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.

The Road to Mecca at the Arcola

This engaging revival of Athol Fugard’s play, though at times ponderous, has many things to commend it, not least a memorable central performance from Linda Bassett.

Barefoot, with her fingers twisted inwards, Bassett plays Miss Helen, an elderly widow, who in the years following the death of her husband, has turned her small, tin-roofed house in Nieu-Bethesda, South Africa, into a work of art, full of glitter and colour. Her drive to create, to give shape to the pictures in her mind, has not been limited to the inside of the house - her garden is also overflowing with statues of wise men and owls, all aligned towards the east. (The play was based on the life of Helen Martins whose wonderful 'Owl House' still stands).

The villagers and the local church council are uneasy about Miss Helen’s work; to them it is bodering on idolatory. She has planted her peacocks and camels on good farming land, making her a subject of suspicion. Her art may have freed her spiritually and brought light into a life of darkness, but it has also isolated her.

Her few remaining friends include Marius, the local pastor, an unseen local girl, and Elsa, a determined young teacher who has just driven the twelve hours from Cape Town because she’s concerned about Miss Helen’s well-being.

The frienship between these two women gives the play its heart. Separated by almost forty years in age, a deep and mutual affection glows from the both. Fearing the return of the darkness, Miss Helen calls out to Elsa for help, a raw plea that Elsa cannot ignore. Miss Helen's is becoming increasingly poor-sighted and arthritic. Her habit of lighting candles to flood her home with light has already resulted in one small fire and Marius is concerned she can know longer care for herself. He suggests she may be better off in an old peoples' home and has even brought her the necessary paperwork to sign.

Russell Bolam's production is slow-paced and rather meandering. It runs to over two and half hours and it feels it, but it places its trust in Fugard’s play and in the elegance of the text. Though the production contains its fair share of lulls and slumps, it grows richer the longer it sits in the memory - new pictures tease their way to the surface. The play contains a number of moments of emotional power. The most charged of these is the scene in which Miss Helen finds her voice and is finally able to make Marius understand that her work, her Mecca, is more than just a few 'ornaments', it is her life, her salvation and without it she is nothing, dust.

Bassett’s performance is wonderful. Sometimes she appears cowed and timid, a fragile, slightly dotty creature in need of aid and guidance, but she grows visibly into a woman infused with pride and passion, who has finally found her purpose in life and who knows exactly who she is.

Sian Clifford provides fine support as Elsa, whose deep affection for Miss Helen can at times make her overly strident. She is spiky yet tired, frustrated by the things in her world she cannot change, sapped by a recent love affair with a married man. The play is set in 1970s South Africa and Elsa is the Cape Town white liberal who prides herself on being forward looking in her thinking. She seems to enjoy getting her wrists slapped by the authorities for setting provocative assignments. She is haunted by the young woman sh gave a lift to on her drive down to see Miss Helen, a young woman with a baby on her back and an 80 mile walk ahead of her.

Fugard allows each of his characters their strengths and failings. Elsa cannot resist speaking for Miss Helen even while urging her to find her own voice and strength, her love is sometimes expressed as frustration and anger; sometimes she is so busy revelling in her own guilt she fails to listen. Marius, the pastor and the voice of the community, played by James Laurenson, is also far from one-note; he genuinely cares about Miss Helen, maybe even loves her, and is just as convinced he is acting in her best wishes.

Ruth Hall's set, is by necessity, simple and limited. It gives a sense of Miss Helen's home but makes little attempt to replicate her idiosyncratic creations. The glitter of candlelight is enough to convey the beauty of the world she has made for herself - the audience are left to paint their own pictures. This is echoed in the way the play depicts South Africa. Just as Miss Helen's art remains in shadow, the play too shines its light only on a trio of white characters. The other South Africa, the one outside Miss Helen's door, the one that evokes such frustration in Elsa, remains in shadow.

Like a Fishbone at the Bush Theatre

Anthony Weigh’s second play, Like a Fishbone, is subtitled ‘An argument and an architectural model’, but while it does indeed contain the latter – an architectural model forms the centre of the set – the former is more elusive; it’s difficult to know just what the play’s argument is.

Like a Fishbone depicts an encounter between a renowned architect and a grieving mother. The architect has been commissioned to create a memorial for a small town that has suffered a tragedy: the massacre of a group of school children in a remote rural village by a crazed gunman.


The Architect has decided to retain the schoolhouse just as it was, with every upset chair and dropped textbook untouched. The Mother argues that this is meaningless; she would rather the building was razed to the ground.

At the heart of the play lies a discussion about the nature of architecture, over what it can and should be, whether it should be purely functional or seek greater significance. This discussion gradually grows branch upon branch, touching on faith, parenting and mourning, the things we create to help us remember. At times the bones of the play bring to mind TEAM’s recent piece, Architecting, only this time minus the exuberance and hoop skirts.

The performances are solid, but both of these women are somehow less than characters – they are mouthpieces for intentionally opposing views, outlines only sketchily filled in. The architect is a hard-edged professional, conveniently atheistic and blinkered by her belief in her project. The mother is dowdy and rumpled, equally conveniently partially sighted and driven by her religious faith and her insistance that her dead daughter deserves better.

The actors do a decent job with limited material. Deborah Findlay is appropriately stately and severe as the Architect yet she manages to – on occasion – inject a hint of warmth and even vunerability into the role. Sarah Smart is also fine as the Mother, calm and consoled by faith, but her character feels, if anything, even more contrived and unknowable. She becomes increasingly fervent in her pronouncements to the point where it threatens to derail the balance of the play in a way that was perhaps unintended; her unshakeable faith comes across as a symptom of someone losing their grip. It is left to Phoebe Waller-Bridge, as a stylish but gauche young intern, to add some necessary humour. Though hers is the smallest of three roles she succeeds in making her character feel like a person instead of a collection of ideas.

Director Josie Rourke’s clean, pared down production does provide a note of tension between the two women but she can’t keep the play from being sabotaged by its own symbolism. Weigh’s previous play for the Bush, 2,000 Feet Away, was an ambitious and intelligent if ultimately rather self-conscious examination of a community’s response to the threat of peadophilia; this follow-up lacks its heft and wit and feels more like a sketch, a blueprint, than a finished piece.

Reviewed for musicOMH

After the Dance at the National

Thea Sharrock’s revival of Terence Rattigan’s rarely produced second play After the Dance reveals it to be just as human and insightful as his better known work.
Following the huge success of his fun, fizzy comedy French Without Tears, After the Dance was an altogether more grown up play, which was first staged in the summer of 1939. But while it was well received by the critics war was imminent and it failed to find an audience, closing after only a short run. Rattigan himself declined to include it in his collected works and, while there have been regional productions since, the play has rarely been seen on a major London stage.

After the Dance is a portrait of the inter-war generation, of those who were too young to have fought in the First World War and remained stubbornly blinkered to the war to come. David Scott-Fowler is a historian who, it’s implied, has squandered his talent and intellect. He’s supposedly working on a book on Italian history, but his life, and the life of his circle of friends, seems to involve a constant stream of parties and the avoidance of anything that could possibly be considered a bore. David’s drinking has reached such a level that he is in danger of killing himself. His wife of twelve years Joan presents a breezy front to the world and has sculpted herself into what she believes is David’s perfect partner: cool, witty, at ease socially, and reluctant to in push or scold him.

The play is set in the Scott-Fowlers’ Mayfair flat, an expensive but oddly comfortless space. In fact there’s very little pleasure in this gin-fuelled, hedonistic world of theirs; it’s a cruel, hard place where people’s misfortunes are reduced to oft-told anecdotes and there’s a sense of people just going through the motions. The younger generation are, in contrast, presented as far more grounded and serious-minded. This is encapsulated in the character of Peter, David’s younger cousin, who is working as his secretary. The play hinges on a somewhat implausible attraction between David and Peter’s perky fiancée Helen. All of twenty, she convinces him to give up the drink and to start striving for greater academic success. The blossoming love between them strikes the one awkward note in an otherwise rich and moving piece – unfortunately it’s a pivotal one. It’s almost impossible to believe the character of David, as he’s played and written, lusting after bright, bland Helen. Yet lust he does, eventually deciding to leave Joan for the younger girl.

The real emotional weight of the play is carried by Nancy Carroll, as the seemingly resilient Joan who has made an art out of concealing the true depths of her feelings for her husband. For fear of alienating him, for fear of being seen as – that dread word - ‘a bore’, she has downplayed her affections for years. The cracking of her façade when she realises that her suspicions are true and that he intends to leave her is heart-breaking to watch.

The strength of the play, as emphasised by Sharrock’s elegant production, lies in the shading of the characters rather than the broader portrait of a generation in crisis. Benedict Cumberbatch’s modulated performance captures David’s complexities, his odd passivity coupled with his hunger for something more, and there’s a wrenching moment when Joan stands over David as he plays the piano, which is rich with loss and love on both their parts. Adrian Scarborough is also superb as the couple’s old friend, John, who cheerfully leeches off them and yet is clearly deeply fond of them both and is capable of greater reflection and insight than might at first seem apparent. But it’s Carroll’s performance that leaves the most lasting impression, vivacious in her red dress, her smile fixed in place, a drink in her hand, while inside she’s breaking apart.

Reviewed for Theatermania.com

Ingredient X at the Royal Court

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reviewed for musicOMH

Peter Pan at the Barbican

"I think that to die would be an awfully big adventure."

There has always been an inherent darkness in Peter Pan, with its land full of lost and abandoned boys longing for a mother to love them, its crocodiles with ticking guts and a taste for human flesh, but rarely has there been a version as murky as John Tiffany’s production for the National Theatre of Scotland.

In David Greig’s adaptation the haunting and iconic story of the boy who never grows up has been transplanted to J.M. Barrie’s native Scotland and Mr Darling is working as an engineer, overseeing the construction of the Forth Bridge. He’s a stern, distracted but not unkind father who dispatches his children’s beloved dog Nana to the backyard.

When Peter Pan flies into the Darling nursery one night through an open window, he tempts and taunts the three Darling children, Wendy, Michael and John, with tales of pirates, fairies and a land where no one will tell them what to do. Seduced, they follow him home to Neverland – but Greig’s Neverland is a harsh and hostile land where the Lost Boys must fend for themselves, often going hungry if Peter fails to bring them home food.

The boys flock to Wendy like bees to lavender, demanding that she tell them stories and generally look after them. Their biggest adversary, apart from hunger, is Captain Hook – here kilt-wearing, tattooed and fearsome in appearance – the one-handed pirate chief.

Tiffany’s staging is often visually very striking. Tinkerbell is depicted as a tiny flickering ball of flame, not entirely dissimilar to the fiery, molten rivets that are thrown about by the young lads working on the Forth Bridge. The flying apparatus is also always visible and the characters bounce and clamber across the set in a manner reminiscent of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (albeit with the wires and harnesses on display); Peter even, at one point, takes a stroll down one side of the Barbican's proscenium arch. But the production is hampered by an uncertainty of tone and a certain acoustic muddiness, whole lines of dialogue get swallowed up or are only half-audible.

There’s a lack of tension in many of the scenes and an excess of rawness in others. Peter’s fury on finding that Wendy has grown older is unsettling and frightening (and made the young girl sitting next to me start to cry) but other potentially potent moments, such as when Peter brings a poisoned Tinkerbell back to life or the final approach of Hook's crocodile nemesis (represented by a sole reptilian eye), feel rather rushed and lacking in magic.

Davey Anderson’s Scottish music - a collage of folk tunes and working men’s songs - is evocative and Laura Hopkins' set is clever and versatile, with segments of the Forth Bridge revolving to reveal the vines and forests of Neverland.

Kirsty Mackay, as Wendy, strikes a good balance between a girl thirsty for adventure and a woman forced to play mother to a whole tribe, while Kevin Guthrie captures something of both the romance and isolation of Peter, the eternal boy, untouched by time, unburdened by memory, utterly free but also forever alone

Reviewed for musicomh

A Thousand Stars Explode in the Sky at the Lyric

The world is about to end. A cosmic string is about to slice and dice the universe and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. We’re all going to die.

This is the backcloth to A Thousand Stars Explode in the Sky, a new play by David Eldridge, Robert Holman and Simon Stephens. The imminent end of everything brings the spectacularly messy Benton clan back together, to spend their last moments as a family. The five Benton brothers range in age from the terminally ill William, who may not live long enough to die along with everyone else, to teenage Philip, who is just awakening to his homosexuality knowing he will have little chance to fully experience love, intimacy, sex.

This is a family blessed with more than their fair share of secrets and dark, buried things. Some of these are allowed to surface, others remain half-submerged and murky. One of the brothers has been left raising his grandson on his own; another has drifted off onto the fringes of society and is glimpsed hobbled and begging in Euston Square. There are hints at past indiscretions and upsets, some family taint inherited from their maternal grandmother, Dority, who sought comfort from her volatile husband in the arms of a German refugee.

Much is left ambiguous and teasingly out of focus. There are sudden springs of poetry and moments of aching tenderness. Philip and William’s fleeting instance of understanding and connection sitting out in the fields of the family farm is beautifully played and a silent scene where Anne Mitchell’s matriarch bathes her dying son is also strange and affecting in its exposure.

As the end of the world creeps closer, time starts to slip and slide and Philip is able to see into his family’s past. Yet the play allows only the slimmest of windows onto the social unravelling caused by the coming apocalypse; the characters exist in a bubble, unpunctured. The ending of life on earth feels secondary to the depiction of this single family and their complex web of stories. There is little indication of global turmoil; a skin of normality remains in place and there is always room for cheese.

Despite having three writers, the play feels - for the most part - of one voice, even though the temptation to look for the joins, to tease out favoured themes is a strong one. But for all the little flashes of magic and beauty in the writing the finished play feels as it is masking a stronger one. As it is, ideas flare up and burn out; some of the characters’ actions seem inexplicable (a beloved dog is killed) and some of the moments of emotional outburst feel unearned. The writing is also not that well served by Sean Holmes’ direction and the pacing is rather static and plodding; the characters sometimes seem to be talking at one another rather than with one another.

Most of the acting is superb, particularly from Harry McEntire, as the bright, wondering Philip, but the production as a whole feels a little awkward and unfinished, tugged, perhaps, in one too many directions.

Reviewed for musicOMH

Eurydice at the Young Vic

This retelling of the Orpheus story by American playwright Sarah Ruhl is primarily a play about memory.

It’s a touching if whimsical piece. Orpheus and Eurydice are very much in love, giddy with it. His head may be full of music but he still has room in there for her. They get married, but on her wedding night, while chasing after a letter from her late father, she slips and falls into the black below.


The underworld is a place where people forget. You are dipped in the river and come out clean. Eurydice’s deceased but dapper dad is something of an anomaly – he still knows how to read and write; he still remembers. When Eurydice arrives in the underworld (by elevator) her father knows her but she does not know him. She speaks the language of the dead, a language without music, without memory. Books baffle her. Her father gradually teaches her who he is, who she is. He constructs a room out of string so they can be together again.

Bijan Sheibani’s production began life at the Plymouth Drum and fits snugly into the Young Vic’s Maria Studio. The floor is made of metal mesh and water fountains up from the ground as well as raining down from above. There’s an intentional Alice in Wonderland quality to the piece: once in Hades, Eurydice encounters a chorus of stones (who, hard as they are, eventually weep at Orpheus’ lament) and a Lord of the Underworld, who is a little more than a brat on a souped-up tricycle.

Ony Uhiara is wide-eyed and engaging as Eurydice, sometimes childlike, sometimes wise, but it’s Geff Francis, as her father, who gives the production its heart; Eurydice’s relearning of herself and the bond she forms once more with her father are very movingly played. Orpheus’ quest to find his wife feels secondary and the awful moment when, attempting to lead her home, he turns and sees her is somewhat swallowed up.

Ruhl’s language can be a little to arch, too aware of its own poetry, but it’s potent when it needs to be. Sheibani’s production, which reunites him with his Brothers Size designer Patrick Burnier, is minimalist in its approach yet not short on atmosphere; light and water are used to create a dreamlike feeling.

At times, however, it takes on a foggy quality and the piece, as a whole, feels overlong; though the middle section of the play is magical and moving, it becomes drawn out and repetitive towards the end. It's left to a touching coda showing Orpheus’ return to the underworld – and the thought of all that music wiped away – to provide a final emotional kick.

Reviewed for musicOMH

Pressure Drop at the Wellcome Collection

Pressure Drop, the first theatrical work to be staged at the Wellcome Collection, describes itself – fairly accurately – as "part gig, part play, part installation." Billy Bragg and his band provide live musical accompaniment to Mick Gordon’s play on Englishness, identity and what it means to come home.

The centre’s exhibition space, recently home to an exhibition on identity to which this is an apt coda, has been strikingly designed for the production by Tim Scutt; dotted around the room are three separate sets: a suburban living room, a pub and a chapel, all united by a great red rip which runs around the walls.


There is also a stage, on which Bragg and his band sit, providing songs that are interspersed with the scenes of the play. There is initially a bit of banter between Bragg and the audience - he starts by summing up promenade theatre for the uninitiated: “you walk up and down the room; if you see a light, go towards it” – but his presence and his playing soon becomes part of the fabric of the production.
The story itself is a (very) well worn one, but it is well-executed. Two brothers are reunited by a family funeral. One, Jon, has left home – a rundown, recession-hit town on the outskirts of London – some years back and has become successful trader in New York; the other, Jack, has stayed behind, married and had a son, but the recent loss of his job has left him adrift. Now Tony (a volatile David Kennedy), his friend since childhood, heavy-set, short-fused and confrontational, is trying to get Jack to run as local councillor for a far right party with a three-letter name and Jack, despite some reservations, can see the appeal, of regaining his voice, ceasing to be passive.

It’s fair to say his dad wouldn’t have approved. The recently deceased Ron, their reggae loving father – the title song by Toots and the Maytels is the music he’s requested for his funeral – regularly emerges from his coffin to offer sage advice from beyond the grave.

Gordon’s play is heavy-handed in places, particularly in its handling of a subplot involving a stolen knife and a stabbing, but the writing is also nicely textured and – mostly – free of didacticism. There are few hard and true lines, a lot of muddy middle ground. Jon is appalled at what Tony is asking Jack to do, but then he also lives a comfortable life, far away from the difficulties they face. Tony is not just a one-note thug, but a father who has lost a son, and through this lens his anger and his hate become more understandable, if not acceptable.

Though in many ways quite conventional, the play springs a few nice narrative surprises, which are well handled by director Christopher Haydon. The cast all give strong performances - particularly Justin Salinger as Jon, the ambivalent outsider, whose feels both distaste and longing for a place that is no longer his home – and the hybrid format, half gig, half play, really works. The pacing of the piece is well managed, with sufficient room left between the scenes for the audience to make their way around the space. But it’s the believability of the characters and their predicament, the warmth of the piece, which ends up shining through. The final scenes are moving and uplifting in equal measure (if a little too clean and contrived) and Bragg and his band lift it that little bit further.

Reviewed for musicOMH

Micro at the Gate

Pierre Rigal’s follow up to his wonderful solo show Press, also staged at the Gate, is a curious hybrid. Part garage jam, part dance piece, part something else entirely, it’s at times inspired, at times a bit directionless.

Described by Rigal as a ‘physical concert’, Micro is like a rock gig in which the performers are as likely to play each other as their instruments. The tiny Gate stage has been equipped with drum kit, guitars, keyboards and amplifiers, while the band takes the form of a charismatic quartet of French performers, three men and one woman, all clad in black vintage rock T-shirts: Bowie and the Ramones.

In between more straightforwardly performed songs there are sequences in which the group, Melanie Chartreux, Malik Djoudi, Gwenael Drapeau and Julien Lepreux, use one another as human xylophones and turn the demo instructions on the keyboard into a kind of free-form riff. There’s a nice line in wit running through the piece, which is full of inventive instances of physical comedy. Chartreux’s spike-heeled sandals are used as drums and, in one memorable routine, they split into pairs, using alternate arms to play their instruments. It’s made to look effortless but clearly requires a superb level of musicianship and timing.

The choreography revolves totally around the instruments and the music gives the piece its pulse. The merging of the performer with their instrument is a recurring theme, given full weight in a welcome encore where the drummer seems almost as if he is possessed, giggling as he runs around the stage in a kind of drumming frenzy. The instruments are repeatedly used as masks, rendering the performer faceless as they play, half man, half guitar.

From a slow beginning, in which the performers emerge from behind their equipment, crawling on to the stage - a kind of a birth – the piece builds like any gig, the songs getting stronger, taking over.

Not everything works; there’s some slightly wonky robot dancing, an overlong air guitar sequence, and the piece as a whole, goes on a bit too long, but taken on its own unique terms this is a memorable and inventive show. It might not share the same wealth of ideas as the compelling and intense Press, but Micro is an exciting and energetic merging of forms, performed with real wit and skill.

Reviewed for musicOMH

Posh at the Royal Court

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

Reviewed for musicOMH

Andersen's English at Hampstead Theatre

Despite its title Sebastian Barry’s play, Andersen's English is far more about the life of Charles Dickens than about that of the Danish poet and writer Hans Christian Andersen.

Barry’s play is set during the summer of 1857 when Andersen visited Dickens at his home in Gad’s Hill in Kent intending to stay a fortnight but eventually staying on for five weeks. Directed by Max Stafford-Clark for Out of Joint, the play is a strange mixture of culture clash comedy and domestic drama that manages to shed little light on the characters of either of these eccentric but gifted men.


As Andersen does not speak English particularly well he is oblivious to much of the tension within the Dickens family. He is only dimly aware of all the torment and disharmony around him and departs with the impression of having stayed in a warm and loving household.

Dickens, as written by Barry, is a fairly unpleasant and controlling man, who has grown tired of his wife, Catherine, the mother of his many children. He has a complex and close though unconsummated relationship with Catherine’s sister Georgie and is about to fall for the young actress Ellen Ternan, with whom he starred on stage in Wilkie Collins’ The Frozen Deep. Catherine will eventually be banished from the family home entirely.

The scenes concerning Dickens’ family life are, at times, engrossing but the play features many odd lurches in tone. Some scenes are played as broad comedy, others as wrenching drama, and the two never really knit together. With the exception of two brief scenes at the beginning and end of the play, Barry never allows Andersen to speak in his own language; his English is fractured and mangled, halting and awkward, making it impossible to get a sense of him as man. Barry presents his surface quirks – he carries a length of rope in his suitcase in case a fire breaks out – but denies him his own true voice.

The production itself also features unexpected and not altogether successful tonal shifts. Rather ungainly puppets are used to stand in for some of the Dickens children and the cast occasionally break into song. Though there is some pleasure to be taken in the way the cast trample over Lucy Osborne’s attractively cluttered set, turning dining chairs into stepping stones and a grand piano into a hilltop picnic spot, the production feels like it is struggling with itself, unsure of what it really wants to be.

David Rintoul (in an amusingly elaborate wig) plays Dickens as a talented yet demanding and difficult man, who is rather over-fond of his own voice, while Niamh Cusack gives the play its emotional centre, as the hard done by Catherine, stung by her rejection by her husband, worn down by the bearing of so many children (ten in all), and desperately scared for her son Walt who is being dispatched to India by a rather disinterested Dickens.

Danny Sapani does what he can with the character of Andersen, suggesting a measure of sadness beneath all the surface oddity, but the device of focusing on Andersen’s broken English never really justifies itself. The audience does not see the Dickens’ household through his eyes nor does it gain much in the way of insight into Andersen as a man. Catherine is the only one who seems to connect with him, but even their freindship is not developed as much as it could have been.

Barry has also grafted on a subplot about Dickens’ young Irish housemaid, a young woman with whom Walt is besotted and who finds herself pregnant. Though Lisa Kerr’s performance in this role is spirited and enjoyable this strand of the play feels superfluous, adding another splash of colour to what is an already muddy palette.

Reviewed for musicOMH

Polar Bears at the Donmar Warehouse

There’s an inherent difficulty in writing about mental illness. It’s something so profoundly internal, so ungraspable to those on the outside, that often it’s easier to depict the effect that a person’s behaviour has on those that love them rather than attempt to truly enter that person’s world. Mark Haddon’s dark, fractured debut play has moments of rawness and insight but it doesn’t quite avoid falling into familiar traps.

Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time took its readers inside the mind of a boy with Asperger’s, but, in his play, a certain distance is maintained between the audience and Kay, the central character, a young woman suffering from bipolar disorder.


Haddon’s play explores Kay’s relationship with both her mother and brother as well as with John, the man who will become her husband. John prides himself on being grounded and steady; he thinks he can keep Kay safe from herself, he sees himself as the person “holding her kite string.”

The play is intentionally unsettling. Time is a liquid thing and the scenes are shown out of order; some are clearly imaginary, events happening in Kay’s mind, but it is a strength of Jamie Lloyd’s production that it is never quite evident how much of what the play depicts is actually happening. From the macabre calm of the opening scene onwards, there is a potent, dreamlike quality to the staging that is intensified as the play progresses.

It is revealed that Kay’s father committed suicide when she was a girl and his father, in turn, was also mentally ill; Kay’s condition is talked about like a family curse, handed down through the generations, the flipside of her artistic talents (she dreams of illustrating children’s books) which she may have inherited from her mother. Both her mother and brother are deeply protective of her, but it is implied their protectiveness is in some ways damaging, keeping her dependent (her mother, living out in a lonely old house by a river, repeatedly asks for reassurance that Kay will never leave her). John, though initially besotted by her vibrancy, finds himself falling into the same patterns once the reality and relentlessness of her condition becomes apparent.

Jodhi May’s performance as Kay is well-judged, capturing both the extreme highs and lows of her illness; Haddon shows her sitting rain-soaked on the roof, wide-eyed with wonder about the possibility of other worlds and the idea of neutrinos streaming through her body. He also shows her foetal and fearful on the floor, terrified and sealed within her own dark sphere.

Paul Hilton captures the complexity of Kay’s brother Sandy, who dutifully sounds out her potential boyfriends for suitability but also perhaps envies his sister’s instability, especially as his childhood was equally marked by tragedy and yet he has managed to live a comparatively normal life. Celia Imrie also gives a strong performance as Kay’s mother, though, as written, her character is the least convincing. Her need to keep Kay close to her is juxtaposed with her confession of the relief she felt following her husband’s death, freeing her from the constant fear. In these moments of revelation the writing feels a little too blunt and controlled.

Richard Coyle’s genial John is the most ambiguous of the characters, but in making him an academic philosopher, Haddon too obviously makes him the mouthpiece for the play’s Big Questions about life and love and the inevitability of decay. This device somewhat limits him as a character.

Haddon clearly relishes the puzzle-like quality of the play and provides plenty of questions to be picked over but he’s also not immune to cliché. Kay explains the beauty and the pain of her condition via a lengthy fairy tale and, in a somewhat tonally misjudged scene, she converses with Jesus. The simple two-level set, designed by Soutra Gilmour, is effective, neatly echoing the split within Kay, but the ominous flickering lighting again seems a step too far into the familiar: mental illness by numbers.

This is a play that plants itself firmly in the mind, but it’s most effective when it’s stillest, when it allows its audience to catch a glimpse of Kay as a person rather than as a device, a conduit for narrative game-playing and philosophical debate.

Reviewed for musicOMH

The Notebook of Trigorin at the Finborough

Tennessee Williams’ “free adaptation” of Chekhov’s The Seagull was written near the end of his life. Williams was fascinated with Chekhov’s play and his version, transplanted to the American South, is infused with his own particular preoccupations. The characters are as much his as Chekhov’s. Arkadina is something of a one-note diva figure, domineering, vain and self-obsessed; she’s the kind of woman who hurls herself dramatically to the floor when she fears she won’t get her own way.

Trigorin is pushed into the foreground and is, by turns, far less submissive and more knowing; seemingly bisexual, he feels that the recognition of his feminine as well as masculine side is a necessary part of being a writer. Nina is delicate and pure yet easily led. Phil Willmott’s production of this intriguing yet difficult play is compelling yet also contains moments of real awkwardness.

While Carolyn Backhouse pitches things well, keeping Arkadina just the right side of caricature, and Stephen Billington’s Trigorin is suitably ambiguous, some of the performances waver. Nonetheless the production is elegantly staged, with Kim Alwyn and Aimee Sajjan-Servaes’s simple set inverted between acts so that the inside of the house becomes the garden and vice versa, and offers a rare chance to see a fascinating if flawed play.

Reviewed for The Stage

Hedda Gabler at Richmond Theatre

Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler is a woman adept at making her own prisons.

Though she is pressured by both family and society to behave a certain manner, to resign herself to life as a wife and mother, the greatest pressure on her seems to come from within.

Hedda has taken it upon herself to marry a distinctly average, academically inclined man, George Tesman, and now that their honeymoon is over she finds herself living in the house she had only pretended to adore, hemmed in, trapped.


When she finds the maid has left the windows open in the drawing room, she orders the curtain drawn, to shield her from the sun, to keep her in shadow. She seems to take a perverse kind of pleasure in her misery, to cultivate it.

Rosamund Pike’s Hedda is, by turns, both malevolent and radiant. There is such determination in her eyes when she lifts a match to the simpering Mrs Elvsted’s hair and threatens to burn it, that one gets the impression it is only a nagging lethargy that stops her from carrying out the act. Pike revels in the character’s contradictions; Hedda is forceful and seductive, yet also passive. There are actions she could take to save herself but she does not take them. Needy and grating though she may be, Mrs Elvsted has greater courage, going after the things she cares about.

Hedda is also the daughter of a general and still has something of the air of a spoilt child about her, though one grown into a volatile, demanding adult. She courts danger, nurtures it, but often buckles under the consequences of the mess she has made. She spars with Tim McInnerny’s creepy, manipulative Judge Brack and enjoys the hold she has over Colin Tierney’s brilliant but weak Loevborg. As the play progresses she becomes ever more inward looking, thriving on her pain and frustration; as she sits by the furnace feeding in pages of Lovboerg’s manuscript, the lights dim and her face is picked out by the glow of the flames – she looks giddy, wicked, and far from blind to the outcome of her actions.

Adrian Noble’s production is handsome and solid but it is also rather blunt in places, especially in the concluding scenes. Hedda’s unease and near disgust about the child she is likely carrying are apparent already without her beating with her hands at her corseted stomach. Her despair in these last moments is perhaps, too marked, too vocal. Conversely Hedda’s fierce belief in beauty seems underplayed and her wish to see Loevborg with vine leaves in his hair becomes a hollow, airless chant.

Noble allows Pike to dominate the production and it is the right decision – she does not disappoint. She is glorious to look at, captivating, a single glowing point amid the muted reds and blacks of Anthony Ward set. Everyone else is secondary, in every sense, though there some strong support performances. Robert Glenister veers between bear-like and boyish as Tesman, genuinely moved to receive his old pair of slippers from his aunt and sometimes so happy he simply bobs up and down; he is clearly still a little baffled by the fact he has landed this strange, imposing woman as a wife. McInnerny has a kind of silken unpleasantness as Judge Brack but Tierney’s Lovborg is rather too muted and when Hedda hands him a loaded pistol, he accepts it with only a flicker of indecision.

The pacing is more sure-footed and events build inexorably towards their bleak conclusion. There is something incredibly wrenching about Hedda’s final, frantic playing of the piano before the shot and the silence that follows.

Reviewed for musicOMH

The Sanctuary Lamp at the Arcola

Tom Murphy’s bleak but tender play is said to have caused outrage after its first performance in 1975. Yet it’s far from being an attack on the Church; it’s a more questioning and layered piece of writing than that, as demonstrated by the playwright’s revival of his own work for the b*spoke theatre company.

The play concerns three characters from society’s margins who seek solace in an empty church overnight. In need of a place to stay, former strongman Harry is given a job as church clerk, and charged with keeping the sanctuary lamp lit. Also taking refuge in the church is Maudie, a waif-like and simply spoken teenage runaway, shaken by the loss of her child.

They are joined by Francisco, Harry’s one-time circus colleague and a rival for the affections of Olga the contortionist. As the night passes, bolstered by fishn and chips and communion wine, they share their stories and make their confessions to one another.

Robert O’Mahoney is bass-voiced and kindly as Harry, his character’s spiritual need palpable, while Declan Conlon is more volatile as Francisco, railing against the Church with his own particular logic, and Kate Brennan is suitably delicate as Maudie, a girl in search of answers of her own. Swaddled in a choirister's robe she looks appropriately ethereal as the third member of this somewhat twisted trinity. Bosco Hogan's Monsignor, on the other hand, is little more than a pleasant but ineffectual adminisatrator type who is, crucially, absent when the talk turns to matters of the soul.

Monica Frawley’s set, with its three thick 'stone' pillars, its pews and confessional, creates a sense of height and space in the Arcola’s rather squat-ceilinged main studio that is convincingly church-like.

Murphy's production of his own material is more problematic; it's rather monotonous and plodding in pace, which has the effect of downplaying the richness of writing.

Slighty extended version of a review for The Stage

Return at BAC

Return, a new piece of storytelling by Polarbear, is a tale of home and its hold on you.

Told in a straightforward, casual manner, eschewing elaborate verbal gymnastics, it takes the form of a spoken screenplay. Polarbear gives the audience a camera lens view of events as his main character Noah returns to the town he left behind.

Performed, without music, against a blue box of a background, he describes close ups, fade outs, establishing shots; he makes the story live visually. Occasionally lines of text or the red flicker of a digital clock will spill across the floors and walls, but the main tool used is his voice. As he explains, he comes from a place where people tell stories: they talk, they don’t write.

So Noah comes home to Birmingham after years away and finds the life he left to an extent unchanged. He bickers amiably with his brother; he bumps into an old school friend, now working in a supermarket. There is little in the way of narrative tension. He pisses off his mum over dinner and has a fleeting encounter with a girl he once had a thing for, but that’s about it. Instead the chief relationship being explored here is the one between Noah and the place that he comes to see has shaped him; the place he left behind in body, but never really left, not completely.

As he says, his work ever since has been "soaked in home." Though the story and its telling are intentionally lacking in flash, there is a strong awareness of the rhythms of natural speech, the way people talk to one another, the poetry of the ordinary and everyday. There is wit and humour too, plus a peppering of references to Steven Seagal movies, The Terminator and Reservoir Dogs. His descriptions are sharp and well-honed, not quite minimalist, but ungarnished, giving only what is necessary to create a potent picture. He describes a barmaid collecting "empty glasses and out of date compliments" and the "butterfly of blood" on a white shirt after a fight.

The hour-long show is a quietly compelling and bittersweet piece of story telling, though sometimes a clearer differentiation between characters would be welcome; the use of visuals also feels a little underdeveloped and it would have been nice to see them made more of.

Return is being performed as part of the BAC’s The Big Story, along with Jon Haynes' The Poof Downstairs and Little Bulb’s wonderful Sporadical, and on Thursdays, it will be performed in different spaces around the building.

Reviewed for musicOMH

Sutra at Sadler's Wells

The beautiful contradiction of the Shaolin warrior monks – their unique intertwining of the spiritual and the physical – forms the heart of Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s extraordinary production, Sutra, returning to Sadler’s Wells as part of a European tour.

Rather than simply being a straightforward showcase for the monks’ extraordinary kung fu skills, this is an often contemplative piece punctuated by passages of quiet. This has the effect of making the sudden bursts of agility and movement all the more dazzling. There are the requisite backflips and soaring jump-kicks, moments when gravity seems to have loosened its hold, but there are also more peaceful, meditative episodes - an apt balance.

The production begins with a lone dancer, originally performed by Cherkakaoui, now by Ali Ben Lofti Thabet, sitting at the side of the stage with a boy monk. They are a playing with a series of tiny wooden boxes, one for each of the man-sized pine boxes that lay at the centre of the stage. As the first adult monk appears on stage, swirling a sword around his head, Thabet replicates his movements with his fingers, giving the impression of controlling his actions.

These wooden boxes are the creation of artist Antony Gormley and they give the show its shape and spine. They are basic and functional things yet also highly versatile. They are stacked like shelves, worn like turtle-shells, made to form the petals of a flower and, in one precarious and truly gasp-inducing moment, they are set tumbling into one another like dominoes. Sometimes the boxes resemble coffins, sometimes they become prisons in which the monks lay writhing and kicking, and sometimes they form a wall, keeping the lone questing Westerner on the outside. Thabet has his own box, which is painted silver, marking out his other-ness. At times he seems to be their puppeteer but more often than not he just stands by and watches and it is only at the very end that he gets to join in, performing as one of them.

The monks initially wear traditional robes in shades of silver grey that match the surrounding walls before changing into black, western-style suits and then, later, changing back into their original outfits. In their cool suits they give off a different kind of vibe; their fluidity of movement is the same but something is both added and subtracted, making you think of the Western take on kung fu as filtered through numerous movies of varying quality.

As useful a tool as the boxes are – with their connotations of enclosure, of the mind and of the soul – they are also sometimes limiting, in the sense that they impose a need to create yet more ways of employing them; the moments when the monks dance in formation in front of the boxes are some of the show’s strongest.

The piece is performed to music by the composer Szymon Brzóska – played live by musicians seated behind the opaque back wall – which verges from the delicate to the aggressively percussive. The 65 minute piece is driven by a desire to explore and understand; rather than a collage of noise and force and visual spectacle at which the audience is invited to gawp, an attempt is made to bridge a cultural chasm, to connect.

Reviewed for musicOMH

Dunsinane at Hampstead Theatre

"You seem to think peace is a natural state but the truth is the exact opposite. Peace is what the sea looks like in a dead calm – a rare and beautiful moment."

David Greig’s new play for the RSC is vivid in its use of language and wide in scope. Set in eleventh century Scotland, it is a sequel of sorts, picking up where Macbeth left off. Birnam Wood has advanced on Dunsinane (following some drama studenty tree-empathy exercises on the part of the soldiers) and Macbeth, ‘the tyrant’, is dead. His wife, however, despite rumours to the contrary, is very much alive as, more problematically, is her son.

Siward, Earl of Northumberland and leader of the English army, his son slain by Macbeth in battle, must deal with the aftermath. There’s strife between the various clans and a refusal to accept the authority of Malcolm, the newly crowned king. It soon dawns on the English soldiers that their battle is far from over and that they won’t see their homes again, not before winter; they are stuck in this hostile country, with its equally hostile weather, for the duration.

Held captive in her own castle, Lady Macbeth, known as Gruach, bides her time, convinced of her right to rule, still queen in mind and heart. Greig uses the observations of a young boy soldier to sculpt his narrative and to create a nice juxtaposition with the more heated scenes between Siward and Gruach. As the widowed queen Siobhan Redmond, her red hair tumbling across her shoulders, a flash of fire amidst the murky medieval greys and browns, comports herself with dignity and a regal distance. She speaks with a grudging grace, forced to converse in another tongue, a language she describes as a “woodworker’s tool”, a language that lacks the poetry of Gaelic in its desperate attempts to “capture the world in words”

Yet despite Redmond’s considerable poise, her attempts at seduction of Jonny Phillips’ battle-hardened Siward don’t feel particularly convincing and Roxana Silbert’s production rather fudges her semi-mystical escape, gliding to freedom amidst crowds of clashing soldiers. The more fascinating character is Brian Ferguson’s Malcolm, a man who knows and understands his own weaknesses, who uses them as a shield. He is also adept at balancing and weighing out his words, in the judicious use of ‘seems’ and ‘appears’, spinning the situation to his advantage.

Greig’s play of invasion and insurgence has obvious modern parallels but only occasionally does it hammer them home with excessive force. He contrasts the antics of the young soldiers – ripe with talk of tits and sex, missing their homes, baffled by this foreign land with its alien foods and customs – with the machinations of those in power and relies on slender red threads to link their world with the current situation in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Silbert’s production moves smoothly and elegantly from the broad, almost Monty Python and the Holy Grail-esque atmosphere of the opening scenes to the stark, snow-swept landscape of its low-key denouement.

Designer Robert Innes Hopkins has created a simple, stepped stone set which, while effective, also sometimes feels cramped (especially during a central wedding scene). Though the production is a decent one, it can feel a bit pedestrian in places and one is left with the impression that Greig’s play is a much richer thing than it is fully allowed to be here.

Reviewed for musicOMH

Off the Endz at the Royal Court

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reviewed for musicOMH

Measure for Measure at the Almeida

Measure for Measure is often categorised as one of Shakespeare’s ‘problem plays’, meaning it doesn’t easily fit into the boxes marked ‘comedy’ and ‘tragedy’, but falls awkwardly in between. It’s a morally muddy piece that raises as many questions as it answers. A better way of viewing it is as a challenge rather than a problem; it takes clarity of vision and some strong assured performances to pull it off with any degree of success, something Michael Attenborough manages with his modern dress production at the Almeida.

The first few minutes are full of writhing and thrusting bodies, a gaggle of prostitutes tottering about in quim-skimming skirts, which rapidly serves to establish the Vienna of the play as a place riddled with vice and corruption.


The Duke, who seems keen to clean things up, decides it’s necessary for him to view society from a different perspective, his identity concealed under a friar’s cowl. He appoints the uptight Angelo to be his deputy in his absence, a man who at first seems up to the task; he is rigid and diligent, excessively so, and quite able to send a man to his death for having sex out of wedlock.
Isabella, a novitiate nun, clad from neck to ankle in black, comes to plead for her condemned brother and Angelo is knocked off course by the mere sight of her. She taps into some dark seam within him and he attempts to use his new authority to claim what he suddenly, feverishly needs to possess.

Rory Kinnear is superb as Angelo. To begin with he is socially awkward, a bit of a nebbish in his specs and cheap suit. There is something almost endearing about the way he frets about Isabella’s imminent arrival, putting in his contacts and tidying his desk, but this is quickly undercut by his sweaty-palmed pawing of her and his very indecent proposal, his actions charged with lust and frustration. Yet he seems almost as shocked as she is by his behaviour, by the aggressive, scheming individual he finds himself becoming, a man driven by urges he has perhaps not felt before and can’t process in any normal way. As played by Kinnear, he’s a conniving hypocrite but not a monster.

Anna Maxwell Martin is clear-eyed and determined as Isabella, perfectly plausible as a woman who would consider sacrificing her brother’s life in order to maintain her chastity. Her inner struggle is evident but there is also a slight trace of petulance and self-righteousness to her sheen of dignity.

Ben Miles’s Duke Vincentio remains an enigma. He seems slightly uncomfortable within his own skin, nervy and troubled. Though clearly unsettled by the murky world he finds himself in, he takes some pleasure in the complex string of machinations and deceptions he instigates and his motivations are never quite clear. Returned to his ducal finery he seems oddly exposed and inadequate.

Though his is a far broader performance, Lloyd Hutchinson displays sound comic timing and judgement as the manipulative wide boy, Lucio, playing both sides against each other and revelling in the chaos, though his punishment for his behaviour seems excessively harsh.

The seedy, red-light aesthetic evoked by Lez Brotherston’s set doesn’t always sit comfortably with tone of the piece. The clash is too dramatic. Yet, for the most part, Attenborough’s production manages to achieve resonance whilst still fully conveying the play’s complexities. The cast are a joy to watch and when the production hits its stride the whole things sings.

Reviewed for musicOMH.

Serenading Louie at the Donmar Warehouse

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Six Degrees of Separation at the Old Vic

John Guare’s play takes its name from the ‘human web’ theory that states that every person is, at most, six steps away from any other person on the planet whoever or wherever they may be, anyone from, as wealthy Manhattanite Ouisa Kittredge notes, "the President of the United States or a gondolier in Venice."

Guare’s play is very much concerned with ideas of separation and connection, ideas that carry a possibly even greater resonance now, as the methods in which we are capable of connecting with one another has changed so dramatically since 1990 when the play was written. The key event of the play simply couldn’t happen these days. Facts could be checked within seconds, iPhones consulted, names Googled. In this way the play gains more weight than it perhaps deserves as a telling portrait of life in a pre-internet age, a world on the cusp.


Inspired by actual events, Six Degrees begins with Ouisa and her art dealer husband Flan busy buttering up their wealthy South African friend, when a young black man arrives at their door, bleeding and upset – the victim of a mugging. At first they are baffled and alarmed (Flan was midway through trying to engineer a two million dollar sale of a Cezanne), but the young man, Paul, claims to know their children, to be at Harvard with them, and, what’s more, he lets slip that he is the son of a famous film star, an icon of his times: Sidney Poitier, star of In the Heat of the Night and, as Paul, says pointedly Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?

And he does end up cooking them dinner, over which they discuss his thesis on Catcher in the Rye and Holden Caulfield’s appeal to alienated young men. Charmed as they are by his company, they insist he stays the night, only to be woken by unusual sounds and to discover Paul with a gay street hustler. They ask him to leave and only discover later, when telling their story to friends, the full extent of Paul’s deception.

David Grindley's production is solid and, perhaps, over polished. It’s a little too glossy which at least is fitting in a play about the veneer of money and status. The production is, if not dominated than certainly driven, by Obi Abili’s captivating performance as Paul, the heart and yet also the void of the play. He’s charismatic, but also, as becomes increasingly clear, needy and delusional. Yet he still retains a magnetic quality, an elegance of manner, even as his hold on who he is fragments.

Anthony Head and Lesley Manville do a decent enough job as the Kittredges, though only the latter really stands out as Ouisa, haunted by her encounter with Paul, begins to examine her life and her marriage. The Kittredges live in a fine Park Avenue apartment – rendered as a series of oxblood coloured Rothko-esque panels by set designer Jonathan Fensom – and have surrounded themselves with fine things, with antique ink wells and the (rather too heavily symbolic) double-sided Kandinsky, but it is the thought of more wealth, those rows of gleaming zeroes, that really makes their eyes shine. Guare is saying, non too subtly, that they are wearing masks, as much so as Paul.

The first section of the production, during which Paul charms his way into the Kittredges’ apartment, is smoothly handled, but then as events unfold and Paul’s story fractures, it seems to lose its way. The simplicity and fluidity of the early scenes is replaced with a bittier feel: shorter scenes and more characters. The Kittredges’ children are played as foot-stamping stereotypes by actors who look rather too old for the roles. But Abili and Manville keep things moving and the play gains rather than suffers from being so firmly fixed to its time.

Knives in Hens at the Arcola

David Harrower’s 1995 debut play, first performed at the Traverse in Edinburgh, is as rich as the earth on which its characters depend. It is a pulsing piece of writing, alive with wonder and the power of words.

The play is set in a rural pre-industrial landscape where language still has a near scared potency. The naming of things, the spilling of one’s thoughts and one’s self onto paper, is an act akin to what God does. The gift of the written word allows people to tear themselves open and look inside, to question what was once accepted, to buck against what was once thought to be as solid and immoveable as stone.

At centre of the play is a triangular relationship between the village ploughman, known as Pony William because of his way with the horses, his young wife, and the local miller. Literate and knowledgeable about the outside world, the miller leads an isolated life. His work, which is removed from the toil of the fields, and his power – his ownership and control over the apparatus for turning grain to flour - means he is viewed by the villagers with suspicion, if not outright hatred.
To the ploughman’s wife, the miller is a source of superstition. She fears him and yet is also fascinated by him; with his books and his ink-pen, he holds the keys to something vital and she knows it. He becomes a catalyst to her awakening, the blossoming of her sense of self. The young woman does not cease to be a part of a constant, turning world, driven by the shifting of the seasons, the breaking of day and the needs of the fields, but Harrower shows her waking to her place and power within this world.

Serdar Billis’ atmospheric revival doesn’t quite probe as deeply into this play’s rich ground as it might, but he grasps the particular rhythms of the dialogue and gives them space and shape. Designer Hannah Clarke has turned the Arcola’s Studio 2 into a dark, evocative space. The stage is loamy and soft underfoot, blurring the line between outside and in. The lighting is low and there’s a sense of oppressiveness about the space that suits the piece.

The cast all seem comfortable with the weight of the text and Jodie McNee is particularly striking as the young woman slowly making connections with her inner and outer worlds. Phil Cheadle, as the miller, displays a nonchalance to his situation that masks his sense of loss and separation and Nathaniel Martello-White, as the ploughman, conveys a quiet confidence in his view of the world. Live cello accompaniment is provided by Maria Rijo, who sits clad in black at the side of the stage. Her music never clashes with the language, but the playing at times feels repetitive - there’s little variance in mood or tone.

The production’s main flaw is perhaps an over-reliance on atmosphere, on creating a strong visual sense of this dark world full of things to fear, and the production could do with greater degree of clarity, especially in the later scenes where crucial events and the sense of coming change are somewhat muffled and muddled.

Reviewed for musicOMH

Enron at the Noel Coward Theatre

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reviewed for musicOMH