The Winslow Boy, Old Vic

The emotional undercurrents of Rattigan’s plays swirl like swans’ legs beneath the clipped, clean surface of things. For all its exploration of the line between what is right and what is just, its bucking against the power of the Navy to dispense punishment as it sees fit, with no proper trial, his 1946 period piece, The Winslow Boy, is in many ways most potent as a portrait of a family in times of change.

Arthur Winslow, the Edwardian patriarch played with a silvery glint by Henry Goodman, is a superficially stern man, gruff, moustachioed and stiff of lip, but his underlying humanity is always evident. While he is willing to sacrifice both the family finances and even eventually his own health for the sake of seeing right done, he is never blind to the great cost of his actions; he comprehends all too clearly the toll his fight is taking and yet he cannot drop it, cannot let it fall. In amongst this, it his relationship with his outspoken, cigarette-smoking, suffragette daughter Catherine and their understanding of each other’s drives and beliefs, which forms the heartbeat of the play.

The play is a courtroom drama in essence though it never strays beyond the drawing room of the Kensington home of the Winslows, with its William Morris wallpaper, its mahogany side-tables, nut-brown leather wingchairs and notably charming curtains. When the youngest Winslow, thirteen year old Robbie is sacked from Osborne Naval College for the theft of a five shilling postal order, his father decides to take the case to trial, employing one of the country’s most pre-eminent barristers in order to do so. Based on the case of a young man called Archer Shee who was expelled in similar circumstances in 1911, the fight becomes bigger than the family, a cause celebre, with journalists cluttering the front steps and the parlour maid volubly reporting back on the day’s legal proceedings. In the process, Robbie, is slowly erased from his own story, dozing on the sofa as vital discussions take place over his head.

The role of the lawyer Sir Robert Morton, so dapper in his evening clothes, Sahara-dry in temperament and casual in his brilliance, is a gift of a part for actors with a tendency towards scene-eating, but Peter Sullivan’s portrayal is more delicate and realistic in proportion; he doesn’t dominate the stage, doesn’t over-balance the see-saw. So when his courtroom persona does emerge, when he aggressively interrogates Charlie Rowe’s whimpering but adamant Robbie before dangling a way out in front of him like kipper to a kitten, it’s all the more powerful.

Naomi Frederick is similarly precise in her performance as the principled sister Catherine, who sees one fiancé ditch her as the family name is smeared across the daily papers, and is forced to fend off another kindly but unsuitable suitor, all the time knowing that her age and independent spirit make her chances of marriage increasingly unlikely. Deborah Findlay clearly relishes the moment when Mrs Winslow finally gets to crack, to shed her smile and blaze at her husband about the extent of the sacrifice the family has been obliged to make as a result of his unshakeable two-year pursuit of what he holds to be right. But though Henry Goodman’s Arthur gradually weakens physically, his resolve never leaves him; his eyes shine even as his hands shake.

Lindsay Posner’s production conforms to everything you’d expect a production of Rattigan at the Old Vic to be. It’s elegant, stately, the performers moving about the stage as if moving about a stage, not a domestic space, arraying themselves in tidy semi-circles and appealing tableaux, never bunching or crowding. This choreography is somehow all the more obvious here, because while Peter McKintosh’s drawing room set has been elongated to fill the stage, it intentionally neglects the vertical, leaving a large black void above, an odd mouth. As a production, it’s all very, very solid, and very decently done, but it’s strangely cool in places, a little too slick, this despite Rattigan’s inherent warmth and charm and heart.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Six Degrees of Separation at the Old Vic

John Guare’s play takes its name from the ‘human web’ theory that states that every person is, at most, six steps away from any other person on the planet whoever or wherever they may be, anyone from, as wealthy Manhattanite Ouisa Kittredge notes, "the President of the United States or a gondolier in Venice."

Guare’s play is very much concerned with ideas of separation and connection, ideas that carry a possibly even greater resonance now, as the methods in which we are capable of connecting with one another has changed so dramatically since 1990 when the play was written. The key event of the play simply couldn’t happen these days. Facts could be checked within seconds, iPhones consulted, names Googled. In this way the play gains more weight than it perhaps deserves as a telling portrait of life in a pre-internet age, a world on the cusp.


Inspired by actual events, Six Degrees begins with Ouisa and her art dealer husband Flan busy buttering up their wealthy South African friend, when a young black man arrives at their door, bleeding and upset – the victim of a mugging. At first they are baffled and alarmed (Flan was midway through trying to engineer a two million dollar sale of a Cezanne), but the young man, Paul, claims to know their children, to be at Harvard with them, and, what’s more, he lets slip that he is the son of a famous film star, an icon of his times: Sidney Poitier, star of In the Heat of the Night and, as Paul, says pointedly Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?

And he does end up cooking them dinner, over which they discuss his thesis on Catcher in the Rye and Holden Caulfield’s appeal to alienated young men. Charmed as they are by his company, they insist he stays the night, only to be woken by unusual sounds and to discover Paul with a gay street hustler. They ask him to leave and only discover later, when telling their story to friends, the full extent of Paul’s deception.

David Grindley's production is solid and, perhaps, over polished. It’s a little too glossy which at least is fitting in a play about the veneer of money and status. The production is, if not dominated than certainly driven, by Obi Abili’s captivating performance as Paul, the heart and yet also the void of the play. He’s charismatic, but also, as becomes increasingly clear, needy and delusional. Yet he still retains a magnetic quality, an elegance of manner, even as his hold on who he is fragments.

Anthony Head and Lesley Manville do a decent enough job as the Kittredges, though only the latter really stands out as Ouisa, haunted by her encounter with Paul, begins to examine her life and her marriage. The Kittredges live in a fine Park Avenue apartment – rendered as a series of oxblood coloured Rothko-esque panels by set designer Jonathan Fensom – and have surrounded themselves with fine things, with antique ink wells and the (rather too heavily symbolic) double-sided Kandinsky, but it is the thought of more wealth, those rows of gleaming zeroes, that really makes their eyes shine. Guare is saying, non too subtly, that they are wearing masks, as much so as Paul.

The first section of the production, during which Paul charms his way into the Kittredges’ apartment, is smoothly handled, but then as events unfold and Paul’s story fractures, it seems to lose its way. The simplicity and fluidity of the early scenes is replaced with a bittier feel: shorter scenes and more characters. The Kittredges’ children are played as foot-stamping stereotypes by actors who look rather too old for the roles. But Abili and Manville keep things moving and the play gains rather than suffers from being so firmly fixed to its time.

Complicit at the Old Vic

We're going to need a bigger blog!

Except we're not, because most of what there is to say on this matter has been said already, here and here and elsewhere I'm sure.

This really was a bit of a mess. Joe Sutton's play seemed both under-written and unsuited to the space. Whether Richard Dreyfuss was wearing an ear-piece or not I couldn't tell you, for I was too far away to see clearly, but his performance seemed fairly solid on the day I saw it.

Dreyfuss plays Ben Kritzer, a Pulitzer-winning journalist who has published a book about the use of torture by the US and who is being threatened with a charge of espionage if he does not reveal the name of his government source. Elizabeth McGovern plays his (implausibly young) wife, Judy, who pleads with him to abandon his ethics for her sake and the sake of their children. "You’re a father," she informs him over and over and over (and over) again.

David Suchet plays the last point on the triangle, the lawyer who is defending Kritzer, and together the three of them debate the hell out of this predicament in a way that makes it difficult to believe in or care about any of the characters.

One of the main problems is the dialogue. Sutton likes repetition. He uses it a lot. McGovern in particular has to say nearly all her lines twice over with a slightly different emphasis the second time around: "Have you been drinking?" she asks Ben, "Have you been drinking?" Sutton is also fond of the mid-sentence trail off, but this rarely if ever feels like natural speech in the actors' mouths, it just makes the play feel disjointed.

The pacing of the piece does not help. The scenes of dialogue are static and sluggish and the in-the-round stage, left over from Ayckbourn's The Norman Conquests, really does the play no favours. Complicit is essentially a string of intense conversations - the circular nature of the dialogue I'm guessing is supposed to suggest claustrophobia, the system closing in on Kritzer - but this does not come across well at all as the actors shout at each other across the big shiny disc of the stage. (It must be said that, up in the nosebleed seats where I was sitting, the stage itself, with its television monitors glinting under glass, does look impressive, but I wonder if the effect of this was the same in the stalls).

Dreyfuss doesn’t do too badly at conveying a man forced into a corner. Suchet is OK, but only OK and McGovern is saddled with a role that just makes her sound whiny for most of the time.

Yes, there are some nuggets of interest (deeply) buried in this thing, questions about the way the rules of journalism and politics have changed in the wake of 9/11 and the war on terror, but I had long since lost interest and it's not enough to say a thing and just leave it hanging there in the air.

There was no sign at all of the interrogation scenes that others have mentioned. The running time was listed as one hour 45 minutes (with an interval) but it was creeping towards the two hour mark by the time the thing actually finished; it felt as if the interval had gone on for rather longer than usual but the play had already started to skew my perspective on such things by that point so I couldn't swear to that.

A Lucky Escape

This Thursday gone I took my first trip of the year to Theatre 503. Their current show is a thing called Mad Funny Just, a devised piece being staged as part of the Old Vic, New Voices award scheme.

The story it tells is a not an original one. A girl is dead and her brother, friends and teachers attempt to come to terms with it. Plot-wise that’s about it, but it’s lifted off in unexpected directions by the manner of its staging. The dark and poky studio space above the Latchmere pub has been made over to resemble a rehearsal room, complete with kettle and pack of chocolate biscuits in the corner. Props are kept to a minimum, ditto costumes, and the telling of the tale is left to the performances, all of which are nuanced and well-observed.

Shifting rapidly between characters, the five actors – who along with the director of the piece, Sarah Tipple, are part of a collective called Creased – bring to life the world of Louise, the dead girl in question. The cast are particularly adept at the adolescent mannerisms of her friends and Becci Gemmell in particular is superb as a nervy and quivery voiced old lady who finds herself reinvigorated after a trip to the hairdresser.

More a collection of character sketches than a play proper, not everything it attempts works – there were too many heavy-handed fantasy sequences for my liking – but, despite that, this is an exciting and energetic piece, exuding potential and invention. The story it tells may not be particularly original and the method of its staging leaves little room for the characters to grow. But in terms of performance and sheer creativity, it’s a delight. And did I say there was no set to speak of? Well, that’s not quite true. The production has a sweet little surprise saved for its closing minutes, but to say more would spoil it.

It seems that the theatre gods were really smiling on me last week as, as well as seeing this, I managed to miss out on seeing An Audience With The Mafia at the Apollo when technical difficulties caused the performance I was down to attend to be cancelled. Having since read the reviews, I realise what a lucky escape I had.