Coriolanus, Donmar Warehouse

Coriolanus is a man of the battlefield. War is a language he speaks with fluency. It is the way he has been raised. But what makes him such a potent force in a time of conflict, a fire-eyed, driven machine of a man, doesn’t translate to the political arena. And this proves his undoing.

Making his return to the Donmar stage, Tom Hiddleston revels in the knottiness and complexity of the character. He last performed here as Cassio in Michael Grandage’s Othello, in which he more than held his own alongside the magnetic, magnificent Chiwetel Ejiofor and in many ways eclipsed Ewan McGregor’s Iago. Now – following his Asgardian interlude – he confirms what a capable and engaging stage actor he can be; his performance is one of clarity but it’s also layered: he is proud, courageous, arrogant and vain all at the same time. It’s a very physical performance, he struts and grapples, simmers and winces, and yet he always keeps something back; he won’t give of himself to the people, won’t use his scars as trophies. He bristles at the position into which he has been pushed and fumes at the people in front of whom he must display himself and lay himself bare.

Josie Rourke’s production is an intensely corporeal one, all skin and sweat and blood. It contains some striking imagery: at one point Hiddleston stands before us green-garlanded with blood rivering his face like a red masque of death; later, as the adrenaline of battle dissipates, he flinches and grits his teeth as he bathes the blood of others from his ravaged body. The choreography of the early fight scenes is slick and physical – Coriolanus and his enemy hurl each other about the stage, dashing each other to the floor – but it’s almost too slick, and there are times when you find yourself marvelling at the technical effort involved, at the clank of cutlass on cutlass, at the force with which the punches appear to land, rather than feeling any sense of the rawness and mess of warfare. (Though, at least, when they finally cast their weapons aside and grapple on the floor you do get a glimpse of this).

The cast wear a mixture of leather breastplates and tight black jeans, with neckerchiefs tied at their throats and clothing which is intentionally asymmetric. They wouldn’t look entirely out of place hanging out with Ron Perlman and Linda Hamilton in the subways of 1980s New York. Later the banished Coriolanus wears a cowl so precise in its raggedness that you can almost see the kiddie scissor marks. And, yes, there’s more than a dash of Loki the trickster in these later scenes, as he twists and infiltrates, smiling his enigmatic smile.

The supporting performances are also very strong. Coriolanus’ formidable mother Voluminia is the kind of woman who swells with pride at the thought of her son being wounded on the battlefield and Deborah Findlay gives a fittingly impassioned performance though she doesn’t have the ice-eyed majesty of Vanessa Redgrave, who played the role in the 2011 film (but, then, who does?). Mark Gatiss is soft-spoken and delicately paternal as Coriolanus’ advisor Menenius and the scene of his rejection is one of the play’s most moving, while Borgen’s Birgitte Hjort Sørensen does what she can with a role that says so much with silence, as the cast-aside wife.

The back wall of the stage is strewn with graffiti (of the actual, spray-painted kind) to which more is added digitally, the slogan “grain at our own price” multiplying and spreading as the soundtrack thumps and pounds. This feels like a misstep, a half-hearted way of insisting on the play’s ‘now-ness’ while also undermining it, and, much like the choice of costumes, making it feel oddly dated. The sense of hunger and want which underscores the text and its exploration of power and the reasons people lead don’t really need to be underlined quite so heavily.

In the end these things don’t really get in the way of what is an engaging production. Hiddleston is a compelling central figure and the visuals are very often memorable, but there’s a gloss and polish to it all, a sense of engineering which subtly undercuts its potency.

Reviewed for Exeunt

The Weir, Donmar Warehouse

Conor McPherson’s 1997 play is one of words not actions. Stories are told, traded like currency; talk becomes an art form. The Weir is set in a rural Irish pub, beautifully evoked by designer Tom Scutt, a building of old stone wreathed in thin mist, with tatty rattan lampshades and walls the colour of old men’s thumbs.

The Guinness pump is on the fritz so garage-owner Jack is forced to grapple valiantly with the bottled stout. He’s one of a number of lonely souls who congregate nightly for a couple of pints and a ‘small one’ or two. Drinking with him is Brendan, the pub’s relatively young landlord, and Jim, the local handyman whose life revolves around his aging, fading Mammy. But the pattern of this particular evening is disrupted by the arrival of Finbar, a local businessman, who having flitted to the city, now sports a cream linen suit and an air of urban flash; he is accompanied by Valerie a “blow-in from Dublin” who has just bought a house in the area.

In an effort to appeal to this stranger in their midst, a rare female presence (the alarmed response when she requests a glass of white wine is one of the production’s funniest moments), the men start to tell stories, to conjure a landscape steeped in myth and memory. There is talk of fairy roads, of strange nocturnal knockings, of still, staring figures spotted on stairs or in graveyards. They each relate their own small encounter with the uncanny, moments – whether frozen or fevered – when they seemed to glimpse something beyond.

These are stories, one senses, that have been trotted out often before, fetched up on dark nights, spun out over a succession of glasses of stout. In many ways they’re fairly pedestrian, nothing to truly prickle the skin. The pleasure’s more in the telling than the tale.

While the men start out trying to charm Valerie, and maybe even to tease her a bit, after a while their stories become less about local ghosts and more revealing of themselves and their regrets, wants and losses. It’s a subtle shift, so when Valerie, buoyed by such talk, begins to tell her own harrowing tale, the delicate balance of things is upset as she careens into a place of true pain and heartbreak. It pulls all the men up short but it doesn’t entirely capsize the night, instead this interloper is gently enfolded into their small world.

Josie Rourke’s production is also a delicate thing, an environment in which any one false note would ring loud. The performances are all measured and knit well together. Ardal O’Hanlan’s slightly dim Jim conveys a kind of baggy sadness while Dervla Kirwan’s Valerie moves from nervy, girly outsider to centre of attention, without ever letting the character get eaten up by grief; her performance is anchored and steady. The play’s true masterstroke is in not letting Valerie’s moment of revelation crown the night, instead it comes full circle, letting Brian Cox’s craggy bachelor Jack weave the last story, describing one tiny act, one small gesture of kindness in a time when he thought he was lost, and a chance he let slide through his fingers years ago but which nags at him still, the ghost on his shoulder, the thing he will have to carry throughout his days. While his first story is told for show, this last one comes from some deeper place: he gives it to her.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Like a Fishbone at the Bush Theatre

Anthony Weigh’s second play, Like a Fishbone, is subtitled ‘An argument and an architectural model’, but while it does indeed contain the latter – an architectural model forms the centre of the set – the former is more elusive; it’s difficult to know just what the play’s argument is.

Like a Fishbone depicts an encounter between a renowned architect and a grieving mother. The architect has been commissioned to create a memorial for a small town that has suffered a tragedy: the massacre of a group of school children in a remote rural village by a crazed gunman.


The Architect has decided to retain the schoolhouse just as it was, with every upset chair and dropped textbook untouched. The Mother argues that this is meaningless; she would rather the building was razed to the ground.

At the heart of the play lies a discussion about the nature of architecture, over what it can and should be, whether it should be purely functional or seek greater significance. This discussion gradually grows branch upon branch, touching on faith, parenting and mourning, the things we create to help us remember. At times the bones of the play bring to mind TEAM’s recent piece, Architecting, only this time minus the exuberance and hoop skirts.

The performances are solid, but both of these women are somehow less than characters – they are mouthpieces for intentionally opposing views, outlines only sketchily filled in. The architect is a hard-edged professional, conveniently atheistic and blinkered by her belief in her project. The mother is dowdy and rumpled, equally conveniently partially sighted and driven by her religious faith and her insistance that her dead daughter deserves better.

The actors do a decent job with limited material. Deborah Findlay is appropriately stately and severe as the Architect yet she manages to – on occasion – inject a hint of warmth and even vunerability into the role. Sarah Smart is also fine as the Mother, calm and consoled by faith, but her character feels, if anything, even more contrived and unknowable. She becomes increasingly fervent in her pronouncements to the point where it threatens to derail the balance of the play in a way that was perhaps unintended; her unshakeable faith comes across as a symptom of someone losing their grip. It is left to Phoebe Waller-Bridge, as a stylish but gauche young intern, to add some necessary humour. Though hers is the smallest of three roles she succeeds in making her character feel like a person instead of a collection of ideas.

Director Josie Rourke’s clean, pared down production does provide a note of tension between the two women but she can’t keep the play from being sabotaged by its own symbolism. Weigh’s previous play for the Bush, 2,000 Feet Away, was an ambitious and intelligent if ultimately rather self-conscious examination of a community’s response to the threat of peadophilia; this follow-up lacks its heft and wit and feels more like a sketch, a blueprint, than a finished piece.

Reviewed for musicOMH

If There Is I Haven't Found It Yet at the Bush

Nick Payne’s promising play journeys into the dark terrain of adolescent pain and desire.

Anna is fifteen, overweight for her age, and has the added handicap of having a teacher for a mother. This makes her a target for bullies and, at the start of the play, she is about to be suspended for retaliating against her tormentors (with a head butt). Her parents know there’s something wrong; they sense she’s unhappy, but neither really sees, neither really understands.

Her father is an academic and environmental campaigner consumed by research for his current project, a polemical book on climate change. He grasps the bigger global picture and despairs over the damage being done to planet but is blind to the growing divide between him and his wife and to Anna’s increasing unhappiness and confusion. Her mother, though kind and concerned, is equally unable to get through to Anna.

The head butt results in Anna being suspended from school just at the same time as her father’s younger brother, her uncle Terry, rolls up to their door with a rucksack on his back and a vague, poorly thought through plan of getting things together with his ex-girlfriend. He’s good hearted geezer type, the antithesis of Anna’s father, with a runaway mouth that’s not overly well-connected with his brain. As played by Rafe Spall with sublime comic timing, a string of endearingly inappropriate comments come clumsily tumbling from Terry’s mouth (his drunken monologue on the joys of taking a ‘fat bird’ to bed is a stand out example).

Terry suggests that he could help out the family by spending time with Anna during her suspension and through this simple act her life is lifted, bit by bit. Immature and inept as he is, he listens to her, he pays attention to her, and he talks relatively openly about sex. He even throws her a condom when she confesses to him that she’s been asked out on a date. He treats her like a whole, grown person, in a way her parents don’t and can’t.

Ailish O’Connor is astonishingly good as Anna; she captures the confusion of adolescence, the sense of being tugged in every direction, ricocheting between longing, embarrassment, anger and acute desperation. She’s alternately sullen and gleeful, occasionally hiding her face like a shy a child. Spall fills the small space of the Bush Theatre as Terry – it’s a big but balanced performance; while Pandora Colin and Michael Begley provide solid support as Anna’s parents, though the latter’s performance initially feels too mannered, like a caricature in comparison to the rest.

Lucy Osborne’s glorious set has the whole interior of the Bush's auditorium painted sky blue and streaked with cloud, signifying both the sky Anna’s father will no longer fly in as frets over his carbon footprint and the blue of the future, the things waiting in the distance for Anna once school and all its attendant horrors have faded and fallen away.

Payne’s play is funny and touching and quite brutal in places. He’s good at writing scenes of awkwardness and at conveying unsaid things as well as said things - the words held back, trapped on the tongue - and while he doesn’t quite succeed in fusing the environmental thread (which provides a kind of framing device) to the main body of the play, he’s spot on in his writing of the complex knot of gulfs and bonds that develop between parents and children.

Reviewed for musicOMH

2,000 Feet Away At The Bush Theatre

The show was set to start at 8pm. Twenty minutes later and we were still waiting, in a queue that snaked down the Bush Theatre stairs, swelled to fill the narrow lobby area and then trailed out of the door and in to the street. Apparently – I later learned – this was due to a leaking roof, but if any announcement was made at the time, it wasn't a very loud one. And there was me, having long since necked my gin, getting repeatedly poked in the back by an Australian woman with very pointy elbows.

OK, I appreciate that the mid-performance electrocution of lighting technicians is a thing one would probably want to avoid, but an apology wouldn't have gone amiss. So, it goes without saying that, after being brusquely prodded into our seats for the now sold-out 2,000 Feet Away, our mood – myself and, I’m guessing, Andrew’s too – was not the best. Oh, and then there was the play – I had almost forgotten about that.

2,000 Feet Away takes its inspiration from a piece of American legislation that states that sex offenders cannot live anywhere close to where children might gather. This includes playgrounds, parks and schools. In the small town of Eldon, the timid deputy, a placid man who has been known to rescue half dead animals from the side of the road, is charged with evicting these men from their homes and moving them on, in order to keep the town ‘safe’. The question the play asks is, once you move them on, where do you put them? There is no easy answer, of course there isn't; and in the end the deputy comes to see himself as a kind of cursed pied piper figure, destined to keep leading these men away from his home town.

The dialogue in Anthony Weigh’s debut play has a certain rhythmic quality that is, at times, almost Mamet-like (though the repetitious nature of some of it did get on my nerves). What pleased me most was the sense of ambiguity and the way the play frequently shifted gears; first it made you sympathise with these men, before flipping things over and reminding you of exactly what they had done and what they were capable of doing again. One of these sex offenders, holed up in a grotty motel on the outskirts of town, still received perfumed letters in the mail, sexual contracts scrawled on flattened cigarette packets.

Anyway I am writing this at a late hour and I have written more coherently about the play over here. I will just add that though he may loathe theatre, Ian Hart appears to have put his dislike aside for the duration of this production, as his performance, pale and hesitant, was incredibly compelling. And the man can dry heave like nobody’s business. Being very unfond of anything vomit-related, I suddenly developed an intense interest in the contents of my handbag during this bit of the play.

There was also an amazingly confident performance from a young girl called Miranda Princi, who was quite astonishingly good as the strangely semi-sexualised pre-teenager whose fascination with these exiled men is such that she keeps their photocopied mug-shots on her bedroom wall. The scene between her and Joseph Fiennes’ deputy was incredibly tense and unsettling.

The play itself contains as many strengths as it has weaknesses. There is one wonderful moment when Grant Wood’s painting American Gothic is brought strikingly to life. But at other times you feel that Weigh has lighted on this subject matter without actually having anything much new to say about it, that he is striving and failing to create some kind of modern day fable. But this all pales besides my main problem with the piece: the casting of Joseph Fiennes. His isn't a bad performance, but never for a second did I buy him as this schlubby man, slow of thought, who is always munching on something or other (burgers, pancakes, cookies). Despite the ink-stained fingers, he just didn’t feel right in this role, physically – the script paints him as a big guy in need of a diet – or otherwise. This has less to do with his skill as an actor than with his total miscasting, and his presence actually became something of a barrier in the end. I’m sure I had some more thoughts about this, but as I said, the hour is late and my bed beckons.

Home

So. Then. Back in England. An England that appears not to have noticed that it is now well into the middle of spring and is busy hurling rain and hail and all manner of stuff in between down at the pavement – so it was with my winter coat buttoned high that I tube-and-bus-hopped my way to the Bush last night in order to see a play where (appropriately enough) Barking is underwater and Scotland is separated from England by Hadrian’s Channel.

Lucy Kirkwood’s debut play Tinderbox is set some time towards the end of the 21st century in a butcher’s shop in Bradford. The shop is run by the unpleasant Saul and his young wife Vanessa, a one time actress whose creative apex was a film by the title of Fellatio Nelson. Perchik, a fugitive and passport-less artist from Scotland arrives at their shop and is taken on as an assistant by Saul. It soon comes to light that Saul’s previous assistants have a tendency to have accidents that conveniently coincide with the arrival of a new batch of fresh meat in his under-stocked shop.

Josie Rourke’s production had an appropriately seedy feel to it but despite an abundance of bodies in sacks and much talk of maggots and flesh and digestion, I found parts of Bliss at the Royal Court far more unsettling and horrific. Though Joe Orton has been cited in most reviews what this kept reminding me of was an extended episode of The League Of Gentlemen. Very extended. It really did drag on. Two and a half hours, with interval. Initially it had a grubbily amusing quality with Kirkwood’s skewed vision of a flooded, brutal future coming through, but it soon lost direction, ambling on with the occasional comic volley of dialogue raising a laugh. Though Michael Billington wrote that it was refreshing to see a young writer “delivering a two-act play rather than opting for the comfort zone of 90 minutes,” its length really did work against it. The energy and excess needed to make something like this work could not be sustained over such a time and any points Kirkwood wanted to make about the besieged English and the retreat into nationalism were soon lost along the way as the play meandered towards its conclusion. The three main cast members were very good though, particularly the hugely likeable Sheridan Smith (from Little Shop Of Horrors and that Two Pints thing off the telly) as the deceptively dim Vanessa.

For this production, the Bush Theatre’s old L-shaped layout has been replaced with a small series of raked benches and a conventional stage complete with red curtains and a even a little glinty chandelier hanging from the ceiling. Like a West End theatre in miniature. It’s a potentially flexible space and presumably won’t always be arranged in this way; however the benches seemed to have been designed so that even the longer-legged audience members have a struggle to reach the floor – something that surely can’t have been intentional.