Cuban Grooves

After a pleasantly aimless week of No Theatre, I ended my drought by drifting over to the boxy, character-free Peacock Theatre, Sadler’s Wells city-centre sister venue, to see their new show Havana Rakatan.

This is one of those big dance extravaganza type things that Sadler’s Wells likes to stage from time to time. The last one was Brasil Brasileiro, which I saw last summer, and this new production does for Cuba’s musical heritage what that show did for Brazil’s.

Havana Rakatan is a kind of chronological trawl through the country’s musical history, so we get opening scenes devoted to Cuban music’s colonial and African influences, with a second act concentrating on mambo and salsa, with a little chachacha chucked in for good measure. And it was entertaining, as these things go, though I often find these shows work as a kind of two hour build-up to that bit at the end where they want to get everyone on their feet and clapping in unison. Something I whole-heartedly detest, being both a natural introvert and a bit of a snob. Still despite my resistance to the enforced enjoyment factor, the sheer energy of the musicians and dancers made it nearly impossible not to get swept along by things - at least a little bit anyway.

I was however distracted by the dancers’ costumes on a number of occasions: in the earlier tribal set-piece, one chap appeared to have scalped Bungle and be wearing the results on his head, while later on, one woman was sporting, not only an Ed Wood-worthy mid-riff exposing angora sweater, but also these bizarre billowy satin hot pants that resembled, rather disconcertingly, an adult nappy. No-one else on stage was thus encumbered. I think she may have lost a bet or pissed off the costume designer.

There were also a large number of toned, shirt-less and sweat-slick torsos on display, Lisa, I suspect will be rather sorry she sat this one out.

Withdrawal Symptons

I've not set foot inside a theatre for seven days now, I am starting to get The Shakes. (Which, of course, has nothing at all to do with the three cups of coffee I've had today).

Inspired Casting

Thumbing through the Culture magazine of the Sunday Times yesterday over cereal and coffee, I came across an interview with Tim McInnerny about his forthcoming role as Iago in the Globe’s new production of Othello. It was fairly predictable stuff: blah, blah, Blackadder, blah, blah, proper actor actually. But then I read something that got me rather excited, something that had passed me by up until now – I read that the Othello to McInnerny's Iago will be played by a certain Eammon Walker, best known, to me anyway, as Kareem Said from the bonkers HBO prison series Oz.

How fantastic is that! Shakespeare with added shankings! Or something. Possibly. I'm slightly loathe to admit it, but I used to be a teeny bit obsessed with this show and how it consistently managed to be so, so wrong, yet so oddly watchable at the same time. I'm really looking forward to seeing him tackle the role and think the Globe should give serious thought to extending their HBO inspired casting further. How about Six Feet Under's Rachel Griffiths as Lady Macbeth? Or James Gandolfini, Tony Soprano himself, in doublet and hose?

PS: There will be slightly less theatre this week due to the stubborn insistence of people I know on having birthdays and warming their houses and such like.

Scenes from Russian Life

What better antidote to a grim, grey May Thursday then a piece of deeply bleak Russian theatre? No, seriously. It doesn’t sound promising and I’ll admit when I read the synopsis, which made liberal use of the words ‘harrowing’, ‘uncompromising’ and ‘human spirit at its lowest ebb’ I wasn’t convinced that this would be quite the thing to haul me out of my current vague malaise. But actually I was pleasantly surprised. Phil Willmott’s adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s second play, The Lower Depths is a spirited and compelling production. It’s on at the Finborough in Earls Court, one of London’s best pub theatres (though, having said that, this actually the first time I’ve been there in something like two years now).

The play is set in a provincial pre-revolutionary Russian doss house inhabited by a thief, a prostitute, a gambler, an alcoholic former actor, an elderly vagrant, and various other characters on the lower margins of society. The set is appropriately grubby, a muddy collage of browns and greys. And things don’t exactly begin well - the play starts with death of a young woman and an awful lot of wailing, making me immediately regret not making better use of the ‘pub’ part of this pub theatre and stealing myself with a pre-show gin (or vodka for that matter, which at least would have been thematically in keeping with the play). However due to Wilmott’s agreeably earthy adaptation, some fine ensemble acting and a healthy streak of black humour, this wasn’t the misery-fest it could have been and it successfully lifted me out of my self-induced fug.

In other news, my lemon tree has gone all wilty again - my excitement over its resurrection was clearly premature.

"Dead White Men"

So, in case you missed it, Nicholas Hytner got a bit snippy about the middling reviews for A Matter Of Life And Death and laid into the critics for, not only being past it, but for also being a little bit sexist, referring to them as "dead white men."

Perhaps unsurprisingly, messers Billington, De Jongh et al took against this, while the Guardian's Lyn Gardner agreed with Hytner that theatre criticism is indeed too male-dominated.

David Eldridge, who of course has had work staged at the National under Hytner, says his bit over here and the guys at Theatre Encore Magazine wade into the debate here.

Me? I think Hytner has a valid point that he rapidly undermines by flinging accusations of misogyny around. The world of theatre criticism is currently far too insular - I remember Mark Shenton blogging some time ago about how a large number of the top critics went, not just to Cambridge, but to the very same college at Cambridge. Which inevitably makes for a rather narrow critical spectrum.

It's just a shame this discussion was sparked by the reviews for A Matter Of Life And Death, a bloated, unnecessary production, where I found myself heartily agreeing with a number of the dead white men in question!

Death Row Drama

Ah, that’s more like it. After a run of duds and disappointments, I was beginning to wonder whether I was becoming unduly cynical and difficult to please. After all there were so many good reviews in the press for the overblown A Matter Of Life And Death, I was starting to think that the fault was mine, that something in me had, you know, soured.

Thankfully I saw something this weekend to lift me clear of my black little pit: Terre Haute by Edmund White was an engaging and thought provoking piece of theatre, a concise yet powerful play.

White has been inspired by the idea that, during his last days on death row, Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh entered into a correspondence with the essayist Gore Vidal. White uses this as a springboard to “imagine” a scenario where an elderly writer, much like Vidal, visits a young man in prison, who much like McVeigh, has been convicted for the mass murder of 168 people.

These characters are called James and Harrison to differentiate them from their real-life counterparts, but James is played (superbly) by actor Peter Eyre in a way that makes it difficult not to think about Vidal as you watch. Despite this White manages to successfully steer through the reality/fiction issue and produce a play that is easy to appreciate on its own terms.

The character of Harrison is articulate, intelligent and utterly without remorse - far more than the red-neck, survivalist stereotype he could have been. He’s played deftly by Arthur Darvill – in fact, both his and Eyre’s performances are first class. White draws some interesting parallels between the men – both are having to deal with their own mortality, as a result of old age, for one, and imminent execution for the other.

The play does not shy away from the reality of Harrison’s crime either, and the scene where James is no longer able to maintain his studied detached demeanour and screams at Harrison about the sacredness of human life, trying to illicit some reaction, some regret, is particularly powerful.

So, in short, strong but compelling stuff, though I rather wish White didn’t cloud things by adding a narrative strand about the bisexual James’ attraction to the younger man. I agree with theatre blogger John Morrison's view that White seems a little more interested in the Vidal character than that of the prisoner, something White more or less concedes in an article in the Guardian, saying that in the process of writing the play, the character came to reflect his own fears, anxieties and "confused amorous-paternal feelings towards a younger man in trouble."

That’s a small criticism though, Terre Haute is an excellent production, and at less than 80 minutes, one that hits you hard and leaves you hungry for more, rather than checking your watch and fidgeting in your seat (a quality in short supply of late). It’s playing at the smaller of the two Trafalgar Studios until June 2nd and is well worth seeing.

Heaven Can Wait, Gin On The Other Hand...

Two hours and ten minutes without an interval! Not a good sign. It’s not that I need that half-time gin, but, hey, this thing ain’t called Interval Drinks for nothing. So it wasn’t in the best of moods that I entered the Olivier in the National to see what Emma Rice’s Kneehigh theatre company had done to one of my favourite ever films, the classic 1946 Powell & Pressburger movie, A Matter Of Life And Death.

The film tells the tale of RAF pilot Peter who is forced to bale out from his burning plane without a parachute. To do so will mean his certain death, something both he and the American air control girl he is speaking to over his radio, know. This opening scene has me weeping every time I watch it. “You’re life and I’m leaving you.” Fantastic stuff.

So, in fairness, I was always going to be difficult to please with this one, but I’ve liked Kneehigh’s work in the past, and I was more than willing to give it a chance. Indeed, both Lisa and I thought their take on Nights At The Circus was one of the best things we saw last year. However in that show, their particular brand of theatre – cluttered stages, aerial stunts and rather ramshackle live musical accompaniment – gelled perfectly with the source material. Here almost identical techniques are trotted out with little thought given to how they might enhance (or overpower) the story. So we get cycling nurses and flying beds and small explosions and annoying Scandinavian chappies and some really quite bad music. Just far too much stuff. I quickly began to regret not smuggling in a hip flask. Then remembered I didn’t own one, a huge oversight on my part, I wonder how much they cost?

Anyway, sorry, distracted there, back to theatre stuff.

I’ll admit the production delivered a couple of visually striking set pieces (I enjoyed the slo-mo table tennis game and the camera obscura scene), but that wasn’t nearly enough to save this production from its own excessive approach. Plus they’ve tampered with the ending. When Peter takes his case to heaven’s version of an appeal court, to argue that – having fallen in love during the extra time on earth mistakenly awarded to him – he deserves to stay alive, he is now confronted not only by his dead father, but by the victims of the Coventry and Dresden bombings.

The production hits you about the head with the message that love, however pure, rarely triumphs over the indiscriminate brutality of war. Yes, War is Bad, and good people die and, yes in this respect, war in 1945 has much in common with war in 2007. It’s not exactly a message you can argue with, but surely there were other ways of making this resonate with modern audiences, by giving the play a contemporary setting, or, I don’t know, creating an original work that didn’t involve pissing all over one of the best British films ever made?

Page To Stage

Another bank holiday sprints into the distance, bringing with it summer rain, cake and coffee, evenings down the pub with friends, and various other hurrah-not-at-work type happenings. Oh, and Vernon God Little, the Young Vic’s staging of DBC Pierre’s Booker-winning novel.

I’ve read the book and remember liking it for its Technicolor prose style, though the actual plot faded faster from my memory then, well, a fast-fading thing. It was just one of a glut of novels based around school shootings that came out a couple of years ago, and not the best one at that. Fortunately this didn’t prove to be to much of a problem – unlike some page-to-stage adaptations, Rufus Norris’ production was easy enough to follow, whether or not you had any knowledge of the book. I’m just a little puzzled as to the point of the exercise.

Shorn of Pierre’s prose style, the story feels clumsy and cartoonish in the extreme: Vernon Gregory Little, a teenager from a small town in Texas, has been falsely accused of being an accessory to mass murder after his friend Jesus opened fire on his high school class mates before turning the gun on himself. As a satire of media mores and excesses, it already feels dated, a fact compounded by the recent appalling events at Virginia Tech. It also unfailing opts for easy laughs. Americans you see, they’re funny because they’re stupid. And fat. And greedy. OK, the book swiped at the very same targets but these were easier to take in the context of Vernon’s first-person narration

The set was something of an oddity too, consisting mainly of a moveable platform – seemingly made of sticky-backed plastic – that was raised and lowered at various points in the production. And the Young Vic got to play with their exciting new toy again, the ceiling heist – so Vernon spends the closing scene wearing a harness over his fetching pink shirt. The cast were great though, tackling multiple roles with ease, and Colin Morgan made an engaging Vernon, baffled, angry, horny, a plausible teenager in an impossible situation.

The whole thing was at least a whole lot slicker and more entertaining than Absolute Beginners. But whereas that was an interesting idea, ripe with potential, let down by poor execution, I just couldn’t grasp the reasons for bringing this to the stage.

Spotted in the audience on the night I was in: Mark Lawson, Lionel Shriver (who of course wrote the similarly-themed We Need To Talk About Kevin) and the Scottish chap with the lime green turban whose name escapes me, so I’m guessing this will be under discussion on Newsnight Review on Friday.

Back To The Beginning

So, yes, Lyric Hammersmith last night, with the man who for reasons best know to himself prefers to be known as Juice, to see Absolute Beginners, Roy Williams adaptation of Colin MacInnes’ novel set in 1950s Notting Hill.

I’d been looking forwards to this one considerably; I have a lot of time for Williams, having seen one of his plays, Little Sweet Thing, tame and engage a theatre full of rowdy, gum-chewing and generally disinterested teenagers a couple of years ago. I also have a personal interest in the subject matter as my family lived in Notting Hill during the time the play is set, after coming to England from what was then Yugoslavia.

(Not that this interest had extended to actually reading MacInnes' book you understand, but I knew of it, and at least I wasn’t alone in my ignorance. Sample interval conversation, heard several times over: “so, have you read the book then?” “No, but I know of it.”)

Anyway, point of story being: expectations high, perhaps too high. Things started well enough. Visually the production is spectacular – the set is a Mondrian-esque collection of blocks that drift about the stage giving the city a kind of stylised vibrancy, London depicted as playground and party town, really quite striking. These blocks in turn open up to reveal rooms and spaces within spaces. Unfortunately the look of the thing sets the bar a little too high and the actual meat of the play never really delivers on this initial promise.

The unnamed hero – a wannabe photographer and a part of the ‘teenage generation’ that had suddenly sprung into existence – dashes about town in an attempt to scrape some cash together in order to impress his girlfriend Suze. He encounters an array of characters: shady media types, Teddy boys and beatniks, as well as some nasty Keep-England-White thugs; Soweto Kinch's tinkly jazz score plays throughout. The elements are all there for a thrilling evening of theatre, but for all its promise, it just didn’t work. Nothing clicked. The dialogue was flatly delivered and the pacing felt all off. The episodic first half was little more than a primer on 1950s London and the Notting Hill race riots, while at least giving the second half more of a dramatic focus, were portrayed by means of a Dance Sequence. Yes, that’s right. Lots of chaps twirling and tumbling. I know this was in keeping with the production’s overall stylised atmosphere. But, still. No. Bad.

The play was crying out to be grimier, to be tougher than it was. True, there was a scene towards the end, where the hero and his black friend Cool get into a fight over Suze, which had the requisite intensity that the rest of the play lacked, but it was too little too late – even the constantly shifting and sliding boxes, so exciting initially, had started to grate at that stage. So, to summarise, I was bit disappointed in this one. It felt like an opportunity missed. Plus one Notting Hill social group were significant, to me anyway, by their absence – where were all the Eastern Europeans? Because obviously that’s what this needed. A load of shouty Slavs, that would have helped I’m sure.

Beautiful Thing

“Wasn’t that wonderful?” said the woman next to me as the house lights went up, and I had to concede that it was.

I was at the cosy Bush Theatre to see odd couple comedy Elling, a play based on a cult Norwegian film, adapted for the stage by Simon Bent and directed by Paul Miller. A play that happens to star John Simm, which of course had nothing to do with my decision to see it - no, I was here through a love of live theatre. Not to see That Thing With John Simm In It. Well maybe a little bit. But I was definitely not here because of Life on Mars, as, due to a mild phobia of that evil test-card girl and to over-praised telly in general, I only ever watched about an episode and half of that. My Simm obsession stems from watching Tony Marchant’s Never, Never and Paul Abbot’s brilliant State Of Play. So I am obviously better than all those people here to see that bloke from Life On Mars. Obviously.

Anyway, Elling is a good-natured comedy about two of society’s outsiders who, having been released from a mental institution, have to work out how to adjust to living independently. Simm plays Elling, a prissy self-declared mummy’s boy, prone to story-telling, who hides in wardrobes when things get too much for him. He wears sensible beige trousers that match his sensible side-parting and is the antithesis of his friend Kjell Bjarne, played by Adrian Bower, a lanky, hairy chap, who dislikes washing and wearing trousers, and who says “Holy Shit” a lot. Bjarne, that is, not Bower.

Given a flat to live in by the state and assigned to a social worker, the two men soon discover the joys of phone sex and takeout pizza and, with the help of a heavily pregnant woman and an aging poet, actually start to reengage with the world. Elling discovers poetry, and the fact that he may have some real talent, and Bjarne gets to touch a real live woman who doesn’t immediately have him arrested.

With his prim measured way of speaking and pink-scrubbed face, Simm is barely rescognisable, completely wrapped up in his character. The bond between the two men is touchingly and entertainingly conveyed, with Simm having a great rapport with the amiable Bower, and the play is stuffed with highly quotable dialogue - lines with more than a touch of the Withnails to them, like: “Mother did the shopping, I was in charge ideology.”

Elling is warm and compelling and a pleasure to watch. This was delightful stuff, very funny but with an occasional edge of poignancy, and it left me so uplifted that even the interminable journey from Shepherds Bush back home seemed more of a pleasure than a chore; indeed I positively bounced to the bus stop.

One Year On

Today is my blog’s first birthday. It is a whole one year old. This is probably not exciting to anyone other than me, but still I am quite chuffed about the fact. Thank you to everyone who occasionally drops by to read this unfocused waffle (which since I finally got around to installing Stat Counter I know is more than none and less than many people – substantially more than I ever imagined would read it though. I was also quite amused to discover that someone ended up here after typing Cheap Gin Drinks into Google – welcome, my friend!)

I started writing Interval Drinks because, as I found myself seeing more and more theatre, I wanted a place to order my thoughts about what I saw, a place to record the things that moved and engaged me (as well as the things that irritated and infuriated me). I had been pondering the idea of starting a blog on the subject for a fair bit and then I went to see a play by this man (Festen, if you're interested, which after stupidly missing it in the West End, I finally caught on tour in Richmond), that was vital and thrilling, and finally made me stop prevaricating and get on with it.

Oh, if you are able to make it over to Theatre 503 in Battersea in the next week or so, I strongly recommend you see George Gotts’ new play Cocoa. It’s an unsettling and engaging little play about a daughter returning home to visit her parents - but just like in Festen you soon sense there are dark, hidden things in this family. I enjoyed the way it took a familiar premise and twisted it around. It felt fresh and original; Gotts' dialogue has a lovely lulling rhythm to it as well, an excellent sense of pace and pause. In short, ‘tis good – go see.

New York, New York

I was standing by the bar in the Coliseum (gin-less for a change but waiting for my mother who’d nipped outside for a quick interval cigarette), when an elderly man in a grey suit, who was also waiting for someone, started talking to me. “£75, my ticket cost,” he informed me.

I made a kind of noise that began as a popular expletive but was hastily amended to something a little milder. It sounded a little like: “fosh, really?”

He nodded, with the stunned look of a man who was still coming to terms with this fact, but then he shrugged and smiled warmly, “But whatever makes her happy.” He waved his hand in the vague direction of ladies’ toilets where I’m guessing his wife was. And I smiled too because his sentiment seemed genuine and because I was glad my tickets had not set me back anywhere near £75. It had been an enjoyable evening so far, but it wasn’t £75 worth of enjoyable. In fact, I was under the impression that the most you’d ever pay for a ticket in the West End was a still-scandalously high £55, but I guess the Coliseum operates slightly differently.

Anyway, I was there to see the ENO’s production of Leonard Bernstein’s On The Town, which was back in London after a sell-out run in 2005. As I said I was with my mother who - though she had claimed to be far too busy to come to Menopause The Musical with me - suddenly had a free evening when the show on offer involved three strapping young men in sailors’ garb.

The plot, such as it is, involves the three aforementioned sailors, who have 24 hour shore leave in New York. One of them spots a poster of a pretty girl on the subway and resolves to find her before the day is through. The musical is set in 1944 and therefore this is not considered weird or stalker-ish behaviour but as something sweet and romantic. Much running about follows and, oh, you’ve seen the film, you know the rest.

Though staged by an opera company, surprisingly there weren’t that many standout vocal performances, bar a fabulously resonant turn from Andrew Shore, as a cuckolded judge, and a great performance from Caroline O'Connor as the man-hungry and magnificently named Hildy Esterhazy, who managed to exude brassy New York charm even when driving around the stage in a strange taxi contraption seemingly made from Meccano.

The stage is stuffed with people, all gamely dancing away, which went some way to compensates for the rather spare sets, and I did enjoy hearing the score performed by a full orchestra. But even with all the care that had clearly been lavished on it, it wasn’t possible to disguise the fact that the plot was thinner than (insert lame but topical size zero related pun here) and that the three sailor chappies remained unforgivably interchangeable throughout.

The Importance Of Being Interesting

Prior to the Whingers’ bash on the weekend I managed to squeeze in a trip to Jermyn Street Theatre. If you’ve not had the pleasure, this is a little basement theatre tucked beneath the Getti Restaurant, kind of charming in its own way despite some of the most cramped seating of any fringe venue I’ve been to. Indeed the two men sitting beside me had to resort to some increasingly elaborate seat gymnastics to retain blood flow in their lower limbs. At least that’s what I assume they were up to.

The current production is a revival of The Importance Of Being Earnest, a play of such comic perfection it would take a fairly determined director to make a hash of it. And this staging, by the fringe company Antic Disposition, does indeed avoid anything resembling a hash-making. In fact, theirs is a pleasant, conventional, entirely competent production. Straight, solid and safe. Determinedly dependable. Do you see a pattern emerging? The only vaguely novel element in this version was the casting of James Pellow as the fearsome Lady Bracknell, but even this bit of cross-gender casting malarkey seemed a tad obvious, and Pellow’s performance felt rather subdued.

There was nothing very wrong with the production, the acting was decent, and the audience chuckled in all the right places. It’s just that there was nothing there likely to make it stick in the memory, nothing to make you poke your friends repeatedly on the shoulder, when you meet for a drink afterwards, and annoy them by saying: “you really must go and see this show.” (The way I did after seeing Ridiculusmus’ frenetic two-man staging of the play). Maybe I’m being too harsh. Not everything has to be daring and rule-bending. Or have a singing polar bear. But there should be a spark - of life, of love for the text, of something – and there simply wasn’t one discernable here.

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.

Hot In Here?

If you live in London, you may have seen the posters on the tube. Four podgy cartoon women doing high-kicks beneath the strapline Menopause The Musical. You may have seen them, chuckled a little and/or sneered, and filed them away in the back of your brain as something you will never, ever be going to see ever – which is pretty much what I did too.

But then I found myself thinking that I am a woman and the menopause is something that will one day happen to me, and it isn’t something to be scared of or ignored. In fact maybe it is worth singing about, why not?

I mentioned I was going to my mother, because being, you know, a woman whose 50th birthday was well behind her, I thought she might be interested and want to come with me. However she looked slightly alarmed at the prospect and declared rather too quickly that she already had plans for that night. Even though I know for a fact these plans involved uncorking a bottle of Merlot and watching House, I thought it was telling that she preferred this to watching a musical about hot flushes. Would actual menopausal women want to watch such a thing?

The answer is yes, oh yes, they would. I haven’t seen such predominantly female crowd since I went to see Dirty Dancing. There were only about three men in the auditorium and I wondered what they had done wrong recently to warrant being dragged along to this.

The show has been a huge global success, and since 2001 it has played in cities all across America and Australia; now it has arrived in London, to the Shaw Theatre, which has to be one of the most charmless venues in London, tucked away in the Novotel near Euston Station – an utterly anonymous space. This did not bode well. The set was cheap-looking and covered with Marks and Spencers logos in the most overt display of corporate sponsorship in the theatre that I’ve ever come across.

The show itself consisted of four intentionally stereotypical women, a housewife, a business women, an aging actress and a Per Una wearing hippy type, singing familiar songs from the 1950s and 60s that had been slightly reworked to include references to night sweats and elasticated-waist trousers. And that was pretty much it. For two bloody hours. And yet the majority of the audience loved it, they lapped it up, to the point where their enthusiasm became a little infectious.

But after a while I found myself becoming quite dispirited with the whole thing. This was the laughter of recognition, not anything more. The message was that, yes, women have hot flushes and it can be embarrassing but it can also be quite funny, however there were no ideas to engage with beyond that. It was patronising and simplistic, pretty damn dismal in fact. The emotional impact of the menopause, of seeing society’s view of you as a woman shift as you got older, was not really touched upon at all and any tricky issue, like HRT or loss of libido were also brushed aside. Instead the production veered dramatically in the other direction with a penultimate number which involved Su Pollard singing a song that was in essence an ode to wanking herself off (now there’s a sentence I never thought I’d type).

I felt disappointed both for, and a little bit in, the other women in the audience, yet in the main they seemed to be loving it, with a large number dashing on stage to join in with the final dance number. I left the theatre feeling more than a little confused, distinctly unclean and oddly desirous of an M&S sandwich.

Familiar Feeling

This has happened before.

Last night at the theatre I was surrounded by people in fits of laughter while I just sat there straight-faced and bemused. Yes, I chuckled occasionally, but on the whole I was definitely, you know, not getting it.

The show was Peepolykus’ three-man staging of The Hound Of The Baskervilles, it had got decent reviews when it opened in Leeds last year and its transfer to London was something I had rather been looking forward to. However, for some reason, the humour just didn’t work for me. I found many of the jokes laboured and have seen this sort of small-cast/big-story parody done better elsewhere – the current production of The 39 Steps at the Criterion springing most immediately to mind. I waited for something to click, for the joke or the scene that would draw me in, but it just never happened. And yet, all around me, people were laughing so hard they seemed in real danger of having their minor organs evacuate their bodies through their nostrils.

I began to worry that this was somehow my fault, that I was somehow deficient for not finding this rather clumsy and patchy comedy life-threateningly funny. Fortunately I had gone along with Not French Clair, who seemed equally perplexed and unamused. On the interval, and at the end of the show, we found it necessary to reassure each other that we weren’t alone in our bemusement, that we weren’t both in some way broken.

As I said, this isn’t the first time this has happened (hello Spamalot) but it’s always disconcerting when it does. And it’s a shame as the cast were not untaleneted and had a nice rapport with one another; I just found the whole thing a bit meh. No actually, on reflection, a little less than ‘meh’, maybe simply ‘eh.’

The Lemon Tree Lives

For my birthday last year, the L half of D&L bought me a little lemon tree (along with a little bottle of gin, presumably so that when it bore fruit I could make lots of little gin and tonics – and then, you know, pour them all in to one big glass).

However, and perhaps predictably, after two months of living with me the lemon tree started to look rather unwell indeed. Its leaves shrivelled and dried, and it became a somewhat sad and twiggy thing. This could be down to our flat's rather aggressive central heating, but I suspected it was somehow my fault, that my lemon-tree tending skills were sub-standard. I was at a bit of a low ebb at the time and, of course, this became Just Another Thing In My Life That I Had Managed To Fuck Up through my general uselessness.

But still I continued to water and look after what remained of my lemon tree. And, last week, I noticed proper shooty green things – leaves and everything – protruding from what were recently dry and bare stems. I was so happy and excited I cried a tiny bit.

So no theatre this week, as you may have gathered. I’ve actually been enjoying having a run of evenings to myself and have been spending some quality time with the glinty box in the corner of my living room. As I don’t usually watch much television, I am however a bit behind on most things - still I enjoyed learning that selling kisses to old men in Richmond pubs is a legitimate business activity and not at all cheapening and tawdry. Who knew?

Easter. In Lists.

1) Driving from Dorset to London via windy back-roads and pretty villages is a very satisfying way indeed to spend a Bank Holiday Monday.

2) They’re very big on flinty walls in Winchester.

3) Yeovil is not a place to stop for a mid-drive snack or for any reason actually. ‘Tis dull as anything.

4) Two cups of coffee is all it takes these days to give me the Twitches.

Easter Egg Consumption:

1 Chocolate. Dark. Purchased from a quality high-street confectioner.
1 Real-actual-egg egg. Hard boiled. Shell dyed red with onion skins in a nod to eastern European ancestry.

Sheep sightings:
Many. Very, very many.

Goat sightings:
Zero. Not a one. Fluffy or otherwise.

The Elephant Man

The latest show at the smaller of the Trafalgar Studios’ performance spaces is a staging of Bernard Pomerance’s 1977 play of The Elephant Man. The story of the short life of Joseph Merrick is a familiar one, most memorably told in David Lynch’s film. Abandoned as a child, he was forced to work in a freak show before being taken in by surgeon Frederick Treves at the London Hospital. Here he soon became a society favourite, spending his time in the company of artists and aristocrats (though arguably still on display).

In the film Merrick was played by John Hurt, buried under a mound of facial prosthetics. Here they make no attempt to replicate the man’s considerable deformities; instead they are solely conveyed through the contorted movement and speech of actor Marc Pickering. He was the chap who played Johnny Depp’s sidekick Young Masbeth in Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow and is now all growed up. I know, I saw. (And though there’s a joke begging to be made here about the Elephant Man’s trunk, I shall step around it, because I am a Nice Girl). Anyway it’s his subtle and touching performance that holds this solid but unspectacular revival together. The production feels rather cramped in the tiny subterranean studio space. Some plays can stand a simple, stripped down staging, but this just felt hugely lacking in the atmosphere department. Not as hideous as some of the critics have been saying, but still a rather plodding and uninspiring piece of theatre.

Wonderful World?

I traipsed over to the Royal Court last night to see Anthony Neilson’s new play The Wonderful World Of Dissocia. Now Neilson has been making a lot of noise lately in the Guardian and elsewhere about how so many modern plays are irrelevant and dull and advising young playwrights to be, well, less boring. And while a lot of what he has to say is valid, that kind of slightly self-aggrandising, I-hold-all-the-answers talk does make people (well, me anyway) arrive at the theatre with a ‘come on then – entertain me’ attitude.

The play is about a young woman called Lisa, who in the first half is lost in her own internal world, a land called Dissocia. It’s a colourful place, where people frequently break into song and cars can fly, a wee bit Wizard of Oz, a tad Alice in Wonderland with a whole heap of League Of Gentlemen thrown on top and maybe a smidgen of The 5000 Fingers of Dr T chucked in for good measure. She’s on a quest – searching for a lost hour (the clocks went back while she was on a plane, crossing over time-zones, or something, and she ended up minus one hour, her life unbalanced as a result). Here she encounters numerous oddball characters, including a pair of Insecurity Guards and a clipboard-toting woman whose job it is to suffer pain on other people’s behalf.

The second half is completely different from what went before. Now Lisa is in hospital, having clearly suffered a psychotic episode. These scenes play out against a sterile white background, with minimal dialogue. The set is behind a glass panel and the sound is slightly distorted. It’s an effective, unsettling technique. Indeed, despite my reservations, some elements of the play work very well. And though it is not nearly as clever as it thinks it is (there are some very heavy-handed and poorly judged moments in the Dissocia scenes), it achieved Neilson’s aims – it kept me engaged. I’m not sure Neilson had anything particularly enlightening to say on mental illness, but the play in parts, both angered and amused me, it was impossible to just sit there passively soaking this stuff up, it demanded a response of some kind. Even if that response was to get quite upset and walk out as the woman sitting behind me did.

Oh, and did I mention it had a goat in it? Only not the cute fluffy kind like in The Rose Tattoo, no – this goat was a very bad goat that did very bad things. I certainly did not want one of these. The singing polar bear on the other hand…

On Loveliness

This weekend was almost wholly composed of wedding. It was very weddingy indeed.

This is only the second wedding I have ever attended ever and given that it was for two good friends who I have known for many years, it’s impossible for me to write much more on the matter without risking some flagrant overuse of the word ‘lovely’ and a probable descent into unabashed sentiment. So I shall desist. (But it was lovely).

By Any Other Name

French Claire and I were at the National last night for their new production of The Rose Tattoo. It’s very upbeat for Tennessee Williams, love prevails (kind of) and at least no one gets carted off to the loony bin. Zoe Wanamaker plays Serafina delle Rose, a Sicilian widow, still deep in mourning after the death of her husband three years ago. We know this because her head lolls a lot when she speaks and she wears a stained and frayed nightie for a lot of the time. Wanamaker gets to do some big, ‘accenty’ acting, throwing up her arms in despair and spitting at the local crone for giving her the evil eye, that kind of thing.

This all started to get a bit much by the interval and, not knowing the play, I was wondering where on earth it would go. But instead of a descent into madness and alcoholism or some combination of the two (for Serafina not me, though I was on the red wine), a bumbling truck driving Sicilian stumbles into her tin-roofed shack and things start to look up. Though the play definitely overstays its welcome at nearly three hours, I did start to warm to it during these later scenes, I laughed a good deal, and even Wanamaker’s performance and the over-egged rose symbolism grated less. I suspect it helps that we went on press night; the original director of this production, Stephen Pimlott, died midway through rehearsals and there seemed to be a lot of determined good feeling in the audience.

And like these chaps here I too found myself unduly preoccupied by the onstage presence of a real goat – does it have an understudy? What if it gets stage fright? What if it spots a tempting Waitrose bag in the front row and decides it doesn’t want to do a nice circuit of the Olivier with the cute stage school children, but fancies an early supper? Plus, ignorant urban type that I am, I didn’t know that goats were fluffy. I think I kinda want one.

A Small Good Thing

My friend John-in-Sheffield saw Fin Kennedy's new play How To Disappear Completely... at the Crucible Studio yesterday and loved it. His review appears here if you're interested.

Spring Sprung

How lovely is it, to leave the office when it’s still light outside?

Very. Especially yesterday when people were lounging in Soho Square with books and beers, and lingering on pavements chatting, instead of stalking towards the nearest tube station with their heads down. I almost had a little ‘oh yeah, that’s right, this is why I love this city’ moment. Until, that is, some chap, busy yelling into his mobile phone, shouldered into me. Roughly, without a backwards glance. There was plenty of pavement space and I am Tall For A Girl and wear a purple coat, so not exactly invisible. The moment was rather lost after that.

Grumble, growl.

Perchance To Dream

Well, there was a weekend, and it was nice and warm with sleeping and eating and stuff. And there was some theatre because there usually is. The Skin Game at the Orange Tree, since you ask, requiring a trek out to Richmond. And yes the ten-minutes-on-the-train journey to Richmond counts as a trek, as does anything requiring movement outside my zone two comfort bubble.

The Skin Game is the latest production in the theatre’s season of infrequently revived Victorian and Edwardian plays. Written in 1920, by John Galsworthy, it dealt with a messy family clash between the Old Money aristocratic Hillcrists and the self-made New Money Hornblowers. There was a blackmail and scandal and a woman with a ‘past.’ (I wish I had a ‘past’). It was dramatic, well-acted and engaging and, while it descends into melodrama in the second half, it is well worth seeing.

However, as with previous trips to the Orange Tree, I was very aware of being one of the youngest people in the venue, not by a few years, but by a few decades. Which seems a shame, as the work they stage is consistently ambitious and thought-provoking, work that deserves to be seen by a wider audience then they currently seem to attract.

The theatre’s in-the-round lay-out does mean you can play ‘spot-the-sleeper’ with ease though. Friday’s count: two definites, plus one chap who may have been just ‘resting his eyes.’ A lot.

At The White Bear

So I finally made it to the White Bear on Thursday, coughing having sufficiently abated that I could sit through two hours of Shakespeare and not make the cast and audience hate me. If you’ve never had the pleasure of the White Bear, it’s a proper pub-pub in Kennington with permanently smoky air and ‘regulars’ who are rather unsteady on their feet and repeat themselves a lot: “This friend of mine, Charlie, he went skiing, right, skiing. Off skiing, somewhere people go to ski. Skiing I tell ya.” And the play, a fringe production of Timon Of Athens was OK, quite good in moments – a review will appear here at some point.

In other news it now seems like Wandsworth Council in their wisdom will not be withdrawing funding from the BAC after all. Which is a good thing. Now if only I could get them to actually come and collect the bloody, sodding, bloody cooker that’s been sat outside our flat for the past fortnight, given that they have taken my actual money to do just that very thing, then I would be happy.

Lovely Links

Over there, on the right, beneath the woefully inadaquate profile thingy, is a list of blogs that are worth investigating. I am currently enjoying muchly this site: little.red.boat. It is very, very funny. Very. And the West End Whingers have got themselves one of the best theatre blogs on the web. Go. Read. Make inappropriate snorty noises in the office when you should be working.

Not At The White Bear

So, as a result of aforementioned high probability of my expiring through coughing (and after being so rude about the Richmond audience for their high phlegm factor), I have been forced to postpone tonight’s trip to the White Bear in Kennington, as due to its shoe-box like dimensions, I doubt either the actors or my fellow audience members would appreciate having me in the front row. So instead of Timon Of Athens my night now involves large amounts of pasta and perhaps the last couple of chapters of a William Boyd.

Also at the risk of becoming one of the seemingly endless numbers of people blogging about tube-iquette, but having little else to write about today bar Strepsil consumption, you’ll have to bear with me. On the Northern Line this morning I collided with a chap on the stairs and we did that mutual “whoops-sorry” shrug-and-smile thing, as per usual. And then he gave me a little, almost affectionate, pat on the shoulder, before walking away. I admit I may have been looking particularly sniffly and pathetic but this is a new one on me. It is also, of course, a massive improvement on the slightly sozzled middle-aged chap who gave me a strange from-behind bear-hug a couple of weeks back as I made my way home from the Young Vic, slurring: “Sorry, I just had to touch you,” into my ear before staggering off towards Lavender Hill. That was just odd and unpleasant. And so unexpected I didn’t have the chance to employ my elbows in any useful way whatsoever.

C'est La Vie

This weekend was supposed to be spent in Paris but the Eurostar very inconsiderately decided to catch fire or some such, hampering my travel plans. So instead of sipping a café crème in some charming Left Bank pavement café, I find myself sheltering from icy winds in the Starbucks near my office, drinking over-sweet coffee flavoured foam, absent-mindedly doodling over my copy of The Times, and dreaming of the City of Lights. Plus if my raspy throat and prickly eyes are to be believed, I’m coming down with a cold, so for the next few days I will be that irritating coughing person sitting right behind you in the theatre…

Feed Me, Seymour

Met Sarah B after work on Thursday for a large, much-much-much-needed glass of Merlot and a hasty spot of dinner before heading to the Duke Of York’s Theatre to see Little Shop Of Horrors.

This is another transfer from the Menier Chocolate Factory who sent Sunday In The Park With George to the West End last summer. The Menier is also the place where Laura and I slowly expired from heat exhaustion during a sauna-like performance of The Last Five Years, but I'm learning not to hold that against it. I don't hold grudges, no, I swallow my hate, I bottle it safely away. Far healthier.

Anyway their version of Little Shop itself was great fun, slick and witty, silly yet endearing. If you don't already know the play, it's based on a 1950s B-movie, a Roger Corman film about one of life's losers, a weedy chap called Seymour, who works in a florist - and the killer plant that promises him good fortune in exchange for food (and we're not talking Baby Bio here.) The Menier's production is hugely entertaining, hitting just the right kitsch tone, and boasts fantastic performances from everyone involved, particularly Sheridan Smith as Seymour's breathy love-interest Audrey, who managed during one number, to simultaneously sing and weep - quite a difficult thing to pull off, I’d imagine.

However I did think the production's centre-piece, the blood-thirsty plant Audrey II, - though superbly voiced by Mike McShane - was a bit of a let down. I remember a lot of talk, when the show opened at the Menier, of all the money they’d spent on it, changing the design, making it properly scary, so how come it still looked like a big green dustbin with teeth? Was that really the best they could come up with?

The only new additon to the cast since the transfer, is Alistair McGowan, the long-faced impressionist guy of the telly; he was great fun as Audrey’s vile dentist boyfriend Orin (a part memorably played by Steve Martin in the 1980s film version). A minor prop malfunction, in the scene where he has Seymour in the dentist’s chair, almost caused him to corpse – but he pulled himself together quickly and fortunately it’s the kind of show where the odd involuntray giggle just adds to the charm. The shoo-wopping three-girl chorus who sing back-up on all of the songs were also superb, perhaps the best thing in it. Not only did they have great voices but spot-on comic timing as well. So, yes in short, 'twas a brilliant evening, very entertaining – and the perfect antidote to a monumentally crappy day at the office.

Margaritas on a Monday

Last night, for the second week in a row, Lisa made a pitcher of margaritas for no good reason other than she felt like making some (teaching does that to you, I guess). Margaritas on a Monday – that’s one of the reasons Lisa makes a fantastic flatmate. Some weeks we buzz around, doing our own things, and barely see each other, and indeed last night by the time I’d lugged my body back from the office she was about to disappear to her room in order to embark some serious lesson planning, so these brief cocktail interludes are very welcome.

Tour de France

I spent the weekend out in the suburbs at my mum’s house, for a couple of blissful days that revolved primarily around sitting on the sofa, eating my way through a packet of dark chocolate-dipped ginger biscuits and wading through the Sunday papers. God knows how I found the time, but I did manage to crow-bar a trip to Richmond Theatre into my hectic schedule - to see English Touring Theatre’s revival of Terence Rattigan’s French Without Tears. Written in 1936, it’s a frothy comedy set on the west coast of France where a group of would-be diplomats are taking French classes. It’s all rather so-so stuff – until the interval when everything kind of clicks and the precision of Rattigan’s comic writing reveals itself. The second half was very well executed and very, very funny, as the three principal male characters fret and fuss about the advances of a predatory female in their midst. It’s dated, inevitably, but still highly entertaining.

It’s been ages since I’ve been to see anything at Richmond and luckily there was a classic Richmond audience in to make the experience complete. Two elderly ladies a couple of rows behind me were having a good old catch-up chat that continued well in to the first act, a woman a few seats along from me was busy repeating every joke, word for word, to her mother, and – just for good measure – there were a couple of near-fatal-sounding coughing spasms too, seemingly planned, as these things are, to coincide with the very quietest on-stage episodes.

Kristin At Koko

I love going to theatre. Obviously. I wouldn’t spend so much of my life sitting in front of a stage if that wasn’t the case. But I do sometimes miss other non-theatrey pursuits. I used to be a regular gig-goer but over recent years one has rather eclipsed the other. So I couldn’t pass up the chance to see one of my favourite artists, Kristin Hersh, play Koko on Wednesday night, could I? Koko’s a new one on me. All red and glittery, like being in the belly of a big gay whale. And Hersh was reliably great though I prefer it when she dispenses with her band-mates and goes acoustic.

However what I found myself noticing most was how, well, not at the theatre I was. For a start I somehow seem to have forgotten how late these things start. Hersh is a considerate performer and she didn’t keep us waiting but still there was a lot of milling about. And then there’s the people sending serial text messages, taking pictures on their phones, and chatting away through the songs they didn’t know – all crimes punishable by the British breach-of-etiquette death stare at the theatre.

Plus there’s all that encore faffing. KH played a storming version of Me And My Charms after she came back on stage, but even though I enjoyed it I found myself manoeuvring myself subtly towards the exit, so I could make a break for the tube at the end of her set before the mass exodus. A great gig and a great night, but none of these things used to bother me before. Just a blip I hope.

A King Among Men

What happens if the heir to the throne should (gasp) fall in love with a Muslim girl? And not just fall in love, mind, but want to marry her and even ponder converting to Islam himself. This is the premise that Alistair Beaton uses as a springboard for King Of Hearts his entertaining if uneven new comedy at Hampstead Theatre.

In a near and familiar future, an accident has left the King in a coma, and the labour Prime Minister, the leader of the opposition, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the two young princes (one decent and level-headed and the other a bit of a boozer with a bad attitude – who, for the purposes of the play, are called 'Richard' and 'Arthur' respectively) have gathered in Sandringham where their father's life support is due to be switched off. It then turns out that the elder prince has been dating a Muslim and the politicians practically self-combust in panic.

For me the main problem with the play was that it never seemed quite sure whether it wanted to be a satire or a full-on farce. Beaton raised some interesting points about the relationship between church and state and the limits of tolerance in modern Britain, but he seems reluctant to stray too far from stock farce situations, men in underpants hiding behind sofas, that kind of thing. There were some great performances from the ensemble cast and a good handful of laugh-out-loud moments, but I do wish the play had had sharper satirical teeth. It kind of lost momentum after the interval and the tacked-on epilogue rather confirmed the idea that perhaps Beaton had come up with this intriguing scenario and then didn't quite know what to do with it. But still it’s slicker and more entertaining than the pleasant but rather overrated Whipping It Up, which recently transferred to the New Ambassadors, and benefits from, unlike the last Royal Farce to hit London stages, a complete lack of involvement from Toby Young.

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.

The Reporter

Last night was spent on the ridiculously uncomfortable seats of the National’s Cottesloe Theatre for Nicholas Wright’s new play The Reporter, a study of the life and suicide of the BBC correspondent and former MI6 operative, James Mossman. Ben Chaplin (someone Lisa is physically incapable of talking about without employing the word ‘yummy’, often several times in the same sentence) plays Mossman and he plays him well. The role is written almost as if Mossman were delivering an on-air report on his own life, and Chaplin’s delivery, all clipped English consonants, can’t be faulted.

The play is also fascinating on the ways in which onscreen journalism has evolved. The scenes of Mossman and Robin Day presenting Panorama were superbly handled, full of brilliant little details. I loved the way Mossman’s boss at the BBC paused for a cup of tea and a fig roll before ticking him off over a wayward interview. Mossman’s ‘demotion’ to the role of arts journalist also lead to lot of wry laughter from an audience in which arts journalists made up a major percentage.

Wright doesn’t provide any concrete answers to why Mossman killed himself (leaving a note that read: “I can’t bear it any longer, though I don’t know what ‘it’ is”), but then how could he? Despite that, this is still the most thought-provoking and engaging play I’ve seen so far this year. Fascinating stuff.

An Indian Epic

Back to the Lyric on Wednesday for David Farr’s Ramayana. I love the work Farr is doing at the Lyric and his last stab at a big epic narrative, The Odyssey was fantastic I thought, inventive and memorable. But this, an adaptation of the story of Rama and Sita, seemed static and pedestrian in comparison. There was too much exposition and nothing as visually startling as the lumbering Cyclops from The Odyssey.

The way the text had been updated also struck me as rather awkward, the dialogue frequently veered from the overtly poetic to the casual and contemporary (men dressed as monkeys making appalling puns about 'gorilla warfare,' that kind of thing). It felt confused and unsure of itself, a little rough around the edges but not in a good way. I did like it however when one of the actors clambered out into the audience, treading on seat backs (and probably on the odd theatre-goer as well), the production could have used a few more moments like that.

Yesterday, I was at North London's Pleasance Theatre for the opening night of David Strassman’s new show. He’s that ventriloquist chap with the demonic Chucky-doll dummy. Strassman plays the affable straight-man, while the puppet gets to be all foul-mouthed and nasty (it spits as well, as those in the front row found out). It was very funny, in a crude, dick-jokey kind of way, and as a result you simply don’t notice the technical precision of it all, the constant juggling of characters and voices.

The show had a nice sinister feeling as well, playing on the idea that his dummies were slowly taking over. It's not the most original idea, certainly not if you've seen Magic, the faintly ropey Anthony Hopkins’ ventriloquist-slowly-driven-mad-by dummy movie (now there's a genre), but it worked well in context.

If you’ve seen Strassman perform before, then there’s not much that's new going on here. Having seen his act on TV, I knew the man had an interest in robotics, that his dummies were a little more advanced then they first appeared, but if I'm honest, even though I knew what was coming, when the puppets came to life at the end, when their eyes opened and their heads began to swivel, it was still pretty damn creepy.

Weekend Escape

Was down in Kent on the weekend, visiting French Claire. Nice to be out of the city and surrounded by green (see photo); we went for a long country drive on Sunday and attempted a bit of a stroll near the coast, though our plans in this regard were cut short by a combination of unseasonable weather and inappropriate city-girl footwear. Ended up having a nice long lunch - with cake - but we did see the sea from the car on the drive back.

No theatre this week as of yet. But I saw a preview of Factory Girl on Monday, the biopic of Edie Sedgwick, starring Sienna Miller. Sedgwick was the It Girl of her day, an heiress who became an icon, thanks to her involvement with Andy Warhol’s insular circle. Bit of disappointment I thought; very harsh in its treatment of Warhol. I don’t doubt he was a rather odd and unpleasant human being but it paints his abandonment of Sedgwick as the key factor in her decline. Guy Pearce, gaunt and pockmarked, gives a frighteningly cold performance as the artist and Miller doesn’t do too badly – she certainly looks the part – but it’s a poorly constructed film, too reliant on cinematic clichés and one that fails to say anything particularly enlightening about the world it’s portraying.

Snow

Wow. It snows and everything grinds to halt. It has snowed before hasn’t it? I mean, we are a country where from time to time snow does fall, right? Not in large quantities and not that often. But it does happen. From the news coverage and general fussing, it feels otherwise. Sloshing my way into work this morning, there were delays on the trains and the world’s most stoic commuter bottleneck at the Waterloo entrance to the Northern Line. Needless to say lateness ensued.

No lateness on my part last night, fortunately. I went to see Typo, a darkly comic two-hander about modern office life, at the Tristan Bates Theatre, a cool little studio space just off Shaftesbury Avenue and, I admit, a place I’ve walked past on numerous occasions but never actually visited. The play, a series of loosely connected episodes, was tightly written and greatly enjoyable, especially one scene, a Kafkaesque job interview, where a hapless guy has essentially meaningless questions aggressively fired at him by a scary, suited woman. The cast did wonders with just a couple of office chairs and a folding table (which doubles entertainingly as a photocopier at one point) and, at just an hour in length, it recognises its limits and bows out before it becomes repetitious or tired. A skill I wish more productions would learn.

Mode Of The Man

Visited the National last night for Nicholas Hytner’s The Man Of Mode, a modern update of George Etherege’s 1676 comedy of manners. The contemporary resetting worked well, all swish bars and galleries and knowing references to Diptych candles, but it took an age to get going, never really taking off for me until Rory Kinnear arrived onstage playing the ludicrous Sir Fopling Flutter. The chief problem for me was Tom Hardy’s Dorimant, the main character and a philanderer extraordinaire, juggling three women without creasing his designer suit. He had the necessary alpha-male egotism but none of the charisma such a role demanded. Whereas Kinnear as Fopling, a figure of fun in tassled denim, gave a far more sympathetic and charming performance. This slight off-balance stopped the production rising above being anything more than a superficial study of superficiality. Something of missed opportunity I thought, though great fun in the second half.

All That Jazz

Two very different fringe shows occupied my time last week. First up, was Theatre 503 and their latest show The Atheist, a monologue by Ronan Noone about an amoral journalist. Now one of my pet hates has to be the standard caricature, still trotted out with some regularity, of the journalist as evil incarnate, completely void of principles and willing to sell their own kids for a story. It’s the laziest kind of writing. But though he’s undeniably one of humanity’s more ‘flawed’ products, Augustine Early, the (anti-)hero of The Atheist has enough going on as a character to raise him above this level. Noone has a winningly filthy imagination and understands how to sculpt a character from a few minimal details. The play itself is the tallest of tales, all sex scandals and blackmail, plus a particularly novel, bedroom-related use of a bungee cord. As Early, Ben Porter does a decent job, though on the night I saw him, he tripped over his words a fair few times in the second half, just managing to pull things back from the edge. It’s a verbose role to be fair though, a challenge for any actor.

Later in the week The Stage sent me over to the Arcola to see Jack Shepherd’s jazz club-centric play Chasing The Moment. This was an ensemble piece about a jazz quartet struggling against changing musical tastes. The actors all played their instruments and the interval was used to stage a brief (and pretty decent) set. It meandered a bit in its desire to let every character say their piece, to have their solo as it were, but the performances kept things moving, particularly Clifford Samuel as a young drummer who worries about not having the approval of his strict West Indian father.

After all that, theatre had to take a backseat on the weekend; I had a couple of friends, the Gin Soaked Boy, L&D, the usual lot, over to dinner, with me on kitchen duty since Lisa was elsewhere. Given how limited my culinary range is (and that I consumed almost an entire bottle of Sauvignon Blanc purely in the prep stages last time I offered to cook for anyone), I was pretty nervous. And though I kept things simple – you can’t go wrong with pasta (well I probably could, but I was hoping I wouldn’t) – I still fretted a bit that everything would somehow conspire to go tits up. I was especially worried about how I would navigate the whole vegeterian/kosher/nut allergy hurdle that feeding the five of us presented me with. In the end it was a reasonable success though, or at least I thought so – food got eaten, drink got drunk, nobody went into anaphylaxis – and I enjoyed playing host. Must repeat in the near future.

Shakespeare x 2

Long time, no blog. Spent much of the weekend down in the suburbs for my mother’s birthday do (and much of the week beforehand fretting over the details of said do) but it all came together nicely.

Last week was very Shakespeare-heavy. On Monday I went to see the RSC’s Antony and Cleopatra, now at the Novello. It was a gripping production with some strong performances, but the play itself I found problematic. W H Auden said that if he could save just one of Shakespeare's plays, it would be this one, but I really don’t see the appeal. Shakespeare’s Egyptian Queen behaves for the most part like a spoiled teenage girl in the midst of an adolescent passion; this isn’t a woman I understood or cared about, despite Harriet Walter’s best attempt to give her a certain dignity. Patrick Stewart made a highly charismatic Antony, but actually I thought John Hopkins’ Caesar made an equally strong impression. This production came to London trailing glowing reviews; I'm usually wary of buying into such hype, but the critical reception had been so unanimously warm I was rather excited about having secured tickets. And inevitably my expectations were inflated as a result. And while this A & C didn’t exactly leave me reeling, it certainly had its strengths - I could see what all the fuss was about, despite the fact that the play itself is not destined to become one of my favourites.

On Thursday I went back to the Hammersmith Lyric with website Clair to see the new Kneehigh production of Cymbeline. Now, as I may have mentioned once or twice in the past, I absolutely adored their production of Angela Carter’s Nights At The Circus. And this new work proved to be equally dazzling and inventive, if not quite so moving. Scrapping most of Shakespeare’s verse, but retaining the framework of the plot, Emma Rice’s production was overflowing with inspired details. As with Nights, there was much live music coupled with a strong sense of warmth and wonder – plus the sight of the tiny Hayley Carmichael, as the tormented Imogen, disguised as a hoodie called Ian. Her performance was so sweet and endearing - perky without being irritating (not easy to do, I suspect). Given the liberties it takes with the text, I suspect it’s a love it or hate kind of show, but if you know Kneehigh and like what they do you should definitely try and catch it while it's in London. It’s quite brilliant.

New Year's Resolutions

Well, it’s been a while since I last posted. I thought some more about putting together an end-of-year best-of list to put on here, but in the end decided against it. This is was partially down to festive procrastinating, mainly based around chocolate consumption and the fact I was given Murakami’s The Wind Up Bird Chronicles for Christmas and have spent every spare moment since dipping into it. The odd hangover may have played a part too. But mainly down to what I felt was the pointlessness of the task – there were a lot of supposedly important shows that I missed, some because they weren’t my cup of tea, some I will attempt to catch up on this year if I can – but, while it’s impossible for one person to see everything, it does rather impact on my ability to pick an over-arching best-of. Plus the time-banding is rather restrictive: one of the best things in a long way, I saw in 2006 was Deavid Eldridge’s Festen, which I finally caught on tour at Richmond Theatre – in fact my eagerness to tell everyone how brilliant I thought it was, was one of the things that prompted me to start this blog. Trouble is, having been around for some time, first at the Almeida and then in the West End, it's hardly a 2006 show.

Anyway - the venue that made me happiest last year was, without a doubt, the Orange Tree in Richmond. Every show I saw there engaged me in some way, from the fluffy delights of The Pirates Of Penzance to their staging of Ben Brown’s Larkin With Women which, for various reasons, left a major impression on me. My favourite single scene of any production was that wonderful moment in the Arcola’s production of Yerma when the village women gathered together to wash their clothes and a perfect synergy developed between their onstage actions and the percussive backing music. Huge arcs of water filled the air and the sheer energy of the moment reminded me why theatre is still such a vital and wonderful medium, an experience unlike any other. Running a close second, was the haunting closing scene of Kneehigh’s Nights At The Circus at the Lyric, as Fevvers and Gisli Orn Gardarsson’s Walser spun in mid-air, reaching for each other, clinging to each other; sometimes I find physical theatre techniques can trample the narrative, but in this case they worked in perfect harmony with Angela Carter’s rich and magical source novel.

In the absence of any Big List, I thought I’d at least share my theatre resolutions for the year.

1) I will attempt to be less lazy. I told pretty much everyone I know that I was determined to see The Life Of Galileo at the National before it finished its run, and did I go? No. Despite it being part of the Travelex £10 season and being at my favourite venue. I really regret missing it, as nearly everyone I’ve spoken to who did see it, loved it.

2) In a similar vein, I will make a real attempt to see productions of plays I haven’t seen before (something I’ll be doing next week in fact – I’m down to see both the RSC's Antony and Cleopatra and Kneehigh's Cymbeline, neither of which I’ve seen on stage before).

3) I will try and see more productions later in the run. Press nights have their perks undoubtedly, but seeing a play surrounded by critics and the cast members’ mums doesn’t really reflect the reality of going to the theatre. When you see a play gradually connect with a gang of rowdy teenagers who’ve been dragged along by their teacher, as Roy Williams’ Little Sweet Thing did so well when I saw it on a weekday matinee, nothing quite beats that.

4) If I’m going to see a production on the weekend, I will phone and check just exactly what sections of the underground they are digging up that day, or I’ll just leave with an extra hour to spare even if it means sitting in the theatre bar for an age beforehand (not exactly a chore) – I have no intention of repeating my experience at the Bush in November.

5) If I go back to the Menier Chocolate Factory I will not do so on the hottest day of the year. Twice I’ve found myself slowly melting in what I’m sure is an otherwise lovely venue. (This year I learned my lesson and packed a little Chinese paper fan, while my fellow audience members struggled with those little battery-powered ones they were handing out on the door).

Pirates at the Orange Tree

Thursday was my last day at work before Christmas and my last trip to the theatre of 2006. Lisa and I made the trek out to Richmond (trek is perhaps overstating a 15 minute train journey, but hell, it was cold, really cold) to see the Orange Tree's festive staging of Chris Monks' The Pirates Of Penzance. And it was worth the trip. Monks' production rejigs the Gilbert and Sullivan classic to included black-suited wiseguys and abseiling posh girls, a wonderfully myopic heroine and a Major General in a wetsuit and flippers. Preposterous, yes, but fantastic fun. The production had a delightfully ramshackle quality - it was silly, sweet and didn't outstay its welcome. The perfect way to round up my theatrical year.

Much Ado about Something

It’s mid December and, along with Christms present panic (two weeks to go and shamefully little done), come those inevitable end-of-year round-ups in the papers, all the critics busy picking their best plays and whatnot, summarising a year’s worth of theatre in a few snappy paragraphs.

I’m not sure I like the process - though I read them all of course, I always read them – it seems to leave little room for the plays that moved you on some level but that might not have been the most polished or successful of productions, the interesting failures, the guilty pleasures. So I’m not going to inflict my top five on you here, (not yet anyway – I may cave). Having said that, the play I saw last night may well be a candidate for such a theoretical list. I was at the lavishly revamped Novello for the opening of the London transfer of the RSC’s Much Ado About Nothing. Being one of about three people in the UK who found Green Wing terminally unamusing (all those little speeded up bits did nothing to make it any funnier) I wasn’t overly thrilled at the casting of the angular Tamsin Grieg as Beatrice, but though I thought she overplayed wildly at times, she gradually won me over. As did the entire production. Set in pre-revolutionary Cuba, Marianne Elliot’s production was a wonderful, uplifting affair, full of music and dance, and brilliantly performed - especially, I thought, by Patrick Robinson as the Prince, an actor I first saw on stage some ten years ago when my A Level class went to see a touring production of The Country Wife at Woking Theatre. (Christ, my A Levels were ten years ago? Now I feel old).

All of the supporting cast were excellent and were it not for the large gentleman in the seat next to mine who slept (and snored) pretty much through the entirety of the first act, it would have been almost perfect. Still, it was definitely the best Shakespeare production I’ve seen this year.

A Dark Night at the National

Have decided my failure to engage with Love Song last week was a 50/50 split between my bad mood and the play’s inherent not-very-goodness. Because, despite the persistence of a certain sense of malaise throughout the remainder of the week, I found myself really enjoying Coram Boy at the National on Friday.

Melly Still’s production is an incredibly dark piece of theatre: dead babies and onstage birth, child trafficking and hard-hearted fathers, yet it somehow works as a family-targeted show (though certainly not for very small kids). Lisa loathed it last year, when it first played at the National, and even I shuddered slightly when they started producing little baby skeletons from the floor, but the plot drags you along and the sheer bombast of the play keeps you hooked. I found myself all tense and trembling during the end of the second half and all the people around me seemed rapt. (Except for the two women sitting directly beside me, who though they seemed to be enjoying it, felt the need to discuss every plot point in some detail, with only vaguely lowered voices; it was as if they were watching television in their own living room, no acknowledgement of the people around them who might not want each dramatic exchange pointlessly reiterated and in case you haven’t gathered, it was very, very annoying).

Love Song Leaves Me Cold

I’ve written before about how very often I arrive at the theatre, tired and in a flap and not really in the mood for engaging my brain with anything, but then I take my seat and the lights dim and slowly I’m swept up in another world. All the stresses of the day fade into the background. It doesn’t always happen of course, it takes a certain kind of production I guess, something in tune with what you’re feeling; but last night was the first time I can think of when quite the opposite has occurred. I had tickets for Love Song at the New Ambassadors, John Kolvenbach’s quirky, (kind of) romantic comedy, starring Neve Campbell and Cillian Murphy.

I’d heard mixed things, but was eager to see it – to make up my own mind. The play focuses on Murphy’s loner Beane, an extremely introverted character whose life is opened up by Neve Campbell’s urban ‘liberator’ – a kind of cat burglar on a moral mission, who steals his only spoon. Everything was so determinedly offbeat, and while I could see how some would find it sweet and charming, I just found myself sinking deeper into my seat until, by the end, I was enveloped in some dark malaise of my own making – unmoved and actually a little dejected. This wasn’t completely a result of the play itself which was often very funny in places – but I think you had to be in the right frame of mind to appreciate it and for whatever reason I just wasn’t. I found it overly whimsical and quite the opposite of uplifting. Indeed I scowled all the way to Waterloo. Go figure.