Edward II, National Theatre

If Dexter has taught us anything it’s that when the heavy duty plastic sheeting starts gets rolled out things are bound to get messy. Yet in Joe Hill-Gibbins production most of the mess comes before this moment, the cacophony replaced by a quiet, desperate tension, the appalling gentleness of Edward’s inevitable demise made all the more powerful by the noise and excess that came earlier.

Hill-Gibbins’ take on Marlowe has a similar chaotic, near operatic energy to his recent version of The Changeling for the Young Vic. But just as that lost some of its focus and intensity when taken from the smaller Maria studio and blown up and out to fill the Main House, this too feels a bit hyper-aware of the size of the space it’s required to fill.

The opening sequence has a kind of familiar gloss, an almost Donmar-ish aesthetic, as John Heffernan’s king sits upright on his throne, his crown gleaming against a cloth of gold. But when the curtain lifts we’re instead presented with a series of stage flats, MDF battlements, stripped-down, fragile, transitory. Lizzie Clachan’s design takes full advantage of the depth and height of the Olivier with Hill-Gibbins again making interesting use of closed doors, spaces into which we can’t quite see, rooms in which conspiracies can be hatched amid silver curls of cigarette smoke.

After the opening coronation scene, the production becomes increasingly stylistically layered, making much use of Brechtian title cards and video, running Headlong into Katie Mitchell territory. It’s an everything-including-the-kitchen-sink approach, chock-full of references. Live recorded footage is used to convey a sense of up-the-nostril Blair Witch proximity to a world that might otherwise seem remote on the cavernous stage. One memorable sequence, which recalls the meta-theatrical playfulness of Rupert Goold’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, uses the external architecture of the National Theatre itself – its turrets and stairwells, its blocky concrete eminence – as a backdrop for the introduction of Spencer and Baldock. The cry of ‘drums’ becomes a defining one, with a throbbing, pulsing, humming running through things.

Yet at times it feels more like a tick-list of directorial influences rather than a cohesive universe. There are sinister helmeted henchmen – Three Kingdoms by way of Knightmare – and much gleeful anachronism. But this approach pays off in the end: as Edward’s balsa wood kingdom is toppled, the production stills itself too and the final scenes have a chilling and bleak power.

When fully robed in the opening scenes, Heffernan’s Edward combines the studied regal air of Eddie Redmayne’s Richard II with something of Disney’s other lion king; in the beginning he’s bratty and petulant, a foot stamper rather than a thumb-sucker, albeit one with a massive hard-on for Koyle Soller’s Gaveston, a drainpipe-jeaned yank outsider who makes a parkour-style entrance from the stalls, bounding onto the stage, wrapping himself around Edward’s body, locking lips. In an apt yet poignant piece of mirroring, Soller will later be the one to finish Edward when he returns as the assassin Lightbody. Despite the ominous expanse of plastic sheeting, there is no blood, just one lone broken man, the life leaking from him.

Good as both Heffernan and Soller are, they’re matched by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith’s deeply charismatic Mortimer and by Vanessa Kirby, whose crimson Isabella has the calculating aspect of Cersei Lannister. Near mute in the first half of the play and wearing a wig last seen on Guy of Gisbourne in Maid Marian and her Merry Men, Bettrys Jones’ Prince Edward really comes to life in the last few scenes, to unnerving effect; there’s strong support too from Kirsty Bushell and Penny Layden in some creative examples of cross-gender casting.

The production might well place the visual ahead of the lyrical, it might take a craft knife to some of those ‘mighty lines’ but these plays aren’t going anywhere, they can take it. It does however fall short of the queasy, bloated brilliance of Hill-Gibbins’ The Changeling, but that’s perhaps because it keeps its foot hovering just over the brake, it never quite lets rip, it never quite floors it, even though it threatens to on occasion.

Reviewed for Exeunt

The Amen Corner, National Theatre

In a production full of soaring choral moments, it’s the undercurrent of silent strength that sounds loudest in this revival of James Baldwin’s 1955 play. When Sharon D. Clarke’s Sister Odessa faces down the grumblers and the gossips in her sister’s church, she stands firm, arms solemnly folded, dignified in the face of their snipping and griping, their small-mindedness and back-biting. She’s steady as a stone, a force to be reckoned with, even though she barely says a word.

This quality of quiet, feminine strength stripes through Baldwin’s play; his women know what it is to struggle – they understand hunger and grief and loss all too well.

Marianne Jean Baptiste plays Sister Margaret, the iron-minded pastor of a Harlem tabernacle who has raised her young son on her own after being abandoned by her musician husband. When she is in full flow as a preacher she is capable of generating waves of euphoria in her congregation; though small in stature she fills the room, white-robed, her voice rising and falling like the tide, her hands drifting heavenward, sending her flock into ecstatic paroxysms. She councils her congregation to put the Lord above all else in the world, to go hungry rather than take that job driving a liquor truck, to empty their pockets into the collection plate, to do everything they can in the service of God. He is everywhere and in everything. The church elders always greet each other with the exultation to ‘Praise the Lord’ - it’s the first thing that leaves their lips when they meet.

Sister Margaret faces a double test of her faith when her husband, Luke, returns unexpectedly, sick yet unrepentant, quivering with fever, his lungs ravaged by TB; at the same time her son is proving himself to be a talented young musician who’s not content just to play piano in church, he wants to ‘live in the world’ instead. There’s dissent too among her flock, who start to question the status of a female pastor and question quite how she can afford a shiny new frigidaire while they can hardly make ends meet.

Baldwin’s addict father left his mother when he was young and the man who replaced him was none too pleasant either, but despite this he does not make Margaret a saint; she is complex, proud, and over-comfortable in her position of power in the community. When the poorer members of her church complain about their situation, she doesn’t really hear them. And when it turns out that the reasons her relationship with Luke collapsed are more messy than she led on, and that, in reality, it was her that did the leaving, walking out him after the death of their child to make a go of it on her own, they have their ammunition.  As the church elders use this against her, the repeated calls of ‘Praise the Lord’ start to sound increasingly hollow, a way of excusing the most craven behaviour.

The play is often over emphatic and heavy of hand – the way the elders suddenly turn against Margaret seems too quick, too simplistic – but the central performances are powerful and Rufus Norris’ production creates a enveloping sense of community, a world, mainly of women, with the church at its heart, filling the Olivier with ceiling-lifted gospel music. Marianne Jean-Baptiste traces Margaret’s journey from near-complacency in her faith and her position in the community to raw confrontation with what it really means to love. Sharon D. Clarke’s Odessa is a calm, capable presence, unruffled and wise. Cecilia Noble is a cupcake-voiced delight as the most sanctimonious of the elders, a pastel-suited woman who uses her virginity as a weapon, a demonstration of the strength of her commitment to God. And though it’s the women you go home remembering, Lucian Msamati’s Luke is also more than a man gone bad; he’s been as undone by the death of their daughter as Margaret has.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Othello, National Theatre

My, but she takes a long time to die, Desdemona, twitching on her barrack mattress, doll-blonde and bare-legged, as her husband crushes the breath from her. Just when he thinks the deed is done, she splutters back to life, pleading. He could stop then, could maybe save her, but he’s gone too far, so he plunges on, laying his weight on her until she is still, his hands wrapped round her delicate neck. It’s awful and protracted and upsetting – as it should be – with Nicholas Hytner’s production making much of their physical disparity, the brutality of it: she’s so fragile-looking and exposed, in her knickers and the tiny child-like T-shirt she wears to bed, his muscled, uniformed form all but obliterating her.

It’s sexual too, all that writhing, there on the contested bed. Adrian Lester’s Othello doesn’t rape her, but there are intimations of reclamation in the methodical way he goes about putting out her light, still palpably, physically drawn to her, even when he his sniffing her sheets to detect traces of betrayal.

Hytner’s production is the third in a sort-of triptych, together with his Henry V(starring Lester) and hisHamlet (starring Kinnear) and it shares a similar contemporary earth-toned aesthetic. At its best it succeeds in saying some interesting things about the weaponisation of men in the military, with Othello, the career soldier, pinwheeling from love-struck to rage-fuelled in half a heartbeat, his jealousy so intense it makes him vomit. And though Iago tries to rationalise his hatred, it seems to spring from some deeper, primordial place, controlling him rather than the other way round.

With their faces close-cropped and deep shadowed, their eyes burning out at you, the NT poster campaign pits Lester and Kinnear against each other like prize fighters, the Rumble in the Olivier if you will, and it’s difficult not to look at it through this frame, though it seems reductive to do so as both performances are powerful, both rich in their own way. Lester’s Othello is commanding and full of fire – he has a voice you could warm yourself by and hulks out convincingly, flipping over a table with a flick of his wrist whilst roaring with rage – but it’s perhaps the nature of the play that Kinnear’s Iago is the more compelling figure (though it’s in no way inevitable that Iago should dominate – Chiwetel Ejiofor in the Donmar’s 2008 version remains one of the most intense, controlled Shakespearean performances I’ve seen), coming across as a bit of a bruiser, Phil Mitchell with added smarts, driven, cold-eyed and calculating but with a dash of the schoolboy in the way he air-punches and victory shimmies when he gets one over on the object of his malice. As with his Hamlet, Kinnear’s performance has a kind of ease to it, there’s a clarity of intention to his delivery, and he juggles the verse as if he spoke that way every day, though there are times when the mechanics of it all feel a bit too visible.

Olivia Vinall’s Desdemona fades into the background a bit, but that’s again perhaps a consequence of the role. (In making Desdemona an absence, The Q Brothers’ Othello the Remix – performed as part of the Globe to Globe festival last year – was one of the more interesting readings of this play and the placing of women within it). Lyndsey Marshal’s Emelia, while furious and forceful in her loyalty, seems a bit trapped in a role that feels particularly contradictory in its modern context.

For while the production’s military setting makes sense in terms of translating the hierarchies and power games – this man’s, man’s, man’s world – into a recognisable present, embroidered handkerchiefs aside, there are times when it feels a bit tired, a bit ‘done’, a rehashed Iraqistan which we’ve seen before and we will see again. It does at least allow for a great, lively and messy, mess-room scene - with a couple of bikini pin-ups the only thing to break up the bare walls - in which Jonathan Bailey’s Cassio is forced to chug down a lager fountain while being beerily cheered on by his fellow soldiers.

Vicki Mortimer’s flood-lit military base of a set is intentionally bulky and ugly, a transient space, devoid of home comforts, all concrete, harsh strip-lighting, and cheap plaster board walls: when Othello punches out in anger his fist goes straight through. Though there’s something a bit effortful about the set, with its numerous sliding panels allowing various bedrooms, offices and yards to emerge and retreat, its very blankness is an asset, for in this fenced-in place of sun and sweat and tension and little in the way of distraction which doesn’t come in a can, it’s plausible that here passions, jealousies, petty vendettas, could grow and spread unchecked like bacteria on a petri dish.

Reviewed for Exeunt

The Magistrate, National Theatre

‘Tis a pretty thing, Timothy Sheader’s production of Arthur Wing Pinero’s sort-of farce of 1885: an awful lot of care and effort has clearly gone into design. Katrina Lindsay’s set unfolds like a pop-up book, its intricate fringes part city-scape, part snowflake, and the whole thing looking like an illustration by Phiz or something out of Punch: there are even ink blots spattered across the backdrop. Everything is at angles and diagonals – even bodies, even limbs, the cast tilting at windows and doorways – and everyone is coiffed to look like a living caricature.

But, pretty as it is, there’s something a little off-kilter about the piece and Sheader’s production never quite syncs with the stylised visuals: farce should appear liquid and effortless but the timing is often fractionally off, props are dropped and doors stick, making you all too aware of the mechanics, the creaking and squeaking of cogs and gears.

Nancy Carroll plays Agatha Posket, a widow who has shaved five years off her age in order to make herself more appealing to the upright magistrate, Aeneas (John Lithgow). To pull off this deception she was obliged to reduce the age of her young son accordingly, passing off her nineteen year old Cis as an ‘advanced’ fourteen year old. Trouble is it’s no longer possible to “pacify him with a stick and hoop” and despite his Eton jacket and short trousers he’s partial to a cigarette and a spot of Port of an evening and has all the women in his family’s employ out to pet and pander to him.

When Cis’s godfather, the bluff but decent Colonel Lukyn, threatens to pay them a visit and reveal her little deception, Agatha is forced to intercept him and ends up being caught up in a police raid and forced to appear in her husband’s court the following morning. To further complicate things Aenas – thanks to Cis - is also caught out of his element at the same hotel, obliged to flit to Kilburn in the middle of the night to avoid tangling with the law.

Lithgow is entertaining as Posket – his ordered world unravelling spectacularly over the course of a night – and, when he’s finally allowed off the leash, smudged and dishevelled and generally bested, he eats up his character’s main monologue with glee. But the production is never more alive than when Joshua MacGuire’s Cis is leap-frogging settees and dry-humping his piano mistress; a kind of matryoshka Tom Hollander with Willy Wonka hair, the production noticeably slumps whenever he is off-stage.

The issues with pacing are intensified by a series of between-scene musical interludes, in which a chorus of outsize oompa-loompas in stripy trews and matching Charles Dickens wigs sing about the perils of telling porkies. (“It’s the little lies that get you into trouble.”) But instead of acting as playful Dahl-esque winks, these are over-extended and plodding, hammering home messages that were already fully evident in the text. There are laughs, but they are very thinly spread, minor eruptions of mirth, and there’s an unresolved tonal disconnect between the cartoony design and the manner in which the piece itself plays out, an issue of identity, a gap which is never satisfyingly bridged.

Reviewed for Exeunt

A Woman Killed With Kindness at the National Theatre

Two households. Two women. Katie Mitchell’s new production of Thomas Heywood’s 1603 play splits the stage down the middle: on one side, there is an ancient family manor house and, on the other, an elegant early twentieth century home. This division allows for a process of mirroring, for moments of both harmony and discordance between the play’s two plot strands.

Heywood’s play begins on a joyous note, on the day of the wedding of John Frankford. But the celebratory spirit of these opening moments is soon diluted when his wife Anne embarks on an affair with Wendoll, a friend of her husband who has been invited to stay at their home and treat it - and its contents - as his own. The idea of women as property is made explicit in the secondary but more potent account of Sir Charles, the wealthy landowner imprisoned for his shooting a servant, who in order to free himself from mounting debts, offers up his sister, Susan, to a man she can’t abide.

Mitchell’s production continually contrasts these two women and their predicaments. The events have been transplanted from the early seventeenth century to 1919, in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, when social structures were shifting. The Representation of the People Act had recently granted women over 30 the right to vote, but both of these women remain trapped by entrenched social codes, the need for female purity most pressing among them. Whiteness. The wedding gown takes on a toxic symbolism as Susan stands shrouded in lace awaiting the man Charles would have her give herself to and, on the night of her wedding, Anne’s white nightdress is tainted by her own blood, so it seems apt that, later, when her husband interrupts her in bed with Wendoll, she emerges from the room clad in turquoise silk. Heywood’s play offers little in the way of insight into why Anne gives herself so quickly to Wendoll but the walls of the Frankford home are pointedly hung with butterflies under glass. On the other side of the divide, the walls of the Mountford home are methodically stripped of their finery, of the oil paintings and the chandeliers, as their once grand family seat becomes little more than a decaying, chilly prison.

The stage space is actually split into four rather than two since both sides of Lizzie Clachan and Vicki Mortimer’s set are spread across two levels, each connected by a staircase, while Mitchell’s production plays with the vertical as much as the horizontal. Servants are forever flurrying up and down the stairs or gently ascending to the bedrooms above; in one striking moment, Susan, amid a blizzard of activity, walks slowly backwards up the stairs as if tugged by a cord. Visual paralleling also occurs between the upstairs and downstairs worlds: when Anne is in labour both Frankford and Wendoll rattle back and forth across the stage like fingers being impatiently run up and down the keys of a piano.

For all this visual intricacy, Mitchell sometimes seems to be sparring with Heywood’s play rather than dancing with it; a constant process of negotiation with the text seems to be at work. There’s wit here - when Frankford faces his wife over card table and they debate whether to play Hearts and Cheat – but the play is often merely functional, shoving its characters from point A to point B without giving much thought to the journey. It’s full of emotional lurches and leaps in plausibility and neither play nor production ever fully gets under Anne’s skin as a character, neither makes the audience grasp quite why this woman is so quick to hop into bed with Wendoll (Mitchell suggests that sex with Frankford is a brusque, abrupt affair but this feels like a tacked on explanation).

The production is better at painting the fall-out of Anne’s adultery, the pain Frankford inflicts through his stoic determination to drive his wife from her home and her children and the awful punishment she inflicts on them both as a result. There’s a continuing resonance to Anne’s decision to starve herself; a woman of appetite remains a suspect figure and self-denial is a kind of power, a means of taking control. Yet at times the production seems to be pushing too hard to make its point: the final hospital scene – which finally unites the two women’s stories – is as clinical as the space in which it is set, and an earlier scene in which Susan clutches a noose and contemplates escape, are blunt in execution and out of step with the production’s particular rhythms.

Of the performances, Paul Ready’s decent, bemused and ultimately shattered Frankford stands out, as does Sandy McDade, a still, drifting presence as Susan. But this is very much an ensemble piece, elegantly and intricately choreographed. Mitchell seems particularly interested in the relationship between servant and master, the bonds of dependence and affection, and there are always large numbers of bodies on stage, clearing dishes, serving drinks. Gawn Grainger’s turn as Frankford’s paternal, no-nonsense butler, Nicholas, provides a necessary note of warmth.

Amid the near-constant motion and the dramatic use of the domestic interior it’s the moments of connection that mark themselves out. The most memorable image, the one you are left with long after, is of these two women on either side of the wall picking out notes on the piano, briefly connecting with one another, before life spirals away from them.

Reviewed for Exeunt

One Man, Two Guvnors at the National

The woman in the row in front of me appears to be gripped by some kind of near-orgasmic spasm. “Oh my God,” she keeps saying, while fanning her face with her hand. The man sitting to my side is less overtly amused, but I notice his mouth, set so firm at first, has curled itself into a smile and that his shoulders are twitching despite himself. This is a production where the chief currency is laughter and judging by all this barking and hooting, the multifarious music of mirth, it’s hit paydirt.

Richard Bean has transplanted Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters to 1960s Brighton, a bawdy, gaudy world of cardboard cut-out sets and a particularly English strain of smut. Nicholas Hytner’s production is a riotous collage of panto and music hall, the scenes interspersed with musical interludes by sharp-suited skiffle band, The Craze. The cast members occasionally join the band to do a turn on the xylophone or a stint at the microphone; there’s the obligatory bit of cross-dressing and a comedy chase sequence in which the performers ricochet from one side of the set to the other. This is a production at ease with the inherent comedy value of the chest wig; at one point someone even sports a fez.

James Corden plays Francis Henshall, the none-too-bright Harlequin figure who ends up working two jobs. His first master is Jemima Rooper’s Rachel Crabbe, who spends the majority of her time on stage disguised as her dead twin brother Roscoe, the other is Rachel’s lover – and Roscoe’s killer – lanky posh boy Stanley. Unbeknownst to the other, both are trying to extort money from the tight-fisted Charlie the Duck so they can do a bunk to Australia together (Australia comes in for a lot of digs in Bean’s deliciously spiky script) while Francis, caught between them, ties himself in knots as he attempts to run errands for them both while keeping them apart.

Hytner orchestrates the pacing meticulously, balancing moments of (comparative) restraint with those of full-bodied physical comedy. His production works as a bell curve, building to a magnificent middle sequence in which a starving Francis (he has already chewed through an important letter in an effort to ward off his hunger) is forced to serve dinner to both his bosses. To this end he is assisted by Tom Edden’s spectacularly palsied and decrepit waiter, Alfie (think Julie Walters in that skit with the soup, only add a few decades) who is forever being pitched down the stairs.

Bean’s update retains many elements of commedia dell’arte, replete with set social types that are recognisable to a modern audience: the miserly dad, the pompous Latin-spewing lawyer, the swaggering actor. There is also much audience interaction, with Francis nimbly riffing with the front row and occasionally inviting people to join him onstage.

Though the selfish and whining Francis – his character is in fact led by the two masters of groin and belly – is never exactly endearing, Corden’s performance provides a reminder of what a capable comic performer he can be when well directed; he’s quick-witted and responsive as well as energetic, tumbling from armchairs and taking a swing at his own head with a dustbin lid. Hytner meanwhile makes as much use of Corden’s bulk as he does with Oliver Chris’s long-limbed agility as blazer-clad ninny, Stanley. No gesture, however small, is wasted: he strides and thrusts and towers over Jemima Rooper, so that even their embraces have a comic quality; there are times when he appears to be channelling Hugh Laurie in his delivery.

This level of attention to the physical is evident in every performance. Daniel Rigby seems to be forever angling his body towards the audience, as Alan, an actor who speaks only in sonorous declarations with his arms windmilling and his chest permanently puffed, while Edden’s Alfie continues to jitter even when taking his bow. Pleasingly the female characters are also allowed to indulge in the slapstick, with Rooper shuffling around the stage hobbled by her trousers and Susie Toase, as Francis’s Babs Windsor-bosomed would be paramour, Dolly, writhing on the floor in mockery of his earlier tantrum.

After the comedic high-water mark of the middle section, Hytner lets things tail off gradually, tying up all the various plot strands and throwing a few last minute hurdles for Francis’s character before wrapping it all up – naturally – with a song.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Greenland at the National Theatre

The polar bear is something of a lumbering paradox; it could kill a man with ease and yet it seems so vulnerable in its whiteness, a vulnerability that has only intensified as its Arctic habitat has come under threat. For this reason the bear, an animal both threatened and threatening, has come to serve as a easy symbol for the damage climate change seems likely to wreak on the planet, for all the things we stand to lose. So the presence of a polar bear in the National Theatre’s attempt to tackle the suject is not exactly surprising, is in fact pretty predictable, and yet this ursine cameo is handled so delightfully that its predictability is eclipsed.

The appearance of the bear, the work of Blind Summit’s puppet-master Mark Down, creates a moment of awe and wonder amid an otherwise noisy and tangled production. Greenland is issue theatre, or perhaps more correctly, Issue Theatre. It takes the subject of climate change and attempts to graft narrative onto it, to inject dramatic life into it. To do this the National has drafted in four writers: Moira Buffini, Matt Charman, Penelope Skinner and Jack Thorne. The production has a jumbled quality, a franticness, though it eventually becomes possible to tease out a number of distinct narrative strands: a young boy with a passion for geography grows up to lead an isolated life studying sea birds in the Arctic Circle; a young girl, much to her parents’ bafflement and dismay, drops out of college to become an activist; the most developed strand, set in the run-up to the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, involves an ambitious political adviser and her burgeoning relationship with a scientist whose projected climate models present a bleak picture for the future of the human race. These stories are interspersed with other characters, other voices, the most interesting being a pair of delegates from Mali. Together they present a less familiar picture, that of a country already feeling the real effects of climate change, encroaching deserts and disrupted rain patterns. But no sooner have they said their piece than they are ushered to one side in a way which could, optimistically, be read as a comment on the general media coverage of the issues at hand. Bijan Sheibani’s production is certainly slick. That’s not intended as a dig; the staging is always visually striking and there are moments of real invention and magic: the polar bear, the silhouettes of swooping circling guillemots. At other times there is a sense of excess and repetition: first plastic bottles fall from the ceiling, then paper, and finally both rain and wind machines get a work-out. Music is used throughout; there’s a brief burst of It’s Raining Men and a rather heavy-handed dance sequence to the strains of Come Fly With Me, presumably intended to illustrate the irony of all the air travel that an event like Copenhagen entails. The obvious parallel is with Rupert Goold’s Enron - and the production’s dramaturg is Goold’s regular collaborator Ben Power. Yet while the markers of the musical, the air of showiness, felt like a bombastic but logical choice for a play about banking and commerce, they feel somewhat shoe-horned in here. There are some strong individual performances, particularly from the ever-watchable Lyndsey Marshal, and there are also a number of moments of genuine humour, yet the overriding tone is didactic and clichéd - the strand with the young activist is particularly limp - and the whole thing has a stitched-together quality This is one of a growing wave of plays about climate change. Richard Bean’s The Heretic (chosen promotional image: the polar bear) at the Royal Court looks set to cover similar ground while Steve Waters’ potent double-bill, The Contingency Plan, has already shown that’s it’s possible to merge gripping and plausible writing with the idea of a threatened world. Here, while it’s possible to glean the thinking behind the exercise, the weight of all the voices serves to sink things. Reviewed for musicOMH

Hamlet at the National Theatre

Rory Kinnear is a very cerebral actor. It’s often possible to see the things clicking and connecting behind his eyes, but here in his long-mooted Hamlet for the National Theatre, this only works in his favour.

He speaks with a clearness of tone and freshness of voice, as if the words were just occurring to him, and, even when he is still, a sense of inner desperation remains.

His Hamlet is a mercurial figure, sometimes self-pitying, sometimes hard-edged and cunning; a young man pinioned by circumstance. When, rather self-consciously shamming insanity, he curls himself up in his trunk and pulls down the lid, there’s a palpable feeling that he wishes he could stay like that, balled up with a book, secure and safe, and shut out the hell he’s found himself in.


The production belongs to Kinnear. Nicholas Hytner’s direction is solid and polished but also rather safe and occasionally uninspired. The overriding sense is of a watched world: dark suited men with earpieces glide through anonymous corridors, people listen behind doors and silent figures can often be glimpsed through windows or submerged in shadow. It is impossible to be truly alone in this environment – there is always someone looking on or listening in.

Kinnear is first glimpsed in his mourning suit, looking stiff-spined and awkward as people buzz around him, an afterthought in his own home. Claudius’s first speech has become an on-camera address and once it’s all wrapped up everyone visibly slumps while Gertrude reaches for the first of many glasses of bubbly. The playing out of events for public consumption is a recurring theme and Hytner’s production contains visual echoes of The West Wing as well as touches of something more sinister and Soviet.

Patrick Malahide is a sly and understated Claudius while Clare Higgins plays Gertrude as a groomed and glossy political wife, crammed into a pencil skirt and high heels, masking her complicity with drink; but, in a production of great clarity, her motivations remain the haziest of all the characters and Higgins rarely allows the audience a handle on what she is feeling or thinking, a barrier remains in place.

Ruth Negga is a sparky Ophelia and has a real sense of sibling warmth with Alex Lanipekun's Laertes but, as is often the case, comes unstuck with the mad scenes, and just seems silly gliding round the stage on an overly symbolic shopping trolley papered with her dead father’s image.

Vicki Mortimer’s design enhances this idea of the ‘corridors of power’; the palace is an elegant but anonymous space, sparely furnished, chilly and shifting, with Hamlet’s book-strewn and messy quarters standing out in contrast. Though Hytner’s production can be a bit obvious, a bit blunt in places, and some of the innovations seem misplaced – the matching T-shirts whipped out to accompany the players’ performance are a case in point, stretching credulity – it’s very well-paced and has real dramatic propulsion, thanks in large part to Kinnear.

Kinnear’s somewhat studenty Prince is pitched into a hellish mess and made to confront himself and his world for what seems the first time; his is a very human Hamlet, smacking his hand against a desk with such force he hurts himself, smoking through his soliloquies. It’s his performance that sticks, that roots itself deep, a thoughtful portrayal that never feels mechanical, always fresh, considered and touchingly real.

Reviewed for musicOMH

After the Dance at the National

Thea Sharrock’s revival of Terence Rattigan’s rarely produced second play After the Dance reveals it to be just as human and insightful as his better known work.
Following the huge success of his fun, fizzy comedy French Without Tears, After the Dance was an altogether more grown up play, which was first staged in the summer of 1939. But while it was well received by the critics war was imminent and it failed to find an audience, closing after only a short run. Rattigan himself declined to include it in his collected works and, while there have been regional productions since, the play has rarely been seen on a major London stage.

After the Dance is a portrait of the inter-war generation, of those who were too young to have fought in the First World War and remained stubbornly blinkered to the war to come. David Scott-Fowler is a historian who, it’s implied, has squandered his talent and intellect. He’s supposedly working on a book on Italian history, but his life, and the life of his circle of friends, seems to involve a constant stream of parties and the avoidance of anything that could possibly be considered a bore. David’s drinking has reached such a level that he is in danger of killing himself. His wife of twelve years Joan presents a breezy front to the world and has sculpted herself into what she believes is David’s perfect partner: cool, witty, at ease socially, and reluctant to in push or scold him.

The play is set in the Scott-Fowlers’ Mayfair flat, an expensive but oddly comfortless space. In fact there’s very little pleasure in this gin-fuelled, hedonistic world of theirs; it’s a cruel, hard place where people’s misfortunes are reduced to oft-told anecdotes and there’s a sense of people just going through the motions. The younger generation are, in contrast, presented as far more grounded and serious-minded. This is encapsulated in the character of Peter, David’s younger cousin, who is working as his secretary. The play hinges on a somewhat implausible attraction between David and Peter’s perky fiancée Helen. All of twenty, she convinces him to give up the drink and to start striving for greater academic success. The blossoming love between them strikes the one awkward note in an otherwise rich and moving piece – unfortunately it’s a pivotal one. It’s almost impossible to believe the character of David, as he’s played and written, lusting after bright, bland Helen. Yet lust he does, eventually deciding to leave Joan for the younger girl.

The real emotional weight of the play is carried by Nancy Carroll, as the seemingly resilient Joan who has made an art out of concealing the true depths of her feelings for her husband. For fear of alienating him, for fear of being seen as – that dread word - ‘a bore’, she has downplayed her affections for years. The cracking of her façade when she realises that her suspicions are true and that he intends to leave her is heart-breaking to watch.

The strength of the play, as emphasised by Sharrock’s elegant production, lies in the shading of the characters rather than the broader portrait of a generation in crisis. Benedict Cumberbatch’s modulated performance captures David’s complexities, his odd passivity coupled with his hunger for something more, and there’s a wrenching moment when Joan stands over David as he plays the piano, which is rich with loss and love on both their parts. Adrian Scarborough is also superb as the couple’s old friend, John, who cheerfully leeches off them and yet is clearly deeply fond of them both and is capable of greater reflection and insight than might at first seem apparent. But it’s Carroll’s performance that leaves the most lasting impression, vivacious in her red dress, her smile fixed in place, a drink in her hand, while inside she’s breaking apart.

Reviewed for Theatermania.com

Time and the Conways at the National

It is difficult to enter the world of J.B. Priestley’s Conway family without thinking of Virginia Woolf’s Pargiters. The Years was published in 1937, the same year that Priestley’s play was first staged, and charts the fortunes of a similarly sized family over several decades.

But while it is the linear passage of time that interests Woolf – the toll it takes, the way people age and change – Priestly has a more idiosyncratic take on time, very much influenced by the theories of J. W Dunne, that time is eternally present, that our pasts, presents and futures somehow exist simultaneously and that, therefore, we are all our moments, the best and worst of them.

The Conways are a large brood: four daughters, two sons, and a mother recently widowed. Spanning the years between the wars, Time and the Conways opens in 1919, on the night of Kay Conway’s 21st birthday. Everybody is dressed up and gathered together, party games are being played, the younger son Robin is home on leave, the mood is celebratory, optimistic about the future.

The second act of this hefty three act play (three hours, two intervals) allows a glimpse of this future. There is a leap forwards, of almost twenty years; the bright young things are now world-worn and disappointed. Marriages have crumbled, promised novels have never been written, the family is beset by money problems and death has robbed them of one of their number. The dominant mood is one of bitterness, the once close family have fragmented, and petty resentments are harboured.

This scene is a kind of premonition, glimpsed by a frightened Kay from her place in the past, a reflection of things to come. It seems fitting that a door, a window and a mirror occupy prominent positions on Laura Hopkins set, one on each wall; in the party scenes the music and laughter from the other unseen room drift in like memories.

Though Rupert Goold’s compelling production is, for the most part, naturalistically played, each act ends with an imposed moment of visual invention – a freezing, a fracturing – that echo the ideas expressed.

However if you remove the theorizing, much of what is left is familiar family saga stuff. The National reinvigorated Priestley’s An Inspector Calls with their renowned 1992 Stephen Daldry production, but Goold doesn’t quite manage to replicate that here. The play remains a stubborn thing, its fusion of ideas and narrative always feeling a little forced. The Conway daughters in particular are rather thinly drawn and it’s all too easy to reduce their characters to one-word descriptions: the beautiful one, the artistic one, the academic one and the youngest, innocent and good – the mechanics of the writing are, at times, too obvious and Priestley seems almost to be enjoying setting up young dreams only to dash them.

Some superb acting helps to counter these difficulties and to make the production compelling despite its length. The whole ensemble is strong, especially when required to age convincingly for the second act, something most of them achieve. The smoke-throated Francesca Annis makes a formidable matriarch, unable to hide her disappointment that some of her children have not lived up to her ambitions for them, and Paul Ready is also quietly impressive as older brother Alan, with his slight stammer and his ever present pipe, content to live an uneventful life even if it means being scorned by his mother. It is Alan who gets to act as Priestley’s mouthpiece, explaining his ideas on time to Hattie Morahan's Kay, consoling her at a point in life when all seems impossible.

Both the magical mirror sequence that ends act two and Goold’s striking coda, with the characters caught up in their very own dance to the music of time, feels somewhat tacked on, reiterating rather than adding anything new, garnish on what is an otherwise straight down the line revival, with the grandfather clock tick-tocking in the hall as the Conway family walk (clockwise) into their future.

Reviewed for musicOMH

Dido, Queen of Carthage at the National

Is it wrong to snigger at self immolation? I suspect it is. But it was difficult to keep an entirely straight face watching Anastasia Hille’s distraught Phoenician queen build a pyre of John Lewis throw pillows before dousing herself in liquid, lighting a match and waiting for the ‘roaring flames’ sound effects to kick in.

Michael Billington has asked we celebrate a straightforward staging of a rarely performed work, but making Marlowe dull takes a fair bit of doing and this does it. It’s not so much the length – 3 hours, despite what the programme says – but James MacDonald’s staging which seemed almost wilfully old-fashioned and unadventurous. That’s perhaps a little harsh. I did think that Hille, as Dido, and Mark Bonnar as Aeneas gave strong, at times moving performances but I found so many of the design and directorial choices got in the way of the play rather than making it live.

The yellow shower curtain that formed the main backdrop was one such niggle, especially as the performers often left gaps in it when pulling it closed. Some of the costumes had the whiff of the dressing up box to them too, one kept in the attic by an aunt and full of odd scarves and skirts, and I couldn’t fathom why Mercury – who seemed to be wearing sock-suspenders – seemed to address the mortals via one of those devices that serial killers use to disguise their voices when taunting the police (or that’s at least what it sounded like).

There were some moments of lightness and invention but things – especially in the later stages of the play, as Aeneas was compelled to depart and Dido fretted and raved, her thoughts turning to death – felt more laboured than anything else and the climactic conflagration, when it came, was something of a damp squib. Billington has a point, in that I did enjoy seeing this play lifted off the page, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that more could have been done with it. The West End Whingers were spotted departing hastily at the interval (no doubt via the bar).

Burnt by the Sun at the National

With his current role at the National, Rory Kinnear has been given a gift of a part. He plays Mitia, a charming and playful character, who is also highly enigmatic and a little sinister; a man of layers and hidden things, a wearer of masks and disguises.

Mitia was once in love with Maroussia, the daughter of his music teacher, but one night he left, vanished without a word, and has not been seen since. Now, twelve years later, he has returned to a world not dissimilar to the one he left.

Though the music teacher is now dead, his family still live as they once did, a gentle and rather Chekhovian existence, sipping tea and singing songs in their summer dacha.

They are allowed to continue in this gentle facsimile of pre-Revolutionary life because Maroussia has, in the years since Mitia left, married Colonel Kotov, a celebrated Bolshevik hero who – literally – has a direct line to Stalin.

So while the family waft around their airy home in linens and silks, it is only the stream of MASH style loudspeaker announcements (“Comrades…”) and the passing troupes of beaming, red-sashed Pioneers, that show that life beyond the dacha has changed so completely.

Kotov meanwhile lumbers round the place in his grey flannel breeches looking bear-like and out of place. The family sniff about his rough habits – he prefers to use the old fashioned steam house rather than the bathroom – but there is clearly an unvoiced pact between them, a harmony which Mitia’s return threatens to undermine in the most brutal fashion.

Nikita Mikhalkov’s Oscar winning Russian film has been adapted for the stage by Peter Flannery and as with many screen-to-stage transfers there have been a number of inevitable and necessary changes. Flannery’s version (based on the screenplay by Mikhalkov and Rustam Ibragimbekov) makes explicit many of the things that are merely danced around in the film. At one point, as the family bemoan the things they miss from their old way of living, Kotov asks them outright: “why didn’t you fight for it?”

The film filtered the complex tangle of adult relationships through the eyes of Kotov and Maroussia’s precocious young daughter Nadia. Here, while Nadia is still a delightful presence, the emotions of the adult characters are pitched closer to the surface, they are more exposed.

Michelle Dockery is quietly impressive as the stricken Maroussia suddenly torn between the man she once adored and her current husband, who she also cares deeply about. Ciaran Hinds, however, feels oddly underpowered as Kotov. He is suitably gruff but there are too few glimpses of the feared and revered leader of men or, for that matter, the man who charmed Maroussia. Rory Kinnear, of course, benefits from the showier role but though clearly revelling in his character’s propensity for dressing up, playing the piano and tap dancing, he never overdoes it. He maintains a careful balance and there is always the sense of pain and loss under the veneer of playfulness, an aura of danger about him. When the truth behind his long absence is revealed it is very chilling indeed.

The supporting cast are also very strong, particularly Stehanie Jacob as Mokhova the eternally virginal maid, prone to howling on the stairs when upset.

Howard Davies’ production works well, gently and divertingly building to a tense and moving conclusion. It is powerfully played and compelling and yet there are the usual niggles when translating something that worked so well in one medium to another; there are a number of key images and scenes that can’t be replicated on stage, so the production doesn’t attempt to. The balloons bearing a huge image of Stalin’s face, a central motif in the film, simultaneously unsettling and slightly absurd, is here reduced to a throwaway reference. The atmosphere of terror on the horizon, of a world about to be overturned, is not so pervading.

But, taken on its own terms the production works well, it is initially funny and charming, before successfully shifting to something much darker in the later scenes, as a larger tide washes away this small golden world forever.


Reviewed for musicOMH

I once again coaxed my mother out of the house for this one and am rather glad I did. As a girl she once was a beaming, red-sashed Pioneer and that, combined with pre-show and mid-show wine and standing next to the "pretty one from the History Boys" at the bar, made it one of her preferred theatre experiences of this or any other year I expect.

England People Very Nice at the National

Richard Bean’s recent play The English Game took a look at England through the prism of the cricket pitch. It was as warm and subtle a piece of writing as his latest is broad and brash.

Though still clearly interested in ideas of Englishness and how one becomes English, England People Very Nice deals in stereotypes and coarse humour; instead of using a fine brush it uses a stonking great roller.

Immigration is the theme and Bean focuses his attentions on Bethnal Green, the corner of East London that was once the main place of settlement for the Huguenots fleeing France, then became home to a sizeable Jewish community before becoming, as it is now, home to the largest Bengali community outside of Bangladesh.

This shifting cultural landscape is symbolised by their place of worship, the Great London Mosque on the corner of Brick Lane and Fournier Street, formerly the Spitalfields Great Synagogue, formerly a Huguenot chuch.

Bean’s play is framed by scenes set within a detention centre for immigrants, who while waiting to hear whether they’ve been granted leave to remain in the country, have devised a piece of theatre about the various arrivals in Bethnal Green across the centuries. These scenes neatly provide the set up for a number of upcoming jokes including a delightfully silly gag about being "on the wagon."
There then follows a short introductory sequence that covers the various waves of invasion from the Romans, Saxons and Danes, bringing us up to the arrival of the Huguenots in the late 17th century, ousted from Catholic France. Next come the Irish (shown as prone to incest and criminal behaviour), then the Jews fleeing the progroms of Eastern Europe – much to the anxiety of the existing English Jews – and then, as the centuries flip further forwards, the arrival of Asian immigrants, during the Second World War and the years afterwards.

Each new set of arrivals is met with scorn by the inhabitants of the local pub, spitting venom about the "facking frogs" and "facking Micks." As each group is assimilated they are depicted as becoming hostile to those who arrive after them; it’s a cyclical process, the play is saying, as in a late scene we even see the Bengali immigrants griping about the way the Somalis are getting preferential treatment at the housing office.

Bean crams in a lot of intriguing historical detail – the bombing of the underground by anarchists at Aldersgate Station, the pelting of Orthodox Jews with bacon sandwiches by young radicals: all real events – but this sits at odds with the play’s overall broad comic tone. The cartoonish graphics projected onto the set, though amusing at times, also act as a barrier to getting emotionally involved in proceedings. Through dealing with stereotypes and rarely digging beneath the surface, Bean paints a pretty dismal picture of what it means to be an immigrant in London. Along the way, we are shown the invention of the Biro and Chicken Tikka Masala, but these barely scratch the surface of exploring how immigrants influence and enrich a culture.

A love story is streamed through the generations and this adds a brief glimmer of hope to the play, depicting how people from different backgrounds can and do connect with one another. But this is undermined by scenes in the second half that focus on how, in some parts of the Muslim community, the pattern is being reversed, how young people are becoming more traditionally minded, more fundamentalist in their thinking then their parents were. But again Bean only touches the surface, there is no real exploration of why this is happening (interestingly this opens in the week after Alia Bano’s Shades at the Royal Court, which provides a more thorough dissection of the various threads that make up the British Muslim community).

There are some nice performances from the large cast, particularly from Michelle Terry as one half of the cross-generational love story, and Nicholas Hytner's production is swooping and energetic and, at times, very funny, if in a somewhat crude way. The play is a good example of the Monsterist tradition of which Bean is a proponent - theatre unafraid of being big in terms of scale and scope - but it falls down at a crucial hurdle in that it is never really successful in picking apart what it means to come to this country and make it your home.

Reviewed for musicOMH

I have, rightly I suspect, been called overly idealistic when I pound on about such matters, but this play though broad in scope seemed oddly narrow in its outlook. Also, both myself and my teacher friend who tagged along for the evening, felt there was something a bit predicable in focusing on Bethnal Green and its environs, the history of which I've seen documented in a fair few books in recent years. London has weathered so many shifts and changes, it would have been nice to have seen some less familiar areas explored. Ive not seen many depictions of the West London my grandparents came to, or for that matter the area of London in which I now live.

Mrs Affleck at the National

It began with the rain. As a fine mist of moisture fell across the Cottesloe stage, the coughing started. Nothing out of the ordinary at first – par for the course at the National – but then it grew louder and louder until the scene was awash with coughing, a cacophony of coughing, a cacoughany, if you will.

It’s a shame, as this scene was one of the more striking in the production, this gentle mist heightening the emotional content of this strangely unaffecting play. Despite centring on the death of a child it was difficult to give a damn about these people.

Samuel Adamson has taken Ibsen’s late play, Little Eyolf, and transplanted it to a Kentish coastal town in 1950’s Britain. We know it is the 1950s because there are superbly be-quiffed Teddy boys strutting around, numerous references to the end of rationing and the recent arrival of immigrants from Jamaica, and the women wear dresses that wouldn’t look out of place in a film by Douglas Sirk (Claire Skinner wears a stunning turquoise shirt dress in the first act). But despite such details, this act of relocation feels forced and the play sits uneasily in its new surroundings.

At the start of the play, Alfred Affleck has just returned from a trip to the Highlands, a trip he undertook ostensibly to complete a book he had been working on. During his stay, he has come to the decision to abandon his book and focus his attentions on their son, Oliver, a bright young boy disabled after an accident when he was a baby. Rita is affronted by this announcement, for she views her son as a barrier to her husband’s affections and, because he was injured while they were making love, the boy’s disability provides a constant reminder of the passion she feels she has lost.

Adamson (who also adapted Ibsen’s Pillars of the Community for the National) takes a good long time establishing this dysfunctional set up. Indeed the moment with the most action in this somewhat plodding play takes place during the interval when a team of head-set wearing techies rush out, armed with drills and lifts and things, to dismantle the kitchen set of the first act and replace it with the sea front café of the second.

The production does pick up a bit after the interval. Alfred, deep in grief is torn between his wife and the affections of his half-sister Audrey, while Rita is catapulted into an abyss of self-questioning. Despite all the emotional turmoil on display the chap next to me was checking his watch at three minute intervals come the last half hour. It doesn’t help that the production is rather awkwardly staged. Though the performance space extends forwards, with the audience arranged around three sides, much of the action takes place at one end of the set, giving neck ache to those sitting side on. A friend of mine just qualified as an osteopath, I am definitely bringing her with me if the National retain this configuration for their next Cottesloe production.

Though Marianne Elliott has directed some of the National's most vibrant productions (War Horse and Saint Joan among them), this is a static and chilly thing. She does at least draw out committed performances from her cast. Naomi Frederick makes Audrey plausibly warm, the only really likeable person in the thing, while the rich voiced Angus Wright gives Alfred a measure of charisma. Claire Skinner, in the title role, does what she can with the character as written, but her plight fails to involve the audience; I ended up wishing she’d just be quiet.

At the start of the evening, on my way in to take my seat, I passed a table laden with props for the night. A battered paperback, a football, some flowers - and a bottle of sherry. With hindsight I should have taken a swig.

August: Osage County at the National

Apologies for the gap in blogging, but the last few days have been all things and stuff and whatnot. Last Friday however there was actually some theatre when 'Barry' and I went to see Tracy Letts' August: Osage County at the National. For the sake of thematic appropriateness, Barry had a pre-show whiskey and I, not having ready access to heavy-duty pharmaceuticals, contented myself with a large glass of merlot.

I had already read the play, having consumed it in one greedy sitting, and thought it a ripping thing, a great dark ride. But though I enjoyed the production hugely, there were certain things that didn't quite click for me – though conceivably this might have something to do with my pre-show excitement levels being so high.

Right then, here are some things that you probably know: San Francisco, Steppenwolf, Broadway, Tony Award and so forth. It premiered last summer, made the leap to New York and then it was awards all the way. And it’s long: L-O-N-G. Three acts, two intervals, three and a bit hours. Though, actually, having said that, I've been to shorter plays that have felt a hell of a lot longer.

The first act takes its time setting things up. The Weston family is a mess. Daddy drinks, mom pops pills. The marriage of the eldest daughter is falling apart. The youngest daughter is engaged to that evil dude from American Gothic so that obviously doesn't bode well. Middle daughter has stayed close to home, only to provide a source of constant frustration and disappointment to her mother. And then dad goes missing and all the various Westons come home. This slow-burn first section leads up to the most amazing central act, an incredibly funny, tightly constructed funeral dinner in which momma Weston sets about each of her family members with the paring knife that passes for her tongue. It was sublime, though Barry objected to the fact that for much of it, we were looking at the characters backs as they sit at the dinner table.

It was the third act where I thought it lost its way a little. There was just too much, revelation after revelation, and not a shred of hope. It felt excessive, even silly, almost like a (very sharply written) soap opera. The extremity of it was alienating and drained any true tragedy out of the final scenes.
The performances were however superb, Deanna Dunagan, as the tiny, pill-raddled mother, clip-clopping down the stairs in her satin pyjamas. Amy Morton was also wonderful as Barbara the eldest daughter, you could see the capacity to become like her parents written within her, despite her external show of strength.

The thing mentioned by many people who have seen the play is recognition, that they see something of themselves and their families in the Westons. I didn’t have this feeling at all, which is perhaps why I didn’t get it in the way some people have, certainly I was aware of two people weeping in the audience at the end of the play, really bawling, clearly affected on a level I was not. I enjoyed so much of this production –the performances, the Gothic dolls-house set, the line “Well, forsook you and the horse you rode in on” - but it lost its grip on me in those last scenes; it seemed a bit to keen to be saying Big Things about America. However that central sequence, that middle scene, well, that was truly wonderful: perfectly pitched, tense and deeply, darkly funny.

If you're interested, my interview with Mr Letts for musicOMH is here.

Puppets

When I was in Palermo earlier this year I quickly discovered that the need-to-do thing cultural thing was a spot of Sicilian puppet theatre, but in the end I never went, for when I saw the puppets – they were everywhere, displayed in shop windows and cafes – I found their spindly and inanimate forms rather unnerving. They creeped me out; so instead I invested my energies in gelato consumption and crossing the street without being mown down by unobservant motorists (a sport in itself in Sicily) and enjoyed a pleasantly puppet-free holiday.

I’ve always found puppets a little upsetting. There is a shop somewhere in Clapham full of the things and every time I walk pass it I imagine them coming to life after dark and maybe holding little puppet ceremonies in which they sacrifice a Care Bear or some such thing to their little puppet gods.

But now having had, not one, but two positive puppet experiences in one weekend, I realise how wrong I was, for it is not the puppets per se that I dislike, for when brought to life by skilled performers they are quite amazing – I understand that now, the subtlety and precision in both shows was astonishing – it’s just when the puppets are vacant and lifeless that they make me shudder.

The first show on my puppet double bill was Blind Summit’s Low Life at the BAC, which I saw as a kind of primer to On Emotion which opens at Soho Theatre this week and also features their work, and also because I wanted to address the whole puppet thing, to look it square in its (creepy, painted) face. This was a slight but very enjoyable show. Apparently taking its inspiration from the writings of Charles Bukowski, it was set in dive bar populated by both people and puppets. But really the setting was just an excuse to string together a series of sketches: a character called Kevin (portrayed by a puppet who is the spit of Kevin Spacey) fights with his wife for one last drink and ends up performing a balletic airborne duet with an empty glass; an elderly cleaning lady gets worked up about the outcome of the book she is reading; a faded star of the stage smokes a cigarette and makes a pass at the bartender; a tiny plumber embarks on a Mission: Impossible-style adventure to fix a leaking pipe; and 1940s B-movie is re-enacted using a series of little blue men.

With the exception of the last sketch the puppeteers are always visible, there is no attempt to conceal them or distract from their manipulations. With up to three people controlling each puppet, the way in which the performers create the movements becomes as fascinating as the puppets themselves. There’s no plot, hardly any dialogue and for a show of an hour, it felt a bit stretched, but within it there were some very tender, funny and magical moments.

The same – well, the tender, funny and magical bit – can also be said of puppet show number two: War Horse at the National Theatre, which I finally caught on its Sunday matinee. There’s probably not a lot I can say about this that hasn’t been said already, as I’m rather late to the party on this one, but oh my, weren’t the horses amazing: cloth and wood and wire, but so wonderfully life-like. From the stiff-legged, Bambi-like foal to the magnificent adult animal (when Albert first jumped into the saddle there was an audible ripple of excitement). Yes, it’s kind of baggy plot-wise and veers towards sentiment at the end, but given its source material (Michael Morpurgo’s novel is narrated by the horse, something the play has not tried to replicate) I think this is acceptable. In the closing scenes, the whole theatre seemed to be physically willing this horse to stay alive and the moment when one of the horses dies and the puppeteers (who again are visible, though never distracting) tumble out of the animal and slowly, respectfully walk away, it was as its spirit was quietly departing and it almost, almost made me cry a little bit.

Describing the production to a friend today I was searching for a photo online to illustrate my babble, but the horses invariably looked a little rubbish in two dimensions, you really had to be there to see them move, to see them whinny and buck and stamp and nuzzle: to see them live. I found the look of the production also quite powerful. Rae Smith’s design fitted the piece perfectly, the sketches flickering in the background were very effective and, in the trench scene, it featured one of the best uses of the Olivier revolve I’ve seen in a long time. Being Remembrance Sunday, the cast all returned to take their bows sporting poppies, which was a lovely, thoughtful touch and the play itself made me think about the First World War in a way I’d not really done so before, the devastation of land as well as life, Europe as a battlefield, for once the trenches and the pain and the mess of it all felt geographically as well as historically grounded in my mind.

I won't say I'm totally over the puppet thing but I am dealing with my issues (I will still be keeping my distance from that shop in Clapham though, I'm not that brave).

A Mad Macbeth and Then The Menier

If you’ve been to the South Bank this week you may have seen that the National have erected a big-fenced off area near the stage door. This is Square2, and for the next couple of weeks it is home to two international former Edinburgh hits, the first is Macbeth: Who Is That Bloodied Man?, a condensed al fresco take on Shakespeare’s tragedy full of motorcycles, stilt-walkers and guns, by a Polish theatre company. (There was going to be a rather laboured riff here on the production featuring an abundance of poles – the wooden kind – and Poles, but I suspect that would be scraping the bottom of even my shallow barrel).

We were ushered into fairly large space where the audience were made to stand behind crash barriers and, given that this is open air theatre in London in August, it immediately started to rain. Everyone fiddled with hoods and scarves and brollies in a stoic manner but fortunately it didn’t last long and the residual damp in the air kind of complimented the production’s war-scarred, slightly Mad Max-ish landscape. I was particularly taken with the witches, who strode around the place on stilts, dressed in black, their faces covered with white veils. When shot by the gun-toting Macbeth they would drop to the ground before silently rising again like Michael in the Halloween films. It was really rather creepy.

The production is short, just over an hour, and they’ve ripped out nearly all the dialogue, except for a few key passages (which are delivered in over-amplified and accented English). Instead they really fairly firmly on the visual to convey the power of the narrative, acknowledging that if you’re going to make people stand around for an hour you better give them plenty to look at. It was a visceral and memorable experience, one that had a pleasing cohesiveness, a sense of an over-arcing vision at work, rather than just being a string of striking images. However I suspect the National’s health and safety officer must have developed a whole collection of nervous ticks by now, what with the heady blend of flames and petrol on display here and the onstage fires lit every night in …some trace of her

This week I also saw They’re Playing Our Song at the Menier Chocolate Factory, a production that, while not truly awful, left me shrugging my shoulders and wondering what the point of it was. It seemed to be wholly an exercise in 1970s kitsch. That’s it. Ho, ho, look: orange curtains, a turquoise cardigan, some bad wigs, and so forth and so on. At least the costume changes raised a few laughs, as the one-liners, particularly in the first half, fell rather flat, leaving quite a few of those awkward, empty moments where you knew a laugh was supposed to be required, that a line was meant to be funny, only it hadn’t quite worked out that way.

While the leads – Alistair McGowan and Connie Fisher – were both amiable enough (she has a lovely singing voice and he has, well, he has a voice) and did much to make me feel warmly towards the production, they both seemed miscast as fast talking New York types and the play itself (it’s not really a full-on musical) seemed a ridiculously inward-looking piece of writing, a musical about a composer and lyricist who meet, bicker a little, get together, break up and get together again. Apparently it was based on the relationship between Carole Bayer Sager and Marvin Hamlisch who supplied the (forgettable, except for the title number which was just annoying) lyrics and music that accompany Neil Simon’s book. But that doesn’t excuse the lack of dramatic tension and the songs that evaporate from the memory the minute you step outside the theatre. It raised a couple of smiles I’ll admit, but I couldn’t shake this so-what feeling the whole time I was sitting there.

Two Nights At The National

Things have been a bit quiet around here recently. Well that’s not strictly true, life has been the opposite of quiet, with weddings to attend and house-moves to plan. But, in theatre terms, things have been quiet. However at the end of last week I did have a couple of lovely back-to-back nights at the National. On Thursday I met up with my friend Nikhilesh for the opening night of Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s Her Naked Skin, a big sweeping play set against a backdrop of the Suffragette Movement and, as nearly every reviewer – me included – felt obliged to point out, the first original work (not an adaptation) by a living woman writer to be staged in the Olivier.

Certain elements of this I adored. The scene where Jemima Rooper’s Eve was forcefed is one of the most upsetting things I’ve seen on stage in a long time – I found the image following me around all weekend, refusing to vacate my mind. The performances of the three women, Lesley Manville, Rooper and the wonderful Susan Engel, were also superb. But – and it’s a big ‘but’ - I found the central love story, the relationship between Manville’s Lady Celia Cain and Rooper’s seamstress character, far less involving than the era evoked. And I agree with all those who’ve mentioned the fact that there are too many short scenes, that the revolve is forever revolving, the cage-like set constantly swinging in and out of view. The play reminded me, favourably, of some of the things the Orange Tree has been staging of late, but it was crying out for a good monologue, a good, long passionate piece of oration.

On Friday I returned to the South Bank to see Katie Mitchell’s …some trace of her. But first I stopped to pick up coffee and nibbley things from the Slow Food Fair behind the Royal Festival Hall, then I settled on the ‘grass’ outside the theatre to half-watch something that may have involved juggling and mime, but made me laugh on more than one occasion. Feeling warm and content, I tottered around to the Cottesloe and my mood was not dented by the production. I was worried that not knowing the book – Dostoevsky’s The Idiot - would be a handicap but I did not find this to the case, the production conveyed the essence of the thing well enough, it did not try to be retain every element of the narrative, that was not the point, but as a riff on the text, a kind of game played with it, there was much to take pleasure in.

I have not seen Mitchell’s Waves, which I gather uses many of the same techniques (though I will try to rectify this when it returns next month) and so much of what she was doing here was new to me.

A screen fills the back wall of the stage and the actors create scenes which are filmed and projected onto this screen. Every frame is beautifully composed and lit, shot in rich black and white. The performers double as technicians, setting up props, positioning cameras, wielding microphones, and all the while hitting their cues with perfect timing. It’s a hypnotic process, thrilling to watch.
While the images created are already, individually, arresting (a vase apparently spinning in midair, a plate of burning banknotes, a soup bowl teeming with maggots) the contrast with the manner of their construction is equally fascinating. Sound effects are created in front of us, music is played live and rain comes out of a plastic bottle.

There is an intentional dislocation between what can be seen on the screen and what is taking place on the stage below. Moments of conversational intimacy are filmed with the actors sitting on opposite ends of the stage with their backs to one another, each facing a separate camera; close ups of hands and faces are filmed using different performers and then seamlessly edited together on screen; a couple who appear to be lying in bed are actually standing upright with a sheet wound around them, the camera tilted to give the impression they are horizontal. In this way the onscreen image, the illusion of reality, is picked apart, deconstructed, but in a way that adds to, rather than detracts, from the image itself.

If I’d seen this done before, I wonder if my response would have been quite so positive, but I hadn’t, so it was. Yes, it was frustrating at times, having performers such as Ben Whishaw and Hattie Morahan on stage and having to see them running around all the time moving props and fiddling with cameras when I was hoping for a bit more acting, but again, from a technical point of view, there was something quite fascinating about seeing the differences, the contrast, between what works for stage and screen, the tiny gestures and expressions that can took on new meaning. Ultimately the piece excited me on an intellectual level more than on an emotional level, though I’m not sure that’s a criticism, not in this case at least.

Sometimes London starts to wear me down and I seem to forever be running for (and missing) buses or fretting over bills or skating along on too-little sleep. Sometimes I think a change would be good, an adventure, a new start, somewhere less frantic and friendlier, and then I have a couple of nights like this where everything seems to slide together in a satisfying fashion and I reconsider. Surely I’d miss this, I’d long for this, this richness, if I lived anywhere else but here?

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.

Afterlife at the National

It was a surprisingly tough call. I was sitting with the West End Whingers (and honorary Whinger Graham) outside the National during the interval of Michael Frayn’s Afterlife. Should we stay put, in the sun with our bottle of red, or venture back inside? The first half had not been promising at all. Grand but rather empty, hitting the audience over the head with its cleverness. But we, or at least I, felt a need to see whether it would take flight after the interval, whether the plays potentially fascinating themes would actually start to, well, fascinate. So we (after polishing off the wine with practiced ease) left our sunny spot on the terrace and plunged back in.

Mistake. Definite mistake.

Indeed there was a distinct lack of taking off in the second half, a distinct lack of anything much happening that one could actually care about. This was a play of Ideas rather than one that gave much weight to things like character and pacing and so forth. And these Ideas were, in turn, rather bluntly flung about without really cohering in any satisfying fashion. Roger Allam played Max Reinhardt, the Austrian theatre impresario who staged morality plays at Salzburg Festival. Reinhardt was fascinated with the interweaving of art and life and therefore Frayn presents Reinhardt’s life as a morality play with Allam as Everyman. So we have a black-caped and skull-masked figure of death stalking the stage and much speaking in verse. (“Have they learned nothing from Fram” the Whingers asked). While Reinhardt career flounders under the Nazis and he is forced to flee to the United States, his finances decimated, living first in Los Angles with the mistress he eventually married and then finally moving to New York where Death, inevitably catches up with him. Still he achieves an afterlife of a kind through his work.

But the play remained wrapped in a thick shield of its own making, impenetrable. Clearly there is no one at the National who is able to say to Frayn, I see what you’re trying to do here Michael, but isn’t it a bit dull? A bit laboured? Wouldn’t a little burst of Climb Every Mountain pick things right up? The set was big and grand and got across the opulence and excess of Reinhardt’s lifestyle but, in terms of pacing, it was like wading through toffee, a real slog with little reward at its end. It seemed the antithesis of the The Pitman Painters, a play that managed to be about Things, to deal in Ideas, and yet also to entertain, to move, to uplift its audience. This missed the mark on all counts. You know there’s a problem when you start being distracted by finger marks on windows (God, I am turning into my mother) or when the most positive comment you appear to have made in your notebook is ‘a lovely cloche hat.’

Selina Griffiths was very good as Reinhardt’s ever loyal assistant, but Allam was nowhere near as he strong as he could be, as he has been in the past. And, OK, there were a clutch of good moments, including a scene where Reinhardt prepares to give a lavish dinner party, choreographing the waiting staff as he would the actors in one of his productions, but these were few and very, very far between.

Afterwards, our party of four moved swiftly away from the National, the source of our pain, and set about a couple of bottles of Rioja outside the BFI South Bank, (the NFT as was) and, eventually, the Bad Thing was forgotten – along with much else I suspect.