Miniaturists 24 (somewhat belated)

This took place a couple of weeks back now and I really honestly did mean to write about it the following week, but then a friend came to stay and I had some other worky things to attend to and, oh, I don't know, stuff just happened, and somehow suddenly it is midway through July and I feel that if I don't write down some brief words now then it will drift from my head altogether.

This was the third Miniaturists I'd attended at the Arcola and, of those, probably the strongest line-up to date. Of the five short pieces on the bill, there were three that really stood out. Smile, by Simon Treves, was a wonderful exercise in unease set in a prison that managed to be both very funny and incredibly tense, sometimes simultaneously.

Helen Smith's The Memory Man, a short play about a medium, was the most ambitious piece and the one that had the most potential to be built on and extended into something longer. It had an intriguing symmetry, was full of lovely lines and details and managed to remind me of many things that I've read and seen and enjoyed while also having its own distinctive voice - plus it's always exciting and gratifying when someone you know and like produces something you find yourself really enjoying and admiring.

The final piece. Postfeminism, by Samantha Ellis (who also wrote the well-received Cling to Me Like Ivy) was a lovely example of romantic comedy writing. Witty and clever and genuinely touching, it managed to convey the whole journey of a relationship in a very short space of time. It also contained a properly groan-inducing pun of the very best kind.

All the pieces were incredibly well performed by casts whose rehearsal time was limited to say the least and the whole experience made all the various grapplings with public transport it required to get there more than worth it. The West End Whingers do the thing more justice over here.

Bits and Pieces

Not much time for blogging of late due to stuff and things and general elsewhere occupied-ness. Two of my friends got married in a wedding of near-cinematographic wonderfulness on a recent sun-blessed weekend and my flatmate did lots of lovely things with compost and seedlings and planters and now we have lettuces in the garden, growing in a discarded butler sink of all things – it is too Sunday supplement for words.

And obviously there was some theatre. Quite a bit of theatre. I reviewed Michael Grandage’s Hamlet for Theatermania and I am Montana at the Arcola for The Stage. Last night I went to the Globe for the second time this season to see Thea Sharrock’s As You Like It, an interesting if slightly patchy production. While not quite balmy, the rain held off at least and the Globe worked its twilight magic and afterwards Helen and I strolled along the south bank to the National to join some other friends who were in the post-Phedre phase of their evening and there was wine and it was good.

A proper, actual review of As You Like It to come. At some point, maybe.

The Miniaturists

Confession: I have never been to a Miniaturists at the Arcola before. Oh sure I have considered it, I have talked about maybe possibly doing so one day, but thus far I have utterly failed to get myself over to Hackney on a Sunday due to my own ingrained indolence. Until, that is, this past weekend, where the chance to see one of Helen Smith’s plays properly staged (with strawberries and cornflakes and everything) proved too tempting to resist.

And it was more than worth grappling with the broken Northern Line to get there: six short plays, none longer than 20 minutes, a lovely variety in terms of style, tone and approach, a fair higher standard of performance than one would expect from pieces with such a short rehearsal time and the pleasure of knowing that for every coconut cream you bite into there’s likely to be a piece of praline along in a minute. Or something. Just go with it.

Anyway there was wine and there were Whingers and there was the lovely Stephen Sharkey who took the time to stop and say hello and generally be charming despite presumably having much more pressing things to attend to.

There are some more words over here if you’re interested…

Under The Blue Sky at the Duke Of York's

I’m sure I’ve asked before what the collective term for a group of bloggers is. I’m not sure what consensus was reached on that matter but it was just such a group that descended on the Duke of York’s Theatre on Tuesday to see a preview of David Eldridge’s Under The Blue Sky, a production featuring her off Doctor Who, him off The It Crowd and them off Cranford. There were 14 of us in total, including Helen Smith, City Slicker and Paul in London, in a group outing arranged by the Whingers (and, appropriately, as with most school trips, someone was late, someone left their jacket behind, but no one was sick on the coach home fortunately, not that there was a coach home).

David Eldridge’s play, first staged at the Royal Court, in 2000, is divided into three sections, each concerning the relationship between a pair of teachers (how apt that it opens just as the school holidays begin). The first section, featuring Chris O’Dowd (him off The IT Crowd) and Lisa Dillon, was possibly the weakest. O’Dowd plays Nicholas, a bit of shit, who though aware that his fellow teacher Nicola has a bit of a thing for him, still uses her as his ‘best friend’, comfortable in the knowledge that there’s nothing she won’t do for him. Nicola is however incredibly shrill and clingy, which has the effect of diluting much of the sympathy you feel for her. Neither is particularly likeable but the sequence has an increasing rawness that I found compelling (up until, that is, Nicola does something so completely far-fetched that any sense of emotional plausibility was lost, for me at least).

The middle section is the one featuring Catherine Tate, now recovered after the ankle injury that caused them to cancel the first preview. She plays the school man-eater a role she is adept at despite wearing the world’s most unflattering dress, a nasty brown jersey thingy, belted at the waist. We first see her as she is luring the geeky Dominic Rowan to bed with a bit of fantasy role play, her playing a military nurse tending to his war wounds, the prospect of which gets him rather (over) excited. Eldridge takes this sitcom-ish set up, the misguided drink fuelled liaison between two colleagues and rapidly subverts it, their exchange takes on a sinister turn, laced with blackmail and self-loathing. The tension and unease in this scene was handled incredibly well and I enjoyed not knowing how it would end up, not knowing quite how far it would go. Tate’s role too appeared quite caricatured at first and whenever she raised her voice, used a certain tone, it did bring to mind some of her television comedy characters (I’ve not seen her in Who though which I gather puts me in a very small minority indeed) but her character and performance gradually, subtly, softened allowing the audience a glimpse of underlying damage.

The final pairing of Francesca Annis and Nigel Lindsay was quite wonderful. They play a couple of friends who spend most of the school holidays together and are clearly besotted with one another, but she has held back, fearing the age barrier will be too big a hurdle. This is a beautiful scene, superbly played and written, there is a real sense of maturation in the writing as the play progresses, a sense of a writer testing the limits of his abilities and finding them pleasingly elastic.

After the play David Eldridge unwisely wandered past the pub that we decamped to for a post-theatre glass of something and was, for his sins, subsequently bombarded with questions about prop knives and onstage food hygiene. That’ll teach him.

Afterlife at the National

It was a surprisingly tough call. I was sitting with the West End Whingers (and honorary Whinger Graham) outside the National during the interval of Michael Frayn’s Afterlife. Should we stay put, in the sun with our bottle of red, or venture back inside? The first half had not been promising at all. Grand but rather empty, hitting the audience over the head with its cleverness. But we, or at least I, felt a need to see whether it would take flight after the interval, whether the plays potentially fascinating themes would actually start to, well, fascinate. So we (after polishing off the wine with practiced ease) left our sunny spot on the terrace and plunged back in.

Mistake. Definite mistake.

Indeed there was a distinct lack of taking off in the second half, a distinct lack of anything much happening that one could actually care about. This was a play of Ideas rather than one that gave much weight to things like character and pacing and so forth. And these Ideas were, in turn, rather bluntly flung about without really cohering in any satisfying fashion. Roger Allam played Max Reinhardt, the Austrian theatre impresario who staged morality plays at Salzburg Festival. Reinhardt was fascinated with the interweaving of art and life and therefore Frayn presents Reinhardt’s life as a morality play with Allam as Everyman. So we have a black-caped and skull-masked figure of death stalking the stage and much speaking in verse. (“Have they learned nothing from Fram” the Whingers asked). While Reinhardt career flounders under the Nazis and he is forced to flee to the United States, his finances decimated, living first in Los Angles with the mistress he eventually married and then finally moving to New York where Death, inevitably catches up with him. Still he achieves an afterlife of a kind through his work.

But the play remained wrapped in a thick shield of its own making, impenetrable. Clearly there is no one at the National who is able to say to Frayn, I see what you’re trying to do here Michael, but isn’t it a bit dull? A bit laboured? Wouldn’t a little burst of Climb Every Mountain pick things right up? The set was big and grand and got across the opulence and excess of Reinhardt’s lifestyle but, in terms of pacing, it was like wading through toffee, a real slog with little reward at its end. It seemed the antithesis of the The Pitman Painters, a play that managed to be about Things, to deal in Ideas, and yet also to entertain, to move, to uplift its audience. This missed the mark on all counts. You know there’s a problem when you start being distracted by finger marks on windows (God, I am turning into my mother) or when the most positive comment you appear to have made in your notebook is ‘a lovely cloche hat.’

Selina Griffiths was very good as Reinhardt’s ever loyal assistant, but Allam was nowhere near as he strong as he could be, as he has been in the past. And, OK, there were a clutch of good moments, including a scene where Reinhardt prepares to give a lavish dinner party, choreographing the waiting staff as he would the actors in one of his productions, but these were few and very, very far between.

Afterwards, our party of four moved swiftly away from the National, the source of our pain, and set about a couple of bottles of Rioja outside the BFI South Bank, (the NFT as was) and, eventually, the Bad Thing was forgotten – along with much else I suspect.

Wherever I Lay My Hat…

Another year, another West End Whingers party. As is my wont in such situations I drank more gin than was prudent, and then preceded to ramble repetitively at a variety of people including City Slicker, Ben Yeoh, Helen Smith and her lovely daughter Lauren, Andrew Haydon and possibly some others. David Eldridge was particularly patient and kind, and it was a pleasure to finally meet him in person.

As with last year, my friend Jeinsen came along, (though, for reasons known only to him, introduced himself as Barry to anyone who asked) more faces were put to names and a ridiculous amount of organisational effort appeared to have been put in to everything by the Whingers.

I particularly enjoyed the hat-centric dress code and, in a method touch, wore my borrowed cloche-type thing for most of the day, including an afternoon trip to catch the matinee of The Lover and The Collection at the Comedy Theatre. I got two flattering comments – though admittedly both from ladies in their seventies bemoaning the lack of hat wearing these days. Still I may have to hang on to it for a little while longer.

Lucky Man

And so to the Donmar, with a party that included the West End Whingers and Cityslicker, for a preview of The Man Who Had All The Luck - which, we were forewarned by the posters, is a ‘fable by Arthur Miller.’

(Maybe it’s my inner cynic but when I see the words fable or parable used in relation to a play it usually sets alarm bells ringing).

David is a young mechanic with plans to marry childhood sweetheart Hester. He’s not particularly talented or intelligent, but he’s a nice enough guy, and for some reason fortune seems to smile on him. Though he has no formal training his repair business is doing well and his girlfriend’s hostile and controlling dad, a major impediment to their marriage, is conveniently taken out of the picture. Later when David buys a gas station, a motorway is, soon after, built alongside it. So, while his friends and brother contend with the various knocks and disappointments of their lives, everything appears to go right for David, to the point where he starts to feel that fate owes him a catastrophe. Indeed, he becomes completely fixated with this idea of himself as ‘lucky’, to the point where he is unable to derive any pleasure from the good things that life has given him.

The first half is unusually short and, as we gathered at the bar in the interval, we were unsure as to where the play was going (particularly in regards to a mysterious Austrian character who fortuitously shows up at David’s garage at 4am and helps him fix a car; we suspected he may be angelic or somehow supernatural in origin, though this turned out not to be the case). After the play we were still somewhat hazy as to what it all meant but we knew an awful lot more about mink farming and, should we ever encounter black spots in mink feed, we’ll know just what to do. (In the later stages of the play David invests in a mink farm – a high risk venture).

Over the inevitable post-play bottle of red in a nearby pub we decided that the overall message has something to do with the fact that good deeds and good fortune don’t necessarily go hand in hand and that ‘luck’ is arbitrary and flexible concept; if you think of yourself as lucky you can become so. To David his luck becomes his curse, he becomes frozen, waiting for something to give – though in the end, common sense and a cautious character play as much of a part in David’s fortunes as his luck.

Regardless of what the whole thing may have meant, the notion of luck and chance and of some folks unaccountably having an easy ride of it in life, was pleasingly underlined by the fact that Jeffrey Archer was sitting prominently, smugly some might say, in the middle of the front row throughout.

Andrew and I had less luck however when we tried to sneak down from our perch in the circle to snag some empty stalls seats, as some other lucky sods beat us to it.

Bathtubs, Bangkok and the Barbican

It's been a while since I entered the eerie interior of the Barbican. On Tuesday night it felt particularly odd: more staff than visitors, the evening's concert already well underway.

I was there to see Tough Time, Nice Time, the latest BITE commission from Ridiculusmus. Before the show I ran into the West End Whingers, who were, perhaps unsurprisingly, in the vicinity of the bar. Well, I say ran into, they were semaphoring at me from the adjacent table for a good five minutes before I noticed them.

We then spent a further five minutes being bewildered by the lifts (not all of them go down to the right level for the Pit theatre because, well, because it's the Barbican), arriving in the right place just in time to see an overzealous usher extracting dawdlers from the men's bathroom.

So: Tough Time, Nice Time. The lights come up on two men sitting together in a bathtub, which we soon establish is in a Bangkok sauna. The two men sip beer and they talk. And they talk. For 70 minutes. That's it. But, strange and static as this show is, it's also quite fascinating, a repellent yet compelling watch.

The two men, played by Jon Haynes and David Woods, are both ex-pats, Germans. One is a lawyer, the other a hack writer of some description. They don't know each other, have little in common, bar a shared nationality (though while the website blurb says both characters are German, Haynes' accent bore little trace of this I thought). Their conversation meanders as conversation tend to do, awash with film references and cynical jokes. Some of what they say is shocking, some of it banal.

The lawyer is keen to tell his story to the writer, to share his past with him. But, if there's a theme at all in this piece, it's that stories, and the telling of them, are subject to all manner of factors. Truth is a loose concept. The writer is in turn fascinated with atrocities and drops references to genocide into the conversation with the same easy flippancy with which he discusses the plot of The Constant Gardner, real horrors and celluloid fictions bleeding together as he speaks.

Haynes and Woods have a real rapport, unsurprising as they've been working together for 15 years, and the show is tautly written, but the sheer unpleasantness of the men they portray, for me overrode the play's ideas about the ownership of stories, about how memories have become commodities, another thing that can be sold.

Naturally, after the show we felt duty bound, compelled to discuss these issues further, something that could only really be done in the pub over the road with a couple of bottles of red as an aid to intellectual clarity.

The Horizontal Hour (And A Bit)

It was always going to be an opinion-splitter: Peter Handke’s The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other.

If you’re reading this, chances are you probably know the basics: 450 characters, 27 actors, and no dialogue – though there is a fair bit of humming, clicking, yelling, screaming and sobbing, just no talking.

I was surprised by how much I got out of this. Yes, it was frustrating at times, it was tedious at times, but I still found myself engrossed in it, the rhythms, the swings from the familiar to the mythic. A thousand tiny stories. Walking through Waterloo station on the way home had a new frisson, I found myself watching people’s gaits, the striders, the slouchers, it made me smile.

There were parts I had trouble with certainly. The yellow tank-topped figure soon started to grate on me and I thought some of the comic moments were too forced. I certainly found the braying laughter that greeted the sequence when a line of old people shuffled across the stage in various guises rather unsettling. Surely this was more poignant than hilarity-inducing? I don’t know. Anyway there’s a far more intellectually rigorous discussion about the piece going on over here and the West End Whingers’ review is, of course, worth a read, that goes without saying.

I had gone along to the National with my friend Simon, a man who knows much about Handke and was even carrying a copy of the original text so he could assess the new version (apparently Mickey Mouse features in the original, one of many omissions.) Simon’s profile of Handke written in adavance of the production is here, if you’re interested. I’m quite taken with the idea of the companion piece: Journey to the Sonorous Land or The Art of Asking, which, in stark contrast, is all dialogue, most of it nonsensical, a sea of words.

Lady Disdain

I often wonder what actors talk about in those moments when they are on stage but the production is yet to officially ‘start’. Are they wryly dissecting the sartorial efforts of the front row? Are they engaging in some in-character debate about codpieces?

Nicholas Hytner’s production of Much Ado About Nothing opens with Leonato and family having a spot of dinner, a scene which requires a good proportion of the cast to be on stage as the audience file in and take their seats. There’s a lot of chatter in this sequence but it’s impossible to make out what’s being said.

Simon Russell Beale and Zoe Wanamaker make a pleasingly mature Benedick and Beatrice: him with a rather unmilitary paunch; her with a wine glass near permanently dangling from her hand, a woman after my own heart. Beale was particularly wonderful I thought, tremendously endearing, if, perhaps, a bit too soft-hearted in the role, while Wanamaker, though convincing as a strong-willed, acid-tongued woman, was conversely rather too spiky, too hard-edged. And as such the chemistry between them refused to spark as it should; their verbal sparring didn’t have the necessary sexual undercurrent. You couldn’t quite believe he would ever be able to ‘stop her mouth,’ in any capacity.

There was, however, a lovely bit of comedy business with a pool in which Beale demonstrated the kind of precise comic timing that caused the bronchial National Theatre audience to cease coughing for a good thirty seconds and applaud instead. It was so funny that Hytner tried to repeat it in the following scene with Beatrice – with less success, the surprise factor this time absent. (I did wonder if the odd hair-wrap Wanamaker was sporting for this scene might have concealed some kind of shower cap, to cut down on frantic interval hair-drying.)

Much Ado is, of course, a play with a jet black heart, the Beatrice and Bendick narrative merely a sub-plot to the cruel machinations that lead to the brutal jilting of Hero. But the shift in tone proved a difficult one, and I was surprised at the number of people who greeted Beatrice's impassioned request for Benedick to “Kill Claudio” with a casual chuckle. On the whole I think I preferred Marianne Elliot’s recent-ish Cuban-set take on the play, which managed to better inject an under-layer of menace into proceedings.

Where Hytner’s production struck gold was in the casting of Mark Addy as Dogberry. He was superbly self-important and entertainingly accompanied by That Chap From The Vicar Of Dibley.

The set was a strange blend: Mediterranean in the main but with this minimal, slatted central structure that divided the space and appeared rather Japanese in nature. The Olivier’s revolve got to do plenty of revolving, allowing for lots of opportunity for eavesdropping and dancing. And the West End Whingers will be gladdened to know that said dancing was accompanied by a fair bit of hey-nonny-ing, and the use of, not just a mandolin, but an accordion and a really big tambourine too. There was a disappointing dearth of goats though.

All Greek

I headed over to Hammersmith on Thursday for the National Theatre of Scotland's production of The Bacchae at the Lyric. Having sorted out my tickets a while ago I was delighted to discover that Andrew from the West End Whingers, Helen Smith and City Slicker would also be in attendance on the same evening and we duly met up for a pre-show drink on the theatre’s terrace (anyone know the collective noun for a group of bloggers?)

And the show? Well, it's already played in Edinburgh and Glasgow, so it's been around for a bit. This is David Greig's version of Euripides' tragedy with John Tiffany, the man behind Blackwatch, directing, and Alan Cumming as Dionysus – a concept that seems inordinately exciting to some. I don't think it fully delivered on its promise. It felt more like a collection of incredibly striking moments than a really satisfying theatrical experience, and was peppered with considerable longueurs. It begins with Alan Cumming descending headfirst on a harness (wearing, not a dress, as some have said, but a gold kilt and waistcoat combo). The chorus of Bacchae were clad in the most wonderful feathery red dresses and boasted an amazing range of singing voices between them. There was also an unexpectedly convincing severed head. Oh, and there was fire – a burst of hot, fire-y fire – the force of which could be felt back in row J of the stalls. These things, on their own, all worked wonderfully.

And of course there was Cumming. I can never quite make up my mind about Alan Cumming; as Andrew commented, he's quite a show-off as an actor, and I found his tic-driven performance in Bent last year quite alienating. But while the same can be said of his performance here, his stage presence, his force of personality and way with an audience are such that, when he was off stage the show rather stumbled, a fact that undermined the impact of the scenes with Paola Dionisotti, excellent as Agave, the mother of the slain Pentheus. Though, at first, the shift in tone was welcome, this rather wail-heavy interlude eventually grew a little wearing and I found myself hoping for a return to the over-the-top campery of earlier in the evening.

Perhaps inevitably there were further post-show drinks (as discussed previously, the chief benefit of staging something without an interval is that it leaves room for at least two bottles of wine afterwards, not a glass as I erroneously stated) and we even managed to snag one of the Bacchae (the lovely Marcia Mantack) and bombard her with questions about the production. She patiently explained how some of the effects were achieved (the cool moment where flowers fall from the sky is done with darts not magnets as we had thought) and revealed just why it’s never advisable to let on to your choreographer that you are still capable of doing a cartwheel.

Maids and Marshmallows (or not, actually)

I must admit I was apprehensive going in. The National’s website stated a provisional running time of three hours and five minutes, and due to a minor brain hiccup while booking tickets I’d managed to land myself in the second row from the back of the Olivier circle.

There to see Marianne Elliott’s production of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, I was anticipating a long fidgety evening squinting at the tops of people’s heads. But while my precarious perch did necessitate a degree of squinting, my somewhat negative expectations were pleasantly overturned and, despite the lengthy running time, I was completely engrossed.

Last time I saw Anne-Marie Duff, in the tedious The Soldier’s Fortune at the Young Vic, I was pretty underwhelmed; she looked lost and ill at ease in what was a messy and dull production. But here she was captivating and commanding, so full of passion and energy you quite understood why these soldiers would follow a young girl into battle. Elliott’s spare staging was also striking, drawing out both the humour and the drama of Shaw’s play.

The evening did have a few shaky moments. The opening sequence, which consisted of some slow motion fiddling with chairs to a soundtrack of what sounded like Enya played backwards, had me worried, I’ll admit (and absolutely certain that those chairs would be called into play for the climactic burning sequence, as indeed they were). A stylised battle scene, with a lot of percussive banging and stamping, also resembled something that would not have looked out of place in Stomp.

But most of these wibbles were quickly remedied by the confident staging and strong performances, including an appearance from the wonderful Paterson Joseph (the super-cool Johnson in Peep Show and the man who single-handedly saved Trevor Nunn’s irritating production of The Royal Hunt Of The Sun from its 1970s-style theatrical excesses)

On the interval I caught up with Andrew and Phil, the West End Whingers. They had also been fretting about the three hours plus running time, and were, like me, won over by the production. Indeed, we were so short of things to moan about over our interval drinks, we had to resort to whinging about the Royal Festival Hall refit. They even remembered that I was a gin girl, which perked me up further.

After the interval, and an incredibly tense and gripping trial sequence, the chairs did make a return for the burning, and though the National's smoke machine got a good work out, no actual actresses were harmed. A good thing for Anne Marie Duff, but a let down for the Whingers who were hoping to toast a few marshamllows.

All Mouth, No Heart

As a general rule, most plays need some form of structure and shape; they need to unfold, to develop, to take the audience on a journey. It doesn’t need to be a long journey, it doesn’t need to make you reassess your life as you know it or shift your political beliefs. But it needs to move you in some small way. Or else it’s just two hours of noise.

Which brings me, conveniently, to All Mouth, the new comedy at the Menier Chocolate Factory. The play, by Jonathan Lewis and Miranda Foster, is set in the world of advertising voiceover artists, and while it does make you chuckle on occasion, it’s more or less two hours of noise. The characters, four actors who use a central London flat as a base for hanging out and learning their lines, are incredibly thinly sketched, stereotypes who never really grow beyond simple two-word tags: aging thesp, American bloke, divorced mother, and, erm, the other one.

There’s a plot of sorts about an actors strike and a young actor who wheedles his way into the aging thesp’s affections as a way of getting his career off the ground, but it doesn’t work as drama or satire and you get little sense of who these people are. Some solid performances keep the play afloat and render it watchable but, as it is, it feels like a work in progress – a play in need of a complete re-write.

Now, the West End Whingers have a thing about the Menier’s unreserved seating policy, but this has never bothered me quite so much as the lack of air-con, more noticeable here than at any other venue I can think of. I have never had a more uncomfortable night at the theatre than I had watching a performance of The Last Five Years there on a hot July night last year. It was so stuffy in the theatre that the staff were handing out tiny battery-powered fans at the door. Even with those it was impossible to enjoy the show properly; it was like sitting in a sauna. Christ knows how the actors coped. It’s a shame because as a venue I’m quite fond of it, though my affection is bound to dwindle if they keep on staging nothingy comedies like this.

Oh yes and the ‘dead white men’ debate is still trundling on, with a riposte from Nicholas Hytner in the Observer.

Putting Faces To Names

So these chaps had a party on Saturday, attended by a number of theatre bloggers, and very entertaining it was. I tend to get a bit nervous in these situations, so I hit the gin with more enthusiasm than was prudent, but fortunately I had brought along a friend to back me up (and to hold me up for that matter.) This chap was there and this one too. Oh and him also, and several more I suspect, though those are the ones I talked at/to the most. And now all these virtual voices have form and shape and faces, which is a trifle odd but on the whole a delightful development.