The Painter at the Arcola

For JMW Turner light was all. His paintings are luminous; they shimmer with the glory of the sunlit sea, they emanate heat. In Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s new play about his life, his genius is the solid thing at the centre of the text, while Turner the man is far more opaque.

Having been obliged to leave their former home, the Arcola has moved to new premises in a converted paint factory on Ashwin Street. This raw, unfinished space doubles well as Turner’s studio and the atmosphere of the place counts for much in a production that sometimes seems to walk on tiptoe, its tread uncertain.

In choosing Turner as her subject, Lenkiewicz has to grapple with a familiar dilemma. How does one go about showing creative genius on stage? Take away the work and what remains? Though the son of a barber, Turner is utterly assured of his own abilities and seems to relish his role as an outsider. He speaks with mild disdain of the Royal Academy ("English painting is dead") and the ‘fashionables’ but certainly does not suffer from self-doubt; he seems quite certain that his work will live on after him yet Lenkiewicz shows him to be far less capable in his relations with other people, particularly women.

His companion, closest friend and studio assistant is his father; his mother, having lost a daughter in infancy, is gradually unravelling. She resents Turner for having survived to adulthood and though her venom seems a symptom of greater ailment, it is clear her comments cut him.  

As Turner, Toby Jones gives a strong, subtle performance, but an essentially reactive one. As played, Turner is a man who gives little away. He accepts things as they come to him and the drive he shows as an artist does not seem to translate into his personal life. He seems genuinely fond of Jenny, the prostitute who becomes the model for a series of anatomical studies, but he even terminates this relationship at the behest of his widowed neighbour, Sarah, with whom he is having a child. He builds a bond with Jenny’s young son but casts him aside too. There seems no malice in his actions; he just does as he is bidden. Denise Gough is superb as this brittle young Jenny; her love for her young son is palpable and she gives a sense that she grasps Turner’s emotional limitations far better than the other women in his life.

Amanda Boxer impresses as his distressed and volatile mother, terrified of the asylum, while Jim Bywater and Jones have an understated rapport as father and son – there is a strong sense of men familiar with each other’s habits, able to communicate without words. Niamh Cusack (who recently played another emotionally ostracised woman, Catherine Dickens, in Out of Joint’s otherwise patchy Andersen’s English) is a mix of calculation and resignation as the widow who desires Turner but knows he will not love her in return.

The play is episodic in structure and takes the form of a collection of short scenes, nicely handled individually but lacking in bite. Lenkiewucz mingles snippets of Turner’s home life with speeches drawn from his lectures to the Royal Academy and, in its fragmentary way, the play gives the audience a sense of Turner. However, having picked as a subject a man so distant, Lenkiewicz has penned herself in. He is both a presence and absence at the centre of the play and, though her writing contains - as ever - moments of lyricism, Turner's remoteness inevitably has an impact on the play’s power.

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.

Miniaturists 24 (somewhat belated)

This took place a couple of weeks back now and I really honestly did mean to write about it the following week, but then a friend came to stay and I had some other worky things to attend to and, oh, I don't know, stuff just happened, and somehow suddenly it is midway through July and I feel that if I don't write down some brief words now then it will drift from my head altogether.

This was the third Miniaturists I'd attended at the Arcola and, of those, probably the strongest line-up to date. Of the five short pieces on the bill, there were three that really stood out. Smile, by Simon Treves, was a wonderful exercise in unease set in a prison that managed to be both very funny and incredibly tense, sometimes simultaneously.

Helen Smith's The Memory Man, a short play about a medium, was the most ambitious piece and the one that had the most potential to be built on and extended into something longer. It had an intriguing symmetry, was full of lovely lines and details and managed to remind me of many things that I've read and seen and enjoyed while also having its own distinctive voice - plus it's always exciting and gratifying when someone you know and like produces something you find yourself really enjoying and admiring.

The final piece. Postfeminism, by Samantha Ellis (who also wrote the well-received Cling to Me Like Ivy) was a lovely example of romantic comedy writing. Witty and clever and genuinely touching, it managed to convey the whole journey of a relationship in a very short space of time. It also contained a properly groan-inducing pun of the very best kind.

All the pieces were incredibly well performed by casts whose rehearsal time was limited to say the least and the whole experience made all the various grapplings with public transport it required to get there more than worth it. The West End Whingers do the thing more justice over here.

The Road to Mecca at the Arcola

This engaging revival of Athol Fugard’s play, though at times ponderous, has many things to commend it, not least a memorable central performance from Linda Bassett.

Barefoot, with her fingers twisted inwards, Bassett plays Miss Helen, an elderly widow, who in the years following the death of her husband, has turned her small, tin-roofed house in Nieu-Bethesda, South Africa, into a work of art, full of glitter and colour. Her drive to create, to give shape to the pictures in her mind, has not been limited to the inside of the house - her garden is also overflowing with statues of wise men and owls, all aligned towards the east. (The play was based on the life of Helen Martins whose wonderful 'Owl House' still stands).

The villagers and the local church council are uneasy about Miss Helen’s work; to them it is bodering on idolatory. She has planted her peacocks and camels on good farming land, making her a subject of suspicion. Her art may have freed her spiritually and brought light into a life of darkness, but it has also isolated her.

Her few remaining friends include Marius, the local pastor, an unseen local girl, and Elsa, a determined young teacher who has just driven the twelve hours from Cape Town because she’s concerned about Miss Helen’s well-being.

The frienship between these two women gives the play its heart. Separated by almost forty years in age, a deep and mutual affection glows from the both. Fearing the return of the darkness, Miss Helen calls out to Elsa for help, a raw plea that Elsa cannot ignore. Miss Helen's is becoming increasingly poor-sighted and arthritic. Her habit of lighting candles to flood her home with light has already resulted in one small fire and Marius is concerned she can know longer care for herself. He suggests she may be better off in an old peoples' home and has even brought her the necessary paperwork to sign.

Russell Bolam's production is slow-paced and rather meandering. It runs to over two and half hours and it feels it, but it places its trust in Fugard’s play and in the elegance of the text. Though the production contains its fair share of lulls and slumps, it grows richer the longer it sits in the memory - new pictures tease their way to the surface. The play contains a number of moments of emotional power. The most charged of these is the scene in which Miss Helen finds her voice and is finally able to make Marius understand that her work, her Mecca, is more than just a few 'ornaments', it is her life, her salvation and without it she is nothing, dust.

Bassett’s performance is wonderful. Sometimes she appears cowed and timid, a fragile, slightly dotty creature in need of aid and guidance, but she grows visibly into a woman infused with pride and passion, who has finally found her purpose in life and who knows exactly who she is.

Sian Clifford provides fine support as Elsa, whose deep affection for Miss Helen can at times make her overly strident. She is spiky yet tired, frustrated by the things in her world she cannot change, sapped by a recent love affair with a married man. The play is set in 1970s South Africa and Elsa is the Cape Town white liberal who prides herself on being forward looking in her thinking. She seems to enjoy getting her wrists slapped by the authorities for setting provocative assignments. She is haunted by the young woman sh gave a lift to on her drive down to see Miss Helen, a young woman with a baby on her back and an 80 mile walk ahead of her.

Fugard allows each of his characters their strengths and failings. Elsa cannot resist speaking for Miss Helen even while urging her to find her own voice and strength, her love is sometimes expressed as frustration and anger; sometimes she is so busy revelling in her own guilt she fails to listen. Marius, the pastor and the voice of the community, played by James Laurenson, is also far from one-note; he genuinely cares about Miss Helen, maybe even loves her, and is just as convinced he is acting in her best wishes.

Ruth Hall's set, is by necessity, simple and limited. It gives a sense of Miss Helen's home but makes little attempt to replicate her idiosyncratic creations. The glitter of candlelight is enough to convey the beauty of the world she has made for herself - the audience are left to paint their own pictures. This is echoed in the way the play depicts South Africa. Just as Miss Helen's art remains in shadow, the play too shines its light only on a trio of white characters. The other South Africa, the one outside Miss Helen's door, the one that evokes such frustration in Elsa, remains in shadow.

The Sanctuary Lamp at the Arcola

Tom Murphy’s bleak but tender play is said to have caused outrage after its first performance in 1975. Yet it’s far from being an attack on the Church; it’s a more questioning and layered piece of writing than that, as demonstrated by the playwright’s revival of his own work for the b*spoke theatre company.

The play concerns three characters from society’s margins who seek solace in an empty church overnight. In need of a place to stay, former strongman Harry is given a job as church clerk, and charged with keeping the sanctuary lamp lit. Also taking refuge in the church is Maudie, a waif-like and simply spoken teenage runaway, shaken by the loss of her child.

They are joined by Francisco, Harry’s one-time circus colleague and a rival for the affections of Olga the contortionist. As the night passes, bolstered by fishn and chips and communion wine, they share their stories and make their confessions to one another.

Robert O’Mahoney is bass-voiced and kindly as Harry, his character’s spiritual need palpable, while Declan Conlon is more volatile as Francisco, railing against the Church with his own particular logic, and Kate Brennan is suitably delicate as Maudie, a girl in search of answers of her own. Swaddled in a choirister's robe she looks appropriately ethereal as the third member of this somewhat twisted trinity. Bosco Hogan's Monsignor, on the other hand, is little more than a pleasant but ineffectual adminisatrator type who is, crucially, absent when the talk turns to matters of the soul.

Monica Frawley’s set, with its three thick 'stone' pillars, its pews and confessional, creates a sense of height and space in the Arcola’s rather squat-ceilinged main studio that is convincingly church-like.

Murphy's production of his own material is more problematic; it's rather monotonous and plodding in pace, which has the effect of downplaying the richness of writing.

Slighty extended version of a review for The Stage

Knives in Hens at the Arcola

David Harrower’s 1995 debut play, first performed at the Traverse in Edinburgh, is as rich as the earth on which its characters depend. It is a pulsing piece of writing, alive with wonder and the power of words.

The play is set in a rural pre-industrial landscape where language still has a near scared potency. The naming of things, the spilling of one’s thoughts and one’s self onto paper, is an act akin to what God does. The gift of the written word allows people to tear themselves open and look inside, to question what was once accepted, to buck against what was once thought to be as solid and immoveable as stone.

At centre of the play is a triangular relationship between the village ploughman, known as Pony William because of his way with the horses, his young wife, and the local miller. Literate and knowledgeable about the outside world, the miller leads an isolated life. His work, which is removed from the toil of the fields, and his power – his ownership and control over the apparatus for turning grain to flour - means he is viewed by the villagers with suspicion, if not outright hatred.
To the ploughman’s wife, the miller is a source of superstition. She fears him and yet is also fascinated by him; with his books and his ink-pen, he holds the keys to something vital and she knows it. He becomes a catalyst to her awakening, the blossoming of her sense of self. The young woman does not cease to be a part of a constant, turning world, driven by the shifting of the seasons, the breaking of day and the needs of the fields, but Harrower shows her waking to her place and power within this world.

Serdar Billis’ atmospheric revival doesn’t quite probe as deeply into this play’s rich ground as it might, but he grasps the particular rhythms of the dialogue and gives them space and shape. Designer Hannah Clarke has turned the Arcola’s Studio 2 into a dark, evocative space. The stage is loamy and soft underfoot, blurring the line between outside and in. The lighting is low and there’s a sense of oppressiveness about the space that suits the piece.

The cast all seem comfortable with the weight of the text and Jodie McNee is particularly striking as the young woman slowly making connections with her inner and outer worlds. Phil Cheadle, as the miller, displays a nonchalance to his situation that masks his sense of loss and separation and Nathaniel Martello-White, as the ploughman, conveys a quiet confidence in his view of the world. Live cello accompaniment is provided by Maria Rijo, who sits clad in black at the side of the stage. Her music never clashes with the language, but the playing at times feels repetitive - there’s little variance in mood or tone.

The production’s main flaw is perhaps an over-reliance on atmosphere, on creating a strong visual sense of this dark world full of things to fear, and the production could do with greater degree of clarity, especially in the later scenes where crucial events and the sense of coming change are somewhat muffled and muddled.

Reviewed for musicOMH

The Spanish Tragedy at the Arcola

Mitchell Moreno’s modern dress production of Thomas Kyd’s influential, but infrequently performed revenge play of the 1580s is bathed in blood. The final scenes are a cacophony of violence, of inventive slayings and splatters of red - it’s gloriously bombastic and operatic in scope, sending judder after judder through the unnerved audience. Many of the dramatic devices that appear here would find their way into later plays of the period.

Portugal has been defeated in battle by Spain and Balthazar, the son of the Portuguese Viceroy, has been captured. A marriage is suggested between the Spanish Duke’s daughter, Belimperia and Balthazar in order to broker peace, but Belimperia, mourning a dead lover, has amorously entangled herself with Horatio, son of Hieronimo, Knight Marshall of Spain. Horatio is duly and brutally dispatched.

Dominic Rowan plays Hieronimo who, traumatised and near-mad with grief after the murder of his son, seeks revenge on those who orchestrated it. It’s a intelligent and subtle performance. Initially he is little more than a background man, one of a number of suits, but events force his hand. His raw response to finding his son strung up from a tree is incredibly well-judged. He moves from soft-voiced disbelief, pleading and hoping that this is but some other clad in his son’s clothing, to the astonishing clarity of a man committed to his actions, however bloody the outcome. There are other strong performances in the cast and Charlie Covell in particular is impressively dignified as Belimperia.

Revenge in this production takes the form of a young girl in pigtails and ankle socks (played with the perfect air of menace by the eleven-year-old Shannon Williams in the performance I saw, although the role is shared) who watches events unfold from the sidelines accompanied by the ghost of the slain Spanish soldier, Andrea.

Moreno counters the absurdities and excesses of the play with a necessary measure of dry humour and – for the most part – he manages a good balance, as he builds up to the climactic play within a play (there are actually two plays within plays: the first provides a brief window of comedy before the blood-shed begins and the second, more pivotal scene is also performed with a measure of wit, using video projections, a Katie Mitchell-style layering of sound effects and streamers of red ribbon to contrast with the spreading stain of stage blood). In fact visually black and red dominate the production and the set is kept simple with a metal garage door at one end that can be raised at the push of a button, which is most effectively used in one of the final reveals.

The modern setting works reasonably well and the use of video and digital voice recorders never feel gimmicky. There’s a shady, almost gangland quality to the piece; it’s all money and machinations and messy exits. Subtlety is necessarily abandoned for the final scenes, which have more than a little of a horror film feel to them, with the increasingly malign presence of the Omen-eyed child, the bloody de-tonguings and a genuinely jolting take on falling on one’s sword.

It Felt Empty at the Arcola

Lucy Kirkwood’s new play is a fine piece of writing, one capable of creating a hard, hot ball of anger in one’s stomach.

Most people are aware of the vile reality of sex trafficking, of young women from overseas bought and sold, imprisoned with no means of escape, their bodies reduced to a package of holes and fluids to be used and then discarded when they’ve served their purpose. Kirkwood’s play, commissioned and produced by Clean Break, journeys into this world. But, instead of showering its audience with harrowing statistics or indulging in redundant hand-wringing, it provides a warm and plausible guide - a way in, a window, a voice - in Dijana, a bright, optimistic, full-hearted young woman with, as she proudly informs us, "a good head for figures."

She knows exactly how much she’s worth because she’s been keeping count, noting down each transaction and each amount earned, so she can buy back her passport from her pimp Babac and, with it, her freedom.

We first meet Dijana in her bleak Dalston bedroom as she prepares to meet the man she hopes will be her last ever client. Despite her skinny limbs and raw-thighed totter, she claims there is little difference between her and a ‘high-class’ sex worker like Billy Piper in ITV’s Diary of a Call Girl, the overtly glossy, soft focus adaptation of the books (and blog) by Belle du Jour.

Her self-delusion is both blatant and necessary, a cushion against the utter desperation of the truth. We see her counting out the used condoms in her dustbin, a series of limp white, jellyfish remnants, and being pounded, repeatedly and aggressively, by an invisible punter. Even as she is subjected to this degradation, she retains a degree of humanity and hope; she is not totally broken, not yet.

Dijana tells her story to an unseen child, her baby, her ‘little clown’, assuring her they will be reunited one day and they will eat chips together on Brighton beach. It is a testament to the open and assured performance by Hara Yannas that this approach never feels too heavy-handed or mawkish. Yannas somehow conveys Dijana’s intense vulnerability along with some inner strength of spirit that is only finally threatened when she ends up at a detention centre, thrown together with other women, removed from one hellish place only to find herself in another.

The Arcola’s chilly and cavernous Studio K has been divided into a number of spaces through which we follow Dijana on her nightmarish journey through a rabbit hole world. She clambers through vents and doorways leading the audience through rooms of glaring neon, shiny plastic wrap, twisted wire and seedy seafront shimmer. The narrative is broken up into three main scenes in which the audience perch on benches or plastic stools, sometimes sat uncomfortably close to the performers. The first scene takes place in Dijana’s stark bedroom, the second in the detention centre, a dreamlike stretch of corridor with a chequerboard floor, and the last takes place in a room padded with plastic, cluttered with white goods and lit by a chemical sun. This final scene is set some time before the other two, at a point when Dijana was still convinced her future had some good in it.

Blending elements of promenade theatre with more conventional dramatic monologue, Lucy Morrison’s production manages to be disturbing without hammering its audience over the head with the grimness of Dijana’s situation (not until the end at least). There is humour here and startling flashes of imagination, even if Kirkwood has to hop through a few hoops to make the play’s internal world hold up.

Chloe Lamford's design uses every corner of the space creatively and intelligently and, despite the sometimes bittiness of the interludes between scenes (which actually provide a welcome breathing space), the piece works as a whole - it’s cohesive and fluid.

Though the monologue form sometimes trembles under the weight of what’s required of it (and the play becomes an altogether tenser thing when a second character is introduced), Yannas’ performance and Morrison’s staging combine to turn this into a powerful, genuinely distressing, physically unsettling and yet also inventive theatrical experience that shines a torch beam into the corners most people would rather not look.

Reviewed for musicOMH.

The Miniaturists

Confession: I have never been to a Miniaturists at the Arcola before. Oh sure I have considered it, I have talked about maybe possibly doing so one day, but thus far I have utterly failed to get myself over to Hackney on a Sunday due to my own ingrained indolence. Until, that is, this past weekend, where the chance to see one of Helen Smith’s plays properly staged (with strawberries and cornflakes and everything) proved too tempting to resist.

And it was more than worth grappling with the broken Northern Line to get there: six short plays, none longer than 20 minutes, a lovely variety in terms of style, tone and approach, a fair higher standard of performance than one would expect from pieces with such a short rehearsal time and the pleasure of knowing that for every coconut cream you bite into there’s likely to be a piece of praline along in a minute. Or something. Just go with it.

Anyway there was wine and there were Whingers and there was the lovely Stephen Sharkey who took the time to stop and say hello and generally be charming despite presumably having much more pressing things to attend to.

There are some more words over here if you’re interested…

In Blood: The Bacchae at the Arcola

Right then, some words would be good I suppose, specifcally some words about theatre. I think I can just about manage that.

First visit of the year was to the Arcola, one of my favourite venues, to see In Blood: The Bacchae. Taking its cues from Euripides, this is a play set in Brazil during the twenties, that pads out its story with the distinctive movements of capoeira. But though not short on atmosphere, it ends up being a curiously flat thing, lacking in dramatic punch. The dance-combat scenes were very striking, but in terms of narrative the production suffered form a lack of coherence.

Frances Viner’s play is based on the true story of Besouro, a young outlaw, a folk hero. In a divided society, he used his cunning and charm to humiliate the authorities rather than resorting to violence, but it was only through reading the programme notes that this really became clear. Instead of shaping and enhancing the production, the reliance on music and movement hobbled proceedings, fighting the narrative, weighing it down.

Apart from Greg Hicks' police chief, there were no strong performances, and even he was oddly muted. It was difficult to get a grip on his character. He was sometimes a caricature of a villain, flinging cocaine about the place, sometimes more ambiguous. Having long ago killed Besouro's mother he still returned to leave flowers on the spot were her body fell. But all of this was muddied by the often overly ornate language and the thick accents of some of the supporting cast.

The capoeira was exciting to watch and, coupled with the music played on drums and berimbeaus (cool twangy things that look like archery bows with gourds attached), the production had a degree of agreeable energy, but even so, taken together, it felt underpowered. The AfroReggae concert Barry and I saw at the Barbican last year managed to say more about Brazil's past and present than this odd concoction.

Small Craft Warnings at the Arcola

This was going to be a review of Six Characters in Search of an Author. But my friend and I arrived at the Gielgud theatre earlier in the week to find the shutters down and some apologetic front of house staff explaining about unexpected illness in the cast. So we were forced, forced I say, to go and come to terms with our disappointment over a bottle of red wine. And a number of gins. Hopefully I will reschedule for a date in the near future as it’s one I was super keen to see. So in lieu of the planned review, here’s some words (borrowed from musicOMH) about Small Craft Warnings at the Arcola which I saw last week.

A sail fish hangs above Monk’s bar, gleaming and glossy. It’s about the only clean, untainted thing in Tennessee Williams’s 1972 play, Small Craft Warnings, set in a Californian beach bar where human flotsam drifts in on the tide.

Apparently Williams specified fog blowing in off the Pacific in his stage directions, spewing forth desperate men and women like something in a John Carpenter film. We don’t get fog during Bill Bryden’s revival at the Arcola, but we do get desperation. The play reeks of it. Broken people and the whiff of bourbon. There’s the Doctor, who can’t get through the night without a cocktail of brandy and Benzedrine; the short-order cook with the pot-belly and the My Name Is Earl moustache; the feckless layabout who calls his cock ‘junior’ with pride rather than irony and the gay Hollywood screenwriter whose life no longer surprises him. Then there’s the young farm boy, hope undimmed, who he has picked up en route, and Violet, thin-limbed and prone to wailing in the ladies’ toilets, the varnish peeling off her dirty finger nails, who regularly dispenses hand jobs under the cover of the incongruously quaint red and white checked table cloths.

And in the middle of all this, there's Leona, the trailer dwelling beautician whose eyes have clearly seen things. It is her brother’s death-day and she sways round the place listening to violin music on the duke box, trying to pry another drink from Monk the bartender, who kindly but firmly declines.

Sian Thomas is superb as Leona, hardened but soft at the same time, a force to be reckoned with. No-one else in the fine cast gets quite the same chance to shine. Jack Shepherd, as Monk, has the spot-on look and manner of the man behind the bar and Greg Hicks makes an impression as the wasp-tongued and bitter, blazer-clad screenwriter Quentin who compares gay sex to a jab with a hypodermic. Meredith MacNeil, black bra showing through her a flimsy dress, dark hair piled up on her head (in a fashion appropriately reminiscent of Amy Winehouse), is also memorable as the fog-brained Violet.

The play is a difficult one, bleak and meandering, with shards of lyrical beauty amidst the murk. Each character takes their turn to step forward and spin out a confessional monologue, before retreating back into the wash. It has its powerful moments but something about it just doesn’t sit right. It’s a hard, tired play. And it is tiring to watch, all that misery, those empty lives. Bryden’s production is moving in places but also wearying, and, talented as the cast are, they sometimes struggle to do much with this collage of lost, sloshed people.

The detailed design (by Hayden Griffin) has some nice touches and the beat of the Pacific, the constant sound of crashing waves outside the door gives a certain rhythm to the piece, but it remains a play of moments rather than a satisfying whole.

Strung Out And Sleep Deprived

Gah, this week has been ridiculously busy. I have been beset by the constant sense of needing to be somewhere other than I am. Amidst all the dashing around and the white-faced late nights in front of my laptop, I have managed to see a couple of productions this week: Femi Oguns’ Torn at the Arcola, and a revival of Bryony Lavery’s Frozen at Riverside Studios, both of which have much to recommend them (though the performance of the former was rather horribly overshadowed by the violent death of the brother of one of the cast members). Tomorrow I am fleeing the city and heading someplace green and pleasant for a few days.

Arcola, Again

I was back at the Arcola at the end of last week and, once again, I found myself overcompensating for previous lateness incidents at this venue by arriving unnecessarily early. I got there a good hour before the start of the show and entered the bar only to find that the usual scattering of tables had been swept aside and replaced with ladders, lots of ladders. Interesting, I thought, there is clearly some Punchdrunk-style embracive use of the venue’s public spaces afoot here, but, no, it turned out the ladders were being used merely for a spot of (very) last minute light bulb tinkering and, as more people started to arrive, a rather anxious looking chap quickly reinstated the tables as I availed myself of the first of the evening’s glasses of (no doubt, organic, fair trade and carbon neutral) Rioja.

The Living Unknown Soldier, the production currently occupying the Arcola’s main space, is based on a French play, Le Soldat Inconnu Vivant by Jean-Yves Naour. It’s a play concerned with memory and loss. A soldier is found wandering at the end of the First World War. He is suffering from amnesia and has no idea who he is. He doesn’t know his name, the whereabouts of his family or even who he was fighting for. He is a blank, an absence, a man lost. The doctor at the institution that takes him in makes it his mission to discover the man’s identity, to find his family. To do this he gets a journalist to write a piece about the man’s situation. But, after the publication of the story in the newspapers, the doctor is flooded with families, with desperate people, longing to somehow turn this man without a past into their lost son, brother or husband.

The bare bones of the narrative are fascinating and incredibly poignant, and I thought the decision to have each member of the company play the soldier at some point during the production was inspired, emphasising his lack of identity, his role as non-person and, at the same time showing how this same void of personality makes him the ideal vessel for the hopes of these people, these families, whose loved ones are missing – and may forever be missing. But while the story itself was compelling, some of the devised elements that the production used in the telling felt rather forced; there was often too much going on, too much noise, too much ‘theatre.’ There was a strong performance from Tony Guilfoyle at the centre of things, as the doctor who devotes years to searching for the soldier’s relatives, but his naturalistic approach often seemed to conflict with other elements of the play and the piece as a whole felt rather disjointed. However, despite all that, I think this is one I will remember for longer than some of the more polished productions I’ve seen of late.

Some Fringe Things

I squeezed a couple of fringe things in at the end of last week. Friday night I swung by the Arcola (and, as if to compensate for previous lateness incidents at this venue, I managed to arrive almost an hour early, and was forced, forced, to spend the intervening minutes milling about in the bar, drinking coffee, reading the paper and generally being indolent – a tough, tough life).

I was there to see The Blind, a staging of Maurice Maeterlinck's 19th century parable in the smaller downstairs studio. The play has a very Beckett-ish quality. A group of inhabitants from a hostel for the blind have been taken out on excursion by the priest who looks after them. But, for unknown reasons, he has abandoned them, and so they sit and wait for his return.

This is a very still production with long, l-o-n-g periods of silence. The six actors, three men and three women, are all either blind are visually impaired. They sit around a u-shaped rock, one by one rising to their feet, saying their piece. Above them hangs a lonely globe light that could easily be either sun or moon, emphasizing their isolation. The characters fret about their situation, but nobody takes any action, they bicker and worry, but remain where they are - sitting and waiting. Despite its literal casting, this is a play less about being blind and more about being lost and without power, forever waiting to be saved.

The night before I'd been over to the Courtyard Theatre in Shoreditch, where I'd met up with Helen Smith and Andrew of the West End Whingers to check out Tom Green's The Death of Margaret Thatcher. It's a provocative title to be sure, and one that probably does the play a disservice in the long run, setting up expectations that were, inevitably, difficult to meet. The resulting play was less explicitly about Thatcher’s legacy and more an entertaining satire on how such events are covered by the media, how deeply complex issues are compacted into easily churned out sound bites, banal and insincere pieces-to-camera, a life reduced to a fixed smile and a somber nod of the head.

Green does make some reference to the level of venom she generated in the British public during her time as PM: throughout the play we hear of a man who is walking down to London with the intention of spitting on her grave, gathering a large band of followers in the process – but, tellingly, this character is never seen, never heard.

I was born in the year that Thatcher came to power and the play did make me think about my memories of the woman, my own memories, not ideas absorbed in later years – perhaps sadly it does boil down to free school milk and the odd snippet of news footage about the Falklands and the miners. Being both a single mother and an immigrant, my mum was unsurprisingly not a fan of the Tories, and inevitably that colours my thinking – but I also remember the faint warmth that came from there being a woman in a position of such power. When my mother and aunts told me I could grow up to be anything I wanted to be, Mrs Thatcher was proof of how true that was – which really meant something especially since I can clearly remember a time at primary school when we my class was asked by our teacher what jobs we would like when we were older and most of the girls were still answering with something along the lines of ‘secretary’ and ‘dancer’. (I think I said ‘writer’, silly child that I was).

Anyway, the Daily Mail has got itself in a right old stink about the show, which while predictable, is also quite funny – they also seem to have forgotten that over at the Apollo Victoria they sing nightly about Thatcher’s death in the Billy Elliot musical.

Green’s play also afforded me the opportunity to see my second naked cock in as many evenings, (following A Prayer For My Daughter at the Young Vic), a sentence I include purely to see what interesting search engine traffic it swings my way.

Buses And Belly Dancers

This was the second time in a row that I’d arrived at the Arcola breathless and flustered and in need of a steadying glass of something. The Victoria line had inconsiderately ground to a halt and I was forced to bus-hop frantically across London to make it on time. (Though it’s pleasing to note that, despite considerable Christmas indolence, I can still run pretty fast if circumstances require)

Anyway, the Arcola. Their first new production of 2008 is an odd one. The British Ambassador’s Belly Dancer is written by Craig Murray, the former ambassador to Uzbekistan, together with his partner Nadira and Alan Hescott. Murray, of course, was very publicly sacked for exposing human rights abuses. During the same period, he also left his wife for an Uzbek dancer, Nadira, who worked in a gentlemen’s club he frequented.

The subsequent media blitz has already made it to the stage, as part of Robin Soans’s wobbly verbatim piece Life After Scandal at Hampstead Theatre, and, as this play notes, there was a time where the couple had “Noam Chomsky on Hotmail and David Hare in the kitchen.” But that was a while ago (and Nadira never got her promised Nicole Farhi dress).

This current play comes across as Nadira’s attempt to tackle the way she was treated in the tabloids, to speak for herself, to tell her own story. So she performs, as well as co-writes, sitting before us wreathed in her black silk dancer’s garb and a pair of clumpy desert boots. And her story is both fascinating and harrowing. Her family were plunged into poverty after Uzbekistan became independent and, as a result, her father developed a drug habit. Though trained as a teacher, Nadira ended up dancing in a strip club to keep herself and her family afloat. Later, she was twice raped by the Uzbek police. She describes all this in a calm, matter of fact fashion, peppering her account with the occasional wry comment about Murray’s fondness for spanking and her struggles to source sheep fat in Shepherds Bush so she can prepare her favourite Uzbek dishes.

She is now taking acting classes. This is a woman who knows how to survive, to keep her head above water, to make the most of every opportunity. And one can hardly blame her. But on theatre terms this is still a strange exercise and one that smacks of indulgence. Nadira’s accented delivery is sometimes hesitant and the piece is full of contradictions: she wants to be taken seriously, yet intersperses the piece with bursts of belly dancing. Her story is compelling but I wondered if a show like this was the best way to present it. I must admit I left the theatre feeling more puzzled than enlightened. I gather its bound for the Arts Theatre after its stint at the Arcola though.

Lateness Averted

On bus. Slow bus. Checking watch. Getting rather too close to start of play for my liking. Bus still slow. And doing random loop through back streets I swear it has never taken before. Crap. Finally jump off bus, pelt down street, pass Kingsland Road shouty drunk, and reach theatre. Attempt to appear marginally less flustered than I actually am as I request my ticket. Fail. Enter theatre. Just in time.

Phew, I never usually cut things that close. I am much better organised than that. Oh, yes. Anyway, the play, the point of all that dashing: Tim Stimpson’s One, Nineteen, currently being perfomed in the Arcola’s baby back alley studio on a stage bare bar the odd sandbag and folding chair.

The title refers to the date of a catastrophic storm that devastates an area of England. But though it touches on the implications of climate change, this is not a post-apocalyptic, the whole-world’s-going-to-hell type play, but a more familiar media satire, taking the events in New Orleans as a cue to explore how the media responds to a disaster of this scale.

So Stimpson presents us with a series of characters, often in conversation with invisible interviewers. First up we get a few blanket-clad survivors, then he settles on individual stories: an environmental activist, a politician who becomes something of a scapegoat, a self-satisfied rock star who is quick to spearhead a huge concert at Wembley to raise aid, and at the heart of all this, a young mother who was separated from her three children as the waters rose, and whose story has inadvertently become the human interest hook on to which all the journalists cling. These children’s names, "Sam, Jack and little Chloe" – it's always ‘little’ Chloe – become something of a mantra throughout the play in a depressingly plausible manner. The satirical elements are at time rather heavy-handed, but I enjoyed the way the stories intersected, the pacing was taut and it managed to touch on the subjects of climate change and environmental upheaval without being preachy or overly doomy.

Plus, and here's praise, it was engaging enough for me to - just - about be able to blot out the noise from above. I‘ve not seen Jenufa which is playing in the Arcola’s main space, but from the sounds of things, it has a cast of possibly around three hundred.

Oh, and there's another "enjoyably off-the-wall" Observer post over here.

A Post Almost Wholly Devoted To Food

Ah, Arcola. I was back over there on Monday night to see their new production of Mustapha Matura’s Meetings, a play set in 1980s Trinidad.

It’s an intriguing but rather stilted play about a well-off, career-minded married couple who employ a cook so that the husband can reacquaint himself with the foods of his childhood. The play isn’t just about food, of course, it’s also about how economic prosperity can make people feel cut off from a more simple, tradition-driven past. But, as I’m sure the themes will be discussed more eloquently elsewhere, I, perhaps predictably, am going to focus on the food.

Designer James Humphrey has installed a working (Ikea) kitchen in the Arcola’s smaller studio space, complete with oven, sink and dishwasher – but it’s not just any kitchen, it’s a magic kitchen. Oh, yes. When Elsa, the young girl employed by the couple as cook, starts to prepare her meals, she opens up pots and pans to reveal lots of pre-chopped food. Actually I don’t really think this is meant to signify anything mystical, rather it is a time-saving device on the part of the director. Unfortunately, having all this food secreted around the set, was rather distracting – I kept thinking, how come this couple never noticed they had bread rolls in their dishwasher before?

Also the (teeny, tiny) portions that Elsa puts on the plates – and that actor Nicholai La Barrie duly eats – never resemble the tempting dishes they’re supposed to be. So she announces the fact she’s made something like ‘hearty, warming Trinidadian sausage and bean stew’ and then serves up a small puddle of watery, tomato-y liquid. I guess this is because it would be difficult to whip up said stew on set, even with most of the ingredients hidden in saucepans beforehand, but this disparity seems like a crucial flaw in a production that revolves around the evocative power of food. It just seems like such a shame; here we have a play – that, at least, superficially – is about food and a working kitchen - and all the food we see looks so miserable, so uninspiring. And this just a week after I saw ordinary (egg on toast, pasta) but at least edible looking fare, cooked up on stage at Soho Theatre in Pure Gold.

In addition to Elsa’s dubious dishes, the couple in Meetings also get through numerous slices of the most anaemic looking toast I’ve ever seen, a carton of chicken and chips, and bottle after bottle of radioactive-hued Caribbean soda (I think there may have been some sort of sponsorship thing going on here, as there was with Ikea for the kitchen). Not that they actually eat all of this, the actors pick and nibble, making yummy noises where necessary, before scraping most of it into the bin. Which could be taken as a comment on the wasteful habits of the wealthy, though I suspect it has more to do with actors not wanting to gain half a stone over the course of the run.

And the play itself, aside from all the food-related issues? Well it was an odd one, initially intriguing, but strangely paced and saddled with a bizarre subplot about Toxic Killer Cigarettes, a heavy-handed moral metaphor if ever there was one. But it was the use of food that lingered the longest and that I found myself thinking about as I rode home on the Big Ol’ Bus of Loud Shouty Drunks.

Home and Away

Deep breath, dive in.

The Arcola , tucked off the Kingsland Road in Hackney, is probably one of my favourite fringe theatres in London, so it seemed apt to break my recent theatre drought with a trip there. The place has a buzz about it, an energy which I really like, and I spent a nice half hour in the bar before the start, sitting with a drink (a coffee, OK, just a coffee) and my paperback, enjoying being surrounded by happy, chatty people and furtively trying to ascertain if that was Douglas Henshall standing in the corner.

The current production, Fragile, by London based, Croatian born writer Tena Stivicic was on in the smaller studio 2 and there’s something rather illicit and exciting about the way they lead you down a dark side alley, past the bins and down some steps, to gain entrance to the space.

The play is an interesting layered thing, a bit too sub-plot heavy for my liking but saying some genuinely interesting things about being an immigrant in London. The two main characters Mila and Marko, a Croat and a Serb respectively, share a flat together, as well as working shifts in a seedy club owned by a shady, but warm-hearted, Bulgarian. Mila is dating a foreign correspondent Erik, who was out in Balkans during the conflict; both of them are unaware that Erik’s former lover is now in London after being trafficked through Europe as a prostitute.

There’s a lot of potential for stereotype here but Stivicic manages to avoid it, for the most part steering her characters in unexpected directions. Marko has dreams of being a stand-up comedian (something that, coming from a Serbian background myself, made me smile) and Mila wants to make it in musical theatre – dreams, and the way that this fair city of ours can so casually crush them, is a major theme here. Only the naïve and hippyish New Zealand social worker remains a bit one-dimensional (and swapping her wardrobe of dream-catcher earrings and ponchos for more muted black attire is a bit of a heavy-handed indicator of personal growth).

The play becomes a bit convoluted in its incident heavy final scenes, with the various twists and the neat little epilogue feeling more suited to cinema than the stage, but the pacing kept your attention held and I was fascinated by its portrait of London as a city where so many live but so few truly feel it home. This echoes something my mother, who has been in this country for over four decades now, often describes and I feel I understand that sentiment a little better now.