 
But in the play’s 1934 present, Lewis’ secretary Beryl (Victoria Rigby in a finely judged, weary-eyed low-key performance) has diffidently introduced them to her boyfriend Leonard (Max Wilson). He is a fascinating addition to the play’s complexities: burning with intensity and TB. A less inhibited version of Forster’s doomed clerk Leonard Bast, he is a ‘30s autodidact: a bookshop assistant with a passion for art, culture, dreams of travel and a profound 1930’s pacifism. He even challenges his hostess for having been a nurse – “You did wrong! You were helping the war…telling them they were heroes, patching them up to go back..” He has particular scorn for the romantic soldier-poets (school of Rupert Brooke) who wrote about being sleepers awakened to glory, and for clergy, like the late vicar, who spoke of the divine redemption of war.

 
In fact, we learn in flashback, Naomi’s Richard was one of those poets (later sinking into bitter disillusion) and Mercia’s Tommy was the opposite: a musician who studied in Germany and defied the jingoism of others, including Mercia who snarls that “Shellshock is pure funk” and “If we allow this war to end with one German left alive, one stone standing, I’ll kill myself”. Subtly it becomes clear that these opposite reactions are part of the same trauma: the shock-wave that crumbled into irony the Edwardian certainties about patriotism, class, and women.

 
It is a talky, discursive period-piece with edges of melodrama – even the supernatural – and none the worse for that. Van Druten is tremendous at depicting female sensibilities, and Ward, Penny, and Rigby are finely pitched: the older pair handling the contrast of their younger selves brilliantly. Gabriel Vick gives Richard’s transformation an angry conviction, and Max Wilson as the excitable Leonard is explosive and – despite a spooky 1930’s twist at the end – ultimately convincing.

 
So here’s another beautifully improbable Jermyn triumph: who would expect, in this tiny space, a cast of eleven (Biggs must have wondered whether to ditch the butler) and a fine naturalistic set by Victoria Johnstone. She places us firmly and intimately in an affluent 1934 drawing-room, transformed with dim-lit bustle into a family tea-table by an inglenook in a country Vicarage.  Detail, lamplight, candlelight, moonlight, firelight feed in to the pity and understanding both of the period, and of the writing which tried to make sense of it. It deserves full houses.

 
box office 020 7287 2875 to 18 October
rating: four   4 Meece Rating

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September 23, 2014 · 11:09 pm

TEH INTERNET IS SERIOUS BUSINESS – Royal Court SW1

WIKILEAKS MEETS JUST WILLIAM

 

 

Serious? Not always, it’s not. “Everything is funny all the time!” screams one of our heroes. “Epic Lulz! Nothing is to be taken seriously!”. The topic under discussion is a friend’s suicide. A manic one-man band hurls himself through a ball-pond, a fancy-dress dog, cat, penguin and “PaedoBear” hurtle around with dancing figures in orange running-shorts and dive out of flaps in the wall and trapdoors. Authority, privacy and reflective thought are hateful. “The internet doesn’t care! It sets scenes of mass rape to Japanese rock music! We don’t need a hierarchy! Information wants to be free!”

 
Tim Price’s new play is manically directed by Hamish Pirie, and designed by Chloe Lamford with that ballpond reflected by huge overhead clusters of brightly coloured balls. Which, at moments in the first half, came dangerously near feeling like a metaphor for its content. But it was never going to be easy to find a visual live-theatre language for the anarchic, lawless, mischievous, disguised online world of the “hacktivists” of Anonymous and LulzSec. And Lamford and Pirie have probably got as close as anyone could.

 

 

Certainly, as the hour progresses, you become soaked in the world of these young men – they nearly always are revealed to be such when the irate forces of law catch up with them. Jake Davis ,the young Shetlander sentenced in 2011 to two years for conspiracy to commit computer misuse, and played as a version of himself here by Kevin Guthrie ,collaborated with Price after his release.

 

 
It is a world of adolescent alienation, back-bedroom loneliness, defiant clowning, gang identity between people across continents who never meet, and naive idealism mingled with plain mischief. The internet hones and rewards their particular kind of intuitive intelligence, and accidentally throws into their hands the ability to publish the most serious of documents and the cruellest of private revelations. They have no brakes: they are part self-righteous Assanges, part Just William. They attack the CIA and Scientology and the “God Hates Fags” nonsense of Westboro Baptist Church, but have no scruple about “regular people’s data”, emails and passwords, breezily saying “They’re X factor applicants, they crave humiliation!”. They’re kids with virtual Kalashnikovs. They rock the adult world.

 

 

As the play goes on – and some get found out, we see glimpses of their “irl” or in-real-life identities. In a lovely moment the shy schoolboy Mustafa (Hamza Jeetooa) turns down an invitation to go for a McFlurry because he promised to help some Egyptian dissidents break into a government server; in another the group easily hack and expose a suited ‘security expert’ . Gradually, as their campaigns grow wilder and their nemesis approaches, the play draws you in, expressing – if not very deeply examining – the astonishing cyberworld we have somehow created, where commerce and authority can be made putty in the hands of clever, troubled, disaffected teenagers.

 

 
Spirited, comic, the cast of fifteen give it everything,  rattling out codes,   hurling merry obscenities,  playing up to eleven parts apiece (that’s Sargon Yelda with the record). It will make half the audience feel old, and the other half – well, sort of jubilant…

 
box office 020 7565 5000 to 24 October
Jerwood Royal Court partner: Coutts

Rating: three   3 Meece Rating

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September 23, 2014 · 9:31 am

SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER Rose, Kingston /now touring

TWO HUNDRED YEARS OLD AND FRESH AS A DAISY

 
Two centuries before Oscar Wilde there was another eloquent, satirical, socially subversive, intermittently disreputable Irishman at work: Oliver Goldsmith, fondly called the “inspired idiot”. His most enduring work for the stage is this riotous tale of Marlow and Hastings, two city blades at large in the countryside, conned into thinking that their irascibly rustic host’s house is an inn. And that his daughter – who the parents plan must marry Marlow – is the barmaid. And since Marlow is the kind of Bullingdon-ish lad who is terminally shy with “ladies” but a cheeky seducer of the lower classes, it turns out quite well. Though not without a complicated a subplot of Hastings’ relationship, some jewels, and a final twisted knot of improbable tricks and cross-purposes straight out of comic-opera.

 
It is a comic classic: and Conrad Nelson of Northern Broadsides gleefully restores it to life for today. Not modernizing it exactly, but letting in some modern gestures, eschewing the standard 18c “La, Sir!” mannerisms and letting his designer Jessica Worrall craftily adjust the costumes – not in style but in fabric – to send modern messages. So Gilly Tompkins as Mrs Hardcastle who longs for the bright lights, and her daft foppish son Tony Lumpkin (Jon Trenchard, very funny) are upholstered in leopard and tiger print, and Hannah Edwards’ witty, charming Kate roars around in raspberry,almost neon, silk bustle, palmtree hair and long bright yellow gloves.

 
They Hardcastles are broad Yorkshire, the two hapless city lads very RP : their lofty, entitled snobbery quite modern enough to draw giggles of recognition. Social satire, however, rightly comes second to fun. The larkiness of the whole production is its delight, which Goldsmith would approve- people often breaking into song, Lumpkin dancing around with a fife and leaping on tables, some some marvellous interludes of pretended flirting (to please Mum) with Lauryn Redding’s Miss Neville. The comic chemistry between the two is perfect. And Oliver Gomm as the posh young man wincing at the “terrors of a formal courtship, the episode of aunts, mothers, cousins..” overdoes it just enough.

 

 

Howard Chadwick is a splendid harrumphing patriarch Hardcastle (quite a shock in Northern Broadsides to find the part not bagged by top harrumpher Barrie Rutter, but he’s got a King Lear to prepare for). And the folkish, joyful music under Rebekah Hughes brings it all together. Grand fun.
http://www.northern-broadsides.co.uk         Touring    Touring Mouse wide

rating;  four   4 Meece Rating

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September 22, 2014 · 9:55 am

THE MAN JESUS Richmond Theatre & touring

IMAGINING HOW HE WAS….

 

Simon Callow’s solo shows have become a landmark: his impassioned Dickens, his Marigold and Chips characters and his Christmas Carol. In Edinburgh I have seen him as Shakespeare and as a troubled transsexual (Tuesdays at Tescos), at the Royal Opera House he was Wagner. This summer – while performing his hour-long turn as the Roman satirist Juvenal – he learned this show.

 

Some critics cavil at this Victorian energy, the Wolfit-Sinden energetic oration, the striding command.  Me, I rather like it. As in his prolific and fine writing (notably Love is Where It Falls and the Laughton and Welles biographies), Callow has a quality of fearlessness: not arrogance but something which which feels born more of reckless, generous ambition.  It sits unusually in an age which praises dry obliquity, a Cumberbatchy screen-friendly  minimalism.  But it is an honourable idiosyncrasy.
Here he storms in again with a show about Jesus, scripted by Matthew Hurt and directed by Joseph Alford on a stage bare of all but random piled chairs. used to represent interlocutors or to hurl around as moneychangers’ tables.   Not that Callow is being Jesus.  Rather he plays, without changing anything but accent, twelve recurring characters who encounter him in the occupied, brutally ruled 1st century Galilee and Judaea.  Making a fierce initial demand of our suspension of disbelief, he begins – in tweed jacket with leather elbows and grizzled middleaged maleness – as a teenage Yorkshire Mary, stared at for her single pregnancy and shuddering at the rows of rebels crucified alive by the roadside. Then he is Jesus’ half-brother, James, Simon the fisherman, Barabbas the freedom fighter, a ranting Baptist (unquenchable even when beheaded) and others including Judas (gratingly Scottish) Lazarus and – curiously effectively – Joanna, the woman afflicted by years of bleeding who touches his robe and is cured.
She is played Sloaney, affluent, county-posh and wholly credible. Indeed it is the RP  arrogance of Herod and the nervy camp of Pilate which work better than Yorkshire Mary or even the borderline-scouse Peter, though the latter’s panic after the arrest is good.  Indeed the second half (the whole is a neat 110 mins including interval) is more political, and therefore more interesting, than the first.

 

 

Does it work? Not entirely. A problem with Hurt’s text is that in its obvious need to quote the more startling and interesting words of Jesus,  it too often fails to filter them properly  through the characters of his multiple narrators. Can’t blame Callow for this: the direction could give him more help in creating a sharp transition from, for example, Judas to Peter. Both being overwrought men – one cynical, one enthusiastic and weak –  it would be clearer if their moments were separated by one of the other characters, like Pilate, Herod or the women. Though even Mary is not rapidly enough established by text in her later appearances, since Callow wisely attempts no gendered mannerisms.
Still, the last moments are striking: Pilate’s view of his prisoner is the one which most strikes home.  Hurt dodges the idea of literal resurrection: many an Anglican Bishop would approve of that. And Callow’s performance won three enthusiastic curtain calls.
Touring   Touring Mouse wide to 4 Nov.    themanjesus.co.uk  –   http://tinyurl.com/ob24x89

RATING:  THREE 3 Meece Rating

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September 22, 2014 · 9:35 am

FRED AND MADGE Hope Theatre, Islington

GHOST GUEST REVIEWER EDNA WELTHORPE TAKES ON ORTON, AGAIN

by A.N.Onymous (The Critic Who Knows)

 

 

Calling all ordinary, decent folk. Edna Welthorpe (Mrs) here!   I am on a brief return trip to London from the very select part of Purgatory where I have been stationed (pedestal mat, Teasmade, and a tip-top Ewbank ever to hand). They make you fill out forms in which you have to specify how would like “your” Heaven to be when you eventually get there. I told them that, for me, it would be a world in which the office of the Lord Chamberlain has been fully reintroduced. Restore the blue pencil to manly hands that have seen active service, and going to the theatre with the family would no longer be fraught with risk. You and your loved ones wouldn’t always feel just an inch away from involuntary immersion in the crazed extremes of phallus-worship.

 
Someone at HQ in Purgatory must have been going through my files. They noticed that I had felt obliged, in the 1960s, to despatch several stiff letters of complaint about the works of Joe Orton. “I myself was nauseated by this endless parade of mental and physical perversion perversion!” is how I confided my disgust at Entertaining Mr Sloane to the Daily Telegraph. When Loot came out, I added that “these plays do nothing but harm our image abroad, presenting us as the slaves of sensation and unnatural practice”.

 

A person by the name of Libby Purves, who reviews theatre, sprained her ankle last Thursday while attempting to rush to an opening night. I can just picture her – tottering on five inch heels, weighed down by department store bags. If you live that way, what can you expect? The production turns out to be the world premiere of Fred and Madge, a previously unperformed play, written in 1959 by my old sparring partner, Joe Orton.As part of my remission programme, I have been sent back to earth for the penitential purpose of “standing in” for Mrs Purves. One night only. The prospect of cleaning the bathroom facilities after a Roman orgy would plunge me into the dumps less.

 

Fred and Madge, though, has some surprises in store. Moaning minnies, Fred and Madge (Jake Curran and Jodyanne Richardson) are an “absurdist” attack on the conformity that some us of us see as the cement of civilisation. The couple have a daughter called Janice ,who is a hygiene buff and over-taxes her strength practising for a carpet-beating exam. This character never appears – though, in my view, she should be central. It was the cleaning company I felt for most after the uncalled-for circumstances of Orton’s death in Islington’s Noel Road : just a hop, skip and a jump from the little fringe pub where this premiere has been mounted.

 

In the bar during the interval and afterwards, glowing praise for the play and Mary Franklin’s production was rife. I overheard one young woman saying that “the increasing suspicion that there is nothing beyond the theatre reminds me of The Truman Show”. I myself was reminded of Private Lives in the scene where the divorced Fred and Madge re-encounter each other in neighbouring hospital beds, having sustained accidents on their way to their second weddings. The audience seemed to be doubled up by Geordie Wright as a very hirsute and leggy Queenie, the character whose nuptials to an Indian occasion the wholesale, elephant-ride fantasy escape to shift to the Palace of the Mogul at Sutpura. And by “the sly Audrey Hepburn charms” (overheard comment) of Loz Keystone, as the chief “insultrix” of the bunch of professional insulters.

 

 

I’m afraid that I couldn’t enjoy their performances. The view of hairy legs popping out a frock is not my idea of good night out. Fred and Madge, though, is probably the least sick-making of Orton’s works. After this, it was downhill all the way.

 
Box office 0207 478 0160 To October 18

Rating; four 4 Meece Rating

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September 20, 2014 · 9:10 am

RAGNAROK – Hush House, Bentwaters Air Base

VALHALLA IN A VALHANGAR

Deep in the bleak Cold War desolation of the old US Air Base in Suffolk stands a shed where once jet engines were tested. Inside, the old Norse gods gather to bicker, swing axes, rip out eyes, bind Fenrir the wolf whose jaws will eat the world. They brag of feuds and love affairs more entangled than Dynasty, and move inexorably towards their Gotterdammerung twilight. Walls rumble away, giants with gnarled heads and fiery eyes lumber out of the tunnel where once the jet-flames roared. Puppet eagles fly overhead.

 

Eastern Angles, with a commendable desire to express the ancient mentality which sent the funeral ship to Sutton Hoo up the road, have commissioned Charles Way to tell the tale of the bickering gods, with Hal Chambers directing, a gleefully site-specific design by Samuel Wyer, and brilliantly ominous soundscapes from Benjamin Hudson. Audiences are either fascinated – like me – or, in a few cases, baffled (“I don’t do f—ing goblins!” muttered one. But he did like the giants).

 

For Norse myths have tended to be outranked in general awareness by the Greek variety, and unless you are a keen Wagnerian (or, like a delighted twelve-year-old boy near us, well up on Marvel comics) it is prudent to Wikipedize a swift refresher on what happens in the Eddas to Odin, Thor, Loki, Freya, Baldur and the rest of the Asgard set. Remember the difference between Nibelheim and Midgard, why the gods hate the giants though related to them, and why the tree Yggdrasil matters. If you prefer to come to it cold, sit back and accept that hairy Norsemen round winter fires had to make up something to explain their violent weather and volcanoes, and entertain themselves. And us: not least because Oliver Hoare’s vigorous Loki looks more like Russell Brand every minute, and it is gratifying to imagine Brand being held over a volcano with a magic eagle pecking his liver, or being electrocuted by Thor using a moose’s antlers as a lever.

 

Amid all the roaring uncouthness (Theo Ogundipe a fabulous Thor, Gracy Goldman a foxy provocative Freya) it is fascinating to notice elements echoing Christian or classical myth: significant apples, sexual misconduct, miscegenation, disguises, even an oracle: Sarah Thom in an alarming spidery-raggedy outfit with a rat-skull in her headdress and a lot of booming echo. Antony Gabriel’s Odin is striking, as is Frigga his wife (Fiona Putnam): they’re the only ones allowed a trace of nobility. The rest – apart from the necessarily bland goodie Baldur – roister and fight intemperately, and when the walls of Asgard need mending are stupid enough to hire a disguised enemy who demands the sun and moon as payment (Josh Elwell, particularly adept at suddenly turning into a huge puppet giant).

 

Well, you get the idea. It rolls along to a spectacular final doom, with flame and shocks and drumming. I can’t entirely admire Way’s text: sometimes it takes off in poetic epic flights or adds adds nice Anglo-Saxon constructions like the mason’s horse – “tail-swinger, grass-muncher, stone-shifter”. But when it descends into slangy modernism the bathos grates without amusing. But the narrative is always clear, even if some side-stories need a cut. And the death of innocent Baldur, with the fire-ship vanishing down the tunnel as the world sinks into “Axe-age, sword-age, wind-age, ice-age” finally brings a creepy sense of eternal themes, immolation and the world’s fall from grace.

 

And then you’re out into the dark concrete wastes of the old air base, monument to more recent follies. Brrrr.

 

box office 01473 211498 http://www.eastern-angles.co.uk

rating: three 3 Meece Rating

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September 18, 2014 · 12:05 am

DOCTOR SCROGGY’S WAR. Shakespeare’s Globe SE1

A GALLANT SADNESS : FACES OF WAR

 

“We don’t do glum here. Glum just doesn’t work”. Clipped, officerly with an edge of confident eccentricity, cradling his Cambridge Blue oar and musing on blood vessel repair, the speaker in Howard Brenton’s WW1 play is James Garnon as Major Harold Gillies. He was the Army surgeon whose pioneering work in plastic surgery at Sidcup saved, or made bearable, hundreds of young men’s faces blown to horror by the burning, spinning, infected, jagged weaponry of trench warfare.

 

Taking him at his word, Brenton avoids the centennial pitfalls – prurient wallowing in misery or simplistic hostility towards the officer class. This is neither Birdsong nor Oh What a Lovely War, and frankly a better play than either. Never ‘glum’, although at times the tale of one young volunteer, blown into the hospital of ruined faces, is compassionately poignant, and never dodges the irony that many such young men took their mended faces straight back to the front.

 

Soldiers are not glum, and will not be made so. Furious, suicidal, bitter at moments, male youth will extraordinarily defy gloom. And Gillies, famed for his practical jokes, does not allow despair. “The medicine of fun” has him prowling the wards by night in a comedy Scottish rig and ginger beard as the mysterious Scroggy, dispersing nips of champagne and vaudeville jokes, and outraging the Matron and senior officers by encouraging bandaged, faceless patients to drag up in frocks and do a cabaret for the visiting Queen Mary.

 

Which may sound mawkish – consoling fodder for our softer age – but is balanced by the baldness of facts about mutilation, by almost casual scenes of VAD nurses checking through corpses for signs of life, and by the attitude of our hero Jack (Will Featherstone). He is a Thames mudlark who won a Balliol scholarship, a “temporary gentleman” promoted for his intelligence but explicitly despised by toff officers and a purblind Chief of Staff (Paul Rider). Featherstone gives Jack a chippy patriotism and an adolescent stubbornness as he resists Gillies/Scroggy all the way, both in his initial suicidal despair and then in needy, restive determination to go back to war.

 

Gripping historically and emotionally, and often very funny in laddish soldierly humour and domestic vignettes, the play lightly conceals its subtlety. Brenton knows how to play the Globe: clean simplicity, speed, and a few casual comradely addresses to the groundlings (“You all know what’s going to happen to me” says Jack early on “I’m going to lose my face”). But within the first minutes interesting undercurrents are flowing: the decay of the old class order, the brittleness of fading Edwardiana, the parallel seductive challenge of both warfare and experimental medicine, the naïveté of propaganda.

 

Nor does Garnon fail to indicate, fleetingly but credibly, the need for emotional release of the doctor himself in his practical jokes like the (ooh, fortuitously topical) comedy kilt-and-beard. And goodness, how the music helps: not least if you recognise the odd snatches of “When a knight won his spurs…” from trumpeter and ‘cello above. Another sad, necessary echo of understanding. We will never entirely empathise with these great-great-grandparents, but theatre gets some distance.

 

So altogether, ia perfect Globe piece. But I hope that like this author’s Eternal Love and Anne Boleyn, similar leaps towards understanding of past sensibilities, it soon tours to other stages.

 

Box office 0)20 7401 9919. To 10 oct
Rating: Four. 4 Meece Rating

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September 16, 2014 · 11:06 pm

BALLYTURK Lyttelton, SE1

A PSYCHOTIC PUCKOON

 

Watching Enda Walsh’s surreal new 90-minuter, late star of the Galway festival, one reflection kept intruding: that there is, God save us, a dangerously fine and porous line between Beckettiana and bollocks.  Not that the writing isn’t fine, swooping from small-town comedic observation to bleak philosophical uplands as the trapped characters confront mortality and terror within “the prison of the self”.  Nor is there a single thing wrong with Walsh’s direction, or with the performances: indeed Cillian Murphy’s emotional intensity and Mikel Murfi’s wild LeCoq-trained physical clowning are breathtakingly good as they interact and fantasise in an inexplicable garage-cum-flat with scrawled walls and no door.   Stephen Rea’s arrival halfway through, as a business- suited mystery man presaging death after playing Jenga with a tower of biscuits and crooning into a ceiling mic, is impressive too.

 

Some comic moments (though I suspect Galway laughed more merrily) are fed by the two men rushing, leaping, doing wild things with balloons, a golf club and gym equipment.  Better received are the passages – powerfully reminiscent of Under Milk Wood – when in role- play they evoke the village they no longer inhabit . Actually, maybe they never did, or possibly they were banished from it to this weird graffitied limbo for being crazy. Murphy, pretending to be the old shopkeeper Joyce Drench while hunched on top of the wardrobe is fine; so is Murfi’s physical evocation of each inhabitant, changing in a second. But that is a matter of applied craft.   More enlightening, oddly, are the ghostly recorded voices from the walls (one is the inimitable Pauline McLynn, hurrah). They offer scraps of barmy but recognizable elderly conversations – (“I always felt my body was following me around”)  as if scripted by a Hibernian Alan Bennett in the process of emerging groggily from a general anaesthetic.

 

But that word, scripted… Yes, there lies the problem. Not only do the whimsical passages about five legged rabbits make you fear that the dialogue is in danger of vanishing up its own craic, but some more serious long monologues near the end destroy any illusion that we are among real suffering individuals (and they are indeed suffering in their dislocated universe, it’s bleak). Twice or thrice I felt that awful jolting sense ‘he isn’t speaking, he’s reciting”. And for all the atmosphere, the cleverness, the small good shocks which set and events offer – that gap between text and humanity sort of kills it.  Maybe Walsh means it to: maybe it is a rueful paean to self-harming introverted Irishness: “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold…” See:  Yeats said it better, a century ago.

 

box office 0207 452 3000 to  11 oct

rating: three3 Meece Rating

 

 

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September 16, 2014 · 12:00 am

FORBIDDEN BROADWAY Vaudeville, WC2

DAFT AND DARING,  WITTY AND WHOOPEE

 
Onstage a suave Robert Lindsay preens and pirouettes, a matinée idol sick of self-love, pivot of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels running just across the Strand. Down in the audience the real Lindsay, on his night off, cringes in the dark amid the first-night guests. That is the sporting spirit which, for thirty years, stars and creators of musical theatre have had to summon up in the face of Gerard Alessandrini and Phillip George’s spoof ’n satire revue of musical theatre. From broad amiable joshing to startlingly sharp digs of the knife, this incarnation takes care to reflect the London streets around it: more West End than Great White Way, and all the jollier for it.

 

 

It feels soon for a re-review – my take on  the Menier’s July show can be found by scrolling down a few inches here – but this transfer is studded with new numbers (not least some astonishing diva-impersonations by the new cast member, Christina Bianco, who joins Anna-Jane Casey, Damian Humbley and Ben Lewis). It nods to the coming Evita and Cats revivals and the new Miss Saigon, has a wonderful time with Once and even squeezes in a Stephen Ward joke (brief, because the creators prefer to kick shows which are winning, rather than relative flops).

 
So plenty of remembered treats from July: the child-exploitation sequence with a Warchus-Trunchbull cursing “vermin! vermin with Oliviers!”; the super-stupor Abba, Cameron Mackintosh as producer-seducer humping the grand piano (where Joel Fram presides with brilliant panache). The glorious quick-change costumes are each more absurd than the last, the vocal and lightning wit of the foursome cast intact. But seeing it again draws out its sheer cleverness, verbal and musical. The barbs are finely tuned to each show’s weakness: Miss Saigon is pilloried for noisiness and show-off helicopter, and given a snatch of West Side Story to guy its derivativeness. Sondheim’s oeuvre is a scholarly gabble of antonym and metonym and tonguetwisting internal rhymes as the cast challenge the house to an impossible Sondha-singalong. That’s an almost loving parody: others – like the Book of Moron – are startlingly savage. Though among the barbs about that show’s smugness and crudity I’d have liked a swipe at its racism too…

 
Almost best though are the moments when sympathy lies with the actors – the CATS revival sequence has a row of disaffected moggies longing to be in A CHORUS LINE but finding “One. Singular. Degradation” instead of Sensation. In the Les Mis section weary veterans shuffle round an invisible revolve (“Ten more years…”) .Valjean struggles to bring down the high notes in Bring Him Home – “Bring it down!” and Eponine glumly texts behind the barricade: wage-slaves of long musical runs, loving steady pay and starting to hate the show. The Lion King, soldiering on, hear their vertebrae crunching under enormous headdresses and sing resignedly “African baloney, but we won a lotta Tony”. An Evita revival meets a demonstration against itself; a Frankie Valli Jerseyboy resorts to helium.

 
Cleverness and silliness entwine, as they should: physical jokes and puns like “Vietnumb” alternate with parody so clever you only get it seconds too late. It’s party-time, a riot of an evening, a love-hate insider treat for musical-junkies.

 

box office 0844 412 4663 to 22 nov

rating: four    4 Meece Rating

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September 10, 2014 · 9:02 am

TRUE WEST, Tricycle Theatre, NW6

GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES WATCHES A GOOD IDEA STUMBLE AWAY INTO THE DESERT

This is a drunk play. It rambles a great tale at you, mildly hooks you, then fluffs the end as it totters off for another tipple. We’re promised a great modern classic from Sam Shepard but the result is uneven, strange but interestingly cinematic. Our view is a widescreen picture of a house in LA. The kitchen is perfectly even, the plants scream 70s from the far wall and the sky is piercing blue. The designer Max Jones has built a creepily smooth Stepford house; the kind you can easily picture yourself having a breakdown in.

The play, however, has no such vision; no coherence. Austin is a successful screenwriter with an all-American face and bright blue shirts. He is house sitting for his mother. His rough-looking brother, with muddy hands and an unwashed t-shirt with many tales to tell, has arrived unannounced. Austin has a screenplay to write, but, uh-oh, Lee has an idea. An idea from the desert, no less. This sets us off nicely. The dialogue is hit and miss, a little self-absorbed, but with enough shine to make it promising. A suitable but not particularly exciting turn comes from Steven Elliot (as a ‘moooovie’ producer with cash to splash) who appears to get Lee’s idea rolling. An outline is written, the brothers clash; it is thoroughly usual but is lifted by good humour and nice outbursts from Alex Ferns as Lee. There is nothing more intriguing than the mentally unstable and Alex starts with this well.

Its biggest crime at this stage is simply self indulgence. It rambles, stagey arguments bubble from nowhere, and this Tricycle audience gasps with horror at snide remarks about producers, and roars at jokes about agents’ fees. This is the best, I thought, that a play about screenwriting could do. Until it twists. It is as if Sam Shepard, or the director Phillip Breen (who draws some nice tense moments in the first half) utterly lose faith in the will-they-won’t-they ‘brothers who work together’ dynamic. It flips into a horrible dream; the lights are cranked up, the performances are strained and the script melts into nonsense about stealing toasters and whether the desert would be a suitable home. All of the tepid momentum about their father, different upbringings and contrasting lifestyles (which we attentively waded through with the promise of a payoff) is cast aside in favour of getting the brothers pissed and trashing the mum’s house. The cinematic style, tense edge and average humour are lost. Eugene O’Hare becomes absolutely cartoonish, Alex Ferns ditches all character in favour of the obscene and the script droops lower and lower until the excruciatingly obvious return of the mother. An interesting premise bottled.

– LUKE JONES
Rating: Two Mice 2 meece rating

Playing at the Tricycle Theatre until 4th October
Box Office: 020 7328 1000

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September 8, 2014 · 7:46 am

COMEDY OF ERRORS, Shakespeare’s Globe SE1

GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES FINDS AS MUCH TO KEEP AS TO THROW AWAY

Uneven, but with big laughs, confused but not entirely to fault; this production nestled itself almost perfectly between brilliance and rubbish. The text has great, solid laughs, but they are drowned by the poor farce, which only rarely grabs attention. This was a messy show. The stage was littered with the straws it was clutching at. At any one point, half the audience was laughing; the other wincing or blithely inspecting the woodwork. This was a pick-your-own comedy with just as much to keep as throw away. This Comedy of Errors had arrived via farce, stumbled over the language, was picked up by a few plucky performances and then had a bucket of bad comedy staples poured over it. It was knackered, but we laughed.

Two identical brothers are split at birth but 30 years later run the city of Ephesus amok with confusion, mistaken identity and unfortunately identical servants. 4D confusion with too many slamming doors, entrances and exits to handle. The laughs are there; why did they feel the need to add their own?

The good performances hold this production together. Hattie Ladbury gives us her best Carry On edition of Adriana, but the entire show is stolen by Brodie Ross, the servant Dromio, who serves the brother from Syracuse. He commands the audience on multiple occasions, reaping big laughs from mastering the gags available and not playing with rubber props. At points he is in such control that his pauses, glances and delivery let him ride the audience, cueing our roars and conducting our silent concentration. His was a great performance; the funniest I have seen at the Globe. Jamie Wilkes is excellent but his scenes with Simon Harrison (the brother from Ephesus) are ridiculous slapstick. The fighting is dull. The poorly executed highs (e.g. a squid being thrown and then a struggle to ‘accidentally’ have it latch onto his face) had as many eyes rolling as mouths laughing.

The two brothers, Matthew Needham and Simon Harrison, were thoroughly acceptable but with little variance in their expression of ‘huh?’. They were confused, constantly, but a little dull, grabbing fish to slap people to get a handful of laughs when they needed it most. Their range was trills in the voice and looks to camera and nothing more. 70s sitcom at most.

The interest was primarily farce, an added feature, which was average and played as if stodgy routine. The highlight was strong Shakespeare delivered from bold, funny performances; quite the mix. It was exclusively played for laughs so when it finally tried to show its heart, cash in some drama, eke out some substance, we had no time for it, and it no enthusiasm left. Funny, but little else.

– Luke Jones

Rating: Three Mice 3 Meece Rating
Playing until 12th October
Box Office: 020 7401 9919

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September 1, 2014 · 11:34 am

TOAST Park Theatre, N4

THE STAFF OF LIFE: ORDINARY LIVES.

 

A shift in a Yorkshire mass-production bread factory in the 1970’s: Richard Bean , at eighteen, was there. In that perceptive, new-fledged moment of adolescence he met, he says “some of humanity’s most desperate, funny and tragic human beings”, and recognized that he was one himself. Twenty years later he wrote this play. It’s a comedy, with moments of disconcerting darkness and threat, but beyond that a lasting tribute to a world – still with us – of resigned, morose, dry-witted industrial workers.

 

The set (James Turner’s design) is brilliantly grimy, with a sink from hell, artfully begrubbed floor and walls and an ironic sign “Please Help Keep your Canteen Clean”. Keep? Some hope. In this we find the chargehand Blakey (Steve Nicolson, every inch the powerful man enslaved to tedium, his back-story slid artfully in late on but pretty visible in his watchful self-containment). We find chirpy Cecil (SImon Greenall), Peter (Matt Sutton) , Dezzie (Finlay Robertson) the ex-trawlerman, Colin (Will Barton) and the great, ancient , lumbering lifer Wilfred – known as Nellie – a superb evocation by Matthew Kelly of a monosyllabic monolith, an institution, mocked a little but pitied by the others as a warning of how it might be to stay in this grim job forever.

 

The first half, for all its naturalistic uneventfulness, is constantly gripping: not least with the incursion of the student casual worker (John Wark) who unnervingly combines vulnerability and sadness with menace. At one point, to be honest, I wondered whether the character was a supernatural manifestation: there is a real weirdness in the second half of that first act. And when the ovens jam, and dangerous manoeuvres seem essential to keep these precarious men’s jobs open, the drama of the second act intensifies. And there is both a hint of tragedy and – with Lance the student and the watchful Blakey – a genuinely redemptive moment.

 

All of which is making it sound a bit heavy. It’s not. Bean’s dough, as ever, rises beautifully (Eleanor Rhode directs with clarity and pace). But it’s definitely wholegrain stuff, chewy, with nourishment.

 

box office 0207 870 6876 http://www.parktheatre.co.uk to 21 Sept

RATING  FOUR  4 Meece Rating

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August 29, 2014 · 9:47 am

PITCAIRN – Minerva, Chichester

NOT SO PEACEFUL IN THE PACIFIC

 

 

It is not often that the Chichester front-row is questioned about its sexual practices by merry brown girls extolling carefree Tahitian sex. “Our favourite thing! Young people go into the hills in a big group for days and do nothing but have sex with each other. It is a good way to make friends. Do you do that?”. A balding man froze in horror at being targeted, but I am proud to say that his white-haired wife called the impertinent bluff and just nodded serenely. Go Chichester!

 

It was only one of many odd moments in Richard Bean’s latest play, produced by Out of Joint (Max Stafford-Clark directs) with Chichester and the Globe. It imagines the two years after Fletcher Christian’s Bounty mutineers of 1789 cast Captain Bligh adrift, returned to Tahiti to collect (or kidnap) twelve local women and a few men to help with the ship, and found sanctuary and fertile land on the tiny Pitcairn island, one mile by two. When they were found some twenty years later, only one mutineer remained, surrounded by the women and children. To this day on the island a few descendants with English names remain (several of the men lately mired in a notorious paedophile and incest scandal).

 

Bean, however, focuses on the first couple of years and the desire for what Fletcher Christian calls “a virgin leaf of vellum…”. A fresh start for the Enlightenment era, an equal society without clergy, aristocracy or injustice, everything discussed at the “Yarning Court”. Utopia. Of course it falls to pieces, as in most such fables from sci-fi post-apocalypse tales to Lord of the Flies. Christian concludes, as various ghastly or ludicrous events transpire, that “the natural condition of man is violence, lechery, drunkenness, greed, suspicion and hate”. The Englishmen resort to muskets and manacles, the Tahitians rebel.

 

There are some good sharp ironies: not least that the islanders are more class-conscious than the Englishmen, Mi Mitti the ‘wife‘ of Christian discarding him when informed that his family has lost its money. The performances are fine: Tom Morley as the angst-ridden Christian and Ash Hunter as the appalling Bible-bashing hypocrite Young in particular. But the women – Anna Leong Brophy, Saffron Hocking, Cassie Layton, Siubhan Harrison, Lois Chimimba and Vanesse Emme – are particularly fine, not least at handling the Pacific-pidgin speech into which they have to fall, and in Chimimba’s case performing two extreme sexy-haka dances without loss of dignity. Which is important, because the most uncomfortable aspect of Bean’s text is the amount of dirty-old-man lines in which lovely brown women with tumbling black hair extol the joys of constant and group sex. I am sure it is meticulously researched, down to the expressions, but…tricky. On the other hand he also imagines a final revolt where the women violently take charge. I admire Bean greatly, and wish this cudgel-feminist denouement didn’t feel quite so much like guilty compensation for the raunchy stuff.

 

Anyhow, the islanders’ fragile society crumbles into rivalry, rape, religious fanaticism, civil war, Naveed Khan as the low-caste Tahitian wandering around with an axe and assorted scalps, and the worst villain’s death scene so prolonged (women! Can’t even beat people to death properly!) that actual giggles arose as poor Samuel Edward-Cook kept rising with a groan.
It is an interesting, far from dull evening, though it comes nowhere near Timberlake Wertenbaker’s noble Our Country”s Good (the last 18c imagining done by Out of Joint). It is wonderfully well staged with Tim Shortall’s design of bare rocks and Andrzej Goulding’s projections.

 

box office cft.org.uk 01243 781312  to 20 Sept then touring till 22 Nov

Rating three3 Meece Rating

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August 27, 2014 · 11:42 pm

HAY FEVER Theatre Royal, Bath

BLISS?  OH YES IT IS

 

 

Here’s a 1924 creation: swooping and frivolously asymmetric as a drop-waisted flapper-dress, flashily well-crafted as a Deco windowpane. Its first critics complained that it has no plot, and indeed in that regard the 25-year-old Noel Coward was well ahead of his time. All that happens is a dreadful weekend, or 18 hours of it. The Bliss family, a quarrelsome quartet of fascinating but hellishly uninhibited bohemians, have each invited down a guest without warning the others. The matriarch Judith, an actress bored in retirement, has a young admirer Sandy (a nicely pop-eyed James Corrigan); her ill-tempered novelist husband David has absentmindely recruited a young girl to study as a “type”, while the daughter Sorel has asked an FO grandee old enough to be her father, and the son a fortyish socialite vamp who hates Judith.

 

All the family enjoy creating dramas, with no mercy for the hapless civilians who are in turn ignored, embarrassed, flatteringly half-seduced, manipulated, compromised, and driven to flight. And that’s it. Between Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning the Blisses stalk, confuse and appal their prey.

 

It is a play everyone should see in youth, and again when tempted to indulge parental dramatics in age; just as everyone should read and re-read Cold Comfort Farm and be armed against the ruthlessness of those who live in a “featherbed of false emotions” as one victim puts it. For this therapeutic treat, you could do a lot worse than Lindsay Posner’s sharp, gleeful two-hour production.

 

Felicity Kendal is Judith Bliss: not the Junoesque tragedy-queen she is sometimes played as but a petite, shingled no-no-nanette figure perfectly in period, hurling herself into the insincerely tragic scenes with gusto but always indicating the monstrous woman’s watchful steeliness, alert for the next opportunity of mischief, flirtation or ideally both. Kendal adds some lovely touches: whenever Judith does her famous line about “dreams trodden in the dust” she points at the supposed dust, every limb trembling hammily; but in seconds returns to her beady-eyed search for attention. The famous second-act closer has her draped, sobbing theatrically, halfway up the banisters as she recreates her favourite melodrama “Love’s Whirlwind” . The audience actually gurgle with pleasure.

 

As for Judith’s cat-and-mouse scene with her daughter’s diplomat boyfriend (a glorious, baffled-senatorial turn by Michael Simkins) it is like watching two perfect gears mesh. And in her pretended renunciation scene with her husband (Simon Shepherd) and the alarmed Myra (Sara Stewart) it is remarkable to watch them simultaneously emote weepingly and shake with suppressed laughter at the panicking victim’s expense. So yes, Bath delivers this precious antique as the joy – and the Awful Warning – that it always should be.

 

box office to 6 Sept – touring to 27 Sept, Richmond & Brighton

rating  four  4 Meece Rating

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August 26, 2014 · 11:32 pm

SOME GIRL I USED TO KNOW – Arts Theatre, WC2

ESSEX GIRL COMES OF AGE

 

 

I rather like Denise van Outen. A trouper, a trained musical-theatre talent who had to make it (and she did, triumphing in CHICAGO here and on Broadway) by first becoming a celeb: presenting a couple of vapid TV shows and being named Rear of the Year. That tells us uncomfortably much about star-casting shallowness, but equally proves van Outen’s determination, discipline and taste for the hard graft of the live stage.

 

And, of course, she has a glorious voice, considerable acting talent and endearing presence. Here, in cheeky TOWIE style, she plays Stef: a lingerie entrepreneuse, gossip-column veteran exploiting trashy fame but, in her thirties, ever more uneasy with its pressures. Hard to think of anyone more fit to perform such a part – and indeed co-write it (with Terry Ronald). The result is rather better than a couple of snarky male reviewers suggested during its recent tour. Maybe it’s a girl thing.

 

It’s a simple, slight plot: alone in a hotel room (‘Minibottles of Molton Brown, a bed the size of Belgium but walls like Kleenex”) she restlessly shrugs into a tracksuit between media appearances, roaming around beneath a surreal dangling mobile of teenage memories – T shirts, a bike, an old phone, toys and fripperies of the girl she used to be.  She takes calls from  her loyal and broody husband, depressed by the way their sex life has become “polite”, hesitates about having a baby and reminisces ever more intensely about her schoolday lover Sean. He has begun to send her cheeky Facebook pokes, and fancies coming over to pick up where they left off now that she’s a Veuve Cliquot Businesswoman of the Year. That Sean is a pig is apparent to us, but not, at first, to her . Golden memories flood in.

 

The format is a brave one, a one-woman jukebox  musical (only the title song is not an 80s or 90s cover) but holds up surprisingly well. Van Outen has the character’s brittle-coarse Essex girl persona off pat, and adds an awkward gentleness which, for all her confidential asides through the fourth wall, builds an illusion that Stef is, indeed, alone and at a crisis point. She conjures up her teenage years with references to Aramis, Funny Feet, Guns ‘n Roses, Ibiza raves, and how her pal Slaggy Sue melted her Rampant Rabbit on the electric heater because Charles and Di had split up and she was “distracted by Nicholas Witchell”. It is not, I must admit, my own nostalgic period, nor are these anthems my songs of choice. But it’s a proper story, and I wanted to know her ultimate response to the booty-call.

 

The second act develops into sharper drama and deeper pain as she brings herself to remember how that firat love actually ended.  There is real courage and feeling when she scrubs off the defensive makeup and sings of loss and humiliation, pallid and distraught and looking all of Stef’s age.  If this is a showcase, I hope it makes some directors think seriously of making better use of Denise van Outen’s gifts.

 

box office 020 7907 7092 to 13 Sept

rating:  three 3 Meece Rating

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August 24, 2014 · 7:14 pm

THE DOG – Frinton Summer Theatre

A NEW BLONDE BOMBSHELL STORMS THE STAGE

 

 

Summer seaside rep is not dead. Frinton Summer Theatre is marking its 75th year, and it’s worth celebrating , even though I caught the last play right at the end of its run (it sold out anyway, including three extra matinees, who needs critics?). There’s comedy, dance and Jacqui Dankworth to come this week, but I have to report that the final play – a premiere by Jon Canter – was a humdinger, a triumphant flourish for the season’s end. Four cracking performances, one of them by a real golden retriever; many fine jokes, and a sweet-hearted undertow of gentle melancholy about age, loss, love and memory.

 

 

Richard Wilson, that master of intelligent curmudgeonliness, plays a septuagenarian couples counsellor (“The first couple I saw were Gerald and Marjorie – that dates me”). He is trying to reconcile his final clients: a pretty abominable pair of nouveau-riches . In a series of short scenes – often picked up, niftily, in mid-conversation – we learn that Charlie is the manager of a volatile girl popstar called The Moon, and that his leather-trousered wife Apples (Jasmine Hyde) was his efficient PA but since marrying him does nothing but run a self-aggrandizing charity and make awful jewellery. Both are permanently affronted and intermittently savage.

 

 

But before, and between, these scenes in the first act the old man is alone onstage with his dog Grace: a part played with superb insouciance and expressive listening skills by Darcey, a golden retriever and former guide-dog in the most striking stage debut of the year so far. Stage tradition would suggest that Richard Wilson cannot have been entirely keen on sharing the stage with this blonde showstopper, but the rapport is tremendous. Canter’s sharp thoughtful script has him addressing exactly the sort of remarks to her that one does proffer to a familiar pet when alone; between that, and phone calls to his demented old mother’s care home, we learn where he is and has been in a brave and lonely life. And the dog, fully in control of her exits, moves and loyal expressions of attentiveness, does not detract one bit from the humanity of it. Even the occasional inevitable, British-audience-standard signs of “aaah!” cannot distract from Wilson’s magisterial command of our attention.

 

Canter writes some wonderful lines (not least Charlie’s cross “Do I LOOK deep to you?”) and Apples‘ prim, contemptuous irritability is both funny and exasperating: there is a nice sense of modernity about their shallow preoccupations set against the counsellor’s generational difference.

 

 

When it does become touching, near the end, the sour comic edge of which the older actor is a master cuts through schmalz with good moments of bathos. Aftar a splendid exchange after the couple reconcile (“What shall we do now?” “Leave!”) – I did cavil a bit at a final five-minute scene which tied up the story into too pretty a bow. I’d drop that. But I’d watch the play again: if only another theatre can get Wilson backm and cast a dog as stageworthy as Darcey.

rating: four  4 Meece Rating

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August 23, 2014 · 3:17 pm

REVOLUTION FARM – City Farm, Newham

ORWELL GOES GANGLAND

 

 

Far out in DLR-land, in the wilderness of Urban Regeneration that is the new East-of-East End, Newham City Farm has been since 1977 a place where you can, refreshingly, look at cows and carthorses and rabbits and remind yourself that there is more to the messy-feathery-dungy business of life than high-rise banks and bland groomed city parks. As site-specific theatre goes, it couldn’t be a niftier place for director James Martin Charlton to put on an urban-gangland adaptation of Orwell. With a one-off special permission the story is rewritten by James Kenworth, and local children in rather terrifying facepaint and paper snouts (Ian Teague’s designs) join five professionals.

 

Nicola Alexis and Andreas Angelis are smarmy pigs with fearsome snouts and hoodies, eyes glittering nastily from the dark paint, Kevin Kinson is the towering, faithful, dim carthorse (Orwell’s Boxer renamed Warrior), Katie Arnstein his sceptical horse best friend, and Samuel Caseley is Hero, eventually betrayed. The original father of the revolution, Old Boy, is a more benign puppet pig, who we first meet in the atmospheric darkness of the barn as the animals plot their bid for justice and freedom.

 

It’s a promenade performance: you folllow the animals round as, with considerable spirit, they enact the story in shed, field and open space, leaping onto a ping-pong table and erecting a fine wooden windmill for the industrial revolution led by the crafty pigs. The script is gangishly modernized, the slogans not four-legs-good-two-legs-bad but “Four legs badass – two legs Wasteman”. It is also more explicitly violent for today’s youthful sensibilities: “Kill the scum! Cut off his head!” “He’s got a gun!”- “But we’ve got the darkness!”.

 

Dark it is, at times. But it follows, with correct intelligence, exactly the Orwellian line of political decline. A founding pig, idealistically, tries to educate the lower animals: the sharper swine disrupt the education, feed them exciting slogans and flatter them as heroes of the revolution. Gradually the rules change and those who question that are silenced, mocked, eventually accused of sabotage and called the Enemy Within. Power concentrates in the hands of the pig-elite. The dogs become an obedient, enforcing army. Repressive murder ensues, and is whitewashed.

 

There is a bit of slightly irritating topical-leftie grandstanding when the pigs talk of “tough decisions” and say “We are all in this together” but the final sacrifice and betrayal of the honest worker Warrior is touchingly done. And, while enjoying the performance (it is a brisk 85 minutes) I have to say that the greatest pleasure was seeing those splendid, spiritedly performing Newham children getting an excellent political education about power, politics, and the need to keep asking questions. I hope a lot of children come to see it.

 

http://www.animalfarm.ticketsource.co.uk to 24 August
rating : three  3 Meece Rating

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August 22, 2014 · 12:48 am

GUYS AND DOLLS – Chichester Festival Theatre

A WINNING ROLL OF THE DICE FOR CHICHESTER

 

 

There is a sort of generosity, an overflowing vigour, when Chichester’s great three-sided arena does the classic musicals. They can’t be safely confined in a proscenium frame but have to pour out in three directions, sharpening the need for story and character, spilling the cast sometimes among us, bursting into 3D choreography with dazzling movement and gorgeous compositions of colour and piled-up shape. And of all the great musicals, none offers more of everything than Frank Loesser’s exuberant 1950 fairytale of gamblers, showgirls and tambourine-banging missionaries out to convert them.

 

The book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows drew on Damon Runyon’s world: a sunny, larky, almost Wodehousian interpretation of New York lowlife. And here, beneath a great illuminated arc of nostalgic advertising posters – pure Disney, in a good way – Gordon Greenberg’s production sings and soars unfettered. The choreography – acrobatic to the point of insanity – is by Carlos Acosta, no less, supported by Andrew Wright: the gamblers in their suits and ties leapfrog, hurtle, somersault in a melée of precise chaos. “Siddown you’re rocking the boat” is phenomenal, and the crap-shooting dance down the sewers almost equally astonishing. As for the women, Anabel Kutay leads a Havana dance which becomes still wilder as the degenerating brawl incorporates Clare Foster’s disinhibited missionary Sergeant Sarah, and Sophie Thompson’s Miss Adelaide in the Hot Box club is backed by plenty of slyly witty, naffly innocent ensemble hoofing in gingham corsetry or strippable mink stoles.

 

When the cast are in motion there is always something to amaze: while Peter McKintosh’s overarching design of ads (Oreo! Cadillac! Camel!) is sometimes reflected in the shiny floor until the cast seem to be floating in a circular mirage of light and colour. And they themselves – perfect right down to the men’s two-tone co-respondent shoes and snazzy socks – form patterns rarely less than perfect.

 

But enough about the look of the thing. Its wit is more the point: the spoken dialogue (of which there is more than many musicals) is sharp and funny, giving scope for subtleties of character. Jamie Parker, chiselled and cool, lets the character of Sky Masterson breathe and genuinely change as he falls in love with Sarah; Peter Polycarpou’s harassed Nathan Detroit has a nice unwilling charm, his confreres (especially Harry Morrison as Nicely Nicely and dour, towering Nic Greenshields as Big Jule) each stand out distinct. Neil McCaul as Abernethy the minister creates in his small moments something genuinely lovable and precious. And Greenberg’s detail never misses a passing joke, not least when he makes momentarily solid the women’s dreams of a ruralized Nathan and domesticated Sky. It takes only seconds, that, but adds to the sum of happiness; so does the real steam from the New York pavement gratings and the momentary appearance (twice) of a wobbly nun on a bicycle with a collecting-bucket.

 

Hard to pick out stars, but the obvious, irresistible, fabulously broad performance is Sophie Thompson’s as Miss Adelaide. Who could resist that high Bronx twang swooping down to a dismayed baritone, her barmy dancing, or that angular anxiety – both hilarious and heartbreaking – about the ever-vanishing wedding day resolved in a final sisterly duet with Sergeant Sarah? Not me.

 

box office cft.org.uk 01243 781312 to 21 Sept
Sponsors Henry Adams / Reynolds / Seaward
Rating: five  5 Meece Rating

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August 21, 2014 · 12:42 am

DOGFIGHT – Southwark Playhouse, SE1

WARM, WONDERFUL,  WISE..THE YEAR’S BEST NEW MUSICAL

 

 

Strewth! What a wonderful show.  In this trade we are cautious of superlatives, lest omething even better comes along and renders us weaponless. Nor am I a target audience for American fringe-musicals chewing over the emotional wreckage of the Vietnam war, and the green boys who came back (if they were lucky) to find themselves both traumatized and unpopular. No Woottom Bassett welcomes for most of them, poor devils.

 

But this –  book by Peter Duchan, with plaintive, both folky and rock-wild music and lyrics by Banj Pasek and Justin Paul – is special. Not just because the young men are so roughly, endearingly young and nervously macho, and  move with an energy both joyful and menacing (Matt Ryan directs, Lucie Pankhurst choreographs). Nor is it mere nostalgia, though set in San Francisco in 1967, sliding back as a memory-play to ’63 and the night before embarkation. It has real dramatic energy, never flagging or overstating the obvious, and within the musical form lies a very good play: a romantic, hard-edged and humane love story with universal feeling at its heart.

 

The “Dogfight” of the title is a nasty squaddie ritual for the last night : a pre-brothel prize for whoever can pick up the ugliest girl and get her to a dance to be judged.  Marine Eddie (a waiflike Jamie Muscato, half-lost boy, half-lout) finds Rose, a chubby shy waitress. His basic shy decency makes him gradually hesitate as she blossoms in innocent delight at her first date, but macho comradeship defeats his doubts. We cringe for her, singing to herself anxiously as she dresses (in a truly awful bow-belted party frock) and hoping her beau will be “nothing short of wonderful”.   By this time, I have to tell you, the entire room is helplessly in love with Laura Jane Mathewson, fresh out of the Royal Academy of Music and in her first job. Gotta be Newcomer of the Year: she’s a jewel.

 

Goodness, they say, writes white: but Matthewson gives Rose a beautiful guileless sweetness , never bland, wholly credible, girlish, emotionally vulnerable but with a fierce intelligence. She shines, but – no Madam Butterfly – delights us further with some sharp feminist-cum-motherly scolding when she discovers her humiliation, and more when Eddie remorsefully tries to make it up to her. Their rapprochement is enchantingly – and funnily, and melodiously – achieved. Add a lovely swooping voice, clear and warm, and a seemingly unselfconscious womanly physicality and..well! strong men swoon, and women who were once chubby girls in wrong dresses whoop and cheer. Remember that name. Laura Jane Matthewson!

 

Around these two is gathered a strong cast, notably Nicholas Corre as a geeky virginal fellow-marine with nervous doubts, and Rebecca Trehearn as a minxy tart. Behind them on a towering section of the Golden Gate Bridge an six-piece band sounding twice the size. Ask no more. It’s almost perfect.

 

box office 020 7407 0234 to 13 Sept

rating: five   5 Meece Rating

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August 16, 2014 · 3:02 pm

WUTHERING HEIGHTS – Theatre in the Forest, Nr Ipswich

OUT IN THE FOREST,  SOMETHING STIRS…

 

 

The slope beneath the great chestnut trees makes a perfect arena: on tiered seating or below it on chairs, the audience are held breathless by Emily Bronte’s unfolding melodrama, as players with whitened faces, mummer-style, appear from the depths beyond or roam between convincingly aged tombstones.

This is outdoor theatre for the summer, surrounded (on “Jimmy’s Farm”) by strings of lights leading down paths through the gloom, and that rejoicingly summery mud-and-Portaloo festi-vibe we love. The informality is enhanced by the fact that your ticket will probably be taken and your steps guided, by Edgar Linton in his pink top-hat (Laurence Pears) or by one of the Cathys: the dark impassioned Cathy Earnshaw (Kirsty Thorpe) or her scampering spirited Linton daughter (Anna Doolan). And that Heathcliff, saturnine and savage, the white makeup eerie beneath dark curls, peers out from nearby trees in the person of Daniel Abbott.

 

It is a sharply, neatly adapted version by the director Joanna Carrick, moving spirit of the splendid Red Rose Chain Theatre. It works with a mixture of naturalism, narrative split between the players as if in some ancient ritual, and occasional chanted choral lines which raise the hairs on the back of your neck. I wondered, in the headlong first half – from the Earnshaw childhood to Cathy’s death and Heathcliff’s crazed grief – how she would handle the second part. The novel’s shape is very different from what a classic tragedy asks, its climb towards reconciliation and the rappreochement of Hareton and young Cathy less arresting dramatically than the wildness of the first part.

 

But Carrick uses the deepening darkness of the evening cleverly, with a constant sense of the haunting Catherine and the haunted Heathcliff set, in black moments, between particularly charming and cleverly adapted Hareton-and-Cathy scenes. Indeed Joel Johnson’s Hareton – childish, then loutish, then earning a wounded dignity – is one of the high points of the show. He’s still training at the Bristol Old Vic: watch out for him. Also worth watching is Rachael McCormick as Nelly: she holds the narrative together with authority and humour. But they’re all good, and the production of a standard you don’t often find outdoors, not on a dank evening up a farm track near the Orwell Bridge. It’s in rep with Red Rose Chain’s COMEDY OF ERRORS, which word of mouth is also recommending. May it stay dry for them…

 

box office http://tinyurl.com/mjgg4r2
01473 603388

rating four    4 Meece Rating

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August 14, 2014 · 5:34 pm

PRODUCT BY MARK RAVENHILL Assembly Hall guestreview

GUEST REVIEWER PHILIP FISHER ON RAVENHILL’S EXTENDED HIT

 

 

It is amazing how quickly contemporary events become history, and recent history becomes the distant past. Mark Ravenhill’s 45 minutesatire was first seen at the Traverse during the 2005 Fringe, less than a month after the London 7/7 bombings. It uses as its central figures Al Qaeda activists involved in the War on Terror, and even features a cameo from the late Osama bin Laden. As such, it already feels dated by the advent of the latest generation of terrorists such as ISIS.

 

This new production stars Olivia Poulet, best known for her appearances in The Thick of It. She plays a role originally taken very successfully by the playwright himself, both at the Traverse and in a remixed version at the Bush a couple of years later: a movie producer trying to sell the role of a modern girl named Amy in her latest project, the comically-bad Mohammed and Me, to some big-hitting Hollywood starlet.

 

Where Ravenhill’s guest was played by a real actress, albeit a silent presence, in this version she is a void located somewhere near the audience. Oddly, this does make a difference to both audience perceptions and the performance, which has slightly less focus. The gender change for the producer almost comes off but that too alters the piece, reducing the irony inevitable when a middle-aged man was telling a young woman how to react and express feelings that she would understand far better than he ever could.

 

The story remains compelling,though, filled with dark humour. Amy, having lost her lover when the Twin Towers fell, meets a “dusky” fellow on a plane and due to force of circumstance takes the Islamic virgin straight to bed. In heavy-handed Hollywood fashion, we discover that he is a suicide bomber and as love blossoms, Amy is left with a series of decisions which only ever occur in bad movies. The story builds explosively to a blockbuster denouement.   Yet Product is effective both because it shines a light on terrorism and cruelly lampoons Hollywood blockbuster movie for shallowness and unthinking tactlessness. Poulet urges the text along in an entertaining performance but one that cannot quite match that of Ravenhill who conceived the role. But it will still draw audiences and has been extended to the Fringe’s end

 

http://www.edfringe.com now to 24 Aug
rating three  3 Meece Rating

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August 13, 2014 · 10:58 am

CALAMITY JANE Watermill, Newbury

BUCKSKINS, BURLESQUERS, BLISS

 
Yee-ha! Calamity Jane strides in, beefy in buckskins, more beltingly, braggingly alive than any man in the room. Or, indeed, any room. She’s been ridin’ the stagecoach through war-parties of redskins real and fictional, likes to accentuate a point by firing her six-shooter at the ceiling, and presents the more feminine Sue-from-the-saloon with a dress-length of gingham roaring “I wouldn’t know how to act with sump’n like that hangin’ off me”. This dame can make Wild Bill Hickock look prissy, and as for poor Lieut Danny whose wounds she binds up with yearning calf-love, he’s plumb terrified. As is the extravagantly bearded Rattlesnake, stagecoach-driver and bass player (Paul Kissaun) who recoils timidly from her fabulous swagger, like the grizzly-b’ars. Of which she says she just shot two. At once.

 

What a treat is this stage version of the great Warner Brothers 1953 Fain and Webster musical . A few minutes in, cosied up under a rope chandelier with the regulars in the Golden Garter saloon, you feel a daft grin spreading across your face which never deserts you all evening. I’d forgotten about the Doris Day film, but every number in this feast of feelgood ‘50s Americana is a classic, as the Deadwood Stage rolls again through the Black Hills of Dakota, whipcrackaway! Unbidden, the audience softly sings along with the Black Hills in the dance scene. And Nikolai Foster’s production is a joy: a cast of storming actor-musicians seizing instruments from fiddle to spoons and percussing the scenery, then breaking into brilliantly hokey line-dance movement from Nick Winston. All this within Matthew Wright’s saloon–and-stage set, perfect in its battered intimacy. The show tours onwards next month and is tough enough to take any theatre: but within the little wooden Watermill it is a particular kind of bliss.

 

And of course Jodie Prenger was born to play Calamity. She’s a belting singer, as we all know from OLIVER (she won ‘I’d do Anything’) but also a smart mover and a dab hand at the spoons. And she radiates a lovable vitality which, in the old cliché, lights up the stage. The plot, diverging somewhat from history but in a good cause, has her braggingly promising to bring a top Chicago act – Adelaid Adams – to the saloon where the guys fight over cigarette-card pictures of the star: the landlord nearly got lynched when he accidentally booked a man (Rob Delaney with a hilarious tap-and-uke routine) instead of a burlesquer. Calam brings a substitute, the ambitious Katie (Phoebe Street) and a romantic tangle ensues, with Prenger dropping her macho act in genuinely moving disappointment and sadness before finding – ta-daaa! – true love in Wild Bill.

 

Hokum, hokum all the way but a blast of playful energy. The rattling stagecoach ride is created by Rattlesnake and Calamity sitting on the top of the old upright piano and the rest shuddering behind , Phoebe Street has a gorgeous feather-duster ballet to “A Woman’s Touch”, Tom Lister’s is sultry Rhett-Butlerish Hickok, and we learn the best Wild-west insult any sister coulda wished for: “Ya frilled-up man-rustler!”.

 

box office 01635 46044 to 6 sept then touring nationwide to Dec.
rating: four   4 Meece Rating

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August 13, 2014 · 10:02 am

ANIMAL FARM – Assembly George Square

GUEST CRITIC PHILIP FISHER IS AWED BY GEORGIAN ORWELL..

 

 

Anyone expecting a children’s show from Guy Masterson’s adaptation of Orwell could be in for a shock. This deeply political production, performed by a large ensemble from Keti Dolidze’s Tumanishvili Film Actors Theatre of Tbilisi, Georgia can be quite terrifying. In fact, its impact and mood are closer to what we expect from 1984 rather than Animal Farm.

It takes a little time to tune into the 90-minute play, partly because it is performed in Georgian with English surtitles; but also because the animals (a large menagerie) are only identifiable thanks to the strong physical acting capabilities of cast members. Once they get going, the classifications become pretty clear and the audience is treated to some chillingly effective imagery, courtesy of designer Simon Macahbeli.

The story is familiar but even so, takes on new connotations when delivered by actors from a country that was for so long a Soviet state and home to Josef Stalin. What seems like a hopeful beginning, when the animals are freed from the established tyranny of Farmer Jones and his human henchmen doesn’t last long. The seven commandments laid down to regulate life are soon forgotten as the terrible Napoleon, given a fearsome mien by leading actor George Kipshidze, begins his civil war against the more benign Snowball, Vano Dugladze.

Soon the animals are divided into two factions and the farm has become the USSR under Stalin, complete with plans, empty promises and enslavement, state-sponsored murder not too far behind.
The animals react very differently to Napoleon and his black hench-dogs, but one the most poignant experiences is that of Zurab Getsadze’s stalwart, workhorse Boxer who keeps the faith to the end. Which comes in the knackers’ yard, not the promised hospital ward.

This very special production is an undoubted Edinburgh highlight, thanks to a powerful adaptation and the commitment of its talented cast. It would be good to see it transfer to London in the autumn.

http://www.edfringe.com to 24th

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August 10, 2014 · 9:32 pm

HUFF Traverse, Edinburgh

WHO’S AFRAID OF THE BIG BAD WOLF?
I thought it was a children’s walk-through amusement, something to keep the little bleeders willing to accompany parents to the serious Traverse plays below. Had too many reviews to do anyway. But that heroine of fringe and innovative theatre, Lynn Gardner of the Guardian, said “Go. It takes twenty minutes. Go”.  So I booked a slot, divested myself of shoes and bag, and crept into a tiny room and sat down on some suitcases to watch revolving musical china pigs on a dresser . And I saw that she was right as usual. One must abnegate adulthood sometimes if one is to maintain balance.
What Shona Rebbe and Andy Manley have created (for Catherine Wheels) is indeed child-friendly: a series of miniature rooms taking you – surreally and obliquely – into the domestic world of the three little pigs: the reckless jerrybuilders who used sticks and straw, and the prudent one with the bricks.  The joy is in its weirdness: you are encouraged to handle and touch things, and you open the kitchen drawers to find bricks, find a fridge worryingly full of Italian ham, and a washing machine spewing straw. It has an unpretentious Dali-cum-fairytale appeal.

 

A disembodied kindly voice leads you on, telling you which wall is the door out (my favourite instruction is “pull on the underpants”. The bathroom is upside down, lav on the ceiling: sometimes you are in a cupboard, once a garage, always with offbeam, slightly threatening suggestions of the prowling wolf only countered by determined porcine domesticities.
It is quite lovely. Thank you Lynn. Unaccompanied children should be 8 at least (CCTV watches out for panic). But with siblings or parents , six year olds have loved it. As for lone adults…well, I played with everything and had a little dance once or twice. Bliss.
box office 0131 228 1434 to 24 aug
rating four

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