The Judas Kiss, Hampstead Theatre

David Hare’s diptych about the decline and fall of Oscar Wilde hones in on two decisive moments in the man’s life. The first half is set in Wilde’s suite in the Cadogan Hotel on the afternoon on which his libel case against the Marquess of Queensberry has fallen spectacularly apart. The police are on their way to arrest him for sodomy, the press are massing at his door, and his friend, Robbie Ross, is begging Wilde to use the slim window of time they have left to flee to France. But his darling Bosie, Lord Alfred Douglas, wants him to stay, to stand his ground, and Wilde also believes that he is in some way “trapped by the narrative”, that he has no choice in the matter. He seems almost wilfully determined to be dragged down by the gods, believing the outcome of his story is, like Christ’s, all but inevitable despite Ross’s increasingly desperate pleas that he leave England while he still can.

The play’s second act is set two years later in the Neapolitan fishing village to which Wilde has retreated, diminished in every sense by his time in Reading Gaol, with Bosie – once again – in tow. It’s by some way the more emotionally gripping part of the play. Wilde has got his wish, and is busy pickling in melancholy, disdaining motion of any sort, while Bosie cavorts with the tanned local fishermen. It’s this second half which provides the emotional charge that the play requires and – with the exception of an achingly tender exchange between Ross and Wilde – is largely absent from the first half.

There’s a real poignancy to the way in which Wilde explains his belief that there is nothing delusional about falling in love, how in actual fact it brings the true nature of a person into the light (“Love is not the illusion. Life is.”), while all the time Bosie is planning to abandon him, to retreat into his aristocratic familial cocoon and the financial security which comes with it.

It takes a while for Rupert Everett’s performance as Wilde to warm up. This is partly due to the alien physicality; he’s puffy and neckless, Mr Toad wearing Rufus Wainwright’s hair. Only in the second half does he seem to really settle into the role, reining in his more flamboyant gestures, internalising his pain; there’s a delicious stillness to this later, deflated Wilde. Everett sits primly in the centre of the stage, with his moth-eaten greatcoat spread over his lap, his pallid face shaded by a limp straw hat. Occasionally he lets an eye glide casually over the sculpted, naked body of Galileo, but otherwise he stares flatly ahead.

Freddie Fox’s Bosie, meanwhile, with his wet-lipped schoolboy pout and Mount Etna temper, initially comes across as a tantrum throwing brat, a petulant man-child in a salmon cravat, but Fox manages to generate small moments of tenderness and affection between the pair, moments which make it possible, albeit briefly, to see why Wilde may have been so fixated with this spoiled and selfish young man. Cal Macaninch, as the steadfast Robbie Ross, is perhaps the most touching and restrained of the three; when he admits sadly to Wilde, “I adored you too,” both men know that, true as this was, it was never enough. It’s one of the production’s most heart-breaking moments.

Hare’s 1998 play – much like Everett’s performance – strips away the surface flamboyance, the veneer of myth, to expose the man beneath. It also takes a scalpel to Victorian hypocrisy when it came to matters sexual, something Dale Ferguson’s design underlines, the dishevelled bed featuring centrally in a set which seems to have been sparked by Wilde’s purported deathbed retort that “either the curtains go, or I do.” Here the curtains appear to be eating the set like something out of a 1950s B-movie, spilling from above like a great velvet waterfall, and pooling alarmingly on the floor.

This set-up is echoed visually in the second half: the bed remains the focus, this time swathed in gauzy white cotton upon which Bosie lies in a post-coital tangle while Everett’s Wilde regards him with something akin to resignation, glorying in the beauty of the boy while knowing in his heart that what they have cannot last.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Farewell to the Theatre at Hampstead Theatre

There’s a gentle, tip-toe quality about Richard Nelson’s new play. Intentionally thin on plot, it’s less concerned with “doing” than “being” and allows its characters’ stories to unfold in a delicate rippling fashion. It’s not exactly ‘about’ the life of the innovative actor-manager, playwright and director, Harley Granville-Barker, either, rather it’s a play in which Granville-Barker features as a character. If anything it’s more concerned with the condition of the English in exile and the potency of theatre.

Granville-Barker is marking time at a boarding house in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in 1916. Having left behind the collapse of his marriage (a divorce is pending) and the trauma of the war in Europe he finds himself witness to a number of private tragedies and passions. He’s disillusioned, frustrated and contemplating giving up theatre for good – it is at this point in his life he writes the one-act play with which Nelson’s shares its name – but he can’t quite let go of the theatre, not yet, nor it of him.

The majority of the characters are, like Granville-Barker, English escapees. There’s Beatrice, a middle-aged actress deep in the midst of an infatuation with a young American student; the genial Frank Spraight, a renowned Dickens specialist; Henry, a professor at the local college, and his widowed sister Dorothy, who runs the boarding house at which Granville-Barker is staying. They each have their longings, they all have their regrets.

An unseen but much discussed production of Twelfth Night at the college where Henry teaches forms the backdrop to the play. Granville-Barker watches as Shakespeare’s comedy becomes the source of much toxic academic wrangling and acute social humiliation. It seems his presence has alarmed one of the resident professors and he, in turn, has taken it out on the hapless Henry. None of this adds up to very much but it is, at times, gently compelling, full of quiet Chekhovian melancholy. There are other times however where a little bit more in the way of momentum would be appreciated, more incident, more ‘doing.’ As it is Granville-Barker’s one moment of physical and emotional connection feels like a thunder clap on an otherwise still day.

Ben Chaplin excels at playing English men of a certain stripe – sardonic, intelligent, reserved – and he’s superb as Granville-Barker, a watchful, contemplative man, his words carefully measured. Jason Watkins is hugely endearing as Spraight, his chipper exterior concealing a deep sadness of his own; both men are adept at putting up shields, guarding themselves emotionally. Tara Fitzgerald makes for a giddy Beatrice, near-intoxicated by the blood-rush of feeling for her pretty young American while Jemma Redgrave is alternatively nervy and bold as the permanently black-clad Dorothy.

Roger Michell’s production seems to follow some of Granville-Barker’s tenets in terms of use of space and the minimal bare-board aesthetic of the stage design, but while Nelson has created some intriguingly shaded and layered characters, the college in-fighting that soaks up so much of the play feels unnecessarily laboured, Granville-Barker and the others bobbing on the surface of an ultimately slight story.

The final scene in which the characters take solace in the performance of a traditional mummers’ play, wearing dressing-up box costumes and wielding wooden swords under a bright American sun – revelling in theatre in one of its oldest forms – feels slightly tepid and tacked-on rather than in any way revelatory or transformative.

Reviewed for Exeunt

American Trade at Hampstead Theatre

This ‘contemporary Restoration comedy’, a commission for the RSC by Tarell Alvin McCraney, is a play full of colour and noise and excess and yet for much of the time it is an oddly flat experience. At its best it has the sass and playfulness of McCraney’s earlier play,Wig Out!, at its worst it’s like a particularly lacklustre episode of Ugly Betty.

Pharus, a New York hustler, first glimpsed sporting hot pink Calvins, has just escaped the attentions of hip-hop mogul Jules when he receives an out of the blue call from his, before now unbeknownst to him, great aunt Marian who, while knocking back a 7am gin, invites him to London come and work for her PR company, Move.

That’s all the excuse Pharus needs to hop on a plane and high-tail it to the UK, but he can’t shake off his old habits, and even manages to mile-high a diplomat’s wife en route to Heathrow. Once installed at Move, he’s charged with recruiting models for the agency but ends up attracting a multicultural assortment of fellow hustlers and hookers, his presence triggering suspicion and jealousy in his jump-suited cousin, Valentina.

McCraney clearly has much affection for London’s multiplicity, for the sexual and cultural collision of the city. There are natty Haitian immigrants, volatile cabbies, towering ‘Prussian’ sex workers and closeted airport jobsworths, not to mention a generous scattering of turquoise posing pouches, PVC shorts and men in killer stilettos. The fondness and amusement elicited by a particular brand of English officiousness is also evident, with Debbie Korley’s Girl Wonder assuming the role of various uptight uniformed types: flight attendant, London Underground announcer and hotel receptionist. (“Do you work everywhere?” Pharus eventually asks her).

Though it apes the wit and artifice of Restoration comedy, it lacks bite and is somewhat one-note in its gaudy excess. The lyricism of the Brother/Sister plays is only occasionally glimpsed and even when it is in evidence the performers don’t always rise to the challenge of mining the most from the rhythms and rapidity of the writing. Tunji Kasim, as Pharus, is the only one who really nails it; he seems comfortable with the language and manages to convey a sense of a man well accustomed to living off his wits beneath a varnish of surface charm. But then as the protagonist, he’s required to play it cool, while everyone else in Jamie Lloyd’s production dials their performance up to eye-rolling levels. This works better in some cases than others; Sheila Reid plays aunt Miriam like a cross between Anna Wintour and Mindy Sterling’s villainous sidekick from the Austin Powers movies but elsewhere people just resort to yelling and mugging.

Soutra Gilmour’s neon night club of a set looks a bit like some someone has set about the stage with a collection of highlighter pens, but this visual insistence – the hot pinks and acid yellows, the glitterball shimmer – seems to be intended to underline something that isn’t actually there in the text. The plot is slender as a stiletto heel, but the narrative arc is tried and tested; bracketed by McCraney as one of his Identity Plays, it seems to be saying that a man can move cities, move countries, but he can’t escape himself. The bitter circularity, that the city will get you in the end – no matter which city it happens to be – is delivered almost as an aside.

As a whole, the production looks like it should be a lot of fun, like it wants to be a lot of fun, but while it intermittently raises a smile, the not inconsiderable energy of the thing quickly dissipates; it’s a lipstick kiss, easily wiped away.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Little Eagles at Hampstead Theatre

To be indispensible is to survive. Having been released from the frozen hell of the Siberian gulag, Sergei Pavlovich Korolyov rose to become Chief Designer of the Soviet space programme, its architect and aorta. He was the driving force behind both the Sputnk and Vostok projects; his vision led to the first man being sent into space, his ambition allowed mankind to – briefly – touch the stars and when he died the programme fizzled like a spent match.

Rona Munro’s new play for the RSC (the first part of a proposed trilogy) tells the story of this pivotal but little known figure (Korolyov’s centrality and significance were suppressed by the Politburo during the years of the Cold War). It successfully condenses a complicated and fascinating story – touching on the symbiosis between the Soviet space programme and their defence programme; the training of the cosmonauts, Korolyov’s ‘little eagles’; the questioning of whether the vast sums spent on the space race could have been better utilized in, say, feeding and clothing people – but as is often the case with biographical drama, it also suffers from an overly episodic quality; it’s more of a kite-string of scenes than a cohesive theatrical experience.

Roxana Silbert’s production does contain some memorable individual moments. A scene of wide-eyed and yokel-accented (the performers avoid Russian accents even when curling their tongues around polysyllabic patronyms) Soviet farm labourers confronted by a jump-suited Yuri Gagarin, elated after his orbit of the earth, is played, in part, for laughs. The sight of the cosmonauts-to-be competing to see which of them can hold his hand to a scalding samovar for longest contains an edge, if only an edge, of the testosterone crackle of Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff. The rivalry and camaraderie of these young me, their training, experiences and the glare of their subsequent fame, is a fascinating seam that remains only partially developed.

Silbert’s production never fully taps into the sense of wonder and vision inherent in what Korolyov achieved; it skitters on the surface but rarely digs deep. Blueprints are wafted around and a miniature Sputnik dandles on a string, but the sense of hope and magic of those early days of space exploration is only superficially evoked (at times one longs for the visual panache of something like Complicite’s A Disappearing Number, a piece which though clearly different in its objectives, succeeded in giving shape to complex theories while weaving them together with biographical information). According to one character, Korolyov “changed everything I thought and felt when I looked up at the sky”, but the audience needs to take his word for it on this. The scenes of space travel are also oddly low-key, a LED backdrop and some timid aerial work; though perhaps this serves as a decent visual metaphor for the extraordinary things that were achieved with such comparatively limited technology.

Darrel D’Silva, with frosted quiff, is gripping in the lead role, suitably bullish and driven as a man who refuses to relinquish his grip on his work even as his health began to fail him. Brian Doherty is both boorish and menacing as Khrushchev, with an amusing hint of Al Murray in his demeanour. Greg Hicks doubles as a confrontational Soviet general and the gulag ghosts that haunt Korolyov. Noma Dumazweni provides a good foil for D’Silva as a doctor carrying with her the carapace that comes from spending twenty years in the gulag. She’s the only real mirror to his character’s sometimes alienating drive and allows the audience to better understand how his instinct for self-preservation became so tangled up with the Soviet push for the stars (certainly his personal life, what we learn of it, takes a back seat to the world of his work). This is echoed in Ti Green’s set, a cold, factory-like space with grime-fogged windows and a blade of riveted steel – evoking both wing and debris – jagging down from above.

Munro’s play works best as a piece of storytelling, accomplished if a little over-long, elegantly plaiting a number of narrative strands, but as an act of theatrical trepanning it doesn’t quite come off.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Tiger Country at Hampstead Theatre

Perhaps more so than any other profession, the working lives of doctors and nurses (or, at least, a dramatically palatable version of them) have come to seem intimately familiar through long running television shows; the hospital politics, the medical language, even the expected emotional journeys - of the idealistic junior doctor, of the tough female surgeon – all have a ring of the habitual. Nina Raine attempts to defamiliarize these narratives by transferring them from screen to stage, but she only succeeds in part.

Of her large cast of characters only two really stand out. Ruth Everett, as Emily the young doctor whose hide has yet to toughen, and Thusitha Jayasundera as Vashti, the ball-breaking genitourinary surgeon, an Asian woman playing in a game still dominated by English men. The other characters remain sketches in comparison: the tough but not unkind SHO, the experienced doctor given a glimpse of his own mortality. Raine’s production, traverse staged across a sea of institutional blue linoleum, concentrates its energies on recreating the bustle of the hospital, from the fever of the incoming emergency and the precious lulls in between to the tightrope between levity and tension in the operating theatre and the sting of having to deliver bad news. As with her previous play for the Royal Court, Tribes, Raine’s research has clearly been considerable but the play doesn’t wear it too heavily. Even so, it’s evident in the surgical-medical rivalry and sniping, the carping about the poor CD selection in the operating theatre (“oh no, not All Woman again”) and, more generally, in the interplay between the characters’ sense of resignation and weariness with the thrill and passion that drove them to study medicine in the first place. At its best the writing is reminiscent of the television work of Jed Mercurio - doctor turned novelists and screenwriter - though in a more dilute form. Where the play truly lifts off is in the moments it hints at the things beyond the physical - the autonomic, the hunch in one’s guts, the hovering ghosts – and their necessary presence in the rational, medical world. In other places the drama is hamstrung by sheer overfamiliarity, never quite managing to reinvigorate situations that have been played out nightly on the BBC. Raine is in no way blind to this and even milks the ironies, showing a doctor unwinding after a night shift by flopping, beer in hand, in front of Doctors, (a show that must by now outrank The Bill on most actors CVs, including many of the cast). Everett and Jayasundera strike the right notes with their respective roles and the ensemble playing is strong throughout. When Raine uses the potential of the stage to fracture the action, to make the audience look between and beyond the things they think they know (a stroke patient, dazed and dysphasic, is puzzled by the uncanny congregation around her, the sea of staring faces) then the production has real power, but this happens only intermittently and the lack of strongly defined characters does begin to become an issue as the play progresses. Emily, confronted with the reality that she can’t save everyone as well as the growing understanding that if she becomes emotionally overinvested in every single case she will eventually burn herself out, duly toughens up while Vashti, her aunt ill following surgical incompetence, questions both herself and her priorities; none of the other characters is given much room to evolve and the result, in terms of narrative focus, is something like a photograph of a fast-moving object. Reviewed for musicOMH

Enlightenment at Hampstead Theatre

Edward Hall begins his first season as Artistic Director at Hampstead Theatre with a new play by Shelagh Stephenson, a writer whose career was shaped by the theatre (her early play The Memory of Water was staged there in the 1990s).

Lia and Nick’s 20-year-old son, Adam, has disappeared while on his gap year. They suspect he may have been caught up in a terrorist attack in Indonesia but can’t be sure. They have been left in an awful limbo; not knowing whether he is alive or dead they are unable to grieve, unable to continue living - Lia has even taken to consulting psychics in her need for answers, for closure.


Meanwhile Joanna, a young film maker, is very keen to televise their story, but while she professes an affinity with Lia - for, as she keeps reminding them, she's "a mother myself" - it’s clear her own career comes first.

Stephenson’s play is – to a point – compelling, the twisty plot keeps the audience guessing and it has a real narrative tug. But the writing is also chilly and clunky and often implausible. Lia spends an awful lot of time dissecting her predicament, to the extent that it clouds out her grief – her words are just words, unanchored to anything resembling real emotion.

There’s an uncertainty of tone to Edward Hall’s production. The early scenes not only suffer from an excess of exposition but they also have an awkward comic edge to them, a whiff of sitcom, especially those featuring Polly Kemp’s perky medium. Fortunately things shift at the play’s midway point and a welcome darkness sets in with the arrival of a mysterious young man into the family home. So significant is this change in gear that it almost feels as if the play could jettison its opening scenes to no ill effect.

The production, when it finally hits its stride, is well-paced and the plot holds the attention but Hall can’t quite disguise the stiffness of some of the writing nor the frequent lapses in credibility. When Paul Freeman, as Lia’s gruff MP father, blusters in at the end and starts behaving bluntly but sensibly it just highlights how frustratingly everyone else has been acting before then.

In a play that touches on the connectedness of things there’s a failure of all the various elements to intermesh. Lia’s many digressions, on chaos theory, the impossibility of trying to protect one’s children from the awful randomness of the world and the human capacity for goodness, seem superfluous to the story being told; one can hear the voice of the writer bleeding through. In amongst this Stephenson occasionally touches on something potent and true, like Lia’s quietly expressed anxiety that if she goes to the cinema with Nick she might enjoy herself, may even laugh, but these moments of emotional complexity are too few and far between.

Francis O’Connor’s sleek, curved white set is very striking, as is the use of projections on the ceilings and walls to create different locations, a park, and most effectively, an airport, but these potentially haunting and evocative visuals don’t quite click with the action on stage; again there’s a failure to completely mesh.

The cast do a decent enough job with the material. Julie Graham just about copes with a role that, though central, feels strangely half-formed and incomplete. Richard Clothier fares slightly better as her husband, Nick, though there’s a chilly impotence to his character too; he has little to do but bristle. It’s Tim Weston-Jones who really stands out, playing this young mixed up interloper with a suitable blend of brightness and menace; the scenes that he’s in are increasingly tense and provide the atmospheric kick the production is crying out for.

Andersen's English at Hampstead Theatre

Despite its title Sebastian Barry’s play, Andersen's English is far more about the life of Charles Dickens than about that of the Danish poet and writer Hans Christian Andersen.

Barry’s play is set during the summer of 1857 when Andersen visited Dickens at his home in Gad’s Hill in Kent intending to stay a fortnight but eventually staying on for five weeks. Directed by Max Stafford-Clark for Out of Joint, the play is a strange mixture of culture clash comedy and domestic drama that manages to shed little light on the characters of either of these eccentric but gifted men.


As Andersen does not speak English particularly well he is oblivious to much of the tension within the Dickens family. He is only dimly aware of all the torment and disharmony around him and departs with the impression of having stayed in a warm and loving household.

Dickens, as written by Barry, is a fairly unpleasant and controlling man, who has grown tired of his wife, Catherine, the mother of his many children. He has a complex and close though unconsummated relationship with Catherine’s sister Georgie and is about to fall for the young actress Ellen Ternan, with whom he starred on stage in Wilkie Collins’ The Frozen Deep. Catherine will eventually be banished from the family home entirely.

The scenes concerning Dickens’ family life are, at times, engrossing but the play features many odd lurches in tone. Some scenes are played as broad comedy, others as wrenching drama, and the two never really knit together. With the exception of two brief scenes at the beginning and end of the play, Barry never allows Andersen to speak in his own language; his English is fractured and mangled, halting and awkward, making it impossible to get a sense of him as man. Barry presents his surface quirks – he carries a length of rope in his suitcase in case a fire breaks out – but denies him his own true voice.

The production itself also features unexpected and not altogether successful tonal shifts. Rather ungainly puppets are used to stand in for some of the Dickens children and the cast occasionally break into song. Though there is some pleasure to be taken in the way the cast trample over Lucy Osborne’s attractively cluttered set, turning dining chairs into stepping stones and a grand piano into a hilltop picnic spot, the production feels like it is struggling with itself, unsure of what it really wants to be.

David Rintoul (in an amusingly elaborate wig) plays Dickens as a talented yet demanding and difficult man, who is rather over-fond of his own voice, while Niamh Cusack gives the play its emotional centre, as the hard done by Catherine, stung by her rejection by her husband, worn down by the bearing of so many children (ten in all), and desperately scared for her son Walt who is being dispatched to India by a rather disinterested Dickens.

Danny Sapani does what he can with the character of Andersen, suggesting a measure of sadness beneath all the surface oddity, but the device of focusing on Andersen’s broken English never really justifies itself. The audience does not see the Dickens’ household through his eyes nor does it gain much in the way of insight into Andersen as a man. Catherine is the only one who seems to connect with him, but even their freindship is not developed as much as it could have been.

Barry has also grafted on a subplot about Dickens’ young Irish housemaid, a young woman with whom Walt is besotted and who finds herself pregnant. Though Lisa Kerr’s performance in this role is spirited and enjoyable this strand of the play feels superfluous, adding another splash of colour to what is an already muddy palette.

Reviewed for musicOMH

Dunsinane at Hampstead Theatre

"You seem to think peace is a natural state but the truth is the exact opposite. Peace is what the sea looks like in a dead calm – a rare and beautiful moment."

David Greig’s new play for the RSC is vivid in its use of language and wide in scope. Set in eleventh century Scotland, it is a sequel of sorts, picking up where Macbeth left off. Birnam Wood has advanced on Dunsinane (following some drama studenty tree-empathy exercises on the part of the soldiers) and Macbeth, ‘the tyrant’, is dead. His wife, however, despite rumours to the contrary, is very much alive as, more problematically, is her son.

Siward, Earl of Northumberland and leader of the English army, his son slain by Macbeth in battle, must deal with the aftermath. There’s strife between the various clans and a refusal to accept the authority of Malcolm, the newly crowned king. It soon dawns on the English soldiers that their battle is far from over and that they won’t see their homes again, not before winter; they are stuck in this hostile country, with its equally hostile weather, for the duration.

Held captive in her own castle, Lady Macbeth, known as Gruach, bides her time, convinced of her right to rule, still queen in mind and heart. Greig uses the observations of a young boy soldier to sculpt his narrative and to create a nice juxtaposition with the more heated scenes between Siward and Gruach. As the widowed queen Siobhan Redmond, her red hair tumbling across her shoulders, a flash of fire amidst the murky medieval greys and browns, comports herself with dignity and a regal distance. She speaks with a grudging grace, forced to converse in another tongue, a language she describes as a “woodworker’s tool”, a language that lacks the poetry of Gaelic in its desperate attempts to “capture the world in words”

Yet despite Redmond’s considerable poise, her attempts at seduction of Jonny Phillips’ battle-hardened Siward don’t feel particularly convincing and Roxana Silbert’s production rather fudges her semi-mystical escape, gliding to freedom amidst crowds of clashing soldiers. The more fascinating character is Brian Ferguson’s Malcolm, a man who knows and understands his own weaknesses, who uses them as a shield. He is also adept at balancing and weighing out his words, in the judicious use of ‘seems’ and ‘appears’, spinning the situation to his advantage.

Greig’s play of invasion and insurgence has obvious modern parallels but only occasionally does it hammer them home with excessive force. He contrasts the antics of the young soldiers – ripe with talk of tits and sex, missing their homes, baffled by this foreign land with its alien foods and customs – with the machinations of those in power and relies on slender red threads to link their world with the current situation in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Silbert’s production moves smoothly and elegantly from the broad, almost Monty Python and the Holy Grail-esque atmosphere of the opening scenes to the stark, snow-swept landscape of its low-key denouement.

Designer Robert Innes Hopkins has created a simple, stepped stone set which, while effective, also sometimes feels cramped (especially during a central wedding scene). Though the production is a decent one, it can feel a bit pedestrian in places and one is left with the impression that Greig’s play is a much richer thing than it is fully allowed to be here.

Reviewed for musicOMH

Amongst Friends at Hampstead Theatre

Despite a reference or two to MPs expenses, April de Angelis’ new play feels rather like something that has been lingering in a desk draw since 1987. And perhaps it would have been better off being left there.

In Amongst Friends, Helen Baxendale plays Lara, a glamorous tabloid columnist who has recently developed agoraphobic tendencies. Her husband, Richard, is a former MP who has turned his hand to writing crime fiction but who soon hopes to be reinstated in a safe seat. Together they live in a glossy glass and exposed brick apartment, part of a gated community in a run down part of south London – a fortress-like complex complete with spas, bars and a flotation chamber.

For reasons that make very little sense other than to set up a source of conflict, they have invited their former neighbours over for a dinner party. Caitlin is a breast care nurse, who has written a book about her experiences, and her partner Joe is a drugs counsellor with aggression issues. They provide a reminder of the life Lara and Richard have left behind in their scramble up the social ladder and there is a sense of hostility between them from the start.

It is not long before their world is further punctured by the arrival of Shelley, a woman from the local council estate who attempts to milk them all for money on behalf of her recently deceased son Lee. She claims she is able to communicate with him psychically and that each of the four may well have known the boy in some capacity. Guilt buttons duly pushed, she helps herself to some of their champagne and waits for them to donate to her unfortunately acronymed charity, PENIS. It’s a con, of course, but it doesn’t really matter, nor does Shelley matter – her jarring working class presence is only required to act as a catalyst for the dredging up all kind of buried secrets among the four main characters. And what do you know? Love affairs and past liaisons are soon being confessed to at a rate of knots.

While Shelley, as a character, has all the nuance of a Vicki Pollard – hair scraped back into a pony tail, gold jewellery clinking round her neck and her g-string visible over the back of her too-tight white jeans – the others are not far behind in the stereotype stakes. Baxendale’s Lara is all elbows and teetering designer heels; Aden Gillett’s Richard is an oil slick of a man and Emma Cunniffe’s Caitlin is a hippy-drippy, soft-hearted type, though not above using her patients’ emotive stories to forward her own career. Only James Dreyfus’ cranky, difficult Joe seems a bit more interesting, a bit less of an obvious ‘type.’

None of them feel like real people, nor does their dialogue ever convince. They don’t talk so much as hurl words towards each other, speaking in would-be clever phrases that might pass muster on paper but sound clunky on the tongue. With a few notable exceptions, the jokes clang to the ground like cannon balls. Clang, clang, clang.

It’s not that the cast aren’t any cop but having been assigned such simultaneously flat yet nasty characters, they all seem to be going through the motions, hitting their cues, speaking their lines, but doing little more.

There is, of course, a lot to be said about social division, about the way people with the means often seal themselves off from the problems they don't want to handle, but this play, though it occasionally teeters on the brink of being interesting, wastes its time with dud jokes, implausible twists, and slightly offensive working class caricatures.

Reviewed for musicOMH. It gives me little pleasue to be so negative, but, yeesh, did anyone actually read this before they agreed to put it on stage?

Mine at Hampstead Theatre

I should know better by know. I should know that the tube to Swiss Cottage, that grim grey line to Hampstead Theatre, can only lead to disappointment. But time dulls past pains, one forgets, and then one glances at a flyer or a preview write-up and thinks ‘yes, I like the sound of that.’

I had seen and enjoyed past productions by Shared Experience, so their latest play Mine was not unappealing. But the curse of Hampstead Theatre continues. In Mine an unnamed, childless couple try to adopt a baby girl. They are wealthy and successful and clearly lead a life of considerable comfort while the girl’s birth mother is a drug-user and prostitute whose daughter has been taken into care while she attempts to rehabilitate herself. But all the money in the world can’t prepare them for the reality of raising a child and the arrival of this tiny, helpless person into the couple’s lives leaves them feeling exposed and unsettled.

Throughout the production there are dreamlike sequences in which an actress in a floaty white dress appears and scampers round the stage like a little girl, hiding behind furniture and playing with an ornate dollhouse. She represents both the woman’s desired daughter and her memories of her own childhood. But while this is initially interesting, it’s hard to get past the fact that this ‘child’ is being played by an adult, it’s too big a hurdle, and some of these sequences feel silly as opposed to moving or revealing.

The main problem with the production – and it’s a big one - is that there isn’t a single remotely sympathetic character on stage. The woman is joyless and her husband is a domineering, sharp-tempered, one-note sod; you find yourself questioning the social worker who entrusted these two people with a vulnerable infant. The couple is surrounded by a group of walking clichés. There’s the sister with three children of her own who worries she has forgotten how to be anything other than a mother and the housekeeper from some unspecified Eastern European country. None of these people feel real. Even Rose, the child’s mother, the character with the most potential to be interesting, is a harshly pony-tailed, tracksuit clad stereotype.

It’s such a shame as the play has some valid things to say about the way motherhood can open you up like an exposed wound, how the world suddenly becomes a more threatening, unsettling place when you have this small person to raise and care for and protect. But all this is buried under the clumsy and ugly production. There are some potentially good performances marooned in there too. Katy Stephens does what she can as the woman who has longed for a child for so long that she struggles to handle the reality when her wish is granted. And Lorraine Stephens, as the baby’s mother, somehow maintains a degree of dignity despite having to perform with her G-string riding up over her trousers as she staggers around stage, cigarette in hand.

But none of this compensates for having to sit through this turgid thing – though there is some unintentional humour to be derived from watching the actors cooing over the unnerving, tufty-headed fake baby. Shared Experience has done fine work in the past but their trademark approach feels cumbersome here. The play would have benefited from a lighter touch and less reliance on familiar theatrical tics and devices.

Buses And Belly Dancers

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

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

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

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

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

Scandalised (Or Not, Actually)

What is the sound of one arm shrugging? Or two arms for that matter? I’m not entirely sure. If I could think of a good word to encapsulate a sense of not-bothered-ness, a general lack of whelm, I would use it here, because that’s how I felt after watching Robin Soans’ latest at Hampstead Theatre.

This is another verbatim theatre piece in line with his previous work Talking To Terrorists. Only, in the case of Life After Scandal, this time it is more a matter of Talking To Disgraced Aristocrats – which doesn’t really have the same ring to it.

The play consists of a series of interwoven interviews with various public figures who have been involved in scandal – sexual, political, often a blend of the both – and whose lives subsequently became tabloid fodder, meat for the media. So we have contributions from Jonathan Aitken, Lord Brocket, the Ingrams (they of the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire coughing farrago), an embittered Edwina Currie, Duncan Roy, who passed himself off as a Lord for some years, and Craig Murray, the vilified former ambassador to Uzbekistan. Oh, and Neil and Christine Hamilton. Because.

Anyway, Soans clearly has a knack for drawing people out of themselves and the stories were cleverly interlaced, I’ll give it that. But I simply struggled to care about these people and their predicaments. There were exceptions, there was pathos of sorts in the story of the elderly Lord Montagu who was embroiled in a homosexual scandal in the 1950s, a time when such things devastated lives rather than paving your way onto I’m A Celebrity, get me Out Of Here!. But often the juxtaposition between the more weighty issues – Murray discussing horrific human rights abuses in Uzbekistan – and, say the Hamiltons taking tea as they described their appearances on This Morning, felt more than a little awkward. Everything was slick and smooth and tautly (and, in the main, sympathetically) performed and it’s not that documentary techniques such as these have to be confined to Big Serious Themes only, but, still. I wanted more bite, more insight, more focus, and none was forthcoming. Oh and there was singing. A fair bit of singing. I really, really couldn’t fathom the point of the singing.

It was also press night and thus there were actors aplenty in the audience, as is the norm at such things. Post-show, they were doling out Brocket’s beer (yes, really, and no, I was not tempted to try any), though I did find the sight of the Hamiltons meeting ‘The Hamiltons’ (Caroline Quentin and Michael Mears) fairly amusing.

The Truth Will Out

Ah Hampstead Theatre. How many times have I trundled up the Jubilee line to Swiss Cottage to visit you, revelling in a warm anticipatory glow, and how many times have I come away feeling all “huh?” and “hmm?” and “feh.” The answer is many. Rather too many times. So I was in a cautious mood when I went up to see Dennis Kelly’s latest play, Taking Care Of Baby.

The play begins with the words: "The following has been taken word for word from interviews and correspondence," scrolling across a bank of television screens. Using the techniques of verbatim theatre, Kelly tells the story of a young mother, Donna McAuliffe, who has been imprisoned, and subsequently released, for killing her two children. It's a depressingly familiar set-up, resembling any number of stories that have recently graced the headlines, as well as bringing to mind the National Theatre Of Scotland's production of Aalst which covered similar thematic ground.

Donna is released from prison after she is diagnosed by psychologist Dr Millard as suffering from Leeman-Keatley Syndrome, a condition that could cause an otherwise loving mother to harm her own children. This is despite questions being raised about the doctor's research methods, and indeed, whether the syndrome exists at all. Of course, after all this, Donna's life is no longer her own - her marriage inevitably crumbles and her mother Lynn, an ambitious local politician, finds her career initially jeopardised and then, perversely boosted, as her family's tragedy becomes tabloid fodder.

But Donna's innocence or otherwise is not really the issue here; Kelly is far more interested in the way her story gets pulled apart for the personal gain of others, how her truth, the reality of what happened to her children, ceases to be as important as the truths that other people impose on her. The play becomes increasingly cynical as it progresses, with Kelly even poking away at the very idea of verbatim theatre itself. He slowly chips away at our sense of what we're seeing, toying with audience expectations as the narrative becomes increasingly fragmented.

The actress playing Donna, Abigail Davies, does an amazing job: her speech is excruciatingly nervy and hesitant, with pain evident beneath the surface of every action, every utterance. Anthony Clark's direction is sharp and well-paced, knitting all the disparate strands together and this along with the memorable set, with its creepy baby-in-a-box centre-piece, adds to the overall impact of the piece.

But there's a nagging sense of missed targets as the play reaches its increasingly satirical conclusion. A sense that Kelly is trying to say too much about too many things - and, in doing so, he loses the focus that elicited so much uncomfortable laughter in the first half. This is an undoubtedly ambitious and intelligent piece of writing, but it's one that, in the end, proves just too slippery for its own good. Despite this, it’s still the most satisfying thing I’ve seen at Hampstead in a good long while.