And I and Silence at the Finborough Theatre

Confinement comes in many forms. The windows don’t have to have bars; lack of opportunity, lack of money and food, lack of hope: these will do the job just fine.

Naomi Wallace’s new play, And I and Silence, hops back and forth over a period of nine years in 1950s America. Dee and Jamie, two young women, one white and one black, meet in prison and become close. Together they make plans for their future. They don’t hope for much: a job they can hold onto, a room they can share, the chance to walk through the city arm in arm and drink ice-cold soda. Their dreams are small but even so they are to prove incompatible with the realities of the segregated world outside their cell.

The women rehearse together for the roles they will need to play to get by: the good servant, dedicated, capable, graceful and uncomplaining. They practice polishing invisible silver, dusting invisible shelves. They remind each other there is a line that must never be crossed, there are things they must never succumb to and there are times when the only choice left to them will be to run, though even then they must always take care never to forget their bucket and brush.

By having different performers play the characters’ older and younger selves, Caitlin McLeod’s production highlights how much the hard passing of time has shaped and changed them: the optimism of old has been dulled and something vital and bright has been drained away. While both women knew well the taste of hardship – it brought them to prison in the first place – it had not broken them; it takes a constant pattern of let downs and disappointments, an ever empty stomach, and the knowledge that even on the outside they can never really be free, to tip them over.

Produced in association with Clean Break, a company whose work explores the experiences of women in the criminal justice system, Wallace’s play has a transcendent quality; its reach stretches beyond its setting. In some ways the play has parallels in Chloe Moss’ This Wide Night (also written for Clean Break), a contemporary account of two women trying to reshape their lives on the outside and doing what they must in order to survive.

Wallace’s approach is more lyrical; her language has heat and rhythm and occasionally the dialogue is rhymed, something which is initially jarring but quickly becomes part of the play’s particular texture. It has an elegance of structure, alternating scenes of the past and present, and uniting the two threads only at the end in a moment of potent circularity. There’s a more general resonance in the way the characters rehearse their actions and behaviour, learning their lines by rote, perfecting each scene.

The performances are strong on all sides, managing to convey both a sense of unity as well as the crucial one of difference, a wearing down and wearing out. Cat Simmons and Cherrelle Skeete play the two faces of Jamie, the former a little less buoyant than the latter, her spirit slowly sapped. There’s a more overt gulf between Lauren Crace’s bright-eyed and impulsive young Dee, a woman who’ll exact gleeful revenge on a cruel prison guard even it means weeks in the hole, and Sally Oliver as the same character nine years on, still given to impulse but with some central spark starting to fade.

McLeod’s production – set in one room that, appropriately, doubles as both their cell and the sparse, cell-like place the characters end up in – has some issues with the tonal differentiation of scenes, particularly at the beginning, but as the split between what the women hope for and the harsh reality that overtakes them becomes ever wider, the piece becomes stronger, building to a bleakly inevitable – if slightly overwrought - but still moving conclusion.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Ordinary Days at the Trafalgar Studios

As one of the characters in Adam Gwon’s Ordinary Days points out, her Manhattan is not a Gershwin Manhattan. And yet the soundtrack of her city is not entirely unfamiliar either; it’s literate and witty and inward-looking, full of lyrics about Virginia Woolf, the pairing of red wine with fish and the labyrinthine floor-plan of the Met Museum. It’s well-read and tinged with angst, full of echoes of Jason Robert Brown, Jonathan Larson and Michael John LaChiusa. But while there’s a strong sense of having visited this place before, its characters are recognisable in a good way and it contains a decided emotional charge, balancing out cynicism with sentiment - though at times veering too much towards the latter.

Ordinary Days is a song cycle made up of two New York stories that touch each other without intersecting. Claire and Jason (played by Julia Atherton and Daniel Boys ) are a young couple who finally decide to take the plunge and move in together, but instead of drawing them closer together, this only accentuates the distance between them. Deb is a grad student who’s been so busy running away from the cul-de-sac she grew up on that she’s lost sight of what’s she’s running towards. When her lost thesis notes find their way into the hands of artist’s assistant, Warren, he views the event as kismet, a fated moment, while she just wants the damn things back so she can appease her professor.

The closer Jason tries to get to Claire the more she withdraws. Atherton and Boys have a crabby chemistry which they milk on their duets, particularly during the snippy passive-aggressive back and forth of ‘Fine’. And Atherton demonstrates just how skilled a performer she is when tackling the show’s big emotional number, I’ll Be Here; this is a song that could so easily have come across as mawkish, as manipulative, and yet in her hands it’s delicate and devastating, a genuinely moving moment.

Alexia Khadime, as Deb, and Lee William-Davis, as Warren have slightly less to play with. Khadime’s sweetly soaring voice stands in marked contrast with her character’s fractious personality and she’s gifted with – and revels in – the funniest lines; William-Davis is also endearing though he doesn’t quite nail the needy geekiness of Warren.

Sometimes the writing becomes bogged down with cliché –there’s a riff about overly complicated coffee ordering which feels tired out before it's finished – but director Adam Lenson keeps things light. He knows how to play up the musical’s qualities, having staged it at the Finborough Theatre in 2008 prior to this re-staging in the similarly sized, Trafalgar Studio 2. Indeed space is something of an issue here. While the studio allows for a superb degree of intimacy (with both the performers and with the audience - you could hear each teary sniffle as the show hit its emotional crescendo), it’s also constrictive. With the musicians on stage, the limited floor space is limited further and the performers have little room for manoeuvre, especially when entering and exiting.   The final visual flourish, the moment that unites the two stories, also loses some of its power as a result – if ever a scene needed a higher ceiling, it’s this one.

Alistair Turner’s set is a collection of slightly scuffed white cubes, a basic reproduction of the New York skyline which also double as a set of shelves onto which objects can be placed; this twinning is particularly apt as this is a musical much concerned with our personal debris, the things we hold on to and the things we choose to let go. 

Reviewed for Exeunt

The Potting Shed at the Finborough Theatre

Like Cold Comfort Farm’s Aunt Ada Doom, Graham Greene’s infrequently performed play is preoccupied by something dark at the bottom of the garden. The play has not been seen on a London stage in forty years and, on watching it, it’s possible to grasp why this has been the case. Greene’s fixation with issues of faith and the rather ponderous way in which the play unfolds root it squarely in the past; however as a counterpoint to his work as a novelist, if only to illustrate that what works well on paper doesn’t always translate to the stage, it is an intriguing piece.

In the play Greene returns to a familiar theme: the answered prayer. The Callifer patriarch, a renowned rationalist and chum of Bertrand Russell, is on his death bed and his friends and family have been summoned to his side – with the exception of his son James who has been all but ostracised from family life following a mysterious incident in the potting shed when he was a boy. The first half of the play is concerned with the now middle-aged James’ desire to discover just what happened to him and why it has so split the family (an uncle who became a Catholic priest has also been painted out of the picture). While the play contains some pleasingly crisp lines of dialogue, the plotting is repetitive with James continually pleading with his mother to tell him what happened – for he has no memory of the event, no memory of his childhood at all – and her continually refusing to bend. Eventually, with the help of his inquisitive niece, James is able to track down his uncle and discover the cause of the family rift; the play hinges on this moment of revelation and the scene between James and his uncle is the strongest in the play. But it takes an age to get there; there’s a stiff quality to the early scenes and while Greene does appear to have tried to build a sense of tension and mystery, it doesn’t quite come off. Svetlana Dimcovic’s production for the Finborough is solidly staged and draws some strong performances from the cast. Paul Cawley, as James, slowly develops from the passive and baffled man of the opening scenes, through methedrine-fuelled desperation to dig up the truth, to a kind of contentment. Martin Wimbush, in his brief turn as the whisky-sodden Father William Callifer is also impressive, giving a sense of man who has lost some vital part of his himself, and Zoe Thorne is appealing as Anne, James’ young niece whose openness stands in marked contrast to her family’s tendency to bury the things they find disagreeable. The main hurdle, which this revival can’t quite get over, is the crux of the play itself. Greene’s depiction of faith and its loss, the literalness of it, feels heavy-handed and forced on the stage; to contemporary eyes there is even the danger of it appearing daft. Interestingly, with the exception of Anne and perhaps also of Father William, the characters simply don’t take shape in the same manner as the characters of his novels do; they seem flat in comparison, despite being stood there in front of the audience. That said, the play has an appealing oddness about it and as a thing of its time and for those who know Greene's work well, it is of real interest, particularly in the way it echoes themes from his novels.  Reviewed for musicOMH

Quality Street at the Finborough Theatre

First performed in 1901 in New York, J.M Barrie’s romantic comedy was a hugely popular thing in its day, and did indeed inspire the brand of chocolates that still bear its name. Though there was a time when it was oft-revived, the play hasn’t been staged in London since 1946, but the Finborough, who also recently staged Barrie’s What Every Woman Knows, have decided to rectify that, reviving it as part of their continuing Rediscoveries season.

Louise Hill’s production is light of foot and warm of heart. Barrie’s play is set during the Napoleonic Wars; when dashing doctor Valentine Brown enlists in the army, Phoebe Throsell abandons her hopes of marrying him and resigns herself to life as a faded old maid and reluctant school teacher. When he returns some years later, Phoebe is stung by the fact he thinks she has not aged well, that he seems to find her weary and beaten-down, so she pretends to be the flighty young thing she presumes all men desire. She lets her hair down (literally, loosing her ringlets from her school mistress’s cap) and dresses up in what she had once hoped would be her wedding gown; she simpers and giggles. The transformation is such that Brown does not recognise her and Phoebe ends up masquerading as her own gauche young niece, Livvy, her deception becoming more and more tangled as events progress. Eventually Brown ends up escorting young ‘Livvy’ to a ball to mark the Battle of Waterloo and she is pursued by every red-blooded and red-coated man in attendance.

Though Barrie’s play occasionally oozes sentiment it is not without charm. The scenes with Phoebe and her invented niece are pleasingly nimble and witty, and beneath the good natured sheen Barrie seems particularly attuned to the plight of the unmarried woman without means. Not that he dwells too long on such issues – this is not Harley Granville Barker – and Barrie soon returns to the business of steering his two lovers together.

Louise Hill (who also directed What Every Woman Knows) presents a faithful production which contains just the right amount of knowingness. It’s a difficult balance to strike and she hits it. It’s played fairly straight, with only the faintest hike of an eyebrow. Claire Redcliffe pitches her performance perfectly as Phoebe, bright and sparky, self-aware but not too removed. James Russell on the other hand is a touch too arch as Valentine. Though he returns from the war damaged and bandaged, there’s no real sense that he’s a changed man and his sudden interest in Phoebe seems to drop out of nowhere. He’s suitably dashing and has a nice wry manner, but one wishes for a hint of something more beneath the surface. Catherine Harvey brings a level of nuance and warmth to the character of Patty, the Throssels’ maid, whose optimism in regards to matters of love provides a neat contrast to that of Phoebe and her elder sister.

A large cast is squeezed with ease onto the tiny Finborough stage, while Hill manages to orchestrate all the various entrances and exits well and to make, if not exactly a virtue, than at least not a failing of the lengthy and low-tech scene changes.

The play may not be the fizziest or fiercest of comedies – and it contains some lines that are thoroughly steeped in syrup - but it’s entirely possible to see why it was so popular in its time, and in the plight of Phoebe, unmarried and fearful for her future alone, it still has a degree of resonance.

An extended version of a review for The Stage.

Saturn Returns at the Finborough Theatre

Noah Haidle’s play revisits the same character at three pivotal moments in his life. Gustin Novak is first seen as a man of 88, comparatively sprightly and in good health for a man of his age, but desperately, desperately alone. His wife and daughter are long dead and he has to beg and cajole a young nursing assistant to spend time with him. The title of the play refers to an astrological phenomenon involving the orbit of Saturn. Every 30 years or so the planet returns to the same position it was at during a person’s birth and, in doing so, it is meant to herald a major event in a person’s life, a test of character, an emotional upheaval.

Haidle uses this idea as jumping-off point from which to interlace scenes of the older Novak with those from two earlier points in his life, both as a young married man of 28 and as a middle-aged widower of 58. The play, originally staged at the Lincoln Centre in New York in 2008, is infused with a sense of loss. The elderly Novak, living in a house crammed with memories, many of them painful, yearns for company. His middle-aged self is no less needy. He loves his daughter deeply, but their relationship is forever shadowed by the figure of her dead mother and his constant demands end up pushing her away. Even as a younger man Novak’s life is not free from tension; his wife, Loretta, is troubled by the absence of children in their marriage and hints at other losses, a sadness that dogs her days and makes the long hours at home without him tough to bear. Both the writing and the performances of the actors playing Novak over the three periods of his life (Richard Evans, Nicholas Gecks and Christopher Harper) create a sense of consistency of character – they all perch on the floor in front of the armchair rather than sitting in it. Haidle’s use of echoes, of recurring phrases in the dialogue, is elegant and not overstated, but doesn’t quite compensate for the fact that, to be blunt, Novak, at all points in his life, is a bit of a shit. He’s needy, demanding, self-sabotaging and a teller of awful jokes. His repeated digs at fat women leave a sour taste and his quick, cruel tongue is a source of upset for both his wife and his daughter. He’s an alienating figure, for both the women in his life and, at times, the audience. Lisa Caruccio Came plays the three female roles, wife, daughter and the young nurse (whose physical resemblance to the daughter is noted), with sensitivity and sure-footedness. On stage for all but the brief moments it takes to change costumes, she ably switches between the three, differentiating them while also suggesting a sense of cohesion in Novak’s relationship with each of these women, something underlined by the fact that the play text requires these three characters be played by the same performer. The three actors playing Novak go some way to rendering this often spiky and difficult character palatable without ever completely defanging him. Gecks has perhaps the hardest task as the middle aged incarnation of the man, selfish and volatile, yet not without charm, his relationship with his daughter complicated by the pain he still feels at the loss of her mother and his own fear of being alone. Andrew Lenson’s production for the Finborough is suitably intense, the emotional pitch of the piece building gradually as the three versions of Novak begin to share stage space and eventually start to interact; like small town American versions of Dickensian Christmas spirits they plead across the years with their other selves to act differently, to make other choices, but their voices go unheeded. While the tone of the writing is unfocused in places and Novak is a hard man to love, the cumulative effect of the piece is fairly potent and it succeeds as a study of need and the self-haunting of memory. Reviewed for musicOMH

The Notebook of Trigorin at the Finborough

Tennessee Williams’ “free adaptation” of Chekhov’s The Seagull was written near the end of his life. Williams was fascinated with Chekhov’s play and his version, transplanted to the American South, is infused with his own particular preoccupations. The characters are as much his as Chekhov’s. Arkadina is something of a one-note diva figure, domineering, vain and self-obsessed; she’s the kind of woman who hurls herself dramatically to the floor when she fears she won’t get her own way.

Trigorin is pushed into the foreground and is, by turns, far less submissive and more knowing; seemingly bisexual, he feels that the recognition of his feminine as well as masculine side is a necessary part of being a writer. Nina is delicate and pure yet easily led. Phil Willmott’s production of this intriguing yet difficult play is compelling yet also contains moments of real awkwardness.

While Carolyn Backhouse pitches things well, keeping Arkadina just the right side of caricature, and Stephen Billington’s Trigorin is suitably ambiguous, some of the performances waver. Nonetheless the production is elegantly staged, with Kim Alwyn and Aimee Sajjan-Servaes’s simple set inverted between acts so that the inside of the house becomes the garden and vice versa, and offers a rare chance to see a fascinating if flawed play.

Reviewed for The Stage

Little Fish at the Finborough

Michael John LaChiusa's Little Fish, a musical reworking of two short stories by Deborah Eisenberg that merges the characters from two of her pieces, Days and Flotsam. The result is an intricately written and intriguingly fragmented if ultimately rather insubstantial piece, about finding your feet in a difficult city. But while this new London staging, its European premiere, is nearly always engaging and is well-performed, it seems to expend an awful lot of energy (and perspiration - literally) in order to go a very short distance.


The show began life off-Broadway in 2003, at the Second Stage Theatre, and is now been squeezed into the dinky Finborough Theatre in Earl’s Court. The plot (perhaps too strong a word) concerns Charlotte, a writer who uses her decision to quit smoking as a catalyst to examine her life. Charlotte is always running away from things; she’s been running ever since her abrasive former lover, Robert, told her that she was not a natural born writer; that she was proficient but boring. Following their break up, Charlotte moved – ran – to New York and ended up sharing a flat with the coke-snorting and volatile Cinder.

LaChiusa links together a series of brief scene in New York galleries and night clubs, in Cinder’s dress shop, hopping backwards and forwards in time as he does so in order to show how Charlotte has ended up where she is and to show her growing closeness with her friends Marco and Kathy. In fact what gives the musical its heart and gives Charlotte’s crisis a bit of weight, is LaChiusa’s interest in friendship and its importance in an often hostile urban world: the necessity of connection. Whenever events seem in danger of getting too sugary, he tempers things by allowing violence and illness to intrude into Charlotte’s world, scenes which, for the most part, are well handled.

After relinquishing cigarettes, Charlotte tries to get fit – first by swimming and then by running – and she starts spending large amounts of time at the Y and at the track. It’s a physical manifestation of her unsettledness and insecurity, a feeling unhelped by the constant stream of advice she’s given by other people about all the things she’s doing wrong – wrong technique, wrong footwear: there’s always something.

LaChiusa favours complex rhymes - involving words like 'aquatic' and 'anesthesiology' - and his writing is always interesting even if the show’s main metaphor, little fish in a big pond, feels rather over-extended and forced. The cast attack the material with gusto and Lee William Davies is particularly good as Marco, investing his brief, funny song about finding himself (complete with comedy "oms") with real humour and injecting a flash of anger and pain into his account of being assaulted by his ex-boyfriend. Julia Worsley, on stage throughout as Charlotte, manages the not inconsiderable feat of keeping her self-involved character on the right side of irritating and Alana Maria is suitably fierce as scary flatmate Cinder.

Though it’s by nature an intimate musical, Adam Lenson’s production still feels rather cramped at the Finborough, even with some endearing choreography by Nick Cunningham (the glittery swimming floats are a lovely touch). The band perch atop of Bec Chippendale's clever and versatile blue-brick set, the colour presumably meant to bring to mind a swimming pool, and their playing is excellent throughout. But the Finborough is a small space filled with very bright lights and it became an increasing struggle to ignore the resultant heat. As the characters strode around in their coats, in the midst of a harsh New York winter, the audience turned their programmes into makeshift fans and reached for their water bottles. Unfortunately it’s this discomfort that ends up being the dominant memory of the production.

Reviewed for musicOMH

Country Magic at the Finborough

One can see what drew Phil Willmott to Arthur Wing Pinero’s fable The Enchanted Cottage and made him think it a suitable case for rescuing. For buried beneath the sentimentality of the age, which is laid on pretty thick in places, there is something truly touching.

Written in the early 1920s, Pinero’s play concerns itself (and was one of the first to do so) with the aftermath of the Great War for those left alive: the widowed and the maimed. Having been left permanently disabled, Oliver Bashforth has moved away from London, moved away from his old life, and settled in a secluded country house where he can better avoid the attentions of his overbearing family.

Out of exasperation at their continual interference in his affairs, Oliver decides he needs a wife and proposes a marriage of convenience to Laura, a friendly local woman, who though kind of heart is not much to look at. She is, at first, justifiably hurt by the assumption that she is somehow less of a woman than the pretty city things he once associated with, but she accepts his offer all the same.
They duly marry but soon afterwards something curious happens. The couple become convinced they have fallen under a spell, an enchantment; that they have both undergone some glorious physical transformation. The truth of the matter is obvious enough, but it takes their blind neighbour Hillgrove, another war casualty, to make them see it.

Though the play has been pruned and retitled by Willmott, there’s still a good degree of syrup to wade through. The characters of Bashforth’s family and the local rector and his wife are flat as pancakes, but there are other, more interesting things going on which Willmott brings to the surface. The play is populated with physically and psychologically damaged men trying to find new ways of living. There is a strong background sense of a country reshaping itself, of the struggle faced by those returning home physically and emotionally altered. In this way, the classes have much in common, for Hillgrove’s valet Rigg is missing an arm and the husband of Bashforth’s housekeeper Mrs Minnett died on the battlefield.

But, for all that, it’s not really a play about loss, in fact it’s full of hope that people will heal each other, through love, through friendship; that England will, eventually, heal. That doesn’t excuse it being as stiff and plodding as it is at times – something not helped by Robin Don’s narrow, expressionistic set, with its jags of barbed wire and moody shadows, which doesn’t give the actors much room to move and makes for a rather static staging. The central device, this idea of enchantment, also stretches things to silliness. That such apparently intelligent people would believe such a thing seems absurd, fable or no.

The three central performances help to raise it up a level. As Bashforth, Daniel Abelson is suitably bitter, sharp tempered and cantankerous, stalking around the stage with his walking stick. He seems reluctant to sit still, as if to do so would be a sign of weakness. In the original, Bashforth was supposed to be disfigured, facially scarred as so many were, but here it is his temper that makes him ugly. Victoria Gee, as Laura, perhaps overstates the gawkiness of her character initially but she successfully fleshes out a rather thinly written role.

It is Jamie Hinde who leaves the strongest impression, in a role that could so easily be utterly clichéd, as Hillgrove, the wise, blind neighbour. There is something in his manner that suggests a sea of emotions going on beneath the ever placid surface: true fondness for his friends, recognition of his own loss and, again, that elusive idea of hope.

There is some attempt in the programme notes to connect the play with more recent events, more recent conflicts, but that seems unnecessary. The play is too time specific for those connections to be more than superficial, but that’s not to say the play isn’t resonant, it’s just a more diffuse resonance and, for all its stiffness and sentimentality, there is something very warm and potent about the production.

Reviewed for musicOMH.

The Time of Your Life at the Finborough

The Finborough Theatre has a good track record in digging up treasure. They like to stage plays that have fallen out of fashion or simply been forgotten. Sometimes they strike gold; sometimes not so much.

Written in 1939, William Saroyan’s sprawling barroom play has a lot going for it; it’s warm and engaging, if practically plot-less, and has an endearing faith in human goodness. It was a big hit in its day and won Saroyan the Pulitzer, but while there’s much about it of interest, Max Lewendel’s rather muddy production doesn’t do it many favours.

The Time Of Your Life is set in Nick’s Pacific Street Saloon, a San Francisco honky-tonk, a dive bar with an upright piano, a jukebox in the corner and Tiffany lamps on the tables.

Into this bar come a series of people, many of them liver-pickled and desperate. There are streetwalkers and drunks, a marble game addict, a teller of tall tales, a cop who’s dissatisfied with his job and a would-be comedian and dancer who is skilled at neither art.

Sitting calmly in the middle of this constant human stream is Joe, a man with deep pockets and a generous spirit. He no longer works, choosing instead to spend his days sipping champagne, getting amiably squiffy and studying the world and its vagaries. When his friend and errand boy, Tom, becomes infatuated with a troubled prostitute, Joe does what he can to help them.

In its focus on people on the margins, the play has much in common with other more familiar names of American drama, with Eugene O’Neill and his ilk. There’s a touch of John Fante in there too, I think. But while the play contains mess and desperation in abundance, there’s also hope and a sense of optimism untainted by the coming war in Europe.

Lewendel’s production, however, seems uneasy with the play’s loose, episodic structure; with no real story arc to speak of, the production falters when it should free-flow. It only really hits its rhythm in the shorter second half, aided by a lengthy and very funny, if a little icky, scene where Joe and Tom compete to see how much chewing gum they can each fit in their mouths.

For this production, the Finborough seating as been rejigged to create a suitable barroom feel. Instead of the usual benches, many audience members perch on bar stools; the cast sometimes choose to acknowledge the audience, sometimes not. The cast, it should be pointed out, is vast: easily numbering over twenty. They’ve crammed in so many people that it feels as if, even at full capacity, the audience-cast ratio would be something like 2:1.

Among this number there are some strong performances: while there’s something appealingly oddball about Alistair Cumming’s Joe, those in some of the smaller roles leave the deepest impressions, particularly Payman Jaberi as a sad-eyed Arab man who says little but says it with weight and Emma Vane as the melancholy lady who catches Joe’s eye. Elsewhere accents waver alarmingly and there’s a fair bit of acting that’s rather too ‘big’ for the space.

Saroyan’s play is certainly intriguing and some of that comes through here. But this over-crowded production never quite gets to grips with its idiosyncrasies, never quite milks the richness from the material.

Reviewed for musicOMH

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.

By Jingo!

I paid my first visit to the Finborough in a good long while this week. It appears to have gone all gastropub since I was last there, though I didn’t have time to eat anything. I was running a tad late and didn’t even have time to avail myself of a gin, so, in the opening seconds of the play, when a uniformed waiter sailed in with a cocktail on a tray, I did momentarily wonder if it would be bad form to ask him to pop downstairs and sort me out with a drink.

The Finborough are currently reviving Charles Wood’s Jingo, a dark unsettling farce set in Singapore in 1942. The floor of the theatre has been papered over with a world map, the pink of the British Empire prominent. Susannah Harker plays Gwendoline, an army wife, who is more concerned with the reappearance of former lover Ian than with the imminent Japanese invasion. She is a woman who clearly takes care of herself first, and is implausibly wed to weedy, doltish George, a non-military sort who has been made an honorary major in order to deliver lectures to the troops on the habits of the ‘little yellow men’.

Wood’s play is a bitter thing. The British are depicted as naïve and over-confident, charging into a situation and then retreating when things go awry, leaving the native Chinese to their fate. And though his characters speak in an intensely English manner that is now almost comic, with everything ‘spiffing’ and ‘top notch’ and so forth, the contemporary resonance of the play is considerable.

The cast really throw themselves into it. Susannah Harker is a joy as the divinely self-involved Gwendoline, idly toying with the men in her life for her own amusement; sitting adrift in a ball gown as people flee the country, desperately boarding boats. And Peter Sandys-Clarke is also excellent as George, a priggish and yet deeply pathetic figure, plainly not cut out for battle. Though it appropriates elements of farce, it makes for a rather bleak evening. There are however a number of very memorable scenes, most notably the sight of the broken brigadier with trembling hands begging Gwendoline to spank him - which she duly, if reluctantly, does.

Scenes from Russian Life

What better antidote to a grim, grey May Thursday then a piece of deeply bleak Russian theatre? No, seriously. It doesn’t sound promising and I’ll admit when I read the synopsis, which made liberal use of the words ‘harrowing’, ‘uncompromising’ and ‘human spirit at its lowest ebb’ I wasn’t convinced that this would be quite the thing to haul me out of my current vague malaise. But actually I was pleasantly surprised. Phil Willmott’s adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s second play, The Lower Depths is a spirited and compelling production. It’s on at the Finborough in Earls Court, one of London’s best pub theatres (though, having said that, this actually the first time I’ve been there in something like two years now).

The play is set in a provincial pre-revolutionary Russian doss house inhabited by a thief, a prostitute, a gambler, an alcoholic former actor, an elderly vagrant, and various other characters on the lower margins of society. The set is appropriately grubby, a muddy collage of browns and greys. And things don’t exactly begin well - the play starts with death of a young woman and an awful lot of wailing, making me immediately regret not making better use of the ‘pub’ part of this pub theatre and stealing myself with a pre-show gin (or vodka for that matter, which at least would have been thematically in keeping with the play). However due to Wilmott’s agreeably earthy adaptation, some fine ensemble acting and a healthy streak of black humour, this wasn’t the misery-fest it could have been and it successfully lifted me out of my self-induced fug.

In other news, my lemon tree has gone all wilty again - my excitement over its resurrection was clearly premature.