Precious Little Talent at Trafalgar Studios

Ella Hickson’s second play has been considerably reworked since it first appeared at the Bedlam Theatre at the 2009 Edinburgh Fringe. The premise remains the same but certain scenes have been strengthened and lengthened since that first showing, certain points clarified.

Hickson’s three-hander begins on a New York rooftop on Christmas Eve. This is where Sam, nineteen and bursting with adolescent chutzpah, first meets Joey, the English girl in New York, flight-frazzled and fidgety in a new city. One thing leads to another and they end up dashing through the New York night, wrapped in each other’s arms beneath the chandeliers of Grand Central Station. These opening moments, with their faintly unreal, US indie movie quality - Linklater-lite - are revisited later in the play and amusingly undermined.

Joey, it transpires, is in New York to visit the father she hasn’t seen in more than two years. Having recently lost her job and feeling increasingly uncomfortable at home following her mother’s remarriage, she is trying to build bridges. George, her father, a retired academic, has allowed the ties between them to slacken because he wants to shield her from his own mental and physical unravelling.

Joey is yet to discover this; she also initially does not realise that Sam, the boy with whom she shared her rooftop liaison, is also her father’s carer. The play turns its attention on the relationships between these three people who are so intimately connected – father and daughter; patient and carer – and yet distanced from one another, emotionally, culturally.

The character of Sam has benefited most from the reworking of the play. He retains his blithe American optimism and his certainty about how the world works, but there are greater hints at the things that drive him and these are drawn out by Anthony Walsh’s confident performance in the role. Ian Gelder also gives a measured and moving performance as George, a man all too aware of his own deterioration; his life has been one of the mind and now he is losing his hold on himself and the things he loves.

Joey is, oddly, the weakest point of the triangle. Her own struggle to gain a sense of her place in the world has lost some of its freshness; the play, on first viewing, gave a strong sense of what it meant to become an adult just as the rules about what exactly that means – in terms of career and security, in terms of the future – seem to be shifting dramatically. Yet this seems to have been diluted a little in the re-writes (or maybe it’s just that I have grown a little older, lived a little more). Sam’s kind manner and puppyish enthusiasm now seem to jar more with Joey’s capacity for child-like outbursts. Though the character of Joey as written gives a good account of what it is to be perched between adolescence and adulthood, Olivia Hallinan’s performance veers more towards the former. While her brittleness occasionally comes across as brattish, there is a measure of poignancy in her sudden need for her father’s reassurance, in her wish to recreate a proper English Christmas, just like the Christmases of her childhood. As a generational mouthpiece she’s on shaky ground but the character succeeds as a portrait of a confused, if rather self-involved, girl who suddenly feels at sea in the world and misses her dad.

With a longer running time, this reworking of the play is able to better flesh out all three relationships and allows for a more playful, plausible sense of attraction between Joey and Sam. The relationship between George and Joey, volatile but fuelled by love, is also elegantly portrayed in James Dacre’s new production and George’s monologue, in which he acknowledges all he stands to lose, is particularly moving (aided by Hickson’s sense of the poetic). That said, the culture clash humour can feel overplayed at times, an easy recourse rather than a source of real insight, and the final coda strikes a rather hollow note. The sheen of Washington D.C. on inauguration day and the way it feeds Joey’s need to belong to a moment, to be part of a movement, to just connect with something, all seems a trifle too neat a way to end a play that is otherwise brighter and sharper than that.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Interview: Ella Hickson

A quick link to my interview with Ella Hickson for Exeunt. Her first full length play, Precious Little Talent, which I saw and loved in Edinburgh in 2009, is transferring to the Trafalgar Studios this week in a new production directed by James Dacre.

Ordinary Days at the Trafalgar Studios

As one of the characters in Adam Gwon’s Ordinary Days points out, her Manhattan is not a Gershwin Manhattan. And yet the soundtrack of her city is not entirely unfamiliar either; it’s literate and witty and inward-looking, full of lyrics about Virginia Woolf, the pairing of red wine with fish and the labyrinthine floor-plan of the Met Museum. It’s well-read and tinged with angst, full of echoes of Jason Robert Brown, Jonathan Larson and Michael John LaChiusa. But while there’s a strong sense of having visited this place before, its characters are recognisable in a good way and it contains a decided emotional charge, balancing out cynicism with sentiment - though at times veering too much towards the latter.

Ordinary Days is a song cycle made up of two New York stories that touch each other without intersecting. Claire and Jason (played by Julia Atherton and Daniel Boys ) are a young couple who finally decide to take the plunge and move in together, but instead of drawing them closer together, this only accentuates the distance between them. Deb is a grad student who’s been so busy running away from the cul-de-sac she grew up on that she’s lost sight of what’s she’s running towards. When her lost thesis notes find their way into the hands of artist’s assistant, Warren, he views the event as kismet, a fated moment, while she just wants the damn things back so she can appease her professor.

The closer Jason tries to get to Claire the more she withdraws. Atherton and Boys have a crabby chemistry which they milk on their duets, particularly during the snippy passive-aggressive back and forth of ‘Fine’. And Atherton demonstrates just how skilled a performer she is when tackling the show’s big emotional number, I’ll Be Here; this is a song that could so easily have come across as mawkish, as manipulative, and yet in her hands it’s delicate and devastating, a genuinely moving moment.

Alexia Khadime, as Deb, and Lee William-Davis, as Warren have slightly less to play with. Khadime’s sweetly soaring voice stands in marked contrast with her character’s fractious personality and she’s gifted with – and revels in – the funniest lines; William-Davis is also endearing though he doesn’t quite nail the needy geekiness of Warren.

Sometimes the writing becomes bogged down with cliché –there’s a riff about overly complicated coffee ordering which feels tired out before it's finished – but director Adam Lenson keeps things light. He knows how to play up the musical’s qualities, having staged it at the Finborough Theatre in 2008 prior to this re-staging in the similarly sized, Trafalgar Studio 2. Indeed space is something of an issue here. While the studio allows for a superb degree of intimacy (with both the performers and with the audience - you could hear each teary sniffle as the show hit its emotional crescendo), it’s also constrictive. With the musicians on stage, the limited floor space is limited further and the performers have little room for manoeuvre, especially when entering and exiting.   The final visual flourish, the moment that unites the two stories, also loses some of its power as a result – if ever a scene needed a higher ceiling, it’s this one.

Alistair Turner’s set is a collection of slightly scuffed white cubes, a basic reproduction of the New York skyline which also double as a set of shelves onto which objects can be placed; this twinning is particularly apt as this is a musical much concerned with our personal debris, the things we hold on to and the things we choose to let go. 

Reviewed for Exeunt

Novecento at Trafalgar Studios

The complex intertwining of music and myth inherent in the lives of so many famous jazz musicians of the past forms the heart of this second in the Donmar Warehouse’s season of plays of at the Trafalgar Studios, a monologue by Alessandro Baricco, Italian author of the fable-like Silk.

The prodigiously named Danny Boodmann T D Lemon Novecento was abandoned as a baby, left in a lemon crate aboard a transatlantic ocean liner. Named (in part) for the new century into which he was born, the foundling grows up on board the ship and never sets foot upon land. For him the ocean is home, bordered by docks and ports, while land is limitless and terrifying, land is the there-be-monsters place of nightmares.

Though he never receives a lesson, Novecento turns out to be a supremely gifted pianist, entertaining the passengers in steerage with his hypnotic music. He becomes the stuff of legend, as both an ocean-bound eccentric and a God-given jazz innovator; talk spreads far and wide about his music and people even travel in third class for the sole purpose of hearing him play.

Novecento’s story is narrated by his friend, the trumpeter Tim Tooney. His delivery is feverish and hip flask-fuelled as he relives the years they spent at sea together. Mark Bonnar’s performance is energetic and animated, sweaty and intense, and conveys a strong sense that this is a tale that has grown as it’s been retold (and retold and retold). There’s a loose-collared, bar room vibe to his narration that doesn’t detract from the magic but does underline it with doubt. The love for his friend and the hold that the past has on him have coloured his story and allowed it to fly.

This storytelling reaches its peak as Tooney describes a jazz duel between Novecento and the incredulous and over-confident Jelly Roll Morton, self-styled sire of jazz, with the two pianists trading increasingly complex riffs. There’s a similarly glorious moment where Tooney and Novocento ride a piano back and forth across the ship’s parquet ballroom floor during a storm, with Novecento playing the whole way. Only in the last twenty minutes or so does the writing lose its grip. The finale is baggy and melodramatic when compared to what has gone before.

Novecento’s phenomenal playing remains, of course, unheard, limited to Tooney's descriptions of its brilliance - his playing, we are told, is ‘impossible’, untethered to the ‘normal notes’ - but the production is not free of music, far from it - a dream-like lilt underscores the whole piece.

Paul Wills’ set, in its use of muted colours, feels in keeping with the Donmar’s familiar visual palette, while his use of riveted metal, dangling chains and copper piping evokes the clanking belly of the ship. Those rippling chains simultaneously give a sense of being on deck with the ocean beyond, a sense enhanced by Paul Keogan’s softly shifting lighting.

Director Roisin McBrinn, whose work this season was, in part, designed to showcase, knows how to handle a monologue, how to bring texture and pace to the text; she previously directed Mark O'Rowe’s ink-black triptych, Crestfall, at Theatre 503 and this piece achieves similar glimmers of intensity. Bonnar’s performance, while very big, very physical, in his gestures and delivery (clambering about on the set, hurling himself to the floor as he describes a storm) is also deceptively controlled. There’s a line that he observes and only on a couple of occasions does it feel as if he was overplaying things; again these moments were towards the end when the piece began to unravel and never quite righted itself.

Reviewed for musicOMH

Eight at Trafalgar Studios

There’s an interactive element to Ella Hickson’s Eight. As audience members arrive at the theatre, they are directed towards a touch-screen monitor near the box office. There they can read through the synopses of eight possible monologues and vote for the four they would like to see most. People like to vote for things, we like to have a choice or the illusion of choice, and so only the four most popular will be performed, though all eight actors remain on stage throughout the evening as a reminder that choice is as much about what is excluded as what is included, and that for the four monologues we do see there will be four that we don't. (Interestingly, during its New York run, all eight monologues were performed nightly, changing the concept of the show entirely).

Those that were performed on the night I attended were all solidly acted, particularly by Simon Ginty as the teenage Jude, despatched to an overseas language school by his father and told to "return a man." There he develops an increasingly intense passion for his middle-aged French landlady and loses himslef in thoughts o perfume and lingerie. It's the lesser of the four selected pieces but his performance sells it. Solomon Mousley is also compelling in the most memorable piece of the night, as Miles, a young American Merrill Lynch exec who "won everything he touched" and whose life was derailed by the 7/7 attacks.

While there’s no denying that Hickson is a skilled writer, some of the pieces were far stronger than others and the simple presentation of these character sketches was rather straightforward in comparison with the unusual set-up (however, I now gather there are meant to be some projections that were not used on the night I went). The notion of choice and chance is tied most overtly with Miles’ narrative, but the inclusion of some of the other pieces felt rather arbitrary, despite Hickson's assertion that the characters are all somehow representative of a generation, "showing the effects, when taken to extremes, of growing up in a world in which the central value system is based on an ethic of commercial, aesthetic and sexual excess."

Another monologue concerns Holly McLay's Bobby, a single mum with two young children who gets fired from Tesco in the run up to Christmas. She gets a new job with a wealthy, elderly woman, helping her to prepare for the coming festivities and becomes entranced by the woman's life - with the rich, Christmas smell of her kitchen as they prepare puddings - and also frustrated by what she sees, by the things and the life that she will in all likelihood never possess. The gap between her life and this woman's life - and the impossibility of bridging it - is just too big and Bobby's frustation spills out of her in a sudden expletive-flecked flow.

The final piece of the four concerned Gwendolen von Einsiedel's Astrid, a woman returning to her lover's bed in the middle of the night after a liaison with another man. Both these pieces feel like they are scratching at the skin of something true and honest, but there is not room to dig deeper, to explore more, and the Christmas setting of the former piece feels a little obvious.

The very nature of the production means that each performance will be different and it seems likely that on another night the sense of disjointedness I felt may not have been so strong. But, all the same, there is something a bit anticlimactic about the show after the novelty of its opening gambit.

Extended version of a review that appeared in The Stage.

Well at Trafalgar Studios

Right, been back in the UK a few days now and am slowly getting back into the swing of things, adjusting to the whole no-longer-on-holiday hoo-ha. I was hoping to have put together some words by now on the Belgrade/Bosnia experience but have been prevaricating and it has yet to happen.

I have, however – small drum roll – been to the theatre. My first excursion after landing was to see Well at Trafalgar Studios (in the little downstairs one). This is a play about ‘issues of illness and wellness’ by American playwright and performance artist Lisa Kron. When Kron was growing up her mother was often ill, fatigued to the point where she could hardly move, yet at the same time she managed to do considerable work in the community, to ‘heal’ a neighbourhood, as the play rather too neatly puts it. Kron was also ill herself, ill enough to warrant a stint in a hospital allergy unit and in order to better understand both her mother’s and her own experiences of illness, Kron has created a ‘multi-character theatrical experience.’ This is how the play terms itself. There’s a lot of talk like that as Natalie Casey, playing Kron, speaks directly to the audience throughout, describing her intentions and how she hopes the piece will work.

Sarah Miles , sitting in a battred red leather Lazy Boy chair swaddled in blankets and sporting a pair of huge fluffy bed socks, plays Kron’s mother, Ann. She is very entertaining in the role, forever interrupting proceedings and puncturing the monologue in order to offer drinks and Oreos to the audience and point out inaccuracies in the narrative. However while there are some gloriously funny moments (an anecdote about her childhood obsession with Laura Ingalls Wilder, chief among them), the production is hampered by some major problems, most significantly the fact that Kron played herself stateside while here she is played by Casey (who apparently is from Two Pints Of Lager and A Packet of Crisps, which I gather is a thing off the telly). She is very, very good as Kron, with solid, comic timing and a nice rapport with the audience, wholly inhabiting the role, but she is, still, an actress playing a part. So when the production loops ever in on itself and the other actors start breaking character and ditching their American accents, when they start questioning Kron and what she is trying to achieve, the fact that Casey is also playing a role and is not the author of the piece sits in the middle of the room like a big postmodern elephant.

The fact that the play also tiptoes around the nature of Kron’s own illness, doesn’t help either. Was she ever genuinely sick? It remains ambiguous – and while the writing acknowledges these ambiguities, that doesn’t make them any less problematic.

Despite these sizeable flaws, it is a warmly written and well performed piece, if, at times, a bit too cute and too, well, for want of a better term, American (specifically east coast introspective) but where it did work was in making me think about my attitude to illness and health. Having always enjoyed pretty good health, I think I do sometimes rather assume that people who haven’t (and I’m not talking about people with serious conditions, rather people who are more prone to sicknesses, colds, lurgies and the like, than I am) are somehow complicit in their unwellness. It’s a rather arrogant attitude and I’m not proud of it, and I shall endeavour not to tut and judge so much in future. Honest.

Dealer's Choice Revisited

I don’t get to revisit shows as often as I like. I often mean to but am rather magpie-like and am usually distracted by something shinier and newer. But sometimes I do get my act together and manage to squeeze in a second viewing.

I have been meaning to see Dealer’s Choice again, since it moved to Trafalgar Studios. I had seen it – and loved it – at the Menier, but regretted that I had not gone to see it with my friend Juice who is quite the poker fiend. We finally managed to gather ourselves together on the last day of performance and get day tickets to the penultimate show, the Saturday matinee.

When we bought the tickets we were warned “you can’t be late with THESE tickets.” We only understood the meaning behind these rather stern words (surely you shouldn’t be late with any tickets?) when we arrived. Through luck rather than judgment we had snagged excellent seats, sitting sideways to action right on the stage itself, a whisper away from the actors. Had we been late we would have had to walk across the set itself.

The show itself more than stood up to a second viewing and I was able to delight in the rapport between the actors once more, more so if anything as, from our seats, we could see every subtle glance, every raised eyebrow. It was lovely being able to anticipate what was coming, to be able to focus more on the nuances of delivery and the audience reaction. My enjoyment of the play also gained much from seeing it with someone who knew the ins and outs of the game, who could scythe a path through the denser stretches of poker-related lingo.

I did wonder if, being the last day of play, there might be some end-of-term misbehaving from the cast, but there was none that I noticed - though Jay Simpson, who plays Frankie, did dash on late and breathless for the curtain call much to the amusement of the other cast members and the audience.

And finally, a question: where should one head for a post-play drink after a visit to the Trafalgar Studios, when the sky is a vile, hostile grey and you are umbrella-less?

Emotional Wringer

Last week I was lucky enough to see two plays that packed a real emotional punch. The first of these was random, the new play by Debbie Tucker Green at the Royal Court. This is a beautifully pared down piece of theatre. There is no set, no props, just one woman, actress Nadine Marshall, standing against a black, back wall. She moves from character to character, mother, father, brother, sister, telling the story of an ordinary family, an ordinary day. Arguments over mobile phones and burnt bits in the porridge. And then something bad happens – the random act that changes everything. And the writing suddenly envelops you, tugs you along into awful places. It’s the details that make it so powerful. The sister trying to hold onto the memory of her brother’s odour. The police officers who fail to take their boots off in the family’s living room. The writing has a wonderful grasp of rhythm, finding poetry in people’s everyday voices, and Marshall is superb, hopping from character to character – by the end of the 50 minutes I felt drained, spent.

The other play was Snowbound by Ciaran McConville. Currently on at the smaller of the Trafalgar Studios, this is a play about Tom, a stoic young man who has been caring for his disabled brother since the death of their mother, putting his life on hold. Then he meets Mary and falls in love and starts to put himself first.

It’s a flawed play, yes. It veers close to cliché at times, especially in the way that Tom’s brother Alex is conveniently always able to see to the core of a situation and say something that is both simple, suspiciously poetic and yet wise at the same time. Tom’s girlfriend Mary is also just too damn sweet and good – something awful is bound to happen to her and it does. But where McConville excels is in scenes of unabashed emotion – the final scene between the two brothers is powerful stuff, superbly performed by Sam Hazeldine and Karl Davies. It was a scene of rare rawness. Unsurprisingly there was an awful lot of sniffing and nose-wiping and ‘whoops, I appear to have something in my eye’ type mumbling as people left the theatre.

And, harking back to the Barbican and the less than impressive stage brawling in The Harder They Come, Snowbound also featured one of the most convincing stage punches I’ve seen in ages. You felt it connect; you feared for Davies’s dental work. The Whingers may also be interested to know that a large bowl of pasta, coated in an unappetising sludgy cream sauce, is not only consumed by the valiant cast but is used as an inspired alternative to the familiar glass-of-wine-in-the-lap move as a way of bringing an end to a particularly bitter marital dispute. There even appeared to be some proper Bucks Fizz being drunk at one point, a glass of which I could well have done with myself after that last scene.

Four Angry Men

Four chairs. And four chaps. All clad in dapper suits. That's all Ben Woolf's highly entertaing show required to make me laugh pretty much solidly for an hour. The play, Angry Young Man by theatre company MahWaff, has been around since 2005, playing to acclaim in various fringe venues, but this is the first time I've seen it. The play tells the story of Yuri, a Russian doctor with a limited grasp of English, who has come to London looking for work. The frantic plot crams in menacing skin heads, gullible posh blokes and coquettish Notting Hill rich girls, but for all its incident, the story is eclipsed by the manner of its telling.

The four actors share the character of Yuri between them and switch between supporting roles at a rapid rate. This isn't at all confusing, the timing of the cast is impeccable and the character switches are never jarring, the story flows along beautifully. What really appeals is the way you can simultaneously appreciate the cleverness of the staging while revelling in the humour of the piece. It both excites from a creative perspective, yet keeps you laughing and engaged throughout. There's even a kernel of something serious at its centre about the way this country treats its immigrants, though this is rather thrown away.

While the cast worked wonderfully as a group, a single unit, there were some lovely individual moments. Hugh Skinner, left to mop up the most minor roles, was very funny, reluctantly standing in, at various points in the play, for a trophy stag on the wall, a tongue-lolling Labrador and a urinating garden fountain. I also liked Alex Waldmann as Patrick's simpering girlfriend Alison.

Playing in the rather cramped downstairs space at the Trafalgar Studios (those double benches are a bit of a lottery; I was sat next to a sturdy gent, who, with his coat and case and various bits and pieces, left me with only about a fifth of the thing on which to perch), this was meant to be staged as part of a double bill with a newer work by Woolf, but illness has meant this second piece, The Explorer, has been cancelled. A real shame, as on the strength of this production, I'm really keen to see more of his work.

Some Kind Of Bliss?

It’s been a particularly busy week, both theatre-wise and other stuff-wise - hence the gap in blogging.

Backtracking to Thursday night and I was at the Trafalgar Studios, the little downstairs one, to see Samuel Adamson’s new play, a one-woman show called Some Kind Of Bliss.

Adamson appears to be a bit of a contentious figure in the blogosphere, with many disliking his frothy and whimsical Southwark Fair with an intensity I never quite understood. However, while I quite enjoyed the latter – mainly as a result of Rory Kinnear’s endearing performance – I found his most recent work a frustratingly flimsy and tedious thing. A woman goes for a walk, that’s about the gist of it. She walks from London Bridge to Lulu’s house in Greenwich (she’s a celebrity lifestyle journalist for the Daily Mail), and during the course of this walk she has sex, gets mugged and steals an ice cream van – all things we know from the start, thanks to an overstuffed opening line: “Today - after I'd had the electric sex, got clobbered, killed the dog and parked the hijacked ice-cream van - I found the pop legend's house in Greenwich."

To her credit, Lucy Briers is highly watchable as Rachel, the woman in question, and there are a few sharp lines; but, really, how hard is it to get a laugh at the expense of the Daily Mail? The play shows an underlying love for London’s neglected corners that I found appealing, but whenever things promised to get interesting, Adamson undermined himself by driving the narrative off on odd, forced tangents, and I soon ceased to care about Rachel’s vague marital crisis.

The play did however allow me to meet Ian Shuttleworth in a non-online context for the first time, which was lovely, even if I failed to say one remotely interesting thing during our brief conversation.

This past week I also saw an appealingly dark slice of drama at the Tristan Bates Theatre, a small studio space off Shaftesbury Avenue – just over the road from the resurrected Fopp. They Have Oak Trees In North Carolina was a tense, well-acted ninety minute drama written by Sarah Wooley. Recent events have given it an unnerving topicality. It concerns a middle-aged married couple, whose young son disappeared over twenty years ago while they were on a family holiday in Florida – his body was never found, his story never resolved. Two decades on, an American man turns up on their doorstep, claiming to be the boy they lost. As I said, the play, a co-production with Theatre 503, is well written and strongly performed, but it’s given an inevitable, if unintended weight by events surrounding disappearance of Madeline McCann. It’s almost impossible to watch without thinking of where the McCanns will be some twenty years on from now, without wondering when and how – and if – their story will end.