The Weir, Donmar Warehouse

Conor McPherson’s 1997 play is one of words not actions. Stories are told, traded like currency; talk becomes an art form. The Weir is set in a rural Irish pub, beautifully evoked by designer Tom Scutt, a building of old stone wreathed in thin mist, with tatty rattan lampshades and walls the colour of old men’s thumbs.

The Guinness pump is on the fritz so garage-owner Jack is forced to grapple valiantly with the bottled stout. He’s one of a number of lonely souls who congregate nightly for a couple of pints and a ‘small one’ or two. Drinking with him is Brendan, the pub’s relatively young landlord, and Jim, the local handyman whose life revolves around his aging, fading Mammy. But the pattern of this particular evening is disrupted by the arrival of Finbar, a local businessman, who having flitted to the city, now sports a cream linen suit and an air of urban flash; he is accompanied by Valerie a “blow-in from Dublin” who has just bought a house in the area.

In an effort to appeal to this stranger in their midst, a rare female presence (the alarmed response when she requests a glass of white wine is one of the production’s funniest moments), the men start to tell stories, to conjure a landscape steeped in myth and memory. There is talk of fairy roads, of strange nocturnal knockings, of still, staring figures spotted on stairs or in graveyards. They each relate their own small encounter with the uncanny, moments – whether frozen or fevered – when they seemed to glimpse something beyond.

These are stories, one senses, that have been trotted out often before, fetched up on dark nights, spun out over a succession of glasses of stout. In many ways they’re fairly pedestrian, nothing to truly prickle the skin. The pleasure’s more in the telling than the tale.

While the men start out trying to charm Valerie, and maybe even to tease her a bit, after a while their stories become less about local ghosts and more revealing of themselves and their regrets, wants and losses. It’s a subtle shift, so when Valerie, buoyed by such talk, begins to tell her own harrowing tale, the delicate balance of things is upset as she careens into a place of true pain and heartbreak. It pulls all the men up short but it doesn’t entirely capsize the night, instead this interloper is gently enfolded into their small world.

Josie Rourke’s production is also a delicate thing, an environment in which any one false note would ring loud. The performances are all measured and knit well together. Ardal O’Hanlan’s slightly dim Jim conveys a kind of baggy sadness while Dervla Kirwan’s Valerie moves from nervy, girly outsider to centre of attention, without ever letting the character get eaten up by grief; her performance is anchored and steady. The play’s true masterstroke is in not letting Valerie’s moment of revelation crown the night, instead it comes full circle, letting Brian Cox’s craggy bachelor Jack weave the last story, describing one tiny act, one small gesture of kindness in a time when he thought he was lost, and a chance he let slide through his fingers years ago but which nags at him still, the ghost on his shoulder, the thing he will have to carry throughout his days. While his first story is told for show, this last one comes from some deeper place: he gives it to her.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Othello, National Theatre

My, but she takes a long time to die, Desdemona, twitching on her barrack mattress, doll-blonde and bare-legged, as her husband crushes the breath from her. Just when he thinks the deed is done, she splutters back to life, pleading. He could stop then, could maybe save her, but he’s gone too far, so he plunges on, laying his weight on her until she is still, his hands wrapped round her delicate neck. It’s awful and protracted and upsetting – as it should be – with Nicholas Hytner’s production making much of their physical disparity, the brutality of it: she’s so fragile-looking and exposed, in her knickers and the tiny child-like T-shirt she wears to bed, his muscled, uniformed form all but obliterating her.

It’s sexual too, all that writhing, there on the contested bed. Adrian Lester’s Othello doesn’t rape her, but there are intimations of reclamation in the methodical way he goes about putting out her light, still palpably, physically drawn to her, even when he his sniffing her sheets to detect traces of betrayal.

Hytner’s production is the third in a sort-of triptych, together with his Henry V(starring Lester) and hisHamlet (starring Kinnear) and it shares a similar contemporary earth-toned aesthetic. At its best it succeeds in saying some interesting things about the weaponisation of men in the military, with Othello, the career soldier, pinwheeling from love-struck to rage-fuelled in half a heartbeat, his jealousy so intense it makes him vomit. And though Iago tries to rationalise his hatred, it seems to spring from some deeper, primordial place, controlling him rather than the other way round.

With their faces close-cropped and deep shadowed, their eyes burning out at you, the NT poster campaign pits Lester and Kinnear against each other like prize fighters, the Rumble in the Olivier if you will, and it’s difficult not to look at it through this frame, though it seems reductive to do so as both performances are powerful, both rich in their own way. Lester’s Othello is commanding and full of fire – he has a voice you could warm yourself by and hulks out convincingly, flipping over a table with a flick of his wrist whilst roaring with rage – but it’s perhaps the nature of the play that Kinnear’s Iago is the more compelling figure (though it’s in no way inevitable that Iago should dominate – Chiwetel Ejiofor in the Donmar’s 2008 version remains one of the most intense, controlled Shakespearean performances I’ve seen), coming across as a bit of a bruiser, Phil Mitchell with added smarts, driven, cold-eyed and calculating but with a dash of the schoolboy in the way he air-punches and victory shimmies when he gets one over on the object of his malice. As with his Hamlet, Kinnear’s performance has a kind of ease to it, there’s a clarity of intention to his delivery, and he juggles the verse as if he spoke that way every day, though there are times when the mechanics of it all feel a bit too visible.

Olivia Vinall’s Desdemona fades into the background a bit, but that’s again perhaps a consequence of the role. (In making Desdemona an absence, The Q Brothers’ Othello the Remix – performed as part of the Globe to Globe festival last year – was one of the more interesting readings of this play and the placing of women within it). Lyndsey Marshal’s Emelia, while furious and forceful in her loyalty, seems a bit trapped in a role that feels particularly contradictory in its modern context.

For while the production’s military setting makes sense in terms of translating the hierarchies and power games – this man’s, man’s, man’s world – into a recognisable present, embroidered handkerchiefs aside, there are times when it feels a bit tired, a bit ‘done’, a rehashed Iraqistan which we’ve seen before and we will see again. It does at least allow for a great, lively and messy, mess-room scene - with a couple of bikini pin-ups the only thing to break up the bare walls - in which Jonathan Bailey’s Cassio is forced to chug down a lager fountain while being beerily cheered on by his fellow soldiers.

Vicki Mortimer’s flood-lit military base of a set is intentionally bulky and ugly, a transient space, devoid of home comforts, all concrete, harsh strip-lighting, and cheap plaster board walls: when Othello punches out in anger his fist goes straight through. Though there’s something a bit effortful about the set, with its numerous sliding panels allowing various bedrooms, offices and yards to emerge and retreat, its very blankness is an asset, for in this fenced-in place of sun and sweat and tension and little in the way of distraction which doesn’t come in a can, it’s plausible that here passions, jealousies, petty vendettas, could grow and spread unchecked like bacteria on a petri dish.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Interview: Little Bulb

The creators of Orpheus at the BAC - as well as Operation Greenfield and the gorgeous Crocosmia - on music, myth, the ensemble as family, and what it's like to live on site at the Arts Centre while developing work.

Read the full interview on Exeunt.

The Seagull, Nuffield Theatre

With his shoulders shaking and his body bent low, Boris Trigorin brings himself off as his lover Irina verbally pleasures him, praising his creative skill, his gifts as a writer. It’s a glitteringly satirical moment, the writer as wanker. Once done, he appears to mop up the resulting mess with a page from his trusty notebook, the receptacle of so much mental seed-spilling.

We’re on first-name terms with the characters in John Donnelly’s adaption of The Seagull, no awkward, tongue-teasing patronyms here; Nina bares a breast while performing Konstantin’s fevered failure of a play and everyone says ‘bollocks’ a lot. But there’s more to this reworking than a generous scattering of swearwords, while Donnelly and director Blanche McIntyre haven’t quite burned the text and built on its ashes, as Konstantin wants to do to the ‘old theatre’ that so frustrates him, they have created something that feels contemporary, a thing of now, without ever forcing its hand. It’s not aggressive in its modernity, but it makes you look at the play afresh.

The characters talk about the strange veneer of fame and what it means to be an artist in terms that are recognisable, while Masha does her self-mourning in an LBD and sunglasses before adopting, on her marriage, a shapeless cardigan, the eternal garment of defeat.

McIntyre once again shows that she is a superb director of actors. Abigail Cruttenden’s Irina is not a theatrical caricature but a woman of a certain age and type, confident of her attractiveness, her centrality to the world, but still easily threatened, flippant in her treatment of Konstantin’s artistic endeavours, capable of breaking him with a single brutally dismissive line. Pearl Chanda’s Nina is all adolescent intensity, harbouring a consuming crush on Gyuri Sarossy’s Boris, a girl all too easily swept along on other people’s waves. Alexander Cobb’s Konstantin is a contradictory figure, an earnest young man convinced he can shrug off the past and create something entirely new, that he is the one to show the world where it’s been going wrong, while also a bit of a mummy’s boy (he even calls her ‘mummy’), desperate for Irina’s approval and praise.

There is a lot of comedy in Donnelly’s adaption, the situations, characters and collisions mined for their inherent humour, and more than a dash of audacity in his approach coupled with nice line in metatheatrical commentary. McIntyre’s production makes much use of the aside, the characters stepping to the front of the stage to address the audience directly. Laura Hopkins’ minimal design places a silvery screen at the back of the stage, a lake-like still thing, like a blank page in a notebook, upon which the characters scrawl (or rather spray, as they use squirt bottles, theatrical Windowlene), its clean clear surface becoming increasingly streaked and murky. There is no set as such, just a long wooden platform on a pivot, which serves as a jetty, a dining table, and in one of the production’s only missteps, a giant see-saw. The scene in which Irina and Nina lounge on this device, occasionally over-balancing the other, feels like an exercise in overstatement; the lighting however is gorgeous and golden throughout, each scene subtly shaded.

While the anguish of Konstantin and Nina’s last meeting – the latter damp-eyed and desperate, rapidly unravelling – isn’t as gutting as it might be, and the production struggles slightly to make the transition from tragicomedy to tragedy, it does what it sets out to do: it takes a play so frequently staged –Anya Reiss’ (by all accounts pallid) adaptation was only just performed at Southwark Playhouse in November last year – and makes a case for revisiting it once more, rooting Chekhov’s concerns in a world that belongs to us.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Vanessa and Virginia. Riverside Studios

We are loving vultures, as fascinated by the hand that holds the pen, the face behind the easel, as with the words and work those people produce. We can’t keep from picking, through letters and diaries, through the layers of the lives of this small group of friends and lovers who lived a century ago, in the hope of catching a glimpse of the person who once was, who once wept and lusted and dreamed and created.

Susan Sellers’ novel Vanessa and Virginia tells the story of the Stephen sisters – the girls who would become Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf – from the viewpoint of Vanessa, tracing their complex, entangled relationship from their earliest days in the nursery through to Virginia’s suicide.

It has been adapted for the stage by Woolf scholar Elizabeth Wright, who has pared down and sharpened the original text. The fragmented poetic structure of the novel remains, though the filter of Vanessa’s thoughts is less overt; Virginia is brought more clearly into focus as a character, as a presence – she is given shape and skin, a voice, though Vanessa still speaks the majority of the lines.

The resulting play is like a series of sketches with the other members of the Bloomsbury set pushed to the periphery. The sisters are both deeply needful of one another and also envious of the other’s successes; they know just where best to prick the other to draw blood. Emma Gersch’s production captures this sibling heat, the centrality of it to their well-being, their hunger for each other’s love. On the surface Vanessa appears to be the most stable one, less prone to collapse, less brittle – she is shocked by the ice of Virginia’s tongue, the unabashedly cruel way she speaks of Ottoline Morrell, with her “great beaky face – yet she was capable of deep passion and her lasting desire for the homosexual artist Duncan Grant is shown to be a potent, painful thing, a relationship which could never come to anything beyond friendship, though it would eventually result in the birth of a daughter.

The play shows how strong and necessary the bond between the sisters was. As children they were surrounded by death and loss, their family slowly shrinking. Their mother died when they were still small and a beloved older half-sister, Stella, followed soon afterwards; their brother Thoby would also die young. They had only each other to cling to. Another step-brother George was reputedly a predatory figure and their father was emotionally remote while at the same time needy and fretful, carping over the household accounts which he expected young Vanessa to manage on her own, until he too passed away and the girls were finally able to escape the oppressive Victorian atmosphere of their Kensington home and live as and how they wished. (Within reason of course, they couldn’t do without their servants).

There are times though when the production feels like it is ticking Bloomsbury boxes, with fleeting mentions of Vita, Carrington, Maynard Keynes, and Roger Fry. In fact there are chunks of the play that might prove difficult to unstitch without at least a passing knowledge of this world, its inhabitants, and the numerous ways in which they are interconnected. In its use of soliloquy the play can feel static at times and the drama is at its strongest when the two sisters are interacting, sparking off each other, alternatively vulnerably and hostile.

The staging takes its cues from the dreamlike structure of the play, fragmented, sing-songy and drifting. At the beginning the actors, Kitty Randle as Vanessa and Alice Frankham as Virginia, gambol across the stage like little girls before gradually letting down their skirts, throwing off their pinafores and growing up, becoming women. The occasional use of dance adds to this dreamlike feel, though this does start to feel repetitious after a while. The adaptation lifts nearly all of its words directly from the book and there are some phrases that, even though they sit easy on the page, don’t work as well when put in people’s mouths, (a description of Virginia’s eyes as “snake-green”, a reference to Grant’s “seed”) but again this is less jarring in the context of an aging Vanessa looking back at her life, penning her memories.

Kate Unwin’s set, a canopy of low-hanging objects – a parasol, a mirror, a fishing net - conveys something of the Charleston clutter of the artist’s studio, while Jeremy Thurlow’s original piano score echoes the undulations of the sisters’ relationship. Randle and Frankham age and fade subtly and convincingly. Vanessa would struggle to recover from the death of her son; Virginia couldn’t bear the thought of suffering another mental breakdown: their descent into a grief they could not save each other from is movingly conveyed.

The play presents its audience with a not altogether unfamiliar portrait of these two women, it doesn’t really challenge the image of them we have come to expect, not of Virginia anyway, she remains brilliant and difficult and magnificent and aloof; Vanessa on the other hand is allowed to emerge from behind that easel, and this is where the play’s real strength lies.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Peter and Alice, Noel Coward Theatre

John Logan’s Peter and Alice – the only new play in Michael Grandage’s current West End season – trades in information. It’s all tell. Logan envisages a meeting between the elderly Alice Liddell-Hargreaves and Peter Llewellyn Davies, now a war-shattered young man. It’s an idea ripe with potential, and these two did apparently meet briefly at one point, but instead of having them engage in some form of recognisable conversation – reflecting on the characters they inspired, Lewis Carroll’s Alice and JM Barrie’s Peter Pan, and the world they feel they have disappointed by committing the twin sins of growing up and growing old – they spend much of the time exchanging potted biographies.

The results are strangely static, Judi Dench and Ben Whishaw stand at opposite sides of the stage and relate their characters’ stories and because they’re Judi Dench and Ben Whishaw, theatrical alchemists both, this is often magical and moving, but rather dramatically flat all the same.

Logan slowly starts to give shape to the pattern of their flashbacks by introducing the characters of Carroll and Barrie – the Reverend Dodgson and Uncle Jim (played by Nicholas Farrell and Derek Riddell as two similarly suited and reticent men)– and poking around in the psyche of these two complex individuals, men who seemed altogether easier and happier immersed in the world of children than of adults and who did their best to fix the objects of their particular affections and obsessions in a state of eternal childhood. Alice asks bluntly if Peter was molested, and he replies that he was not, at least not physically, but it’s clear that he regarded what Barrie did to him, what he took from him, as a kind of abuse. The play shows that both characters were, to a degree, composites – there were three Liddell sisters and five Llewellyn Davies boys, and Peter was by all accounts far more timid and nervy than his dashing and adventurous brother, Michael – but they were the namesakes and so they carried the weight of that connection.

On top of this Logan places a third layer in the form of the archetypal stage/page Peter Pan and Alice, played by Olly Alexander and Ruby Bentall, both eye-wide and arm-wide in their performances, him in a ragged green tunic with a cloud of disobedient hair, her in a broad, blue dress with long blonde tresses, a walking John Tenniel illustration. These two hover in the background, like lost shadows, and occasionally pass comment – there are sweet moments when they glance tenderly at their other selves, or smilingly reveal little hidden things, like the flask of gin in Peter’s pocket – but the relationship between the three dramaturgical layers is always fuzzy. The effect is a little like picking up a copy of a newspaper where the print colours haven’t quite synced.

Occasionally the play threatens to do something a bit more intricate, as in the scene where Dench’s Alice recalls a conversation with Dodgson in the dark room of his photographic studio, him struggling to put into words exactly what she means to him while clutching her fragile, frozen image in his hands. Later Logan seeds Michael’s probable suicide – sliding under the water of Sandford Pool with his close friend clasped to him – in a scene that shows the growing prickliness of Barrie towards the young man. But these moments are brief and over quickly.

The lead performances give the piece its weight. Judi Dench is magnificent, shucking off her initially haughty and brittle exterior like a fur stole, loosening her spine and her smile as she recalls herself as a child, giggling, gambolling – she did something similar in Peter Hall’s otherwise stiff and stately Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Rose Theatre and it’s similarly enchanting here. Beneath his tweeds, Whishaw is a black bundle of anguish, a man on all too close terms with death. Llewellyn Davies had a rough life: along with his brother’s death, he lost both his parents early to cancer – his mother’s death swift, his father’s horribly drawn out, disfiguring and pain-wracked – while another brother perished in the war. Whishaw’s Peter is at first gentle in his melancholy, soft-spoken and emotionally contained. But when he cracks and recalls his own time in the mud of the trenches, and the psychological toll of all that death and loss, it’s awful and it’s raw and it’s amazing, all at the same time.

Grandage’s production is also beautiful to look at. Christopher Oram’s set is, initially, typical of his designs at the Donmar Warehouse, all dark tones and diffused light, the sun seeping down into a book-lined room through smeared and murky glass. But as Peter and Alice go back into their respective pasts, this is replaced by a toybox of a theatre, filled with a succession of vibrant painted flats in Crayola colours that part and lift as the characters push further back into their memories; the stage becomes a Never-Wonderland of poster paint palm trees and storybook lagoons, with the face of the Cheshire cat looming above like a twisted moon. Visually fitting as this all is, it also highlights the play’s theatrical lack, its filmic bittiness, the way it strives to be elegiac and haunting – and in its best moments succeeds – but also feels like it may have been a more potent experience on screen than on stage.

Reviewed for Exeunt

The Winslow Boy, Old Vic

The emotional undercurrents of Rattigan’s plays swirl like swans’ legs beneath the clipped, clean surface of things. For all its exploration of the line between what is right and what is just, its bucking against the power of the Navy to dispense punishment as it sees fit, with no proper trial, his 1946 period piece, The Winslow Boy, is in many ways most potent as a portrait of a family in times of change.

Arthur Winslow, the Edwardian patriarch played with a silvery glint by Henry Goodman, is a superficially stern man, gruff, moustachioed and stiff of lip, but his underlying humanity is always evident. While he is willing to sacrifice both the family finances and even eventually his own health for the sake of seeing right done, he is never blind to the great cost of his actions; he comprehends all too clearly the toll his fight is taking and yet he cannot drop it, cannot let it fall. In amongst this, it his relationship with his outspoken, cigarette-smoking, suffragette daughter Catherine and their understanding of each other’s drives and beliefs, which forms the heartbeat of the play.

The play is a courtroom drama in essence though it never strays beyond the drawing room of the Kensington home of the Winslows, with its William Morris wallpaper, its mahogany side-tables, nut-brown leather wingchairs and notably charming curtains. When the youngest Winslow, thirteen year old Robbie is sacked from Osborne Naval College for the theft of a five shilling postal order, his father decides to take the case to trial, employing one of the country’s most pre-eminent barristers in order to do so. Based on the case of a young man called Archer Shee who was expelled in similar circumstances in 1911, the fight becomes bigger than the family, a cause celebre, with journalists cluttering the front steps and the parlour maid volubly reporting back on the day’s legal proceedings. In the process, Robbie, is slowly erased from his own story, dozing on the sofa as vital discussions take place over his head.

The role of the lawyer Sir Robert Morton, so dapper in his evening clothes, Sahara-dry in temperament and casual in his brilliance, is a gift of a part for actors with a tendency towards scene-eating, but Peter Sullivan’s portrayal is more delicate and realistic in proportion; he doesn’t dominate the stage, doesn’t over-balance the see-saw. So when his courtroom persona does emerge, when he aggressively interrogates Charlie Rowe’s whimpering but adamant Robbie before dangling a way out in front of him like kipper to a kitten, it’s all the more powerful.

Naomi Frederick is similarly precise in her performance as the principled sister Catherine, who sees one fiancé ditch her as the family name is smeared across the daily papers, and is forced to fend off another kindly but unsuitable suitor, all the time knowing that her age and independent spirit make her chances of marriage increasingly unlikely. Deborah Findlay clearly relishes the moment when Mrs Winslow finally gets to crack, to shed her smile and blaze at her husband about the extent of the sacrifice the family has been obliged to make as a result of his unshakeable two-year pursuit of what he holds to be right. But though Henry Goodman’s Arthur gradually weakens physically, his resolve never leaves him; his eyes shine even as his hands shake.

Lindsay Posner’s production conforms to everything you’d expect a production of Rattigan at the Old Vic to be. It’s elegant, stately, the performers moving about the stage as if moving about a stage, not a domestic space, arraying themselves in tidy semi-circles and appealing tableaux, never bunching or crowding. This choreography is somehow all the more obvious here, because while Peter McKintosh’s drawing room set has been elongated to fill the stage, it intentionally neglects the vertical, leaving a large black void above, an odd mouth. As a production, it’s all very, very solid, and very decently done, but it’s strangely cool in places, a little too slick, this despite Rattigan’s inherent warmth and charm and heart.

Reviewed for Exeunt