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.

Under The Blue Sky at the Duke Of York's

I’m sure I’ve asked before what the collective term for a group of bloggers is. I’m not sure what consensus was reached on that matter but it was just such a group that descended on the Duke of York’s Theatre on Tuesday to see a preview of David Eldridge’s Under The Blue Sky, a production featuring her off Doctor Who, him off The It Crowd and them off Cranford. There were 14 of us in total, including Helen Smith, City Slicker and Paul in London, in a group outing arranged by the Whingers (and, appropriately, as with most school trips, someone was late, someone left their jacket behind, but no one was sick on the coach home fortunately, not that there was a coach home).

David Eldridge’s play, first staged at the Royal Court, in 2000, is divided into three sections, each concerning the relationship between a pair of teachers (how apt that it opens just as the school holidays begin). The first section, featuring Chris O’Dowd (him off The IT Crowd) and Lisa Dillon, was possibly the weakest. O’Dowd plays Nicholas, a bit of shit, who though aware that his fellow teacher Nicola has a bit of a thing for him, still uses her as his ‘best friend’, comfortable in the knowledge that there’s nothing she won’t do for him. Nicola is however incredibly shrill and clingy, which has the effect of diluting much of the sympathy you feel for her. Neither is particularly likeable but the sequence has an increasing rawness that I found compelling (up until, that is, Nicola does something so completely far-fetched that any sense of emotional plausibility was lost, for me at least).

The middle section is the one featuring Catherine Tate, now recovered after the ankle injury that caused them to cancel the first preview. She plays the school man-eater a role she is adept at despite wearing the world’s most unflattering dress, a nasty brown jersey thingy, belted at the waist. We first see her as she is luring the geeky Dominic Rowan to bed with a bit of fantasy role play, her playing a military nurse tending to his war wounds, the prospect of which gets him rather (over) excited. Eldridge takes this sitcom-ish set up, the misguided drink fuelled liaison between two colleagues and rapidly subverts it, their exchange takes on a sinister turn, laced with blackmail and self-loathing. The tension and unease in this scene was handled incredibly well and I enjoyed not knowing how it would end up, not knowing quite how far it would go. Tate’s role too appeared quite caricatured at first and whenever she raised her voice, used a certain tone, it did bring to mind some of her television comedy characters (I’ve not seen her in Who though which I gather puts me in a very small minority indeed) but her character and performance gradually, subtly, softened allowing the audience a glimpse of underlying damage.

The final pairing of Francesca Annis and Nigel Lindsay was quite wonderful. They play a couple of friends who spend most of the school holidays together and are clearly besotted with one another, but she has held back, fearing the age barrier will be too big a hurdle. This is a beautiful scene, superbly played and written, there is a real sense of maturation in the writing as the play progresses, a sense of a writer testing the limits of his abilities and finding them pleasingly elastic.

After the play David Eldridge unwisely wandered past the pub that we decamped to for a post-theatre glass of something and was, for his sins, subsequently bombarded with questions about prop knives and onstage food hygiene. That’ll teach him.

Get Happy

If I wanted to watch a gentle comedy drama about middle class marital woe, I’d switch on ITV around 9 of an evening. I wouldn’t head to the National. (Well, obviously, I would, because I did, but I wouldn’t make a habit of it).

Anyway, the play in question was Lucinda Coxon’s Happy Now?, a gentle comedy drama about middle class marital woe which is being staged in the National's Cottesloe Theatre.

It stars Olivia Williams as Kitty, the emotionally overstretched executive of a major cancer research charity, who spends her time trotting between conferences. Her husband has recently chucked in his high-flying legal job to retrain as a teacher and she has two young children at home to cope with as well as an ailing estranged father. She also has to deal with the amorous attentions of a fellow charity big-wig she meets in a hotel after one of her conferences. With her husband oblivious to her unhappiness, the man’s advances start to look all the more appealing.

The set reminded me of a hotel in Antwerp I stayed in the early 1990s, all polished dark wood and beige carpets - no soul. It didn’t seem like the kind of place these characters would actually live, where anyone would actually live, however it did allow for a bit of impressive set acrobatics from actor Dominic Rowan, while pretending to clamber drunkenly into a garden.

I learned a number of things from Coxon’s play. I learned that it is impossible to maintain any degree of grace and poise while having a cushion fight and wearing a wrap dress. I learned that informing parents that their young daughter is definitely not gifted is the best way to terminate a dinner party. I learned that my Eastern European phobia about wasting good food is so hardwired it kicks in even when it’s just bags of pretend Thai takeaway that are being chucked in the bin. Oh, and I learned that a broken Cindy doll representing, I think, broken childhood hopes and dreams makes an excellent impromptu cake decoration.

Other aspects of the play were rather less enlightening. Just as in the superbly tense Swedish portion of the Family Plays at the Royal Court, I found myself waiting for the cuddly and inoffensive ‘Gay Best Friend’ to betray Kitty in some way or turn out to be a bigger twit than the husband and his wanky friend Miles combined, to do something, anything – surely such a bland, one-note character wouldn’t have made it through the first draft – but no, nothing. I also thought it was telling that both Kitty’s two children (not to mention the GBF’s pool attendant boyfriend) remained conveniently invisible throughout; the kids weren’t seen as people but just as another problem on Kitty’s already over-burdened shoulders. And, Christ, it’s a good thing I’d polished off my G&T before the interval or the scene where a character’s (guess which one) emotional growth was depicted via the release of a pink helium balloon, might have resulted in some involuntary gin spittage.

I’m picking a lot of holes in the play, I know, but I did enjoy parts of it, especially those (too short) moments involving Ann Reid as Kitty’s frightful mother. In fact I thought most of the actors did a decent job with underwritten parts, particularly Stanley Townsend as the portly but charming hotel lothario. But while I chuckled quite frequently throughout, the play as whole left me more irritated than anything.