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

Passion at the Donmar Warehouse

The Donmar Warehouse begins its celebrations of Stephen Sondheim’s 80th birthday with a staging of the composer’s 1994 musical, an emotionally complex piece based on the Italian film Passion D’Amore.

Giorgio (David Thaxton), a handsome young military officer, is in the midst of a consuming affair with Clara (Scarlett Strallen), a married Milanese woman, when he is posted to a remote mountain garrison.

Initially he finds this separation tortuous; he dreams of her and longs for her perfumed letters to arrive. Soon his gentle manner and bookish ways bring him to the attention of Fosca (Elena Roger), the colonel's invalid cousin. Being far from conventionally beautiful, a plain and sharp featured woman, Fosca has never been loved and her loneliness manifests itself in an intense burning for Giorgio. She throws herself at him both emotionally and, at times, physically. At first he is alarmed, repelled even, but there is something about the pureness and unbending quality of her love that comes to move him.

Elena Roger, returning to the Donmar following her Olivier Award-winning performance in Piaf, stands up to the challenge of playing a character as knotty as Fosca. She is at times both desperate and pathetic in the depth of her need, her emotions running out of control, yet Roger manages to balance out her character’s rather too frequent episodes of neurotic collapse with a clear-eyed pragmatism about the hand that life has dealt her.

Jamie Lloyd’s production brings an emotional potency to the piece while doing little to conceal quite how strange it is at times. There is something rather chilling and predatory about Fosca and the way she clings to Giorgio with an almost animal need. Her passion seems to have been building in her for years; it only took one kind deed to unlock it. Giorgio himself often appears to have very little to do with it so quickly and completely does she latch onto him.

Though Roger’s is the showier role, Thaxton is no less compelling as a man being slowly eroded by the heat of Fosca’s need. He does not shy away from showing how Giorgio’s acceptance of Fosca’s devotion comes at a considerable cost to him. Physically powerful in the opening scenes, he towers over the diminutive Roger but seems to shrink in stature as the story progresses, until finally he is left contorted and whimpering on the floor, broken.

Sondheim’s score lacks stand out numbers and is instead a work of layers and recurring motifs, its power slowly building. Lloyd’s production makes the most of the Donmar’s compact stage; the ensemble scenes are well handled, succinctly portraying the somewhat boorish atmosphere of the garrison, and it is strikingly designed, with a shimmering and beautiful set by Christopher Oram.

Yet there is something rather unsettling about the piece as a whole which Lloyd taps into and exploits; the abiding feeling is not one of love conquering insurmountable odds but something altogether darker and more ambiguous.

Reviewed for Theatermania

Polar Bears at the Donmar Warehouse

There’s an inherent difficulty in writing about mental illness. It’s something so profoundly internal, so ungraspable to those on the outside, that often it’s easier to depict the effect that a person’s behaviour has on those that love them rather than attempt to truly enter that person’s world. Mark Haddon’s dark, fractured debut play has moments of rawness and insight but it doesn’t quite avoid falling into familiar traps.

Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time took its readers inside the mind of a boy with Asperger’s, but, in his play, a certain distance is maintained between the audience and Kay, the central character, a young woman suffering from bipolar disorder.


Haddon’s play explores Kay’s relationship with both her mother and brother as well as with John, the man who will become her husband. John prides himself on being grounded and steady; he thinks he can keep Kay safe from herself, he sees himself as the person “holding her kite string.”

The play is intentionally unsettling. Time is a liquid thing and the scenes are shown out of order; some are clearly imaginary, events happening in Kay’s mind, but it is a strength of Jamie Lloyd’s production that it is never quite evident how much of what the play depicts is actually happening. From the macabre calm of the opening scene onwards, there is a potent, dreamlike quality to the staging that is intensified as the play progresses.

It is revealed that Kay’s father committed suicide when she was a girl and his father, in turn, was also mentally ill; Kay’s condition is talked about like a family curse, handed down through the generations, the flipside of her artistic talents (she dreams of illustrating children’s books) which she may have inherited from her mother. Both her mother and brother are deeply protective of her, but it is implied their protectiveness is in some ways damaging, keeping her dependent (her mother, living out in a lonely old house by a river, repeatedly asks for reassurance that Kay will never leave her). John, though initially besotted by her vibrancy, finds himself falling into the same patterns once the reality and relentlessness of her condition becomes apparent.

Jodhi May’s performance as Kay is well-judged, capturing both the extreme highs and lows of her illness; Haddon shows her sitting rain-soaked on the roof, wide-eyed with wonder about the possibility of other worlds and the idea of neutrinos streaming through her body. He also shows her foetal and fearful on the floor, terrified and sealed within her own dark sphere.

Paul Hilton captures the complexity of Kay’s brother Sandy, who dutifully sounds out her potential boyfriends for suitability but also perhaps envies his sister’s instability, especially as his childhood was equally marked by tragedy and yet he has managed to live a comparatively normal life. Celia Imrie also gives a strong performance as Kay’s mother, though, as written, her character is the least convincing. Her need to keep Kay close to her is juxtaposed with her confession of the relief she felt following her husband’s death, freeing her from the constant fear. In these moments of revelation the writing feels a little too blunt and controlled.

Richard Coyle’s genial John is the most ambiguous of the characters, but in making him an academic philosopher, Haddon too obviously makes him the mouthpiece for the play’s Big Questions about life and love and the inevitability of decay. This device somewhat limits him as a character.

Haddon clearly relishes the puzzle-like quality of the play and provides plenty of questions to be picked over but he’s also not immune to cliché. Kay explains the beauty and the pain of her condition via a lengthy fairy tale and, in a somewhat tonally misjudged scene, she converses with Jesus. The simple two-level set, designed by Soutra Gilmour, is effective, neatly echoing the split within Kay, but the ominous flickering lighting again seems a step too far into the familiar: mental illness by numbers.

This is a play that plants itself firmly in the mind, but it’s most effective when it’s stillest, when it allows its audience to catch a glimpse of Kay as a person rather than as a device, a conduit for narrative game-playing and philosophical debate.

Reviewed for musicOMH