The Snow Queen at the Rose Theatre

The set alone is a source of wonder. Paper artist, Su Blackwell, in her first design project for the stage has created a delicate, wintry world of trees, cottages and lampposts that appear to have been snipped from the pages of a paperback. Black lettering nests against white, making an apt and charming backdrop for Charles Way’s adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s classic fairy story.

Young Gerda is a nervy girl, prone to panic attacks and terrified of her bad-tempered schoolmaster father, Mr Overskou. When her classmates take turns to dance in front of one another, she can’t bring herself to join in and her best friend Cei has to calm her down. Though Cei and Gerda have been friends and playmates all their lives, Mr Overskou disapproves of the boy’s dreamy ways and forbids them to see one another; it is then that Cei falls under the Snow Queen’s spell. A shard of mirror pierces his heart and he becomes cold and cruel before being whisked off to the Queen’s winter palace and forced to piece together the shattered fragments of her magic mirror. But though the townspeople believe Cei to have drowned, Gerda refuses to accept this and sets off to find him.

Way’s adaptation has Gerda travel through the changing seasons with winter forever on her tail. In spring she encounters talking flowers and a secateurs-wielding gardener; in summer she encounters a gaggle of Hooray Henry types and in autumn she encounters a robber gang and an ageing reindeer. There’s much wit and invention in the visual detail (umbrellas turn into autumn leaves, paper butterflies alight on paper trees, billowing white fabric is used to create a downhill sleigh ride) and some gentle humour in the writing. Gerda grows slowly in confidence and strength as the story progresses, declining to give up her red boots to the spoilt Sloaney teen princess and taking on the robber queen in a dance contest, but the production doesn’t overplay her emotional growth and this aspect of the writing is handled with a pleasingly light touch.

If anything Natascha Metherell’s production is too gentle and sedate. It has its moments of comedy and its moments of chill but there are a few too many slack patches that cause outbreaks of fidgeting amongst the younger members of the audience. Sara Stewart’s towering, ice-eyed Snow Queen is also the source of some genuine cries of alarm and, in one child’s case, a fountaining of frightened, urgent tears. The production seems better pitched at slightly older children than at the very young.

Some strong performances help compensate for occasional failings in pace. Bettrys Jones is compelling as Gerda, her initial anxiety and fretfulness slowly transforming into maturity and strength, and there is some good support from Michael Matus as the menacing Mr Overskou (who also cameos as a decidedly camp daffodil) and Deirdra Morris as the archetypal kindly, wise grandmother. What’s missing, despite all its considerable polish, is any real emotional tug or genuine sense of peril; it’s all a little too neat and tidy and lacks the wild fringes of the best children’s theatre.

Reviewed for Exeunt

We are Three Sisters at the Rose Theatre

“We are three sisters.” It is like an incantation. Surrounded by wind-lashed moorland, with tombstones looming at the window, the Brontë sisters wrote words that would survive them, in the process becoming semi-mythic themselves. Blake Morrison’s play for Northern Broadsides acknowledges the pull that the sisters’ lives still exert, the need to keep repeating and retelling their story.

Morrison draws deliberately on Chekhov’s Three Sisters, transporting events and people from the Brontës’ lives into a Chekhovian framework. It’s an elegant device, particularly because the parallels between the two sets of women were not entirely accidental and Chekhov may, at least in part, have been influenced by the inhabitants of the Haworth parsonage.

Though the play stands up well on its own as a piece of biographical drama, there’s pleasure to be taken in appreciating the many ways Morrison has woven together the Brontës’ world with that of the Prozorovs: the sibling harmonies and rivalries, the proximity of death – both plays begin with the remembering of a parent’s funeral. But it doesn’t adhere to its source too closely, breaking away from the template altogether in the later stages of the play; Morrison refers to it as a “shadow text”, one that inspires rather than dictates.

Though the timeline is condensed, Morrison’s play takes place at the most pivotal point in the sisters’ lives, when their books had finally found publishers and Charlotte in particular was starting to experience the first glow of literary success. This was to prove exposing and disconcerting to Emily who was content to shelter behind her pseudonym and pointedly did not join her sisters on their first tentative journey to London. Though London is a place the sisters ache for, it is a subtler form of longing than Chekhov’s sisters feel for Moscow, and Emily in particular makes her ambivalence felt.

Natasha’s ill-advised green sash in Chekhov’s play has become a dress the colour of limes, a retina-searing garment which stands out a mile next to the palette of matt browns and greys of the Brontës. The dress may as well have been Jezebel red, such is its effect; its wearer, Mrs Lydia Robinson, is Branwell’s older, married lover, here depicted as a cruel and manipulative woman with few redeeming traits (we know she is no good because she’s nasty to Tabby, the Brontës’ frail and ageing housekeeper).

Morrison has his Mrs Robinson paying a fictional visit to the sisters, much to their shock and displeasure. The other interlopers into their guarded world are all men – and all found wanting. John Branwell plays the local doctor, poignantly sporting a soft spot for Anne because she reminds him of her dead mother, whom he once loved. Marc Parry plays a rather feeble curate and director Barrie Rutter plays a self-promoting teacher to generally humorous effect. Fittingly it’s those playing the sisters who stand out. Rebecca Hutchinson’s Anne gets to escape her elder sisters’ shadows and speak of her own hopes; Catherine Kinsella’s Charlotte is the most grounded and subtly ambitious of the three and Sophia di Martino captures Emily’s volatility but also conveys a touch of knowing wit.

The play is less strong at providing social context and the references to events outside the parsonage walls, the Chartist riots for example, often feel heavy-handed; the same can be said of the handling of some of the background biographical detail. Branwell’s rapid decline into a stumbling drunk with a penchant for dipping into the family funds is also rather forced. The play is far better at sketching the tensions between the siblings, as that famous family portrait, with Branwell’s face blotted out by his own hand, watches over them from the far wall.

Rutter’s production can feel a little slow-paced and stiff; it sometimes lumbers rather than glides, and it lacks the energy and physicality of Shared Experience’s exploration of the same narrative ground. But it never feels like mere intellectual exercise; the play has an elegance of expression and an – eventual – emotional power as the three sisters, already coughing ominously, look ahead to their shared future.

Reviewed for Exeunt

A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Rose

My mother hasn’t featured on this blog for a while, simply because I haven’t been able to persuade her to come to the theatre with me in some months. The idea of traipsing into London on a cold night just to see a play is not her idea of fun; preferring as she does a kind of semi-hibernation in winter months involving lots of Cabernet Sauvignon and selected DVD box sets (she is quite taken with Mad Men).

Though she gets a kind of stricken look on her face every time I so much as pick up a copy of Time Out or the Guardian Guide in her presence, last week she, without prompting, mentioned that she might quite maybe want to see that thing with the Scottish chap in it (that Scottish chap being Ken Stott, we eventually established after further discussion and not James McAvoy). Her enthusiasm trailed off a bit when she realised I was serious about arranging tickets but I was not going to let such an opportunity pass.

The Rose in Kingston is the nearest theatre to where she lived and they happened to be playing host to Ed Hall’s all male theatre company Propeller who were doing A Midsummer Night’s Dream in tandem with The Merchant of Venice. The former seemed like a fair comprise. My mother was less sure, having not enjoyed the last few Shakespeares I subjected her to, but I mentioned that there was a large bar and I absolutely, definitely would not make her sit on the floor as I sometimes do at the Rose (the cheapest tickets, the best views and even at home I usually opt for the floorboards over the sofa anyway – so it works for me). There was an unspoken agreement that pre-show drinks were on me.

The production is broadly performed and entertaining, a bit laboured in places but good fun. It’s an all male company and the performers playing female roles do little to signify femininity except for putting on skirts and speaking in a higher tone of voice: the actors all sport close cropped hair and stubbled chins. There’s some neat playing about with gender roles: when squabbling in the forest, Hermia and Helena square up like football fans in a pub brawl while Demetrious and Lysander scrap like schoolgirls in a playground. Puck wears stripy tights, a tutu and a pair of glittery ruby slippers. But other than that it’s a pretty straightforward run through, not quite as bawdy and well-paced as the Globe’s recent production. My mother looked a little perplexed at times but I think she may just have been working out the logistics of nipping downstairs for an interval cigarette.

At the end her verdict was: “OK”, “quite funny in places” and “not as long as I thought it would be.” All of which is more positive than I expected. She couldn’t quite fathom why the woman next to us was “laughing like she wanted everyone to notice she was laughing,” but this is an improvement on the time she spent much of a (admittedly fairly pedestrian) production of As You Like It glaring at the large man who was taking up more than his fair share of the bench they were sharing and scribbling notes throughout – who turned out to be Peter Hall.

She has tentatively agreed to come and see something else with me in a couple of weeks provided it's not another Shakespeare, though she says she must first “check the work diary” which I think is a euphemism for seeing if she can’t find something better to do, but still – I’ll take that as a yes.

Again With The Backlog

I suppose I should probably have spent this weekend investigating Hide and Seek, the festival of social gaming and whatnot on the South Bank, but the opportunity to spend some time instead catching up with friends ended up taking precedence. It is alarming to me, at this stage in my life, just how quickly the weeks, and sometimes months, can scamper past without seeing some of the people I care about, so it was quite, quite wonderful to spend a few aimless, weather-blessed hours traversing the city before raising a glass or three in honour of my friend’s imminent marriage.

That’s not to say these last few days have been theatre free, far from it. Most recently I caught Anna Ziegler’s Dov and Ali at Theatre 503 (who, I notice, have finally reupholstered their bench-seats and done something to make conditions inside the theatre a little less sauna-like). Ziegler’s play is about two men who end up hurting the women they love – a girlfriend and a sister respectively – as result, in part at least, of their religious beliefs.

Dov, an Orthodox Jew whose father is a rabbi, is an English teacher at a Detroit high school; Ali is his student, a seventeen year old Muslim boy, who is unshakeably confident in his views and incredibly sure of himself. (“Life” he says “isn’t about happiness, it’s about being right.”). A classroom debate over The Lord Of The Flies pits student against teacher: Ali has his own, very clear, ideas about what the events in the novel mean – he believes one must have set rules to live by, with little room for negotiation – and he challenges his teacher on these points. This discussion rapidly lurches into an aggressive critique of Dov’s life choices. Ali sees the fact that Dov has yet to complete his PhD as evidence of laziness and is critical of Dov's constant, reductive self-questioning. This behaviour, he believes, is typical of all Jews and he says as much to Dov. But, perhaps inevitably, despite the obvious oppositions between the two men, Ali begins to feel a connection with his teacher: they both have dominant fathers and they have both been pushed into difficult moral corners by their respective faiths.

Through a series of conversations between the two, Zielgler unpicks both characters. Despite his superficial self-possession, Ali is capable of doing little beyond parroting his father’s views, and though Dov speaks about the wisdom and experience that come with being an adult, he is unable to summon the courage to tell his parents he is dating, and is indeed in love with, a non-Jewish woman, a shiksa.

The set up, it has to be said, sounds worryingly trite. This is the second play in as many weeks that I’ve seen about a Jew and a Muslim striking up an unlikely friendship (after Stewart Permutt’s warm, compassionate Many Roads To Paradise) – but , despite my reservations, I found myself warming to the play. It’s an intelligent and considerate piece, not as preachy as it sounds, and Zielger resists the urge to tie things up neatly at the end, asking questions without offering answers. The acting is strong, particularly from Ben Turner as the slightly rumpled Dov. But while it avoids tidy resolutions, it is also, at times, rather too blunt in its approach. The play packs a lot of meat into its hour and twenty minutes, and as a result, it sometimes felt hurried and also a little implausible. This is especially true of the way Ali’s relationship with his teacher develops. It seemed to become very intense, very quickly and I couldn’t quite believe Dov would be that relaxed about Ali’s anti-Semitic baiting even if it was obviously being done to provoke a reaction. I’m also still unsure about the narration from Ali’s absent sister, Sameh, (who, having fallen for a man deemed unappropriate by her father – and, by default, her brother – has been dispatched to Pakistan and a life, it is implied, of untold misery.) Her character regularly interrupts events to move the story on, to provide a counterpoint to Ali’s moral rigidity – and, of course, there is an irony in the fact that it is Ali who has deprived her of her voice and yet it is her who now shapes his story. At times I found this device too constricting a way of structuring the piece, too obviously a device, but in the end it gave the piece an added sense of poignancy, not to mention a female counterbalance to the masculine bluster of the main characters.

I also enjoyed the novelty of seeing a play on a Sunday evening and of emerging from the theatre with much of the night still ahead. (Theatre 503 is one of the few London venues that does this: holding performances at 5pm most Sundays),

Other memorable things from the last fortnight included Richard Bean’s The English Game, a play about an amateur cricket team, which I saw when it came to the Rose Theatre in Kingston last week. This is a venue that has really grown on me. I love the fact that you can pay a few quid and sit in the central pit area (they advise you to bring a cushion, but I am relatively young and springy and have not felt the need for one yet). This appeals hugely to my inner-student and made me take a punt on a play that, knowing next to nothing about cricket as I do (really nothing, I even had to use google recently just to ascertain that a wicket was actually called a wicket), I might otherwise have ignored. And I’m so glad I didn’t, because it was a warm-hearted, amusing and very well acted piece. Though it contained a dozen or so characters, many of whom were quite simply sketched, Bean has a way of making these men seem to have lives beyond the cricket pitch, to exist beyond the stage. The men bicker and rib each other, tensions surface and settle, unexpected opinions are revealed, a friendship fractures, perhaps irreparably, and an old man fades gently away in the afternoon sun. It is not just about cricket, of course, Bean also seemed concerned with issues of Englishness and, beneath the banter, there was a sense of things changing, a whiff of decline, but what I really liked about it, was that, in the end it was mainly about cricket, a game I have no knowledge of or love for, and yet it didn’t matter a jot. While I admire the stripped down, nipped down style of something like The Ugly One, I love the big-ness of this, the clutter of characters, and am now, as a result, rather gutted that I missed his Harvest at the Royal Court.

Speaking of big-ness, this blog post is going on for a bit and I will wrap things up shortly before your attention wavers, but I just want to mention Metamorphosis 08, a competition for new writing in south east London held by the Churchill Theatre in Bromley. The judging panel was chaired by David Eldridge and the two winning plays were staged at the Churchill last week in a specially constructed studio space that had been erected on the stage. The first of the double bill was [in parenthesis], by Ben Hales. It contained a nice, visually appealing set up: three climbers have tumbled from a mountain and now hang suspended by their climbing ropes in midair, one with a bloody hole in his side. The shock of the fall has passed and, as they wait, to be rescued, or to not be rescued, they tell bad jokes and, inevitably, given their predicament, start talking about life and love. It was, once the novelty of the dangling actors subsided, rather a static, overlong (and, I think, rather flatly directed) production but it was well acted, particularly by Adam Sopp as the young lad slowly leaking vital fluids, and the writing had a considerable degree of charm and openness.

It was the second piece of the evening that really made an impact. Overspill is by Ali Taylor (who also wrote the wonderful Cotton Wool, one of my favourite new plays of the year) and tells the story of three lads on a night out in Bromley town centre. The language is the thing here, the pounding pulse of the piece, rhythmic, poetic, and yet wholly evocative of the location in question: the outer edge of London, the weekend impending. I preferred Cotton Wool for the way it married its lexical musicality with more strongly developed characters, but this still packed a punch of its own.

A Rose In Bloom

A whole bunch of years ago (OK, maybe three) I went along to the Rose Theatre in Kingston, when it was still in its unfinished state to see Peter Hall’s As You Like It which was being staged in the raw auditorium, with its exposed concrete and pipes (and Portaloos, as I recall). And this was rather exciting, not so much for the production, which was decidedly Peter Hall-y. But for the space, which felt fresh and full of potential and, also, crucially, local to where I was living at the time, so no long, crawling train from the depths of Surrey to worry about.

Roll on 2008 and, having been dogged with delays, mainly funding related, the theatre is finally open. And the finished space is really quite something. It has a layout modelled on the original Rose Theatre in Southwark and seats around 900. It's most notable feature is a pit area in front of the stage where more limber audience members can come and sit on the floor for around £7 a ticket (the theatre's website recommends bringing your own cushion). It won’t please everyone - there have already been online grumbles about sightlines and whatnot – but I thought it was an attractive and elegant space. It just seems a shame that they’ve chosen to fill it, for this, its debut production, with a stiff, if dependable, production of Uncle Vanya, once again directed by Hall.

Solid. I think that’s the best way to describe it. Solid and sturdy. This is a production that delivers exactly what it was designed to deliver. But, presumably because it is intended to tour and has not been specially created for the Rose, it failed to use the great sweeping stage in an imaginative way. The acting was fine (particularly Loo Brealey's Sonya), the simple set, with its single autumnal tree, was attractive enough, and it did have its moments, its solid, sturdy, dependable moments, but it was too gentle to be truly moving and I just wish they could have christened this space with something a bit more, well, more.

Certain parties will, however, be cheered to know that the bar area is sizeable, spacious and very reasonably priced, if rather lacking in decent seating.

A case of watch this space.