Fatherland, Battersea Arts Centre

A circle is chalked on the floor, a space for spell-casting and spirit conjuring. Then the drums begin to thunder, louder, louder, and the woman in the grey suit starts to dance, a series of ritualised movements, toe and heel, arms aloft, the dance of her fathers.

Nic Green’s new show is an exploration of absence, the spaces between people. Can a relationship exist with someone who is not there? Who has never been there? Inspired by Green’s own experiences of meeting her Scottish father for the first and only time as a sixteen year old, Fatherland is about the space we create for ourselves in the world and the way we define ourselves in relation to others, even if they have never really been present in our lives.

We are played into the room by bagpipes and sit arrayed on all four sides of the space. Green begins by assembling a choir of ‘fathers’ from the men in the audience and engages them in a poetic pre-scripted exchange, a refracted conversation with a man she met only once and who she struggles to recall in any real detail, what he looked like, which pub they went to; he’s the ghost in the room, the ghost within her. Her approach is delicate, the man, and the land from which he came, are like invisible tethers tying her to something which is hard to pin down; there’s a drifting quality to the show in the beginning. At times it’s almost too cobwebby, the lilting language cloudlike and lacking in solidity. That’s perhaps the point, the absence of anchor, the sensation of floating free, but from the audience’s perspective there’s not a lot to grab onto; we drift too, but not always with her.

And then the drums kick in. A wild, tribal heart-thump; a primal, pounding sound. Green starts to dance, shedding clothes as she does so. First her jacket, than her shirt, than her trousers, until she’s bare except for her Louise Brooks bob and her tartan-tailed knickers, blue as woad. She dances with her head high, cheeks colouring with the effort and a single streak of sweat licking down her back like a second spine. Her dance combines the quality of a battle cry with the abandonment of dancing around in your bedroom when you know no one is watching, breasts bobbing, flesh quivering with each rhythmic stamp. I look around the room and people are beaming.

Then, as she slows, as the drums still, the whisky bottles emerge. Single malt. Islay. A peaty smell fills the air as we fill our glasses, passing the bottle from hand to hand, row to row. A toast is raised. A couple of people clink their glasses. Then another two, then another, and suddenly the room is filled with the music of the charged glass, as we, smoke- throated, are invited to connect with each other and with her, to share this moment.

Even when the piece is elusive and remote, as it sometimes is in the beginning, there’s a warmth to it, a sense of invitation. This is something Green excels at, having created Trilogy, a three stranded piece exploring contemporary feminism that centred on a celebration of the female form, a gloriously naked dance sequence in which Green, her fellow performers and a whole host of volunteers bared all and invited women in the audience to do the same. While the piece as whole was messy in places and somewhat front-loaded (so to speak), there was something inescapably joyous about that dance: all that jumping, stamping, shaking. The beauty of bodies in motion.

And I was up there with them, one of a hundred or so, naked on the Barbican stage, roaring and leaping, arms in the air, skin bright under the lights. It seems trite to say it, but it was freeing, putting yourself out there like that, letting yourself go; the sense of unity between the participants was strong and Green made sure that the experience was a positive one for all involved, easing us into it, making sure everyone felt comfortable. For someone who finds the idea of public speaking anxiety inducing it was as unexposed as I’ve ever felt in front of an audience and it genuinely made me examine my relationship with my body.

This piece has a similar strength, though this time Green stands alone – dances alone. It’s a more personal, inward piece, but in its roar, in its thunder, it draws its audience together.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Goran Bregović - Margot: Diary of An Unhappy Queen

The concerts of Goran Bregović – probably best known in this country as the composer of the soundtrack of Emir Kusturica’s Underground – are usually riotous affairs, characterised by much audience foot-stamping, and the effusive chanting of ‘ka-la-nish-kov’ with varying degrees of irony. But his latest work is rather different; Margot: Diary of An Unhappy Queen is a contemplative narrative-drive piece about the conflict in the Balkans, and the music – which swooped from drum-driven gypsy abandon to more plaintive choral passages – was interspersed with lengthy spoken word sections.

Bregovic, sitting centre-stage in his trademark white suit, was surrounded by his usual gypsy brass cohorts along with a string quartet, a six-man Bulgarian choir and two female vocalists. The men, all magnificently rich of voice, wore full evening dress while the woman wore peasant costume and colourful headdresses; in front of this impressive semi-circle sat an armchair and a battered trunk: a container of memories, a symbol of exile and escape.

One of Bregović’s earliest successes, written during the war years when he was based in Paris, was the score for Patrice Chereau’s 1994 film, La Reine Margot, which was set against the backdrop of the French Wars of Religion. Here Bregovic transports that story to a modern Bosnian setting. The music is interspersed by bursts of narration from the actress Lisa Dwan. She plays the widowed daughter of a Balkan General, a Ratko Mladic figure. Her husband is from a different faith to her and so he is first forced to convert before being sent to the front line where he is killed; the man she loves reduced to so much meat. To dull the pain, she smokes weed, tearing pages from her mother’s books to roll her joints, ripping up the words of poets to feed the flames. “Small countries need big poets,” she comments dryly.

On the search for further joint-fodder, she comes across what initially appears to be the diary of a sixteenth century French queen, written during a previous period of religious slaughter. Parallels are drawn between the two women’s lives, between the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and the war in what was once Yugoslavia.

Not all of the audience seemed to welcome these spoken interludes or to appreciate what Bregović was trying to achieve. Many people seemed to be anticipating a more conventional Bregović concert. There was an atmosphere of restlessness and unease in some quarters that only grew with each renewal of the spoken part of the performance. And conceptually it wasn’t always successful. There were too many spoken sections and while Dwan is a strong stage presence with an evocative voice (her Irish accent seeming apt in context), there was a static quality to the staging, a lack of progression which at times diluted the potency of the music rather than adding to it. A better balance was achieved towards the end of the night, as the tone of the piece grew darker and the music and the words seemed to coalesce. As Dwan finally, desperately pleaded, “Lord, give the world to women,” a cheer went up, a chorus of female voices. Given the way in which Kustarica’s films either romanticize or interrogate – or both – a certain stripe of Serbian masculinity, the audience’s response was interesting, and the cheer that met Dwan’s entreaty provided a telling contrast to the derisive male catcalls that had marred some of the performance.

The main piece was followed by the obligatory – and, possibly in this case, necessary – encore in which Bregović and his fellow musicians launched into a series of drinking tunes and partisan songs, the stomping, soaring music that so much of the audience had been hoping for, culminating in a magnificent rendition of ‘The Belly Button of the World’. People leapt from their seats and danced and whooped and air-punched and all thoughts of war – and of the wives and daughters left behind – were soon washed away on a wave of rakia and revelry.

Reviewed for Exeunt

The School for Scandal at the Barbican

Deborah Warner’s production of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s delicious comedy is a shouter. As the audience make their way into the auditorium the soundtrack is already pounding while a number of cast members strut across the stage as if on a catwalk wearing blue steel stares, Hoxton specs and man-bags along with their knee breeches and crinolines; occasionally someone in a technician’s headset and a Barbican BITE T-shirt throws a few shapes.

If you saw Warner’s production of Mother Courage at the National, you’ll recognise this stylistic landscape. Scene titles unfurl on banners or are held up on cards, the flats are intentionally flimsy and rough drawn, and there is no attempt to disguise the rumble and clank of props being assembled. The whole thing is thick with anachronism, the 18thcentury violently colliding with the 21st: there are Vivienne Westwood shopping bags, bottles of Bombay Sapphire and a whiff of urban decay. There’s something very modern in libertine Charles Surface’s debauchery; he glugs from a jug of Burgundy while sporting fashionably ratty jeans and an Indian headdress, his associates and hangers on slumped and sozzled around him.

Some of these anachronistic flourishes are inspired – particularly when Charles slakes a hangover with a can of full fat Coca Cola and something greasy and possibly from Greggs or when a vital piece of gossip is confirmed via iPhone – but sometimes it feels like Warner has taken one of those banners of hers, scrawled This Is The Concept on it in fat marker pen letters and is waving it in your face.

All that said, the exuberance of the production is seductive, compelling even, and the rapidity of Sheridan’s wit is only occasionally dampened by the racket. The principle joys come from the performances. Amid all the noise Alan Howard gives an elegant and understated performance as Sir Peter Teazle, grumbling, dogged, with an air of being permanently put upon: “was ever a man so crossed as I am?” He is well paired with Katherine Parkinson – whose delivery, as ever, is superbly measured – as his wayward and (much) younger wife. Though her character has succumbed to all the trappings of life as a lady of fashion, she is not without a heart and somewhere beneath all the snapping and sparring of the couple’s “daily jangle” they manage to suggest a degree of real affection.

Leo Bill is suitably nervy and spaced as the rakish wastrel Charles, yet beneath his array of twitches he suggests the existence of some small nugget of inner decency, however eroded. Aidan McArdle, as Joseph, the other Surface brother, a noted man of sentiment, conveys a strong sense of superficial moral solidity whilst suggesting a lack of any real resolve; at one point he is even seen enjoying some 18th century porn. This is a production particularly interested in the things underneath, the padding and girdles – and, in one case, a pair of Superman underpants – beneath the mile wide dresses and towering wigs.

The broader ensemble seems to have been differently instructed; here are performances dialled up to eleven, all snivelling and screeching, pratfalls and harsh caricature. This results in some over the top mugging but also, with the character of Moses the Jewish moneylender (played with an extravagant lisp by Adam Gillen), it presents something more testing as Warner looks the play’s anti-Semitism in the face and doesn’t attempt to pull back or soften it any way.

Sheridan’s play, with its strong distaste for hypocrisy and the pedlars of slander, remains a joyous thing to behold and Warner is faithful to its spirit; despite the 21st century visual vocabulary, she lets the play speak for itself. This is theatre as event – over three hours long and big, big, big – and it’s nothing if not memorable in its own bludgeoning way.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Peter Pan at the Barbican

"I think that to die would be an awfully big adventure."

There has always been an inherent darkness in Peter Pan, with its land full of lost and abandoned boys longing for a mother to love them, its crocodiles with ticking guts and a taste for human flesh, but rarely has there been a version as murky as John Tiffany’s production for the National Theatre of Scotland.

In David Greig’s adaptation the haunting and iconic story of the boy who never grows up has been transplanted to J.M. Barrie’s native Scotland and Mr Darling is working as an engineer, overseeing the construction of the Forth Bridge. He’s a stern, distracted but not unkind father who dispatches his children’s beloved dog Nana to the backyard.

When Peter Pan flies into the Darling nursery one night through an open window, he tempts and taunts the three Darling children, Wendy, Michael and John, with tales of pirates, fairies and a land where no one will tell them what to do. Seduced, they follow him home to Neverland – but Greig’s Neverland is a harsh and hostile land where the Lost Boys must fend for themselves, often going hungry if Peter fails to bring them home food.

The boys flock to Wendy like bees to lavender, demanding that she tell them stories and generally look after them. Their biggest adversary, apart from hunger, is Captain Hook – here kilt-wearing, tattooed and fearsome in appearance – the one-handed pirate chief.

Tiffany’s staging is often visually very striking. Tinkerbell is depicted as a tiny flickering ball of flame, not entirely dissimilar to the fiery, molten rivets that are thrown about by the young lads working on the Forth Bridge. The flying apparatus is also always visible and the characters bounce and clamber across the set in a manner reminiscent of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (albeit with the wires and harnesses on display); Peter even, at one point, takes a stroll down one side of the Barbican's proscenium arch. But the production is hampered by an uncertainty of tone and a certain acoustic muddiness, whole lines of dialogue get swallowed up or are only half-audible.

There’s a lack of tension in many of the scenes and an excess of rawness in others. Peter’s fury on finding that Wendy has grown older is unsettling and frightening (and made the young girl sitting next to me start to cry) but other potentially potent moments, such as when Peter brings a poisoned Tinkerbell back to life or the final approach of Hook's crocodile nemesis (represented by a sole reptilian eye), feel rather rushed and lacking in magic.

Davey Anderson’s Scottish music - a collage of folk tunes and working men’s songs - is evocative and Laura Hopkins' set is clever and versatile, with segments of the Forth Bridge revolving to reveal the vines and forests of Neverland.

Kirsty Mackay, as Wendy, strikes a good balance between a girl thirsty for adventure and a woman forced to play mother to a whole tribe, while Kevin Guthrie captures something of both the romance and isolation of Peter, the eternal boy, untouched by time, unburdened by memory, utterly free but also forever alone

Reviewed for musicomh

Architecting at the Barbican

Architecting, an ambitious exploration of emotional and social repair, is stimulating and exciting and messy and frustrating in equal measure.

Devised by the TEAM (Theatre of the Emerging American Moment) in association with the National Theatre of Scotland the piece began life as a BAC Scratch commission in 2006 before a much expanded version drew plaudits last year at Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre in 2008 and at New York’s Performance Space 122 earlier this year.


As the audience enters the theatre a woman is already on stage crooning in country-and-western fashion as her companion strums a guitar on his guitar. A bottle of JD sits on a nearby table and, behind her, the walls are papered in Tyvek wrap; a couple of CCTV monitors flicker from the corners of the versatile wooden box that forms the centre of Nick Vaughan’s set (and, by turns, represents a New Orleans bar, a service station, and a pony cart).

Perhaps as a result of its multi-stranded structure, it takes a little while for the production to warm up. In the first few minutes numerous themes and ideas are introduced, from a thermodynamic view of history to the architectural merit of Chartres Cathedral; only after a while do the various threads (to an extent) separate themselves.

Architect Carrie Campbell arrives in a post-Katrina New Orleans to oversee the completion of a new property project – a TND (Traditional New Development) called Phoenix Meadows – that had been designed and originated by her late father. The locals, those that remain, are not altogether happy with this re-imagining of a traditional American community, this re-packaging of their city into neat, polished boxes.

This present day scenario – the battered yet proud American south – is paralleled with another period of reconstruction, the one that occurred after the American Civil War, and this is viewed through the particular prism of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. Mitchell herself is a presence on stage (played by Lana Lesley as an intelligent woman slightly unsettled by the freight train success of her novel) as is her iconic heroine Scarlett O’Hara.

Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind is further tied to the present day narrative by a storyline involving a boorish Hollywood producer who is trying to get a new production of the book off the ground; this time with a black director and with various trims, tweaks and wholesale re-writes having been made to bring it more into keeping with modern sensibilities, especially in regard to race. The producer suggests turning one of the O’Hara servants into Martin Luther King’s grandfather and making him an early campaigner for civil rights, but the director, having started to read the novel for the first time (his parents wouldn’t allow it in the house) becomes fascinated with the book and its depiction of the American South.

Rachel Chavkin’s multimedia production is hugely ambitious in scope and execution: characters both real and imagined happily interact, while music and video, dance and movement, all form a part of the collage. The performers all play numerous roles and gender and race provide no barrier to their character-hopping; at various points throughout the production every person on stage dons a hoop skirt and corset to play Scarlett O’Hara and the most famous exchange of dialogue between Scarlett and Rhett is delivered by the two male cast members.

There are numerous moments of humour that stop it from being too overwhelming, but at near on three hours, though it rarely lags, it does sometimes feel like the work of an artist who can’t help but keep adding and refining until some original clarity is lost. This is a complex but intriguing piece, a thing of many bricks, and it’s not always as coherent as it could be but in the last few minutes, as Carrie (compellingly played by Libby King, the emotional core of the show) delivers her final plea, everything else falls away and the audience are left listening to the cathedral-echo of her voice alone.

Reviewed for musicOMH.

Black Watch at the Barbican (Take Two)

I was tempted to let that last line stand, after all what can one hope to add to the waves of acclaim that have followed this production since its Edinburgh debut in 2006? A production that is near enough finished its London run anyway? Not that much. But I feel the need to say something and, obviously, it was not merely OK, it was rather brilliant – and it passed the Mother Test with flying colours. Despite her pained expression when informed she was going to the Barbican, and despite the fact that the Barb lived up to expectations by being roped off in places necessitating much wondering up and down stairs to find a bar that had any wine to serve us, my mum said it was the best thing I’ve ever taken her to see – a fact only partly influenced by the fact she found herself standing by the fountains next to Ralph Fiennes when she went out on the terrace to smoke her pre-show cigarette.

I also loved it; it certainly deserves all the praise it has attracted. John Tiffany’s National Theatre Of Scotland production creates a rare harmony between the visual and the emotional. While the material mined from the interviews with the Black Watch soldiers is already full of powerful stories – like that of the soldier, who having survived an attack that left his friends dead, keeps rebreaking his injured arm every time it begins to heal – the power of these stories are enhanced by the scenes of dance and mime, which successfully convey the things left unsaid in this intense, insular military world: the longing for those left at home, the men’s sense of fear and frustration.

The ensemble cast have a fantastic rapport with one another, conveying the mutual protectiveness and the intense sense of connection that comes from co-existing together in a place where you may need to kill or could be killed at any time, and while I partially agree with the Whingers, in that it wasn’t quite the sum of parts, it contained so many separate wonderful moments – the pool table, the final tainted Tattoo – that it didn’t really matter. Anyway, I could go on – at some length – but I suspect it’s all been said already.

Black Watch at the Barbican

It was OK.

Backlog

Aah, I have a backlog! Lots of theatre seen, much of it good, but a lack of time to actually write about it all. So since I now have a window of, oh, some minutes I’m going to try and rectify that in at least a semi-coherent fashion.

First up, Many Roads To Paradise at the Finborough, Stewart Permutt’s warm-hearted and kind play about the lives of six disparate characters. Is ‘kind’ a relevant adjective for describing a play? Yes, in this case I think it is. This is a play full of warmth and wit and affection for its characters despite their flaws, their failings. As I said, it concerns six people, whose lives we come to realise are all interconnected. There is Martin, a middle aged Jewish travel agent who arranges to meets a man 20 years his junior on a gay dating website. Then there is his colleague Helen, who is in a long term relationship, thirty years and counting, with Avril, a strident and formidable type who wears driving gloves and has been hitting the Chardonnay with a vengeance after losing her job as a radio producer. And there is Helen’s mum, Stella, old and frail, once a milliner, a maker of hats, but now blind. She is in an old people’s home where she has developed a friendship with her new nurse, a Muslim woman from Somalia. Their growing closeness is starting to make Helen jealous. This is an admirably unsentimental view of old age. The elderly Stella is fragile and fading but ancient resentment still resurfaces within her, fresh. She asks after long dead friends and gobbles bananas as if they may be stolen from her at any minute.

I suspect the production elevates the play into something more than it is. With a lesser cast, its various coincidences and predictabilities may have grated more (a friend who also saw the play commented ‘If I ever see an African nurse portrayed as a bitch, I think I shall cheer.’ Here, of course, the nurse is as decent and caring and patient as it gets). The cast are superb, particularly Gillian Hanna as the dumpy Helen, who has become accustomed to being told she is ugly, lumpy and useless, and Daniel Hill as the nervy, needy Martin. And then there is Miriam Karlin’s Stella, frail herself, with stick limbs and near translucent skin, but still with much fight in her.

Going back further, some two weeks now, and there was Simon Stephens’ Harper Regan at the National. This to me was a play of moments, rather than a satisfying whole, with Lesley Sharp’s performance a gleaming light at its centre. The things that have stayed with me are the image of Sharp’s Harper collapsing to the floor, a slow fall, in her mother’s living room; the sense of escalating menace supplied by Jack Deam’s coked up, bigoted hack reporter in a grotty northern pub; a moment of tenderness between strangers in a glossy, anonymous urban hotel room; and the final glimmer of hope and potential healing in a morning sun-warmed garden.

Sharp is quite amazing in the role, her Harper is a woman under water, limbs and tongue weighted down. She seems forever out of step, askew, she talks where no words are needed. The play though, demands a lot of its audience. It is only in the second half that you discover the pressure she’s been under, the reason her behaviour is so odd (by which time some people had given up on it and departed to the bar). I liked the fact that the play parcelled out its story to you slowly, making you wait. But I still found the whole thing less than the sum of its parts, Harper’s journey failed to convince me, it didn't move me as much as it might have.

I also saw Hugh Hughes’ Story Of A Rabbit, which has been touring for a while and has now landed in the Barbican Pit. I remember reading Helen Smith’s description of this piece last year and being intrigued; I was worried that the knowledge that Hugh Hughes was the creation of an actor, that this ‘emerging Welsh multimedia artist’ was simply a persona, would be a barrier to my enjoyment. That the blurring of fact and fiction would somehow clash with a subject as emotive and personal as the death of a parent. But it really didn’t matter, taken on its own particular terms, this production was incredibly effective. Hughes’ eye-wide enthusiasm seemed ever so fitting, well-meshed with the collage style of the production, blending music and photographs and amiable audience banter (and cups of tea), and by the time he was describing is dad’s final fall as a kind of super heroic, acrobatic tumble, a daring dive into death, my throat had tightened and I was aware of the building prickle of tears.

Gosh, that brings us about up to date. Yesterday I saw Chris Goode’s …Sisters at the Gate, but to write about that requires a little more time and thought, so I shall hold off for now.

Mass Hysteria

"Men in first; women wait here." So said the ushers at Hysteria, the new production to be staged the umbrella of BITE. We were queuing on the rather grand Hogarth staircase in St Barts waiting to see a show by the Brazilian company Grupo XIX de Treatro. This piece is set in a 19th century mental institution and, as it portrays a world strictly divided on gender lines, so the audience are divided, the men made to sit separately on one side of the room - the hospital's ornate Great Hall - while the women sat on benches and on the floor.

As a subject matter it's not unfamiliar. Many of the expected elements were there: much shrieking and writhing on the floor, generic 'mad' acting, women with wild hair mumbling about making themselves pretty for Jesus. And yet, despite that, it was quite an affecting piece of theatre. This was due to the way the female members of the audience were pulled into the world of the play – sometimes literally – being taken by the hand and led in a dance or asked simple, curious questions: "how old are you?" "Do you have a husband?" Though the rather pinch-lipped woman who was asked, "are you an onanist?" did not, perhaps understandably, seem too enamoured of the experience.

I was one of those sat on the floor. And, sitting there, cross-legged on the worn wood, being told what to do and where to sit, I felt transported back to school, to the assembly hall – I felt appropriately small and willing to do as I was bidden. Which, fortunately, wasn’t that much, bar a bit of twirling. Others were less, or more, lucky depending on your attitude to audience participation. Some women got invited to stand on a bench and chant along with the inmates or were interrogated by the ‘matron’ figure. The underlying theme was one of rules and their breaking, with many of the women depicted locked away for not conforming or for being excessively sexual. By being drawn into the performance, into this world, it forced me to think about what is deemed acceptable and what is not, for women today, for anyone.

Fiona Mountford, writing in the Standard, called the production ‘irredeemably dire’ which I find an excessively harsh reaction. While it’s true, the women never develop as individual characters and their accents do no favours to the coherence of the piece, it still has its own power. Being there, on display, in front of the male section of the audience, at times forced to perform, was quite a strange experience, and for all its mess and clutter – it is rather a messy thing – it cast a certain spell.

The Harder They Fall

The sign on the door of the Barbican theatre warned: ‘This performance contains smoking, guns, a haze machine and intermittent loud music.’ Loud music – at a musical? Is that the theatrical equivalent of ‘Caution, contents may be hot?’ At first this made me laugh when I read it, but after some consideration I think this degree of detail in signage could be a good thing, indeed they could well have continued: ‘This performance contains alarming polyester trousers, some ineptly thrown stage punches and an unnecessary degree of exposition in the second half.’

Actually that’s possibly a tad harsh. I enjoyed the show, The Harder They Come, Theatre Royal Stratford East’s staging of the famous Jamaican film, a great deal.

A big hit at the original theatre in both 2006 and 2007 it has now been picked up by the Barb for this year’s BITE line up. Which is gladdening, as it's one of the most entertaining things I've seen at the Barbican in a good long while. I’ve never seen the film on which it is based but the plot, which unfolds in flashback, is classic rise-and-downfall stuff. Ivan, charismatically played by Rolan Bell, wants to make a go off it in the music business but his efforts in this direction are thwarted by the local Mr Big, who insists on owning the rights of his songs and soaking up any profits. So Ivan turns to the drug trade to fund his dreams. A tussle with the police leads to him becoming an outlaw, something of a celebrated rebel. But, of course, it can’t end well with him and it doesn’t.

The production is split very distinctly. In the first half we get one musical number after another – all superbly performed – but little in the way of plot bar Ivan’s attempts to woo Elsa, the Preacher’s daughter (this mainly involves a comic misunderstanding about an invite to go for ‘a ride’ on his bike). In the second half this ratio of plot to music flips completely, as if someone suddenly remembered that a story was in order and there is a rush to cram everything in before the curtain falls. So suddenly the songs give way to the story of Ivan’s climb to notoriety and subsequent fall. The audience is bombarded with police corruption, shootings and sickly babies to the point where it is slightly disorientating. Fortunately the production’s ramshackle energy and sense of celebration carries it over these rougher moments. The songs help a lot: Many Rivers To Cross, You Can Get It If You Really Want, Higher and Higher and, of course, the title track. As does the fact that both Bell and Joanna Francis, as Elsa, have excellent voices.

There are also plenty of nice touches that go some way to softening the often soulless Barbican space. As the audience file in, the cast are milling about, both onstage and off, in the stairwells and balconies and later, the police chief, orders the house lights up and starts to interrogate the audience. Oh and there was smoking and guns as promised, though the latter sounded like a kid's cap gun when it was fired, quite why we were deemed to need prior warning wasn't clear.

You’d have thought the Barb’s signage efforts could be better employed elsewhere in the building. A confusing place to navigate at the best of time, large sections had been roped off for some event or other, and it took me an age to find the friend I was supposed to meet as our usual rendevous point - the bar - was out of bounds.

Bathtubs, Bangkok and the Barbican

It's been a while since I entered the eerie interior of the Barbican. On Tuesday night it felt particularly odd: more staff than visitors, the evening's concert already well underway.

I was there to see Tough Time, Nice Time, the latest BITE commission from Ridiculusmus. Before the show I ran into the West End Whingers, who were, perhaps unsurprisingly, in the vicinity of the bar. Well, I say ran into, they were semaphoring at me from the adjacent table for a good five minutes before I noticed them.

We then spent a further five minutes being bewildered by the lifts (not all of them go down to the right level for the Pit theatre because, well, because it's the Barbican), arriving in the right place just in time to see an overzealous usher extracting dawdlers from the men's bathroom.

So: Tough Time, Nice Time. The lights come up on two men sitting together in a bathtub, which we soon establish is in a Bangkok sauna. The two men sip beer and they talk. And they talk. For 70 minutes. That's it. But, strange and static as this show is, it's also quite fascinating, a repellent yet compelling watch.

The two men, played by Jon Haynes and David Woods, are both ex-pats, Germans. One is a lawyer, the other a hack writer of some description. They don't know each other, have little in common, bar a shared nationality (though while the website blurb says both characters are German, Haynes' accent bore little trace of this I thought). Their conversation meanders as conversation tend to do, awash with film references and cynical jokes. Some of what they say is shocking, some of it banal.

The lawyer is keen to tell his story to the writer, to share his past with him. But, if there's a theme at all in this piece, it's that stories, and the telling of them, are subject to all manner of factors. Truth is a loose concept. The writer is in turn fascinated with atrocities and drops references to genocide into the conversation with the same easy flippancy with which he discusses the plot of The Constant Gardner, real horrors and celluloid fictions bleeding together as he speaks.

Haynes and Woods have a real rapport, unsurprising as they've been working together for 15 years, and the show is tautly written, but the sheer unpleasantness of the men they portray, for me overrode the play's ideas about the ownership of stories, about how memories have become commodities, another thing that can be sold.

Naturally, after the show we felt duty bound, compelled to discuss these issues further, something that could only really be done in the pub over the road with a couple of bottles of red as an aid to intellectual clarity.

A Musical Interlude

Still Not At The Theatre. But I have been At The Barbican.

Sometimes when I go to the theatre I feel rather over-burdened with information – I’ve read the previews, heard the word of mouth whispers – I rarely, if ever, go and see a production without having some grasp of what it is I’m going to get, but since my knowledge of classical music is almost laughably poor, when I go to a concert I am freed of any sense of expectation. It is rather liberating and exactly what I wanted, as I had been feeling rather poked and prodded by life this week and simply wanted to sit in the dark for a couple of hours and let pleasant sounds float over me.

The concert was part of the Barb’s Mostly Mozart season and featured the Bach Brandenburg Concerto No 6, the Mozart Violin Concerto No 5 and Piazzolla’s Four Seasons. And, well, I don’t really have the vocabulary to do it justice, but I enjoyed it hugely. I went in feeling all tense and tired and tightly knotted and came away feeling less so.

Ooh and, as I type, the rather biblical deluge outside my window has abated and a tiny sliver of sunlight is just about discernable, which is a good thing indeed as I am due to visit the Open Air Theatre at Regent’s Park on Monday and was starting to fear that it would be the Under Water Theatre if this continued.