Twelfth Night at the Roundhouse

An antiquated slam-door lift, a revolving door, a scattering of battered lobby sofas: David Farr’s Twelfth Night – the second instalment in the RSC’s Shipwreck Trilogy – is set in a hotel, which makes a superficial sense: this is a place where the people of the world wash up and interact, a place of transience and displacement. Jon Bausor’s set has the trappings of 1920s New York establishment, a touch of faded art deco glamour, but everything is askew and decaying; water laps at the floorboards, a bed rests near vertically against the back wall – it is as if a storm has raged through the place.

It’s an intriguing thematic canvas but its potential is never fully exploited – though that lift gets a good work out. Farr’s production is, instead, one of broad laughs and pratfalls. Belch and co indulge in the obligatory drunken carousing – complete with disco lights – and Kirsty Bushell’s rather manic Olivia soon trades in her veil and her mantle of mourning for more earthly pleasures.

In the midst of all this, Jonathan Slinger gives a deliciously scene-eating turn as Malvolio. He is the very picture of buttoned up pomposity, his pale hair slicked to his skull, every follicle regimented, his nose held permanently aloft, his gaze withering. A mixture of the monkish and the managerial, he is officious with his clipboard, part Hitler youth, part snooty otter. He’s the type of man who wears a corporate name badge at all times, even on his dressing gown. When he emerges on stage lavishly cross-gartered (after descending in the rickety lift), he sweeps backs his blazer with a flourish to reveal the kind of outfit only available from specialist retailers before pursuing Olivia around the stage with creepy insistence. It’s a cheap scene in many ways, a heavy-handed device, but one which Slinger manages to make psychologically plausible – and very, very funny.

The trouble with his performance is that it leaves the rest of the production looking flat and patchy. Emily Taaffe is rather underpowered as Viola and Farr oddly chooses to make little of the obvious physical mismatch between her and her ‘twin’, Stephen Hagan’s Sebastian. Jonathan McGuinness’ strangely uncharismatic Orsino also fades into the background and there’s little sense of attraction between him and Viola; when he claims her at the end it feels like a bit of an afterthought. Bruce MacKinnon is a far more endearing presence, playing Aguecheek as a Tim Nice But Dim type, posh and gangly with wide, kind eyes and a shock of blonde hair. Kevin McMonagle’s melancholy Feste handles the songs well – the music has been inventively reworked by Adem Ilhan – but seems less comfortable at other times, an old school comedian out of time and given to mumbling.

Though there are individual comic scenes that really work on their own terms, the production feels tonally inconsistent and the relocation to this dilapidated hotel world thematically superfluous. Slinger’s nuanced, exposing, and often hilarious performance as Malvolio would stand out in any production, but here – where everyone else seems to be drawn in the broadest of lines – he towers.

Reviewed for Exeunt

The Heresy of Love at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

A woman born with the gift of poetry was, according to Virginia Woolf, until ever so recently, “a woman in strife against herself.” The world did not permit her to pick up a pen. And if she persisted to kick against the way of things, to write despite all the obstacles stacked against her, she was usually met with suspicion, distaste, and ridicule. To stand any hope of living a creative life, a woman needed space, time and money: that elusive room of her own coupled with considerable strength of will.

For Sister Juana Ines de la Cruz, the seventeenth century poet and playwright, her room took the shape of a nun’s cell. For her the convent was both a confining and a freeing place. Though physically caged, living out her life behind gates and bars, she was able to study, to feed her intellect, to achieve a form of independence and amass a significant library, not just texts of theology and devotion, but of the whole world and its workings.

She was well liked at court where her play, House of Desires, was performed and she was a particular favourite of the Vicereine. But though she also had her supporters within the church, she had – inevitably perhaps – her detractors, those who were alarmed by the idea of nun writing secular poetry and works of entertainment, who were wary of the idea of a woman writing in any form. Helen Edmundson’s play for the RSC is alert to the complexities of Sister Juana’s predicament: the divisions between church and court and between Spain and what was then still New Spain, now Mexico. For a long time her creativity was tolerated, encouraged even, but the special status accorded to her sparked disquiet both within the convent and beyond its walls. Eventually she was obliged to halt, to lay down her pen, stem the flow of words and renew her vows.

As Sister Juana, Catherine McCormack is passionate, yet serene. She is a woman driven; writing is part of her nature and to not do so would be to deny some vital aspect of her character. Though McCormack’s portrayal is radiant and intelligent, it is not an unshaded performance: there are un-nun like traces of vanity and pride in her too, a thirst for acclaim. She is most at ease in the company of Catherine Hamilton’s Vicereine and together they convey the intensity of the women’s friendship, their need of each other and understanding of one another as women both isolated by circumstance.

The play’s male characters are more broadly drawn. Geoffrey Beevers is kindly and warm as the full-hearted Father Antonio, a man who despite his affection for Sister Juana is easily cowed and swayed. Raymond Coulthard plays the duplicitous Bishop whose admiration for Sister Juana turns to repulsion when he finds himself becoming attracted to her. Stephen Boxer is suitably stern and threatening as the hair-shirted Spanish Archbishop who views Sister Juana as an affront to his faith and can barely bring himself to look on a woman for fear of being in some way tainted. It is in Boxer’s character that the play’s modern parallels are made most explicit: in any society peopled by authority figures who view women as a source of corruption and contagion, the act of writing becomes a subversive and powerful one.

Nancy Meckler, who previously directed House of Desires during the RSC’s 2004 Spanish Golden Age season, gives the material a solid if over-emphatic production. A retractable gate is used to convey a sense of Sister Juana’s cloistered existence, but it also helps to keep her distant. Though never less than compelling, at almost three hours in length the play occasionally sags (a sub plot involving Sister Juana’s niece is rather drawn out), the constant rattling back and forth of the separating gate eventually becomes repetitious and the staging itself is a little flat and unadventurous. The otherwise simple set, dominated by Christ’s looming face, is beautifully lit by Ben Ormerod – the stage suffused with soft golden light, evening sun – but it’s McCormack’s performance that gives this play its heat.

Reviewed for Exeunt

American Trade at Hampstead Theatre

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reviewed for Exeunt

Little Eagles at Hampstead Theatre

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reviewed for Exeunt

Dunsinane at Hampstead Theatre

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reviewed for musicOMH

The Tragedy of Thomas Hobbes at Wilton's

First the good. The RSC have chosen to stage their new production, The Tragedy of Thomas Hobbes in the wonderfully atmospheric space that is Wilton's Music Hall. Hidden in an East London alley, Wilton’s is, according to their website, “the world's oldest and last surviving grand music hall.”

The building is utterly lovely, barrel-ceilinged and beautiful, yet flaking and fading, its paint peeling, its windows boarded. But, gosh, it seems rather sad for a place that once resounded with gin and laughter to now be a venue for people to fidget through tedious RSC fare. That’s not to say that Adriano Shaplin's ambitious historical play is utterly without merit, that’s not true at all, it just manages to takes a period of innovation and energy and ideas and somehow sieve much of the magic out of it.

The play is pretty good at scene setting. This Tragedy takes place in the mid 17th century, post Civil War, pre-Restoration; the theatres have been closed and London is alive with intellectual chatter. This comes across well, but the play lacks a sense of dramatic structure and direction. Lots of famous figures flit on and then off again: oh look, there’s Cromwell and there’s a young Isaac Newton, but it all feels a bit quick and bitty.

Shaplin depicts the ideological clash between Hobbes, the political philosopher, and the men of science from Gresham College: Roberts Boyle and Hooke and, um, some others. I am always drawn to things that try and marry science and art, but am usually disappointed. OK, my knowledge of the period is admittedly fairly sketchy, but one would hope that wouldn’t be too much of a problem, that the writing would illuminate and clarify. Unfortunately the play seemed to go out of its way to make things more confusing then they needed to be: why was Robert Boyle played by a woman? Why was Charles II dressed like Lawrence Llewellyn Bowen (or was it supposed to be Russell Brand?) What was the point of the two men who sat up on the balcony and passed comment on the play? It’s not as if they shed any light on proceedings; they were credited as Statler and Waldorf but this is not a connection I would have made without reading the cast list. (On an unrelated note, the West End Whingers might be interested to know that the RSC wigs department also do a nice line in merkins).

This Tragedy is an ambitious thing certainly and one ripe with potential, but it felt in real need of taming and shaping. However it at least inspired me to go away and do a bit of reading about the period, if only to fill in the gaps of comprehension.

I was supposed to have company for this one, but my eminently sensible would-be companion, having clocked the running time (it's a long one) and Nicholas de Jongh's less than complimentary review, suddenly decided against it. I didn't even bother asking my mother, as she doesn't do theatre in the colder months unless guaranteed a pre- and post show glass of wine and a running time not in excess of ninety minutes. It’s probably a good thing my +1 skipped out, because as gorgeous as Wilton’s is, its decrepitude means that sightlines and acoustics are pretty poor – I had an achy neck for most of the following day from sitting side-on to the stage – and, horror of horrors, they, for this show at least, have an unreserved seating policy.

Bah Humbug!

I feel somewhat torn. On one hand I am glad that a company like the RSC is willing to work with someone like Anthony Neilson, to do something a bit daring, a bit experimental, to take a chance on a more collaborative – and initially script-less – way of working. (Brian Logan goes into the details of the creative process on his GU blog).

But then I get to the show itself, the finished product, God In Ruins, which I saw last night at Soho Theatre with my friend Juice, and my enthusiasm wavers. I just didn’t think it was all that good. It didn’t even seem like a brave failure, more a muddle of ideas, many of which I’d seen better executed elsewhere. While Neilson’s previous work, The Wonderful World Of Dissocia managed to be compelling and infuriating in equal measure, this new one was – cardinal sin in Neilson’s book – kind of on the dull side: there was something rather tired and lifeless about the play, beneath all the swearing and shouting.

It starts with a mildly amusing prologue in which Ebenezer Scrooge, now fully redeemed after his encounter with his three ghosts, turns out to be just as insufferable in his new perky and life-loving incarnation as his old bah-humbug self. This did make me chuckle a little, but it was essentially one joke, and a rather over stretched one.

The play then jumps forward to the present and we meet Brian, a divorced, alcoholic reality TV producer. Having been rude to his ex-wife and failed to tip a pizza delivery man, he has his own Scrooge moment when he is visited by the white-suited ghost of dead dad, there to help him reconnect with his estranged daughter. Even at this early point in the evening there’s a seen-it-before feel to the set up: a heartless TV exec forced to confront his mortality, wasn’t that Scrooged? Even his reality shows have a ring of the familiar to them, like Chimp Monastery – Monkey Tennis, anyone?

There’s also an internet porn sequence that reminded me of Closer, even more so when the truth behind it is revealed, and a not–quite-as-funny-as-it-could-have-been interlude where two small boys discuss the fact that Santa is actually dead and it’s their parents that really buy the presents, which features liberal use of the underused put down ‘pooh head.’

This is followed by a bizarrely studenty, post-modern moment when the characters become aware that they are in a theatre and that they are being watched by an audience. A further layer of artifice is then peeled away as a ‘real’ homeless man bursts into the auditorium and interrupts proceedings, claiming to be an ex-soldier, just back, oddly, from Iran. If this was meant to indicate a slightly futuristic setting, it passed me by – I was too busy wondering why Scrooge from the opening sequence had popped up to help Brian on his way; was he a ghost? A drunken hallucination? Did it even matter?

To be fair, there were a handful of good gags, but most of the laughter I could hear was of the uneasy ‘this is supposed to be a funny bit, right?’ type – forced and awkward. As a whole, the production often seemed to be striving incredibly hard to be anarchic, and coming nowhere near. Brian, eventually finds his daughter, in Second Life, but as Juice pointed out to me in the bar afterwards, he was actually desperate to get in touch with her at the start and was only unable to because he was pissed out of his head, so it’s not much of a redemption. Though there’s also a suggestion that Brian’s unhappiness might be down to some latent homosexuality on his part.

I don’t know, I hate to tip a bagful of negative over a work that takes risks, that tries something different, but none of the disparate elements of this show seemed to fit well with one another and, on top of that, there was a sense of over-confidence to the thing – a touch of swagger about it – that I found very off-putting.