August 10, 2014 · 9:32 pm

CASTING THE RUNES – Space on the Mile, Edinburgh

A CREEPY GENTLENESS 
I found this maverick pair, “Box Tale Soup”   out in the boondocks last fringe: Antonia Christophers and noel Byrne, creating a wonderful Northanger Abbey out of cardboard suitcases, paper props and puppetry. I wrote ‘wonderful’ and I hope it helped. Anyway, they are still touring that delicate, gentle Austen – one of the best and truest treatments, bar none, in any dramatic medium – but this year up on the Mile they fill their little space with something different. There are fewer puppets – though one sudden and very scaring one – and a creepier, more oblique piece of storytelling. They still have their trademark costumes and solemnity: charming ties, facings and belts made of bookprint, indicating a literary rather than wholly naturalistic mood. All props are paper, deliberately simple, indicating that this is literature made visible.

 

The playlet’s story is typical of its author M. R. James: a sceptical exposer of occultism , played by Byrne, tangles with something dark and powerful and a beautiful girl who warns him of its threat (Christophers plays several characters with the minimum of fuss and open changes).  The style is elegant. Ritualistic, even: they create an odd magic of attentiveness in the audience with deliberate, quiet moves, a solemnity: occasionally they briefly leave character to sing (the fine score is by Dan Melrose) a couple of those frightening lines from the Ancient Mariner about the man who “turns no more his head / because he knows a frightful fiend /doth close behind him tread”.

 

This simplicity builds to something really odd and alarming: James’ “Who is this who is coming” genuinely arouses the terror of myth. Often it is more like reading, alone, than watching a show. And seeing them handle costumes and props reinforces what M.R.James wanted: “Let us be introduced to the actors in a placid way; let us see them going about their ordinary business, undisturbed by forebodings, pleased with their surroundings; and into this calm environment let the ominous thing put out its head, unobtrusively at first, and then more insistently until it holds the stage.”

 

http://www.edfringe.com           http://www.boxtalesoup.co.uk to 23 Aug

rating:  three  3 Meece Rating

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August 9, 2014 · 12:35 pm

THE QUANT Hill St Solo, Edinburgh

THE BONUS BOYS UNMASKED…

 

 

Jamie Griffiths is not a quantitative analyst in the City. He’s an actor and playwright. Not a “quant”, a risk-taking star of the city betting and hedging and ducking and diving and making billions and then losing some and panicking and covering his tracks. But his hard, chiselled smartness and edgy delivery ring so true that at times in this remarkable monologue you drift into thinking the performer is telling a true story.

And in essence, true it is. As a maths graduate, enraged by the bank bailouts, Griffiths became obsessed with how it all worked, read widely, hung out in forums for quants and traders and got even more enraged. Fascinated, too, by the bizarre, risky casino culture of young, wet-behind-the-ears adventurers encouraged to bet not only their own institution’s money, but imaginary money it doesn’t have. So he begins his presentation as if we are trainees being told how it works; as it goes on, the story shades into autobiography and a final reveal about the Quant’s own biggest, baddest bet. It becomes ever more gripping, ever more brilliantly appalling.

It is full of fierce little wisdoms, which might be spoken by a real practitoner. “We do not grow anything, we do not manufacture anything. We manufacture risk”. He explains the levels and types of risk. Execution risk, in which the other guy might be faster, so it is vital to be near the server hub (“ever 93 miles away you lose a millisecond”). There’s Excel risk, in which you model a computer programme but it doesn’t deliver. There’s counterparty risk, in which you win but the other guy can’t pay up. And there is people risk, in which human beings simply don’t behave logically (“Why didn’t Greece default?” etc). We learn about derivatives, leverage, arbitrage, and above all the giddy triumphalism of the successful trader who is dealing in sums so vast, and earning sums so vast, that he feels omnipotent. “Staring into the face of God and realizing you are looking in a mirror”.

Watching him, listening to this impassioned impersonation, I found it easier than usual to answer the humble layperson’s question, “why don’t these people just take the first couple of bonuses and bail out, buy a farm or something pleasant, get a proper life?”. They can’t: it is addictive behaviour. And, as becomes clear as his narrative unfurls, even the maddest of this behaviour is not likely to be controlled, curbed, or even condemned by the big profitable institutions in charge. Until it goes seriously wrong and they need a scapegoat. Riveting.

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

rating  four 4 Meece Rating

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August 9, 2014 · 10:37 am

JUVENALIA – Assembly Hall, Edinburgh

THE GRUMPY OLD ROMAN RETURNS…
Terrible times we live in. A decadent civilization, a crumbling empire, hypocrites in power, toadies fawning on the rich, women strangers to chastity and hard work, who live obsessed with celebrity gossip , hairdos and “crushes on ham actors”. There’s nobody much believing in the old religion, cheats and scroungers declare fake dependants, ghastly foreigners show off, and there’s urban racket everywhere “How much sleep , I ask you, can one get in lodgings here?” cries our host, to a roar of laughter from a hungover Fringe audience. Even the canapés these days are ghastly – “half an egg stuffed with a prawn, faugh!”.
The times he excoriates are two millennia past, the decadent noisy city is Rome; the satirist snarling at it is Juvenal. It is 38 years since Simon Callow first strode onto an Edinburgh stage, scowling, in the character of the Roman satirist Juvenal: now with a mop of curly white hair and an easier route to summoning up the eternal grumpy-old-man, he probably suits it even better . This revival of Richard Quick’s adaptation of the writings (translated, with wonderful vigour, by Peter Green) certainly roars along. He’s an equal-opportunities insulter, is Juvenal, and while women get a pretty rough deal so do the gay collectors of pretty boys – “Soon” he snarls “male brides will yearn for a mention in the Daily Gazette”. His explicit remarks about their sufferings from piles and the boredom of slaves tasked to serve their needs remain quite shocking enough to answer my vague wondering about why we never did any Juvenal for A level at the dear old convent…
His lines, though, have fed into the language – “who will guard the guards?” ‘Bread and circuses” “A healthy mind in a healthy body”. And the skill of Callow’s presentation, and the structuring of this bravura character recitation (directed here by Simon Stokes) is that it lightens and sweetens towards the end. Just as you think you’ve had enough grumping, Callow pauses and looks, reflectively, into an imaginary mirror to mourn that “all old men look the same..an aged baboon, trembling lips…impotent dodderers, senscent in mind…”. And that those who live long will live through grief: bury sons, wives, sisters. So live well, friends: it ends with a gentle, wearily lyrical evocation of that healthy mind and body, needing just simple food with friends, sun on your back..and “a valiant heart.”
http://www.edfringe.com to 24 August

rating:   four  (well, three plus a virtuoso performermouse)  3 Meece RatingMusicals Mouse width fixed

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August 9, 2014 · 10:36 am

FRANKENSTEIN UNBOLTED – Caves, Edinburgh

FRANKIE GOES TO EXTREMES…

 

Good to know (and I mean this seriously) that Edinburgh comedy is not cowed by squeamish PC seriousness. If you can’t laugh at everything, you probably can’t laugh at anything for long. So here is Victor Frankenstein, driven by rivalry with his old schoolfriend, competing for the coveted academic chair of P.A.E.D.O. (Physics of Artificial Expertise in Developing Organisms). He must invigorate a Creature, sending Igor (an Avenue Q puppet obsessed with musical theatre) to fetch body parts. But Igor is careless with the liver, so the otherwise perfect, mop-haired creature can’t take his drink, sings a lot of Rolf Harris tunes to his own slurring words, and after one tot of whisky becomes – well, the floppy blond wig sort of gives it away.

 

Hey, why not? We have lived in an atmosphere of hushed horror for too long. Laugh at the wicked: it’s better than cringing. Not that this particular strand goes far, for they’ve a tale to tell. In a flurry of songs, dopy jokes and clever ones, by way of a wickedly parodied University Alcohol Awareness seminar and a full Chippendale silver-thong routine, Mary Shelley’s tale of Dr Frankenstein and his creation Frankie is traduced in fifty hugely enjoyable minutes.
This is Last Chance Saloon again – Sam Dunham, Jack Faires and Jack Gogarty. I saw their Dracula two years ago with delight and I am frankly (ha ha, see what I did there?) a fan. Their shows are intensely silly but also intensely disciplined: they understand audience atmosphere and pick it up, but are masterly with their vaudeville and slapstick skills. No sound-effect misses by as much as a millisecond, no joke outlives its mayfly impact. These things matter, especially here this month where , up and down the roaring, laughing, chaotic Fringe lanes, there is so much sloppier comedy. Welcome back, lads.
http://www.edfringe.com to 24 August

rating:  4  4 Meece Rating

 

 

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August 8, 2014 · 8:48 am

WINGMAN – Pleasance Dome, Edinburgh

WHO SAYS THE ROM-COM IS DEAD?  IT JUST GOT WITTY..

 

 

Last year I purred over Richard Marsh’s “Dirty Great Love Story”,
a blissfully clever, likeable, honest miniature rom-com, observing of its tone “You are in safe hands when the inner monologue of a stag-night has the nerve to rhyme “penis” with a plaintive “We’re grown up men now, some of us have cleaners!”.

 

I hoped Marsh would find other outlets for the style he had so beautifully evolved: an acted, two-handed narrative in what I can best describe as Relaxed Rap. Or Mellow Middleclass Mashup. Which is to say that he has no fear of rhyme, alliteration, assonance or scansion, and is indeed adept at them all; but neither is he aspiring to some poetry-slam intensity or heroic consistency: he’s happy to drop in utter naturalism of dialogue, and jokey blokey gags which could fall as easily from the classier sort of comic.

 

This time his director is Justin Audibert, his fellow-player Jerome Wright. The theme is fatherhood, the tale a sour-sweet account of a young man – about thirty – losing his mother to cancer and reconciling with an estranged father. Characters spring to vivid, eccentric life: his mother’s last days of determined individuality “suffering as herself, an awesome autumn”, his own tricky love-life (“what kind of man breaks the heart of a hospice nurse?”) and the invasion of his long-estranged father into the funeral. The absurdity of that funeral itself leads to sour dour jokes – “an old person’s dead, so let’s eat food for a children’s party..”

 

The father offers to be his “wingman”, helping him pull girlfriends, one of whom seems to be pregnant. which is awkward. The narrator bitterly resents this: the interplay between Marsh and Wright – playing the ultimate annoying Dad – is funny and painful at once. The tale, and its back-story wind on cleverly, dark and light together. Finally there is a good twist, and then another, and a happy ending which leaves you with a grin.

http://www.edfringe.com to 24 Aug
Rating: four  4 Meece Rating

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August 8, 2014 · 8:47 am

SHAKESPEARE FOR BREAKFAST – C Theatre, Edinburgh

OH DEAR

 

Sometimes you have to check out the Fringe regulars, especially when tagged with “sizzling” by the Scottish Express and “well worth getting out of bed for” by the Indy.  So I bought a ticket for this hardy annual – and the show was indeed packed, sold out in a venue on the large side of medium.
But it’s pretty terrible. Sloppy, self-indulgent, witless sub-sixth-form larking by five players old enough to know better. We live, after all, in the post-Reduced-Shakespeare age. This stuff can be smarter, by a factor of about fifty times. Here, the loose  plot has a girl shipwrecked on an island populated by Shakespeare characters who switch randomly around, mainly as an excuse to chuck out prithees and sirrahs and extract bad jokes from overfamiliar lines from the Dictionary Of Hackneyed Quotations. When Prince Hal strolls on with a union jack towel saying “once more unto the beach dear friends”, and the audience obediently guffaws, you know where you are. You’re in middle-aged 1950s philistinism, a world scared of poetry and feeling, demanding nothing more than validation of its fear of the archaic, the heroic, the complex. Smirk at a Yorick skull! Put Shakespeare in his place!

 

 

There are three middling good jokes – Hamlet taking a selfie, “hashtag thatisthequestion”, and a four-wall-breaking moment when a Romeo looks at the ceiling with “But soft, what light from yonder lighting rig breaks?”, followed by “things can only get meta”. And it’s a nice idea that ever since Plomley you can always find a copy of the Complete Works on a desert island.  The rap at the end has at least been worked on, and updated to put Richard III in the car-park. But sizzling? Worth getting up for? What were they thinking?

 

http://www.edfringe.com
Rating…oh dear.   Dead Rat

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August 7, 2014 · 9:23 am

MY NIGHT WITH REG Donmar, WC1

IT’S NOT ALL ABOUT AIDS…
Kevin Elyot’s 1994 play is pretty much perfect: a twist on the traditional drawing-room, single-set comedy of sex, love, friendship and death. Directing, Robert Hastie does it full justice. In two unbroken hours here is a constantly involving, slyly funny and heartbreaking production.
That is the first thing to say, and should precede the standard description of it as a famous play about gay men and an important landmark in writing about the AIDS crisis of the 1990’s. Not that it is a rant against social prejudice: indeed you would hardly know that there was any. A flippant toast “To gross indecency!” carries no implied legal terrors as it would have done before Wolfenden; and when Eric the Brummie barman casually says, pretty unbothered, that his comprehensive wasn’t like the film Another Country – “if you were a poof they threw you in the canal and pissed on you”. Gay rights are not Elyot’s message, unless incidentally through the lovability of the characters. For all their campery, these are just six people in a tangle of friendship and love: only one explicitly fears AIDS, and the two deaths occurring between scenes might almost as well be cancer.
That’s its strength: but of course a “gay” play has advantages over farces and tragedies set in the ‘straight” world. You can complicate your sexual relationships faster than Feydeau if anyone can sleep with anyone (and anyone probably will have had a night, or part thereof, with the unseen Reg). Gay men are also, forgive the stereotype, often gifted at satiric, savage and explicit verbal humour, which rapidly ramps up the comedy. It also helps defuse and pivot the moments of high emotion, and there are many: for sudden male tears and embraces are more natural. Then add to that – especially twenty years away from gay marriage and the domestic normalization of today – the ability to play with some un-British closeness across class barriers: the barman with four CSEs and the public-school toff, the copywriter with the smart flat and the lorry-driver (“though I think he’s really a florist”). It all helps.

But it is not a play of stereotypes and special pleading. It drills into universals: the uses and limits of sex, the blind alley and brief relief of hookups, the yearning for intimacy, the ache of jealousy, Spender’s “grave evening demand for love” . At its heart is a superb performance by Jonathan Broadbent as Guy: tubby, fussy, decent, maternal, frustrated, everybody’s confidant and nobody’s first choice. He is achingly funny and heartbreakingly noble. Julian Ovenden and Geoffrey Streatfield are the glamour-boys whose conquistador pride crumbles into grief and longing; Lewis Reeves the barman, wisest of them all. Outside that circle – though nobody escapes Reg – Richard Cant is funny and sad as Bernie, sinuously lovesick for his nonchalant brutal bus-driver Benny (Matt Bardock, cocksure in every sense).

 

So, not a “gay play”, cultish and exclusive. Shock, betrayal, the comfort of touch echo in us all. And plenty of conventional spouses might ruefully echo Benny’s observation that sometimes you never realize what a bore your partner is until you’re both out with other people. Brilliant.

 

Box Office 0844 871 7624 to Supported: Barclays /Simmons & Simmons
Rating: five  5 Meece Rating

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August 7, 2014 · 9:18 am

KINGMAKER Pleasance Dome, Edinburgh

FUTURE HORRORS OF A RISING BORIS?  
Here is a cheerful, dishevelled Alan Cox as Max Newman, London Mayor turned Tory MP. He’s a seemingly bumbling, teddybearish, pratfalling, polysyllabic Beano favourite, disguising his laser-sharp political brain by uttering lines like “Crikey-what-a-tower-of-preposterous-piffle”, with a lovable authenticity which as his sworn enemy Eleanor Hopkirk MP snarls, “takes enormous technique”. Guess who..

 

In this tale, the PM is resigning, and Max wants the leadership. But he wants to be elected, not to be the Tories’ Gordon Brown: there is only one rival left in the race, the green youngster Dan Regan. The two of them are summoned secretly to a basement office by Eleanor (Joanna Bending) , who is Chief Whip. She suspects Max of getting some of his followers to vote for Dan (Laurence Dobiesz), in order to make him seem a credible rival. That would obviously give Max more lustre when he inevitably wins. But the Whip has a plan to topple him, act kingmaker to Dan and probably control him in office. Her motive tangles politics and personal anims: she thinks Max a bully, a game-player with no ideals, and wants to blackmail him over provoking a suicide long ago.
The play sees the verbal duel between the two, with Dan as the third point of the triangle. But in trying to keep us gripped by this squalid insiderish Westminster-bubble scene for an hour the writers Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky have bitten off a lot, and given its excellent director Hannah Eidinow a tricky task. I enjoyed Khan and Salinsky’s last political romp much more: indeed being set in the closing weeks of a Con-Lib government it would feel more topical right now than this one’s peering into a Borisoid future. Writing about that earlier play, COALITION, I called it a “ near- credible story, its sharp lines underpinned by a real apprehension of what practical power entails”. This one doesn’t get that far.

 

It has its moments, especially when Cox demonstrates the humble line he will take on Newsnight to defuse the old scandal. And the whip has one speech offering a devastatingly accurate analysis of the Max technique for fighting off difficult subjects: bumbling bafflement, quick pivot, attempt at flattery, anger, then a head-down-rugby-scrum attack and finally the little-boy-lost look.
That’s good. But it’s not quite enough.

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

Rating:  three   3 Meece Rating

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August 6, 2014 · 9:53 pm

THE CURING ROOM – Pleasance Dome, Edinburgh

COMRADES AND CANNIBALS

 

“It’s not just seven naked men eating each other” must be the most startling aplogia yet for a play; but the author David Ian Lee and the director Joao de Sousa have a point. This shattering story bases its ninety graphic, violent minutes on a brief anecdote of cannibalistic wartime horror once mentioned by George Steiner. It does make a serious attempt to imagine extremes of stress, and wonder how human beings – half animal half angel – would reconcile themselves to such behaviour over 39 days of horror. And as the characters are military, it has particular interest in the dissolution of discipline, structure and status. Whether this is a valid exercise each viewer must judge. I’m not sure.
The men are Soviet soldiers in 1944, thrown naked into a monastery cellar after the Waffen SS capture them and set their dogs to eat others alive. Their death-prison is the old meat-curing room. The senior officer, Comrade Captain Viktor Nikolov (they’re all very formal to start with, albeit naked) is young and green, but injured, bleeding, struggling to keep authority. He refuses to sanction drawing lots for cannibalism, but dies first.  Some of the men are older, veterans of the October Revolution and the terrible starvation sieges of Leningrad.  One youngster, Yuri, is halfwitted and another, Georgi, a farm boy. At first they quarrel, starve, thirst and resort to licking the dew off the stones in turn and drinking their own semen. Once, movingly, they sing the Internationale. At first, none of them will break the taboo by eating the dead officer.

 

 

But then the brutal Drossov is killed in a violent scuffle: even then the men circle warily, reluctant to take the first bite. Until they do. It becomes routine. Thomas Holloway is a touching childlike Yuri, protected from ever looking “in the corner” by the sweet protective Georgi (Matt Houston). Whose task, made easier by the adoption of makeshift tools like sharpened femurs, is butchery. We are not spared watching it: there’s a stripped torso, several heads, and much dim-lit truffling for tripes pulled out from below or behind the naked corpses (who lie more horridly still than any actors i have yet seen die). Two people in the audience were helped out. One was retching.

 

There are some remarkable interactions: violent and explicit or quietly moving: Matt Houston’s decline is particularly touching. Yuri’s confusion flowers into full- blown religious mystical speech, not entirely convingingly but a good coup de theatre, which the play needs by that time. And when around day 26 two older men talk about their families and old friendship at home in Kursk, they evoke an unbearable intimate sadness. Even while starkers, daubed in blood, intermitently gnawing human offal and having just drawn lots for the next murder by using – agh – knucklebones. Not sure whose.

 

 

So where does this get us? Is it redemptive, as the author hopes? or sadism, war- porn for an age when theatres find it hard to shock?   It is certainly overlong – one should not be counting heads to see how many more deaths till we get out. I was going to say it needs the fat trimming off the script, but under the circumstances let us grope for another metaphor, possibly drawn from something comelier. Like gardening.
All in all, the actors give a brave tour de force and the play does ask questions about human duality: meaty body and lofty spirit. One thing I’d deny is what a PR puff calls it – “darkly funny”. Not so. Or at least only once: when the university- educated officer is available to be eaten, Drossov observes “When theres nohing left to count, an economist should be repurposed”. Don’t tell Peston.

 

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

Rating: three 3 Meece Rating

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August 6, 2014 · 8:07 am

CHAPLIN – Pleasance Forth, Edinburgh

STICK, BAGGY PANTS AND BOWLER:   POLITICS AND EXILE

 

 

My Granny met young Charlie Chaplin once: he was at her father’s Theatre Royal Nottingham with Fred Karno’s Mumming Birds.  That was before America, before the years of silent movie fame. And long before he scandalized conservative America with his courageous Hitler parody in The Great Dictator, and a speech on human brotherhood incautiously opening with the word “comrades!”.  The actor protested that it was a small c he meant, and that being passionately anti-Nazi did not make him a Commie. But postwar America, paranoid in the J Edgar Hoover years, exiled him and his young wife Oona for the last 25 years of his life.

 
You will tramp across a lot of cobbles this Fringe before you see a finer performance – especially a static one – than James Bryce as the aged Chaplin remembering his long life of poverty, work, fame, love and exile.  The Finnish director Sven Sid – and writers Christoffer Mellgren and Johan Storgård – draw from the Chaplin autobiography, and Bryce frames and narrates his memories from a bath-chair. Here is a man near death, haunted by memory and ghosts both benign and hostile.  It is a remarksble performance, not least in the moments when the focus is off the old man and he watches – affectionate or pained – his life unreeling as Christopher Page plays his acrobatic urchin self.

 
It was a life started in grinding poverty on the edge of the workhouse, with a mother who succumbed to dementia: John Scougall plays the devoted, more level-headed brother Sidney who introduced him to the theatre. He came home; butold and young, the conflicted Chaplin stays driven by his mantra “Work, work, work, theres no better medicine!” as his track takes him to Mack Sennett’s Hollywood farce factory and beyond.

 

The director uses odd clips of real Chaplin film, but sparingly: the play rests on black-browed earnest young Page and the centreing, powerful Easter-Island statue profile of the old man, tended in intermittent moments of distress by his beloved young wife Oona in their Swiss exile.   There is always a risk that a straight bio-play will feel formulaic: but the manic flawed determination and historic political conflict of the man carries it forward. The insecurity of being “depressed, disheartened, loved by everyone yet by no-one” may be a cliché: but, as the US press close in viciously on his love affairs and allegations of ‘un-American’ thinking, the tension here grows rather than ebbing.   Sarah McCardie and Michelle Edwards play the various women strongly; Ross Dunsmore is both Karno and the rat-faced Hoover. And as the closing moment reminds us, on the sparely used screen, that it was 1970 before Hollywood restored Chaplin to the hall of fame, we see for a moment the face of the real man on that day.

 

And yes, the tears prick.  No saint, but a grafter and a trouper, a man the century should remember.

 

 

http://www.edfring.com. To 24 aug

RATING  FOUR  4 Meece Rating

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August 5, 2014 · 6:25 pm

UNFAITHFUL Traverse, Edinburgh

SEX ,  SEDUCTION  AND  STALE MARRIAGE…

 
Middle-aged man in a hotel bar, having a drink after work; miniskirted girl hits on him, shameless, provocative – “do you want to fuck me?”  Next thing we know, his frumpish wife is furious, so seeks revenge by donning a red dress and heels and hiring a gigolo in the same hotel.
Ho hum, you think,  here we go again. Dark drama of middle-class passion and potential bunny-boiling. But actually, Owen Mc Cafferty’s  80 minute four-hander, directed by Rachel O’Riordan, is far subtler than that. And despite a few slowdown moments near the end, it is an interesting take. Significantly that first scene is heralded by a screaming discordant siren sound effect, the final moment with a smooth love song. For by devious means,  via nude moments and startlingly explicit verbal sex descriptions, it winds to a satisfying conclusion about the glumly transactional nature of raw sex and the rather deeper, trickier need for intimacy which lies beneath any bonking.

 

 

For both couples are in trouble. Tom is a working man, a decent plumber, played with beautiful finedrawn dryness by Benny Young. He is having a crisis about being 57 and wondering ‘is this it? In a worn-down marriage he hardly talks to his wife. She (Cara Kelly, solid and formidable ) is becoming bitter, stroppy, critical, nursing that mid-life sense of waste. She is almost hungering for a solid, resent-able betrayal and a revenge.
Whether she gets either is something we only slowly find out, by way of an interlude with the younger pair (Gary McCann’s set, apparently stark, proves more complex than it seemed at first, nicely reflecting the fact that McCafferty’s tale does the same).  Owen Whitelaw is vibrant, spring-heeled, cocky and ultimately vulnerable as the gigolo, Ameira Darwish touching as the girl: very young in her breakable brittleness, a good but desperate liar.  So despite some slowing, I warmed to it. And as the older couple thaw, there is one particular very good laugh to be had – as our relief at the lightening tone matches theirs. It’s about a certain squarehead Doyle, and is a pleasingly Scottish football moment, for all that the author is an Abbey Dublin man…
box office 0131 228 1434 To 24 Aug.

rating:  three    3 Meece Rating

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August 5, 2014 · 6:20 pm

HOW TO ACHIEVE REDEMPTION AS A SCOT THROUGH THE MEDIUM OF BRAVEHEART Underbelly, Edinburgh

BEFORE THE REAL DEBATE…TRY THIS…
Every afternoon at ten past five, a kilted 24-year-old woman in blue-and-white facepaint emerges from the leprous tenement of the Underbelly on a bicycle with a horse’s head on the front. She moves a short way along the Cowgate followed by a bemused crowd, and in a handy loading bay wobbles round in circles on her horse-bicycle declaiming William Wallace’s rousing speech to the rebel army, as delivered by Mel Gibson in that absurd film Braveheart. “Will ye fight?” she cries, to which the crowd obediently shout “No. We will run and we will live” and then moments later change their mind and cheer her. WIth rather more courtesy, as a rule, than when this intrepid she-Gibson did the same to a rowdily Unionist Rangers crowd outside Ibrox Park.

 

 
It is the culmination of an endearing hour in which performance artist Rachael Clerke attempts to define her identity as a “mongrel” now living in Bristol but proud of ancestry, childhood and Scottishness. And for all its flippancy and personal comic amusements, the hour probably says most of what is true about the dilemma which Alex Salmond and David Cameron have together wished on Scotland. Few, I suspect, will vote either way on coldly pragmatic economic lines. It is all tied up – as she points out – with tumbling cliffs, wide vistas, red haired heroes, football teams, songs, grudges, pessimists, victims, and inventors of the bicycle, the mackintosh, Dolly the Sheep and Tunnocks’ Teacakes. It’s visceral, emotional.

 

 
Clerke’s story – chosen by IdeasTap to showcase here – is a teasing personal take on it all, delivered with shyly cheeky likeable anecdote. Requiring National heroes, she tries out three. The first, with black irony, is Donald Trump – American, plutocratic and absurd, son of a Gaelic-speaking mother and governmentally named a “global Scot” for his planned investment on the East Coast. Which was to be a vast golf course, ruining the old sand-dunes of Clerke’s childhood where her family scattered a grandfather’s ashes. Enraged, she stole and framed a lump of turf.

 

 
She then, before our eyes, dresses up as Trump in a crazy wig and golf outfit, and shows a video of herself impersonating him. But he won’t do: so next a cushion is shoved up the shirt and pads into the cheeks to make her Alex Salmond, in which persona she roams around the Parliament, gives imaginary answers on Desert Island Discs and enacts a wild dance to The Proclaimers “Five Hundred Miles”.

 

Then she turns herself into Mel Gibson, in that film where as she points out “the clothes are a hundred years too late and the face paint a hundred years early”. If there is a conclusion, it is that between that imaginary past and Salmond’s imaginary future there is little to choose. “Identity is only an idea, and deeply personal”. And as an artist she likes creative vagueness. So there you are. Either this sort of bafflement in thousands of hearts has nothing to do with the vote September 18th, or else it will be the most important factor in it. Who knows?,

 

http://www.edfringe.com to 24 August
rating: three McMice   3 Meece Rating

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August 5, 2014 · 1:04 am

FORGOTTEN VOICES Pleasance Grand, Edinburgh

THE COMMEMORATION Posted, 0100, 5/08/2014

 

 

“Terrible old uniforms, no proper webbing, even. Off to Destination Unknown” says the private soldier, remembering how he threw a postcard out of the train window in the hope it would reach his wife. “War was young, and so were we” says a sergeant, heady from the welcome at the liberation of Antwerp. An officer reminisces about making bombs out of jam tins to throw into enemy trenches: he enjoyed getting the stuff together because, as a public-school chap “I had never been shopping”. But the war that should have been over by Christmas never was. The memories darken: gas, foam in the lungs, drownings in foxholes, the longing for a good clean Blighty wound. And the ultimate horrors of the Somme and Passchendaele, nightmare retreats, rats, mud, the strangely sweet smell of a thousand corpses all around.

 
Actors, low-key at lecterns, speak the words of the long dead to a silent packed hall, weaving the memories of 1914-18 into the awareness of our century. It is profoundly moving. It must be admitted that the national dimming of lights for the WW1 centenary was not apparent in much of Fringe Edinburgh, as the rock and racket of comedy, kebabs and queues carried on unabated through the evening. But walking through that to the Pleasance it was good to find the hour and day marked by a special performance of this understated 90-minute play by Malcolm McKay. Using the Imperial War Museum’s verbatim memories of the Great War, he brings them together as if in conversation between an officer, a private, a sergeant, a woman munitions worker with a husband at war. And, in the last twenty minutes, a joining American serviceman.

 
Here is the daily reality of war: soldiering satisfactions and grumbles, matter-of-fact horrors, the yellow skin of women in munitions factories, the purging of lice from shirt-seams over a candle flame, the trauma of an officer supervising a firing squad at dawn and losing faith in the public-school credo of being born to lead. Here too are memories of the beauty of the 1914 Christmas Truce: soldiers’ accounts of friendly fraternizing and football crossly, hopelessly denied by the officer. It feels true and terrible and rightly humble, the cast (including Julian Sands and Robert Vaughan) mere mouthpieces.

 

It is the woman, Kitty (Wendy Nottingham), who has the last word. Her husband was recruited, like so many other adventurous young men in those heady early days, his shoulder tapped at a Vesta Tilley concert where men took the King’s shilling on the music-hall stage. He didn’t come back.

 
It ended at midnight. Lights dim, lecterns gone, twelve chimes. And then the pipes of the Royal Scots Association Band: O Flower of Scotland. Then one by one the pipers left the light and marched into darkness. As thousands did a century ago, forever.

http://www.edfringe.com
(Forgotten Voices is at the Grand – Pleasance Courtyard to 25 August daily at 1.30pm, excluding Tuesdays. Further guest artists appearing in the show after Julian Sands and Robert Vaughn, are Peter Bowles (6 – 13 August), Christopher Timothy (14 – 18 August), Robert Powell (14 and 15 August), James Fleet (20 – 25 August) and Celia Imrie (20 – 22 August).

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August 4, 2014 · 2:19 pm

THRILL ME C THEATRE, Edinburgh

1924  PREPPY KILLERS RIDE AGAIN

 

 

Kevin Spacey thrilled us all right as the lawyer Clarence Darrow (at the Old
Vic, reviewed here). One of his great triumphs was saving two young men – Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb – from the gallows after they murdered a 12 year old for kicks . The story convulsed the world ninety years ago this month: for some unfathomable reason media always act astonished at crimes committed by affluent, preppy young people (they were law students) . You’d think that personality disorders, selfishness, bored sadism and mutual egging-on to outrage were exclusive to the poor. But L & L have been studied and written about ever since, and this musical treatment by Stephen Dolginoff (joint production with Greenwich Theatre) has met fascinated approval here and off- Broadway.
It feels more operatic than musical-theatre, eschewing big distinctive numbers for a piano upstage (Tom Turner turning in an epic non-stop performance) and atmospheric, intense, threatening music. Which, interestingly, emerges seamlessly from being a sort of film-noir background to accompanying recitative moments and suddenly swooping arias from the two young men. The storytelling is good – and not over-sensational, though the moment when Loeb, alone, lures the unseen boy Bobby into his roadster is truly horrible. Leopold, the seemingly weaker teenage personality of the two, narrates in retrospect from the day of his fifth parole hearing 34 years later, with a longdrawnout mournful melodic line (repeated often) “I went along with him”.

 

That, in fact, is the emotional core and interest of the piece. Thrill-killing itself – and Loeb’s famous obsession with “Neetchey” and becoming a Nietszchean genius superman – is the most popular source of intellectual dissection of the case, and is covered here. But the real interest is (as in Sondheim’s PASSION ) is the awful, cannibal power of obsessive sexual love. For Leopold the lonely geek, wonderfully realized in a fine debut by Danny Colligan, is homosexually adoring of the preening, psychopathic Loeb – a nicely nasty smooth performance by Jo Parsons. Leopold signs a ‘contract’ to be his idol’s efficient accomplice in all crimes – arson,burglary, vandalism, finally the murder – in return for embraces and friendship. The fawning, shirt-stripping, begging ‘thrill me’ moments are oddly powerful, not least when after one victory (Loeb ground down into bored, unwilling sexual contact) sees them lying together with Leopold’s narrative line ‘it was later that night – about five minutes later”. Poor old Leopold clearly never got much bang for his buck. The only moment when this nasty, humiliating dependence tips over into undignified audience snorts of hilarity is early on, when they are enjoying a warehouse fire they have started , and the acolyte is worried fire engines might come and catch them. Loeb draws him close and purrs “You’re the lookout – tell me if you see anything..BIG and RED coming”. Ouch.

 

But as it darkens and the effect of this blind adoration and folie-a-deux becomes more complex, any laughter fades in appalled contemplation. As well it might.

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

rating four   4 Meece Rating

 

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August 3, 2014 · 11:49 pm

SMALLWAR Traverse, Edinburgh

THE BEAST WITHIN

 

“Our enemies are not the Germans, nor the Russians or the French. The common enemy of us all is the beast within”. As Syria, Ukraine, Israel and Palestine burn and the lights dim tonight to mark the World War I centenary, those words of Valentin Bulgakov are spoken by a nurse, beside a trolley where a maimed soldier lies dying. In a still-brutal world that cannot help but be powerful. In some ways that enforces caution: weeping for lost boys can be too easy.

 
But this is a treatment out of the ordinary from the Belgian theatremaker Valentijn Dhaenens. Last year the Soho theatre ran his BIGMOUTH – now also running at the Traverse. My review (paywall, tinyurl.com/lba4sze) said among other things “brace yourself for an unnerving, technically risky and thought-provoking hour…..[as] this elfin figure demonstrates with brilliant obliquity the art of oratory from Socrates and Pericles to George W. Bush”. In this premiere – again using words drawn from reality – he uses the writings of combatants, dissidents and nurses in wars from Attila the Hun to modern Afghanistan. And echoes the other play, with “There’s always going to be bigmouths who are willing to sacrifice somebody else’s life…in churches and schools, in newspapers and congresses”.

 
But the core of this disturbing, ghostly piece is that unnamed half-man on a hospital trolley. The nurse is Dhaenens himself in WW1 nurse’s uniform. Troublingly androgynous, but not out of place in a woman who – in the words of one of the real nurses – needs to renounce womanly empathy in order to cope with the terrible job day after day: the screaming, dying, gaping mutilations. She/he comments, relates the nursing day, reflects. Into a screen behind the passive dying patient rises not one but several of him, multiple images of Dhaenens. They walk, discuss, and speak on a telephone – lovingly or angrily – to loved ones at home, or call on the God who loves his “murderous little children”. One, bare-arsed in hospital gown, becomes an insistent priest telling the dying man to recite in French “God, I give you my life, willingly, for the fatherland”. Another begs a lullaby and “Wake me up mother, and tell me this isn’t real”.

 
Deep voiceover from the patient himself merely has him longing to live, to feel his legs and arms once more, to wriggle his toes, find the ring his sweetheart gave him, now maybe discarded on an amputated hand. By the end there are four figures, melting, growing , shrinking, mourning – some of the real letters are shattering – but one in the voice of the philosopher Ernst Jünger acknowledging the “ecstatic, fulfilling, horrible, obscene” pleasure of killing.

 
Once or twice, despite Dhaenens’ hypnotic presentation and the number of times I wrote “vids – brilliant” in the margin about Jeroen Wuyts’ design, a certain unease shimmered: the pity of war, the broken young bodies, will always move an audience. Sometimes there is more power in the more restrained stage evocations – like An August Bank Holiday Lark, or The Two Worlds of Charlie F. I worried once or twice – notably when Dhaenens sang Are You Lonely Tonight – that this was an artist saying “Look at me, making a Theatre Piece”. But in the end its power stilled such doubts. As the nurse says “Life is clean, death is clean..the gap in between, that’s another kettle of fish”. That harsh focus on the private dreams and sorrows of the dying underlines the terrible pointlessness, the dulce-et-decorum lie.

 
box office 0131 228 1434 To 24 Aug.

rating:  four   4 Meece Rating

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August 3, 2014 · 5:38 pm

CUCKOOED. Traverse, Edinburgh

BRACING, BRILLIANT AND NECESSARY…

Mark Thomas is the most intelligent of the modern leftist standups: impassioned, a practical activist emotionally driven but capable of rich mockery of himself, his confreres and the absurdity and illogic which threatens all human endeavours, even (or especially) the most sincere. In this riveting, headlong narrative about the Campaign Against The Arms Trade (CAAT) there are plenty of laughs at the expense of its fellowship, founded by Quakers, run by “atheist Guardian readers” and comprising “crusties, hippies, people who sing with nuns…”. Describing a protest at an Arms fair where he hijacked a party of credulous buyers and later chained his neck to the axle of a BAE Systems bus, he muses on those who cycle, march, and light candles for Peace – “This is our Ascot! Dress code, camouflage gear worn ironically”.

It’s a blokeish, beguiling way to take us in to the hard reality of the cause: hampering, mocking and exposing the illegal, criminal brutalities of a shady world of torture and genocidal cooperation despite its respectable top-dressing. He has scored plenty of closedowns and a few arrests. But it is a personal, conflicted tale he has to tell here, as well as a political cry of protest at the ubiquity of unpunished official and corporate spying on individuals: pretty damn topical after the Lawrence family revelations.

Though Thomas narrates in standup style, it is a genuinely theatrical hour: he pulls video screens from a filing cabinet to recreate interviews with colleagues, shows a clip of the bamboozling of an Indonesian general in a fake media training session, does the voices, flips around the stage with urgent manic energy. And emotion: for the story he is telling here is not just me-and-my-funny-clever activism, but a heartfelt, sorrowful account of how his close friend and fellow CAAT member Martin (whose identity he ruefully disguises) was spying, over years, for a company in the pay of BAE. Who, incidentally, were later forced to apologize to CAAT. In a sharp aside Thomas explains why the little pressure group was targeted by such a big multinational – it followed the acquittal of women who broke into a hangar to disable some fighter jets bound for bad doings in Indonesia. They were deemed to have committed a smaller crime to prevent a greater one, he says, and in one of his priceless asides, muses on how bitter it was for BAE not only to lose “but to have a 13m fighter jet which is not hammer-proof”.

The traitor Martin – working class, geezerish, jokey, solid-seeming – comes to life in the telling, and so does Thomas’ own furious disbelief, followed by stunned belief and years – culminating this spring – of trying to meet him and resolve the conundrum of a shattered trust. It is at times very moving: not least when he finds Martin depressed, living shabbily in a two up two down ‘so they weren’t paying him much”. Outrage,sadness, humour, and an underlying solid decency: whatever your politics and pragmatisms, an unmissable hour.

To 24 Aug. rating: four

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July 30, 2014 · 1:48 am

A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE – Young Vic SE1

 

DELUSION AND DESIRE IN THE DEEP SOUTH

 

If you are on one of the high back-row benches there is a bar to rest your feet on. It can create for a moment the illusion of being on a roller-coaster, braced for a wild ride. By the second half of this stunning production that sense was powerful indeed. One would have been quite grateful for a lap-strap.

 

The Young Vic is particularly suited to Tennessee Williams. Its habitual audiences (I came a day after the press night) have a warmth often missing in more formal and expensive theatres. You are more likely to hear gasps, even murmurs of “Nooo!”. This passionate unselfconscious identification serves the lyrical compassion of Williams very well, for his great gift is to lay before us the flawed, the deluded and disappointed, giving them language so beautiful that love reaches out even to the worst.

 

Director Benedict Andrews as director has updated setting and costumes, putting Blanche duBois, her sister Stella and Stella’s thuggish husband Stanley Kowalski right here in the 21st century. And although it is a play of its time, of a tough new America kicking aside the gentilities of the old South, this works : skinny, sensous Vanessa Kirby in her pedal-pushers and sneakers conveys the downwardly-mobile contentment of Stella, Ben Foster’s Kowalski is a volatile, chippy, crop-haired ex-sergeant from anyone’s army, and Gillian Anderson’s Blanche – over-groomed and unstable in her desperate refinement – could again belong to any age. Magda Willi’s design is revolutionary too (literally: the skeletally suggested two-room apartment at 632 Elysian Fields turns slowly round through most of the play, making its first uneasy move at the moment when Blanche dives into her sister’s cupboard for the first drink.

 

Its movement, like a slow-motion grinding of inexorable Fortune’s wheel, means that our view of the claustrophobic struggle is enriched by seeing “offstage” moments in bathroom or bedroom: around it on the floor and fire-escape occasional neighbours bicker or chase, and at one heart-stilling moment, with Blanche spilling out her terrible truths to Mitch in dim silhouette, a Mexican vendor wanders by offering “Flores por los muertes” as if they are the dead walking. As Mitch leaves, Blanche drags on a Miss Havisham ballgown to deck her latest fantasy before Kowalski – with horrid symbolism – digs impatiently through the layers of pink net to rape her.

 

 

Much has been said about Gillian Anderson’s remarkable performance, taking Blanche through to final pathetic craziness through superior, princessy snobbery, unsettling flirtatiousness, strident rebukes to the hitherto contented Stella and lady-of-the manor insults to Kowalski (a very funny moment has him standing behind her in the doorway, hearing her tirade about his apehood). It is a brilliant performance, in a part which is always disturbing because her desperate Southern-Lady monologues about culture , beauty and art and a ‘little temporary magic that ought to be the truth” are, face it, actually expressing just what the average theatregoer believes about art and culture. Thus the very arguments which hold us in our seats are being brutally guyed as a cover for Blanche’s degradation and drunken descent into madness. Cruel.

 

Other performances are also remarkable: Vanessa Kirby’s Stella catches the practical sensuality and shrugging, loving acceptance of her bit-of-rough husband, but also brings to life her love of Blanche and the old fealty of the lost Belle-Rive homestead. And Foster – who at first I thought too slight and uncharismatic for Kowalski – soon astonishes by making sudden terrifying bursts of violence and dry pragmatic irony both seem genuinely and credibly part of his reality. It’s a London stage debut, and a tremendous one. A word too for Corey Johnson, the most moving, awkwardly dignified Mitch I have yet seen.

 
Tough stuff, and though well over three hours – you stagger out on to the Cut just before eleven, all passion spent – it never fails to grip. There is a crashing, alarming rock soundscape by Paul Arditti with music by Alex Baranowski: contemporary too, but not distractingly so. After its marvellous grim A View from the Bridge, the Young Vic’s courageous freshness of vision wins again.
box office http://www.youngvic.org 020 7922 2922 to 19 Sept
supported: Bruno Wang & an anonymous donor

rating five   5 Meece Rating

NB: it will be broadcast live to over 550 UK cinemas and many more worldwide on 16 September as part of National Theatre Live

ALSO NB – Young Vic offers its first day seat lottery: names taken at the box office in person at 5pm with winners (2 seats each) announced at 5.30pm for each evening’s performance and at 1pm (winners announced at 1.30) for matinees.  All tickets in the lottery £20 or £10 for under-26s.

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July 29, 2014 · 12:11 am

PORGY AND BESS – Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park

GERSHWIN’S GRANDEUR:    SPLENDOUR ON THE GRASS

 
From the moment Nicola Hughes wanders onto the stage in the overture, pulls on a strident red dress, sniffs her “happy dust” and flings herself into a Maenad dance of frenzy, we know this is one of the great operatic heroines: the ultimate hot-patootie, bad boy’s moll, the scandal of Catfish Row. Her story is as operatically gripping as any Violetta or Mimi. From the dirt-poor simplicity of 1930’s black America and a novel by D & D Heyward, George and Ira Gershwin conjured up immense harmonic distresses, a tale of tyranny and addiction, sexual obsession, heroism and murder. That songs like “Summertime” and “It ain’t necessarily so” get hoicked out and covered for mere entertainment is almost a pity; with this magnificent production, under the sighing trees and sunset glow of a London park, Timothy Sheader (and musical director David Shrubsole) rightly restore it to its towering emotional grandeur.

 
Almost entirely sung-through – indeed to the point that the brief spoken dialogue sometimes stands out with an added intensity – this version is trimmed and blended until it moves with ferocious momentum, never allowing the musical-theatre indulgence of big showstopping numbers. Indeed when numbers are big enough to win their own applause it feels almost an interruption. What matters is the trajectory of Bess: the flight from justice of her murderous lover, her rescue by the crippled beggar Porgy, her reform, sexual obsession and faltering addiction.

 
Sheader eschews any attempt at a literally picturesque shoreside village and sets it on a bare stage, chairs and tables and fishing-nets becoming boats,doors, beds. This gives Liam Steel’s choreography a wide expressive freedom, the ensemble sometimes forming square choirs, sometimes violently or joyfully mobile, sometimes symbolically still , always serving the narrative momentum. But the huge abstract backdrop by Katrina Lindsay is remarkable: a sort of vast, crumpled shining copper sheet in which you can almost see faces, sensual folds, stitches. Onto this Rick Fisher’s brilliant lighting plot projects the mood: warmly bright before a real sunset at the happy island picnic, hellishly flaming as the brutal Crown returns to claim Bess, pure and silver as faithful Porgy waits and the gospel choir sing to “Doctor Jesus”. It is truly terrifying in the storm. But again, all of this only serves, with pinpoint atmospheric accuracy, the unrolling universal tragedy.

 
Hughes’s Bess is ravishingly sexy, dangerous, troubled, sweet; lured back to the happy-dust by Cedric Neal’s sinister, light-toned pusher Sporting Life (in a bright yellow suit and pink trilby) she evokes both the conflict and horrible relief of succumbing. Rufus Bond’s twisted crippled Porgy raises a shiver with deep-felt basso cries of loneliness, but gains irresistible ungainly charm in his happy selfless love (“I’ve got plenty o’nuttin!”). Mariah is, as you would expect from Sharon D.Clarke, a ferocious matriarch to remember (and model yourself on, at my age). And Philip Boykin as Crown is so satisfyingl, villainously macho that he got a volley of pleased boos at the curtain call, and roars of approval for dropping an ironic curtsey in return.

 
But individual praise seems jarring, however deserved. Because this marvellous production is what it should be: a true ensemble, everyone from the dance-captain to the lighting crew serving the Gershwin genius and the pity and terror of the human condition. Unforgettable.

 

box office 0844 826 4242 to 23 August
rating: five  5 Meece Rating      Male director mouse resized

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July 25, 2014 · 7:11 pm

THE NETHER – Royal Court SW1

 

A WORLD FOR THE WICKED

 

 

 

 

It quotes a Roethke poem: “Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire..” Indeed it is. In a shiningly hyper-real world suspended in the air, a pretty little girl in a Victorian pinafore welcomes a middle-aged man to her storybook bedroom, with dolls’ house and rocking-chair. Suggestively she strokes a toy and indicates that he can do what he likes to her, including savage murder. “Perhaps you’d like to start with the axe? That usually comes after, but if you’re more inclined that way…” Later, she reassures him “It’s all right, I always resurrect”.

 

 

 

 

 

For she is not real,nor is the room itself: perfect in glassy detail, a shining box framed in screen-saver foliage. We have watched this elegant period house and its inhabitants seem to form, shimmering, from grids and lines: a virtual paradise for paedophiles, complete in sound, touch, smell. The Internet has evolved into “The Nether”, where businesses, educations and fantasies flourish . Wealthy people can even afford to “cross over” opting for life-support and life entirely in these unreal worlds.

 

 

 

 

 

Meanwhile, before returning to daily reality men like this can be avatars doing unspeakable things, “without consequence”. Below the “screen” – live actors seeming unreal – a detective at a bare table “inworld” is interrogating the patriarchal, pompous businessman “Papa” who creates and hosts this exquisite child brothel, demanding where he hides the server.

 

 

 

 

 

Yes, once again the Royal Court is chilling our spine (its Let the Right One In vampire-fest is running in the West End). But Jennifer Haley’s 80-minute thriller is not after mere sensation, but proves one of the most stunningly intelligent, important and brilliantly executed pieces of the year. Co-produced with Headlong and designed by Es Devlin, it makes brilliant visual use of the idea of virtuality, with the perfect floating world forming and fading above the grim interrogation table. Jeremy Herrin directs a text so understatedly strong that every line and gesture builds intensity. Papa is Stanley Townsend, bluff and defiant; the tense troubled interrogator is Amanda Hale, Ivanno Jeremiah is an undercover investigator – or is he? – and David Beames is a nervy, puzzling, unhappy customer. On opening night the child was played by Zoe Brough: a professional debut of unnerving assurance. She is not, by the way, required to undress beyond long Victorian pantaloons, or to do or say anything unduly troubling. Except perhaps about the axe. That the whole situation is troubling – and that she is in fact a complex sequence of computer code – is is a paradox we are drawn towards, fascinated, horrified, questioning.

 

 

 

 

 

Its strength is in those very topical questions: how far can we police imagination? Should we cavil when imagination can be fed with such realism? How wrong is it to indulge and encourage cruel and horrible fantasies if there is no “inworld” consequence? Is it corrupting, or better than loosing such desires in the real world? It is not only paedophilia we should think about: not far from you now, the odds are that some fresh-faced 12-year-old is happily shooting ‘whores‘ in a game like Grand Theft Auto. As Papa says “porn drives technology” – always has, ever since 19c dirty photos. His codes, motivated by awful urges, are now so advanced and effective in their realism that he suspects the law-envorcers of “stealing them to sell to Disney”.

 

 

 

Serious sci-fi has always had this ability to ask big philosophical questions, and Haley does it with finesse and humanity. She also provides two tremendous, unexpected twists towards the end. Who can ask more?

 

 

 

box office 0207 565 5000 to 9 August
Sponsor: Coutts
Rating: five    5 Meece Rating

 

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July 24, 2014 · 11:55 pm

HOLY WARRIORS Shakespeare’s Globe SE1

CROSS , CRESCENT, CRUELTY, CONFUSION
When this “fantasia on the third crusade” picks up momentum and reaches the summit of its oddity – a spectacular, if rather foggy peak – there comes an ensemble chant of “When does the West act wisely in these lands?”. Er, not often. Little wisdom is evident in the 11c declaration that certain bits of other people’s countries were “Outremer”, and Christian-ruled. Or in the 1099 sack of Jerusalem. Or the crusades. The partition of Palestine and the Balfour declaration could have had happier results, too, as could the Iraq war.
Not that the locals were models of benign wisdom: you could take this play as a requiem for some terrible ideas. “Caliphate” is one, “Christendom” another. “Holy War” is one of the worst concepts ever, and it is ludicrously unspiritual to believe in “Holy Places”: lumps of earth worth killing the locals for, even if they were mildly letting you visit…
David Eldridge has bitten off a lot in this pageant-play, and Dominic Dromgoole deserves credit for putting it on just as Syria, Gaza and the civil war in Iraq dominate the news. But clarity of exposition is not Eldridge’s strong point, and unless you’re a medieval historian with a taste for broadsheet middle-east analysis, buy the programme and study the historical essays and timeline first. Slowly.

 

It opens with Globesque spectacle: Director James Dacre uses the big space with confidence. Priests chant, Saladin brandishes his scimitar, a great jewelled cross descends and Raymond of Tripoli rants to King Guy (no, me neither, till I read the notes). “If Jerusalem is lost” he roars “Christendom will be lost and the penitent willwalk like lost souls on this earth forever more”.
Scenes whirl on, with dynastic marriage bickering which resolves into fierce Eleanor of Aquitaine urging her son Richard the Lionheart (John Hopkins) to war. Gregory VIII urges “every true Christian Lord and man of honour” to win eternal life by zapping the infidels. But its success as a history-play is hampered by gratingly archaic lines and a lack of earthy commoners who don’t see the point (Shakespeare always put them in). And when Berengaria invites the Lionheart to bed with the words “I will make for you a gift of sensuality that will smooth your troubles” you wince. Actors should not be forced to speak such lines. Not outside Spamalot. It isn’t fair.
Later Saladin reappears in modern militaria surrounded by a chorus in chrono-clashing helmets, turbans, business suits, epaulets and battle-fatigues; Napoleon has a row with King Abdulla, and fragments of real 20c speeches raise the interest, not least King Faisal’s “We Arabs have none of the racial or religious animosity against the Jews” while warning that imposing a Jewish homeland in Palestine – where many Jews had lived in peace – might bring strident new arrivals with little respect for “their duties under a Muslim power or a foreign Christian power mandated by the League of Nations”.
Begin, Ben-Gurion, Sadat, and kindly President Carter of Camp David flit by. Blair speaks to Congress after 9/11. Richard and Saladin bicker about who massacred most people, and Eleanor of Aquitaine (a fine Geraldine Alexander) returns to riff about what a mess it all is 800 years on. Richard becomes a modern British soldier, effing and blinding then suddenly going all medieval about how he will rip cherubs from their clouds to win the New Jerusalem. George W Bush gives him a sword.
In consort with an earnest study of the programme and source books it could be thought-provoking (if depressing). It looks good. Elena Langer’s music is enjoyable. But it’s a bit of a mess.
box office 020 7902 1400 to 24 August

Rating: two  2 meece rating

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July 24, 2014 · 7:18 am

SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE – Noel Coward Theatre SW1

RUFF TRADE….

 
Young Shakespeare, a struggling player and playwright, falls for the upper-class Viola de Lesseps, not knowing that she has dressed as a boy to join his cast. She is to be given in marriage to a boorish aristocrat, and it all goes wrong enough to inspire him to write Romeo And Juliet.

 
Mills & Boon stuff? You betcha. The film was pop-schlock: posters blaring “love is the only inspiration” – but was redeemed by the wit of co-author Tom Stoppard, with sly theatrical in-jokes and pleasurably recognizable references: a Banquo moment, a Malvolio moment, an Othello joke. Now it gains another authorial layer: the stage premiere is adapted by Lee Hall, who wrote Billy Elliott, and directed with fun-loving brio by Declan Donnellan. Whose only real mistake is letting it run a good ten minutes too long.

 
He adds one particularly precious gift. The film’s Oscar-winning Viola was Gwyneth Paltrow: glacially glamorous but not noted for humour. Whereas Donnellan has cast that gorgeously antic spirit and adornment of the RSC, Lucy Briggs-Owen. She is that rare mixture, a sly comedienne who is also an honest conduit of emotional truth. I am less sure about Tom Bateman’s Will, but it is not a cherishable part: a sulky hunk dependent on Kit Marlowe (a nice ironic David Oakes) for his best ideas but oafishly giving Kit’s name to get himself out of trouble. He conceals the existence of his wife and twins at Stratford from his trusting virginal admirer, and succumbs to self-pity when Marlowe is killed. Even in a pastiche, this combination of caddishnesses makes it dangerously hard to believe in the great words and sentiments emanating from him.

 

Great cameos,though. Colin Ryan is the creepy boy Webster who loves corpses, Ferdy Roberts the backer “I am the money!” seduced by the offer of a bit-part and fretting about his hat; Henslowe and Burbage the rival impresarios, and Anna Carteret coolly magnificent as Queen Elizabeth The in-jokes keep on coming: rehearsals full of “insurmountable obstacles on the way to immiment disaster”, funny auditions, and Henslowe’s wailing insistence that a play needs comedy, love interest “and a dog”. The dog is real, and achieves glory near the end (I assume Alistair Petrie has a portion of steak secreted up his gallygaskins to create one pleasing moment. It also permits the line “out damned Spot” (should have cast a dalmatian).

 
At times it did all feel like a we-know-Shakespeare sixth-form revue, though Briggs-Owen’s balance of exuberant clowning and real sharp emotion always raises it. But Donnellan deftly manages the switchback between well-rendered tragic verse and bathos, and there are splendid fights, especially the stage-fencing rehearsal which degenerates into a real brawl.

 
It is beautifully set within a section of Elizabethan theatre, balconies serving for domestic – and, of course, balcony – scenes; conversations are held in circling, stamping galliards, and group compositions are fit to paint. There’s also a nice conceit whereby non-participants hang around on the galleries watching scenes. Paddy Cunneen composes the incidental music (on which rather too much of the mood depends): the songs oddly shrill but the instrumentals mellow.

 
So who’s it for? Teenagers will enjoy the permission to roust and laugh about the too-often sacred Bard, summer visitors score a Shakespeare-lite experience without getting rained on, fighting for a parking spot in Stratford or having to puzzle over which Lord is which and why the sentences work backwards. I really wanted to love it, and thank it for some laughs and for Briggs-Owen. But to be honest it isn’t quite funny enough, or quite clever enough, or quite touching enough.

 
box office 020 7400 1234

rating:  three     3 Meece Rating

 

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July 22, 2014 · 1:24 pm

AMADEUS Chichester Festival Theatre

DIVINITY AND DEADLY HATRED

 

 

One day someone will put Milton’s Paradise Lost on stage and cast Rupert Everett as Satan, the bitter archangel. For now he is Peter Shaffer’s Salieri: court composer to Emperor Joseph of Austria. Here is a functionary ploddingly competent in his task of “ceremonializing the mediocrity” of a stultifying court, but who has dreamed childhood that he would write something transcendent and“blaze like a comet across Europe” to the glory of heaven. He made a bargain at sixteen with the deity of the frescoes in his native Italy: not the soppy compassionate long-haired Christs but the “old, candlesmoked God the Father.” He swore to do good works and be chaste in return for that divine gift.

 

God threw it back at him. Exalted music did spring in that 18th century court: a miracle of “crushed harmonies, glancing collisions, agonizing delights: an absolute beauty”. But it was not Salieri who wrote it but Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: a childish, obscenely foul-mouthed, capering sensualist with a high infuriating giggle who “without even setting down his billiard cue” is somehow visited with music perfect, complete, and immortal. With still bitterer irony, it is Salieri himself who is first doomed to recognize its greatness while the court dullards say “too many notes”. Enraged at the unfairness like the Prodigal Son’s elder brother, he sabotages and undermines the ebullient young man’s career and bring him to an early death.

 

The brilliance of Shaffer’s play, immaculately served by Jonathan Church’s cast, is not particularly in the plot – which is linear, a downhill slope – or even in the powerful raging jealousy of its antihero. It lies in the identification of a particular and individual agony: a man with deep belief in the transcendent and a gift of rare artistic perception who cannot rejoice in the art of another because it is not his own. Everett – tall, gaunt, hot-eyed, quivering with fastidious distaste for the clownish romping Mozart – expresses that “agonizing delight” in his finest stage performance to date. On the night I saw him he seemed to be fighting vocal problems, but in a performance this finely judged moments of hoarseness actually added to that terrible sense of discord, a croaking envy. Fits the play’s time-frame too: for this is an old, wispily grey man telling us his story. In unfussy transformations – a swift dark wig and a straightening back – rhe re-enacts the time 32 years before when his hatred flowered.

 

The play, though, does not all stand or fall only with this towering portrait. Joshua McGuire’s Mozart – a head shorter than the black-coated, pallid, square-browed Everett – is perfect; a rounded, rosy-lipped romping sensualist, irritating and shrill, flawed and human conduit for divine music (which Church uses judiciously, without the overkill which marred the film). In his last moments McGuire achieves profound pathos, as does Jessie Buckley as his wife Constanza: a little common, earthily sensible, defiantly devoted. All three performances shine; around them a perfectly judged court swirls and hisses, Simon Janes particularly funny as the philistine Emperor.

 

It is, altogether, a beautiful start for the recreated Festival theatre: Simon Higlett’s open design expresses with palatial simplicity both Mozart’s glittering splendour and Salieri’s imprisoning darkness: six glittering chandeliers rise and fall before tall dim windows, and the opening moment is a thing of masked, hissing figures: “Ssss…sssalieri…asssasssin…” around the bitter old man’s hooded chair. When Everett rises and conjures up the witnesses of history – us, curving around him in the great arena – the house lights go up . And we are, in the timeless theatrical miracle, involved.

 

box office cft.org.uk 01243 781312 to 2 August
Sponsored by Harwoods Group and Oldham Seals Group
Rating : four    4 Meece Rating

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July 22, 2014 · 12:35 am

MEDEA – National Theatre, SE1

IN WHICH GUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORI FINDS MUCH TO ENJOY, AND ONLY A LITTLE TO MOAN ABOUT

It is always exciting to have a new Medea, possibly the most controversial of all Euripides’ tragedies, documenting a crime still felt to be fundamentally shocking and unnatural: and Ben Power has given us a tense, profound and horrifying Medea which recalls Euripides’ original closely in mood and pace. The simple clarity of Power’s text brings the play easily to new audiences, and while it doesn’t quite have the acid brilliance of Euripides’ wordplay, Power still treats us to occasional moments of real poetry (childbirth is “the unknown agonies where life and death dance together”). Meanwhile, Carrie Cracknell’s fast, dynamic production gives us an urgent sense of the inexorability of Medea’s terrible outcome. Designed by Tom Scutt, the split-level set subtly recalls a classical temple in shape, with Jason’s second wedding going on upstairs in an appropriately-fragile-looking glass box (complete with cake, flowers and white piano), while below in Medea’s house the peeling walls, eerie garden and sparse furniture speak of opulence run dry. Scutt’s elegant costumes fit this changing mood: the Chorus are prim bridesmaids one moment, dark horrors the next,  partly thanks to inspired lighting by Lucy Carter.

Helen McCrory is luminous and magnetic as Medea, showing us all her seductive qualities and sensitively unravelling her descent into murder in a powerfully intelligent, vibrant performance. We can see and feel the deftness with which Medea manipulates all the men (and women) around her: the warmth with which she meets her saviour-to-be, Aegeus (the brilliant Dominic Rowan), whose fatal mention of childlessness gives Medea the idea for Jason’s ultimate punishment, gives real verve and significance to a scene which could otherwise have felt merely convenient. Danny Sapani is an appropriately smug, weak and self-justifying Jason, turning up to drink Medea’s whisky and patronisingly flourish his chequebook at the problem: Sapani carefully exposes Jason’s drastic underestimation of Medea, even managing to gain our sympathy at times. The bitter antipathy of a modern divorce in progress bristles nicely between them, with all its petty vindictiveness and messy emotional history sharply delineated.

Lucy Guerin’s choreography is assured, with a great deal of disciplined twitching and jerking: while superbly executed, this danse macabre often distracts our eye from the protagonists, and only truly fits the sentiment of the fifth ode (just before the children are killed). The intention behind their movements is that the Chorus evoke Medea’s state of mind: the effect is that the Chorus are drained of personality in order to become ciphers for Medea’s emotion. Given the ferocious psychological power of McCrory’s Medea, we don’t need the Chorus to gild this lily: much of Euripides’ human interest in the Chorus’ own predicament, as stateless refugees who will be victims of whatever Medea decides, is consequently lost, though their dancing and singing are immaculate. The music, by Will Gregory and Alison Goldfrapp, is often beautiful and wonderfully atmospheric, but tends to overflow at times into a cinematic expanse of swelling emotion which can’t honestly fit the compressed, neurotic and psychotic world of Euripides’ masterpiece.

Nevertheless, McCrory’s fiercely brilliant central performance makes Ben Power’s threatening, thought-provoking Medea a must-see.

CHARLOTTE VALORI

At the National Theatre until 4 September: 020 7452 3000

Rating: Four 4 Meece Rating

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July 10, 2014 · 8:56 am

RICHARD III – Trafalgar SW1

LOCK, STOCK, AND NO BARRELS OF MALMSEY                The Bard Mouse width fixed
A credit in the programme for “fish care and health” answers one distracting question about Jamie Lloyd’s rackety production. “Do goldfish mind fake blood?” . For the Duke of Clarence (Mark Meadows, after a fine rendering of the famous drowning-dream) meets his end not in a butt of Malmsey but in a fishtank. With added stabbing.

His murder is a fairly brisk affair (possibly so as not to upset the fish). Later there is a prolonged, Tarantino-screaming torture of Rivers (Joshua Lacey in a sky-blue suit and Geordie twang), and an almost pornographically prolonged grunting strangulation of Lady Anne. Richard himself does that, on an office table under an Anglepoise lamp. Just as well there’s an 18+ warning: the murderous usurper is Martin Freeman, beloved as Bilbo Baggins.

The murdered princes are represented, thank God, only by Tyrrel reappearing covered in so much gore one suspects him of massacring a passing buffalo on the way back. Hastings is beheaded offstage, enabling Lloyd to commission another of his bloodsoaked plastic heads, as in in his ferocious 2013 Macbeth.

For this production is aimed fair and square at the action-movie generation (excellent ticket deals, £ 15 on Mondays) and Lloyd expresses the hope that many will not have seen theatre before, let alone Shakespeare. It is fast, violent and greatly appreciative of Richard’s black jokes and ironies. Frequently the cast pick up microphones and amplify part of a speech: this would work better if it either always indicated a public statement, or an inward thought. But illogically it does a bit of both, as if someone feared that the text itself might not keep us awake without occasionally becoming three times as loud. Though never as loud as Ben and Max Ringham’s bursts of soundscape, including at one point a few bars of the Ride of the Valkyries.

If these crudenesses are at the expense of depth, but thrill newcomers, they may be worth it. Freeman is a brisk staccato Richard, and with a few exceptions (mainly the women) the verse is treated with a brusque naturalism which gets the jokes and story across, but can jar. Notably it sabotages that most audacious of scenes where he woos Lady Anne over her husband’s still-bleeding corpse. A speedy, jerky manner entirely robs Freeman of the necessary nasty magnetism, the Richard charm: it makes her capitulation downright baffling. Most of the moments which really thrill are from Maggie Steed’s tremendous, cursing Queen Margaret and GinaMcKee as Elizabeth, who in the second act deploys a powerful,terrified, defiant grief while brutally gaffer-taped to an office chair.

Ah yes, the office furniture. Lloyd sets the play in 1970’s Britain, with programme notes on the CIA plot against Harold Wilson a. There are electric typewriters, an executive Newton’s Cradle toy clacks away, Jo Stone-Fewings’ Buckingham looks like a cartoon tax inspector, Simon Coombs is a gangsta Tyrell, and the little Duke of York bounces in on a Spacehopper. Whether this ‘70s setting will mean much to a younger audience I do not know: it might be wiser to set it in some indeterminate military coup. The text sometimes sits uneasily on the explicit office set, too, to the point when “My kingdom for a horse!” causes even the speaker to smirk.

But the ghosts before Bosworth (some promoted to hallucinations in the battle) are strikingly effective amid flashes, crashes and taserish crrrrkkkkK! effects; and Freeman does achieve real Shakespearian power in the reluctant self-horror of his “I am I” speech. It made up for a few earlier moments when one felt that he’d really be happier six feet under a Leicester council car park.

box office 0844 871 7632 to 27 September     http://www.trafalgartransformed.com

Rating: three   4 Meece Rating

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July 7, 2014 · 10:13 pm

GET UP AND TIE YOUR FINGERS! Touring

FOLLOW THE HERRING,  SALUTE THE PAST 

 

 

That early morning cry that woke the herring lassies: women who, through the great days of the Victorian herring fisheries, met the fleet as it crowded into the east coast ports so dense that “you could cross the harbour boat to boat, dry-footed”. They had to tie rags round their fingers to protect them from the viciously sharp knives and from the preserving salt. The fast ones could gut a fish every second.

 
In Ann Coburn’s play – which has become immensely loved in these small places which remember their history – young Molly doesn’t want to gut herrings. She is bored at home with her dour mother Jean, who cleans obsessively. Molly loves to hear rorty tales from the widowed family friend Janet, who used to be a travelling herring-girl following the fleets from Scotland to Great Yarmouth with a “crew” of friends. They’d crowd the railway carriages, stamp through the towns in their heavy boots and scandalize the quiet locals with their laughter and liberty. Molly wants to see the world a bit, as they did; her mother wants to keep her close.

 
The play – touring through the summer down the coast from Musselburgh to Margate and beyond – is a simple thing, and a delight. In each town a local women’s choir forms and gathers around the principals, to sing the haunting score by Karen Wimhurst incorporating folksong and hymns and strange sea-harmonies. 400 women have learnt it over the run, and it creates a warm local involvement, palpable in the room, as the choir troop on in aprons and headscarves as their great-grandmothers might have done. I caught it in Great Yarmouth, in the fabulously restored church which is now St George’s Theatre. It rang to the rafters.

 
Fiona MacPherson of the Guild of Lillians directs with a straightforward unpretentious energy, confidently allowing deep tense silences and wordless moments of emotion. There is plenty of that, because the event at the heart of the play – once the women’s relationship and the fascinating niceties of their craft is established – is the disaster of October 1881. A hundred and twenty-nine men and boys were lost in a sudden storm, many of them swept to their death in clear view of the women waiting and hauling on the shore.

 
Years ago in a tapestry in Eyemouth museum, I discovered that two of my kinsmen were among the lost that night: Charles and James Purves (there aren’t that many of us with an -es, even in that border country). But even without that, anybody would be touched by this honest, gentle memorial to tough lives, courage and the endurance of women. Barbara Marten’s Jean is a superb, restrained performance with great depth: the tragedy of her own youth and the root of her anxiety only gradually unveiled but subtly apparent all through. Samantha Foley’s Molly is a delight, ingenue without a touch of selfconsciousness; and Sian Mannifield is a fiercely funny, warmly human Janet. It’s a treat. It’s as well worth the catching as the silver darlings themselves.

 

TOURING    Touring Mouse wide
Theatre Royal Margate 17-19 July / Quarterhouse Folkestone 25-26 / The Stade Hastings 31 July – 1 August.
Rating: four    4 Meece Rating

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July 5, 2014 · 1:21 am

JULIUS CAESAR – Shakespeare’s Globe, SE1

BLOOD, POLITICS, RUFFS, AND TOGAS: MUCH TO DELIGHT GUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORI

The Globe audience are still filing in as the Roman rabble break into a raucous, drunken football chant of “Lupercal! Lupercal!”  And so Dominic Dromgoole’s production of Julius Caesar begins: organically, almost unassumingly, yet moving steadily into a reading of tension and power which finally makes the giggling groundlings fall silent, listen, and pause. Jonathan Fensom’s design is entirely in sympathy with this period-conscious theatre: his Romans wear Elizabethan ruffs and hose, even if they do throw a toga over the top to go the Senate. Meanwhile, some sharp choreography by Siân Williams, as well as slick delivery and seamless scene-shifting by the company, brings an energy which stops this production descending into fustiness.

Julius Caesar unpicks the psychology of assassination: its anticipation, in frenzied and anxious plotting, polarising political ideals; and its aftermath, in which mutual suspicion leads to betrayal, mistake and unbridled bloodshed. The constant jockeying for position between Cassius, Brutus and Mark Antony is mesmerising, coming out clearly and movingly here in three memorable lead performances. Luke Thompson is a revelation as Mark Antony, winning the audience at his first playboy entrance (clutching his head in wry hungover glee), yet still keeping enough back to make his step-change in grief for Caesar truly terrifying: even in his anguish, we sense the political opportunist par excellence. Thompson delivers his Shakespeare in genuinely contemporary style without unsettling the flow or sense of his lines, revelling in his great speeches, and developing his character with satisfying depth and precision. Tom McKay makes a perfect foil as an earnest and sincere Brutus, who only becomes more fascinating as he grows more desperate. Anthony Howell moves Cassius skilfully from a strong, coherent and articulate start to his defensive, despairing end.

George Irving is a suave and sophisticated Julius Caesar, his elegant delivery tinged with a Transatlantic tone, reminding us how long Caesar has been away on campaign. A confident and charismatic leader, Irving’s stabbing (choreographed by Kevin McCurdy) is brilliantly horrible, the plotters falling instantly into disarray and panic. Cue bloodbath: and, especially in a nice twist in the final scene, Caesar is revenged indeed.

Joe Jameson depicts everyone from the young Augustus (Octavius) to a garrulous cockney shoemaker with enthusiasm, skill and disciplined distinction, always bringing presence even to his smaller parts. Catherine Bailey is clear, poised, subtle and animated as Portia. Katy Stephens plays Calpurnia with focused anxiety and beautiful delivery. Christopher Logan is an unforgettably saucy, camp and believable Casca, while Keith Ramsay is a delightfully sleepy, musical Lucius.

The Globe has its drawbacks: initial misplaced laughter from the audience is always one, and then we have the aeroplanes to contend with, and of course our own dear weather. But every time I go, the Globe stage produces something those other temples of culture, aesthetically sanitised with frowning connoisseurs, sometimes can’t: a freshness and pure physicality of performance, which can suddenly release the meaning of Shakespeare’s darkest moments – when you least expect it. This production is a perfect example.

– CHARLOTTE VALORI

At Shakespeare’s Globe (Box Office 020 7401 9919) until 11 October.

Rating: three 3 Meece Rating

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July 4, 2014 · 2:27 am

THE CRUCIBLE – Old Vic, SE1

THE GATES OF HELL CREAK OPEN…

 

It will haunt the memory for months, this profound, dark-lit, smoke-scented deep-booming production of Arthur Miller’s play. In the round arena it creates a ring of pity, guilt and judgement: the physically intense direction of Yael Farber makes Salem’s crazy diabolic terror rise again, as fresh as yesterday and as threatening as tomorrow. No need for updating: not in a world where women are murdered by their own families for marrying or converting, confessions are beaten out of suspects and even our milder law sees malicious denunciation, false memory, and a lust for scapegoats.

 

Miller wrote that when he approached the idea of expressing 1950’s McCarthyism through the 17c Salem witch trials, the “story’s lines of force were still tangled”. But that very tangling enriches the play. John Proctor (Richard Armitage in a commanding performance) has slept with the maid Abigail; when her hysterical accusations threaten his wife Elizabeth with the gallows, he fights with desperate self-reproach, and only through final degradation walks upright into dawn and death. That private tragedy, and the pair’s progress from delicate marital adjustment to terror, are given breathless intensity by Armitage and a fine-drawn Anna Madeley as his wife. But the wider tangle matters as much. Complex political, social and psychological subtleties jab at the sorest places in any society.

 

The action is driven by the religious witch-hunt, spreading beyond the village’s control: Christopher Godwin makes Judge Hathorne a striking-cobra of a man. But Miller underpins the ludicrous fanaticism about dolls and visions with hints of the small things that corrode communities: rows about pigs or lumber, poor crops and infant mortality feeding an instinct to purge and control which ends with orphans wandering the streets, cattle loose, crops rotting. Hard not to think of the Balkans.

 

The speed with which Miller plunges into tension is remarkable. After a sinister opening moment when in near-darkness the slave Tituba circles the stage with a smoking cauldron: soup or diabolic incense, depending on credulity. Then we are in the bedroom with Betty in a swoon, the other girls turning their evasive schoolgirl guilt into infectious hysteria, and the suspicion of witchcraft rapidly inflated by Rev.Hale, the pompous theological terrier with books where the very devil is “caught, defined, calculated”. Adrian Schiller as Hale is particularly impressive even in a cast as strong as this, his gradual loss of face and conviction dwindling him to remorse and horror before our eyes.

 

But the strength of this majestic, perfectly judged production lies in faithful perspective and contrast. After the first hysteria the Proctors in their kitchen provide a glimpse of sane, if uneasy, normality as they reach towards one another, trying without words to forget the adultery, laying the foundation of the heartrending closeness of their final prison moments. As for the ‘children’, girls led by the jilted Abigail in jerking, shouting, hair-tossing accusatory seizures, they display all the bodily ferocity which is this director’s trademark: somewhere between St Trinian’s and Bacchantes. Abigail is Samantha Colley: all glaring black-browed control, her decision to deploy her only weapon visibly growing from the moment she is rejected by her lover after a yearning “I have a sense for heat, John! you are no wintry man…” This ticking bomb is finally detonated by the fussy reproofs of the clerics, but Farber allows us brief levity as male horror at Betty’s faint is set against the calm of Goody Nurse (“She’ll wake when she’s tired of it!”). In this small but pivotal part Ann Firbank is unforgettable, a small pool of sanity amid the chaos.

 

Soutra Gilmour’s design is a masterpiece of smoky atmosphere, and Richard Hammarton’s soundscape cracks open Hell itself. But above all the beauty of Miller’s lines is relished, explored, set like jewels. “An everlasting funeral marches around your heart..” ”I have signed seventy-two death warrants, my hand shakes still, as with a wound”. Or the final admission of Proctor that he finds in himself “a shred of goodness. Not enough to weave a banner with”. But do weave one for this unstinting, profound production. It does honour both to Miller and to the Old Vic.

box office to 13 Sept
Supported: Bank of America Merrill Lunch / CQSspace/ pwc
rating: five 5 Meece Rating

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July 3, 2014 · 1:10 am

FORBIDDEN BROADWAY Menier, SE1

CAN YOU FEEL THE PAIN TONIGHT? NOT A BIT.

 

Miss Saigon rhymes with One Big Yawn, a tiny helicopter wobbles over the stage and the “Viet-numb” cast. A huge-breasted “Matthew Warchus Trunchbull” domineers over a flouncing oversized Matilda and tutu-ed Billy “I love exploiting children!”. Pajama-ed figures attempt a Hernando’s Hideaway, with torches.

 

Yes, it’s here! forget the World Cup and the Olympics: for some of us the longed-for event turning up only every few years is the latest Forbidden Broadway by Gerard Alessandrini and his confreres. Musicals addicts – audiences, performers, obsessively completist critics – cram onto the Menier’s benches to cheer and hoot at parodies, subtle musical jokes and unsubtle horseplay guying our beloved shows.

 
I say beloved, because the curious thing is that the more you liked the original show, the more joy is in the send-up. Particularly with four such remarkable performers – Anna-Jane Casey, Sophie-Louise Dann, Damian Humbley and Ben Lewis – who can not only sing like birds but have a rare and rich ability to parody themselves and their musicality in the process. Indeed the better the show targeted, the longer and more loving is the insult.

 
Thus Charlie and the Chocolate Factory gets just a brief, withering moment (“And now Alex Jennings will show us his Willie”) with “Pure Imagination” rightly guyed as lacking any. The Book of Mormon is dealt with by its creators Parker and Stone in white shirts crooning “I believe” in inflated ticket prices, clumsy lyrics, obscenity and their own lyrics. Mamma Mia gets a quick blast of “Super stupor” and Spamalot’s joke “Song that goes like this” is borrowed wholesale on the grounds that Eric Idle stole the idea in the first place.

 
But Sondheim gets an affectionate attempt to make us sing along to a high-speed patter song “Into the Words”, and the Les Miserables sequence is glorious. Its target is the show’s very longevity, as the cast shuffle woodenly round an imaginary revolve and Casey explains that when you get rotated upstage to the darkness “behind the Miserubble” the only way to stay sane is to text your mates (“On my phooone” she croons). “Bring him Home” becomes – in skilled falsetto – a plea to bring the damn thing down a key; “Master of the House” becomes a furious resentment at a half-empty matinee…

 
Other shows get a fiercer stiletto between the ribs. Like Jersey Boys (“Walk like a man, sing like a girl..”) and a memorable Act 2 opener of Humbley in Lion King regalia with a saucepan and Mickey-mouse on his head, while miserable animal characters lurch around in surgical collars spinally oppressed by their enormous headdresses. “Can you feel the pain tonight?”. There are generic sendups too: a hypermanic Liza Minnelli, prim Julie Andrews, Patti Lupone and indeed Cameron Mackintosh humping the piano in glee at the international profits. But the jewel of the evening – which quite made up for the unaccountable absence of a Stephen Ward sequence – is a marvellous take on “Once”.

 
Again I felt that curious hate-to-love, love-to-hate alchemy: I actually adored Once, with its mournful Irishry, unresolved romance and that huge “Falling Slowly” song as the bar-room band joined in. Yet there was a cathartic pleasure in seeing Lewis’ exaggeratedly morose guitar-bashing resolving bathetically into Frere Jacques with an appalling recorder-and-accordion accompaniment and leprechaun capering. It’s all bliss. And noisy. And cruel. And camp. And welcome back!
box office 0207 378 1713 to 16 August
sponsor: Pinsent Masons
rating: four 4 Meece Rating

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July 2, 2014 · 5:53 pm

THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS Southwark Playhouse, SE1

AN AMBULANCE RIDE:   A CITY’S HEARTBEAT

 

 

Some theatre enterprises are quixotic, site-specific, small-scale immersive and probably economically ruinous. Gotta love them: especially if the message and experience they deliver is worth it. This time it is: Curious Directive, under Jack Lowe (who directs) and Russell Woodhead (co-writer) have produced in a one-hour touring show for the Norfolk and Norwich festival a moving, thought-provoking take on the modern NHS and the legacy of Nye Bevan . Paradoxically, it hits home harder than Max Stafford-Clark’s recent bigger, angrier play This May Hurt A Bit.

 

Five of us at a time – better book early, only six shows a day – are loaded into an ambulance, issued with radio headphones and jolted off round South London streets (a trajectory is convincingly projected on the rear door). A young paramedic, Lisa (Emily Lloyd-Saini) travels with us: it is her first night shift out of training, exciting but daunting after working in a callcentre. Calls appear onscreen – lacerations, embarrassments, heart attacks. We hear 999 calls. Lisa fidgets, snaps her latex gloves on “in six seconds!”, folds towels, checks equipment, wipes bloodstains from the walls. Unseen, the older, seen-in-all virago Sylvia argues and reminisces in our ear, presumably from the wheel Sometimes she vents a cynical angry callousness about the decline of the NHS and the feeble rising generation like Lisa. But in contact with patients we hear her as a miracle of practised, tender tact and reassurance.

 

For there are patients. No spoilers, but at several stops, cast members (some local volunteers) appear as the rear door is flung open. Each of us in turn is beckoned by Lisa to join her. Cleverly, we are gestured to perform small, uninvasive services – wiping of the ‘patient’s’ face, for instance – while on the headphones rather more alarming things are being done. Our small contribution, symbolic as it is, brings home the intimacy of paramedic work. I got the drunk clubber girl in a onesie, falling off her chair and using the wrong end of the hairbrush. There’s another outbreak of bickering as the ambulance moves on. Sylvia despises the urban drunks; Lisa protests “Everyone in that club gets up and goes to a job they hate”.

 

We jolt on (covering, I suspect, less than two blocks in reality) hearing the argument and following Lisa’s thoughts which on call sometimes rise to a Dylan-Thomasish urgency – “Red lights. Rail Bridge. Two lanes. One land. Skoda, Volvo, Tesco – dirt track, double back, rucksack, out-the back!” Lloyd-Saini delivers this beautifully; but so do all the unseen performers, Sarah Woodward’s Sylvia is particularly powerful in her pragmatically poetic reflections on what her old boots have seen and done since the ‘60s, what lives her busy hands have touched, saved, or consoled in dying.

 

And yes, there is a story, and it rises to a dramatic climax. Theatre requires that. But the high drama is not what you take away: rather the doggedness, dedication, weary kindness, common humanity.

 
Box office           020 7407 0234 / southwarkplayhouse.co.uk to 16 July
supported by Norwich Playhouse, ACE and the Wellcome Trust
RATING:  FOUR   4 Meece Rating

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July 2, 2014 · 6:59 am

WONDERLAND Hampstead NW3

THIRTY YEARS ON: A TRIBUTE TO THE MEN OF THE MINES

 

 

Down the dark pit, Bible-bred men quote the Book of Job. “He putteth forth his hand upon the rock; he overturneth the mountains by the roots. God was a miner!” A rattling cage brings up singing men. A square-cut pit yawns beneath ladders, gratings and pit-props, a hot deep hell within a giant arc of grimy steel. Ed Hall has made his theatre into a hospital, a running-track, a spacecraft and a Kinks gig. Now it’s a Nottinghamshire coalmine.

 
For Beth Steel’s play marks thirty years since the bitter miners’ strike, the 1984 clash of wills between Thatcher’s Friedmanite free-market economics and the stubbornness of Arthur Scargill, who unprecedentedly called a national strike without a ballot. Communities were fractured, families impoverished, long hatreds bred. Now, as schools at last are told to teach the culture of the white working-class, and while we celebrate the humble heroes of WW1, this anniversary too is fitting.

 
Steel’s theme is the gap between political decisions and the mining communities’ inherited pride in graft and craft – even if, economically, pits made less sense than before. In the first act, apprentices of sixteen are lashed into shape by the gaffer (Paul Brennen, credibly tough). Men josh, stripped to boots and underpants in immense heat. Above and around them stroll the masters, impervious: Michael Cochrane as the American Ian MacGregor, Andrew Havill as a more hesitant Peter Walker. “The public are fond of the miners. They’re seen as the backbone of the working class”. “I don’t believe in class” snaps the American. They are not caricatured (though it is hard to play Nicholas Ridley straight without sounding like one, and Paul Cawley does it justice). There are moments of artful contrast; in one of the many deafening rockfalls the power goes off : the scared voices of the new boys as they dangle helpless in the cage are counterpointed by Walker’s “The government is hanging by a thread..”.

 
The story runs from the first disingenuous NCB reassurances through closures, the strike call, flying pickets, and the Battle of Orgreave. Steel reminds us of other events – the murder of PC Yvonne Fletcher while we still badly needed Gaddafi’s oil, and the Brighton hotel bombing which for all its horror enabled the Prime Minister to talk of enemies within, and to heroicize her stand against the NUM too.

 
But this is not agitprop but a memorial, a replaying of ironies , follies and the sweet sad music of humanity. Steel’s text is well served by Ed Hall’s direction (Ashley Martin-Davis designs, Scott Ambler choreographs stirring movement, and the mining ballads are restrainedly moving. ) Scargill’s folly is acknowledged as much as the government’s savagery (no sacked strikers were reinstated). The preposterous figure of David Hart, ‘undercover stirrer of anti-strike feeling, needs little exaggeration, and Dugald Bruce-Lockhart allows him to provide a sour kind of light relief. And it is, amazingly, true that pitman Spud (Gunnar Cauthery) ,who rejected the unballoted strike, ended up as Hart’s chauffeur.

 
It is not mawkish, though as Christmas approaches the pitmen’s shamed poverty is painful, as proud men scavenging coal-fragments are caught by a security guard, fearing for his own job (nicely, it’s Cawley again). The sense of old pride scorned and humbled is quietly painful. So is the bitterness (the BBC had to apologize for biased reporting of Orgreave, the strike cost billions and was looked on with disgust by fellow European countries). But it makes a piece of thrilling and personal theatre.

 
box office 020 7722 9301 to 26 July    Supported by Lin & Ken Craig

rating four     4 Meece Rating

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July 1, 2014 · 12:02 am

GREAT BRITAIN Lyttelton, SE1

ONE PLAY MANY TARGETS –  CAN BEAN & HYTNER  HACK IT….?

 

 

The headlines flash up, perfect front pages on the glass walls which morph from newsroom to police station or private redoubts: IS YOUR VICAR ON GAYDAR? blares the tabloid end, and MERKEL MIRACLE MUM-T0-BE. IMMIGRANTS CAN’T SPELL in a dozen variants adorns the Daily Wail, and The Guardener boasts a killer slogan “We think so you don’t have to”.

 

Beneath them the surging human players – journalists, police, politicians – enact with deadly energy a farce for today. A roaring editor demands more “Scum” stories , slaps down a reporter’s ovarian cancer story with “This is a newspaper, not a Well Woman clinic”, and on Europe issues barks “Gemma, find a boffin who can prove that Brussels sprouts cause AIDS”. A scavenger is sent to check celebrity rubbish, a scruffy figure pops in to sell Gazza’s laptop and is paid with an instruction to go to Western Union and collect a payment from Mrs Orla Gilhooley, his supposed Granny.

 

The laughs – both cheap shots and brilliant barbs – come thick and fast from the first minute, with reckless energy and gleeful brio. At the heart of it, sleek and ruthless, occasionally turning to us to expound her bleak philosophy of exposure and intrusion, is the News Editor Paige Britain: Billie Piper, evilly irresistible, perfect in every squared shoulder and dangled newsdesk leg..
This is event-theatre: no sooner had the hacking trial ended than Nicholas Hytner announced a preview-free, kamikaze opening of Richard Bean’s secretly completed and rehearsed comedy about a tabloid paper hacking phones, corrupting police and controlling the government. All completely fictional, of course; though there is a red-headed editor who loves horses, is thought of by the billionaire proprietor as a daughter , and remains (genuinely, and ludicrously) unaware of how her news editor is getting all this stories. She even pushes for a “Kieron’s Law” against paedophiles . Oh, and later on the c**t-mouthed ex-editor (Robert Glenister, ranting for England) becomes the PM’s spin-doctor; and the proprietor is trying to buy ITV and shaft the BBC, and the Crown Prosecution Service chief is a humourless female taunted by Piper with “Ooh, a successful woman, you must have been on Woman’s Hour”.

 

Cheekier still, when the proprietor is finally hauled before the Select Committee he complains about not having lunch with “this is the hungriest day of my life”.
What Bean has created , though, is a kaleidoscope rather than a roman-a-clef. Into it he hurls extra bright chips – parliamentary expenses,Youtube parodies, selfies, even a fake-sheikh. The early pleasure, enhanced by Hytner’s generally speedy direction (though it may lose a few minutes as the run goes on) is that in the first half at least Bean lets us enjoy the sheer energy and excitement of a rufty-tufty newsroom, and amuses us with gloriously politically incorrect sideshows. Aaron Neil is a hilariously dim gay Asian Metropolitan Police Commissioner, himself hacked and blackmailed for cheating on his civil partner with a Welsh-Chinese constable. His new Met slogan “Working Together Today To Make Tomorrow A Bit Better Than Yesterday” had some of us choking with unkind laughter.

 

Satisfaction of a different sort awaits in the second half , as with some skill Bean darkens the picture: first with a brief cameo of a family ripped apart by mutual suspicion because they don’t know it was hacking that betrayed the dying daughter, and then with a virtuoso outburst from Paige’s lover: the Deputy Commissioner (Oliver Chris) in which he realizex the full horror of one, central, story she masterminded. It steers just this side of tastelessness.

 

But with remarkable honesty the play makes clear how much sheer bad luck set the Leveson-and-trial machinery in motion. If the crime had been solved and victims saved by hacking, things could have been different. You’ve got to laugh. But why not? It’s a comedy, a good one and a triumph of cheek for the NT. And for Hytner’s ability to prevent 26 actors and a huge technical crew from letting the cat out of the bag before m’learned friends had finished with the Brookses…
box office 0207 452 3000 to 23 Aug Sponsor: Travelex

rating: five. The fifth is for pure opportunist cheek   5 Meece Rating

 

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June 26, 2014 · 10:39 am

THE COLBY SISTERS OF PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA – Tricycle Theatre, Kilburn

GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES ENDURES GLOSSY EMPTINESS AT THE HANDS OF NEW YORK SOCIALITES

Ever wondered what happens to Disney princesses when they grow up boring? Adam Bock has. His new play, premiering at the Tricycle, sets out with such rich pickings: five immaculate sisters, all varying degrees of gorgeous and at the centre of New York high society. The mind can genuinely boggle at this premise; so much to satirise, explore and comment upon. However, this play opts instead to sit and fester. The only injection of drama is that some of the sisters don’t get on that well; a device which is so laboured over and so uninterestingly dealt with that one of the characters takes the initiative and shoots herself. A shocking relief.

Although the play is vaguely threaded around the marital breakdown and eventual suicide of one of the sisters (Patricia Potter), the main bulk of the action concerns a series of extremely flat scenes. At one point they are trying on dresses for the Gala, then they go to the Gala, then they mourn the death of the sister who shot herself at the Gala, then they play tennis. Obviously.

This absolute fluff (not condescendingly satirised, but positively indulged in) is decorated with inane conversation desperately trying to buy subtext. ‘It’s so tiresome not having money,’ Willow sighs, whilst Mouse (these are their actual names) shares that her new boyfriend is a ‘barista, whatever that is. I think it’s some kind of lawyer for the poor’. The entire text is a loathsome cliché with nothing going on underneath. Paparazzi are following them, most of them are extremely wealthy, one has a PA, yet none of it is explained. The poor, poor actors have nothing to get their teeth into and only Claire Forlani (as Willow) manages to scrape together anything interesting as the victim of the others’ snobbery.

The dialogue – a flick switch between dull conversation and raging argument – is exceptionally poor and verging on offensive. We laugh at Made in Chelsea and Keeping Up With The Kardashians because they know it is meaningless distraction, and to some extent play up to that, whereas this production approaches essentially the same group of people but with a worthiness and self assurance that it is something more.

‘Nobody knows us. They think they do. But they don’t,’ Mouse says at the very end of the play, as the three remaining sisters prepare to strut out into the gaggle of photographers. I am here to testify that there is nothing to know. And if there is, this play doesn’t have a clue either.

– LUKE JONES

Rating: One 1 Meece Rating

At the Tricycle Theatre until 26 July. Box Office: 020 7328 1000

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June 24, 2014 · 9:24 am

CAROUSEL – Arcola Theatre

GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES GOES ROUND AND ROUND THIS RICKETY BUT FUN CAROUSEL

If you have never been to the Arcola, imagine the Donmar’s hip cousin; a small and intimate theatre, but with its skirt hitched to reveal even more girders, sheet wood and brick. A rougher venue; smokey and a little too hot for its own good. So too is Luke Frederick’s production of this golden age classic. It is a sweaty and ruffled production which throws a enjoyable but wobbly punch.

We begin with the young Julie and Carrie thrown out of the Carousel and we end with them crying up over their children’s graduation. Carrie draped in furs, husband at her side, and Julie alone, the ghost of her roguish husband watching from the great Carousel in the sky.

This is a tiny production, allowing you to feel the whip of air and a lick of perspiration as dancer after dancer flies past. But however much it got your heart beating, my eyes were increasingly drawn towards the many slips, trips and sloppy steps. Some of the numbers are hit and miss; many a gaggle of limbs, but some, like June is Bustin’ Out All Over, burst from the stage with a tight energy. It is joyful peril as the performers almost spill onto the front row. These instances of classic choreography are refreshing but lost amongst clumsier, stranger numbers.

Where the dancing slips, the performances catch it. Vicki Lee Taylor vocally steals the evening as Carrie; a joy to behold sat only three feet away. Both her performance, and Gemma Sutton’s as Julie, are given a raw and emotional boost by the lack of amplification and the small band. Amanda Minihan as a more raucous Nettie Fowle also shines in this respect. It is strange to hear a musical completely without electrical aid, but at such proximity it forces you into goosebumps. However, as Billy Bigelow, Tim Rogers quickly drags you out of them again as his voice and performance are strained a little too far.

Luke Frederick has crafted some lovely comic moments which dirties the show up a bit and is duly rewarded with big laughs. Its issue is its clunky delivery. The set is a mess which requires loud assembly and wheeling around to little effect. The result, combined with a bland turn from Tim Rogers, is a taming of what could be some really tender moments in between the guffaws.

A rough, saucy production, stitched together laughs but with frayed edges.

– LUKE JONES

Rating: three 3 Meece Rating

At the Arcola Theatre until 19th July. Box Office: 020 7503 1646

Presented by arrangement with R&H Theatricals Europe

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June 23, 2014 · 5:21 pm

MIDSUMMER MISCHIEF B, RSC Courtyard Theatre & touring

GUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORI SEES THE SECOND TWO PLAYS IN THE RSC’S “MIDSUMMER MISCHIEF” SERIES: PROGRAMME B

Continuing the exploration of the challenge phrase “Well-behaved women seldom make history”, Programme B of Midsummer Mischief pairs a play about a woman so well-behaved she was virtually forgotten by her own family, with a play about a woman so hidebound by modern magazine discourse that she cannot live up to the example of her fearless mother. Directed by Jo McInnes, these naturalistic yet surreal pieces are funny, fast-paced, and unsettling.

I CAN HEAR YOU – E.V. Crowe

Perhaps drawing inspiration from the brilliant recent French TV drama Les Revenants, E. V. Crowe’s play shows a family in the immediate aftermath of a tragedy which turns, rapidly, into deliciously awkward farce, as the much-beloved and dead son comes back to rejoin family life. Robert Boulter is chillingly aggressive and careless as Tommy, the macho footballer son with more than a hint of nastiness about him, while John Bowe is convincing and affecting as a father unable to articulate his emotions. Divisions between male and female are tenaciously gripped in this family: the men ignore, control and domineer over their women, who in their turn are unable to get traction on their own lives and dreams. Marie, the mother who died before the action begins, is offered a similar chance, like Tommy, to come back from the dead.  I must say, I didn’t blame her for refusing. Starkly funny, E.V. Crowe’s play shows us how old-fashioned patriarchal family stereotypes fail to nourish or support anyone, and speaks clearly about why they must be broken.

THIS IS NOT AN EXIT – Abi Zakarian

“I was prepared for you to be many things, darling, but naïve wasn’t one of them.” Julie Legrand (also a magnificent Zoe in Programme A) is unforgettable as tough Northern mother Blanche, who chained herself to Parliament when 8 months pregnant to fight for equal pay. Her baby grew up to be Nora, our heroine, played expertly by Ruth Gemmell (wonderful in all four works), who lives in a welter of glossy magazines, manufacturing soapy bylines (“879 Jeans That Make You Look Thinner”) without hope or end, staring depression and desolation in the face. Cue Scarlett Brookes as the hilarious, glamourous Scouse “find your inner lioness” life coach Gulch, and some of the funniest parodying of magazine empowerment-speak I have been privileged to find. Nora is living with the burden of parental expectation, a fear of failure and a consciousness that failure has already arrived; all she can do is hide in a Cath Kidston pillowcase and growl on demand.  As Gulch and the insouciant, thoroughly modern Riley (“Ain’t you heard lady, there ain’t no girls anymore?”) bully Nora more and more fiercely, we see that they are an externalisation of the million media pressures on women today. Clever, funny, and moving, with a haunting sense of nostalgia for the lost priorities of the past, and some wonderful original music by Johanna Groot Bluemink, Zakarian takes us back to a time when achievements, hopes and dreams were real. Let’s hope they can be so again.

– CHARLOTTE VALORI

At the RSC Courtyard Theatre until 12 July: 0844 800 1110

At the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs 15-17 July: 020 7565 5000

Rating: Four 4 Meece Rating

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June 22, 2014 · 4:30 pm

MIDSUMMER MISCHIEF A, RSC Courtyard Theatre & touring

GUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORI SEES THE FIRST TWO PLAYS IN THE RSC’S “MIDSUMMER MISCHIEF” SERIES: PROGRAMME A

THE ANT AND THE CICADA – Timberlake Wertenbaker

Zoe is an artist, living in debt in the old family house in Greece; Selina is her sister, who turns up with a practical plan to save her, which Zoe will hate. It may have taken a few gauche strokes to establish this scenario: defensive liberalism, infuriatingly airy-fairy Art versus depressingly selfish Economy – but the final scene, in which we too are immersed in Zoe’s performance art, brings all the agony, frustration and complexity of the Greek crisis to life. Erica Whyman’s sensitive direction allows this brilliant play to speak clearly. Wertenbaker dares difficult questions, encapsulated in Zoe’s furious speech on the vicious nature of “god the market… Your irrational and capricious god”, and involves us (quite literally) in Greece’s uncertain future. Whether you believe Elgin saved or stole his Marbles, there is no doubting the rueful humour of the observation that “the Parthenon… can’t fit into the British Museum”: we are now beyond the old solutions. Using intimate family faultlines, strong-armed semi-legal negotiation and the louring shadow of Fascism to create an explosive, conflicting atmosphere of fulfilment and betrayal, Wertenbaker’s clear-eyed view of how Greece came into this mess, and her anxiety at what its resolution will be, is fascinating and moving.

REVOLT. SHE SAID. REVOLT AGAIN.  – Alice Birch

Like a shot of philosophical adrenalin delivered to the arm, Alice Birch’s series of short scenes provoke us to be honest about the failures of feminism to date. Porn is an ongoing testament to that failure. Associated by certain lingual tics (potatoes, bluebells) but otherwise not following any deliberate plot pattern, Birch’s scenes distort social paradigms, often to comic effect, to soften us up for the philosophical punch to close, while minimalist set design by Madeleine Girling and Whyman’s strong sense of movement bring dazzling energy to the whole.

Birch opens playfully as a woman criticises, objects to and rearranges the words in which a man tells her how badly, and how, he wants to sleep with her, eventually overcoming and emasculating him by her own verbal and sexual power. Brilliantly acted with taste and without blushing by Mimi Ndiweni, it made me proud to be female. Next, a disastrous proposal scene deconstructs the ideas of love and marriage, romantically and practically. Birch moves on to comment on work-life balance, female body anxiety, the world food chain and carbon footprint guilt, children, motherhood and abandonment – all evoked in scenes busy with tension, drama and surrealist bite. The actors constantly impress with their range and versatility: Ndiweni just steals the edge over her companions for sheer presence, magnetism and skill, though Scarlett Brookes also astounds us with her distinctive portrayals of so many different characters.

The word “wastelands” is one of the play’s final thoughts: “wastelands had grown where we thought we were building mountains”. Though her play ends on a vibratingly misandric note (a final deliberate distortion), the subtlety, breadth and richness of Birch’s vision reminded me that, like T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland, despair can breed luscious creativity. If every girl and boy in every school in Britain could see this play, we might just possibly grow up in a more equal world.

– CHARLOTTE VALORI

At the RSC Courtyard Theatre until 12 July: 0844 800 1110

At the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs 15-17 July: 020 7565 5000

Rating: Four 4 Meece Rating

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June 20, 2014 · 2:49 pm

ADLER AND GIBB Royal Court SW1

IN WHICH OUR GUEST REVIEWER JOHN PETER DOES NOT HAVE A HAPPY NIGHT OUT

 
Tim Crouch has given us a play which is not a play.   It has no
narrative: it does not give you a story; it does not give you characters.
What is a character in a play?    It is a person with a past, a person with
intentions, however simple, crude, or naïve, to create something of his
life.

 
Do you remember HAMLET?    His Royal Highness of Denmark summed it all
up when he told his actors that to play in a play was “to hold the mirror up
to nature”.

 

These words are the most simple, most obvious, but also most profound
summing up of why we need and created the theatre: to see our selves, our
nature and the nature of the world we live in.   This is what the theatre
has done from Sophocles, Shakespeare and Moliere to Arthur Miller, Samuel
Beckett, Harold Pinter, David Hare and Lucy Prebble.

 
Tim Crouch’s play is not such a play.   It is a series of theatrical
installations.   Here, in a series of short scenes, we are presented with
moments of despair, with moments of dark, grim comedy.   Who am I?   Why am
I here?   Why are we loving or hating each other?   Why can’t we be
understood by other people?    You are here but you don’t know why: so what
can you make of it?

 
This “play” is a lecture of unbreakable pessimism decorated with grim
humour.   The actors get little opportunity to act: they have little time to
create a character.   That is why this “play” has neither beginning nor end.

– JOHN PETER
box office 020 7565 5000; royalcourttheatre.com to 8 July
Innovation partner: Coutts

RATING:  three 3 Meece Rating

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June 19, 2014 · 12:12 am

SKYLIGHT – Wyndham’s , WC2

BILL NIGHY BACK ONSTAGE: MORE THAN WELCOME

 

 

Few actors are more instantly recognizable than Bill Nighy, yet his gift is to deploy in faithful service of each distinct part his idiosyncratic, louche grace, his shrugs and closed-lips, headshaking laughs, his light-footed prowling Afghan-hound grace and general air of hangdog mischief. To see this elegant oddness back onstage, after all those films and television dramas, is a considerable treat. To see him opposite Carey Mulligan doubles the pleasure: there is a real rapport there, all the more skilful because of the painful status which David Hare’s play gives to their relationship.
For Nighy  (who did this part first in 1997) plays Tom, a middle-aged successful restaurateur – a sort of Conran – who had a six-year affair with the young, rather earnest Kyra. She became a close family friend, mentor to their son and companion of his wife. It felt, she remembers, almost right: loving. When the wife found out, though, Kyra left. Two years later she is an earnest, devoted teacher in a hard school in East Ham, and lives in an awful tower-block flat off the North Circular. She gets on a six a.m. bus to commute to work and do extra coaching, and listens entranced to the ordinary struggling people on the top deck whose lives, she sees, are more heroic than any business chief’s. She speaks with passion of the mission of schools to provide both “a haven and a challenge” and demand more of disadvantaged children. Very topical, even Goveite.

 

Into her flat – realized in brilliantly depressing detail, bathroom and all, by Bob Crowley’s set – erupts her old lover’s son Edward , seeking her help because, since the wife died Tom has been depressed and unresponsive in their house in suburban Wimbledon (“a green fortress”) where he built the dying woman a room with the sloping glass wall of the title. Edwardfeels doubly abandoned: Matthew Beard (whose part exists only in first and final scenes) evokes a gangling, awkward gap-year boy who sets off the mentorish composure of Mulligan’s Kyra.

 

When he goes, Tom himself turns up, striding and swirling round the little flat in his elegant black overcoat, shuddering at its ordinariness (his wince at the geyser in the bathroom is great), criticizing her cooking as, onstage and live with fine aromas, she makes spaghetti sauce. When he discovers the dried-up cheese she proposes to grate, he falls into a gourmet sulk and tries to send his driver to buy fresh Parmesan. Kyra in return lectures him on the unreal bubble of prosperity he lives in and how it isn’t the real world. Which does, at times, feel like being beaten round the head with a copy of the Guardian.

 

But through all this clash of ideologies and wordy worthy social politicking, a real thread of pain and confusion is drawn tight by Nighy’s needy posturing and guilty desperate longing. Both of them are real people, suffering in the trap of their inability to accept one another’s worlds, atoning for that bygone deception of the dead wife.

 

I expected a bleak ending, and there seemed to be one. But startlingly, Hare ends on a note bordering on whimsy and definitely sentimental. Actually, too sentimental even for me, as director Stephen Daldry lets the dawn light rise at the end of the long night, with sounds of a waking city and children’s happy cries.

Box office 0844 482 5120 to 23 August.
Skylight will be broadcast live to more than 500 UK cinemas on 17 July 2014 as part of National Theatre Live.
Rating: four 4 Meece Rating

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June 17, 2014 · 11:55 pm

HOBSON’S CHOICE – Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park

BY ‘ECK, IT’S BRIGHOUSE ROCKING INTO THE ‘SIXTIES…

 
Never underestimate a young woman in a neat blue dress from anywhere North of Watford. Especially one called Maggie. One glare, and bullies like old Hobson grumblingly cede their ancient sovereignty, while meek lads like Willie Mossop accept the stern judgement “I’ve got my work cut out, but you’ve the makings of a man about you!”. Bygone ministers may sigh in strangely affectionate recognition…

 
Not that the tease is deliberate: just an incidental pleasure in Nadia Fall’s rousing updating of the Harold Brighouse play about a tyrannical drunken widower ruling over a Salford bootmaker’s shop in the 1880’s. He keeps his three daughters in servitude until the eldest rebels, orders the talented junior boot-maker Willie to marry her, sets up a rival shop to take his best customers, and with a sharp smalltown legal plot liberates her younger sisters to marry their own lads . It’s a well-loved play – and film – but Fall has given it new life and irony by updating it to the 1960’s, another time of social change and female rebellion.

 
Ben Stones’ set, the boot-shop revolving to the street and humble cellar where the newlywed Mossops set up shop, is detailed: but its edges are ragged, ruinous, shading into heaps of bricks, a metaphor for a crumbling way of life. Two theme songs wind in and out occasionally, with the same message of change: Mark Benton’s domineering, pot-bellied old rascal belts out Sinatra, the young ones in their miniskirts twist to Gerry and the Pacemakers. Nice.

 
And goodness, it’s funny: sharp Lancashire humour and crushing put-downs from Maggie are played with fabulous, faultless, dominating energy by Jodie McNee. Her wooing scene is matchless, with initial cowering terror from her swain (“I’m engaged to Ada Figgins!” “Then you’ll get loose of her!” shading to “I’m resigned. You’re growing on me, lass!”.) Karl Davies hilariously conveys Willie’s progress from semi-literate cowed boothand to rising businessman under her tutelage. The pair work beautifully together, with a sudden wedding-night virginal softness and, in Willie’s final confrontation with old Hobson, a transformative moment. As t he contradicts even his fierce wife, across her face spreads a marvellous triumphant grin: at last she’s made him a man worth having. Worth wearing that penny brass wedding-ring for.

 
Benton is a treat too: blustering, losing his grip to alcoholism, ranting against his daughters half- Lear half-Falstaff as he sits reduced to dressing-gown, underpants and a single sock-suspender. He succumbs. Who wouldn’t? But like Falstaff he gets some of the best lines, especially against lawyers. And the whole ensemble is joyful around these three: magic moments include Jordan Metcalfe the uppity solicitor embarrassingly forced by Maggie’s magnetic authority to push a handcart of rag-and-bone furniture “in broad daylight down the streets of Salford!”, and Kate Adler as Ada Figgins threatening to set her Mum on Willie if he jilts her.
In high good humour and throwaway wisdom, here to shame the soppy south is the rising North of all ages: the cobbled quintesscence, the ecky-thumpessence of business nous and female ferocity which made it great. A gorgeous evening.

 

box office 0844 826 4242 to 12 July

Rating:  five 5 Meece Rating

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June 15, 2014 · 11:40 pm

KISS ME, FIGARO! – touring, caught at BECCLES

BRAVO BRAVISSIMO!    OPERA-ROM-COM FROM THE HEART

 
I knew I was going to like this operatico-jukebox backstage rom-com (a whole new genre) when Jenny Stafford – as trembling, consumptive Mimi in La Boheme – bared her teeth at Rodolfo and hurled herself backwards in a ferocious thumping faint before sitting up to resume her irritable love scene. Beware the wrath of a miffed soprano whose ex-fiancé – Tom the tenor who cruelly jilted her – has come back to co-star in a struggling touring opera company.

 
This creation for Merry Opera, now recast and near the end of its tour, is the creation of John Ramster, who also directs. What he has done, within the company’s mission to popularize opera and employ rising singers, is to write a romantic comedy of classic shape (meeting, breakup, reunion, tentative rapprochement, misunderstanding, sadness, reconciliation). He then set it in a struggling touring company so he could use real scenes, arias and dramatic passages from Puccini, Donizetti, Mozart , Monteverdi, Handel and Tchaikovsky operas to illustrate and drive the ‘real’ plot. Then he bungs in some modern standards like Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy and You Made Me Love You, so the cast break into them as a sort of sorbet between the rich courses.

 
So skilfully has he done it that the show can work both as an introduction to opera for newcomers and a rich source of in-jokes for those who already love it. There is a bafflingly lovely quartet mashup of The Pearl Fishers and Lakme, and a lovely swipe at ENO style when director Marcus (Matthew Quirk) is trying to get a reluctant cast enthused about a “high-concept non-gender-specific Mikado with a zombie aesthetic” which involves dressing his glum baritone in a gymslip to join a savagely directed “Three Little Maids from School Are We”.

 
But at its heart, and illustrated in the first half with a comic-opera Donizetti scene and in the second with the more heartfelt griefs and yearnings of Puccini, is the romance. Jenny Stafford has a voice of immense beauty and a modern, pragmatic sincerity, and the magnificent upcoming tenor Thomas Elwin is Tom. All the young singers are terrific, and to hear trained unamplified voices is a treat. The love duet from Monteverdi’s The Coronation of Poppaea is supremely beautiful, and Elwin’s Una Furtiva Lagrima makes hairs stand up on the back of your neck.

 

Nice comic moments too: notably Alistair Ollerenshaw as George the gay baritone. As all operagoers know, it is useful for the wicked baritone to make the tenor jealous, and when Jenny hurls herself on his Don Giovanni and deprives him, within a brief duet, of both his fancy shirt and his cherished “rehearsal wig”, you cheer.

 
And so to reconciliation: tragic Boheme conveniently shades into happy Figaro for the purpose, the lovers are united and the seven others manage to sound like a chorus four times the size (musical director Stephen Hose, take a bow).

 

 

Perfect. Now please, Merry Opera, do another of these . Set it in an ENSA army camp entertainment next time, so you can scarph in some rousing bits of Verdi… The only drawback I can see to this strand of backstage-musicals is the risk of making innocent Guildhall trainees think that real opera companies always resolve their personnel and romantic issues by bursting into appropriate recitative and aria. But what a gorgeous double fantasy: opera about opera.
tickets; http://www.merryopera.com
still touring: London The Scoop 18-20 June
Norwich Playhouse 22 June
Kenton, Henley 28 June

RATING:  FOUR4 Meece Rating

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June 13, 2014 · 10:21 pm

A SIMPLE SPACE – Udderbelly, SE1

BEAUTIFUL BODIES, JOY IN ACTION

 

In circus tradition feats of acrobatic daring and balance are hyped up by a ringmaster – drumrolls, pleas to keep totally quiet lest you distract them, portentous announcements that this is the “first ever” attempt at a triple backflip or whatever. This Australian troupe of seven, called “Gravity and Other Myths” , do have drumrolls and sound. The musician occasionally joins them, not least for a super-speed strip skipping competion which leaves one member naked. But only one word is spoken, and not a boast uttered in this extraordinary hour.

 

Joyful as a romping basket of puppies, the five men and two women play, hurtle, leap, swing, climb and defy probability and sense. Their routines – well paced between breathtakingly fast and elegantly, balletically slow – span clowning, dance, and rumbustious party-tricks. For instance, as if a no-hands headstand (there are dozens) was not enough, one member solves a whole Rubik’s Cube while balancing on his head; others balance head-on-head, occasionally with a girl or two attached at some impossible angle to a bare foot; at one point they issue the audience with plastic balls to hurl at them while they adopt still more crazy balancing poses, and find hands to hurl them back. A few of the front row are recruited to lie on their backs while above them – and from nervous hand to hand – one of the young women beautifully balances and stretches, doing the aerial upside-down splits on one hand on a pole. With a smile.

 
But it is the ensemble grace of the troupe all together which captivated me most. They treat one another as gym equipment – trapezes, swings, skipping-ropes, vaulting horses; sometimes they find immense grace, sometimes merrily pile up their confreres in odd-shaped, ludicrous heaps and dance or spin on top of them. Or they toss one another up and down, create a towering arch of humanity, swing one another by leg-and-a-wing like toddlers.

 
The whole hour is a delight, and it is unsurprising that they won the physical-theatre palm at the Adelaide Fringe. But for all the subsequent brilliance my favourite memory is of the opening. All seven dash around, making sudden pyramids or handstands, but each suddenly snapping the one word of the evening in turn. “Falling!” – “Falling” . As each topples rigidly backwards as if in a trust exercise, or dives from a high perch on the shoulders of two others, he or she is deftly, affectionately caught by a companion. It is curiously moving. Beautiful. You leave with a lighter step.
http://www.londonwonderground.co.uk to 6 Jul

then Edinburgh Fringe 1-15 August

rating  five (note the acrobatic fifth mouse)     4 Meece RatingMusicals Mouse width fixed

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June 12, 2014 · 11:51 pm

MR BURNS – Almeida, NW3

BART SIMPSON’S LEGEND SURVIVES THE APOCALYPSE: DO WE CARE?

 

 

A child of the Cold War, I have read post-apocalyptic fiction all my life: from John Wyndham and Kuttner to Nevil Shute – even E.M.Forster had a go. New girl on the bleak old block is Anne Washburn, with this serio-comic “post-electric play”. It’s about East Coast USA after a nuclear catclysm (the hand lettered Act I sign says SOON). The power stations are going up one by one, and the first-act characters huddle in (real) firelight in equally real pitch darkness, telling tales.

 

 

The idea, much chewed-over in programme notes, is how remembered myths and legends grow, as the oral tradition adorns stories to make sense of life. That could have been very interesting: manna to theatre-addicts hooked on live narrative. But her prediction – and a very depressing one it is too – is that the only thing everyone, even educated East-Coasters, can remember will be The Simpsons cartoons. So they sit round the fire for twenty solid minutes attempting, with a painful disjointed slowness which I fear the author thinks is Beckettian, to remember one episode frame by frame. One parodying a Scorsese film. Very hipster. A lone stranger arrives and joins the gang (after a quite poignant little moment when the others ask whether he has met any survivors they know). He remembers an important line from the episode.and can sing a relevant bit of Gilbert and Sullivan referred to in it.

 

 

In Act 2 (“seven years later”) the same bunch, in a makeshift HQ, have developed their obsession into am-dram reconstructions of Simpsons shows, with amusingly makeshift costumes and an empty TV set as a shrine with a mirror and candle in it. The characters do develop, a bit (Adrian der Gregorian, Demetri Goritsas and Jenna Russell particularly). We learn that there are rival groups – “The Rewinds” and “Primetime Players” – and that turf wars rage over the trading of remembered lines. They do commercials too, yearning for Diet Coke and bath-oil, and perform an excerpt from FAME on a home-made wooden pink Cadillac. We suspect they won’t live long.

 

 

The third act gives yet more scope to Tom Scutt’s nicely wild design: it is set 75 years later when the whole Simpsons shenanigan has evolved into a chanted operatic solemnity. Robed priests, acolytes and a resplendently golden family enact a bizarre cross between African folk-dance and Aztec ritual, taking in bits of the earlier memories including the G and S, and some nice creepy harmonies by Orlando Gough and Michael Henry. The evil Mr Burns – boss of the nuclear plant in the cartoon, but done up like a geriatric Russell Brand – has a final confrontation with Bart. Some moments are quite moving, thanks to the music.

 

 

The Almeida sometimes has a knack for polishing up base metals until you leave thinking hey, maybe there was gold there after all. Until you remember that there wasn’t. However dodgy the play, its staging and performances are invariably fine. When it’s a stunner like Ghosts, 1984, Chimerica or The Dark Earth and the Light Sky then content and presentation combine to shine brighter than any stage in London. When it is just ironic fashionable misogyny like American Psycho, or an undercooked news-quizzy script like Charles III, you at least come away pleased at the high production values and performances.

 

 

Here, theatrical skill does its absolute best, but can’t crack it. The final operatic act and the silly Cadillac dance are memorable for goodish reasons – we love a spectacle. The rest is frankly excruciating. Which is ironic, since the brilliance of Matt Groening’s TV Simpsons is that it never milks a joke or outstays its welcome. For all her encyclopadic familiarity with the canon, this lesson seems not to have sunk in to the playwright.

 

 
box office 0207 359 4404 to 26 July Supported by ASPEN

rating two2 meece rating

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June 11, 2014 · 9:28 pm

PRISON WINGS – Intermission at St Saviour’s SW1

A KNIGHTSBRIDGE REDEMPTION….

 
Quotes from critics are always helpful. This one has “Drop dead funny and informative” on its flyer: not from a Spencer or Billington but signed “Inmates from Brixton Prison”. It was taken in there a year ago, and now this unlikely theatre, youth and mentoring outfit in a once ‘redundant’ church behind Harrods has a fresh production. That inmate imprimatur is significant because Darren Raymond, Artistic Director of Intermission, sets his 80-minute piece inside a modern UK prison, mainly in one cell. So it had to feel right: to catch the sweaty pointless claustrophobia, despair, disgrace and bravura bitterness of jail, and the black humour of men locked up.

 
Which, I reckon, it does. The opening parole scene with a weary governor and a severe, sarcastic woman officer (Janine Gillion) fairly catches both the mouthy indignant frustration of prisoners and the half-despairing patience of the staff who deal with them. We see the hero (played by Raymond with a staccato, rap-speed stroppiness) messing up his parole interview with a refusal, as the weary governor jots down “to comprehend the definition of punishment”. Nor does he admit any responsibility for the arsenal of guns found in his possession or the consequent death of a 12-year-old. He snarls that the officers are all just “police rejects and fat kids who got bullied at school”. He despises everything.

 
He has also, in an overcrowded prison, managed to be so violent and uncontrollable that he has had no cellmate for ten years of his sentence of eighteen. Gillion, with persuasive bribery, manages to get him to accept a young rookie, Charlie (Eddie Thompson). The first hint of strangeness, in a nice detail, comes when the officers can’t make the ID machine take Charlie’s photo. He comes up blank…

 
But then in the cell the play becomes a two-hander between this angry inhospitable Ryder, violently possessive of everything from his second bunk to his soap, and the naive lad who has to be told about prison ways like trading cigarettes for double ‘canteen’ credits to get luxuries like orange squash. Quite early on, Charlie says he won’t be there long because he is, in fact, an angel: to which a furiously horrified Ryder cries “A bible-bashing Jehovan’s witness wacko!” and dismisses him as crazy. Eddie Thompson, honed by five years with Intermission Youth Theatre and now in the full company, puts in a superb performance in this enigmatic part: naturalistically naif, good-humoured, nervous in a way which could mean he is a real inmate but could also denote an angel on a first mission. There are some good shivery moments as Ryder slightly softens towards his “nutter” cellmate over several days: not least when Charlie seems supernaturally to know the name of the older man’s wife, and we think “aha! an angel”. But “It’s tattooed on your arm” sputters the youth..

 
Raymond himself was inside many years ago – indeed first encountered the transformative power of theatre there with the London Shakespeare Workout projects. Since then he has matured into a serious and accomplished actor and created with Intermission some fabulous riffs on the Bard – HMP Macbeth, and before it the “Playground” version of a Midsummer Night’s dream. Here, though, he has gone back to a direct, naturalistic portrait of a prison world, and frames it in his own vision of redemption. And yes, in the final moments the redemptiveness gets you. The over-suave might find its religious underpinning and happy conclusion sentimental. But they’ve never been locked up for years and really needed to believe in hope.

 

In a week when we learned that reoffending by ex-prisoners has doubled, a good one to see.
020 7823 8979 info@intermissiontheatre.co. to sat 14th

4 Meece Rating

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June 10, 2014 · 10:59 pm

FATHERS AND SONS – DONMAR WC2

NUMRICH AS A NIHILIST HOUSEGUEST…
It is a universally recognizable moment: an idealistic student home for summer with revolutionary theories and an adored, even more revolutionary, flatmate. Arkady – Joshua James, earnestly puppyish – is back from St Petersburg and thrilled to introduce his bumblingly incompetent Dad Nikolai (Anthony Calf) to Bazarov. As a sultry, arrogant nihilist with collarlength hair Seth Numrich is perfect casting (even better than in Sweet Bird of Youth last year). At first he is magnificently arrogant in his scorn for everything the estate represents – except old Nikolai’s irregular liaison with his mistress Fenichka, which he approves. As he becomes unwillingly attracted to a rich widowed neighbour Anna (Elaine Cassidy) he shades back to show that the ardent, confused youth still lies beneath the political fervour. It’s beautifully done; so is Elaine Cassidy’s bitter self-containment as Anna, veteran of marital compromise, and the corresponding unreadable quietness of Caoilfhionn Dunne as Fenichka, the “healing presence in this uneasy house”.

 
This year already the Old Vic has reminded us of the tragicomic brilliance of Ivan Turgenev, who like Chekhov can make the affairs of 19c Russian estate-owners shake 21st century hearts. For all the costumes and polysyllabic names a good adaptation makes us directly kin to their tenderness, disillusion, longing for love and bearing of “the insolence of life”. This time it is a novel which Brian Friel adapts: elegantly compressed, scenes months apart succeeding one another in musical semi-darknesses. Director Lyndsey Turner holds the mood, often keeping one set of characters frozen in their last emotion, looking on like ghosts as the next group move in and assemble in the beautiful, impressionistic barn-plank set by Rob Howell. It gives the play, taut as it is, a novel’s sense of saga as a long summer wears on to harvest. Friel distils its humanity until what could have been a period piece sings its sad song to us all.

 
The political gap between the young men speaks to all ages too: as Bazarov snarls at Arkady “Your heart never forsook the gentry, the decencies…well-bred indignation, well-bred resignation” the eternal radical confronts the eternal liberal. But the play’s heart is not political. After the central tragedy – not showy, but sorrowfully real – deep moments lie before us: notably an old couple clinging together (Karl Johnson as Bazarov’s old father is enchanting, heartbreakingly bufferish even in deep grief). There are the dry unspoken sadnesses of compromise too, and moments of high humour, as when Bazarov’s first exposition of nililist philosophy goes down very badly indeed with the dandyish Uncle Pavel (Tim McMullan hilariously stiff as his military moustache and silver-topped cane). Susan Engel as the aged Princess Olga only has about eight lines, but every one is a winner (“Do you like October, Princess?” “I detest every month”). Her brief strictures on horsebreaking – hit them in the face with a crowbar – and the need to whip accordion-players are treasures.

 
Underlying it all is a sense of “the proper order of things”: routine, discipline, normality, and a gentle mourning both for its fragility, and for the way it shuts out bigger dreams. Friel’s treatment ends with – literally – harmony in Nikolai’s house. But it is a harmony which makes your heart turn over in pity.

 

Box Office 0844 871 7624 to 26 July Sponsor: Barclays

rating  Four  4 Meece Rating

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June 9, 2014 · 8:55 pm

BETTY BLUE EYES – ON TOUR

THE PIG TAKES ON THE PROVINCES, AND WINS      Touring Mouse wide

 

I reviewed the West End premiere of this new Stiles-and-Drew musical, directed by Richard Eyre and passionately backed by Cameron Mackintosh (the man was happily obsessed with his animatronic pig, which sang in Kylie Minogue’s voice at the curtain call). My Times review (£ paywall http://tinyurl.com/lhacvz5) was enthusiastic: the story of post-war rationing and snobbery defeated – based on an Alan Bennett TV play – was “witty, rude, lovable, warm, dramatic, hilarious.” I said it “beautifully evokes that Bennett north, preoccupied with good dinners and bad feet” . It was also timely, with its theme of a town preparing a banquet to mark Princess Elizabeth’s wedding, just as William and Kate revved up for theirs.
But for all the affection poured on the show, despite Sarah Lancashire and Reece Shearsmith in the lead, it did not run and run. I rather mourned it, with its lovely tunes, its English self-aware nostalgia and bicycling chiropodist hero (few musical lyricists would tackle the words “fetid fungal growth” or hymn verrucae with such elegance). I hoped it would find an afterlife, and suspected that an out-of-London tour was its best hope. Away from the West End audiences are more relaxed, pay less, and perhaps have a little more generosity of spirit.
So I have been wanting to catch up with Daniel Buckroyd’s recast, touring production. And it is lovely. I caught it in Oxford – though an unavoidable late start sadly made me miss the denouement in favour of a train – and can confirm that there’s real joy in Buckroyd’s version, slightly re-tweaked and presented with what he calls a “make do and mend austerity aesthetic.
It may not have major stars but it has even more personality: Tobias Beer booming a ferocious bass as evil Mr Wormold the Food Inspector , Haydn Oakley enchanting as Gilbert the chiropodist, the humble worm that turns. Amy Booth-Steel is plaintively bossy as his wife, dreaming of social advancement, one of those who like Bennett’s portrait of his own mother, will always long for roast pork but suspect that their life will always be spam.
The illegal pig, whose personality, theft and final consumption lie at the heart of the show, is not the clever but limited half-robot of the West End: this time she is a thing of cloth, manoeuvred by Lauren Logan with that magic puppetry which works so surprisingly well on stage ever since War Horse taught us that it could. And my favourite song of any recent new musical made me softly happy again, especially so soon after the D-Day commemorations and the renewed appreciation of that generation. As Gilbert tends the bad feet of war-widows and weary, hungry ration-era wives struggling to hold families together in 1947, they sing their gentle chorus of appreciation: “He reminds me of my husband as he was before the war…he has magic fingers, magic hands..”.
Daft, homely, but tears in the eyes. I’m glad it’s roaming onward and will last. Yorkshire and Liverpool next. Go for it.

TOURING

12 June – 5 July     West Yorkshire Playhouse
Tickets: 0113 213 7700 or http://www.wyp.org.uk

9 July – 2 August     Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse
Tickets: 0151 709 4776 or http://www.everymanplayhouse.com

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June 7, 2014 · 1:38 pm

DEALERS’S CHOICE – Royal, Northampton

POKER AND PATERNITY: A WOMAN QUIETLY DESPAIRS…

 

Poker, like good drama, requires an ability to transmit or conceal “tells”: moments of facial or body language revealing or hiding truth. So it’s no bad subject for a play. And if you belong to a poker school, if smoky late-night strategy and risk is your drug of choice – controllable or addictive – this 1995 play will be half treat and half Awful Warning.

 
Staged at the National Theatre in 1995, and written by Patrick Marber (whose screen persona throughout the Alan Partridge series always did tend towards a pallid, sleepless, morosely superior unwholesomeness) it has a blokey, high-testosterone feeling. Interestingly, that same year Jez Butterworth’s gangster-nostalgic MOJO came out – maybe the disillusioned late-Major years were fertile ground for chic, weary machismo.

 
Today, its story of one day and night in a restaurant whose staff – all male – have a Sunday night poker game with the proprietor feels a little dated, off-kilter. Indeed when in between braggartly poker-chat even the most sympathetic character, casually asks his mate “Did you give it one or not? The blonde bit?” and Frankie replies “Got the clap”, I found myself strangely glad to know that since then, cool blonde Victoria Coren has wiped the floor with all such wannabe Cincinnati Kids by becoming European poker champion – twice. Ha!

 
Enough of this female wincing: what about the play ? The long first half sets up personalities: Stephen the wearily paternal boss (Richard Hawley, in a fine performance reminiscent of Roger Allam) is at the centre. His gambling-addict son Carl, who he sees only at the weekly game, is played with nice defiant vulnerability by Oliver Coopersmith; the chef Sweeney is Carl Prekopp, an access-Daddy struggling not to gamble away the money and sleep-hours he needs to take his small daughter to the zoo in the morning. The two waiters are Frankie, dreaming of Vegas, and the even more delusional Mugsy: a moronic enthusiast for poker triumphs and business dreams played with manic, writhing, enjoyable overstatement by Cary Crankson. He is trying to get funding to turn a public lavatory on the Mile End Road into a restaurant. Which these days, would be a hipster haven and get backers in no time; in the play the idea is the source of rich and enjoyable mockery. Indeed Crankson carries, almost singlehanded, all the best verbal comedy. And good it is: Marber cracks out some beautiful lines especially for Mugsy.

 
Into this group intrudes Ash (Ian Burfield, deploying a sort of still violence which is genuinely unsettling). He is a professional gambler determined to fleece them, and get the hapless Carl or his father to pay a big poker debt. The second and more tautly strung act, sharply staged by director Michael Longhurst, sees them all at the baize table in the basement. Conveying the sense of a long night, scenelets are broken by balletic jerky moves, amplified rattling of chips and slapping of cards, and demonic lightning-flashes on pale tense faces. The men’s various fates conclude, though it is hard to care much about any of them except Stephen. And that owes much to Hawley’s tired, likeable, damaged loneliness. Would like to see more of him.

 

 

BOX OFFICE 01604 624811 TO 14 June

rating:  three 3 Meece Rating

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June 7, 2014 · 12:38 pm

Dawn French – 30 Million Minutes – Lyceum, Sheffield

Guest reviewer   LUKE JONES   appreciates our Dawnie…

At the very beginning, with a large clock face ticking behind her, Dawn French describes what we are about to see as a slice of time.  It is not a slice, it is a chunky portion; a whistle-stop tour of her emotional, but strangely not televisual life. Her performance is completely at ease from the starting pistol. Now 56, this is her look back through her childhood, the nature of relationships and her body, all with strange features (i.e a quick audit of ‘women’s holes’). At one point she pulls up her top to show us how her stomach and bum are symmetrical when standing in profile. There is a huge roar and we’re quickly chastised for agreeing with her too readily.

 

 

She is most alive when telling stories or profiling characters from her life, only faltering when she errs into glib philosophy.  Golden anecdotes include having the Queen Mother for tea and her picking a shard of glass from her ‘mum’s muff’ (separate stories..) With ease and theatrical flair she conjures figures such as her Evil Aunty Lill, who had an alarm set for 3am to down a glass of gin, and her lionised Father who tragically committed suicide when she was 19. Characters are her trade, and watching her get stuck into them is a treat. In a short space of time we move from her mother accusing her of ‘rimming’ strangers, to an emotionally wrought direct address to her dead father, delivered in recorded voice-over, as she faces away from us and smoke drifts up from the stage.

This is a one-woman show, but with a notable male co-star: Michael Grandage directs. At first it was difficult to see why? Dawn wrote it, she’s performing it, she lived it. How could he have been anything more than a sounding-board with occasional suggestions? But his influence runs straight through the piece; it is a show, not a recitation. Slick graphics, scenic lighting, a darkly simple set and emotive sound bind it together.  Treated as drama not a lecture, it succeeds on those terms. Its buoyancy only droops under the weight of dull existential life-lessons which add nothing. Imperfect but fun; a few misses, but mainly very funny hits.

box office 0114 249 6000 to 8 June

then Touring to 29th Nov http://www.dawnfrenchontour.com

RATING: FOUR   4 Meece Rating

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June 6, 2014 · 12:51 pm

PRESSURE – Minerva, Chichester

A HIGH PRESSURE TRIUMPH , AND A TRIBUTE
It happened seventy years ago so we know the outcome. D-Day was the biggest amphibious invasion in history – 156,000 men, 6939 vessels, 11590 planes. It was also the most astonishingly well-kept secret, and the moment when most lives – and the freedom of Europe – hung on nail-biting meteorological calculations: precise tidal, sea-state and visibility had to be found on one intensely planned day. On a coast where, as the Scottish meteorologist James Stagg despairingly points out, you get days when “At ten o’clock the beach is packed – and by twelve there’s howling wind and rain, and the Punch-and-Judy man’s packed up”.

 

We know that Operation Overlord succeeded, after being postponed one day on advice from Stagg, and that this saved thousands of lives and many tanks and guns from flat-bottomed craft which would have capsized on the 4th. We know that only a brief (and daringly predicted) window of calm Channel weather between gales allowed the fleet to sail to success. Yet despite that hindsight, for two and a half hours my heart hammered and tension chilled my neck. Author David Haig and director John Dove have created a play for Chichester and the Royal Lyceum which, should long outlive this commemorative summer.

 

For there is jeopardy, and powerful personalities within the utility bleakness of the Portsmouth HQ where Eisenhower and the service chiefs gather before great synoptic charts hauled up at six-hour intervals. Haig himself plays Stagg, and superbly: precise, a touch geeky, awed by responsibility (“I’m a scientist not a gambler”) , and nicely uncomfortable in the too-long trousers of a RAF group-captain’s uniform “I’ve never been near a plane”. Malcolm Sinclair is a powerful Eisenhower, and Laura Rogers as Kay Summersby his British driver and, in the stress of war, girlfriend. Ike’’s favoured , pally US forecaster Irving P Krick is Tim Beckmann, scornful of the Brit to the point of contempt: refusing to believe in Stagg’s jetstream theory he reads the isobars with insouciant confidence that the Azores High will keep D-Day calm. Their early conflict is fiery, the increasing honest despair of Stagg profoundly moving. We see Eisenhower’s awesome sense of responsibility alleviated by quiet moments sharing a rare orange with Summersby; we see Stagg in near-breakdown as his wife – with , ironically, high blood pressure – is near a dangerous birth. Subtly, we are reminded that not only was three-day forecasting rare and tricky in 1944, but that women often died with pre-eclampsia.

 

So there are personal dramas; but a finely judged script, with occasional evocative sound effects of bustle or storm outside – resists the temptation to movie soapiness and treats them with subtlety. We are never allowed to forget how many other tragedies hang in the balance, and how many will be lost even in victory. Add the tension of science: when Haig and his colleague scribble and repeat pressure readings at heartbeat speed, you bite your lip. I love synoptic charts and have drawn them on small boats, in anxiety: but even if isobars and tropospheric windspeeds are Greek to you, the pressure will hit you in the neck.

 

So will the unique tension of a war room. When Stagg collapses in trembling panic in the small hours – few slept in those last three days – Summersby maternally pulls him together, reminding us of servicewomen’s emotional contribution, which must have helped many. And Haig has the nerve not to leave us on an obvious triumph high: a deeply affecting, morning-after anticlimax is probably truer to the reality of those bare, tired rooms. I hope our national attention-span is longer than this brief D-Day commemoration: this play deserves a long afterlife.
box office 01243 781312 to 28 June . Sponsor: PALL Corporation
rating five    5 Meece Rating

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June 5, 2014 · 3:11 pm

THE CONFESSIONS OF GORDON BROWN – Ambassadors, WC2

GORDON CONTRA MUNDUM…A BLEAK IMAGINING

 
The focus groups, mourns this briefest of Prime Ministers, always come up with the same words about him. “Strong” and “Solid” are fine. “Scottish” is OK, with reservations. Less hopeful are “Dour” and “Headmaster”. The imaginary voters in South-land, he grumbles, fail him on “Likeability – can it really be a word?” They do not invite him to their imaginary barbecues. They prefer the “thieving, deceiving, lying cunt” Blair, who stole his ideas and his limelight and probably wore lifts in his shoes. “Napoleon was shorter than me. So was Tony. That dwarfish thief! Every hour of his was one hour less of me”.

 
I have to admit I gave this show a swerve in Edinburgh last summer: poor old Gordon seemed too easy a target, already humiliated in sequence by Tony Blair, his fellow-ministers and the electorate. Gone now, not one to bother satirizing. I went this time because, after all, this man was not only Prime Minister but before that our longest-serving Chancellor, part of a project whose effects are still upon us. Maybe he deserved it…

 
Anyway, I was wrong: Kevin Toolis set out to write this monologue more in fascination than malice, and allows it to grow into a reflection on the oddness of power and those who seek it. “Power has to be taken…it flows from the crushing of others’ hopes”. There are echoes of Lear and the less successful Shakespearian kings, and in a more ancient aside, he imagines that Brown would have hung on to an clay tablet presented by some Uzbekistan or Tajikistan potentate, engraved with ancient vailglory by “Enkimdu, god of irrigation, the good shepherd…I freed the land”.

 
Ian Grieve is perfect casting: he catches a credible longing, resentment and fury but also idealism and vulnerability. He hints enough at the physicality of Gordon Brown without overdoing the famous angry-fish gaping tic. We find him in a Westminster office, where the clock is stuck at 5.45 am: waiting for his staff, hammering violently at his laptop as if it were a manual typewriter in long-ago Kircaldy, using that time-stopped moment to express the time he was longing for power, his brief spell in it, the moment of the loss and a delusion of return. There are some moments for laughter, but as often with him as against him. I liked his brutal description of any PM’s standard fifteen-minute face-to-face meetings and photos with endless “little brown men from little brown countries” forever sent by the Foreign Office, and the sharp description of those he raised to Cabinet – ”the smirk folded within their dead smiles”.

 

There is also a sad, recognizable truth in the way a true-believing socialist may speak fondly of “The People” while loathing actual contact with The Public. Wisely, Toolis keeps mention of Brown’s teenage injury and near-blindness slight but telling: hard to forget the moment his son of the unforgiving Manse remembers a mother at his hospital bedside, banning him from self-pity even at that grim moment.

 

All in all, not an optimistic portrait of our gnomish Westminster world, but how many other PMs, I wonder, would privately echo Grieve’s cry “I have lost count of all the hateful fools I have endured!”.
box office 0844 811 2334 to 30 July

Rating : four   4 Meece Rating

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June 4, 2014 · 11:14 pm

CLARENCE DARROW – Old Vic SE1

ONE GREAT PERFORMER’S TRIBUTE TO ANOTHER
The main causes of crime, said the famous American defence lawyer Darrow, are “Poverty, ignorance, hard luck and, generally, youth”. A century later, as Kevin Spacey speaks them in the Old Vic’s round arena, the words fall sharp as ever on the city sprawling around us. So do his strictures against the tyrant’s favourite crime, “conspiracy”, and his rage at racism. David Rintels‘ biographical one-man play may be about long-ago murders and workers’ rights in the USA, but even within our shores there are enough echoes and universals to thrill. Across a murderous world of mad laws and extreme punishments, they resonate still more.

 
And it is indeed a thrilling evening. Darrow is most famous globally for two cases. One was saving the teenage killers Leopold and Loeb from the gallows in 1924, commuting it to life imprisonemnt. It was one of his most controversial defences, based wholly on a passionate lifelong opposition to the death penalty. The other, more comically, was his victory in the 1925 “Scopes Monkey trial” where with deadly ridicule he helped to bring down the Butler Act, which had forbidden the teaching of Darwinian evolution theory in state schools.

 
But these – and his shiveringly tremendous defence of a negro family besieged by a racist mob – come in the second part. Before that we learn of his beginnings, his abolitionist and suffragist parents and the dramatic fascination of a law career. It took him first into battles over the working conditions of Pennsylvania miners, some mere children, who asked only a twelve-hour limit to their day and a bare wage. He nearly torpedoed his career, though, when his union allies turned against him. He was prosecuted himself, seemingly on a faked charge, after he persuaded the MacNamara bombers to plead guilty to save their lives rather than attempt an impossible defence and risk their necks.
Spacey has played a role based on Darrow here before, in Inherit The Wind. Here he gives us the old man alone: emphatic and confidential, angry and dryly rueful, self-accusing and self-aggrandizing in turn. Here’s a shining rhetorician haunted by the horror of the rope, a dissenter believing in no deity but human decency and mercy in a messy world. In a lovely aside he wanders the aisles explaining how to pick a jury: on no account accept any “Presbyterian with a tightly rolled umbrella”, and always trust Methodists over Baptists. Apparently “they’re nearer to the soil”.

 
Spacey admits that he has never before done a solo play, and never performed in the round. Under Thea Sharrock’s direction, though, quite apart from the power of the piece he gives us (assisted only briefly by sound-effects) one of the most impressive of technical performances. He is audible, whether in rant or quiet nuance; gives every angle of seating a chance, his shoulders almost as expressive as his face. As intimate with the audience as Darrow with jurors, he is also creditably “on” his props. Which is no mean feat, as he riffles apparently absently through chaotic boxes and drawers to pull out the right photograph bang on cue, or move a chair or stool to represent an invisible witness as he re-enacts interrogations.

 
It will be one of Kevin Spacey’s last performances in this famous theatre, which his determination and persistence brought back to shining life. A modest short run, yet this and the memory of his Richard III should make us grateful enough. America has lent us, these past 11 years, a magnificent throwback to the days of the great actor-managers.

 
box office 0844 871 7628 to 15 June Sponsor: Bank of America Merrill Lynch
In-the-round sponsor: theCQSspace
rating: five  5 Meece Rating

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June 3, 2014 · 11:52 pm

THE LIFE OF THE PARTY – Menier, SE1

A WICKED WIT, WITH HEART ON SLEEVE : LIPPA TAKES LONDON

 
Here is Summer Strallen as Cinderella, ripping off her rags and scorning the ballgown for a dominatrix PVC corset and whip. Here is Caroline O’Connor glittering menacingly as a predatory, glamorous middle-aged lesbian knocking hell out of a party. Here’s Damien Humbley as Uncle Fester from the Addams Family singing a heartrendingly beautiful love song to the moon, with a ukelele accompaniment. And a divorced baseball Mom expressing her terrified love of a son growing away by shrieking at him from the touchline. And here’s a rude sadistic nun , Sister Severia.

 

And here is the Menier audience, shy but game, being persuaded by a slight, dapper figure in a grey suit and schoolboy haircut to sing along an extended, melodious line of the one word “Joooooooo-ooooy”, in honour of an unproduced, unfinished musical about Betty Boop. The man in the suit is Andrew Lippa, Leeds-born lyricist and composer but thoroughly New York now. Towards the end of this beguiling evening he sings something right from the heart, fresh from a work-in-progress about a writer of musical flops encouraging a small nephew whose ambition is to draw comic-strips. “I do what I do and I like what I do” he sings defiantly. “I do what I do, for the many or few..it has to be true”. It is the credo of the determined artist down the centuries, expressed with such joie-de-vivre you have to smile.

 
Lippa is certainly not such a flopster as his hero: a Tony nomination met his music and lyrics for The Addams Family on Broadway, and The Wild Party had cult success. But he is less known here, and with evangelical enthusiasm David Babani – whose sparky Menier has breathed new life into forgotten musicals from La Cage Aux Folles and Candide to Merrily We Roll Along – persuaded him over. Together they devised a showcase evening of songs from eight musicals (four still in progress), plus a revue and an oratorio on Harvey Milk. It makes a rich, funny, rewarding night.

 
I say a showcase, and had expected pure cabaret. But Babani was determined to be more theatrical, so the four cast whip in and out of costumes to perform each number in context, framed by a clever set of changing screens. There are two pianos (one must, obviously, provide an extra one for Summer Strallen to dance on in a pink satin petticoat) and a four-piece orchestra. Once or twice you struggle to grasp where a piece would fit in a musical’s plot, but the emotions of Lippa’s songs are strong and universal enough to carry that. The sequence from the Addams Family, with O’Connor as Morticia bouncing through “Death is just around the corner!” is unmissable. As for “The Wild Party”, a vision of 1929 decadence, it ranges from enormous belting numbers from Strallen, Connor and Humbley to a remarkable quartet (“based on Rigoletto”) with Lippa joining them in the shivering, haunting “Poor Child”.

 
As with his hero Sondheim, Lippa is at his best when working with his own lyrics (a few here are others’). There is a finish and a sharpness in them, dry wit and wickedness, a tattered but defiant heart on the sleeve, and an unashamed gift for melody. He is equally at home with sentiment and cynicism, rhymes and rambling, hokum and heartbreak. I fell for him. Hurry. It’s only got till Saturday week…

 

box office 020 7378 1713 to 14 June http://www.menierchocolatefactory.com

rating: four

4 Meece Rating   and an illustrative rare outing for Musicals Mouse:Musicals Mouse width fixed

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