The River, Royal Court Upstairs

An isolated cabin, nestled deep in the woods, the setting for so many fairy tales and horror films, makes an apt backdrop for Jez Butterworth’s much anticipated new play. The River eschews the large canvas approach of Jerusalem for something more intimate and atmospheric, but while it is a wilfully different beast, lacking the thump and rumble of its predecessor, it too is concerned with the process of male myth-making, the stories we tell ourselves and each other.

Dominic West plays an unnamed man who has brought his new girlfriend, played by Miranda Raison, out to his uncle’s cabin to – amongst other things – school her in the art of sea-trout fishing on a moonless night. Bearded, flannel-shirted and rugged, West’s character is Jimmy McNulty with a dash of Gentle Ben; he’s gruff but far from taciturn, a poetic sort, and wonderfully capable in the kitchen to boot; he even manages to make fly fishing sound appealing, like foreplay.

Ultz’s detailed design is a study in brown: a raw-walled, rustic space, all chestnut and chocolate with a convenient stash of candles and a shelf of well-thumbed paperbacks, a gingerbread room where it is forever twilight. Despite the potentially sinister setting, there are no bloody chambers in this cabin – though that beard of West’s does make one wonder – and the only guts we see belong to a sea-trout, spilling like pink udon into a waiting bucket as West prepares it for the oven, but this place does have its fair share of ghosts; there are faint traces of other women, little tokens and leavings, echoes of distant song. Conversations are repeated, like ripples, spreading outwards, and at the centre of the play there is a sense of a man circling and searching for something he cannot find – something lost, perhaps destroyed – a sense of something aching and even, perhaps, malign.

If it’s not too crass a comparison, there were times were I found myself thinking of that episode of Sex and the City where Carrie’s new chap – the anti-Big – takes her to stay in his country cabin and she, of course, teeters around on inappropriate shoes and squeals at every woodland creature that comes within three feet of her. The cabin in both that episode and here feels like a kind of audition, a test, with West’s character enjoying the game, playing his part and waiting to see how the woman in question plays hers. The early stages of a relationship can feel like a kind of theatre, with each participant acutely aware of their words and actions, and Butterworth plays on this idea of memory as something which can be sculpted but which can also haunt someone more effectively than any external force.

The River contains some characteristically beautiful writing, the play replete with shimmering images and recurring motifs, particularly during the scene where West’s character recalls the first fish he ever landed as a boy, a delicate dream of a story, riddled with the kind of intricacy that comes from retelling, an account honed over time. This image of the dying fish, twitching and slippery, echoes throughout the play, as do those of dead birds and women viewed from a distance across water.

Ian Rickson’s measured yet engrossing production is not afraid of silence. It devotes several minutes to a scene of West preparing a meal, gutting a fish and dicing fennel, dinner as ritual, the snick-snick of knife blade on chopping board the only sound we hear. West himself is excellent, as are both Laura Donnelly and Miranda Raison as the women who flow through his life. The lighting is low and golden throughout, intensifying the sense of intimacy and the mood shifts slowly and subtly from one of warmth to something more strained. The production concludes with, not exactly a twist, but a further rippling, one which slightly undermines the delicacy of what has gone before, and Rickson’s final casting decision – difficult to discuss without giving the game away – doesn’t help matters, spelling out visually what was already fairly explicit in the text.

Reviewed for Exeunt

truth and reconciliation at the royal court

The floor is blanketed in black. This fine covering, like volcanic sand, scorched earth, becomes increasingly mottled as it is disturbed by pacing feet, the white wood underneath shows through as the earth is churned.

The new play by debbie tucker green interlaces stories from some of the most brutal conflicts of recent years. These stories are set not during the conflicts themselves but in the aftermath, years blurred by uncertainty and unanswered questions. The play explores the search for resolution and the agony of not knowing what happened to your wife, your husband, your child: the absence of an ending, any ending.

Designer Lisa Marie Hall has laid out the space like a courtroom, with the audience circled around the edges on hard, wooden seats onto which names have been scratched, marks made. Dates and locations have also been etched in the wood of the walls, like make-shift tombstones. The play begins with a scene from South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. A family are made to wait – more waiting to add to all the years they’ve already waited. The mother refuses to sit; she will remain standing until she is acknowledged, until she is given something tangible.

The South African strand bookends the play but green also visits Zimbabwe Rwanda, Northern Ireland and Bosnia; the characters are, for the most part, nameless while the language is economical, elliptical, to the point of being repetitious. A recurring motif sees people discussing where to sit, when to sit, picking over the little details as their loss floods into the spaces between, in acknowledgement of the fact that there is only so much words can achieve.

The stories echo one another, emotional tension co-existing with the mundane. This repetition, this constant circling, is – by necessity – at times frustrating: the play is constantly shifting, pulling back, holding back, disinclined to settle. Yet occasionally it sharpens its focus, and everything becomes tauter, clearer. The South African mother, powerfully played by Pamela Nomvete, articulates the pain of waiting for so many long years to end up here, facing an empty chair. A volatile Northern Irish woman bristles at having to defend the actions of her son. A dead Rwandan man confronts the man who killed him, left his wife a widow, forces him to remember.

The images that persist are those of doggedness and determination in the face of silence, the need to keep going even if to find the truth – or a version of it – will mean encountering fresh pain. Two Serbian men appear to barter over who will admit to a war crime, as if the thing that matters most is that someone – anyone – accepts blame, someone holds up their hands (which felt particularly pertinent with Mladic and Hadzic now awaiting trial in The Hague).

Some of the threads are more developed than others, but this helps establish the universal nature of the situation in which these characters find themselves: one story blends into the next, and while some come close to resolution, others are left hanging, incomplete. Throughout the play, the spare language pulses and flutters, with a kind of insectile delicacy, but when it hits, it hits hard.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Remembrance Day at the Royal Court

The 16th March marks Latvian Legion Day, a day of commemoration for the surviving veterans who fought against the Soviets on the side of the Nazis. It is a day of remembrance but also a day of protest and anger in which the country’s entrenched social divisions are brought sharply into focus. The march has become a touch-paper for a younger generation, both for young nationalist groups and for predominantly Russian anti-fascist groups.

Aleksey Scherbak’s new play, staged as part of the Royal Court’s International Playwrights Season in a translation by Rory Mullarky, is set on the eve of the march. Anya, the teenage daughter of a Russian family, is getting ready to protest; her rage is blue-flamed and youthful, her view of the world binary. Her father doesn’t condone her anger yet he is sympathetic and even helps her paint an anti-fascist banner; however the more he speaks of forgiveness and leaving the past in the past, the more he seems to upset and anger both her and other Russians who feel as she does.

Scherbak’s play is set in a run-down block of flats in Riga where Russians and Latvians live next door to one another, though this proximity does not equate to neighbourliness. If anything the divisions run deeper than they once did (Latvian Legion Day was only instituted in the 1990s when the country gained its independence); Anya’s elderly Uncle Misha, a Russian army veteran, used to play chess with his Latvian neighbour Valdis, but those days are long gone. To speak of forgiveness, as Anya’s father does, is on a par with declaring oneself a Nazi sympathiser.

In the adjacent flat, the two veterans, Valdis and his friend Paulis, knock back the vodka in remembrance of the fallen and discuss how their fight has become a symbol of Latvian independence and pride. Paulis is full of unrepentant bluster but Valdis is more contemplative, fully aware that things were not so clear cut during the war years.

Tom Scutt’s stark set, its walls and floor painted red and white, striped like the Latvian flag, is agreeably flexible, acting as both the connecting corridor and the interior of the various flats. A pile of rather functional furniture sits at one side of the stage and is pulled into use when needed and left in place so that director Michael Longhurst is able to interweave the scenes and show the neighbours - literally - living on top of one another, sharing the same sofa, eating at the same table.

Scherbak seems to be writing with a broader audience in mind – there’s a lot of contextualising and explanation – but his play paints a fascinating picture of a divided country and the harnessing of the past for political ends, which while very specific to Latvia, contains ripples that run throughout Europe and beyond. Character takes something of a backseat in this process and Anya’s journey towards radicalism, tangled as it is with sexual desire and adolescent romanticism – she speaks dreamily about the purity and beauty of martyrdom, of being willing to die for one’s beliefs – feels rather heavy-handed at times. Ruby Bentall, as Anya, manages to combine teenage petulance with something colder and more disturbing while Iwan Rheon, as her brother Lyosha, is the voice of optimism and internationalism; he pronounces himself a citizen of the world and thinks the whole situation has little relevance for his generation.

Michael Nardone gives the play a solid centre as Anya’s determinedly reasonable father, a man unwilling to dilute his principles. Sam Kelly and Ewan Hooper, as the ageing veterans, add a necessary textural layer as well as some humour - which sits uneasily with the sight of their SS jackets. Luke Norris is fittingly slick and cynical as Boris, the young man using both the veterans and Anya’s passion as a way of furthering his political career (there’s a nice, if a little too wry, moment where Boris meets his fascist counterpart in the corridor and greets him like a colleague, asking after his family before briefly discussing printing costs like any two co-workers).

Scherbak’s play, like Anya’s father, seems keen to draw a line under the past, while demonstrating that looking forward is not the same thing as forgetting or even forgiving. But it does this at the expense of fully engaging with what drives young people towards extremism and sacrifices a certain dramatic richness along the way too, yet for all it lacks, it remains a fascinating portrait of a country split by its past.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Our Private Life at the Royal Court

Pedro Miguel Rozo’s self-labelled family parable is set in a Columbian village on the cusp of becoming a town. Despite the opening of a shiny new shopping mall with its promise of material pleasures and a veneer of urban sophistication, the community still operates like a village; rumours can still spread like a spark through dry grass and the currents of gossip can still pull a man down.

Nothing is truly private in such a place and Rozo emphasises this by muddying the line between interior and exterior. The characters thoughts are often spoken out loud so that not only the audience but also the other characters, can hear them. It is not uncommon for one character to admonish another for not thinking more quietly.

Our Private Life is the first of two plays presented by the Royal Court along with readings and seminars and a second play, Aleksey Scherbak’s Remembrance Day, as part of what they’re terming an International Playwrights Season.

A rumour is doing the rounds that Carlos’s father molested his twelve year old farmhand and this makes Carlos, a “bi-polar compulsive fantasist”, worry that his father may have done the same thing to him when he was a boy. He turns first to Sergio, his older brother (or half-brother, as it turns out), whose marriage and success as a businessman have failed to endear him to their father, and then to his psychiatrist, whose willingness to help Carlos excavate his childhood memories owes much to his desire to own a nicer car.

Rozo’s play, presented in a translation by Simon Scardifield, has a sensational quality and the characters make constant reference to the way unfolding events resemble something out of a daytime soap or a movie. In this light, the performances are pitched at an appropriate level of artifice, encompassing extremes of emotion, with Colin Morgan’s pipe cleaner-limbed Carlos exploding into tears like a hysterical toddler before trying to do away with himself with a butter knife, or the whole family perkily embarking on a doomed Christmas dinner before this too breaks down around them.

Morgan came to prominence in the Young Vic’s adaption of Vernon God Little and indeed Lyndsey Turner’s production shares something of that novel’s Technicolor excess as well as certain parallels of plot; there are also definite echoes of the films of Almodovar in the play’s manner of exaggeration, its relationship with the absurd, and in scenes in which Ishia Bennison’s volatile matriarch flings her prosthetic breast across the kitchen table.

Morgan is springy and boyish, his eyes suggesting both damage and a degree of glee at the chaos wrought. Bennison, as his mother, hits on an intriguing balance as a woman trying to protect her husband from the waves of accusation and ultimately shielding only herself; she maintains a shell that only occasional breaks. Adrian Schiller has the requisite air of tainted professional dignity as the psychiatrist whose wardrobe and whiskey of choice improve in quality as paranoia becomes increasingly rampant in town and his services are more frequently called upon.

Shunt’s Lizzie Clachlan’s set consists of a versatile green sliding panel that resembles a Japanese shōji door in the way it suggests that nothing is ever fully concealed; seen in silhouette it also brings to mind the screen in a confessional.

The pay-off, when it comes – in the form of a downbeat coda- lacks the chill of revelation; the use of sexual abuse as metaphor seems an overplayed device and after the near-cartoonish tone of all that’s gone before, the ugliness that finally comes to light strikes an uneasy note – possibly not in the way intended.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Kin at the Royal Court

EV Crowe’s first full length play for the Royal Court paints a bleak picture of boarding school life. It concerns two young room-mates, Janey and Mimi, both ten. Theirs is a stark world, lit by strip lights and entirely lacking in comfort, cold in more ways than one. Because the play is set in the mid-1990s the payphone, providing a lone link to home, is a central part of their lives and as such the site of conflict and emotion, the holding back of tears.

While Kin can be superficially linked to the work of Polly Stenham and Anya Reiss, plays by young women depicting the turbulent lives of middle class children, it’s in some ways a less daring piece. Where Crowe – whose short playDoris Day is currently showing at Soho Theatre as part of their Charged season – really excels is in creating atmosphere, in capturing the vocabulary of the dormitory (anorexia casually abbreviated to ‘annie’ and so forth). The patterns of the girls’ conversations feel plausible and their interactions, alternatively hostile and affectionate, are equally convincing. Janey is cruel to Mimi, both physically and emotionally, yet she is a solid thing in a world of uncertainty, more tangible then her absent parents, and as such is more important; Mimi hates and loves her in equal measure. The play is less strong structurally. Crowe sets up a scene and then backspins to show the events leading up to it. Yet the play lacks shape and meanders dramatically. This is perhaps necessary to illustrate the repetitious nature of their existence – as it’s twice pointed out the girls have to endure five more years of this before they reach Lower Sixth – but it makes for a rather flat theatrical experience. The characters are younger than in Stenham and Reiss’s plays. It’s only a couple of years but it makes a difference. Their adult banter and expletive-heavy dialogue feels very much like a case of them testing themselves and each other, pushing the boundaries. It’s far less unnerving than the sexual confidence and emotional confusion of twelve year old Delilah in Reiss’s Spur of the Moment. In fact it’s the adults, or at least their teacher Mrs B (played by a permanently frazzled looking Annette Badland), who seem overly keen to credit them with more sexual experience and understanding than they actually have. The production also relies rather too much on the mischievous juxtaposition of these sweet-looking girls and the constant stream of ‘fucks’ that spill from their mouths. This is particularly evident when the girls sing Once in Royal David’s City, faces torch-lit and beaming, only to conclude with a casual, “Who the fuck was David?” Jeremy Herrin (who directed both Spur of the Moment and both of Stenham’s plays) clearly has a knack for drawing strong performances from a young cast. All the girls are making their professional stage debuts and they make a good, if occasionally hesitant, job of their demanding roles. But despite this the play remains sealed off and difficult to penetrate, especially if that’s not a world you’ve known. There are hints of something more reaching in the writing, a very faint sniff of Lindsay Anderson’s If…. Mrs B describes her charges as small dogs and this is echoed in the howling and growling outside the windows, but it’s not something the play builds on. It’s by nature an insular world that Crowe is depicting but it could be made more open, more inviting, instead the play keeps its audience at arm’s length.

Tribes at the Royal Court

For the family in Nina Raine’s new play, Tribes, most meals seem to end in disarray. It’s par for the course, unexceptional, the dining table doubling as battlefield.

Christopher, an academic, clearly relishes a full-throated, calculatedly un-PC rant, while his would-be novelist wife, Beth, and his children Daniel and Ruth all fight to have their say. Opinions are aired, weaknesses are honed in on and picked at and dinner inevitably turns into a cacophonous mess with everyone talking at once and no one really listening to what the others have to say.

The only family member who refrains from diving in is Billy. Born deaf, despite his excellent lip reading skills he struggles to keep up when his family are in full flow, teasing and needling one another, sometimes with affection, sometimes with cruel acuity; rarely does anyone ever pause to make sure Billy isn’t being left behind.

Things change when Billy meets Sylvia. The daughter of deaf parents, she’s losing her hearing as a result of a genetic condition; she’s also teaching Billy to sign, something to which his father has always been resistant, and in doing so she opens up a new world to him. But, in an ironic twist, it’s a world with which Sylvia is increasingly starting to struggle; she finds the hierarchies and rivalries of the deaf community alienating, the insularity alarming.

There’s an overabundance of parallels at work here; some of Raine’s narrative devices that are just a little bit too pat, a little bit too mechanical. Both Billy’s parents write for a living, words are their business, and yet they fail to grasp Billy’s need for connection through language. This point is repeatedly underlined; Christopher, who steadfastly refuses to learn to sign, is even taking Chinese lessons. As the play progresses its subtly dwindles. While Billy becomes more confident, his brother Daniel (who just happens to be writing a thesis on language) is sinking into mental illness, his childhood stutter re-emerging, so as one brother finds his voice, the other loses his.

The performances show no such heavy-handedness. Jacob Casselden, a deaf actor, plays Billy with a calm, wry quality. Accustomed to being stuck on the sidelines, his character’s gradual emergence and growth is deftly handled. Playing opposite him, as Sylvia, Michelle Terry is (once again) controlled and compelling. Her character’s distress at the loss of her hearing is palpable and her response - wary, bemused, unsettled - to Billy’s feuding brood is convincing. She also gently modifies her voice as the play progresses to give a sense of her condition worsening.

Stanley Townsend is suitably larger than life as the booming, bearded Christopher and Kika Markham, Harry Treadaway and Pheobe Waller-Bridge are all on strong form as Beth, Daniel and Ruth respectively, though the two women’s roles are rather thin in comparison.

Mark Thompson’s simple set has a gauze screen that serves a dual purpose, dividing the space and allowing for the projection of surtitles. Most of the early scenes are conducted around the dining table but the piano, partially shielded from view, comes into its own at the end of the first act as Sylvia sits down to play. It’s a poignant moment, well executed, and subtler than some later scenes, beautifully illustrating that while Sylvia will always have the memory of music, Billy will not, something that causes them both disquiet.

The first half of Roger Michell’s production is crackling and energetic, full of familial one-upmanship and some inspired expletive-riddled dialogue (eating his wife’s seafood pasta is, according to Christopher, “like being fucked in the face by a crab”), but this momentum doesn’t quite carry through into the second half as events become more fragmented and unconvincing.

Yet despite this eventual falling off Raine’s play provides some real insight into the way that families communicate (or, rather, often fail to) and into just how painfully isolating it can be not to be able to hear in a world that makes few allowances for this fact.

Reviewed for musicOMH

Ingredient X at the Royal Court

Oh my, where to begin? After all the superb plays I've seen at the Royal Court recently, they decide to put this on Upstairs?

Nick Grosso’s new play is about addiction in all its forms. His characters are a collection of recovering addicts, partners of addicts, addicts in denial about their own addictions, and even someone who’s a veteran of several relationships with addicts: an addict-addict.

Rosanna, Deanna and Katie are three friends in their early forties. It’s a Saturday night and they’re planning a night in with the X Factor in Katie’s apartment. Rosanna is abrasive and mouthy, always on the verge of taking offence to something or losing her temper. Deanna is a mother of four who’s made a life for herself despite a rough background. Katie is far milder than her friends; with a failed relationship with an addict rock star under her belt, she’s now married to recovering drug addict Frank, with whom she has a new baby.

At the centre of the play lies a dialogue over whether addiction is a choice or a disease. Katie firmly believes that it’s an illness, that addicts have little say in their behaviour, that it’s a part of them, hard-wired. Rosanna is dismissive of this and takes the opposite view. Deanna just wants another drink, preferably with ice (though this is negotiable).

While there are some amusing verbal volleys, in Deanna’s disgust at the prospect of drinking rum and apple juice and in a couple of Rosanna’s scorn-tinged monologues (with each vowel stretched like an elastic band: "shaaat uuup"), there’s something very false and strained about most of the writing.

These people don’t interact with one another in a convincing way. They certainly don’t behave like the kind of friends who’d care to spend an evening together. There’s little sense of a shared past between them and they don’t act like people who like each other or even know each other that well. Rosanna and Deanna pass continuous comment on Katie’s relationships, current and past, and treat Frank like their personal butler. Katie is less of a character than a series of excerpts from a self help book, her talk is all of "co-dependency" and "obsessive tendencies"; she’s a cool counterpoint to Rosanna's unrelenting acidity but this doesn't really compensate for her lack of personality.

Grosso's play is also stuffed with characters we never see - children, ex-partners, neighbours - to the point when it becomes tiresome to keep track of them all. This is most evident towards the end of the play where a point of catharsis is reached following the death of a character who, until then, has neither been seen nor mentioned. The resulting emotional crisis seems to come from nowhere and feels hollow as a result.

A playwright shouldn’t have to hold the audience’s hands and explain the motivation behind every action, but in a play like this there needs to be some shape, some visible path – Grosso just steers his characters round in endless circles. At one point Deanna has a brief moment of revelation about her drinking habits – the black outs, the soaked bed sheets, the gradual dawning that she might have a problem – but a few moments later they’re all discussing online dating. There’s no shift in the dynamic between them, no sign that such a confession ever took place. If this is meant to be a commentary on denial, both of the addict and those around them, on the way people sometimes fail to notice the distress of those close to them, it fell well short.

Lesley Sharp is a fine actress and hers is at least a cohesive performance in that every gesture and swagger seems committed to making Rosanna as unlikeable as possible; there is not one chink of warmth or humour in her hard façade. Indira Varma seems very much miscast as Katie. For one thing she's a glorious looking woman, even clad in shapeless grey sweats, so it’s jarring to hear the other two repeatedly refer to how haggard and worn she’s looking when this is clearly anything but the case. This seems like a small point but it matters because one starts to wonder whether they’re trying to undermine her confidence or whether they’re actually concerned for her. Lisa Palfrey has a decent sense of comic timing as Deanna and her character provides some of the few genuine laughs (as oppose to the many awkward, uncertain ones). James Lance, as Frank, just seems rather distant from everything but perhaps that’s just his response to having these two women in his home.

Katie and Frank’s flat, as presented in Ben Stones’ set, is very sleek, spacious and urban, with an abundance of exposed brick and a huge, double-doored American fridge. This seems oddly out of keeping with the world the characters appear to live in (apparently they all have homes on the same cul de sac and can easily pop into one another's houses – Frank doesn’t even seem to require keys to do this).

The final scene sees Frank cleaning up after his guests have departed. Silence is an underused tool in the theatre and there’s a lot that can be told through the way a character performs everyday activities; presumably this was meant to provide a note of hope, of healing, but Deborah Bruce's production couldn’t quite sell it, instead it was just five minutes of watching a man load a dishwasher.

Reviewed for musicOMH

Posh at the Royal Court

Laura Wade’s provocative new play about class privilege concerns an elite Oxford dining club not entirely dissimilar from the now notorious Bullingdon Club of which David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson were all members.

The ten undergraduate members of the Riot Club dress in bow ties and tail coats and quaff wine by the bottle in an attempt to get totally "chateaued". They have a complex set of rules and any breach is met with a forfeit. Bin liners are affixed to the back of each chair to deal with the inevitable physical consequences of such excess and the object of the evening is to create as much havoc as possible.


The play takes place in the burgundy-walled private dining room of an Oxfordshire country pub. One of their number, Guy – his eye on the presidency – has customised the menu to include a ten bird roast, while another, Harry, rocks up in his fencing gear; Dimitri rides in on a newly purchased vintage Triumph motorbike and new boys Ed and Miles are still slightly perturbed that in the name of initiation someone has jizzed all over their college rooms.

These young men have wealth, property (there’s a lengthy rant about the National Trust and how awful it is to have the public traipsing through their family homes), connections, and a deeply held sense of entitlement. They are also, to a man, weak, cowardly, immature and whiny. Wade gradually builds up their belief that money can get them anything they want; at first it’s a few extras favours, small things, but later, as the wine flows, they think nothing of offering the landlord’s daughter cash to perform sexual acts. Their grasp on the realities of how other people live is slim and their attitude to women is, at best, condescending, at worst dripping in misogyny. When their behaviour veers from being merely obnoxious towards something altogether uglier, it’s telling that their first response is to fret about the consequences for their futures.

The most outspoken of their number is Leo Bill’s Alistair who gets a number of impassioned monologues about how people of their class and position have allowed themselves to be carried away on a tide of mediocrity. He believes it is time to reclaim their birth right as members of the ruling class, to rule.

There are other strong performances from Harry Hadden-Paton as the incredibly self-assured Harry (“I always win”) and David Dawson as Hugo, who tries to present himself as slightly more refined than the others. Daniel Ryan’s pub landlord and Fiona Button, as his daughter, Rachel, provide a necessary counterpoint to their indulgence.

Lyndsey Turner’s production is well-paced and inventive, with the interludes between scenes covered by some delightfully incongruous a capella singing, and Wade’s writing is witty and very entertaining. There are flashes of charm in these young men before they degenerate into a braying wine-fuelled mob, but she allows them few, if any, redeeming features; none of them emerge as fully rounded characters – they are just variants on a type. It would have been nice to see a glimmer of goodness or the capacity to change in at least one of them, but the play is more intent on banging its drum.

Wade suggests that clubs like these are not only an excuse for bad behaviour, but an opportunity to gain ties that will last a lifetime, favours to be repaid at some future date when they’re all comfortably ensconced in some position of authority. The final scenes glitter with conspiracy, but it all feels rather over-done, the play having already stated its case several times over by this point.

Reviewed for musicOMH

Off the Endz at the Royal Court

Bola Agbaje appears to have taken a considerable step back from her flawed but intermittently exhilarating debut, Gone Too Far! Off The Endz, her third major work and second for the Royal Court, is a straightforward morality tale built seemingly with Duplo blocks.

The play deals in stock types. David and Kojo are friends from way back. David is the bad boy, always in and out of prison, exuding disdain for honest toil; while Kojo is hardworking and determined to get off the Endz (the estate on which they live) and make a better life for himself and his family.

David – having just been released after an indeterminate stretch inside for an indeterminate crime and needing a place to stay – heads straight to see his friend. There he finds that Kojo’s girlfriend, Sharon, with who he was once also romantically involved, is pregnant and that the couple have plans to buy a house together. Scornful of the way they live yet happy to sponge of them until he finds his feet, David shows no interest in getting a job of any kind; he sneers at the minimum wage positions offered to him at job centre, regarding such work as beneath him, and decides that drug dealing is the only way he can make the kind of money he wants without losing face.

Kojo’s attempts to convince him that hard work and slow slog are the better way to go are met with derision, especially when it transpires that, though Sharon doesn’t know it, the couple are deeply in debt, weighed down with unmanageable credit card bills, and that Kojo is on the verge of losing his job.

Where Agbaje succeeds is in showing the shifting bonds between the three main characters and showing how David subtly slides between Kojo and Sharon. The central dilemma, however, is set out in a very basic way and there’s a total lack of suspense in regards to which way David is going to turn. The fallout from the choices he makes is totally predictable.

Too often Agbaje resorts to interminable domestic scenes (with – faint – echoes of John Osborne) in which angry people shout over at each other over ironing boards, though she does deliver a few striking moments. The scene where David discovers that the estate is now apparently ruled by weapon-packing primary school kids is both amusing and unnerving, and a clash with Kojo’s receptionist succinctly illustrates how uneasy David is with normal social situations and how he compensates with aggression, making trouble for himself in the process.

The tone of the play is, at times, pretty condescending; the wants and needs and hopes of these characters are spelt out in the biggest block capitals and while there is such a thing as being elegantly economical in approach, this isn’t it. It’s all a bit simplistic and naive and feels overstretched at less than an hour and a half. Both world views presented are narrow in the extreme and the play seems closed off to any possible middle ground between Kojo and Sharon’s joyless, middle class aspirational grind and David’s murky criminal dealings.

Agbaje also leaves some potentially interesting avenues unexplored. David’s attitude to women is pretty repugnant: he expects Sharon to clean up after him and his attitude seems to infect Kojo, to some degree. The play even seems to lay the blame for their debt problems at Sharon’s door. Despite holding down a job herself, their situation appears to stem from her excessive spending on store cards and ignorance of their true financial state, though Kojo’s determination to be a man and provide for her and his child, things he sees as fundamentally intertwined, is also a factor. The subtle assertion that women and their material demands can force men into difficult corners and make them act against their better judgement is something it shares with The Wire (though sadly the comparison ends there).

Jeremy Herrin’s production is relatively punchy and the cast do a solid enough job, particularly Lorraine Boroughs as Sharon who seems to do the most to give some shape to her character. Ashley Walters gives a decent account of a man whose charm and easy manner masks a fairly unattractive personality and who can snap with little provocation. But none of this is sufficient compensation for a thinly written and unsatisfying play.

Reviewed for musicOMH

Enron at the Noel Coward Theatre

Bit late to the table with this one, but still...

Lucy Prebble’s ambitious and assured play about the spectacular collapse of the energy company Enron, the biggest bankruptcy in American history, comes to the West End by way of the Royal Court and Chichester, trailing a comet tail of glittering reviews in its wake.

A Broadway transfer is now also imminent. Going to see this show knowing all this, it's inevitable that one’s expectations will be high – given all that’s been said and written, how could they not be? Fortunately the production is, in its own, sometimes overwhelming way, quite dazzling. Rupert Goold directs with a characteristic level of visual invention and exuberance though he sometimes trowels on the different theatrical techniques.

There are song and dance numbers, video projections, puppetry and even a choreographed sequence with light sabres, yet his approach to the material, though it can feel excessive, also feels apt. The production demands your attention. It’s glossy and unstoppable, which seems entirely fitting.

Beneath all Goold’s glitter, Prebble’s play is quite conventional in terms of structure. She depicts in a linear and comparatively straightforward way Enron’s path to implosion as the company is steered into ever more risky waters by its ambitious CEO Jeffrey Skilling (Samuel West) and by the fawning but fiscally creative Andy Fastow (Tom Goodman-Hill). For a while things seem fine. The share price keeps climbing and Skilling keeps pushing the company onwards, expanding into new markets – but the money simply isn’t there. Having purposefully moved Enron away from dealing in the “things you can hold” into more theoretical trading territory, Skilling’s profits are virtual, his debts are mounting. When Fastow suggests a legal loophole that might allow them to camouflage this, at least until things improve, Skilling is intrigued. Neither of them believe they can fail (Skilling proudly describes himself not just as "smart" but as "fucking smart"); it simply doesn’t occur to them that things might go wrong.

Prebble is careful not to make Skilling into a one-dimensional villain. Though never exactly sympathetic, she does at least make him human, a thing she achieves primarily via scenes showing his slightly baffled interactions with his young daughter (they count dollar bills together). At the same time she does not shy away from showing how his hubris devastated lives; the collapse of the company stripped many employees of their life savings and left them with nothing.

West’s superb performance gives the production its pulse. In his hands Skilling is an enigmatic and intriguing figure, highly intelligent, ruthless and manipulative when needs be, and utterly convinced of his own brilliance, but also undoubtedly passionate about what he does. It’s clear that greed is only one of many motivating factors; his is a familiar dramatic trajectory, the archetypal rise and fall – only when he falls he takes a whole heap of people with him. Physically, West transforms himself repeatedly as the play progresses. From a portly outsider with unfortunate hair at the start he morphs into the epitome of the slick executive and then, as the full reality of the situation comes to light, he subtly conveys Skilling’s unravelling.

As company chairman Ken Lay, Tim Pigott-Smith is more of a conventional boo-hiss figure with a reptilian steeliness concealed beneath his friendly gee-shucks exterior. Goodman-Hill is also impressive as the smart but socially awkward and rather repellent Fastow.

Goold’s directorial approach can be playful and witty, but often when he’s drawn to a particular visual device, he can’t resist returning to it again and again. The first use of dinosaur-headed performers to represent the ‘raptors’ (the term used by Fastow to describe his debt guzzling scheme) is both striking and amusing, a deft way of making something quite complex more easily graspable, but their impact is diluted by Goold’s repeated use of them.

Some of the imagery feels forced and overdone. The use of three blind mice in the opening sequence lacks subtly and the paralleling of the panicked shredding of incriminating Enron paperwork with the raining debris of the World Trade Centre is simply crass and unnecessary.

Though the production is, in the main, a fascinating and exciting, if inevitably condensed, depiction of one of the defining events of the last decade, there are several moments where it's tempting to call out to the stage and say: "yes OK, point made, we get it already."

Reviewed for musicOMH

Cock at the Royal Court

Let's step around that title for a moment for Mike Bartlett’s latest play is a far more interesting and rich thing than such a blunt, needlessly provocative moniker might indicate.

Cock is about identity, sexual and otherwise. John has been in a relationship with his boyfriend since he was in his early twenties; now he feels they have grown apart – or, rather, that he has grown and their relationship hasn’t really allowed for this fact.

After he breaks things off with his boyfriend he finds himself in an unusual and unexpected situation: he finds himself attracted to a woman. They have sex - an unplanned, sudden and awkward encounter - yet neither wants to let things end there. Though John has never been with a woman before they feel a powerful connection and believe what happened between them was more than a one-night liaison, they believe that potentially it could grow into something strong and lasting.

Though he has real feelings for this woman, John is still closely emotionally linked to his boyfriend; they were once in love and, while that has changed, the attraction between them remains strong – they are still bound together in many ways. John must make a choice between the two people vying for his affections. This is not something he finds easy; he is drawn to both of them, for different reasons, and in making a choice it is as if he is been asked to define himself, not just sexually, but on many levels. Who is he? What does he want out of life? Marriage, kids, trips to Paris and security in old age with her or a different but no less rewarding existence with him?

He is pulled from both sides and the more they pull, the more he vacillates; he is frozen, silenced and simply unable to make the choice that, it is made clear, will steer his life in one direction or the other. There is no middle option, a decision is called for and sexuality is only a part of the picture; John is being asked to decide the whole future path of his life. This all comes to a head (so to speak) in an excruciatingly uncomfortable dinner party scene when John invites the woman to his boyfriend’s house and a kind of tug of war ensues with John in the middle and the roast beef growing cold on the table.

As specified in the text, James Macdonald’s production is incredibly stripped down. There are no props, no costumes and no conventional set. Events play out on Miriam Buether's circular stage with the audience seated on raked wooden benches around the edges; this whole set up resembles an old-fashioned operating theatre, apt as emotional pain and physical intimacy are both central to the whole production. Macdonald pays particular attention to the distances between the characters. When John has his first sexual encounter with a woman, the pair remain fully clothed, standing apart and slowly circling one another, coming closer and closer together, as if dancing. Initially bringing to mind the non-sexual sex scene in Martin Sherman's Bent, it’s a moment that manages to be comic and erotic and potent all at the same time and allows this pivotal sexual experience to be viewed and dissected in a way that may not otherwise have been possible if the staging were more literal.

John, played by the wiry, if somewhat weak-voiced Ben Whishaw, is the only character to merit a name. The remaining characters are known only as M, W and F (Man, Woman and Father) and any mention of their names is scrupulously avoided. Yet the fact he has a name makes him no more solid as a character, if anything the opposite is true. At one point he remarks that he was proficient at imitating voices as a child and that sometimes he struggled to return to his own voice, to become himself again. The question of whom John is - this quest for self-definition on which the play hangs - is a self-eating one, for John seems to become less of himself, less than himself, as the play progresses.

The proximity of the audience to the performers and the precision of the staging provide a necessary emotional focus, a honing in, otherwise John’s dithering could well become insufferable – even as it is, his near disabling indecision does start to become frustrating, to the point that you want to physically shake him. It helps a great deal that Bartlett’s play is very funny and that he’s capable of seeing the comedy in the situation.

The performances also do a great deal to fill out the play, to add bulk and colour and humour to the words. Whishaw manages to be compelling in a role that requires him to be comparatively blank and, though she’s saddled with some speeches that don’t quite ring true, The IT Crowd’s Katherine Parkinson is superbly subtle and measured in her delivery; in the final dinner party scene it’s a delight to watch her attempts to keep a handle on her temper.

Good as they both are it is Andrew Scott, as John’s boyfriend, who really resonates. His character is charismatic and energetic yet conflicted in his feelings, prone to self pity and insecure enough to invite his dad to the pivotal dinner. He somehow manages to radiate affection for John as well as bafflement and revulsion at his behaviour and pain at the thought of losing him. He’s waspish and politely passively aggressive to John’s girlfriend, yet not completely hostile, and even appears to show a glimmer of sympathy for her predicament. It’s a nuanced performance that seems completely in sync with everything that Bartlett’s play is trying to - and, for the most part - does achieve.

Reviewed for musicOMH

The Author at the Royal Court

It is often tempting, when in the theatre, to end up watching the audience as well as the performers: at the start of the evening when the lights are still up, say, or maybe in the interval, or even – sometimes – during the play itself. They are, after all, part of the experience. Their sounds, their movements, their comments, their behaviour: it is impossible to block all that out, nor is it entirely desirable. They are sharing the moment with you. The communal aspect of the live performance is one of its joys.

In Tim Crouch’s new play, The Author, it is impossible not to watch the audience. The audience is the play; the play is the audience. Crouch likes to experiment with the idea of what theatre is and what it can be. His previous play, England, was written to be performed in an art gallery. His latest has been written to be performed in a theatre; but more specifically it has been written to be performed in the Royal Court’s upstairs space. Both plays invite their audiences to ‘look’ and to see things perhaps in a new way; both plays ask questions of their audience. The Author asks its audience permission to be: “Is it OK? Shall I continue?” (Or at least it gives the impression of asking, the question is never tested. No one says “no”).
The audience sit in two banks of seats that are facing each other. While the lights are still up someone begins talking, quietly at first, to those around him. Then he starts to address the entire room. He talks about his theatre-going habits and the pleasure he takes in going to the theatre, particularly to the Royal Court with all its “bummings and bombings.” He is one of us and yet he is not. The audience member is joined by other speakers, by the author, Tim Crouch (played by Tim Crouch), and by two actors, Vic and Esther who have starred in one of his plays.

The Author is like a series of sheets being pulled away, but being slowly, almost imperceptibly, withdrawn rather than simply whipped aside. At a certain point the audience begins to be aware that the play has ceased to be a dissection of the theatre-going experience and has become something else. It has become an exploration of how extreme and disturbing material can infiltrate the minds and lives of those who come in contact with it. It explores how the act of writing and staging something, of appropriating the stories of others, can infect people. The play that Crouch and the two actors describe is about conflict and abuse in an unnamed country, and it has left a residue.

Every so often the voices are interrupted and jaunty music will play, sitcom themes. During these moments it’s fascinating to see how quickly people reset themselves to this new situation and break out of the audience/performer relationship of silent observation. The audience start to chat among themselves and the music is accompanied by the building murmur of conversations. When the voices begin speaking again it is also fascinating to observe how people react to having the performers sitting amongst them. Some people attempt to follow the sound, their heads twisting around to spot the speaker, while others will stare forwards, content just to listen.

This element of - for want of a better term - interactivity, this breaking down of barriers, creates moments of humour and unease. When the curious theatre-goer (played by Adrian Howells) asks another audience member what he does for a living, the man answers “playwright”, a response which draws a large laugh. Later one woman seems far more interested in the box of Malteasers that is being offered around than in any exercise in theatrical experimentation and Howells is forced to politely but firmly ignore her in order to continue.

When another woman walks out in the early stages of the play, it raises the question of whether this is a planned part of the production or whether she has simply started to find all this heavily meta banter a bit tiresome. Her departure also sets a precedent: it establishes that, even in this particularly intimate atmosphere, walking out is permissible: it is an escape route one could take if one wished. But no one else did. The audience stayed in their seats for Crouch’s sometimes playful, sometimes daring and, yes, even sometimes tiresomely postmodern and self-referential experiment.

Reviewed for musicOMH

Tusk Tusk at the Royal Court

Polly Stenham’s new play Tusk Tusk feels very much like a companion piece or even a prequel to her debut, the acclaimed That Face.

It's near impossible to discuss Stenham without making reference to her youth, to the fact that That Face was written when she was 19 and, that when it transferred from the Royal Court to the Duke of York’s Theatre, she became the youngest woman ever to have a play staged in the West End.

The pressure to produce a second play of similar power must have been intense and she has chosen not to move away from the subject matter that gave birth to That Face but to mine it further, to dig deeper into the same ground.

Both plays deal with emotional neglect and the complexities of child-parent relationships, the crucial difference being that while the figure of the mother dominated the first play – as the vampiric centre of her son’s life – here the mother, though still a potent force in her children’s lives, is an absence rather than a presence.

Eliot, Maggie and their little brother Finn have been left alone. They have just moved in to a new London flat and their possessions are all still packed up in boxes. It quickly becomes clear that they have no idea where their mother is or when she will come back. They keep watching their phones, hoping she will call. Such vanishings are, we soon gather, not entirely unusual and, initially at least, they remain confident she will return. Their aloneness soon becomes a kind of game: they sleep through the day, they eat Chinese take out for breakfast and they use what little money they have to buy a strobe light. Their plight brings to mind the adult-less world of numerous children’s books, though with the added 21st century shadow of social services separating them if they find out about the situation; at one point Maggie even comments that their lives have become like a bad Enid Blyton novel.

Eliot, the oldest at fifteen, clearly needs to believe that their mother will return and that nothing is really amiss. Whenever fourteen year old Maggie attempts to talk of their mother’s pill-popping, her depressions, her unreliability, he bats her words aside. His tie to his mother is obviously a complex, mutually needy one; beneath the nonchalance he seems far more dependent on her than his sister. In this way the family dynamics – the doted-on boy child, the daughter pushed to the side – mirror those of That Face, though here there is no chance of the father arriving white knight style at the end to rescue them, as he’s dead, carried off by cancer when they were young. “Fucking cliché,” as Eliot says. The only adults that puncture this world are the intensely middle-class Katie and Roland, friends of the children’s mother – but they bring with them their own set of complications.

Stenham’s play feels, if anything, more sure of itself than That Face. Though her teenage characters converse with a level of eloquence that at times borders on the implausible, she creates a world in which it is possible to accept that. The sparring between the two older siblings is sometimes uneasily flirtatious, sometimes stubborn and silly; but beneath their volleys of “arrows tipped with wit” there are things that don’t quite sit right, little niggles. For one thing, if there mother has been this unstable and unreliable all their lives, it seems odd that they wouldn’t be better able to fend for themselves, practically as well as emotionally.

And then there’s Cassie, the girl Eliot briefly dallies with, who it is immediately apparent is from a less well off background then the main characters. Though quite thinly sketched in comparison, she is an interesting addition, a more grounded individual who has a job, who supports herself. We never learn what absences she has in her life. But, though one can see why Stenham included her, she feels like something of an interloper, both into the siblings’ self-circling world and within the play itself.

In the end the play survives by the performances of the young cast (all roughly the same ages as their characters). And the three siblings, who are rarely off stage, are pretty amazing. Toby Regbo, as Eliot, mixes adolescent bravado and self conscious coolness with something more desperate and dangerous. Bel Powley, as Maggie, seems older than her years yet also endearingly childish at times. Finn Bennett as seven year old Finn feels utterly at home on the stage.

Though the early scenes, when it seems the play will just consist of sibling bickering, cause alarm bells to ring, the play soon becomes something bigger, darker and more compelling. It does however definitely gain something from watching it with That Face relatively fresh in the memory.

Reviewed for musicOMH

A little link

More on Over There over here.

Over There at the Royal Court

The Royal Court’s Off the Wall season of plays about Germany continues with Mark Ravenhill’s unsettling Over There.

The play is a strongly allegorical piece about two brothers, identical twins, who grow up on separate sides of the Wall.

Though they live apart - Franz lives with his mother in the West while Karl has remained in the East his socialist father - they are still connected by the filaments of their twin-ness, they can feel each other’s pain, each other’s joy.

When the Wall falls the brothers are reunited and Karl comes to stay with Franz in what was the West.

He is initially excited by this prospect, by this opportunity to binge on things, but he also still clings to his Eastern way of thinking. He can’t marry the two, and a divide remains in his mind.
In a delicious piece of casting, the brothers are played by identical twins Luke and Harry Treadaway, with only a slight difference in hairstyle and different coloured underwear to mark them apart; so when they face each other on stage and joke about it being like looking in a mirror, it is indeed so.

Once they start living together, the relationship between the two brothers quickly starts to deteriorate. Karl finds his new life a struggle and starts to imitate his brother, to wear his (shiny, shiny) suits and to teach Franz’s young son Russian, to blur the line between himself and his twin. Ravenhill uses this device to convey the crisis of a country trying to create a new vision for itself, one of a united future, and the cultural and ideological divisions that remain even after the wall has been torn down.

Co-directed by Ravenhill and Ramin Grey, the production has a pared down aesthetic. Johannes Schutz’s set is a stark white box filled with further boxes: brands haphazardly stacked, a jumble of plastic condiment bottles and serial packets, all labelled with familiar names, the detritus of the West.

This spare way of presenting things extends to the performances, and to the very texture of the piece. The Treadaways, frequently speaking in unison, deliver their dialogue in an oddly detached fashion. That is not to say their delivery is empty of emotion, but what emotion there is feels intentionally askew. There is a flatness to their line readings, sentences end bluntly, rather than trailing off naturally, and when they speak in foreign languages – Franz in English or Karl in Russian – we hear a string of nonsense words instead. This manner of staging, playful, teasing and stripped of the unessential, is reminiscent of the Court’s recent productions of work by German playwright Marius von Mayenburg, The Ugly One and The Stone, which began the Off The Wall season.

As the play proceeds, this notion of things being ‘stripped down’ is taking to its logical conclusion and the final scenes see the two men utterly exposed, their skin smeared with food, with sauces and condiments, the contents of tubs and bottles and packets.

There is a pleasing absurdity to some earlier scenes. A yellow sponge stands in for Franz’s son (appropriate since he is not a character, not a person, but a thing, a pawn between them), while a bag of flour temporarily becomes their father’s ashes, and, in a brief prologue set in California, an American waitress is played by Luke in a blonde wig and heels. But this lightness of tone is replaced by something altogether more disquieting in the play’s later moments.

There is something quite repellent about the mess they make, writhing in gunk, skin sticky and slick: it speaks of all manner of fluids spilled and is, at times I found, difficult to watch (literally - I became acutely interested in my shoes at one point). As a metaphor it is not unsuccessful, for the brothers’ relationship is far from tidy, nor is the path of the reunited country free of debris – you can’t stitch a wound that deep overnight. “Your world can’t exist,” Franz tells Karl. “There’s only my world.” And, seeing this, Karl starts to sink, to lose his grip.

Both actors, onstage throughout, throw themselves into demanding roles, and there is an undeniable potency to proceedings. But in the end Ravenhill's approach is too heavy-handed and obvious, it hits its audience over the head, yells in their faces: West eats East. Point made. We get it.

Reviewed for musicOMH.

A double booking error meant that at one point it seemed as if I might have to watch the show sitting on Charles Spencer's lap - but fortuntaley an usher was able to find me a spare speat seconds before the play started.

Faces in the Crowd at the Royal Court

Good lord, this was intense...

I pretty much agree with Lyn Gardner on this one. The Royal Court’s upstairs theatre has been totally transformed for this production by designers Rae Smith and William Fricker with an entire one-bed flat set in a kind of pit around which the audience sit, watching from above. This makes the characters feel like animals in an enclosure. The staging though certainly memorable also had its problems in turns of sight-lines. I was sitting right above the 'bedroom' so struggled to see a lot of what went on there, despite the positioning of a large mirror on the opposite wall. On the other hand I got a, perhaps clearer than desirable, view of Con O'Neill's jiggling naked behind.

Leo Butler's play concerns Dave and Joanne. They were married – are still married – but he skipped town years ago, leaving both her and large pile of debt behind him. and headed to London. Now he lives in tiny but fashionably decked-out flat in Shoreditch. It’s little more than a shoebox but you can see the Gherkin from the window. Now she's journeyed down to see him, keen to take what she feels is owed to her - a baby, or at least the means to make one.

The play demands a lot from its performers, depicting both Dave and Joanne’s sexual fumbling and the violent fallout of their reunion. It’s draining to watch and is blessed with two utterly compelling and open performances from Con O’Neill, as Dave, and Amanda Drew, as Joanne. O’Neill superbly conveys Dave’s barely contained fury, his ability to flip, his volatility, and the way his Sheffield accent intensifies when he loses his cool. Drew is also startlingly good: her anger is better contained but she has the capacity to wound when necessary. But, good as they are there was something false and hollow about the whole set up. The big speeches about debt culture and social mobility felt a bit forced, striving too hard to be topical.

It was gripping though and in the seconds of darkness and quiet that followed the end of the play you could hear an audible collective release of tension. Butler also understands the importance of silence, the things that people do when they aren't talking (or insulting each other's gentalia).

This is a raw, powerful piece of theatre but the couple’s background, their journey to the place where we see them, doesn’t always ring true. But the sheer strength of the performances, the utter exposure required of them, is something not easily forgotten.

Relocated at the Royal Court

I don’t recall having a reaction to a production quite this strong in a while. I have tried to articulate what I found so unpalatable about Anthony Neilson’s current show at the Royal Court over on the Guardian's arts blog. I’m not wild about the headline, but then I did make use of the c-word (compassion), so I can hardly complain. It’s also worth mentioning that I hadn’t read Neilson’s response to Michael Billington’s one star review when I wrote it, as I filed my post the day before.

I do wonder if it’s an intellectual failing on my part that I let my emotional response to the play dominate. But then the fact that I had such a strong, near physical, reaction to the production is testament in a way to its success (on some levels at least). However I just couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something cheap and opportunistic about including such overt references to the Fritzl case – something Neilson was able to do given his particular habit of up-to-the-minute rewriting - though again I think this may say more about my oversensitivity; few people, bar Billington, appear to have found this as problematic as I did. It’s not that I felt it was distasteful (oh, OK, maybe I did a bit) but that it felt as if it had been included simply because it happened and he could.

Curiously, as anyone who has been stuck in a tipsy top-ten films type conversation with me will know, I rank Nic Roeg’s Don’t Look Know as one of my favourite films and am rather partial to a bit of J-horror, particularly Hideo Nakata's Dark Water. Relocated shares much with both these films, indeed part of me revelled in the way the production seemed able to tap into so many cinematic worlds while retaining its own sense of identity. But there was something at the heart of this production I found repellent and I couldn’t get past that. It crossed, or rather removed, some necessary line. It leaked into the real world like a girl with long dark hair crawling through a television screen.

Retail Fatigue

There was a queue snaking down the stairs. It wound from the entrance of the Royal Court's upstairs theatre, down past the bar (but not through the bar, sadly) and ended up somewhere near the foyer.

Eventually, after a fair bit of milling about, they let us in. Music was blaring as we made our way into the theatre and the ushers appeared to have taken on the role of stone-faced club doormen, making us wait then reluctantly waving us in. (I presume this was for scene-setting purposes, either that or the Royal Court needs to work on its staff's charm training).

Yet again the interior of the upstairs space has been completely transformed, this time to accurately resemble a discount sportswear store on Oxford Street. So we have lots of garish strip lighting and brightly coloured signage. And instead of sitting on proper seats, the audience are made to perch on little plastic white stools.

All this is in aid of the Court's production of Levi David Addai's Oxford Street, a brash, patchily amusing comedy set in, as you may have gathered, a discount sportswear store, a place where the young staff all dream of doing something better than earning six ponds something an hour dealing with disgruntled customers and humourless supervisors.

One, Kofi (affably played by Nathaniel Martello-White) – the moral centre of the play, a decent guy with a degree under his belt who is currently working as a security guard – has hopes of becoming a journalist; another, sales assistant Loraina, wants to be a singer; while another one is studying economics at uni. Alek, the Polish security guard, meanwhile just reads his Daily Mail – a nice touch that – and glares at them all, quietly despairing of their slack attitude to their jobs.

Now, I've done my time behind the till (all through university, at various shops and department stores, though being from Surrey I was selling silverware and jewellery rather than trainers) and Addai accurately captures that world and what it's like to be tied to a soul-sappingly tedious job when you know you are capable of more. But unfortunately his plot is thinner than a thin thing, a sub Do The Right Thing dilemma about some stolen stock. There's simply not enough there to hang a ninety minute play on. The dialogue compensates somewhat, a plausible blend of patois and slang and believable staff room banter, but the characters and relationships are in dire need of fleshing out. The play has a fair amount of surface charm with some flashes of interest underneath, but I suspect were the flashy, noisy manner of its staging stripped away, it would struggle to stand up on its own.

On The Face Of It

Whenever I suggest to my mother that she might like to accompany me to the theatre she always looks at me with a touch of anxiety in her eyes and asks: “how long is it?” It is only once she has been reassured that she can squeeze in a post-show drink and still be home in time for Newsnight, that she will then concede that, yes, she might quite like to come along.

This was the routine we went through when I mooted the idea of going to see Polly Stenham's That Face. And it was only once we'd established that it was a) less than ninety minutes long and b) that those minutes would not in any way feature Vanessa Redgrave talking about dead people (my mother was not overly enamoured with The Year Of Magical Thinking), that she tentatively agreed to the idea.

Written when she was just nineteen and originally staged in the Royal Court's 80-seat upstairs theatre, Stenham's play is about a supremely dyfunctional family. Actually dysfunctional doesn't come close to covering it. If there was a tick-list for how best to screw up your kids, every box would be filled in.

So we have a father who has run off to Hong Kong with a younger lover, leaving his former wife, Martha, to float around her bedroom in an increasingly grubby silk nightdress, swigging from a wine glass and indulging in disturbingly oedipal exchanges with her dutiful teenage son Henry. This boy is her world: she dotes on him, clings to him, calls him her 'little Russian soldier' and is fretful when he leaves her side. Her daughter Mia on the other hand, who is in trouble at her swish boarding school for dosing a classmate with Valium during a rather unpleasant initiation ritual, barely registers on Martha's radar.

Lindsay Duncan is as superb as everyone says as Martha, a woman blind to the fact that her behaviour is totally messing up her beloved son, while Matt Smith was also impressive as Henry. His was a difficult task, playing a character on the cusp of adulthood. The contrast between his taut toned physique and strange little-boy voice was striking and he even manages to pull off a scene where he has to have a complete emotional meltdown whilst wearing naught but a nightie and a string of pearls.

Though Stenham knows how to write scenes of emotional intensity, That Face is undoubtedly the work of a young person. Things frequently escalate to a hysterical pitch and the final scene is incredibly over the top. On more than one occasion it veered into Ab Fab territory, albeit with a more poignant edge, and if Joanna Lumley had floated in from the wings, hair bee-hived and ciggie in hand, it wouldn't have felt too out of place. The play did keep me gripped, despite the fact that I found these people – and their world of bitterness and privilege – so devoid of warmth, so unpleasant, that it was difficult to care overly about them. I know that's point: that Martha's extreme behaviour has left little room for normal human emotions, that damage begets damage, but I found the poisonousness of all concerned difficult to take. Again I suspect that is intended, but as a result I found the play easier to admire than enjoy.

That Face has been lauded in some corners perhaps more than is necessary, but it is still a taut, compelling piece of work. And my mother's verdict? "Not bad at all," which is actually pretty high praise by her standards.

Afterwards we headed for a nearby bar for the requisite post-play drink. Topics for discussion over said drink: Did Matt Smith have some sort of special wee-machine under his nightie or was he doing a Jane Horrocks? We presumed the former. Also, was the large, unkempt double bed that dominated Mike Britton’s set a visual reference to Tracey Emin’s bed? And were the increasing quantities of detritus, torn paper, clothes and whatnot, that Martha flung about the set a metaphor for the mess of the characters’ emotional landscapes? Or something. Maybe. Either way my mother, who abhors mess and who used to flinch in near physical pain if I so much as left a stray sock on the floor, was itching to get up there and have a good tidy. Lastly we both agreed that we were very, very glad indeed that neither of us had been to boarding school, as Stenham made it appear plausibly hellish.

The Unsettling City

There is a bus that takes me almost literally from my front door to the entrance of the Royal Court and there is something about this ease of arrival, this smooth transition – from sofa to stalls – that always puts me in an excellent mood: open, excited.

My most recent trip there was earlier this week to see Martin Crimp’s latest play The City, a strange and twisty thing indeed. The play begins with a scene in which a married couple discuss their respective days. The husband, Christopher, is anxious about the impending restructuring of the company for which he works, while the wife, Clair, describes an unusual encounter with a man at Waterloo Station, a writer with a young daughter, which resulted in her being given a diary as a present. A strong sense of tension underlines this entire exchange, as with every subsequent scene.

In the following scene, a woman, Jenny, a nurse you assume from the uniform, arrives at the couple’s house to complain about the noise their children make when playing. This has been preventing her from sleeping following her night shifts. She then tells them a lengthy story about her husband who is overseas, working as a doctor in a war in an unnamed country. Later a young girl appears – the couple’s daughter, you presume – also clad in a nurse’s uniform and the feeling of discomfort that has already been building grows even stronger. There is something about the casual exchange of smutty limericks between the Cumberbatch’s character and this child that makes you fear for this small, vulnerable person surrounded by all this unspoken aggression and anxiety.

This ninety minute play is a taut and finely crafted piece of writing where every detail, no matter how inconsequential it initially appears, carries weight. Katie Mitchell’s direction accentuates these qualities. Every nuance of speech and movement feels as if it has been carefully thought about. Disconnection is the dominant theme. Crimp’s characters seem to be permanently on the cusp of a volatile outburst and each carefully constructed scene is, as I’ve said, an exercise in tension.

An air of unreality is also apparent. The stories that the characters tell frequently fail to ring true: everything feels slightly askew. The reasons for this only become apparent at the end, when Crimp overturns what has gone before with what feels less like a revelation than a new layer seems the perfect conclusion, cementing the underlying sense of despair. The city of the title refers not only to a physical place but a place of the imagination. Clair works as a translator, dealing only with the words of others, her own attempts at creativity are lifeless, fractured – disconnected, her internal world barren

As Christopher and Clair, Benedict Cumberbatch and Hattie Morahan give excellent performances, ditto Amanda Hale as their timid, quivering neighbour. Cumberbatch in particular is proficient at giving an edge of menace to even seemingly mundane statements and all three of them speak with an intensity, a clarity that is oddly unnerving. This, as with everything else we are given, seems designed to unsettle, an effect enhanced by Vicki Mortimer’s stark, very white set and the babble of white noise that accompanies the scene changes.

The world Crimp presents us with, is anonymous yet also familiar - also very sinister. Not a place to linger long: unspecified unpleasantness lurks beneath the surface, constantly threatening to bubble up. Some parts didn’t quite click, when Cumberbatch came out in a supermarket butchers garb, it was a predictable joke, but I enjoyed the games that were being played, the knottiness of it.

On the way home, my bus took longer than unsual, going on an unexplained diversion and meandering all round the house. I didn’t realise why until I read about the shooting in Markham Square the next day, somehow this seemed disturbingly apt.