Starlore for Beginners, Theatre 503

“To life, to life, l’chaim.” Robert stands baffled on his kitchen chair belting out lyrics from Fiddler on the Roof. He’s not a singer. Not even in the shower. This newfound musicality, his girlfriend suspects, is the result of something else: the dislocated soul of her late husband, a dybbuk, intent on making an involuntary Topol of her current boyfriend.

The supernatural laces its way through Samantha Ellis’ writing. This quarter of shorts also proves her point – discussed at greater length here – that the short play can also “be huge and voluptuous and intellectually rangy, at the same time as being lean and punchy, taut and fleet.” All together the four run to just three quarters of an hour and yet there’s an awful lot going on within these tiny plays: grief, love, and life – complex knotty ideas about identity and a dash of the uncanny. These supernatural undercurrents are most explicit in Unfinished, in which a couple have to deal with the returning presence of her dead spouse. The play manages to speak about what it is to begin to live romantically again after the loss of a husband while having a bit of dark strange fun with the idea of Jewish possession (it could have been worse, it could have been Yentl).

These plays while short are never slight; the way in which Ellis deploys detail is both elegant and effective, world building with a small nod here and a half-line there, trusting the audience to meet her in the middle. There’s a lot of humour in the writing as well as a vast amount of charm. The last of the four, the title play – about a woman with epilepsy slowly allowing herself to be loved, letting her walls drop and letting her new partner get emotionally closer to her – is given an extra layer of loveliness by the fact that the two characters are working backstage on a production of Mutiny! the musical.

Noura is the most grounded of the quartet, no witches, no spirits, but it too manages to unpack something complicated and intricate. Taking the form of a dialogue between a young half-Iraqi girl and her belly-dancing instructor, the play explores what it was to be from a place and how much of our identity comes from a sense of belonging, and how much of it we construct. It’s beautifully handled by Olivia Sweeney and Lydia King, the emotional terrain, the nature of their relationship, shifting several times over a brief span of time.

The opening play, Cat in a Sieve, demonstrates that the form is not limiting in terms of setting and scope, set in the reign of James, pitting the King against a ragged girl accused of witchcraft.

Ellis has a great sense of structure and shape and none of the plays hang around any longer than they need to in order to make their mark, to say their piece. While watching a series of shorts instead of a full length plays does require a small recalibration – and perhaps more could have been done with the transition between the pieces, to thread them together – this is a rich and ranging experience, more satisfying than many things double the length.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Many Moons at Theatre 503

There are many things to admire about Alice Birch’s startling debut. It’s an assured piece of writing, a gripping exercise in the control and release of information in which she demonstrates a superb understanding of just what to give away, when to give it away, and what to hold back.

Set over a hot July day in Stoke Newington, it tells the story of four people via four interlinking monologues. These characters are initially familiar types. Ollie has just dropped out of his PhD, he highly intelligent, obsessed with the cosmos, but exceptionally socially uneasy to the point where you suspect he might be on the lower end of the autistic spectrum. Meg is pregnant and suffering from an unspecified malaise, she knows the price of every expensive kitchen gadget but has never felt real love. Juniper is incessantly perky, an eternal optimistic; she’s ‘actively’ looking for love, but hints at an inner sadness. Robert is by some way the oldest of the four, a dignified soft-spoken man caring for a wife who is slowly being lost to Parkinson’s.

Birch switches between these characters and their voices, their stories. From the beginning she sets up particular expectation which she gradually and subtly undercuts and plays with. Meg’s anaesthetised life of jam-making and Debussy is shadowed by something black; she spends her time online, clicking on hate-filled sites – she has four separate Facebook profiles. Juniper, who wears butterfly pins in her hair and describes her personality as ‘cartwheely’ has no-one to celebrate her birthday with. The nurse who looks after Robert’s wife refuses to speak to him, which sets one wondering about the particular nature of the support circle he talks about, while Ollie’s endearing nerviness around women and matters of a sexual nature hides the darkest truth of all.

Birch’s writing is poetic and rich with imagery so when she slides in an unsettling detail, which she does often, it’s doubly shocking. The performances are all of a comparable standard, relishing the power of the writing. Esther Hall captures Meg’s emotional flatness; she convinces as a comfortably off thirty-something mother-to-be yet there’s an overwhelming sense of absence to her performance – she’s both there and not there. Edward Franklin is sweet and open as Ollie which makes Birch’s revelations about his character all the more troubling. Jonathan Newth deftly captures the ambiguity of his character; he gains the audience’s sympathy and never entirely loses it even when his past comes into focus. Esther Smith, as Juniper, has the most winning role and she is quite heart-breaking in it: hopeful, kind, a little ditzy, yet conveying kind of delicate desperation underneath.

Director Derek Bond moves the characters around the stage from time to time, but otherwise the piece is quite static; he trusts the writing to do the work and it does. Where he excels is in the building of tension; this is superbly handled. The play grabs hold of you and doesn’t let go until the end and the audience’s final awkward expelling of breath. James Perkins set is stylised and elegant with two chairs and a sculptural metal sphere at its centre, the curve of the stage floor suitably askew.

Once Birch plays her hand and it becomes clearer who her characters are and what they have done, the piece is a little diminished – but only a little. There is a sense of having been here before (in this same space in fact with Stephen Brown’s Future Me) and the internet is depicted as a place, not of community but of contamination, in a way that while persuasive is ultimately overstated. The play works best as a portrait of social disconnect and of the loneliness one can feel in a city full of people; it’s a confident and exciting piece of writing, and as a debut, as a marker of things to come, it’s one to remember.

Reviewed for Exeunt

The Biting Point at Theatre 503

In a time of protest and unrest, Sharon Clark’s new play, The Biting Point, looks back to the early 1980s, to a time when riots scorched the streets of Southall and Brixton.


The play tells the stories of three characters, a police officer, an angry young man and an ANL supporter, in the days running up to a big march. Clark takes time and care in fleshing out their back-stories and in showing their motivations to be complex, messy and human. Yet even though there’s something slightly too forced and obvious about this desire to show that things are never clear cut as you think and that everyone has their reasons for behaving as they do, Clark goes about it in an intriguing way.
The march itself acts as a catalyst for the out-spilling of suppressed emotions. In many ways this is not a play about the riots at all, they’re simply a means of – violently – bringing these people together.

Malcolm is a hardworking young man who spends much of his spare time looking after his sister who has learning difficulties. He’s kind and patient, a dedicated carer, but it takes all his energy to remain so. He wants more and is beginning to grasp quite how much his sister is holding him back. Things come to a head when he invites a girl he’s attracted to back to their house.

Dennis is a teacher who’s involved in a relationship with one of his students, Anna. He despises himself but he’s weak and she knows it; Anna takes pleasure in exploiting the evident power she has over him. Ruth completes this narrative triangle. She speaks in a succession of oddly charged monologues, ever wary, her body tensing when a hand knocks at the door.

Charlie Holloway gives a an admirably slow-burning performance as Malcolm, a man accustomed to ignoring his own needs and wants, and swallowing his rage until it threatens to choke him. (It is more than fitting that his sister has an obsession with volcanoes and earthquakes). He’s been abandoned by his parents, left to fend for himself, and Clark paints a convincing picture of someone who might find solace and support in an extremist group. Gyuri Sarossy‘s Dennis is revealed to be quite reprehensible in some ways but he retains a degree of charisma throughout. Lizzie Roper’s Ruth stands apart from the other characters. Hers is an intense performance but the character’s instability never quite convinces.

Dan Coleman’s production is measured and restrained and benefits from Mark Friend’s aptly jagged, Futurist set. It’s testament to Coleman’s skill that the production’s most gripping moment is when Malcolm calmly destroys something very precious of his sister’s. Interestingly, when the three stories finally collide, in a suburban back garden with the roar of the crowd and the angry crunch of boots on tarmac growing louder around them, the tension dissipates somewhat. The conclusion lacks the punch of what has gone before.

Clark is rather too deliberate in the way she plays with audience expectations. She holds off assigning ‘sides’ to her characters until near the end – when they all don their various ‘uniforms’ before heading into the fray – but there’s something cautious about her approach, her careful muddying of the moral waters, that means her play is not as hard hitting as it might have been.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Coalition at Theatre 503 (Yellow Programme)

The gulf between concept and excution can sometimes be a wide one. For Theatre 503’s Coalition season, ten playwrights have been paired with ten artists: musicians, illustrators, choreographers and, in one case, a puppeteer, to create ten short pieces intended as a response to the incoming government. The resulting pieces have been split into two programmes (labelled, for obvious reasons, ‘yellow’ and ‘blue’). I saw the yellow programme therby missing Gordon Brown’s whistle-stop visit to the Battersea theatre to catch his speech writer Kirsty McNeill’s Dexterity, part of the blue programme.

Perhaps inevitably given the format the quality varied - some of the pieces felt bitty and repetitious while others were more intriguing and better developed. Two of them, the vaguely Orwellian We Are Where We Are by Telegraphtheatre critic Dominic Cavendish and comedy troupe Clever Peter and Shotgun Civil Partnership in the Rose Garden by Lola Stephenson and supplemented by songs from cabaret duo Bourgeois and Maurice, felt more like skits than short plays; though enthusiastically performed they were both drawn out beyond their natural end point. In the former a benefits claimant is interoggated by two suited men (one yellow-tied, the other blue-tied) who are keen to reclassify him; it ends in a darkly absurdist place but takes a long while to get there. In the latter piece a gardner forms an uneasy alliance with the shotgun-wielding man who wants to rob his wealthy employer. Their plotting was repeatedly interrupted by the woman in question, clad in evening dress and feather boa, but while her musical interjections are initially amusing, they reap diminishing returns. Both pieces felt blunt in tone and heavy-handed in execution. More interesting was Of the Willing, the collaboration between Rex Obano (whose promising play Slaves was staged at Theatre 503 earlier this year) and choreographer Mina Aidoo. This felt more like more thought had been put into the idea of artistic cooperation and better demonstatred the creative potential of such collisions. The resulting dance piece was set in part to a twitter feed concerning tuition fees and voiced in a robotic monologue, the dancers combining juvenile arse waggling with frustrated writhing. It was more eloquent while using less words. The last two plays on the bill were more satisfyingly rounded. Ben Ockrent’s funny and poignant Bedrooms, Dens and other Forms of Magic, the least overtly political playlet, is a tale of two teenagers: Tilly is cocky and rebellious and Neil is nervy and easy to overlook. Susie Hogarth’s illustrations are charming if not as fully integrated into the piece as they could be. Ockrent manages to shape the characters and their relationship - they were friends as younger children but have drifted apart –and say something about the way ones ideals and allegiances shift as one gets older. The most striking piece of the night was Ella Hickson’s PMQ, which cut to the quick, envisioning David Cameron (a diginified Richard Lintern), preparing himself for his first Prime Minister’s Questions, his confidence repeatedly undercut by a guitar-toting Gwendolen Chatfield, singing the lyrics to Mumford and Sons' Little Lion Man while impishly informing him he has a stain on his trousers and reminding him that some questions are unanswerable. It’s a direct piece, simultaneously brazen yet compassionate, which brushes aside the sniping and swiping to examine Cameron as a man, ambitious, self-assured yet fallible, human - a man who has lost things. Hickson, as her plays Hot Mess and Precious Little Talent, showed is an exciting writer, keen to stretch herself to knew places and in this short piece she does just that, bucking against the black and white, creating something shaded. Reviewed for musicOMH

The Charming Man at Theatre 503

Gabriel Bisset-Smith’s new play asks a pertinent question - is it possible to retain one’s integrity within the grip of the political machine? The resulting answer gets lost in a production that, while ambitious in scope, is also problematically muddled and unconvincing.

The main character, Darren, is a youth centre worker who, following an impassioned outburst at a local political meeting, rather improbably becomes the Green Party’s candidate for Number 10. Darren’s lack of political nous, his outsider status, is deemed an asset, but he’s also black and gay and the combination of both these factors works against him in the polls. If he’s to going have a real shot at the top he’ll have to fundamentally change who he is.

The tone of Bisset-Smith’s writing varies wildly, from the broad comedy of Lib Dems on Ice to something much more serious and contemplative: the erosion of Darren’s principles as he succumbs to the continued pressure to make compromises. But the play all too often seems to equate satire with extremes of character and of situation. So among its sizeable roster of characters, it incorporates a South African conspiracy theorist millionaire, the shadowy money man behind the Green Party, who explains that Obama’s election was down to a decade long project involving the oeuvre of Morgan Freeman and the insertion of a black president into the TV show 24. There’s also a hard-line right wing radio shock jock on whose show Darren volunteers to make an appearance. It’s possible to see what Bisset-Smith was aiming for in these scenes but too often the results feel naive rather than amusingly exaggerated or absurd.

Satire, of this particular stripe at least, needs to at least feel like it has a basis in something real or something the audience recognises as real, and Bisset-Smith’s play never really achieves this. The political side of things, the main thrust of the play, feels awkward and poorly thought through in a way that undermines the more successful elements. A number of the topical gags are properly funny, there are some interesting narrative slivers buried in the overstuffed script and the scenes between Darren and his boyfriend Luke feel plausibly intimate and genuinely warm, but the political material swerves all over the place and some of the scenarios really stretch credulity to snapping point, tipping from satire into silliness. Libby Watson’s sticky-backed plastic set doesn’t help matters; cheap and shiny, more Blue Peter than corridors of power, it further undermines the text.

The concept of even the most good-hearted and well-intentioned of men being broken down by a system that places only superficial emphasis on those attributes is a potent one, but Paul Robinson’s production only ever skates around this theme and doesn’t quite find a way of making it work.

The cast do well to ground the play and David Verrey in particular gives a well-judged and amusing turn as pompous politico Marcus, who jumps ship from the Greens when Darren is appointed, while Syrus Lowe is suitably charming yet understated in the main role, as the decent young man forced into the spotlight.

An extended version of a review that appeared in The Stage

The Mountaintop at Theatre 503

The posters for James Dacre’s production of Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop at Theatre 503 make explicit the link between the present and the past: for they are of the face of Martin Luther King Jr. depicted in the familiar campaign colours of Barack Obama.

Hall’s play is set in the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. It is 3rd April 1968 - the last night of Dr King’s life. He has just delivered his "I’ve been to the mountaintop" speech at the Mason Temple, he is tired and his throat is hoarse from talking. Outside, the rain lashes against the motel window. He sends his aide out for a packet of Pall Mall cigarettes and settles down to work on another speech.

A maid brings him a cup of room service coffee. She is new; this is her first day and she is elated to have been sent to see Preacher King. She is further delighted when he cadges a cigarette. They talk about his work, his world, the road he has chosen. She is of a more militant leaning and questions the necessity of his commitment to peaceful protest; “fuck the white man,” she bellows, when challenged to display her oratorical skills. King finds this shocking but also funny. He is also not immune to her physical charms, for she is, as she tells him, so pretty that “even my uncle couldn’t resist.”

Hall’s play is compelling and energetic, at least to begin with. She successfully re-makes a man of this iconic figure through his chance casual encounter with a charismatic chamber maid. But then the play takes a sudden swerve – the rules are changed. Without revealing too much of this unexpected twist, it is enough to say that King is made aware of the imminence of his death. He comes to know that this is his last night on earth and accepts this information almost unquestioningly.

While he accepts it, he does still try and escape his fate: he still has a lot of work to do; he is nowhere near finished. He needs more time. But he can do nothing to change what is to come. All he can do is take solace in the fact that his work will continue after his death and that some of his dreams will, eventually, come to pass; and that in four decades time, the American landscape will have changed to the point where it is possible for Obama to be elected President.

Hall’s play is an attempt to examine both King’s legacy and the man himself; to make the audience see him as just that: a man. And she achieves this, to a degree. King is holed up in a scruffy motel, checking the furniture for bugs (of the surveillance variety – though given the grim brown and orange-dominated décor of Libby Watson’s set, he would also be wise to be wary of the real thing), his feet are ripe from marching and he has neglected to pack a toothbrush. His flirtatious interactions with Camae the maid, a rare moment of relaxation, go further to making him human, flawed. He loves his wife, his family, but he has been known to stray.

But then there comes this strange, forced, supernatural twist (one that owes a hefty debt to Kevin Smith’s Dogma) and Dacre’s production immediately loses focus. Its grip on its audience slackens and it becomes a much limper thing. It begins as a play with much power and charm but becomes something else altogether, something awkward and even rather silly in places.

David Harewood is quite excellent as King. His performance combines the stirring voice of the born orator with more human worries and frailties. But despite his best efforts and the snappy rapport that builds between him and Lorraine Borroughs’ Camae, the play sabotages itself and that initial potency is lost, returning only for a few brief flickering seconds in the final montage

Reviewed for musicOMH.

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 Lucky Escape

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

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

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

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

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

An Over-Familiar Song

I am very fond of Theatre 503. I may have mentioned this before. The standard of work they put on is consistently high and, just within the last year, I’ve seen some startlingly good stuff there: George Gotts’ Cocoa, Stephen Brown’s Future Me and Jason Hall’s GBS. Having said that, I have been rather pathetic in getting over there of late and, much to my shame, missed Ben Ellis’ The Final Shot entirely. I was back there last night though, this time to see John Donnelley’s Songs Of Grace and Redemption

The play focuses on a number of characters whose lives intersect: an Icelandic bartender with a violent ex. A none-too-bright thug for hire with a learning disabled sister. A social worker in an unhappy relationship. A chap whose wife has just left him for his own father. It has its fair share of nicely comic moments, some very funny indeed (I certainly will find it difficult not to snigger next time I hear the word ‘crumble’) but often it felt quite heavily derivative – especially in a scene where one character tries to coerce another into shooting him - I felt I had seen near-identical confrontations before.

Despite some good performances, the coincidence-driven narrative really struggled to take shape on stage, I thought. It felt forced and ungainly. Lyn Gardner said it felt like “a pilot for a Channel 4 series” but actually, what I was reminded of again and again, was the wave of low-budget indie cinema that bubbled up in the mid 1990s, films that can be loosely grouped under the banner ‘starring Steve Buscemi’. Night On Earth, Living In Oblivion or Richard Linklater’s Slacker. Something of that ilk. Indeed I heard someone mention Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes in the bar afterwards so this impression wasn’t mine alone.

I’m sure someone, quite probably someone called Andrew, could weigh in with some lengthy thoughts about theatre that - at least appears to - take its primary creative cues from other media. I just know, in terms of this play, that while my attention was held throughout, I was aware of a creeping need for something more solid, for these characters to be linked together in a more organic fashion and for their stories to lead somewhere a little more unexpected. I think Donnelly has real ability as a writer, but I was just too aware of the mechanics of the writing – and, when one of the characters died, my first thought was “well, I figured one of them wouldn’t make it to the end” which is not what I want to be thinking or feeling at such a juncture. It was however the first play I’ve seen that used Facebook as a narrative device, which I found genuinely interesting.

Not In Edinburgh

I am not in Edinburgh. And am suffering from a fairly strong dose of Edinburgh envy as a result, made worse every time I pick up a newspaper and flick through the arts section. Plus all the twiddly business of moving house has rather impacted on the time I have to spare doing anything that doesn’t involve packing my worldly goods into cardboard boxes.

However yesterday I allowed myself a brief window of escape from bubble wrap and packing tape for the new show at Theatre 503. Called Yoga Bitch, it consists of one woman’s account of a her experiences on a two month yoga retreat in Bali, and as such is so very Edinburgh-fringey sounding that I had to have a look.

And it did tick a large number of boxes on the dreaded One-Woman Show checklist so amusingly skewered by Festival, Annie Griffin’s underrated and hilarious comedy about the Edinburgh festival – stuffy above-a-pub venue; a set consisting of little more than a yoga mat, a bamboo screen and a plant; a monologue about self-discovery, getting to like your true self and, er, that kind of stuff; and, of course, one (American) woman performing the thing.

And yet, Suzanne Morrison, the One Woman in question, has an easy, warm presence as a performer, she knows how to hold an audience and for all her cynicism about her Indonesian experience, for all her anecdotes about Bali belly, wee-drinking, scented candles and Gucci yoga mats, she’s never cruel in her comedy. Better than I thought it would be is, admittedly not much of an endorsement, but well, it was better than I thought it would be.

Oh, and for a look at One Woman Shows of a rather different kind, Helen Smith’s blog is worth popping over to.

Fringe Things

I have written about Theatre 503 before. This studio space above the Latchmere pub in Battersea is one of my favorite fringe venues – and not just because it’s a ten minute bus journey from my front door.

At the moment they’re showing a play called Future Me by Stephen Brown. To steal a term from the press blurb, the play is about ‘ordinary monsters,’ men who do unspeakable things. The main character, Peter, is a young barrister with a promising career ahead of him and a loving girlfriend who he's about to move in with. So, clearly, the laws of drama dictate that his life is about to fall spectacularly apart. This happens by way of an email – he accidentally forwards an attachment to his entire address book that includes a pornographic photograph. Child pornography to be precise.

The play then goes on a journey that covers a number of years. Peter goes to prison where he is kept in a separate unit (his crimes, it seems, went to more than just pornography, he touched as well as looked), he attends group therapy sessions, is released and has to adjust to life on the outside once more. The play also concentrates on the impact Peter's crime has on the people around him. Though initially horrified, his girlfriend Jenny deals with things in a very level-headed fashion, unable to fully relate the man she loved with the man in prison for child molestation.

Stephen Brown’s play is commendable on many levels; it has a detached but not overly clinical tone, and for the most part manages to maintain the difficult balance between the intellectual and emotional. It allows us to question whether some crimes are too horrific to forgive, and whether forgiveness, acceptance, is even desirable. It’s very well written, often very incisive and entertaining, though not without flaws, some of them quite fundamental. The crucial scene where Jenny interviews Peter, ostensibly for a feature she's writing, and Brown takes the opportunity to remind both her and the audience of just exactly what Peter did, should leave you shocked. By hitting home the contrast between Peter’s articulate, sensitive demeanour and the truth of what's he capable of doing, has done in fact – well, it should leave you as bruised and betrayed as Jenny feels, but it doesn’t quite manage it. You never fully get under Peter’s skin as a character.

Two and half hours is a long time to spend in a (very) stuffy studio above a pub on a summer evening, but this is an intelligent, thought-provoking and often unsettling piece of theatre and more than worth it. Good performances too, especially from David Sturzaker as the unnervingly calm and articulate Peter, though he appears to have stolen Simon Amstell’s voice, which was a tad disconcerting.

Of Ships And Soldiers

Haven’t had a chance to post for a bit, work’s been, shall we say ‘intense,’ and this weekend I was down in the New Forest for my friend Caroline’s hen party. We hired out a big converted barn, which had been decorated by her bridesmaids to resemble the pinkest thing I’ve ever seen - with added glitter and marshmallows - and spent the best part of the weekend eating and drinking (pink champagne, of course). It was pretty chilled as these things go – especially considering the state her husband-to-be got himself into on the stag do. (All you need to know is that he spent the night in King's Cross, but the remnants of his dinner remained somewhere in Soho).

Theatre-wise, I saw The Soldier’s Fortune at the Young Vic last week. David Lan’s production of Thomas Otway’s play is the second Restoration comedy I’ve seen in recent weeks after The Man Of Mode at the National. They’ve played around with the layout in the Young Vic’s main space, installing a sprawling multi-levelled stage and a grand proscenium arch complete with red velvet curtains. At first glance it all looked fantastic and Sam LondonTown, who I ran into in the lobby, was very excited about the prospect of a bit of “meta-theatre,” however when these curtains were pulled back there was nothing behind them, just the bare back wall of the theatre and yet more steps. And this, unfortunately, sums up the production for me. Great cast – Anne Marie Duff, David Bamber, Oliver Ford Davies (who I loved as Larkin at the Orange Tree) – but something vital was missing. Primarily, the bit where you find yourself laughing at the jokes. There were some mildly amusing moments, sure, but nowhere near enough to sustain a three hour production.

Better by far was the new show at Theatre 503, Andrew Bovell’s Ship Of Fools. The space at the Latchmere has also been seriously rejigged, the familiar raked bench seating gone and the theatre decorated to resemble the deck of ship with seats for the audience spread around the edges. Definitely one of the most inventive bits of fringe theatre design I’ve seen in a while. The play itself is an interesting one. It starts in 15th century Basel, where a group of town elders decide to banish all the 'fools' and other undesirables from their city by consigning them down river in a boat without oars or sails. In a parallel narrative, a group of job seekers - including a bitter refugee from the former Yugoslavia, the young girlfriend of a junkie, and a woman desperate to flee her deadbeat husband - are sent away together on a new government initiative. Bovell’s point, I guess is that society still deals poorly with its outcasts, with those who don’t fit in. And the play is gripping and atmospheric even if it rather falls apart towards the end as it tries to knit the two narrative strands together.