theatreCat

A TERRIBLE BEAUTY: INSPIRING, INTIMIDATING, INVALUABLE

The lad in the Army Recruiting Office listens enthusiastically to the Para behind the desk speaking of comradeship and adventure.  But as he shifts his chair  the startled recruit blurts “You’ve got no legs!”.  “At least” says the soldier “you passed your observation test” .   God help us: in this searingly memorable evocation of military attrition it isn’t the wrecked young bodies or the drugged night-terrors which bring on tears; not even the anxious lovers and mothers.   It’s the military deadpan,  the ancient dry courage which will quip  in the face of disaster and only then turn inward to contemplate the future in bleak and lonely privacy.

The play brilliantly captures both that deadpan black humour and the soft desperate  inward reality of the seriously injured.  It had to, because most of its cast are real veterans telling real stories: they were recruited at the Headley Court rehabilitation centre  by the producer Alice Driver as a therapeutic recovery project . Still struggling with pain and powerful medication,  they began by telling their stories to writer Owen Sheers and director Stephen Rayne.   A BBC documentary followed the process towards  last year’s gala performances at the Theatre Royal Haymarket with a thirty-strong cast  –  soldiers male and female,  plus a few professional performers and dancers.  So overwhelming was the impact that the Royal British Legion is supporting a nationwide tour with a trimmed-down cast of fifteen.

Quite apart from its documentary and personal reality it has become a striking and effective piece of theatre.  Simple but shattering use of shadow-play, chorus, soliloquy and movement meld scraps of memory and progress into a powerful whole.  In one sequence a balletic rehab-gym sequence explodes and collapses into a remembered image of civilian carnage,  then as the broken bodies move they become night-victims, suffering “high-def hallucinations” and afraid to sleep.   Shafts of rough soldierly humour cut through sentimentality:  one beautiful song sequence as the soldiers read loving, hopeful “blueys” ends with one getting a “Dear John” letter and the others – for the safety of the platoon – mocking and sending him up, forcing  it not to matter.

Nothing is overstated or milked,  Jason Carr’s  songs are low-key and beautiful in their truthfulness:   a chanted list of medications, from oromorph to antidepressants,  chills the blood, and Sheers’  skill picks up and makes poetry of documentary reminiscence.   We believe in  the heat and sand,  the unseen Taleban “like fighting ghosts”,  the frightened villagers,  the misery of trying not to shoot back at children.  A straightforward military lecture illustrates how IED injuries happen,  eyelets from your very boots ripping through your groin:  within modern military kit  still lies the same soft human flesh which wars have always shredded.

To speak of stars feels crass but “Charlie F” (also military slang for a complex disaster or “clusterf–k”)  is the nickname of the protagonist, played by Royal Marine  Cassidy Little:  a natural star who lost half a leg to an IED in Helmand and woke in Selly Oak hospital convinced he was a captive being tortured.   Maurillia Simpson from Trinidad sings with a lovely gospel voice and remembers how as a child she saw the Queen’s visit and vowed to be one of her soldiers. Stewart Hill terrifyingly, flatly,   relates the brain damage which torpedoed his career as an officer.  A wife remembers at the hospital seeing women in burqas, and hating them but then hearing them praying for her husband by name.

But they all shine, in wheelchairs and on crutches, criticizing one another’s stumps or confessing with raw sad courage the emotional and sexual chaos of recovery.   For it is about recovery:  in the final speech Charlie F salutes the oldest regiment in the world,  the regiment of the injured.  Their daily victories of body and mind are being fought all around us, if we would just look.

rating:  five  
box office 0844 871 7651  to 22 March        TOURING  to 7 June  http://www.charlie-f.com/‎  

Quite a few people have asked about the theatre cat logo for theatrecat.  Even more are curious about the mice.

They are all created by Roger Hardy.  Who is really a painter and creator of strange sculptures made of things he finds.

His website is http://www.rogerhardy.co.uk

And it seems impossible to stop him inventing new mice.

Here is the Dead Rat (not needed so far) for truly awful productions:

and here are his Shakespearian mice, which I am saving up…

PORN:   THE NASTIEST COTTAGE INDUSTRY  

Julie is alone,  reminiscing with a cup of tea,  calling her cat.  She’s a geriatric nursing auxiliary,  gentle and cheerful, fond of a laugh and a night out. She strayed from a dull marriage to a series of boyfriends but the latest, Garry,  has a camera.  He likes taking pictures of her in provocative shiny fetish-wear.  It’s under her dressing gown.   He says she could be a model,  pretends she won a prize, takes her for a London photoshoot. They get her waxed and make her snog another girl. Bit of a shock, but it’s just fun, yeah?

He moves on to video.  And live sex filming, and rape simulations.  She is that increasingly hot commodity, an “amateur girl”.   The modern porn industry doesn’t just want professional models, glamorously untouchable.  Carnal  – and violent – fantasies feed on the girl-next-door.    In Amanda Whittington’s 70-minute monologue Lucy Speed plays Julie to perfection:  with wide TV experience she conveys with naturalistic intimacy Julie’s ordinariness, larkiness,  wild party moments and spurts of quiet shame. Garry,  and the boss who remonstrates and eventually sacks her,  are voices offstage.    We have to like her, appreciate the artless sweetness of her reminiscences about her patients,  and mourn her decline to final humiliation and a sex chatline in the small hours  (amateur-girls have, to the Garries, a limited shelf life).

It is heartening that theatre, with its uncensored freedom to challenge and shock, is taking on the ubiquity of porn in a digital age when ten-year-olds in the playground swop on smartphones various vivid, twisted and inventive images which their parents’ generation can barely imagine.  The NT studio has workshopped a startling piece on the subject,  Christopher Green’s “Prurience”,   and porn’s influence crops up in the Shed’s Blurred lines and  Hampstead’s Rapture Blister Burn.   One of the strongest moments in this play is when,  confronted by her Matron’s reproof,  Julie cries “What’s your husband doing when you’re at work? What does your son watch?”.

Whittington does not conclude with having Julie maimed or murdered  (a male writer, I suspect, almost certainly would) .  She’s just used, saddened, humiliated, lonely and looking for friendship from the only man who seems to like her for herself.   I regret only two things:  one is that Whittingron (and director Kate Chapman)  shy away from making us understand that by the stage Julie has reached in this ghastly cottage industry she would most likely have met seriously perverted abuse and probably be on painkillers.  The other is the suggestion of her having been molested by a past  stepfather.  It feels too like a cliché.  Un-abused,  normally happy girls have been drawn into this web by boredom, bad boyfriends and the reckless party vibe.  The play would be stronger for admitting it.

Box Office: 0115 941 9419    to  8 Feb then touring        (www.fifthword.co.uk for schedule)

rating :  three   

MISCHIEF GOES ON THE ROAD     

Sometimes it pays to be a brave gang of friends, fresh out of LAMDA,  putting on your own show rather than waiting for auditions.   Early last year I spent 70 happy minutes snorting with laughter at Mischief Theatre’s tightly-worked, physically adept spoof of a student drama group from “Cornley Polytechnic”,  ruining a Mousetrappy old whodunnit   (original Times review for £paywallers: http://tinyurl.com/nz3p5zg).    Also in that cramped little audience was producer Kenny Wax, who waited for them afterwards and offered investment provided they could extend it to two acts and extend their remarkable fall-down scenery fit provincial touring theatres.   After a blast through the Edinburgh fringe and a splendid Peter Pan (see this site) they have done so.

So I sneaked in to an early gig at the Oxford Playhouse (not press, own ticket),  not least for the pleasure of seeing people pretending to be bad actors on a stage where forty years ago as a student I really was one.   The Haversham Manor library set, now by Nigel Hook, has grown to two storeys, enabling even more interesting collapses as the fictional SM (Lotti Maddox) struggles to keep it together, doors jam and actors make desperate exits through grandfather clock . Which, itself, gets its own superb moment in Act 2.

The best of the original jokes are there,  including the one about the portrait and the mounting desperation of wrong props.  The second storey enables a sequence with  Robert Grove which looked so physically risky that people gasped through the giggles, and the high-perched visible prompt and sound box makes the most of Rob Falconer’s role as the surly techie.

And I still enjoy the central metaphor, embedded in the script by Henries Shields and Lewis: the impossibility of getting life right, the terror of embarrassment, the peril of getting stuck on detail at the expense of the bigger picture (the plot)  and the rage of those who bite off more than they can chew and won’t admit it.  Shields’ nervy, panicking director/Detective is splendid, as is Dave Hearn’s Cecil:  his body language alternately plankish and desperately windmilling.  The catfight between Sandra Wilkinson’s posing ingenue and Maddox’ frustrated stage manager is even more pleasingly violent than before.

I am glad to have watched it grow.  I suspect it will get still sharper on its long tour, and hope the bruised cast find comfortable digs to rest in.  To taste reaction:  I can confirm that Oxford roared with delight and often clapped the scenery or the running jokes,  and that the 19-year-old who came with me was enchanted.  I did meet an eminent philosopher in the interval who, rather baffled,  didn’t get the point at all.  But as the Cornley Players would ruefully confirm from under a heap of collapsed doors and walls,   you can’t win them all.

Mischieftheatre.co.uk     touring UK to 15 June: schedule :  http://tinyurl.com/o8fcpdb

Rating:  four   

AN ERA RECREATED:  THE REAL 1968 IN AN UNREAL WORLD

The opening,  in  a student room correct down to the battered stack of albums, took me aback.    Friends, I was there in 1968:    in Oxford rooms heavy with illegal smoke,  where skinny lads planned groundbreakingly tedious college  productions of Coriolanus and lounged around listening to Bob Dylan protesting  half a world away.  There was often, as here,   an ill-matched roommate:  a “Northern Chemist” stumping off to the lab muttering “Never knew such a place for encouraging bullshit”.

 
My God, how it all comes back!   Even the crucial plot detail that offstage,  the lounging one’s friend Nick risks suspension for nicking books from Blackwell’s on the half-baked Marxexcuse that “Property is Theft”.   The only difference is that in 1968  nobody would say aloud like Nick’s posh sister Pippa (Sophia Sivan) “You’re living in the most amazing old buildings and studying the literature of the greatest language there is. You don’t do a stroke of work and all your cooking and washing is done for you. It doesn’t cost you a penny because the taxpayer is footing the bill. It’s a scandal really.”

 
Yet Alan Franks’ new play is not a satire  but a rueful, layered attempt to pick  its way through the innocent hypocrisies and shifting values of the time.  It’s more Rattigan than Osborne,  mindful of how human relationships drive or impede  progress.   It may seem a tiny world,  but  its faithfulness asks awkwardly universal questions about gilded intellectual elites and the harsher world elsewhere.   The 1968 setting is pivotal,  because into the sweet simplicities of the English undergraduates’ lives (they’re blackmailing a senior tutor for plagiarism to save the book-thief’s bacon)  strides a Rhodes Scholar from Minnesota.  I remember them too, the Clinton generation:   older than us,  avoiding the draft,  their politics forced into sharper focus by the deaths of Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the ascent of Nixon and the fate of  contemporaries in Vietnam.

 
Sally Knyvette directs a cast whose very physicality is evocative: Steffan Donnelly as a wispy boy-child Toby is dreamily planning to emulate a 1953 Brecht production of Gunther Grass which incorporated real strikers  (he finds the Cowley pickets unenthusiastic).   Chris the Chemist is Dan Van Garrett,  more heavyset and bearded: a decent old-school leftie who scornfully points out that the Dylan numbers drifting through the scenes are nicked from folksongs his uncles sing in pubs.   And  Elliott the American is Michael Swatton:  broad-shouldered,   a man among pretty children.  He knows economics and politics,   and recites Bobby Kennedy’s magnificent Kansas speech on the fallacy of mere GDP  (worth a look today –   http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4110).   He mesmerizes Pippa,  who despite a benign nature dislikes “causes”.  Though Mummy does do hospital visiting, in Godalming.

 
Franks weaves themes of  integrity,  emulation, plagiarism,  imitation both straight and crooked:  wistful respect for ancient texts meets an uneasy need for progress. I would love to see it grow to a fuller length.   As for Mayhew the Middle English tutor, Crispian Cartwright is so horribly convincing in the role that for a moment I wondered if Knyvette had done a Brecht-and-the-strikers,  captured and incorporated the real thing…

box office  0207 978 7040 to 15 Feb

rating: four   

…theatrecat.com will be back in the New Year with Wolf Hall and wartime and the new Wanamaker, and Beckett and Cleopatra and maybe even the odd panto.  Thank you all, very much, for following this rogue website and giving head-space to a theatre moggy thrown out in the rain without a newspaper to shelter under.
And remember – at least 40 of the plays reviewed here are still running into January, and many are well worth seeing