The Turn of The Screw, Almeida Theatre

The 1963 version of The Haunting is a film that really gets under your skin. It’s genuinely unsettling, and though you actually see little if anything, the eerie sound design, full of thudding doors and creaking floorboards, creates an atmosphere of almost unbearable dread. Jan de Bont’s 1999 remake on the other hand amplified everything beyond recognition, bloating the film with CGI ghosties and digital whizz-bangery, and amputating any sense of the sinister in the process.

Henry James’ novella is likewise a masterpiece of atmospheric detail and psychological ambiguity but, in this new adaptation, the Almeida has done a Jan de Bont, opting for the easiest of shocks over subtlety and complexity of character. There is never any sense that the nameless governess who is dispatched to a country house to look after two orphaned children is anything other than sane, no sense that the haunting may be emanating from her own fevered mind. The evil that plagues this house is very much manifest, with the flame-haired Peter Quint popping up at windows at every given opportunity. The sexual undercurrents of the original are here made-overcurrents, what with the constant coital howling of foxes outside in the grounds and the ghosts glimpsed rutting against the leaded window panes.

While there are some proper jolts, achieved with the help of illusionist Scott Penrose - and given the volume and tenor of the screams I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a few damp seats in the Almeida auditorium afterwards – there’s very little sense of tension or jeopardy; the battle to save the two innocent children, Flora and Miles, from the grip of a malevolent, deviant force is curiously anaemic, a tiresome tug-of-war. Lyndsey Posner’s production, the first to be presented by Hammer Theatre of Horror, is far more concerned with the sudden shock, the supposedly spooky effect. There’s some self-propelled chalk – just like in Matilda – and the tone of the piece is such that you half expect a repeat of that weird moment in the Menier Chocolate Factory’s production of the The Invisible Man when the transparent protagonist copped a feel of Maria Friedman’s bosoms; Laurence Belcher’s man-boy Miles does the honours here instead.

The set is bird-black and oppressive, like Thornfield after the fire, with a jagged slash in the brickwork through which the moon can be seen. The sound design throws in flapping bat wings, the scritch-scratch of chalk on a blackboard and the occasional piercing scream. The frequent use of the revolve, however, transporting us from room to room, from interior to exterior, slows the pacing of the piece to a crawl, diffusing what little tension had been built up. Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s adaptation does at least explore the peculiar situation of the governess: a woman trapped between worlds, who, socially speaking, is neither one thing nor the other, neither part of the family nor one of the staff, and whose class and background can always be used against her, the shadow of the workhouse a very real and frightening thing. But it also seems intent on making the sexual suggestions of the original as blatant and explicit as possible.

Anna Madeley gets off to a reasonable start in the role of the repressed governess, but she doesn’t fully convey the character’s increasing torment; the pitch of her performance doesn’t build. It’s possible to see why Belcher – seventeen but looking and playing younger – has been cast as Miles, capably suggesting a young man on the cusp of adolescence, a volatile creature, precocious and loving one moment, spite-filled and threatening the next, but it’s Gemma Jones, as the house-keeper Mrs Grose, who puts in the most solid, consistent performance, providing a necessary counter-balance to all the shrieks and the shocks and the spectral bedroom shenanigans.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Filumena at the Almeida Theatre

Elegantly weathered shutters overlook a shaded Neapolitan courtyard. Vines snake up the old stone walls and light streams through the overhanging branches of an orange tree. Crickets chirrup and birds twitter. Fabric flowers sit under a halogen sun. It’s all exquisitely pretty in a strangely sterile way. But Eduardo De Filippo’s play is not big on pretty. It’s a comedy drawn from desperation, haunted by the spectre of poverty, and this tame, tasteful Tourist Board vision of southern Italy conveys nothing of that.

While it’s true that this courtyard, the home of the wealthy Don Domenico, is supposed to be a place of escape for the play’s protagonist, the one-time prostitute Filumena, a safe-haven from the ugly world outside, the production’s prevailing sense of disconnection is not just one of aesthetics. There’s something tonally amiss about the whole thing.

At the start of the play, Filumena has just tricked Don Domenico, her philandering lover of some 27 years, into a deathbed marriage. Though the minute the priest has made things official between them, she is suddenly, miraculously ‘cured.’ In the noisy fallout from her deception, it comes to light that she has three illegitimate adult sons – a writer, a tailor, and a mechanic – whom she has surreptitiously looked out for over the years. She now hopes that Domenico will assume the role of father and provider for all three.

Filumena was driven into prostitution out of desperation. Her teenage years were spent on the brink of starvation; poverty closes doors, it shrinks people’s worlds, and this was the only way out that seemed open to her. It was an act of survival. De Filippo’s play does not skirt around the issue, nor does it gloss over the tough choices she faced in bringing each of her children into the world; she has, in her own way, managed to provide for them financially, though she was never able to be a mother to them. Now she seeks security, comfort, the love that was denied to her. But while pain radiates from the writing it is rarely evident on stage.

Samantha Spiro is an actor of warmth and charisma but in the play’s opening scenes she comes across as shrill and hard-edged, a schemer. Only later, when her motivations are clearer, does she start appearing more human, more sympathetic. Clive Wood’s Domenico is all froth and bluster, a carapace of masculine menace; when he first discovers Filumena has tricked him, he half-heartedly shakes a spoon at her while spouting unconvincing threats.

There is further disconnection evident in the translation by Tanya Ronder. While it’s probably necessary to have the cast avoid Italian caricature, Ronder takes things in the other direction, revelling in the colloquial. Her translation has Filumena’s sons calling one another “twat” and “big man”, and people screeching “silly old cow.” It all sits rather awkwardly on the studiously attractive flower-bedecked set; the gap between what we see and what we hear is an increasingly difficult one to bridge.

Michael Attenborough’s production wakes up and warms up considerably in the far shorter second half. There is some genial if underpowered comic interplay between the three sons and everyone suddenly and almost unaccountably seems inclined to be far kinder to one another. But it all comes too late in the day; and the production never convincingly evokes the social polarization of post-war Naples, the creep of poverty and the lengths people will go to in order to survive. The play’s heat, its vital fire, has been damped down, its emotional potency neutered.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Measure for Measure at the Almeida

Measure for Measure is often categorised as one of Shakespeare’s ‘problem plays’, meaning it doesn’t easily fit into the boxes marked ‘comedy’ and ‘tragedy’, but falls awkwardly in between. It’s a morally muddy piece that raises as many questions as it answers. A better way of viewing it is as a challenge rather than a problem; it takes clarity of vision and some strong assured performances to pull it off with any degree of success, something Michael Attenborough manages with his modern dress production at the Almeida.

The first few minutes are full of writhing and thrusting bodies, a gaggle of prostitutes tottering about in quim-skimming skirts, which rapidly serves to establish the Vienna of the play as a place riddled with vice and corruption.


The Duke, who seems keen to clean things up, decides it’s necessary for him to view society from a different perspective, his identity concealed under a friar’s cowl. He appoints the uptight Angelo to be his deputy in his absence, a man who at first seems up to the task; he is rigid and diligent, excessively so, and quite able to send a man to his death for having sex out of wedlock.
Isabella, a novitiate nun, clad from neck to ankle in black, comes to plead for her condemned brother and Angelo is knocked off course by the mere sight of her. She taps into some dark seam within him and he attempts to use his new authority to claim what he suddenly, feverishly needs to possess.

Rory Kinnear is superb as Angelo. To begin with he is socially awkward, a bit of a nebbish in his specs and cheap suit. There is something almost endearing about the way he frets about Isabella’s imminent arrival, putting in his contacts and tidying his desk, but this is quickly undercut by his sweaty-palmed pawing of her and his very indecent proposal, his actions charged with lust and frustration. Yet he seems almost as shocked as she is by his behaviour, by the aggressive, scheming individual he finds himself becoming, a man driven by urges he has perhaps not felt before and can’t process in any normal way. As played by Kinnear, he’s a conniving hypocrite but not a monster.

Anna Maxwell Martin is clear-eyed and determined as Isabella, perfectly plausible as a woman who would consider sacrificing her brother’s life in order to maintain her chastity. Her inner struggle is evident but there is also a slight trace of petulance and self-righteousness to her sheen of dignity.

Ben Miles’s Duke Vincentio remains an enigma. He seems slightly uncomfortable within his own skin, nervy and troubled. Though clearly unsettled by the murky world he finds himself in, he takes some pleasure in the complex string of machinations and deceptions he instigates and his motivations are never quite clear. Returned to his ducal finery he seems oddly exposed and inadequate.

Though his is a far broader performance, Lloyd Hutchinson displays sound comic timing and judgement as the manipulative wide boy, Lucio, playing both sides against each other and revelling in the chaos, though his punishment for his behaviour seems excessively harsh.

The seedy, red-light aesthetic evoked by Lez Brotherston’s set doesn’t always sit comfortably with tone of the piece. The clash is too dramatic. Yet, for the most part, Attenborough’s production manages to achieve resonance whilst still fully conveying the play’s complexities. The cast are a joy to watch and when the production hits its stride the whole things sings.

Reviewed for musicOMH.

Nocturne at the Almeida

On Friday evening I ran through a mist of fresh summer rain to the Almeida, currently in the midst of an eclectic summer festival, to see Adam Rapp’s Nocturne, an emotionally charged and beautifully written monologue about how one awful incident can devastate a family. The play begins with a blunt, enticing statement: “fifteen years ago I killed my sister” and goes on to describe a horrific accident and its repercussions. Following his sister’s death, as his parents crumble, both physically and mentally, the narrator retreats into himself, fleeing to New York to eke out a living in a book store, to lead a quiet non-life lost in words.

Adam Rapp’s play trusts language, it too puts its faith in the power of words and barely a sentence passes that doesn’t contain diverting image or a striking descriptive phrase. It’s at times a bit self-conscious in this respect, but for the most part it maintains a balance between linguistic richness and narrative momentum.

When Nocturne was first staged in the US, it featured not just the narrator but a cast of supporting characters, his mother and father and so forth, and it sounds as if it was more theatrical in that incarnation, more visually interesting than what we get in this stripped down restaging: essentially just one man and a chair (and a small thermos flask from which he occasionally drinks). There are brief breaks in the flow of words, where rough sketched images – road markings and birds in flight – flit across a black disc that hangs at the back of the stage, but these appear to have been inserted to give both performer and audience respite: the play remains just one man talking.

There were moments where I wondered if this needed to be in a theatre at all, if it wouldn’t play just as well on radio, and I occasionally shut my eyes and let it all wash over me. However to do this too often was to do the actor, Peter MacDonald, a disservice as he seemed totally at home with the material. His gestures, his pauses and expressions all felt organic. Though it ran for over an hour and a half without a break I was never bored, never restless, I sat rapt, attentive throughout. On the way home I dipped into the playtext as my bus curved through the streets, the brake lights ahead glowing red through the rain-streaked windows, and got so caught up in it that I almost missed my stop. It’s Edinburgh-bound, this production, heading for the Traverse and is well worth seeing.

Unmoved At The Almeida

When I mentioned to my friends that I was going to see a play with Stockard Channing in it, most fell into two camps: a lot of them made some reference to Abbey Bartlet and her turn as First Lady in The West Wing, while a few got surprisingly excited about the whole Rizzo-in-Grease thing. For me it's the former role that sprang to mind initially, but I'm sure she’s done a lot more than that (all the press I've read has taken pains to point out that she's done more than that) but when I tried to think of anything else, well, the only other thing that I could come up with was Six Degrees of Separation, where I believe she was reprising a role she'd played stage, but that was so long ago, she got a higher billing than Will Smith in the credits.

But anyway, I’m drifting here. The ins and outs of Channing's CV are incidental. What I do know, is that she is currently starring in Clifford Odets’ Awake and Sing! at the Almeida and on Friday night I duly wandered up to Islington to see it.

This was an interesting one. There were a number of individual aspects of the play I really liked and it certainly oozed quality, both through the performances – which were mostly excellent – and through a nicely realised set (though I thought the canopy of dangling laundry rather overdid things), however for all its undeniable class it left me feeling a bit under-whelmed, like I’d gone to a pizza place and ordered a salad. Good for you and everything, but I still felt hungry afterwards. Actually that’s an awful analogy because there was plenty of sustenance here, but there was something a bit clinical about the production, it failed to move me in any real way.

Channing plays Bessie, matriarch of the Berger family. The Bergers live in a cramped tenement building in the Bronx. Alongside Bessie, there's her sweet but terminally passive husband Myron, their children Hennie and Ralph, and grandfather Jacob, played here by John Rogan, an actor who uses a wheelchair following an accident (something I mention primarily because it was variations on ‘oh, is he actually disabled then?’ type conversations that predominated as the audience filed out after the play, not, it must be noted, musings on Odets’ depiction of 1930s New York).

Anyway, Rogan’s performance gave the show something of the heart I felt it was otherwise lacking and Channing was very good as the somewhat tyrannical Bessie, subtly conveying that her character's actions, though often domineering and insensitive, are driven by a desire for her children to have lives less blighted by hardship than hers. I was also rather taken by Nigel Lindsay’s performance as the fast-talking, cynical but soft-hearted Moe Axelrod (though I suspect this was, at least in part, down to the fact he was playing a character with the rather wonderful moniker of Moe Axelrod).

And, so, yes. While the play is insightful about the social ramifications of poverty, while there was lots about the production to admire - and I am glad I saw it - I didn’t actually enjoy it that much, which is quite a crucial distinction.