The Turn of The Screw, Almeida Theatre

The 1963 version of The Haunting is a film that really gets under your skin. It’s genuinely unsettling, and though you actually see little if anything, the eerie sound design, full of thudding doors and creaking floorboards, creates an atmosphere of almost unbearable dread. Jan de Bont’s 1999 remake on the other hand amplified everything beyond recognition, bloating the film with CGI ghosties and digital whizz-bangery, and amputating any sense of the sinister in the process.

Henry James’ novella is likewise a masterpiece of atmospheric detail and psychological ambiguity but, in this new adaptation, the Almeida has done a Jan de Bont, opting for the easiest of shocks over subtlety and complexity of character. There is never any sense that the nameless governess who is dispatched to a country house to look after two orphaned children is anything other than sane, no sense that the haunting may be emanating from her own fevered mind. The evil that plagues this house is very much manifest, with the flame-haired Peter Quint popping up at windows at every given opportunity. The sexual undercurrents of the original are here made-overcurrents, what with the constant coital howling of foxes outside in the grounds and the ghosts glimpsed rutting against the leaded window panes.

While there are some proper jolts, achieved with the help of illusionist Scott Penrose - and given the volume and tenor of the screams I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a few damp seats in the Almeida auditorium afterwards – there’s very little sense of tension or jeopardy; the battle to save the two innocent children, Flora and Miles, from the grip of a malevolent, deviant force is curiously anaemic, a tiresome tug-of-war. Lyndsey Posner’s production, the first to be presented by Hammer Theatre of Horror, is far more concerned with the sudden shock, the supposedly spooky effect. There’s some self-propelled chalk – just like in Matilda – and the tone of the piece is such that you half expect a repeat of that weird moment in the Menier Chocolate Factory’s production of the The Invisible Man when the transparent protagonist copped a feel of Maria Friedman’s bosoms; Laurence Belcher’s man-boy Miles does the honours here instead.

The set is bird-black and oppressive, like Thornfield after the fire, with a jagged slash in the brickwork through which the moon can be seen. The sound design throws in flapping bat wings, the scritch-scratch of chalk on a blackboard and the occasional piercing scream. The frequent use of the revolve, however, transporting us from room to room, from interior to exterior, slows the pacing of the piece to a crawl, diffusing what little tension had been built up. Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s adaptation does at least explore the peculiar situation of the governess: a woman trapped between worlds, who, socially speaking, is neither one thing nor the other, neither part of the family nor one of the staff, and whose class and background can always be used against her, the shadow of the workhouse a very real and frightening thing. But it also seems intent on making the sexual suggestions of the original as blatant and explicit as possible.

Anna Madeley gets off to a reasonable start in the role of the repressed governess, but she doesn’t fully convey the character’s increasing torment; the pitch of her performance doesn’t build. It’s possible to see why Belcher – seventeen but looking and playing younger – has been cast as Miles, capably suggesting a young man on the cusp of adolescence, a volatile creature, precocious and loving one moment, spite-filled and threatening the next, but it’s Gemma Jones, as the house-keeper Mrs Grose, who puts in the most solid, consistent performance, providing a necessary counter-balance to all the shrieks and the shocks and the spectral bedroom shenanigans.

Reviewed for Exeunt

The Painter at the Arcola

For JMW Turner light was all. His paintings are luminous; they shimmer with the glory of the sunlit sea, they emanate heat. In Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s new play about his life, his genius is the solid thing at the centre of the text, while Turner the man is far more opaque.

Having been obliged to leave their former home, the Arcola has moved to new premises in a converted paint factory on Ashwin Street. This raw, unfinished space doubles well as Turner’s studio and the atmosphere of the place counts for much in a production that sometimes seems to walk on tiptoe, its tread uncertain.

In choosing Turner as her subject, Lenkiewicz has to grapple with a familiar dilemma. How does one go about showing creative genius on stage? Take away the work and what remains? Though the son of a barber, Turner is utterly assured of his own abilities and seems to relish his role as an outsider. He speaks with mild disdain of the Royal Academy ("English painting is dead") and the ‘fashionables’ but certainly does not suffer from self-doubt; he seems quite certain that his work will live on after him yet Lenkiewicz shows him to be far less capable in his relations with other people, particularly women.

His companion, closest friend and studio assistant is his father; his mother, having lost a daughter in infancy, is gradually unravelling. She resents Turner for having survived to adulthood and though her venom seems a symptom of greater ailment, it is clear her comments cut him.  

As Turner, Toby Jones gives a strong, subtle performance, but an essentially reactive one. As played, Turner is a man who gives little away. He accepts things as they come to him and the drive he shows as an artist does not seem to translate into his personal life. He seems genuinely fond of Jenny, the prostitute who becomes the model for a series of anatomical studies, but he even terminates this relationship at the behest of his widowed neighbour, Sarah, with whom he is having a child. He builds a bond with Jenny’s young son but casts him aside too. There seems no malice in his actions; he just does as he is bidden. Denise Gough is superb as this brittle young Jenny; her love for her young son is palpable and she gives a sense that she grasps Turner’s emotional limitations far better than the other women in his life.

Amanda Boxer impresses as his distressed and volatile mother, terrified of the asylum, while Jim Bywater and Jones have an understated rapport as father and son – there is a strong sense of men familiar with each other’s habits, able to communicate without words. Niamh Cusack (who recently played another emotionally ostracised woman, Catherine Dickens, in Out of Joint’s otherwise patchy Andersen’s English) is a mix of calculation and resignation as the widow who desires Turner but knows he will not love her in return.

The play is episodic in structure and takes the form of a collection of short scenes, nicely handled individually but lacking in bite. Lenkiewucz mingles snippets of Turner’s home life with speeches drawn from his lectures to the Royal Academy and, in its fragmentary way, the play gives the audience a sense of Turner. However, having picked as a subject a man so distant, Lenkiewicz has penned herself in. He is both a presence and absence at the centre of the play and, though her writing contains - as ever - moments of lyricism, Turner's remoteness inevitably has an impact on the play’s power.

Charged at Soho Theatre

Founded thirty years ago, Clean Break is a theatre company that specialises in the staging of new writing intended to reflect the experiences of women whose lives have come in contact with the criminal justice system. Their recent productions include plays by Chloe Moss and Lucy Kirkwood (the superb It Felt Empty..., so atmospherically staged at the Arcola) and their current project is particularly ambitious in scope, taking the form of six short plays, which have been grouped into two separate cycles to be staged in various spaces around Soho Theatre.

As with similar theatrical collages some of the pieces are better realised than others, but while there is an inevitable bittiness and some of the pieces feel constrained, the interesting dramatic parallels between the plays and some strong acting go a good way towards remedying this. The first of these triple bills features new work by Rebecca Pritchard, Winsome Pinnock and Chloe Moss, of which Pritchard’s play, Dream Pill, staged by Tessa Walker in the theatre’s basement restaurant is perhaps the most harrowing and unsettling. Written from the perspective of two young Nigerian girls, both under ten, the play wades into the ugly world of child prostitution. It’s potently performed by Danielle Vitalis and Samantha Pearl, both all too convincingly child-like in their movements and interactions, the former fixing her bright, questioning eyes on various audience members. In the context of the play, the noise from the bar above suddenly takes on an ominous air and the sight of Pearl tottering unsteadily up the stairs in ill-fitting heels is almost too much to take. Chloe Moss’ Fatal Light is less unrelenting in its intensity but still capable of emotional rawness. Unfolding in reverse order, it tells the story of a young mother with mental health problems who ends up in prison and features another strong performance from Ashley McGuire as the stoic grandmother. It contains some intriguing dramatic seeds but it feels a bit thin in its current state, as if it could have been fleshed out further. Winsome Pinnock’s Taken, performed in the theatre’s top floor studio space, is another cross-generational tale and one that provides an interesting counterpoint to Moss’ play. A twitchy young girl towing a pram turns up on recovering addict Della’s door claiming to be her daughter. Whereas the bonds between the women in Moss’ play were strong and the daughter’s mental health issues was slowly driving the family apart, in Pinnock’s play abandonment and substance abuse have taken their toll on the characters and memory is untrustworthy. Caroline Steinbeis’ production only partially brings out the play’s increasing dreamlike quality and the ambiguities of the text feel like they could have been made more of. The second cycle features work by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, EV Crowe, and Sam Holcroft. Crowe, whose new full length play, Kin, opens at the Royal Court next week, focuses her attention on what it is to be a woman in today’s police force. InDoris Day, flatmates Anna and Daisy, both police women, have different coping strategies. The play examines the inherent contradictions of their situation. There’s the necessity of working as part of a team and all that entails, but there’s also the question of workplace sexism and whether this should be tolerated or challenged. This is where they differ, over the point on which it becomes necessary to raise one’s voice and risk the fallout. The play circles its subject, looking at it from several angles and providing a plausible sketch of what it is to be a woman in a male-dominated profession, but it feels rather hurried and abrupt. In a nice piece of continuity Emma Noakes who plays Daisy, also plays the consoling policewoman in Fatal Light. Sam Holcroft’s Dancing Bears, a play about gang violence, also explores the idea of female solidarity in a macho culture. Track-suit clad with faces half hidden by hoods, the four female performers begin by playing young male gang member who swagger about the place (they are described in the text as ‘walking on hot coals’), forever shifting from foot to foot with a kind of itchy urgency. Then one by one these volatile young men peel of their hoodies to become young women, who tired of being misused and impregnated by the men around them, draw together, forming a gang of their own, only to begin to emulate the male behaviour that initially alienated them. The central play of this second triple bill is Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s That Almost Unnameable Lust, probably the most wholly satisfying piece of either cycle. The play is set in a women’s prison where a well-intentioned but naïve young writer tries to get the female inmates to open up and share their experiences with her. Elegantly written, with some subtle and moving passages, Lenkiewicz's play serves to crystallise something about theatre of this kind, about the whole exercise in fact, in the way it subtly interrogates the writer’s role, the inevitable impotence of the observer. Empathy only counts for so much. While the plays have their individual weaknesses, viewed together they paint a compelling picture of a system that fails women on numerous levels (some alarming statistics were provided on suicide and self-harm rates in women’s prisons). Of the two cycles, the second has the edge but there's a lot to be said for seeing both if you can. Reviewed for musicOMH

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?