January 26, 2015 · 11:46 pm

TAKEN AT MIDNIGHT Theatre Royal, Haymarket SW1

A TERROR AND A TRIBUTE 

 
“May the Master of Mercy shelter them in the shadow of his wings”. A Holocaust prayer is on a slip in the programme for this eve of the Auschwitz liberation, and quiet music plays after the curtain-call for those leaving bereft of speech. Jonathan Church’s powerful, intelligent Chichester production grows in status in the big space, and that it should be played with quiet brilliance so close to Whitehall and Westminster is stirringly appropriate.

 
For Mark Hayhurst’s play deals with five years from 1933-1938: before the war, while official Britain was still trying to hope that Herr Hitler was, well, sort of OK. It relates the fate of Hans Litten, a combative lawyer who in 1931 had called the Nazi party leader as a witness in the trial of some brownshirt thugs, and in cross-examination humiliated him. Hitler, still at his bierhalle-rant stage, was no match for the angry young advocate. A Jew, too: having converted in defiance of his cautious father (born Jewish, but Lutheranizing himself to keep his job) . His mother Irmgard defended his independence. And when he was arrested the night of the Reichstag fire, Irmgard became his champion, her fight the theme of this play.

 
It could be tragic-heroic, a harrowing reiteration of what we all know about the brutalities of Nazism. It is both, but also a play of ideas and discomforting truths, both warning and beacon. Penelope Wilton is Irmgard, in a performance so controlled, impassioned, ironic, subtle and perfectly pitched that several of us left the theatre muttering “Why is she not a Dame yet?” . We meet her as an elegant Prussian matron, confident of her status, resolved to be “patient and objectionable” with the Gestapo officials to get Hans released from what, weasellingly, is called “protective custody” against the passionate people of the New Germany. “We are looking after him” says Dr Conrad, the official played with wonderful civil suaveness by John Light.

 

 

His encounters with Irmgard recur through the play: she in command of facts, once horrifyingly listing her son’s known (leaked) injuries. But she plays the game, makes Heil-Hitler concessions; he seems to offer hope, even respect, till the gloves come off and layers of class resentment and fanatical belief make him suddenly venomous. Light does it superbly, chillingly, demonstrating that the veneer of Western European civilization can be very thin indeed.

 

 

The city scenes are on a bare forestage, but artfully convey through the curve of a desk-leg or descent of a chandelier a bourgeois Gerrmanic correctness I recognize from life there. Behind them, concrete and bars give us the cells and concentration-camps where Martin Hutson’s Litten is tormented. And core to the impact of the play is that we see him with fellow-prisoners: the ironic newspaper editor Ossietsky and the wild-man satirist and poet Erich Muhsam. For all their bruises they joke: darkly mock their situation, to bring home the vital truth that such victims were intellectuals, sophisticates, wits: the brightest. And that their tormentors were envious stupid thugs or at best dupes.

 

 

 

The same withering humorous intelligence sparks from Irmgard: she is often, for all her maternal torment, very funny. Nobody can wither like Wilton, for all her kindly grace. There is a scene with Lord Allan – the British envoy on whom her hopes are pinned – where he havers in diplomatic language that Hitler is partly a victim of “mistranslation” and that Anglo-German relations come first. Set against the viciousness behind, that throws a timely parallel with today’s emollient attitudes to Saudi Arabia. Where , remember, a dissident blogger is being imprisoned and tortured while we fly flags at half-mast for the royal autocrats.

 

 

The subject could be unwatchably grim, but the play is not, because its intellectual sinewiness and redemptive spirit shine too bright. At last mother and doomed son meet, and quote Rilke about confronting dragons with courage. “That’s beautiful” says Hans. “I wish it were true” mourns the mother. And he replies “It can’t be one and not the other. You taught me that”. So yes, beautiful.

 
Box office 0845 481 1870 http://www.trh.co.uk to 14 march

Rating: five   5 Meece Rating

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January 23, 2015 · 11:42 pm

BAD JEWS St James’ Theatre, SW1

BRAVE, BARNSTORMING AND CERTAINLY NOT BAD

 

 

With Holocaust Memorial day imminent, the Paris murders fresh in mind and anti-Semitism rising across Europe, can you really put on a chokingly, shockingly hilarious comedy about a family at loggerheads over Judaism? Set on the evening after a Holocaust survivor’s funeral? Yes. Joshua Harmon’s wise, fearless 100-minute piece is built around lifestyle conflicts most modern Western Jews will ruefully acknowledge. But by its very intimacy it touches universal tensions: family, class, money, sexual envy, feminism, racism, self-righteousness, and pure bad temper. The kind which only simmers between warring relatives who will never in a million years, admit how similar they actually are.

 
It is set, and pacily directed by Michael Longhurst for the Theatre Royal Bath,, in a tiny New York apartment . Because of the funeral three cousins – college students – have to camp in one room after the funeral of the beloved grandfather. Daphna (Jenna Augen) is passionately observant, more than her parents indeed: they christened her Diana. She plans to move to Israel, join the army and study as a rabbi. Augen is perfect: a vulture of righteousness, she swoops around under a brilliantly unmanageable thatch of curly black hair which in itself enrages her older cousin Liam (christened Shlomo and keen to forget it).

 

 
Liam has a shiksa girlfriend, sweet blonde Melody (Gina Bramhill) and missed the funeral because “his iPhone fell off the ski-lift” during their Spring Break in Aspen. This provides another excuse for Daphna to berate him, though when he is out of the room she deploys equal efficiency in cross-examining the hapless girlfriend. Her gift for rapid offence means that within mere minutes she happily concludes that coming from a white family – Irish-Polish-German-Scottish American – Melody from Delaware is complicit in the genocide of Native Americans. Worse, she has a tattoo, enabling Daphna to say ominously that her grandfather had one too “but that was different”. Audience gasps. Poor Melody, a pitch-perfect innocent, is a failed opera student who, deliciously, works in charity admin “introducing underprivileged children to the City’s architectural past’ . She is conned into the worst rendering of “Summertime” ever heard on a stage. Bramhill , whose voice betrays that in real life she sings beautifully, wrecks it to perfection.

 

 
Secular, atheist Liam detests Daphna and Ilan Goodman delivers his rage with the ferocity of a velociraptor, his energy a mirror-image of her own, did they but know it. But in a curious, clever interlude the three cousins suddenly remember a family anecdote and fall into helpless shared hysterics, leaving the puzzled Melody looking on. The respite is brief. The issue is who inherits one small, significant object: a token whose story is from the Auschwitz years. Daphna feels entitled, as the only “real” Jew; Liam has it. His younger brother Jonah claims not to mind. That is a quietly important part: Joe Coen has to spend most of the play saying “Whatever” and “I don’t -“ or lurking miserably on the sofabed; but his body language expresses eloquent, important discomfort. He is the vital fourth wheel as this rattling, raging vehicle heads downhill to disaster.

 

 

There is ferocious, gasp-inducing language, up to and including lines like “Don’t you Holocaust me!” “Shiksa cunt!” and “barbed-wire-hopping, Uzi-toting superJew”. Yet it is not a cruel or cynical play. We are aware that the hellcat Daphna is privately unhappy, clinging to her racial and religious heritage like a liferaft; that Liam may want to marry out and embrace atheism but did truly, painfully love and pity the grandfather. We bite our lips wondering whether Melody’s sweet nature will survive in this family. And Jonah ? Ah, his final moment is beautiful, and both hurts and redeems.

 

 
box office  0844 264 2140  www.stjamestheatre.co.uk
Rating: four   4 Meece Rating

 

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January 23, 2015 · 12:55 am

OPPENHEIMER Swan , Stratford-upon-Avon

THE BIRTH OF THE BOMB

 

 

This is what the RSC is for. Not mere Bardolatry, but to bring new work illuminated by the craft, humanity and wisdom which comes to those steeped in Shakespeare. We have felt heart-jerking moments in this theatre, when past crises are shaken into present life: Written on the Heart, Wolf Hall, The Orphan of Zhao, A Soldier in Every Son, The Heresy of Love. But rarely has it struck home as hard as in Tom Morton-Smith’s stunning presentation of J.Robert Oppenheimer , leader of the “Manhattan Project” which in 1945 gave birth to the Bomb and death to millions.

 
Steeped in irony and sincerity, it is a thing of tremendous speeches, dazzling metaphor and heartfelt engagement. It is directed, fast and featly, by Angus Jackson in a bare space beneath great girders: the floor is a vast blackboard on which formulae are scribbled in manic creativity or appear lit suddenly from above; it conjures classrooms, the secret desert lab city of Los Alamos, domestic interiors, and finally the fearful inevitability when formulae became solid, incredible bombs.

 

 

Oppenheimer is John Heffernan in the performance of his career: riveting, truthful, complex, sinking deep into himself or flashing sudden charm. Here’s a brilliant physicist forced by circumstance and ambition to becomes a leader in the technical war, a “a skinny intellectual elitist New York Jew with chest problems and sciatica” happily surrounded by communist party friends passionately fundraising against Fascism in 1930’s Spain. Then a man forced to step aside from “doobious associates” , shadowed by the FBI, too vital to sack but never trusted; the reader of Hindu scriptures who finally describes himself with loathing “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”. Skinny, pale, steely, decent, conflicted, aware of having “left a loaded gun in a playground” for political thugs, real tears touch his face in the final scenes.

 

 

They touch ours too. The last sections are stunning, not least when the new-fledged bomb is dispatched, the pilot briefed, and from its casing a small boy rises and – with studied dispassionate care – explains its effects.

 

 
Despite the fascination of Heffernan himself, the ensemble is core to the play’s strength. Fellow-scientists explain and scribble and offer glorious metaphors of the power of the split atom – “a cloud of tethered energy…a pack of wolves in a broom-cupboard”. They emerge as distinct characters: Jamie Wilkes the bespectacled keen Serber, heading out for Japan with his pet bomb horribly named Little Boy “to hold his hand, see him off”. He cracks later into realization. OR the Europeans Lomanitz, Bethe and Teller, the latter petulantly outraged at the loss of scientific “beauty and elegance” in the dormitory life and dull graft of getting the first-generation bomb ready before Hitler could get his.

 

 
There is genuine, inescapable comedy in the human interactions, not least the sometimes tense, sometimes ludicrous relationships with the military overseers. William Gaminara gives General Groves a dignified pragmatism but Andrew Langtree demonstrates a lovely, crewcut Captain’s indignation at the tieless unpolished scientists who dare to perch on his desk while talking to him. In Oppenheimer’s agonized withdrawal after Nagasaki, though, it is Groves who urges the scientist’s wife to remember the point of uniform: ““It helps to make that distinction between an act of war and an act of….the burden is not his alone and never will be”. The women too – Catherine Steadman as the lively, idealistic, doomed first lover and Thomasin Rand as Oppie’s wife Kitty – are pivotal in the hero’s emotional story . They also – with Laura Cubitt and Sandy Foster – subtly remind us that even within the laboratory fastness of Los Alamos this was civilian 1940’s America: its own life not threatened, the complexities of distant Europe a matter for argument not terror.

 
A stunning play, tribute and warning about the “ambivalence – pride and horror” of harnessing the atom, bringing a star’s violent energy to the earth’s surface. As Frank Oppenheimer heard his brother mutter it the desert test “Lord, these affairs are hard on the heart”.

Superb , serious, humane, riveting, honourable. It must have an afterlife.
box office 0844 800 1110 to 7 March.

RATING  five  5 Meece Rating

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January 22, 2015 · 2:02 pm

RETURN TO THE FORBIDDEN PLANET Theatre Royal Brighton & touring

BLAST OFF INTO THE PAST…

 

 

Repolarize the rockanthemizer! Shakespearianize the iamb-ometer, fasten your retrocamp ironido-nebulized harness and prepare to be utterly weightless! Twenty-five years after its 1983 launch in a tent ,and its subsquent West End Olivier glory, Bob Carlton’s jukebox lark sets off on an anniversary tour.

 
And yes, it feels a bit clunky these days, but the sci-fi rocketship set (designed by Rodney Ford ) is a feast for the eyes of us old Trekkies, and the music is still glorious: belting 1954-68 numbers. They’re delivered by a musically adept cast, notably manic Mark Newnham belting hell out of his Stratocaster as Cookie the lovelorn galley hand, and Sarah Scowen as a fabulous Miranda yowling out “Why must I be a teenager in love ?” with all the blissful sincerity of the pre-Madonna age.

 
Yes, Miranda. For newcomers, this is how it works. Carlton- seeking a show for musician-actors, a novelty in those days – decided that nothing could be more natural than to mix up a ‘50s space B-movie and all his favourite rock’n roll anthems with Shakespeare’s The Tempest. A vengeful Prospero exiled to a distant planet wrecks a spaceship with an asteroid storm (Great Balls of Fire, of course at this point). Ariel is a robot – Joseph Mann jerking amiably about in cuirasses and tin knickers, until an outbreak of nimbleness has him breaking into a soft-shoe shuffle). And the romantic hero – back we go to the ‘50s – is a stiff upper lipped, pipesmoking Sean Needham.

 

 
What makes it intriguing for grownups – and potentially a nice early taste of blank verse for the kids – is the pick ’n mix of real Shakespeare from at least a dozen plays (Prospero becomes Lear for a few lines, with a touch of Caesar, Cookie shifts wildly between Richard III, Macbeth, Romeo, Malvolio and points west)). Add in some cod-Bard lines to keep the rather shaky plot going, allow yourself awful space jokes like “Two beeps? Or not two beeps?” , reference Freudian theory in order to “Beware the Ids of March”, and keep sliding suddenly into glorious numbers like “Don’t let me be Misunderstood” , “Good Vibrations” or “Only the Lonely”. And there you are. Rockin’ erratically through space and time, for fun.

 

 

As I say, in all honesty it does clunk a bit. Carlton still directs, and it might have been jerked forward a bit under someone else. But there is real glee in it, a lovely barking-mad evocation by Jonathan Markwood as Prospero in Rupert Bear trousers and a frock-coat and – not least – some very fine movement direction and choreography by Frido Ruth, a veteran of the show. The initial weightless sequence is quite brilliant: rolling, lifting, drifting, the cast make you think for a moment that they really are in space, guitars and all .

And, after all, we now know what that looks like, now that Chris Hadfield has done Space Oddity while floating around up there. Space, and music, and theatre, have moved on greatly in 25 years. But it’s worth a whoop. I am a bit shocked that Brighton didn’t dance in the aisles, but there will be other opportunities…

 

Brighton Box office 0844 871 7650 to 24th, BUT

TOURING to 9 May. – details http://www.forbiddenplanetreturns.com     Touring Mouse wide
( Birmingham next!)

rating three   3 Meece Rating

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January 20, 2015 · 11:04 pm

THE CHANGELING Wanamaker at Shakespeare’s Globe, SE1

MURDER IN THE DARK 

 

 

The gorgeous giltwood brooding atmosphere of the new Wanamaker playhouse has seen comedy in its candlelight – the bonkers Knight of the Burning Pestle – and opera , and recitation. But it comes best into its own with these darkly morbid , claustrophobic Jacobean dramas. Closed in, the theatre itself becomes a crucible of menace.  Illuminated only by the great rising and falling chandeliers, or by candelabras held by actors whose uplit livid faces flicker with murderous hatred or tardy remorse, you are trapped in the box with them and their darkness. You cam laugh at the jokes – and these Jacobo-nasties have plenty of foolery in between the murders – but you laugh hollowly: stimulated, fearful. Dominic Dromgoole, always supertuned to the way the physical form of his theatres affects the mood, makes the most of this.

 
Webster’s Duchess of Malfi last year was a triumph here, but that has the advantage of a a shiningly good, sane central heroine to point up the wickedness of her enemies.  The Changeling – by Middleton and Rowley – is trickier, its heroine dodgy.  Beatrice-Joanna elicits a trickle of sympathy with her initial bewailing of an arranged marriage, but her contemptuous rudeness to ugly, clever de Flores is followed by her enlisting him to kill the unwanted fiancé and offering a derisory payment. Whereon he insists that what he wants is her virginity. I have seen deFlores played grotesque, sinister, as hideous as the words she describes him in: but there is real bite in Trystan Gravelle’s bluff, unexceptionable appearance (despite some kind of rash) and his downright workmanlike approach to murder and rape. As for that famous line where he takes her glove to “thrust my fingers into her sockets”…eugggghhh.

 
As Beatrice-Joanna, a “woman drenched in blood who speaks of honour” Hattie Morahan is as good as ever: her fragility and subtlety move from petulance to panic, by way of a hinted horrid attraction to de Flores, and at last to a genuinely pitiful tragic understanding of how arrogance led to blood, deceit, arson and another murder. Whose victim, the maid Diaphanta, is brilliantly pitched to contrast with her mistress: Thalissa Teixeira is lusty, lively, innocently sexual in a way her aristocratic lady is not; she has no dark side. Her testing of the virginity-test her mistress fears is hilarious (theres some real comic 17c flapdoodle about an apothecary’s.secret potions which makes you realize how self-denying Shakespeare was, not using magic bottles all the time) .

 
But a bigger problem with the play – in one brief production lately dispensed with entirely – is the subplot: set in a lunatic asylum, the inmates treated as bestial entertainment. Isabella (Sarah MacRae) is kept captive by her jealous old husband, and sought by two suitors who disguise themselves as madmen : Adam Lawrence violently so, Brian Ferguson more verbal. Pearce Quigley, what a treasure, is the awful warder Lollio, managing to be both funny and revolting. And Dromgoole brings out all the parallels between this squalid place and the court, especially in the women’s captivity.

It’s a hard one to hold together, but by the final “And now we are in hell”, the full Jacobean horror has been achieved. Brrr.

 

box office 020 7902 1400 to 1 March

rating: four  4 Meece Rating

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January 19, 2015 · 10:10 pm

ISLANDS Bush Theatre, W12

A CULPABLE, CLOWNISH WASTE OF DAVOS WEEK
This week sees the World Economic Forum in Davos. Today Oxfam said that 1% of the world’s people own nearly half its wealth. Tax havens – many of them relics of the British Empire and privileged by successive UK governments – siphon trillions from the world economy. Christian aid reckons that a thousand children die every day as a result of tax evasion…

 
Timely, then, for the Bush to put on a play attacking that evasive, greedy world. Unfortunately it is this one, by Caroline Horton. Who also, in studiedly grotesque costume and manner, plays the lead, and over whose vision director Omar Elerian has not visibly cast any veil of sanity or discipline. The result is a 105-minute marathon of strutting absurdism, with little humour and only rare streaks of useful metaphor. Most of which you wouldn’t get anyway, unless you read up beforehand. ENRON it ain’t.

 
Of all the wasted opportunities for intelligent, joyful angry stage agitprop in recent years, it takes the biscuit. It makes Russell Brand’s ramblings look erudite, and Anders Lustgarten’s “If you won’t let us dream..” seem almost like real political theatre. And on that last occasion, one friend’s verdict was “Waste of good actors! Why doesn’t the bloody man just stand on the stage in a tinfoil hat and read out a list of his prejudices?” In this, they virtually do just that.

 
But you might want to go, if fond of sub-Jarry absurdism and overstretched metaphors about shit and sodomy. And, to be fair, good physical work (the director is a leCoq man and Horton has a gift for physical menace). Oliver Townsend’s costumes are interesting, though possibly the male tutus, stilettoes and peculiar tights are a hangover from his Dick Whittington. Horton’s diamanté crash helmet and silver lamé testicles certainly have a panto vibe.

 
The conceit (allow the word its double meaning, so un-self-challenging is it) is that Horton’ss “Mary” is a teenager imagining an island – Haven – with no rules, unlimited ‘cherries’ of wealth, and screamy dragged-up acolytes – Seiriol Davies and John Biddle. They float above “ShitWorld” which is the rest of us , and lure Adam and Eve (Hannah Ringham and Simon Startin) to be exploited. And that’s it. Sometimes there is a shouty phone-call from a thwarted regulator, sometimes fragments of news actuality – Thatcher, Reagan, Cameron, Osborne – coming out of the onstage lavatory or sewer lid. But it is over an hour before the point starts properly to emerge; before that there are tedious gross-out irrelevancies. Horton, for instance, delivers a nastily detailed description of a bullfight (though heaven knows bullfights are populist entertainments, more shitworld than taxhaven) in order to say “I suppose when the killing is shared one feels less guilt”. Creeeaaaaak!

The best line – the only spark of wit – was a defiant chap in the bowler saying “We will fight them on the pleasant beaches and in the streets, and in the organic bakeries”) and it is quite a nice idea to have “Adam” forced to strip, trousers-down, to represent Austerity Measures and NHS privatization. But it’s a waste. “Devised in consultation with experts on offshore finance” it still can only offer self-regarding theatre-wonk clowning and a shrieky insistence that we’re all in the shit and callous rich bastards did it.

 
Nothing wrong with that conclusion, absolutely not. But it works better when you actually argue and demonstrate it. What’s the point of agitprop which doesn’t even try to persuade?
BOX OFFICE 020 8743 5050 to 29 feb
Rating – no, can’t do it.

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January 16, 2015 · 11:08 am

THE RAILWAY CHILDREN King’s Cross Station theatre N1

IN WHICH YOUR REVIEWER CRACKS UP ENTIRELY

 

 

Tears are strange. They can fill the eye when witnessing not horror or sadness, but a sudden kindness. It is a kind of happy sorrow: maybe a recognition of our own desolate inner yearning for a kind word. However it is, Mike Kenny’s marvellous adaptation of E.Nesbit’s book brings it on more than once. And since steam-engines themselves nearly always make me gulp – so noble, so shining, so faithful, so lovingly tended – the real one in the show pretty well wiped me out. Twice.

 

 

It was one of the first plays I reviewed for the Times, nearly five years ago when it came from the National Railway Museum at York to the old Eurostar terminal at Waterloo. Now it has a bigger cast of extras and an equally wonderful set: audience on platforms either side of real rails, over which simple wooden stages glide the changing scenes to and fro without fuss. Props (apart from the locomotive) are simple enough to inform children, as all good children’s theatre should, that they can go home and recreate it in play. That first time I took a 9-year-old, and despite having never read the book or seen the film, he absolutely got it.

 
Indeed the memory of the film, good as it was, fades very rapidly because this is a real piece of theatre, faithful to the quirky, inventive, principled early socialist Nesbit and her respectful understanding of children. The three are remembering the summer in Yorkshire: now young adults, aware of why their father was taken away. They narrate in memory, slipping easily in and out of time with uncomplicated clarity. Serena Manteghi is an authoritative Roberta, catching perfectly the age of transition: half child, half questioning adolescent worried about her mother and discovering the horror of her father’s disgrace. Jack Hardwick is a nicely pompous Peter (Nesbit had boys bang to rights!), Louise Calf the cheerful, blurting youngest. Children will recognize the types immediately.

 

 

But Damian Cruden’s production is fully satisfying for adult audiences. Because it’s often funny, but also because of its faithfulness to the 1906 setting, evoking the class awkwardness of a family come down in the world, the mother – Caroline Harker again, sternly warm – hiding the truth from her children, and the bluff kindness and bridling offence at “charity” of stationmaster Perks, a gorgeously Yorkshire Jeremy Swift . The arrival of the penniless Russian exile Schepansky is wonderfully handled, the children’s curiosity and the mother’s grief for “all prisoners and captives” in counterpoint. And of course there are the dramas on the railway line, the red petticoat, all that. And OK, some of us do cracking up with emotion when the great green locomotive (LSWR Adam T3 class No. 563) puffs in for the first time and hisses to a lifesaving halt.

 
But the delight of this production is that it doesn’t depend entirely on that – er – star vehicle. Earlier in the show, tremendous sound effects and great clouds of steam evoke it, and so does the children’s wonder. The father disappears into steam, in poignant silhouette between a top-hat and a policeman’s helmet; he reappears from it at last to that famous cry of “Oh, my Daddy!”. Steam! Love! Redemption! All those Brief Encounter emotions rise, and you may well need a bun in the artfully recreated Refreshment Room foyer to get over it. Actually, my daughter went straight home and “made an emergency apple pie” .

 

 

box office 0844 871 7604 http://www.railwaychildrenlondon.com to 1 March

 

Rating Five    5 Meece Rating

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January 14, 2015 · 11:22 pm

BAT BOY – THE MUSICAL Southwark Playhouse, SE1

AND YOU THOUGHT SPIDERMAN WAS CREEPY…

 

 

Imagine a rock-opera mashup of Frankenstein, Pygmalion and Dracula, hijacked by Marvel Comics and dressed up with cartoonish 1950s smalltown Americana. Add gorgeous retro projections overhead, a great deal of screaming, an orgasmic revival meeting with a pastor in a canary-yellow suit truffling for Sin, some deafeningly fierce bass beats and a few yearning teen-spirit ballads of misunderstood adolescence.
 
Got it? This knowing , cultish, campy show by Keythe Farley and Brian Flemming , with Laurence O’Keefe songs, was new to me though in 1997 it won off-Broadway plaudits and did reasonably well here seven years later. It’s a canny choice for Southwark’s youthful audience, with enough dry wit and streaks of sincerity to recapture me after losing me for a while during some rather tiresome small-town ensembles. It was inspired by a cod news story about a boy raised by bats in a cave – a vampiric Mowgli . He is adopted by the local vet’s family (for reasons melodramatically  revealed much later) while the townsfolk of West Virginia want him killed because he may be preying on the cows, and because he bit a local girl whose blood now won’t clot.

 

 
Luke Fredericks’ production for Morphic Graffiti (who did so well with Carousel at the Arcola) suits the inventive gift for spectacle of this warehouse theatre: a huge overarching cave becomes a two-level stage with rapid projections offering filmic scene-shifts, and Mark Crossland leads a five- piece rock band overhead.  At its heart, though, is a tremendous performance from Rob Compton as Bat Boy, renamed Edgar by his doting foster mum (Lauren Ward) and resented by her vet husband (Matthew White). At first Compton is a snarling bestial nightmare: bald, pointed-eared, fanged and powerful, his tall form bat-folded and jerking in a sack and a cage. But, never losing his strangeness and air of suppressed feral energy, he evolves into speaking, pouring tea, graduating High School with a dissertation on Copernicus and Darwin and (gloriously) adopting stilted BBC English learned off tapes. His big yearning numbers where he longs for acceptance by the community “Why can’t I make this world my home?” surprise with a sudden genuine, heart-shaking relevance in a city of uneasy diversity.

 

 
On the other hand, Compton’s sudden jagged crouching lapses into instinctive and bloodlustful bat ferocity made me jump nervously in the theatre lobby at the sight of any rangy athletic young chap with a cleanshaven head. Given the hip profile of Southwark audiences, that happened quite often before I escaped onto Newington Causeway. Luckily, none of them actually had pointed ears. I think. Definitely saw some fangs, though.

 
Box Office 020 7407 0234 http://www.southwarkplayhouse.co.uk
to 31 Jan
Rating: three   3 Meece Rating

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January 13, 2015 · 10:06 pm

A SERIES OF INCREASINGLY IMPOSSIBLE ACTS Tricycle, Kilburn

TEENAGE KICKS AND SORROWS 

 
In the most genuinely engaging sequences of this odd improv-based show, two of the ten-strong cast get a mat out and wrestle, struggling to rip off one another’s clothes and shoes in play-fight frenzy. Before each assault they gasp out the names of their fears: “Drowning” “Not being with people I love” “Syphilis” “Finding out I -um -haven’t got two eyes” “Buried alive” “Rottweilers” “Dying alone” “Being cheated on”, etc.

 
So picking up the disjointed, energetic argot let’s say that the show expresses the following: “Youthful” “Communal” “Baffled by life” “Adolescent” “Longing for love” “Larky” “Frustrated” “Spontaneous” . And, I fear, overarching it all, “Drama School Exercises”.

 
Which is not to deny that it can be fun, for a while, watching selfconsciously expressive, vaguely linked improv sequences performed by young people in random gym gear, expressing meanings which touch them without ordering them into something more traditionally theatrical. And around me there was laughter and applause and approval from an audience of twentysomethings or not much over. Sean Holmes’ “Secret Theatre Company” from the Lyric Hammersmith has had a lot of success. But it didn’t ring my bell.

 
It is framed in the struggle of the title. The audience pulls a name out of a hat, and he or she becomes the protagonist. That night it was Steven Webb – “Stevie”, a likeable, skinny blond who at three points – the opening, middle and end – silently attempts a series of notorious impossibilities of the kind teenagers challenge one another to in the schoolyard: bending an iron bar, fitting in a suitcase, vaulting a high broomhandle, moving a heavy tyre with his mind, eating a whole lemon, licking his elbow. He fails. Except at the very end, when he manages a couple when the whole ensemble helps him. That is oddly touching.

 

 

In between there are the wrestling matches, and a series of courtships between him and three girls, consummated in one case in an irritatingly crypto-acrobatic metaphorical sequence amid neon tubes. She dances, he lies at her feet and gets into La-Soiree style acrobatic poses so that you hope they’ll do a balancing act, but it never happens. Rather better is a sequence which takes a whole relationship from start to finish in a series of questions the girl reads from a paper; and another, actually funny, where the tallest, broadest member (Hammed Animashaun) acts like a relationship counsellor undermining Stevie with another fusillade of questions. The final courtship, after some fierce wrestling, took them abruptly into Romeo and Juliet’s balcony scene, which they did remarkably well. But it made me wish they’d done some real acting earlier.

 

 

So no, not for me. But others have rated their 70-minute performance engrossing, moving, lovable, meaningful, all that. The talent and desire to push theatrical boundaries is not in doubt. But I couldn’t feel they were pushing them anywhere very interesting.

 
Box office             020 7328 1000 / tricycle.co.uk to 31 Jan
rating: two   2 meece rating

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January 13, 2015 · 12:56 am

WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN Playhouse, SW1

A FABULOUS FANDANGO OF FEMALE FURY…

 
Sing to the lunatic moon: Hispanic hysteria, hilarity, tangled lives, 48 hours of Madrid madness. I had my doubts about this one, as did many others: Bartlett Sher’s musicalization of Pedro Almodovar’s wicked, witty tale of betrayal, coincidence and answerphones in 1960’s Madrid didn’t catch fire on Broadway. But now, with Jeffrey Lane’s book sharpened up and staged with simple elegance, rather marvellous songs from David Yazbek and a clutch of superb performances, it falls to London to propel it up and away into the stars. Maybe, too, it hits a particular British and European note: sunset sentimentality cut with sour-lime pragamatism, and real feeling for betrayed love delivered with dry acceptance that hey, even bitterness has a bounce to it. “Everyone’s a genius and everyone’s a fool; sometimes a raindrop is a tear, and sometimes a jewel”.

 

 
Lovers of the film will find the whole chaotic plot here. Pepa (Tamsin Greig, who it turns out can sing like a lark without losing any of her tragi-comedic subtlety) has been abandoned by her lover Ivan. 19 years earlier he also left his wife Lucia, who has been in a mental home (“very nunny, corridors smelling of soup”) and has emerged ferocious to sue him and terrify her wimpish son and his chilly bride . Almost more wonderful than Greig is Haydn Gwynne as Lucia: sometimes nutty as a fruitcake, sometimes utterly sincere and heartbreaking, she deploys a fierce raw mezzo aria about the invisibility of middle-age and wasted wifely life “I didn’t want the money I just want the time back”. In Sher’s pleasingly fluid, economically surreal direction she at one point haunts the younger women like a Miss Havisham in black manilla, growling and stalking. She’s a treat.

 

 

 

Meanwhile, of course, there is the scatty youngr Candela – Anna Skellern – who finds she is having a fling with a terrorist (very topical). “My boyfriend has an Uzi and he doesn’t clean the shower” is, so far, my favourite lyric of 2015. When Pepa asks “Do you have a lawyer?” “I did” wails the girl “But he went back to his wife”. Glorious. As for Ivan’s big number , averring that “love is eternal but the faces sometimes change”, my female companion, whose past is more colourful and Latino than mine, practically had a conniption recognizing it.

 

 
At which point I wondered whether this show is perhaps more of a girl thing, and ought to offer a nice calming creche in a nearby pub for women to park their menfolk in for the evening. But the men around were loving it too: maybe betrayal and mid-life irritability are genderless. Well, of course they are. So it won me right round, and I’d predict it the kind of gentle long-running success that met ONCE – another morphed movie with an eccentric loving heart. Rejoice in Gwynne acrobatic in a pink miniskirt on a Lambretta, in the erotic possibilities of drugged gazpacho, and some blissful gags and a cod flamenco moment from Ricard Afonso as the taxi driver. Olé!

 
box office 0844 871 7631. http://www.atgtickets.com to May

rating: four   4 Meece Rating

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January 9, 2015 · 5:56 pm

DONKEY HEART Trafalgar Studios 2, SW1

SCARS OF THE SOVIET IN A MOSCOW HOME 

 

 

There’s a lovely, very Russian moment in Moses Raine’s play (in from the Old Red Lion and directed by his sister Nina, author of Tiger Country now at the Hampstead). We are in the Moscow apartment of three generations of modern, post-Communist citizens. Sasha, the nervy daughter of the house, is explaining to her guest Tom, a naive British student, why she cannot love him. Five years ago she kissed another boy and now says that love is “A place where space has no gravity…all night an ambulance wails in my soul”. Awkwardly lumpen, the thwarted English swain mutters “Yeah, okay, great whatever…”. And Sasha explains “This is fifth year I try and brainwash donkey heart, still it haven’t worked….”

 

 

It’s never going to. Sasha (Lisa Diveney) likes her dreams impossible. And they’re poles apart: she remembers the excited queues for a single egg in the 80’s, while all Tom connects with that decade is Pac-Man. He doesn’t wail internally, he probably bleeps. Raine, wittily and sadly, is evoking the legacy of the Communist era as “the deep bruise of history works its way to the surface”. Although there are some mercilessly funny moments, his family make Chekhov’s seem positively frivolous.

 

 

James Turner’s design in the tiny space sets it beautifully in a cramped defiant domesticity. The father is Ivan, a government official unable to express the family affection he feels: Paul Wyett gives him a clenched unsmiling tension. He has a secret: for a while we aren’t sure if it is personal or political. His wife is Zhenya, her pain delicately etched into every move by Amanda Root; their son Petya has failed to get round to bribing his way out of conscription, and quarrels with his leather-miniskirted girlfriend; ten-year-old Kolya is both rowdy and vulnerable, Sasha has her internal wailing to deal with, the guestTom is taking up space and speaks no Russian, and suddenly the foxy Natalia (Emily Bruni) is moved in, ostensibly because her rent has tripled. Maybe.

 

 
For life is still not simple in Moscow. Paranoia lurks in every conversation. Focusing it all, in a marvellous subtle tragicomic performance (it’s often the veterans who steal the show) we have Patrick Godfrey as the grandfather Alexander. He cheats at chess, dries his trousers with a hairdryer, and can’t bear to see a morsel of food wasted because he was in the siege of Leningrad, and ate rats. He lived through decades of the midnight knock on the door, bugged walls and the need to talk in metaphors; his young son was killed. In a remarkable scene he rises from amiable elderly absurdity to reprove Tom – through Sasha – when the British lunkhead ‘ironically’ wears a red, CCCP hammer-and-sickle T shirt.

 
It’s a slow-burn, its characters not quite defined enough, and as a play the energy dissipates in the last half-hour. But to set a traditional domestic drama so credibly within this haunted, uneasy Russian present is an achievement.

 

box office 0844 871 7632 to 30 Jan
Rating : three   3 Meece Rating

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January 8, 2015 · 10:44 pm

IVY AND JOAN Jermyn St Theatre, SW1

DROWNING NOT WAVING – TWO WOMEN ADRIFT

 

 

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

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

Rating: three   3 Meece Rating

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December 16, 2014 · 11:39 pm

CITY OF ANGELS Donmar, WC1

 

Shabba-dabba-doo-wop! What a glorious evening. Grownup, dryly hilarious, sublimely jazzy. Josie Rourke’s Donmar walks away with the palm for the season’s top show. Or perhaps sashays away, tossing platinum curls and white mink. Or gumshoes down the mean streets of Seven Dials on the trail of dodgy dames, tipping its hat-brim bitterly over its eyes…

 
For this is the dark 1940’s glamour of Raymond Chandler and Spillane, of private ‘tecs with complicated histories, and blondes who turn up in their grimy offices and are clearly “a handful – maybe two if you played your cards right”. Better, we are watching that literary world intersecting disastrously with Hollywood as the novelist Stine (Hadley Fraser) sees his creation Stone (Tam Mutu) and assorted tricky blondes, pinstriped heavies and bitter Latino rivals traduced into a formulaic film-noir. The appropriately named studio boss Buddy Fidler (Peter Polycarpou, manically perfect). knows that movies have different priorities “They’re light and dark, they’re faces ten feet high..I’ve been through de Mille, I know!”. Rosalie Craig, smart as a whip, plays Stine’s wife, editor and literary conscience: her number “It needs work” probably had every writer (and adulterer) in the audience wincing.

 
Larry Gelbart’s ironic story of artistic differences meshes perfectly with Cy Coleman’s trad jazz score (under Gareth Valentine). Rebecca Trehearn, as both Buddy’s real assistant and the fictional detective’s secretary, knocks the roof off with the sour elegant wit of “You can always count on me” , and Stine and Stone’s ferocious duets are breathtaking. Such big numbers could be showstopping, but with David Zippel’s lyrics are always intelligent, part of the story. And you have to love a man who rhymes “If you’re not celibate, we could raise hell a bit”.

 

 

It’s a handful to stage, as the two plots are kept distinct – real life in garish technicolour and the noir plot in monochrome – while sharing the same stage, mirroring and interfering with one another. There’s some brilliant jerky backwards-work from the characters in the plot when the author, typing overhead, has to cross out dialogue. But Rourke powers through it with panache, thanks to Robert Jones’ brilliant two-tier design, pinpoint lighting work from Howard Harrison, and some ferocious choreography from Stephen Mear . The backdrop is an immense wall of scripts and film canisters on which typed words flit around and witty visual shocks occur. When Hadley Fraser leaps onto an invisible box it is lit -at the second he lands – to become a pile of paper,. When he and his creation fight – Tam Mutu radiating irresistible Clooneyesque glamour as the imaginary detective – it is spectacular. The costumes and manner are fabulously parodic too: when the foxy Mallory (Samantha Barks) leaps on the hero with a Hitchcock-blonde toss of the hair, there are real dark roots on the platinum. It’s details like that you worship.

 

 

And the wisecracks! Gelbart, writing in the 80s, lovingly reproduces the tone and rhythm of a Chandler. “My husband” smoulders Katherine Kelly as the wicked blonde, “is a good deal older than me”. “How good a deal?” asks Stone, deadpan. Must remember to use that one. The millionaire husband is in an iron lung: a retro device wheeled on and off to general glee, getting its best moment right at the end. And I haven’t even mentioned the the wicked stab at Hollywood’s social censorship. Or the castanet-playing corpse.

 
Box Office 0844 871 7624 to 15 Feb.
Supported: Barclays /H & S Williams Foundation for the ARts / Ray Bar-Salisbury

Rating: five   5 Meece Rating

and  design mouse, with extra respect:  Set Design Mouse resized

 

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December 15, 2014 · 11:52 pm

THE MERCHANT OF VENICE Almeida, N1

THE MERCHANT OF VEGAS RIDES AGAIN 

 

Three years ago Rupert Goold reimagined Venice for the RSC, taking ‘casino capitalism’ literally, setting it amid decadent gilt arches and roulette-tables with Lancelot Gobbo as an Elvis impersonator. The casket choice became a TV reality game with Portia as a pouting Barbie whose transformation into a lawyer was pure Legally Blonde. So now in charge of the Almeida, how could he resist bringing it back as his Christmas spectacular, partly recast but glitzy as ever? It’s a Gooldian pound of flesh: Shakespeare as savage rom-com with Elvis numbers, Antonio strung up on a butcher’s hook in Guantanamo orange, and plenty of lurex and leg.

 

 
Most is as per Stratford – including the carnival costume jokes with Gratiano as Munch’s scream and Lorenzo as Batman eloping with Jessica as Robin. But in the smaller theatre both better and worse things emerge. Scott Handy’s morose Antonio droops with such intimate despair throughout that it becomes ever clearer that his devotion to Tom Weston-Jones’ pretty Bassanio is so homoerotic that once the ring-nonsense is over at the end, Portia has every reason to look depressed in her weird hobbling finale dance: there’s a sense that we are moving towards a Design for Living situation.

 

 
As before, Susannah Fielding’s Portia is the most artfully nuanced and difficult performance. She is required to simper, wriggle and pout like Daddy’s southern princess during the garish reality-show sections, become more real but still pouting and spoilt amid her girlfriends, and then convince in the courtroom transformation. But even before that, one of the most strikingly and honestly directed moments in the play comes when Bassanio chooses the lead casket, and instead of a blaring and flashing neon triumph the TV show lights dim and the “unlessoned girl” steps off her stilettos and ditches the big-hair blonde wig to avow serious love. Fielding does it superbly.

 

 
By then it is about time for some reality. The comedy accents began to get me down; standard American, jive-talk, Elvis gobbling from Gobbo, a hillbilly gambler, squeaky girlishness and of course the two failed suitors. Vinta Morgan’s Prince of Morocco is a preening Mohammed Ali in gold lurex shorts, and Vincenzo Nicoli does a Fawlty-Towers-Manuel in a luminous flamenco shirt as the Prince of Aragon. Funny, but recklessly chucking away the poetry. More troubling on the accent front is Ian McDiarmid’s Shylock. He is a marvellous actor, and Goold pulls no punches about his treatment by the contemptuous antisemitic Christians, or the brutality of the trial scene. But earlier, the decision to adopt an extreme caricatured Jewish voice works against the subtleties of his delivery and attitudes, ruining many of the most telling lines. We never get a sense of Shylock as a successful banking figure with real power: rather he emits a jerky cartoonish whimsy. Only in the trial itself is McDiarmid given a chance to project an emotion both real and disturbing.

 

 

 

But when he does it reminds me – if I may wander off-message for a moment – of something I found once in the letters of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll. In 1880 he wrote in distress to Ellen Terry, having seen her play Portia to Irving’s Shylock. He begged her to ask the actor-manager to cut Antonio’s insistence in Act V that the defeated Shylock convert to Christianity. “It is a sentiment entirely horrible and revolting” cries Dodgson, an Anglican deacon.“The idea of forcing a man to abjure his religion may be simply horrible..a needless outrage on religious feeling…in the very fullness of our joy at the triumph of right, we see him as victim of a cruelty a thousand times worse than his own”.

 

 

This memory came back to me during the end of the trial scene, as McDiarmid’s Shylock crawls broken away, and a cleaner wanders on to the empty stage and throws the Jew’s discarded black coat and kippah into a binbag. That memory’s surfacing is what, for me, won this eccentric, often gimmicky production its fourth star.

 

 

box office 020 7359 4404 http://www.almeida.co.uk

to 14 Feb

rating: four     4 Meece Rating

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December 15, 2014 · 9:08 am

POTTED SHERLOCK Vaudeville, WC2

SUPERBLY SILLY BUT FAR FROM ELEMENTARY

 

 

In a beguiling 221b Baker Street set, referencing clockwork and tyrannized over by a brassbound Victorian video-countdown, Watson is talking to a portrait on the wall. The actor playing Moriarty is confused and comes on doing Mariachi, when he isn’t being Irene Adler in a baggy nude onesie with fig-leaves, Mrs Hudson, or twenty people in one minute. Or just annoying his stage partner, as they struggle to relate or perform all the 60 Sherlock Holmes stories in 80 minutes ( (there’s an interval, for youthful ice-cream and loo breaks, so it runs 100).

 

 

A cheerful seasonal habit has West End theatres – this one is home to the ROH Wind in the Willows – sharing the day with larky shows for children and their weary minders, at decently lower prices and with charity buckets at the door. Ir provides a great introduction to plush-seat theatre for the young. This one marks the return of Dan and Jeff – Daniel Clarkson and Jeff Turner – whose “Potted Potter” assault on the entire Rowling canon in 80 minutes got even the New York Times cooing, and whose Potted Panto had even a Christmas-jaded Times critic (me) saying “Cheap, cheerful, deafening if you’re surrounded by ten-year-olds, but not dumb. “

 

 
That’s the key here too. The pair may be CBBC stars, and they certainly know how to throw you a mercilessly childish gag, but with co-writer Tom Clarkson and the sharp no-prisoners direction of Hanna Berrigan, they never become lazy but stay precise, clever, quick, and layered. Dan’s amiable-idiot mugging delights the kids (screeeaaaam!) but is never allowed to go on long enough to annoy the parents. Outbreaks of puppetry, vaudeville joke dances and a moment of conjuring keep it fresh: although its very theme is rush, the pacing is craftily slow-quick-slow, which works.

 

 
. And – we Holmesians being sophisticated types – the rapid drollery is peppered not only with sudden silly bumblebee or Batman costumes but grownup (if always clean) gags about things like Uber. And, of course, the running gag about absurd resolutions of Conan Doyle riddles. Oh come on: even ardent Sherlockians must admit that it is the Victorian fog, the personal eccentricity and atmospheric writing that carries such nonsenses as the Speckled Band or the bit where they poison next-door’s dog.

 

 
For this show they are joined by Lizzie Wort (after a lot of meta-theatrical argument about how the hell she horned in on the boys’ show). She is both a suitable hat-swopping quickfire comedienne and no mean singer, and I hope the three join up together again. And curiously – though technically this show consists of sixty high-speed spoilers – its real affection for old Sherl shines through so strongly that I am going to start re-reading. The real ones, that is: not the hipster Cumberbatchery.
box office 0844 482 9675 to 11 Jan

rating: three   3 Meece Rating

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December 14, 2014 · 5:00 pm

BARBARA NICE’S CHRISTMAS CRACKER touring

MINCE PIES AND MIDLANDS MERRIMENT

 

 

I caught this in its heartland, at the MAC in Birmingham. Half of the audience were clearly experienced followers of Janice Connolly’s creation, Mrs Barbara Nice. They required no warm-up: no sooner had the star pranced onto the stage in her bargain-shop mac (“£ 9.99, WPM- Why-Pay-More?”) than we were cheering, raring to go, more than willing to start by putting up our hands to imaginary reins and swaying right and left, up and down to Leroy Anderson’s Sleigh Ride music, as we followed a route through Birmingham described by a briskly grabbed audience volunteer.

 
Within minutes it was time for the inter-row balloon-batting race, the associated festive chaos kept under control by the smiling, bespectacled diva, always with her concertina-shaped novelty handbag firmly over one arm and ragged tinsel round her neck. We swear in chorus an oath “not to moan if the games get a bit unfair”. A patter of deceptively spontaneous one-line chatter accompanies this, on topics as homely and surreal as alternative uses for Greggs’ sausage rolls, picking up the perils of high-speed hand driers or picking up 5 Live on your Copper 7 IUD on the top of the 30 bus.

 
If you have not yet encountered Barbara Nice on her home Midlands turf, or in lightning appearances anywhere from Aldeburgh to Edinburgh, never seen a middle-aged woman in a sensible skirt hurling herself into crowdsurfing or offering instant uplift therapy, behold her now. Part dinner-lady, part Mum, part anarchic Asda goddess of misrule, she adopts as her own every random scrap of the culture, leading sudden bursts of singalong when a phrase tips her into it – Those Were the Days, Bohemian Rhapsody, whatever. “That’s lovely, yin and yang, feng and shui, Starsky and Hutch, are we having a great time?”

 

 

We are. Even without the local guest stars – at the MAC a memorable spot from the juggler Mat Ricardo and a slightly drunk front row, and a newcomer trainee standup called Lindsay with some ripe Jeremy Kyle references. But it’s Barbara we come for, and only she can be trusted to get the volunteers through the handsfree mince-pie eating contest in good order, and all the way to the legendary Christmas Raffle (we all get free tickets). Prizes range from a Fray Bentos pie to a bottle of Dettol (“the aromatic elixir of life, a dab behind each ear and you’re on the way.” ) And we did not, she assured us sternly, need any repetition of the previous night’s “Lambrini fight”. So no scrapping over the tin of marrowfat peas.

 
Ironic, iconic, homely and surreal, her shows are uniquely joyful. And yes, it is theatre not just standup: because here is control, identification, mood-altering moments, human connection. And a final dancing singalong to Fairytale of New York, with and the bells all ringing out for Christmas Day. I defy you not to love it. My husband – who normally has a morbid terror of audience participation – insisted on coming when he heard it was Barbara Nice, and loved every minute.
rating: four    4 Meece Rating
on tour now:   Touring Mouse wide

Tonight Komedia, Brighton 0845 293 8480.

Monday & Tuesday, 15th & 16th
Yvonne Arnaud Theatre Guildford
£13. Tel: 01483 440000.

Friday 19th
Dancehouse Manchester, 0161 237 1413

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December 12, 2014 · 10:42 pm

GOLEM Young Vic SE1

ANIMATED, ANIMATING, ADMIRABLE, ADORABLE   

 

 

Let’s be honest. It’s nearly Christmas. You could flinch at the thought of staggering in after a day of guilty shopping to face a show – fresh from the Salzburg Festival, based on Jewish and Czech folklore as satirically used in a 1914 novel by Gustav Meyrink – excoriating a “politically impotent generation” in an industrialized 21c democracy hooked on the “heroin of market-driven popular culture”. Especially when you hear that it will be interpreted through movement, cutting-edge sychronized animation and free verse. You might opt for something jollier.
You’d be wrong. Rush for a ticket. For this is the latest piece of brilliance from 1927, who swept the board with their “The Animals and Children Took To The Streets” a few years back. And it has more real, guffawing laughs than most pantos, a sharper topical bite than any news-quiz, more humane and delightedly intelligent thought behind it than most media. There is immense (if rueful) delight in having our comfy delusions slapped about by a faux-naif mythic cautionary tale. Especially right now when we are all just awakening, blinking vaguely, to the way that information technology and network owners are manipulating us – Facebook, Google, Amazon, Tinder, cookies, a thousand apps and platforms seem to obey but control our very desires.

 
That is what the story, elegantly told in 90 minutes, is all about. A Golem is a clay creature brought to life and magically made to serve and obey, but which (like Frankenstein’s monster) takes over. Our narrator, squeakily simple, lives with her brother Robert and a knitting old-fashioned Granny. With her equally unambitious, underachieving friends she has a punk band Annie and the Underdogs, which screams out “music to ruin your Christmas”, protesting against everything with Russell-Brandian vagueness but never actually doing gigs because of stage-fright.

 

 

Brother Robert is a geek, smelling of “unwashed hair and mathematics” who frequents the workshop of an apparently hopeless inventor called Phil Sylocate. Who, Wozniack-like, suddenly makes something that works: a lifesize clay figure (lumpen, grey, primitive) which obeys and does Robert’s job and housework for him. In a sentence which gets whoops of recognition Robert says “I like my work but I’d like to get it done for me, so I could move into a position of authority more suitable”. very BBC.

 

The inventor is taken over, selling his hipster soul to big industry, and at home Golem takes charge – he never needs to sleep or eat – and gets new ‘orders’. “So” asks Robert’s sister worriedly “someone has access to Golem, other than you?” Indeed. It happens to our iPhones and Clouds weekly. So with more barks of shamed recognition from the audience Golem upgrades to new powers, changes Robert’s life, puts him in ridiculous fashion clothes in his own image, and undermines his one real relationship (“She’s a frumpy 35 year old who wants to trick you into having babies. A modern man can do better”).

 

 

Paul Barritt’s animations are a marvel: cartoonish, beautiful, satirically rich (you’d need to see them twenty times to get all the jokes and references). The five performers interact with them surreally well: sometimes as living talking heads through holes of crazy changing bodies, sometimes walking amongst them. But equal credit to Suzanne Andrade’s droll, dry, savagely subversive, hilariously perceptive text (she also directs) . Lillian Henley’s music is played live: light, ragtimey, melding perfectly with the dark mocking tale.

 

 

For Golem wins, of course he does: Grandma herself accepts her new uselessness as “keeping up to date”, trapped inside a high-tech knitting-machine, and the punk band is corrupted into a brand. As is the show itself, with a final triumphant Golem cry of “The arts! We love the arts!”. The clay chap “adores” Benedict Cumberbatch and Helen Mirren. Oh yes, the laugh’s on us. But it’s a very good one.
box office 0207 922 2922 http://www.youngvic.org
to 31 Jan (extended!)
rating five   5 Meece Rating

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December 11, 2014 · 11:07 pm

THE FROZEN SCREAM Wales Millennium Centre THIS IS NOT A REVIEW

This is not a review, because the show is not offered for review until its transfer to Birmingham in January.
I went because I had heard about its development. And hell, Rula Lenska is a second-cousin of my late mother’s bridesmaid . Apparently.
It is therefore my duty to follow her career…
So: 1) Here’s the public domain information:

 

 

The play is said to be based on a lost 1928 supernatural murder-mystery novel by CC Gilbert, about a group of bright young things on the way to a fancy-dress ball, stranded in an abandoned lodge in winter. Some are dressed as Jack Frost, but one of them has Norwegian blood and tells them that Jack, the old Frost Giant, is not a cosy pixie but an ancient and malign giant. Odd things happen. A Mousetrappy murder-mystery-backstory is going on, but so is – aaaghhh! something else. Something lethal.
The idea delighted Sarah Waters, mistress of period and sometimes spooky novels, and Christopher Green, theatremaker, entertainer and cabaret star. They also enjoy the tale that the book fell out of print because of a curse (people kept meeting icy deaths). So they worked together on this adaptation, possibly hoping for a curse to liven things up.  Green directs, and also joins the cast of six. Or maybe seven. Or six. Or five. Never you mind.

2) Having seen it, I can say:

– The makers warn you not to bring under-16s, to wear warm clothes and sensible shoes, and leave large bags in the cloakroom.
I would add, be reasonably physically able, with a bladder that lasts two hours.

– There is absolutely no point expecting a production directed by Christopher “Office Party” Green to remain sedately inside a proscenium arch. There really isn’t. You knew that, didn’t you? Just because Barney George has created a conventionally detailed creepy 1920’s set, don’t settle back and start on your Maltesers.

– Nor is there any point expecting Sarah Waters to resist a teeny weeny lesbian subplot. Rather sweet.

– Rula Lenska’s entrance(s) are – um – unusual. That is one game lady. What a trouper. I am proud to be related to her by way of maternal-bridesmaid-cousinship.

– The Millennium Centre front of house staff are resourceful, patient and trustworthy. Probably.

– Beware the ice. Not the rice, or the mice. The ice.

– There is no interval yet there is a drink of mulled wine. Work it out.

 

 

In Weston Studio (sorry, Stiwdio) at the Milllennium Centre to 20 Dec, with matinees – tel 029 2063 6464 http://www.wmc.org.uk

7-17 Jan at birminghamhippodrome.com

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December 11, 2014 · 12:17 am

TREASURE ISLAND Olivier, SE1

YO HO HO –  PIRATES AND PARROTS ON A DEAD MAN’S CHEST
The first thing to say is that the sets are extraordinary: magnificent, nightmarish, romantic. Lizzie Clachan makes dramatic use of the Olivier’s great revolving, rising, falling drum.The stage becomes a cutaway three-tier ship, a bleak starlit ocean, a heaving volcanic swamp. And as in last year’s wonderful Emil and the Detectives, it is good to see all this top-flight theatre magic laid out for the young in a ‘family’ show, instead of shunting the kids into some low-budget folktale posh-panto round the back.
The second thing to say is that if you are taking children – or indeed, as I did, an baffled adult companion unfamiliar with Robert Louis Stevenson – you would be wise to bring them up to speed first. Bryony Lavery is a seasoned creator and adaptor, and Polly Findlay, on her second NT outing displays the same gift for shock and sincerity as in Antigone. But both seem to take for granted a universal familiarity with the tale of Treasure Island. Although Lavery often uses Jim Hawkins as a narrator, particularly in the first half the script fails to hammer home with sufficient vigour certain vital plot points, especially when the Hispaniola is being crewed by disguised ex-pirates and future mutineers.  I was fine with it, my companion less so.   HOWEVER – the pre-Christmas scramble meant that it was a penultimate preview I saw unofficially (bought own tickets)   and there have been improvements since: don’t trust me on that.  But do refresh the children’s minds about Treasure Island anyway.

 

 

Jim, by the way, is a girl: a bright-eyed urchin in britches (the excellent Patsy Ferran), and the gender-change is wittily handled in one of the best of the cod-18c lines.   Billy Bones staggers brutally to the Admiral Benbow and roars “Be you boy or be you girl?”. Jemima-Jim replies “That be my business!”. Very 21c . A good few of the pirates are female too, which is fine; though it is the men who, with roaring Roger Wilson and his fiddle leading,  fall into deep-toned, thrilling chanties from time to time. The parrot’s pretty good too, especially when it goes AWOL and flits, we genuinely believe, around our heads in the auditorium.

 
Arthur Darvill is a beguilingly slimy, dangerously likeable Long John Silver – an uncharacteristically quiet scene where he explains star navigation to Jim is magical – and among the pirates the one really good joke character is Tim Samuels as Grey, a rather Richard-Beanish figure whose problem is that nobody ever notices he’s there (shades of Mr Cellophane). On the island the pirates forget to tie him up, he’s so insignificant.That’s witty.

 
But for all that it is a remarkably dark show: literally – the lights are never bright, even in tropical sunshine, and the great looming ribs of the ship become part of the island’s ghostly nightmare as its very earth bubbles and swells horribly. Joshua James’ emaciated crazy Ben Gunn erupts from mud and dives down into filthy tunnels, moody half-heard music spreads unease. In one prolonged death scene a nervous child was led out, hands over his ears: the  lightness of the victim’s  “Thank you for the pies and the adventure” gasps the bloodied victim didn’t quite do it for that child. Indeed for all its tremendous physical spectacle – and final romantic beauty as the great ship flies homeward – the production seems unsure whether it is a ripping yarn or a meditation on brutality and nightmare. Actually, don’t listen to me. Children are better at blood-and-thunder than I am these days.   And it’s far better than an action movie.

 

 

box office 0207 452 3000 to 8 April
live relay in cinemas NT Live 22 Jan
Sponsor: Royal Bank of Canada

rating: hmmm….. 3 Meece Ratingbut maybe OK, design-mouse says four  Set Design Mouse resized

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December 10, 2014 · 6:55 pm

NOEL COWARD’S CHRISTMAS SPIRITS St James Theatre SE1

NOEL COWARD’S CHRISTMAS SPIRITS St James Theatre SE1

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

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

 

 

 

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

 

 

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

box office 0844 264 2140 stjamestheatre.co.uk
to 23 Dec. Some matinees.
rating five   5 Meece Rating

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December 10, 2014 · 12:34 pm

THE CHRISTMAS TRUCE Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford upon Avon

CHRISTMAS 1914:  A TRIBUTE, A MEMORY, MANY QUESTIONS

 
That supermarket ad gives a potted version of the 1914 Christmas ceasefire in no-man’s-land: British soldier gets parcel with chocolate, hears Stille Nacht from the German trenches; lads emerge nervously, shake hands, play football, Tommy gives his chocolate to Jerry, smiles with stiff upper lip. Some have raged at the sentimentality of it; some applauded. But what it can’t show is the more painful complexity of this poignant, troubling piece of history.

 

 

You can’t expect a chocolate ad to explore the emotional and philosophical cost of fraternizing with men you must shoot at on Boxing Day; or indeed mention that one of the important favours exchanged before any football was permission for both sides to collect and bury the bodies of friends and comrades , frozen in the mud or impaled on barbed wire. You can’t show that some on both sides must have held back, feared a trick, others found it hard to shake hands; or mention that alarmed orders from top brass brought the truces to a rapid end.

 

 

That complexity is approached, at least, in Phil Porter’s play, woven in with a slightly clichéd subplot about young nurses at the Front defying their strict Matron to put up improvised bandage-and-paper decorations. The main story is built around Captain Bruce Bairnsfather of the Royal Warwickshires, immortal cartoonist of “If you knows of a better ‘ole”. He was a participant and chronicler of the Truce and, appropriately, once a young electrician who wired the former Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. A fine exhibition remembers him upstairs.

 

 
So far, so good. Bairnsfather is played, delightfully and honestly, by Joseph Kloska; his whiskery sergeant Old Bill (looking exactly like the cartoons where he grumbles about the jam) is Gerard Horan. Around them a good cast josh in soldierly fashion, move – sometimes formally, sometimes naturally – play some nicely violent football (watch out, stalls and indeed circle), and narrate the realities of trench warfare in curiously bloodless calm antiphons. Some of the jokinging is good, and vividly soldierly, and Sam Kenyon’s songs and arrangements offer a real thrill of authenticity: could have done with more of them. But in the first half there is a curious slowness, a shrinking reluctance to come to the reality of war. Characters emerge, but slowly; even after the first death (Oliver Lynes in a lovely cameo as the hopeless Liggins – he returns in another great one as a disgruntled German) there persists a determined trombone jollity. Bairnsfather’s concert-party sketches are quite fun, but it all feels puzzlingly bland until you reflect that it is after all a Christmas family show, and part of its remit is to educate the new generation in the fact that its great-great grandfathers were just lads like them, thrown into a terrible machine of war. In those terms, it works. As drama, less so.

 

 
The second act, with some tremendous battle effects and the truce itself, is the best. From the cheeky notices on the British side (“Happy Christmas Fritz Have a Blinking Sossidge”) to the excursions over the top , the sharing and the games, it is truthfully and movingly done. Not least in a disgruntled conversation between Smith and Schmidt, who both think football is “scheiss” anyway and sympathize over disgusting food. And there’s a strikingly interesting diatribe from the German Kohler (Nick Haverson) explaining German paranoia on the grounds that as continentals they don’t have -as we do – the sea as a moat against neighbours.

 

 
But if there had been more to chew on, I suppose, it would be less of a Christmas family show. As such, it is an honourable addition to the year’s WW1 tributes, and a useful one for the 21st-century born: do take them.
box office 0844 800 1110 http://www.rsc.org.uk
to March 2015
rating three   3 Meece Rating

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December 4, 2014 · 4:11 pm

VISITORS BUSH THEATRE, W12

SO LIFE GOES BY, WITH MELANCHOLY BEAUTY…

 

Is there anything more healing, more reassuring of human kinship than the sound of an audience sighing together, murmurously anxious, fondly touched or momentarily afraid for imaginary strangers in a pretend room?  There were moments, in Barney Norris’ tender meditation on life, love and memory, when it felt so intimate that you wanted to reach out a hand to Arthur, Edie, Stephen and Kate in their solitary home, with two armchairs under suggested beams and a World’s Classics subscription bookcase behind them.

 

 

This is one of those heartfelt family plays which the Bush suits well – Tom Wells’ The Kitchen Sink, Rory Kinnear’s The Herd come fondly to mind. Like those it is an author’s first full-length play, and a treasure. Yet it is the simplest of situations. Arthur and Edie – Robin Soanes and Linda Bassett – are in their 70s, Darby and Joan in the farmhouse where chickens cluck outside and time has stood still, contentedly, since the departure of their only child Stephen. He opted for another kind of life as an insurance salesman.

 

 

But Edie is in early dementia. So Stephen (brilliantly evoked as a slick, tense, unhappy character, bravely dislikeable at first) has arranged a “Homeshare” lodger Kate: a recent graduate, a bit daffy with a streak of blue hair and no direction yet. As Edie’s condition worsens, harsher decisions must be made to solve the simplest and saddest of problems: life. And as Edie puts it “to get through it all ok, get to your grave without much trouble”.

 

 

 

Bassett plays Edie with such truth and grace that her curtain-call normality is almost a shock. She has much to work with: Norris has an uncanny knack of evoking the poetry which can emerge from those wandering on the borders between amiable elderly wittering and dementia. She will be suddenly sharp (uncomfortably for her son at times) but then from her occluded depths say something so fine that you almost envy her. Late on, immobile in her chair, she watches sunlight. “Outline of the window crossing that stone, that’s the whole earth spinning, whole lives changing. You can watch it all from here”. And in one of the heartshakingly fond joshing conversations with Arthur (whose farmerly solidity is utterly convincing, and I know a lot of them) – she reminds us that she was always fun. She muses on whether to booby-trap the house for those who might live there after their death, planting fake ghosts and creaking floorboards. Or on how being “a despot” would enable you to keep the shops open late.

 

 
It is in part a sorrowful meditation on the gap between generations – the parents rustic, stable, simplehearted, churchgoing believers who never asked much of life; Stephen the child of the ‘70s, anxious, brittle, impatient, mercantile, thwarted without understanding why. And Kate, today’s girl, speaking lightly of therapy and empathy but still adrift.
But Norris does not let the parents off the hook. Slowly it becomes clear how difficult the relationship always was between the awkward Stephen and his Dad, and how neither parent ever understood him; and how painful is the contrast with Kate – not a settled adult yet, but one enchantingly able to bond and sing Elvis with old Edie. Eleanor Wyld gives her solid reality and immense adolescent charm, clumping in her Doc Martens, sweetness in her half-grown heart.

 

 
And in all the best plays its themes expand beyond their lives and the room to a reflection on life itself, fleeing past while we do something else. As Edie says, you can never pin down a moment which defines what we’re about. And when dementia closes in, you “can hardly tell which of the millions of lives I imagined I might have lived eventually turned out to the the real one. They are all as vivid and vague as each other”. Shattering.
BOX OFFICE 020 8743 5050 to 10 Jan

rating: five   5 Meece Rating

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December 4, 2014 · 12:27 pm

3 WINTERS National Theatre, SE1

GUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORI SPENDS THREE MOVING WINTERS IN WAR-TORN CROATIA

3 Winters takes us to the beautiful old Kos family house in Zagreb, Croatia, in three different years: 1945, 1990, and 2011. In a series of the slickest scene changes I have ever seen, different years are defined by different decor in the house, as the characters come and go, grow up and die, are born and get married, all while trying to come to terms with some terrible experiences and betrayals, personal and political. Štivičić, focusing on the house, is really telling two stories: the life of one family, and the history of Croatia’s bloody upheavals. As the play unfolds, we realise that the two are inextricably linked: that this family exists in spite of, but also because of, the war. In 1945, the house is requisitioned by Tito’s Communists and given (in part) to Rose King (a supremely poised Jo Herbert); by 2011, on the brink of joining the EU, capitalists like the unseen man soon to marry Lucia (an excellent Sophie Rundle) have amassed enough money to start buying others out, scrupulously or unscrupulously. Croatia has evolved; the family has evolved; and everybody’s identity is in crisis.

Amid all the hurly burly of a very busy plot, operating in three different time periods simultaneously while working towards a denouement which illuminates all three, a few superbly poignant moments stand out. One is a harrowing soliloquy from Alexander King (James Laurenson) telling how he had to abandon his horse in a vain attempt to escape Croatia in 1945, only to be marched helplessly past it two days later, captured by Partisans, as it stood starving. Allegorical or literal, it is shattering. Marko (Gerald Kyd) describes the agonising guilt of a soldier with PTSD in another tough, memorable moment which had the tears pouring down my cheeks. Štivičić can be uncompromisingly raw when occasion demands: elsewhere, her warm instinct for humour shines, particularly through Masha’s marriage to Vlado (a dynamic, endearing Adrian Rawlins) in their touchingly ironic exchanges (“I always admired you.” “Did you? Inconspicuously, I must say!”).

Štivičić’s characterisation is deft and clever. We have two very fine Karolinas: beautiful and troubled in her younger days (Hermione Gulliford), elegant and stately in later years (a fabulous Susan Engel). Alisa, soft and quiet in youth (Bebe Sanders) becomes spiky and defiant in later years (Jodie McKnee), though still lonely and confused. Masha, the dowdy matriarch (a nicely understated Siobhan Finneran) makes perhaps the most fascinating journey of all, realising that she has been put upon all her life, grieving, and finally accepting.

Director Howard Davies shapes all of this into a compelling drama, though his use of regional English accents for most characters (predominantly Yorkshire) tends to disorientate the piece, rather than locating it securely. Video projections (including some very shocking scenes of war) punctuate each scene: Štivičić’s ultimate message seems to be how we are human despite war, even though war can (and does) make us inhuman at times: the human journey of this family is, ultimately, what wins out.

– Charlotte Valori

Rating: four 4 Meece Rating

National Theatre, until 3 February. Box office: 020 7452 3000

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December 3, 2014 · 12:12 pm

BILLY THE KID Rosemary Branch, N1

PETITE BUT PERFECT PANTO. Oh yes it is. 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Box Office: 020 7704 6665  to 10 Jan
http://www.rosemarybranch.co.uk
rating: four  4 Meece Rating

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December 3, 2014 · 9:22 am

THE MIKADO Charing Cross Theatre, WC2

GUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORI CAN’T RESIST A BIT OF THE OLD RAZZLE DAZZLE

Gilbert and Sullivan is true Marmite music: some love it, some don’t. It is also, without doubt, a litmus test for any company of players, requiring ferocious energy, lightning delivery and perfect comic timing as Gilbert’s busy libretto spins swiftly across Sullivan’s catchy tunes. So, it’s not always to everyone’s taste, and it can be a risky business: but the Charing Cross Theatre’s new Mikado engages their audience with irrepressible enthusiasm, offering something for everyone to enjoy in a family-friendly evening of riotous fun, with some memorable musical moments. Gilbert’s jokes are all there, but a few have been (I use the word deliberately) ‘upcycled’: Russell Brand, TOWIE, the Twitterati followers of Stephen Fry, Botox, politicians and many more modern menaces are namechecked in two wittily updated arias, which both provoked guffaws of laughter on press night.

The Mikado itself is a gentle comedy of manners, performed here on a 1920s set designed by Phil Lindley which suits the story perfectly, making the piece seem rather younger than its 1885 vintage. Director Thom Southerland’s fast-paced production keeps the comedy rolling, while vigorous choreography by Joey McKneely gives an endearingly old-fashioned finish to proceedings on stage, with slick formation dancing and jazz hands galore. Performed acoustically on two baby grand pianos, it may not be groundbreaking, but it’s great fun. Ostensibly a love story, Gilbert and Sullivan seem to have been far more interested in its middle-aged protagonists Ko-Ko and Katisha than its token lovers, Yum-Yum and Nanki-Pu, and while the cast and singing are uneven at times, these central performances are defiantly strong enough, and the company moments warm enough, to carry us through to a toe-tapping finale.

Gilbert and Sullivan are the architects of a peculiarly British aesthetic, mixing boyish humour with self-deprecating charm and wry wit. Flanders and Swann never feel far away, closest of all in the famous “O Willow, Tit Willow, Tit Willow”, delivered with superb judgement by Hugh Osborne, who impresses throughout as Ko-Ko: Osborne seems entirely at home in this material, giving his Lord High Executioner a depth of characterisation which offers both humour and pathos, endearing himself to us instantly. Osborne’s performance shows Gilbert and Sullivan can be entirely convincing for a modern audience if you create a rich internal life for your character. Likewise, Rebecca Caine is a fabulous, fearsome Katisha, her huge voice easily filling the theatre at times, expressively soft at others. We feel pity (and not a little anxiety) for Katisha within moments; her fragility is endearing, as is her bitter bravado, sung superbly by Caine and acted with gleeful menace, shot through with a real fear of being alone. The reason The Mikado can move us, despite all its apparent silliness, is that some of its humour is in fact presciently serious at heart.

With a healthy dash of camp, glamour, greasepaint and sparkle, The Mikado makes for a rather old-fashioned evening of innocent fun: but hey, vintage is so now these days.

– Charlotte Valori

Charing Cross Theatre, until 3 January 2015. Box Office: 08444 930 650

Rating: three 3 Meece Rating

 

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December 2, 2014 · 11:12 pm

HOPE Royal Court, SW1

SURE START ,  SPEED HUMPS,  SOLIDARITY AND SENTIMENT…

 
Sharp timing, the night before the Autumn Budget Statement! It’s about a Labour council in a post-industrial, working-class provincial town struggling with Government cuts of £ 22 million on top of three years’ previous austerities. After a fierce environmental lecture the other week and that Anders Lustgarten bore-in last year, you might well fear a hardish night in the People’s Republic of Sloane Square. But all is well. It’s by Jack Thorne – who did the spooky, poetic vampire adaptation LET THE RIGHT ONE IN. And while it could hardly be more rooted in prosaic modernity, it has the same skill and grip: funny, subtle, and in the broadest sense, balanced. If not politically, at least between recession gloom and the “Hope” of the title.

 
It is staged entirely within a gloomy public hall, whose stage rolls forward and back . A single, depressing local-authority desk and chairs are the only furnishings to represent the Council offices where the Labour group agonize , plus a couple of domestic interiors for the key protagonists. There is divorced, depressed Mark the Deputy Leader (a pleasingly angsty Paul Higgins), and his girlfriend Julie (Sharon Duncan-Brewster). Cuts are discussed between them and others – including Sarwan (Rudi Dharmalingham) and the hilariously realistic Council leader Hilary (Stella Gonet , who was so blissful as Old Thatcher in Handbagged). A nice antiphonal set-up has them doing random PE exercises while reminding us what diverse responsibilities councillors have – “Taps at graves. Taxi licensing – deciding who’ll have the licence to pick your teenage girls up at night. Allotments. Traffic lights. Speed cameras. Speed bumps. Welfare issues. Parking Charges…”

 

 
Soon Mark’s ex-wife Gina is enraged by the cutting of her day centre for people with learning difficulties – a clientele enchantingly brought to life by Jo Eastwood as Laura. Gina stages a showy demonstration which sparks a Twitterstorm and an e- petition – not difficult once they get Stephen Fry, since these days nobody needs to get off their bum and demonstrate but can just self-righteously click. This panics the national party, and risks getting the poor devils disowned by Ed Miliband. So they must cut elsewhere: four Sure Start centres in – gulp! – Muslim estates…

 

 
Well, you see where this is going. Farce , tragedy and emotional travails intertwine, as in life. The play’s mischievous superscription is from Otto von Bismarck “Laws are like sausages. It is better not to see them being made”. But the seed of hope and humour flowers most beautifully in the hands of a wonderful Tommy Knight, playing the 16 year old son of sad Mark and stroppy Gina. Cocky and perceptive, cheeky and hesitant, bookish and determined, the quintessential teenager and the hope for the future, he steals every scene he is in. It was with difficulty that my young companion prevented herself from proposing to him during the curtain call.

 

 
In a gorgeous final scene with Julie’s dreadful, self-indulgent, sentimentally old-Labour Dad on a park bench, it is the lad who offers the only possible moral. “It’s possible I will have a better life than you. The world’s sort of pointless, if you don’t try”. Now there’s a Christmas message for the age of pessimism…

 

box office 020 7565 5000 to 10 Jan
rating four   4 Meece Rating

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December 1, 2014 · 11:53 pm

ASSASSINS Menier, SE1

A CENTURY OF SADNESS, MADNESS, AND GUNS

 

 

“Angry men don’t write the rules, and guns don’t right the wrongs”. The message is unheard in the nightmare fairground, where beneath ragged seedy fairylights a bloodstained ,clown-faced zombie – a terrifying Simon Lipkin – becomes a series of presidential victims yet still presides over a surging brawling sea of misfits, megalomaniacs, fools and grudges. They bear guns, dream of changing everything by the twitch of a finger. Shots fire, electrocutions fizz, Charles Guiteau dances horribly on the scaffold in 1882 convinced he was right to shoot President Garfield. John Hinckley clutches the picture of Jodie Foster who might just notice him if he shot Reagan. Two young women aim at Gerald Ford and miss; down 110 years differing personalities struggle with life and conclude that the answer is to shoot the President. In the Texas Book Depository Lee Harvey Oswald is persuaded by the whole a pack of ghosts to join the line and be not called murderer but that grander name, “Assassin”.

 

 

You will wait a long time for something as unnerving, intelligent, sorrowful and sharply humane as this 105-minute musical. Once more the little Menier has turned up a quality of Sondheim revival which cements the reputation of the piece itself as much as the theatre’s. For Assassins was not really taken to the heart of Broadway in the patriotic Gulf War atmosphere of 1991; too sourly truthful, too willing to peer at the dark side of the American dream, where pursuit of happiness does not mean you actually get it. It is a reflection on nine people who have attempted to kill a US President, ever since the shot by John Wilkes Booth killed Abraham Lincoln. “Why did you do it, Johnny? You paved the way” sings the Balladeer, a banjo-toting voice of sanity in the lunatic shooting-gallery. He did indeed. Four succeeded.

 
Jamie Lloyd brings to the piece a violent vigour , a solidly breathless, can’t-look-away 105 minutes against Soutra Gilmour’s fairground design. The transverse stage gives unnervingly many opportunities for the assorted crazies to point their pistols right in our faces. Sondheim’s lyrics and music are as riveting as always, the John Weidman book contributes fierce economical dialogue and – even for those hazy on lesser-known presidents like William McKinley and James Garfield – an admirable clarity, despite the apparently random chronology and chaotic personalities.

 

 
Its grace is in expressing, sometimes in pathos and sometimes in wonderfully jarring rum-ti-tum merriment, an unexpected compassion for the helplessness, vanity, paranoia and delusion of the assassins. Moments of fearful levity are studded through it, as no doubt they are in any madhouse: Catherine Tate’s Sara Jane Moore and Carly Bawden’s Lynette Fromme are shockingly funny, Andy Nyman’s bluff, bearded, delusional Guiteau has a creepy fascination, and there is the great unforgettable monologue about the broken American dream by Mike McShane as Byck, in a grimy Santa suit and rusty Dodgem car. Jamie Parker is both the balladeer and, in a coup-de-theatre transformation at the hands of the assassin mob, the shivering baffled Lee Harvey Oswald, driven by ghosts and hopelessness to kill Kennedy.

 

 

All are fine performances: but this is an ensemble triumph, a coherent chaos of darkness and futility. It conveys Sondheim’s humane, grimly witty, always complex vision with intelligence,respect and truth.
Box office 020 7378 1713 to 7 March
rating five   5 Meece Rating

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November 30, 2014 · 10:02 am

THE GREEN BAY TREE Jermyn St Theatre WC1

BENEATH THE STREET, DARK PASSIONS BATTLE…

 

 

What better place to muse on secretive 1930’s sexual angst than under Jermyn Street, once synonymous with sharp shirts and smart tarts? The Jermyn has dug up some wonderful examples: early or unseen Rattigan, rare Novello, a bizarre Graham Greene: atmospheric tales of transgressive love suit that intimate, close up setting where you actually cross the set beforehand to the TOILET sign. Lovely.

 

 
This time, director Tim Luscombe has skilfully edited a piece by Mordaunt Shairp which ran on Broadway in 1933 with Olivier and Jill Esmond. It’s about a young man in love (with a girl) being clung to by the possessive, wealthy male mentor who adopted him at eleven years old (for a bung of £ 500 to his drunken Welsh dad). Mr Dulcimer (great name!) has formed Julian to be as hedonistic and aesthetically precious as he is. But can he lure the lad back from the arms of the vet Leonora, one of the inter-war generation of determinedly independent women?

 

 
The piece is none the less fascinating for being excoriated as “the most dishonest and morally disreputable play” of the period by the critic Nicholas de Jongh, for stepping away from the gay-angst-persecution genre and making Dulcimer manipulative and predatory. And the fact that the Lord Chamberlain nodded it through unchanged does make you a little uneasy: the legend of posh vicious gays seducing honest, straight working-class lads fuelled the nastiest era of homophobia, and for some still does. Leonora’s taunt to Julian takes your breath away: “I hope I shan’t meet you one day in Piccadilly with a painted face, just because you must have linen sheets!”.

 

 

 

But it’s a strong play about needy possessiveness and the lure of wealth, and it was brave of Shairp simultaneously to risk a homoerotic theme and then annoy its (still persecuted) constituency with a caricature of ruthless camp. In Act I, indeed, I was taken aback by Richard Stirling playing Dulcimer barely one notch down from Jules and Sandy. But what else can you do with a character who mimsily arranges flowers and berates his butler (a nicely deadpan Alister Cameron) with “I don’t think I could trust you with a tulip”. He also has a country retreat and purrs “You’ll find the amber pool preferable to the sweaty transports of the Westminster Baths. I think I shall have amethyst cushions this year..”. Well, you gotta play that camp, and it’s not Cowardy-camp either.

 

 

 

But the play develops, and Christopher Leveaux’s handsome Julian becomes torn between his comfortable billet and his love. Leo cleverly reintroduces him to his real father,who has become a lay-preacher. The Welsh hymns call to something “very old and far off…rugged and sad” within him, competing with the scented Chopin delicacy of his other life. Leveaux, for all the absurdities, gives a real sense of a youth struggling to escape the damage done by soft spoiling (Dulcimer never even sent him to school, preferring to oversee his aesthetic education).

 

 

 
He is petulant as he tries to study as a vet (“reading up a lot of flapdoodle in order to give some filthy little Pekinese an emetic”). But his dissolution – after some terrific confrontations between Dulcimer and Poppy Drayton’s fine, angry Leonora – is genuinely horrible, and played with complete sincerity. And so is the older man’s admission that his mission was “to create a cage for Julian’s soul in which he sings to me as sweetly as in that stuffy Welsh schoolroom all those years ago”. There’s a grand melodramatic conclusion, 1930’s style, and a creepy final scene with more flower-arranging.

 

 

box office 020 7287 2875 to 21 December http://www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk
rating: three    3 Meece Rating

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November 28, 2014 · 4:43 pm

AN IDEAL HUSBAND Chichester Festival Theatre

MORALITY, MELODRAMA, AND MANSERVANTS…

 

 

“Suppose I drive down to some newspaper office” says the foxy blackmailerine Mrs Cheveley to the horrified MP Sir Robert Chiltern “And give them this scandal and the proofs of it! Think of their loathsome joy…of the hypocrite with his greasy smile, penning his leading article and arranging the foulness of the public placard!”. Ah, they did scandals with more style in 1894. None of this footling plebgate / paisley pajama / white van nonsense. Years ago as a minister’s secretary, Sir Robert sold a government secret to a foreign Baron, thus founding his personal wealth and career. Now Mrs C with her pussycat smile, has the letter down her heliotrope-silk cleavage…

 

 
Oscar Wilde’s play is often trimmed a lot, to focus on the melodramatically twisty triple-blackmail plot with its dramatico-farcical devices of misunderstanding, overhearings and a mysterious bracelet. Some directors take the red pen to numerous Wildeisms, and trim the rather long, indeed almost Shavian, discursive monologues about moral relativisim, hypocrisy and the uses of wealth, leading to the central message – poignant one given poor Oscar’s own imminent disgrace – that it is not perfect people but imperfect ones who need love and redemption. Here, however, director Rachel Kavanaugh lets it run its full wordy length (nearly three hours) taking in the various comic divertissements and epigrammatic loghorrea of the original.

 

 
So it does, at first, feel a bit like music being defiantly played on “authentic instruments”. The supple, subtle modern cast (led by Robert Bathurst dissolving in credible horror as the MP) sometimes seem to be curating rather than invigorating the text. Jemma Redgrave’s Mrs Cheveley seems positively uncomfortable in the almost Downtonesque stilted social chat of the first scenes. It’s easier, perhaps, for the virtuous wife – Laura Rogers – since Wilde intends her to be an awful prig at first, with her Women’s League do-goodery, grey frocks, and rash belief that her husband has no sin in him.

 

 

But fear not. Relax into it. And just as you’re wondering whether the main delight (no inconsiderable one) will be Simon Higlett’s gorgeous late-Victorian swags and furbelows, a recognizable human reality flowers and becomes properly touching. Even the evil Mrs Cheveley gets the very modern epitaph “She wore far too much rouge and not enough clothes. Always a sign of despair in a woman”. There is real fire and fun in Jamie Glover’s lively Lord Goring: the apparent hedonist, wit and timewaster based on Wilde himself, who works in his orientalesque bachelor rooms to save the day because “Life cannot be lived without much charity”.

 

 
And there’s even more joy to be had from the veterans. A more hurried production would give less acreage to the dowager Lady Markby and her theories of the world, and to Goring’s grandee of an old Dad, Sir Edward Caversham. But Kavanaugh has got Patricia Routledge and Edward Fox in the parts, and you don’t go wasting chances like that. Both are wonderful, a masterclass in aged stage-stealing: Routledge rattles on like a grand fin-de-siecle version of her turn as Victoria Wood’s “Kitty”, and there is timeless artistry in Fox’s pause before asking his flippant son, in heavy despairing tones “Do you always really understand what you say?”.

 

 
Wilde would adore them both. Neither Fox nor Routledge often got offstage on the first night without enduring a round of affectionate applause. But that’s fine. It’s 1894. And nearly Christmas. And Chichester has had its first season in a grand new theatre. Hurrah for everything.
box office 01243 781312 to 13 Dec
sponsor: Rathbone Investment Management and Covers Timber & Builders Merchant
rating: four  4 Meece Rating

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November 27, 2014 · 5:35 pm

FRANKIE AND JOHNNY IN THE CLAIR DE LUNE Minerva, Chichester

A MODERN DATE,  AN ANCIENT NEED…

 

 
You could say it starts with a happy ending. Well, of a sort. Certainly the blackout is riven by an exuberant sexual racket, and as the light slowly rises on a tiny NYC apartment the couple disengage from the sofa-bed and cackle with the laughter of relaxation.  Lovers, though, they are not. This is the modern way, the Saturday night of lonely urban singles reaching for a passing intimacy, She is a waitress, he the short-order cook they caught one another’s eye: a date, a movie-and- benefits . Both grownups with a history, ages either side of the big 5-0, nothing serious…

 

 
Or is it? Terrence McNally’s 1987 two-hander is a delicate, feignedly flippant and deadly serious exploration of human fear of – and need for – intimacy. Against convention he gives the role of romantic to Johnny, who within a jokey uproariousness expresses an earnest demand to be allowed to love, admire, worship and commit. Frankie, brittle and bruised and defensive, purports to be toughly pragmatic, reluctant to accept his exuberant sincerity. Which is sometimes gloriously expressed, sometimes with a kind of ferocity – “Wake up, Cinderella, your Prince Charming has come! It could be another thousand years…”. Sometimes, as they spar through the first act, the thought crosses your mind that someone falling in love with you can feel like an act of aggression.

 

 
Which is, of course, an ancient thought: the pressures and persuasions of courtly love run through a thousand years of art. McNally is well aware of this: both are momentarily transported by Bach on the radio and his autodidact Johnny is intermittently prone to quote Shakespeare, with the lovely observation that it’s all very difficult archaic language “and then he puts it all together clear and simple, and it’s nice”.

 

 

 

Success in such a fragile intimate piece depends heavily on the actors: Dervla Kirwan and Neil Stukecould hardly be better. Kirwan gives off the depth of Frankie’s defensive, damaged pain beneath the stiffness and petulance of her rejections; Stuke has an even harder task, because Johnny could be irritating – or, as she says, “too intense, gives me the creeps”. But behind his explosive declarations is something which he himself defines as courageous: a demand, in mid-life and however bitter your hinterland, to grab something or someone good when you see it, and to hell with caution. Which is rather beautiful.

 

box office 01243 781312 to 6 Dec
Rating: four

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November 26, 2014 · 12:33 pm

PETER PAN GOES WRONG Yvonne Arnaud, Guildford & touring

…AND MISCHIEF THEATRE GETS IT TRIUMPHANTLY RIGHT

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

rating: five   5 Meece Rating

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November 25, 2014 · 11:49 am

CHIMERA Gate, W11

GUEST CRITIC LUKE JONES AGAIN – BAFFLED BY MODERN BIRTHWAYS,  SOLDIERS BRAVELY ON AND WISHES IT HAD WORKED

 

 

Immediately this play had the whiff of a concept. This is a shoebox theatre, and the tiny clearing at the front (stage?) was occupied by only a plain white kitchen. Suli Holum, who performs the piece on her lonesome, appears in the audience (strange) but paints over the blanks with the kind of oomph only an American can muster.
A joint effort from writer/director Deborah Stein and performer/writer Suli Holum, the play is largely dull argument, but with a thrilling story poking in where it could. Broadly it is a story about a woman, who for various scientific reasons I can’t remember, has a son who is not hers. She gave birth but it isn’t her DNA in him. It’s vaguely common. Apparently.

 

 

The story is emotionally gripping and the characters are well drawn. A garishly accented American coffee lady/narrator is nicely cartoonish and pronounces ‘chest’ as ‘cheyesta’. Every syllable is a new invention.
The mother is only just about there; angry and sharp, cold yet a bit weepy. And the son is freakishly good. Suli pulls this shy yank student (think pre-crime Bieber) literally out of nowhere and it is thrilling.

 

 
Unfortunately here ends the praise. The script veers from witty to shitty and loses sight of the actual nub of interest – the story – far too often in favour of lecture. It is also regularly far too cerebral, talking about Darwin and DNA instead of people or experience. It also goes so meta for so many minutes that all we’re left with is jokes about how the taps don’t work because it’s a set. This feels like filling in the gaps for the boring science. As does the trippy pseudo-scientific projections which at first have a point, but end up just facilitating what looked like, and has the intellectual fibre of, the Galaxy song bit from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. You know the bit where Eric Idle comes out of the fridge into the Milky Way. This happens, although with far less substance.

 

 

It is a shame because the central performance was excellent and the lost story had the beginnings of something solidly dramatic. Unfortunately it throws all this to gawp at the great unknown / some facts I first heard on QI circa 2009.
Box Office: 020 7229 0706 to 20 Dec

Rating: two   2 meece rating

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November 21, 2014 · 8:25 am

GOD BLESS THE CHILD Royal Court SW1

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

But although Molly Davies’ play is politically fierce, sassily spoken and expertly staged by Vicki Featherstone, it suffers from a lumpy structure. It runs for 1 hour with an extra 45 minutes weighing it down. There are far too many scenes which cloud the gems and its neat politics get lost in setup and explanation.  Faulty but joyously original. Educational policy made punchy drama – no easy feat!
Box Office: 020 7565 5000 to 20 Dec
Supported by the Jerwood Charitable  Foundation
Rating: four   4 Meece Rating

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November 19, 2014 · 10:32 pm

GO SEE King’s Head, N1

TWO LONELY LIARS IN A BIG SAD CITY…    
Here’s a curiosity worth catching: the only full play by Norris Church Mailer, widow of Norman Mailer (who greatly admired it). It was born at the Actors’ Studio and is directed by another veteran American legend, Sondra Lee. The two players are also transatlantic: Peter Tate, who was so impressive in American Justice at the Arts, and Lauren Fox, an award-winning NYC cabaret performer. You could say that it taps right in to a particular New York neurosis and a particular time – 1985, the height of the AIDS epidemic.

 

 

But Mailer is too subtle a writer to leave it pinned down in time and place: literal as it is, tracing an odd-couple relationship over a few weeks, it has eternal echoes of myth. Tate plays a cultural anthropologist in his fifties, balding and scholarly. Making notes for a book he goes to a “sex booth” where behind one-way glass – she can’t see him – the scantily clad Fox preens, poses, and talks dirty to clients while they masturbate. A dollar a minute – the punter must keep pushing the money through or the light goes off (the tiny theatre is imaginatively papered on three sides with luxuriant giant red flowers, half-savage and half-seedy).

 
The girl is truculent, brittle, practised, appearing in her glass box in a variety of wigs and props. In several sessions he gets some kind of a life story out of her, about youth in Texas and seducing the local preacher – all very Tennessee Williams. Eventually he graphically tells of his own homosexual experiences in a tribe of Papua New Guinea cannibal headhunters.

 
But the twist is that in between booth sessions he has managed to be knocked over by her bicycle as she cycles home in sweatpants and good-girl hair. Scraping acquaintance through his scraped knee, he begins to date her. She has no idea it is the man from the booth; he pretends to be an out-of-town businessman (though unable to remember whether he said Indianapolis and Minneapolis). In return he gets a more respectable version of her own life, as a doctor’s daughter and Vogue model.

 
The clever thing is that until the dénouement you are never sure whether this is a classic Shakespearian wooing-in-disguise myth, or very creepy indeed, borderline Hitchcock. Tate, battered and unsmiling, carries the double possibility brilliantly; Lauren Fox moves between her brittle sex-doll persona and the real vulnerable girl cooking gumbo in her little flat and hoping for marriage. Until he gives himself away, and it all explodes into sad, credible angry confusion. And an acknowledgement that it is never just sex that answers the deepest need, but intimacy. Even between liars.
Box office 0207 478 0160
http://www.kingsheadtheatre.com

Rating: three   3 Meece Rating

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November 18, 2014 · 11:52 pm

BEHIND THE BEAUTIFUL FOREVERS Olivier, SE1

ALL HUMAN LIFE:  A TERRIBLE BEAUTY ON A RUBBISH TIP

 
In the interval of this headlong, crowded kaleidoscope of a play it was hard to know where the second part of David Hare’s script could go. With a 34-strong Asian cast, it is shaped from Katherine Boo’s painstaking three-year documentation of the Indian urban poor in Annawadi: the “undercity” scrabbling a living from the rubbish around Mumbai airport. Hidden behind the vast cosmetic posters for “Luxury Apartments” or “Beautiful Forever”, these are the ones the tourist board prefers we do not see.

 
And that first breathless act, using the vast panorama of the Olivier stage as a corrugated shanty town and bleak police station, felt like every human drama: a neighbourhood catfight, a cynically corrupt police-procedural, a social and environmental comment on global capitalism, a comedy of post-colonial manners, a touching portrait of teenage friendship, and at least two Greek tragedies. One involving fatal envy and self-immolation, another a young man’s a gesture of heroic idealism as powerful as Antigone’s. All this beneath the thundering shadow of jumbo jets, and centred on a patient, careful figure sorting rubbish. Plastic bottles fall like blessings from above , and Abdul (wonderful Shane Zaza), fills sacks, supports his family, only mildly grumbles that bottletops are half-metal half-plastic and need separating.

 
It is more than a documentary, though: India lives on tales, and the narrative is heart-hammeringly strong. My interval qualms were only because for the central Husain family – the ever-magnificent Meera Syal as its matriarch – it seemed to be all over.  They are accused of beating up the stroppy one-legged prostitute Fatima (a fiercely spirited Thusitha Jayasundera) who burns herself to death. The family fail to pay a bribe fast enough, and are variously imprisoned, tortured, and ruined. Life, however, goes on: and the second part is almost stronger, directing us not to schmaltzy “Slumdog Millionaire” feelgoodery but to an ironic conclusion of the case, and more importantly to something which can only be expressed in cliché: a tribute to the human spirit. Without spoilers, let me say that a line near the end about walking to a bus sparked an unexpected tear; and moments later a boy’s leap roused a cheer.

 
But as documentary too it is important, a good omen for the play’s director Rufus Norris, who takes over the NT reins next year. Katherine Boo’s book makes it firmly clear that these are not the abject, the poorest of the streets. In a rising economy, a BRIC nation, and they are the “not-poor”, economically active but intensely fragile in global changes: a Wall Street crash, observes the spry lad Sunil (Hiran Abeysekera) means they start cooking rats again. Vincent Ebrahim’s Karam curses “Don’t drop litter” posters, because without litter they starve. In the good times Syal’s matriarch swanks that although Abdul was born on the pavement outside the Intercontinental Hotel like a naked rat in the gutter, his hard work means they can afford a shelf in their shack and need not squat to cook. One rung above her is Asha , the local Mrs Fixit whose assignations with officials yet another rung above enable her to educate her daughter Manju – who in turn secretly teaches her friend Meena, a despairing unschooled captive of her family’s marriage plans.

 
With hilarious post-Colonial absurdity, what Manju passes on is Mrs Dalloway (“Who are these people? what do they do?”) and Congreve’s The Way of the World. Though she spots that Congreve is all about money, corruption and negotiated sex, just like Annawadi . Meanwhile the police chief can educate his son because of the bonus he gets for a 100% clear-up rate of murders, a statistic easily achieved by writing off a horribly mutilated young victim’s corpse as “Tuberculosis”. You do what you have to do, in Annawadi: as Zehrusina resignedly says “Everything is stolen!”. Or as Asha puts it more grandly “I have learned from First Class People, if you don’t think it’s wrong, it isn’t”. Sharp.

 
Box Office: 020 7452 3000 to March
NB TRAVELEX sponsorship: half the seats £ 15, others £ 25-£35.
NT LIVE in 550 cinemas 12 March 2015: http://www.ntlive.com
Rating: five   5 Meece Rating

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November 17, 2014 · 11:52 pm

ACCOLADE St James Theatre, SW1

THE PRICE OF VICE…

 
The accolade is a knighthood: services to literature for the debonair Will Trenting, already a Nobel for his novels on the seamy side of life. The play is set in his elegant library (a rather shoestring-flimsy set, but that’s the only unclassy thing about this marvellous evening). The writer jokes with his wife Rona that he is not respectable enough; she laughs and retorts “Falstaff was a knight!”. For she broadmindedly tolerates his occasional binges with booze and tarts in a bedsit at the Blue Lion pub in Rotherhithe. Their bookish young schoolboy son doesn’t know; Albert the valet-secretary-chauffeur is at home in both sides of Trenting’s life, and even when Harold and Phyllis from the pub turn up, a wide boy and a cartoonishly tarty barmaid, Rona is cheerfully welcoming. Nothing rocks the family boat. Yet.

 

 

One of the remarkable things about Emlyn Williams’ 1950 play, with two quite superb performances from Alexander Hanson and Abigail Cruttenden, is that you believe in this marriage and menage. In the cunningly crafted early scenes – which director Blanche McIntyre wisely does not speed up – you are drawn by Trenting’s charm: Hanson (so recently both Stephen Ward and Guy Burgess onstage) deploys satanically-browed, peaky assurance and an undertone of beguiling sincerity when he says of his lowlife fictional characters “Are they any worse than couples who nag each other from twin beds every night and are cruel to their children?” He also offers, when forced to admit his Blue Lion life to his censorious publisher Thane, a classic literary-slummer’s apologia: describing a big prostitute Diane sitting topless on his frowsty pub bed drinking Guinness and talking about her mother’s death. He contrasts rowdy, consensual warmly proletarian promiscuity with the deadness of a literary lunch. It is a perennial form of bad-boy romanticism: suddenly reminiscent of Stephen Fry’s sentimentalizing over “incredibly decent” cocaine dealers….

 

 

But as the first act ends the author detonates his bomb. And if we have been lulled into a period-play mood, reflecting smugly on how different things were in 1950 (who’d care if a literary knight was a bit of a party animal? we’ve had Sir Mick Jagger for years) we are jolted into reality. The lovable libertine’s classic plea that his vices are victimless is exploded, on the eve of his investiture. For one of the girls in the last orgy was not what she seemed. Neither (rather shockingly) are Harold and Phyllis. A blackmailer arrives; a wave of police, press and public outrage rolls in.

 

No detailed spoilers, but quite apart from Hanson’s terrific evocation of shock and regret, the performance of Bruce Alexander as the blackmailer is fabulous, a study in menacing, devious humbugging black comedy which simmers tensely before crashing into unexpected passion. And as if all that wasn’t enough to justify this wonderful play’s revival, a final scene between the father and Sam Clemmett – splendid as the son – is at once truthful, moving, heartbreaking and shockingly funny. A real find. Once again, all credit to the Finborough for digging it up.

 

box office 0844 264 2140 to 13 Dec
rating four 4 Meece Rating

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November 16, 2014 · 6:01 pm

LA SOIREE South Bank SE1

BURLESQUE BLISS (AND BOON…)
There’s a towering, assertive giant gay blue rabbit in skintight Spandex, a stripping trapeze artiste hurling garments at the front row, a sadfaced clown who sings Cohen’s Hallelujah like a depressed angel; there is juggling and jokes and a superbly rude faux-baffled reading of a Mills and Boon sex scene. There are brief acts and sustained ones, a provocative diablo, a worrying contortionist, Ursula Martinez’ legendary hanky turn, hulahooping, quick-change transformations and a bathtub aerialist. And dammit, here’s the blue bunny again: lurking in the back stalls of the gorgeous mirrored Spiegeltent…why? Who knows.
I have loved these evenings ever since the first, in Edinburgh in 2004; call it new variety, or performance-cabaret, or circus burlesque, or whatever takes your fancy: it has been riotously successful, giving a platform to individual acts and forging an identity both pleasingly louche and unthreateningly friendly. That last quality is important, because not everyone is a natural nightclubber. As for the tag “not recommended for children” and the nudity warning, it must be said that its sexiness is not of the dead-eyed Soho variety. It is so joyfully self-mocking that I would very happily take a young teen (actually, it could be a useful corrective to the dreary porn they all see online).

 
And goodness, it’s fun. Partly because under the production of Brett Haylock the two-hour show is immaculately paced. This matters: I have been to similar events (with some of the same artistes) where heavyhanded ringmastering and a tolerance of iffy, slow-moving banter took much of the joy out of it. Here, however, there is no self-satisfied ringmaster but a swift, skilful segue of one act to the next, varying between the mainly funny and the breathtakingly acrobatic. It’s brilliant.

 

 

Aficionados and world travellers should know some names which headline this anniversary London run: Puddles Pity Party, an astonishing voice, is the big glum singing pierrot; Tanya Gagné of the Wau Wau sisters of NYC strips on the trapeze, you might see The English Gents, or David and Fofo from Sweden who spit ping-pong-balls. And from Australia Asher Treleaven is our Mills -and-Boon interpreter. His sad outraged “No – that’s not a Thing!” stays with me still.

 

 

Top night out, essence of joyful skill. I’m going again, on proper paid-for tickets: that’s how good it is.

+44 (0)20 7960 4200 http://www.la-soiree.com To 11 Jan

rating: five   4 Meece Ratingthe fifth being a Merry-Christmouse  libby, christmas cat

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November 13, 2014 · 6:55 pm

WHITE CHRISTMAS Dominion, W1

ALED AND TOM DO THE SHOW RIGHT HERE…
Aled Jones is wonderful. Honestly. He is. Won’t ever hear a word against him. This contentedly hokey stage revival of Irving Berlin’s 1954 seasonal heartwarmer is his West End debut, but you’d never know it: not only because he sings with a fluid insouciant ease which relaxes you into the classic songs with a sensation not unlike swimming with dolphins. He dances, not half badly though less spectacularly than the amazing Tom Chambers as his mate Phil . And – as Bob the WW2 veteran turned song-and-dance man – he exudes such industrial-strength, powerfully benign likeability that dammit, you can’t take your eyes off him. You feel safe.

 

And it’s a show about feeling safe, possibly the most unthreatening theatre experience on the planet right now.   It’s a rom-com two performers getting together to save their old General’s failing Vermont ski lodge with a pair of (highly respectable) showgirl sisters, a foghorn-voiced diva turned receptionist and a winsome stagestruck tot (Sophia Pettit, managing to play it both abominable and rather touching). The jeopardy is slight – Betty (a gorgeous Rachel Stanley) misunderstands Bob just as their awkward romance is blossoming, but not for long. The General, given genuine presence and personality by Graham Cole, resolves his yearning to get back to the army without undue stress. The slow farmhand in charge of the curtains more or less gets it right, the Vermont locals dance with improbable precision, and the show goes on, as it must.

 
It’s a relaxed enough pace to cause impatience in some – expect no great spectaculars, no emotional catharsis, no political swipes – and its success is mainly as a period piece. But that relaxation gives you an opportunity to reflect on that world of sixty years ago, and what it needed. America in this show is not questioning itself, but cosying down into domesticity, looking inward, putting its faith in sleigh-bells in the snow, acknowledging the war so lately past and wanting to forget it. The parallels in dialogue between war and showbiz are brief but noticeable: the men adore the General who “would have gone through hell for them” and make parallels with the solidarity of performers. It is as if they were saying “right, Eisenhower was what we needed then, but now it’s over to Ethel Merman…”

 
But enough of the social anthropology. In its terms – and they are, by modern musical theatre standards, limited – it works a treat. By the time the snow falls on us all and a prolonged curtain call of red-and-green, velvet-and-tinsel-and-fur-hat chorines has hoofed its last, we are ready for Christmas. Except hell, it’s only the 13th of November. But that, every year, is the lot of the theatre critic…
box office 0845 200 7982 to 3 Jan
rating: four   4 Meece Rating

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November 12, 2014 · 10:43 pm

WILDEFIRE Hampstead Theatre, NW3

A LONG WAY FROM DOCK GREEN…

 
Gail Wilde earned her nickname at Hendon. A firecracker, an enthusiastic gym-bunny aglow with desire to be a good copper in the Met. She turns up early for her first day in a tough South London nick, stalwart and bouncy. She exemplifies the ideas spoken – moments earlier under a lone spotlight – by Sir Robert Peel in an earlier century. The police are civilians, he tells us, keeping order by consent and co-operation with the public; use minimal force only when “persuasion, advice and warning” have failed, offer“service and friendship” to all, regardless of social standing.

 

 

Brings tears to your eyes, it does. But once Peel has left the stage and Roy Williams’ play takes us to the modern badlands, it’s goodbye to shades of Dixon of Dock Green and the start of PC Gail’s decline into canteen culture complicity, fear, cynicism, grief, misjudgement, betrayal, violent delusion and final ruin. Lorraine Stanley achieves all this in a tour-de-force performance in ninety minutes straight, against a strong mobile ensemble under Maria Aberg’s fluid, high-speed, jump-cut direction.

 

 

Ironically, though, the play’s brisk exciting pace militates against its story: we are shown every stage of Gail’s decline from a happy wife and mother enjoying the comradeship of her new job, but her dissolution happens so fast that credibility becomes strained. The play would have been better given room to breathe: her relationship with a job-seeking husband and invisible daughter in particular is handled with peremptory sketchiness. Though perhaps this is intended to reinforce the fact that there is more vivid importance for her in the banter, frustration and urgency of the police world . That is indeed beautifully drawn, especially Fraser James as the weary sergeant passed over for promotion and Ricky Champ as Gail’s decent partner, who both commits something shocking under provocation and then is victim of something worse.

 

 

Williams is frank in the programme notes about his gradual journey from 1980s resentment to a more sympathetic view of the toughness of police work in a city of gangs and a time of riots. Aberg certainly knows how to direct a riot, and her use of vulturous hoodies watching overhead during the officers’ work and domestic travails is brilliantly chilling. But just too much is packed in to those ninety minutes: from the first stream of vomit to several riots, an unofficial grass, a drugs raid, police brutality, a murder, an inter-colleague affair, prescription drug addiction and domestic violence both sides of the thin blue line. It would be a better play if he focused more closely, gave us time to hope that each disaster might resolve before plunging us neck-deep in awful consequences.

 

 

There is also a technical problem caused by Naomi Dawson’s sparse gymnasium-style set: the acoustic is so echoey, and the style so naturalistically shouty, that you miss a lot of Williams’ best lines. Which is a shame because if you read the text a lot of them are very sharp indeed.

 

 

But it’s certainly not boring: and salutary for a theatre-believer to observe that whereas a murder in a TV police-procedural or detective story rarely even puts you off your macaroni cheese, done onstage it stops your breath with horror. I hope this playwright returns to the police theme. More slowly.

 
box office 020 7722 9301 http://www.hampsteadtheatre.com to 29 Nov
Rating: three3 Meece Rating

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November 11, 2014 · 10:15 pm

NOT ABOUT HEROES Trafalgar 2, SW1

THE POETRY AND THE PITY

 
On this evening of Armistice day a hundred years on, no more fitting place to be than at this finely drawn revival of Stephen MacDonald’s two-hander about the WW1 soldier-poets. Here are Sassoon and Owen, young men in an unexpected friendship struggling with their own nightmares but also with the need, as a terrible new world dawned, to escape from orotund late-Victorian lyricism and express the grief of war without empty phrases or sentimentality. It was Wilfred Owen who wrote that his book would not be about heroes or “glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion or power”: simply the pity of war, the poetry in the pity. He also wrote that his elegies would not be consolatory to his generation but “may be to the next”.

 
And so they are. More, in a way, than his friend Siegfried Sassoon’s: nothing in the century matches Owen’s immaculate directness in Anthem for Doomed Youth. When he reads it to his friend halfway through the play, a palpable tremor runs through the room, as if the bugles were still calling from sad shires.
But the power of the play – a respectful but inventive imagining of the friendship they forged at Craiglockhart War Hospital for nervous conditions – lies in more than the skilful use of letters, journals and poems, and in more than pathos.

 
The men rise as personalities, their friendship jokey, combative, and evolving with Owen’s growing confidence. Young men laugh sometimes, whatever times they endure, and so may we, surprisingly often. Alasdair Craig is Sassoon: taller, chiselled, with an upper-class brittleness. He was few years older and already a published poet, and a decorated war hero so independent-minded that he risked an public statement of “Wilful Defiance” against the war’s prolongation in 1917 and threw his military cross in the Mersey. So, with political cunning, he was sent to Craiglockhart rather than court-martialled.

 
Knocking on his door comes little Owen: stammering, hero-worshipping, sweating with social diffidence, Simon Jenkins is every inch the provincial clerk of the period: smooth centre parting and small moustache, a figure like Forster’s Leonard Bast. The relationship begins with Sassoon as amused mentor and critic, until he recognizes the ardent gift and becomes Owen’s champion, introducing him to figures like Robert Graves (“A man one likes better after he’s left the room”). Woven into their passionate discussions of poetry are moments of war news, of 250,000 lost at Passchendaele. For both will go back, Sassoon with death-wishing anger -“More like being drunk than being brave” – Owen because he is afraid after his first experience, and needs to know whether he can endure side by side with those whose deaths he mourns in verse. He could. He died a hero, a week before the Armistice. Sassoon had to live on nearly fifty years, but published his friend’s poems.

 
Caroline Clegg’s magnificent, understatedly fine production for Feelgood has toured to Craiglockhart, to Catterick, across Britain and to Northern France. It is good that it finds a home so close to the Cenotaph this winter. Don’t miss it.

 
box office 0845 505 8500 to 6 December
Rating: five  5 Meece Rating

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November 9, 2014 · 6:46 pm

DE RAPTU MEO at the Inner Temple

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

 

 

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

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

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November 7, 2014 · 1:55 pm

2071 Royal Court, SW1

GUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORI SINKS INTO HER SEAT UNDER THE WEIGHT OF SCIENCE

It so happened that, on my way to 2071, I had been listening (repeatedly) to Brünnhilde’s Immolation Scene: Wagner’s cataclysmic vision of the end of the world dissolving in purifying fire, flawed humanity and gods with it. So, I was rather in the mood for Armageddon. What I got was more of a science lecture.

2071, by Duncan Macmillan & Chris Rapley, is “a play exploring the future of life on earth and climate change” – or so it claims. I would agree with every word, except the word “play”.  2071 is, in fact, an elegant and succinct overview of the science of climate change, but it is an academic experience, not a dramatic one. Briskly, and with a bewildering battery of statistics throughout, Chris Rapley walks us through the scientific evidence for climate change, the global scientific efforts to track and analyse it, and the human behavioural factors to blame. Effectively, it’s like a guided tour of the coming apocalypse from the relative comfort of your theatre seat, given by an expert whose eminent and pioneering career gives him the gravitas to speak from experience, as well as intellectual prowess in his several fields. Rapley’s grasp of his subject is breathtaking: the concise elegance of his chain of thought, superb. But the overall effect is that of a rather dry, if beautifully reasoned, lecture: and in a warm dark space, at the end of a long day, it is just as soporific as you would expect.

Luke Hall’s wonderful video designs, part informational slides, part atmospheric animations, serve to enhance and clarify Rapley’s words as far as possible. Waves merge beautifully into an image of the globe, which steadily darkens into a view of Antarctica. Grids grow and multiply across the cornered stage to produce three-dimensional laser graphs illustrating the dangerously rising temperature. We also have almost constant soundscapes, designed by Max and Ben Ringham, composed by Paul Clark. But adding visuals and sound effects to a talk does not make it a play. It makes it more like one of those educational videos a tired teacher would show you on a rainy Friday afternoon: worthy, interesting, and wholeheartedly factual.

Prescient observations emerge. “Our infrastructure is not designed to deal with the climate we are provoking. …Science can inform, but it cannot arbitrate: it cannot decide.” Ultimately, Rapley explains, the resolution of climate change is not a scientific question, but a moral one: for governments, for communities, for individuals to choose which parts of the planet they do, or don’t, want to destroy. Here lies the piece’s dramatic problem: it draws together a dazzling array of evidence to provoke the question, but does not actually pose it, nor attempt to answer it. So there’s not so much a dramatic arc, as a dramatic hole.

I applaud and appreciate the intention to bring this science to a wider audience. The Hay Festival has been doing so for years. Still: Wagner’s pyromaniac vision of the end of the world may not be so accurate, but it is far more exciting.

– CHARLOTTE VALORI

Rating: Two Mice 2 meece rating

At the Royal Court Theatre Jerwood Theatre Downstairs, until 15 November: 020 7565 5000

In co-operation with the Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg

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November 6, 2014 · 9:06 am

JOHN Lyttelton, SE1

IN WHICH GUEST CRITIC AND TOP THEATREKITTEN LUKE JONES IS SADLY UNDERWHELMED

 

 

This – created by Lloyd Newson of DV8 physical company – wasn’t quite the piece of dance theatre that had been sold to me. There was quite a bit of writhing around towards the end, but for the most part it was a lot of shuffling with quite dry verbatim dialogue. John follows the story a man with a hefty claim to having the most depressing life story. We start with domestic abuse, shuffle over to promiscuity, then to drugs, obesity, prison, then over to more promiscuity although this time gay. It is given to us as one man’s tale, although it lands as quite a hodgepodge. We rattle through traumas with little to chew over other than basic facts. Some are just casually slipped in – such as the fact that this lean dancer is meant to be 25 stone? Sure.

 

The dance too feels like a stray addition, which slowly sneaks in across the dankly lit revolving stage. At first it is just a lot of poses, twitches and high-concept walking, but its airtime increases and becomes it itself becomes more confusing. A court scene choreographed to manic shuffling or a conversation given from a tumbling ball of limbs. I get it, but is it just making up for the stale dialogue?
However it does have a sly wit which punctures some of the more worthy or strange moments – such as him spending a good 35 minutes of this 75 minute play in a gay sauna for no apparent reason. ‘Credit card fraud – that’s just using someone else’s credit card’ he lists off in a roll call of his crimes. Lloyd Newson has created such a debauched world, that by the time John is out of prison, off drugs and just hanging around in gay saunas for company it seems totally normal.

 

All this would be terribly unwatchable were it not for the excellent turn (shuffle, slide and wiggle) by Hannes Langolf as John. His quiet regional voice brilliantly captures a confused, lost and quite apathetic character in the midst of all this high art. It is a testament to his performance that his dialogue never lost me, despite his flailing arms’ best efforts. But unfortunately this plays like one of those films an art gallery. You could walk in at any time, sit down and watch a bit. There was little arc, nothing to keep me in my seat. It could very well have been on loop and me just passing.

Box Office: 020 7452 3000 to 13 Jan

rating: Two  2 meece rating

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November 5, 2014 · 11:35 pm

MADE IN DAGENHAM Adelphi, WC1

UP THE WOMEN, UP THE WORKERS…AND A JIG  FROM HAROLD WILSON

 

 

It was not until the second-act opener that I thought it might fulfil the hope. That hope has been considerable: here’s a story (formerly a film, by the barely credited screenwriter William Ivory) about unfairness defeated, working-class women winning equality in the barely-vanished world of 1968. 200 underpaid seat-cover seamstresses held to ransom – at great risk – 5000 men’s jobs in their tight community, and defied the vast American Ford empire itself. Their victory included making Equal Pay the policy of the TUC for (rather shamingly) the first time ever.

 
A good start. And this musical team has every chance: script by the unconquerable comedy king Richard Bean, lyrics by Richard Thomas of Jerry Springer The Opera fame, Gemma Arterton as Rita the strikers’ leader, design by Bunny Christie (who rather brilliantly interprets the whole thing as a giant Airfix model, perfect metaphor for the factory process); music by David Arnold of Sherlock and Bond fame, and direction by the ever-flamboyant Rupert Goold. Huge West End money, hurled at a heartwarming tale of feminism and workers’ rights. What’s not to like?

 
Yet the first half , dammit, left me alarmingly cold. There’s a cheerful opening hymn “Busy Woman” to the working mother (could sense Jenni Murray beaming in the row behind), with Arterton endearingly honest and unshowy as ever and Adrian der Gregorian (better every year!) as her husband Eddie. Cue some spirited banter among the sewing women, and scornful, elegantly staged contrasts with the farting idle Union leaders, foxy management, and Mark Hadfield as Harold Wilson neatly ensconced in the cleft stick of his premiership, unions at his throat and production down. His opening number does involve one of the funniest dances of the year, which is something,; but the pace of the (long) first half flags. Especially when you remember that other recent strike musical, The Pajama Game: too many songs just aren’t quite up to it, and only one of them – a fine lament for the horror of Labour Party politics by Isla Blair as Connie the convenor – fulfils the proper function of a musical number in propelling the emotional and narrative line forward. Others simply seem to stop it dead.

 
Some of the dialogue is pleasingly Bean-ish (especially the exasperation of the manager’s bored wife Lisa stuck out in Essex : “But I bought you a horse!” “It doesn’t like me!” . But the first time Rita is properly allowed to catch fire is in the confrontation with management over skilled status “Could you do my job? What sort of needle would you use for leatherette?”

 
It sparks at last with that Act 2 opener, when it becomes clear that it is indeed Richard Thomas of Jerry S fame who is writing the lyrics: Steve Furst’s number as Tooley the American Ford boss is a magnificently, arrogantly, eloquently offensive portrait of US contempt for Britain, spectacularly staged (Gooldian!) with tanks, marines and fireworks. I long for a Broadway transfer and the affronted horror of East Coast liberals. There is also – as Tooley turns the screw on the impoverished strikers and laid-off husbands – a very fine and touching ensemble “Storm Clouds” montage which also makes the night worth it.

 
But as it winds on through domestic jeopardy and momentary heartbreak to Rita’s grand TUC conference catharsis, at least two other numbers – not least an utterly pointless one for Sophie Louise Dann’s oddly unconvincing Barbara Castle – slow it down again. Damn. I wanted to throw the stars around for this all- British, liberal-hearted show, but can’t. Not quite. Never mind: others will. There was plenty of laughing on the first night, and an emotional killer punch when they brought on the real, elderly strikers of 1968 to take a bow…

 
Box office 0844 412 4651 to 2015

rating three   3 Meece Rating

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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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