Joseph K at the Gate Theatre

It begins with a knock at the door. From the moment on his thirtieth birthday when two blandly efficient men in suits arrest Joseph K for an unspecified crime his life starts to crumble. His mobile phone no longer works, a block has been put on his passport and he can only withdraw £20 at a time from a cash point. Even the radio appears to have it in for him. Comedian Tom Basden’s effective contemporary reworking of Kafka’s The Trial is a playful yet tense and sinister piece of writing. The predicament of the lead character slots all too easily into a recognisable world of communicative brick walls and social alienation.

Joseph K, increasingly desperate to escape the charges against him, attempts to battle a system designed to send him in endless loops. He is pitched into an ocean of paperwork, automated telephone systems, and smiling employees with HNDs in empathy but no capacity to actually help him; release is always just teasingly out of reach. Basden takes some targeted swipes, particularly at the inanity of radio talk shows, but the production’s strengths lie in the general sense of powerlessness and impotence Joseph feels in the face of the tyranny of bureaucracy – something that’s as potent as it’s ever been. It’s this idea of inescapability that lingers, this and the idea of an inevitable drip-down: even as his confidence and sanity deteriorate, Joseph is shown treating others with the same offhand callousness with which the system is treating him. Pip Carter, as Joseph K, is suitably business-like and upright to begin with so that his gradual reduction into desperation and, eventually, into mute supplication are all the more unsettling to watch. Basden, Tim Key and Sian Brooke divide the remaining characters between them and this use of recurring faces is used to underscore Joseph’s paranoia. As in Basden’s previous play, Party, Key is particularly effective as a performer, playing both an arrogant dressing gown-clad lawyer who refuses to deal with clients not conversant in Latin and Joseph’s nervy underling at the bank whose career prospects rest on an appraisal he has repeatedly failed to complete. Lyndsey Turner’s production maintains a number of balances, between the comic and the chilling, between a recognisable world and something more absurd and extreme. The tiny Gate stage is made to feel remarkably versatile but the pacing at times is a bit jagged, with frequent scene changes that require the donning and shedding of clothes and the rearranging of furniture; the covering fuzz of white noise doesn’t quite prevent these moments from feeling like lulls and from diluting the otherwise not inconsiderable tension. At times Joseph’s decline can be read as one man’s consumption by mental illness, as he becomes convinced the radio is saying his name and that everyone, his colleagues, and even his brother, is out to get him. But the play twins this with a sense that the system really is out to drive him to edge, that there are walls he’ll never scale no matter how hard he tries and there are innumerable frameworks in place to prevent him from doing just that. Reviewed for musicOMH

How to be an Other Woman at the Gate

Based on a short story from Lorrie Moore’s collection, Self Help, Natalie Abrahami’s production is atmospheric, inventive and full of the language of film and fantasy.

The original story was written as a set of wry instructions and Abrahami retains that device. The ‘you’ of the narrative is Charlene, a twentysomething New Yorker working in an unsatisfying job as a secretary who falls for a man who does not reveal he is married until the requisite number of dates has taken place (“four movies, three concerts, and two-and-a-half museums”) and they are lying in bed together.


Though initially excited by the idea of having an affair, Charlene realises that in becoming a mistress she has, in a sense, become someone else, someone other than herself, a stock character: the Other Woman. The journey of her relationship is a deeply familiar one: erotic and illicit but ultimately unsatisfying. She’s left dancing on her own on New Year’s Eve and is constantly haunted by the presence of the unseen wife, the skier and list-maker of the bed-side photo. Charlene reaches the point where she is seeing her, the wife, the other other woman, everywhere she goes.

By having four actresses play the character of Charlene the production emphasises the distance inherent in Moore’s second person prose. Charlene is both an individual and an everywoman, an archetype. This is heightened by the fact that the performers are all dressed in the black-skirt-and-white-shirt combo of retail assistants, glossy and anonymous, the uniform of transaction; one by one they take Charlene’s expensive beige raincoat and slide their arms into the sleeves, getting a feel of this new skin, grown women playing dress-up. The man, the lover, remains equally familiar yet also absent, a construction, plucked from the pages of a magazine or from the cinema screen, with his scarf draped over his shoulders and his eyes permanently shaded by his trilby. Again the four actresses take turns to play him with Cath Whitefield making the most convincing transition, capturing the stance and manner of this cut-out lover.

Where the production really excels is in its evocation of a particular mid-80s atmosphere. Samal Blak’s simple but versatile set is all black and chrome with an array of high-heeled shoes dotted around the stage that alternatively stand in for lamps, telephones and ashtrays. The lighting is low and smoky and the chosen music (as ever at the Gate) is spot on. The soundtrack is a smooth succession of synth and sax, Sade and Sheena Easton; the choreography meanwhile veers from the slinky and erotic to the comic, the New Year’s Eve nightclub scene a strong example of the latter.

While Abrahami’s production is stylish, well-crafted and filled with little moments of charm and wit, it sometimes dilutes the crispness of the source story and there is always a slight underlying sense that it is wearing a coat that it’s not quite comfortable in.

Reviewed for musicOMH

Micro at the Gate

Pierre Rigal’s follow up to his wonderful solo show Press, also staged at the Gate, is a curious hybrid. Part garage jam, part dance piece, part something else entirely, it’s at times inspired, at times a bit directionless.

Described by Rigal as a ‘physical concert’, Micro is like a rock gig in which the performers are as likely to play each other as their instruments. The tiny Gate stage has been equipped with drum kit, guitars, keyboards and amplifiers, while the band takes the form of a charismatic quartet of French performers, three men and one woman, all clad in black vintage rock T-shirts: Bowie and the Ramones.

In between more straightforwardly performed songs there are sequences in which the group, Melanie Chartreux, Malik Djoudi, Gwenael Drapeau and Julien Lepreux, use one another as human xylophones and turn the demo instructions on the keyboard into a kind of free-form riff. There’s a nice line in wit running through the piece, which is full of inventive instances of physical comedy. Chartreux’s spike-heeled sandals are used as drums and, in one memorable routine, they split into pairs, using alternate arms to play their instruments. It’s made to look effortless but clearly requires a superb level of musicianship and timing.

The choreography revolves totally around the instruments and the music gives the piece its pulse. The merging of the performer with their instrument is a recurring theme, given full weight in a welcome encore where the drummer seems almost as if he is possessed, giggling as he runs around the stage in a kind of drumming frenzy. The instruments are repeatedly used as masks, rendering the performer faceless as they play, half man, half guitar.

From a slow beginning, in which the performers emerge from behind their equipment, crawling on to the stage - a kind of a birth – the piece builds like any gig, the songs getting stronger, taking over.

Not everything works; there’s some slightly wonky robot dancing, an overlong air guitar sequence, and the piece as a whole, goes on a bit too long, but taken on its own unique terms this is a memorable and inventive show. It might not share the same wealth of ideas as the compelling and intense Press, but Micro is an exciting and energetic merging of forms, performed with real wit and skill.

Reviewed for musicOMH

Hedda at the Gate

And, so, to Notting Hill on a sticky, pre-storm Saturday, to the teeny (but fortunately air-cooled) Gate Theatre for Lucy Kirkwood’s modern update of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. I was not overfond of Tinderbox, her first full length play which was at the Bush earlier this year, but this I really enjoyed – with one fairly major reservation. Kirkwood has relocated the play to contemporary Notting Hill, to the streets a stone’s (or a play text’s throw) from the venue itself; her Hedda, still grieving for her father and impulsively married to a man she does not care for, is “marooned in nappy valley with nothing to do.” She has no job – and no real desire to get one – is saddled with a hefty mortgage on a home she never really wanted and, possibly, has a baby on the way. Though her husband adores her (even if he does not really understand her), for Hedda it is hell. So she entertains herself by toying with those around her, mocking and manipulating.

Though it runs to nearly two hours without a break, Carrie Cracknell’s production is riveting, always gripping, and superbly acted by everyone; each performance feels whole, solid. Cara Horgan is a dangerous Hedda, stalking around the two-tier set with her father’s antique pistols (though I did wonder why, when Eli’s manuscript was now carried around on a memory stick, Hedda’s guns had not been updated in any way). Tom Mison is strong of spirit as her husband George, even though he is clearly baffled and awed by his new wife. There is clearly more to him than she gives him credit for. Everyone else – Adrian Bower (the not John Simm one from Elling, Cath Whitefield, Christopher Obi, Alice Patten – adds to the picture

The set design and the use of music in Cracknell’s production is, as ever with the Gate, spot on. As a venue it seems to have a particularly good way with such things. Unkle’s Rabbit In Your Headlights (the one with Thom Yorke on vocals) was just one example of a perfectly judged choice of song.

The crucial problem for me though (and not just me, as I see from the reviews) is that in stripping Hedda of social context, any sympathy for her is lost. She just comes across as monstrously self absorbed and cruel, repellently so. Kirkwood has done her best to get around this, Hedda is still in pain following her father’s death and she clearly views herself as a bad, broken person, unfixable. Horgan too manages to inject some small note of vulnerability into the character. But it’s not enough, or it wasn’t for me. This Hedda is simply too much, too unpleasant, her behaviour malicious and inexcusable.

Unrelated, but the floor seemed to be magnetised at the performance I saw, as both Hedda’s bracelet and that vital memory stick jumped out of her grasp and fell to the ground and had to be scrabbled for.

Even more unrelated, I am off to Belgrade tomorrow, so this blog may go quiet for a week or so.

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.

Speaking In Tongues

There were so many moments of Natalie Abrahami's production of Anne Washburn’s The Internationalist at the Gate that I loved, that I can't quite understand why I didn't enjoy the whole thing more than I did.

For a start, the whole concept was intriguing – an American businessman, Lowell, arrives in unnamed foreign country where he doesn't speak the lingo and doesn't quite understand what's going on around him, and, because the remainder of the cast spend a good proportion of the play conversing in a made up European language, by extension neither do the audience.

The air of dislocation and jet-legged befuddlement created by the production was spot on. And I loved the inter-scene snippets of 1940s music and the neatly choreographed dream/sex sequences that complimented rather than distracted from the material. I also liked its gradual shift from quirky romance to something more sinister and vaguely nightmare-like. I suppose my main problems were with the play itself; I just felt that there were too many narrative avenues that never really went anywhere. And I was never quite sure whether my sympathies were meant to lie with Lowell – the American abroad – or with Sara, the sweet filing clerk at his firm who collects him from the airport. Abrahami certainly seems to be slanting the production towards the latter, but the play doesn’t really allow us to get to know her. There were some vague references to her being mental ill but these were rather brushed aside.

My other problem was that, once Washburn’s premise has been established – once we grasp that this is a language of her own creation onto which any number of possible meanings can be projected – the production loses a little of its impetus. I liked so much about it, there were some quite enchanting moments, but the moments never really knitted together for me.

I stayed on for the post-show talk with the Gate’s artistic directors Carrie Cracknell and Natalie Abrahami and the cast, where they discussed the unique difficulties of staging play where half the dialogue is basically nonsense (I’m sure the Whingers would have an appropriate comment to add at this point, but I shall leave it alone). They revealed that they had christened Washburn’s language Muffle – their abbreviation of Made Up Foreign Language – and Gary Shelford, one of the cast, explained how, no matter how thoroughly you rehearse the lines the brain occasionally injects an English word into the tide of gibberish and he ended up blurting “tumble drier” at an inopportune point on press night.

The Drugs Don't Work

Does a banana muffin and a coffee make for a balanced dinner? I think not. But it’s all I had time to grab as I headed over to Notting Hill after work yesterday to see the Gate Theatre’s production of The Sexual Neuroses of Our Parents.

I had some problems with this one I must admit. It’s a play designed to unsettle – and it does, but not I suspect, always in the ways intended. The play is about a girl called Dora who has learning disabilities and has been on medication since she was a child. Her mother decides to take her off the pills, which have kept her docile, to lift the ‘pharmaceutical curtain’ and rediscover who her daughter is inside. This device is used to explore Dora’s sudden sexualisation. Off the pills, she becomes increasingly uninhibited and fascinated with the physical.

It wasn’t the subject matter that made me feel a little squirmy, rather the play itself, which felt primarily as if it were out to press buttons, to provoke a response, which is fine to a point, but I thought here it was trying a little too hard. It had this overly slick quality, making it near-impossible to get an emotional hook on the action or the characters.

The set appears to have been designed to make the characters look like part of an installation or an experiment, with the audience looking down on them from either side of the stage. The space is filled with a number of black blocks, which the cast shift around as the scene changes require. These scene changes are denoted by little bursts of music (triggered by the actors pressing a buzzer in the corner), during which they dance around, lifting one another up or occasionally jumping over one of the black blocks. There is even a little paper screen that they jump through at the start and I must admit when this happened I did jot the words ‘Legz Akimbo!’ down in my notepad (a reference to the 'educational' theatre troupe in The League Of Gentlemen, if that needs to be clarified).

That’s perhaps a bit harsh, I think I could see what was trying to be achieved, I just thought all these little theatrical devices worked against the material – in fact, I thought the main problem here was the material itself, I just don’t think it was a very good play to start with, too obvious, too button-pushy, as I said. The girl playing Dora, Cath Whitefield, was very good though, pitching the role just right I thought, giving the play a necessary human centre. The play was only ninety minutes long but I felt more than a little fidgety towards the end, though I concede this may have something to do with the twin-pronged sugar and caffeine attack on my system. I should really learn to stick with the gin.

Noh Doubt

Yesterday, after work, I hopped on the Central Line and made my way over to Notting Hill’s Gate Theatre to see Ben Yeoh’s new work, Nakamitsu an adaptation of a classic noh play.

Having done some hasty wikipedia-ing before I left the office, I now know that Noh is a major form of classic Japanese musical drama that has been performed since the 14th century. But, if I’m honest, even armed with this knowledge I still had a very hazy idea of what I was actually going to see. My brain was picturing something very stylised and visual along the lines of Kabuki – so I’ll admit to being a little bewildered, on first entering the theatre, when I set eyes on the rather buff fellow in a school boy’s outfit who was parading up and down the stage, coquettishly slapping his bottom and doing suggestive things with a banana, as the audience filed into the narrow Gate performance space.

However after this slightly disorientating opening sequence (during which the dancer peeled down to his tiny, shiny pants – Lisa, again you were foolish to sit this one out) everything suddenly snapped into place. Following an unbearably tense scene set in the strip club, Yeoh takes the piece back to its traditional roots. The story is simple but harrowing – when his master flies into a rage at his only son, who has squandered his education, Nakamitsu is left to make a terrible choice between love and duty. What follows is gripping, exciting and visually striking. I don’t want to give too much away but it involves samurai swords, great swathes of coloured silk, and a really big drum. Yeoh manages to make it very accessible without undermining the play’s dramatic traditions. The performances were all engaging. And it was less than an hour long. Still daylight as I left the theatre (something that will please these chaps no end).

My not exactly thorough wikipedia-based research (which may well count for nothing as this: “article or section does not cite any references or sources.”) tells me that noh has a rather unique rehearsal process in which the actors practice their roles independently without interacting. I’d be fascinated to learn more.