Visitors, Bush Theatre

Barney Norris’ tiny knife of a play was staged to acclaim at the Arcola earlier this year and now transfers to the Bush Theatre. Tender, unexpectedly funny and warm, it’s a delicate thing - but one capable of upending its audience.

There’s a ripeness to Norris’ writing. Each character feels alive. The interplay between Edie and Arthur is full of little winks and prickles. Their middle-aged, soon to be divorced son Stephen, sensitively played by Simon Muller, is also achingly drawn; a man trying to remain practical in his actions, while all too acutely aware of what his life lacks, perhaps even a little jealous of the depth of his parents’ love. Even Eleanor Wyld’s blue-haired home help Kate is more than just a narrative prop; she grows too.Linda Bassett and Robin Soans play Arthur and Edie, a long-married couple who have lived together on the same farm for decades; we can chart their relationship in every glance and joke and gesture. Their marriage, their scrap of history, has been quiet, and while they are not without regrets, they have carried each other along. Now Edie’s memories, her sense of self, are slowly being eroded by dementia, and she knows she’s going. Decisions need to be taken about their future, for what happens when they can no longer care for each other.

Alice Hamilton’s large-hearted, affecting production is beautifully judged, and the performances from all concerned, but particularly Bassett and Soans, are rich and real and generous.

Reviewed for The Stage

Palace of the End at the Arcola Theatre

This Arcola’s staging of Judith Thompson’s triptych of monologues about Iraq is nothing if not timely, coinciding as it does with both the recent Wikileaks revelations and the results of the inquest into the death of Dr David Kelly. But even if it hadn’t arrived at such an apt time, Jessica Swale’s production would still exert considerable power. The combination of some fine, fine writing and Swale’s superb use of the Arcola’s intimate second studio leaves the audience dazed and unsettled.

The play is divided into three strands. In the first of these Jade Williams plays a young soldier clearly based in large part on Lynndie England. Pregnant and fearful for her future, she feels little real regret for her actions, yet Thompson’s nunaced portrait does not demonise her. It’s a layered account of a young woman from West Virginia for whom casual cruelty has always featured large in her life. She simply doesn’t see the people she has tortured and humiliated as fully human and seems more perturbed about the (mostly vile) comments flying around about her on the internet, especially the ones where she is called ‘ugly’ and, worse, ‘a feminist.’ In Williams’ hands, this woman - this girl - appears simultaneosuly appalled and thrilled at the situation she has found herself in.

The second monologue features Robin Soans in compelling form as Dr David Kelly, contemplating his actions (and his inaction) as he awaits death on Harrowdown Hill. Soans was excellent in the Arcola’s recent production of Pieces of Vincent, and here he gives another powerful performance, one that suucessfully takes a figure from the headlines and makes a man of him once more, a husband, a father, fallible but also noble. Collected and genial at first, he becomes increasingly anguished as he recounts the death of an Iraqi bookseller and his family, people he was close to, a seeming catalyst for his decision to speak out.

The final thread concerns Nehrjas, an Iraqi woman played by Imogen Smith. At first her warm recollections come as welcome relief after the intensity of the David Kelly sequence, but this section is ultimately no less harrowing, as Nehrjas describes the appalling torture of herself and her children at the hands of Saddam’s Secret Police. Smith gives a rich and dignified performance, one that trusts the potency of the text. This last piece provides context for the first two, rooting them, and yet the story exists for itself, it never feels like it’s serving a purpose.

This is not verbatim theatre, the words are drawn from imagination but rooted in truth. This gives Thompson a degree of freedom; there are subtle echoes in the writing, recurring images of flying, of falling, Alice-like, through the looking glass. But Thompson never strays too far from recognisable events. There are some beautiful passages but they’re always anchored to something solid.

Though it’s a common pitfall of monologue-based theatre, Swale’s production is never static; if anything the opposite is true. The actors pace the space, engaging with audience, meeting their eyes. Soans in particular makes the audience aware of the complicity inherent in inaction, making full use of the capacity for connection in such a small venue. He fixes the audience with an interrogative stare, before calmly thanking those gathered for being here to share his last moments.

Simon Kenny’s simple design - twin glass cubes and a solitary tree (which comes to have dual significance) - both divides and unites the three speakers and the stories are further delineated by Christopher Nairne’s lighting, the colour subtly shifting from piece to piece. All these elements are neatly tied together, and the resulting production exerts a considerable and lasting hold. There isn't much time left for the Arcola in their current home (click here for more details of their appeal); if this is one of the last things staged in this space, it makes for a memorable way to bow out.

An extended version of a review that appeared in The Stage.

Pieces of Vincent at the Arcola

David Watson’s new play is one of fragments. Like Cornelia Parker’s exploding shed it is a thing of disarray, its pieces flung to the four corners of the room.

The play takes the form of four seemingly unconnected strands. A music teacher harbours strong feelings for his young student. A woman deals with an emotional appeal from her drifter of an ex. Two Birmingham lads discuss their discontent over a box of fried chicken. An Irish police officer goes to deliver bad news and ends up revisiting his own past.

Es Devlin’s design has an inside-out quality: the audience is seated on cushions in the middle of the theatre and the action plays out around them. This necessitates a degree of swiveling in order to follow the scene changes as the actors perform behind gauzy screens onto which film is also projected. These projections are initially compelling, placing the audience in the back seat of a car or in a park watching children cycle past, but director Clare Lizzimore never completely integrates the technically inventive aspects of the production with the play itself.

The design does initially heighten the fragmented nature of the play, the disruption and scattering caused by a single random yet devastating event, but there is often an underlying sense of squabble between the writing and the method of presentation. This is particularly true of a visually striking sequence set on the Millennium Bridge, where the time-delayed footage overwhelms the words spoken. And from a purely practical perspective there are some real problems with sightlines (a number of people sitting in the corner closest to the theatre’s entrance had to stand on more than one occasion in order to see what was going on).

The performances are however strong throughout, particularly that of Sian Clifford (who also did great work in the Arcola’s recent production of The Road to Mecca) as Rachel, a woman coping with the unexpected return and then the equally sudden loss of her boyfriend, Vincent, and from Kevin McMonagle as John, the policeman shadowed by his own grief. Adam Best’s Vincent gets a little lost in comparison, though this is as more to do with the way the role is written than with his performance.

In Watson’s previous play, Flight Path, the older characters felt the least well-developed but here the opposite is true. Robin Soans’ music teacher is an intriguing and enigmatic character and Vincent’s grandmother, superbly played Dearbhla Molloy, comes fully to life in her one brief scene. The inclusion of the character of the young terrorist almost seems like an afterthought in comparison and Watson’s final twist feels both abrupt and unnecessary; the play is actually stronger when it’s more opaque and less willing to explain itself.

Scandalised (Or Not, Actually)

What is the sound of one arm shrugging? Or two arms for that matter? I’m not entirely sure. If I could think of a good word to encapsulate a sense of not-bothered-ness, a general lack of whelm, I would use it here, because that’s how I felt after watching Robin Soans’ latest at Hampstead Theatre.

This is another verbatim theatre piece in line with his previous work Talking To Terrorists. Only, in the case of Life After Scandal, this time it is more a matter of Talking To Disgraced Aristocrats – which doesn’t really have the same ring to it.

The play consists of a series of interwoven interviews with various public figures who have been involved in scandal – sexual, political, often a blend of the both – and whose lives subsequently became tabloid fodder, meat for the media. So we have contributions from Jonathan Aitken, Lord Brocket, the Ingrams (they of the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire coughing farrago), an embittered Edwina Currie, Duncan Roy, who passed himself off as a Lord for some years, and Craig Murray, the vilified former ambassador to Uzbekistan. Oh, and Neil and Christine Hamilton. Because.

Anyway, Soans clearly has a knack for drawing people out of themselves and the stories were cleverly interlaced, I’ll give it that. But I simply struggled to care about these people and their predicaments. There were exceptions, there was pathos of sorts in the story of the elderly Lord Montagu who was embroiled in a homosexual scandal in the 1950s, a time when such things devastated lives rather than paving your way onto I’m A Celebrity, get me Out Of Here!. But often the juxtaposition between the more weighty issues – Murray discussing horrific human rights abuses in Uzbekistan – and, say the Hamiltons taking tea as they described their appearances on This Morning, felt more than a little awkward. Everything was slick and smooth and tautly (and, in the main, sympathetically) performed and it’s not that documentary techniques such as these have to be confined to Big Serious Themes only, but, still. I wanted more bite, more insight, more focus, and none was forthcoming. Oh and there was singing. A fair bit of singing. I really, really couldn’t fathom the point of the singing.

It was also press night and thus there were actors aplenty in the audience, as is the norm at such things. Post-show, they were doling out Brocket’s beer (yes, really, and no, I was not tempted to try any), though I did find the sight of the Hamiltons meeting ‘The Hamiltons’ (Caroline Quentin and Michael Mears) fairly amusing.