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

Ivana Muller: Playing Ensemble Again and Again

The performance begins with a bow. Six smiling people stand in a line on stage and slowly, very slowly, soak up the audience’s applause.

Ivana Muller’s performance piece is interested in the half-way space of the curtain call. The show is over, but not quite over, and the actors themselves do not know whether they are still performing or not. In this space, the rules and relationships of performance change: the actors can acknowledge the audience and each other in new ways. Yet they are not free. There are patterns to be followed, there is a system to things.

Croatian choreographer Muller’s entertaining Playing Ensemble Again and Again is not a dance piece in a conventional sense. There is not much in the way of actual dancing. Instead the six performers move in slow motion, bowing and smiling, clapping the technicians and each other, trapped in a kind of theatrical limbo.

Once the whole process has been completed all that is left is an empty stage and the sound of the actors’ voices behind the curtains. Then it begins all over again: the same slow motion movements, the same bowing, clapping, and smiling.

What prevents the piece from becoming too tedious for words (because visually it is very repetitive) is the script. Muller allows the six performers to speak, not to each other, but to voice their thoughts. Each actor is wearing a mic so their voices sound over-loud in the compact Lilian Baylis Studio, and eerily detached from the speakers. Their words however are usually quite funny. Sometimes they muse philosophically on the nature of performance in general and sometimes their thoughts are more specific in nature: one actor wonders where he put his backstage bottle of cognac.

Muller allows a little flicker of narrative to enter proceedings, though she never goes so far as to give her characters names or anything approaching a back-story. The performers describe how they are actors in a long running show of some description. Sometimes they fret over their billing and how much actual time they spend on stage; other times they describe the process of touring, the stream of new cities and hotel rooms.

Though their actions remain unchanged, time shifts. At the start they are young and keen, by the end they have aged, grown older together, married and divorced (at one point one of them appears to have delusions of being a vampire) but still they perform, they still continue going through the motions, taking their bows.

Though the words are spoken without emotion, in the same smiling, toothy tones throughout, the script is diverting and funny enough to stop the piece being a trudge and while 70 minutes seems an over generous running time, it’s a strangely engaging piece on its own terms.

Interestingly and amusingly, at the end, when the lights have dipped for the last time, the performers return to the stage and take their bows in a conventional fashion, though its difficult to watch this without reflecting on all that has gone before.

Reviewed for musicOMH

Red at the Donmar Warehouse

John Logan’s play, Red, is more successful than most in translating the world of visual art to the stage and in achieving a workable balance between the said and the shown.

In order to explore the creative drive of the abstract expressionist Mark Rothko he employs a device that might have come across as rather mechanical were it not for the assured performances of the two actors. Logan’s play takes the form of a two-hander: a series of, often very one-sided conversations, between Rothko and his young assistant, played by Alfred Molina and Eddie Redmayne. It could all too easily have felt clunky and forced, but the production manages to avoid straying too far into the terrain of cliché.

It’s 1958 and Mark Rothko is at work on a series of paintings he has been commissioned to produce for the Four Seasons Restaurant of the Seagram Building. The play is set in Rothko’s Bowery studio where natural light has been banished and great, shimmering squares of red dominate the set. Rothko badgers and berates the younger man, lecturing him and dismissing his ideas - dismissing his existence. He talks constantly about art. There is no other. Art is everything. He expresses a hope that his paintings will put the wealthy diners off their dinner and eventually turns down the commission, returning the not inconsiderable fee.

Logan’s Rothko is a rather unsympathetic character. His capacious intellect and his consuming passion are coupled with a "titanic self-absorption." As written, he’s a bully and, at times, a bore. He takes pride in explaining how his generation of artists stomped on the cubists but then bristles at the thought of sharing gallery space with the emerging wave of pop artists. (The obligatory quip is made about Warhol’s work and the unlikelihood that anyone will care about it in the future).

Michael Grandage’s production grapples with one of the main hurdles in any play concerned with matters of art. Painting and sculpting – the processes of art – are not easy to stage in any plausible way (the charcoal sketch scene in The Pitmen Painters a notable exception). In a wonderfully physical scene, Grandage has Rothko and his assistant prep one of the large canvases, splashing red paint about the place until the floor looks - aptly as it turns out for the younger man' parents were stabbed to death - like a crime scene and their arms and faces are coated in the splatter of the of abattoir.

The performances go a good way to papering over the gaps and cracks in the writing. Alfred Molina, stocky and shaven-headed, is a necessarily dominant Rothko, bullish and aggressive, using his intellect as a weapon, yet not uncharismatic, not without charm. There is a bright flare of humanity and humour in him, though it’s often well hidden. Eddie Redmayne is the perfect foil to Molina. Wiry and wired, for much of the early part of the play he’s little more than a sounding board for Rothko’s tirades, but Redmanye has a way of responding with intelligence and fire, qualities evident even when he’s silent. Eventually he grows increasingly intolerant of Rothko’s indifference to him and his determination to be significant to the detriment of all else. He rebels, he bites back, and, in doing so, becomes the catalyst for Rothko’s rejection of the Seagram commission.

Christopher Oram’s set, warmly lit by Neil Austin, recreates Rothko’s studio: cavernous and concrete-walled, spattered and practical, complete with the pulleys the artist used to manoeuvre his large canvases into place.

Logan’s play is undoubtedly a polished piece, composed with care; but while it’s neither as cumbersome as Timberlake Wertenbaker’s recent The Line (a play about Edgar Degas and Suzanne Valadon), nor as overwrought as Dea Loher’s Land Without Words, which also channelled Rothko, it’s just too neat a package - it’s an essay on art given flesh and voice, but though Molina and Redmayne do much to counter this, the play leaves the heart and the gut largely untroubled.

Reviewed for musicOMH

1984 at BAC

Though the creative use of puppetry is what theatre company Blind Summit is known for, puppets don’t dominate their new production of 1984 – they don’t need to. In George Orwell’s terrifying vision of life in a totalitarian state, every aspect of life is subject to control.

The company’s previous work includes the Charles Bukowski influenced Low Life and they also provided the puppets for Anthony Minghella’s Madam Butterfly, but here the puppets are only part of the fabric of a witty, sinister production.

A neat framing device sees the story of the thought criminal Winston Smith and ‘his whore’ Julia being performed by a travelling community theatre group as a lesson on what happens when you defy Big Brother. Winston is a worker in the Ministry of Truth, where he spends his days rewriting old news reports in order to bolster Big Brother’s omnipotence and erase the very existence of dissenters. He has been harbouring doubts about the regime for some time and embarks on a furtive relationship with the similarly disillusioned Julia. When they are together, they are human – living, loving individuals – not simply cogs in a vast grinding machine (it is fitting that the production visually references King Vidor’s The Crowd).

Winston and Julia rent a shabby room in the Prole District, where they believe they will be safe from prying eyes, at least in the short term, but Big Brother sees everything and it is with a degree of inevitability that Winston finds himself facing the harrowing prospect of Room 101 in the Ministry of Love.

Mark Down’s production draws out the comedy of the situation, something that was admittedly not particular evident in Orwell’s text, and enthuses every scene with visual ingenuity. There are some wonderful executed moments and a scattering of chairs and some pieces of cardboard are all that’s required to recreate the various scenes of the novel. A particular highlight is the staging of the rebel text The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism using a white bed sheet and some cardboard signs; it’s a fast, funny and very inventive scene. And of course there are the puppets, simple yet emotive things. There are puppet birds and bunnies and a spindly child threatened by falling bombs. These are stringless puppets, each limb manipulated by a performer and the connotations of this within the context of the narrative are clear (though the company spell things out for those not paying attention).

The ensemble cast work well together and Simon Scardifield, as Winston, and Julia Innocenti, as Julia, convey a strong sense of being normal people in an abnormal world. The balance falters a little towards the end and, perhaps as a result of the framing device, the final scenes of torture suffer from being too stylized – the full horror of Orwell’s denouement is diluted.

Despite that, this remains a potent, engaging and highly inventive rendering of a novel that has lost none of its edge or resonance over the decades.

Reviewed for musicOMH

Enjoyment of show enhanced on spotting this in the bar afterwards:

The Stefan Golaszewski Plays at the Bush

The Stefan Golaszewski Plays, two bittersweet monologues about lost love, were first seen in Edinburgh. Stefan Golaszewski Speaks About a Girl He Once Loved premiered at the Pleasance in 2008 while Stefan Golaszewski is a Widower was performed at the Traverse earlier this summer. This is the first time they’ve been staged together, but they share similar themes and preoccupations and work well as a double bill.

Speaks About a Girl is a lovingly detailed account of a teenage brief encounter with a girl called Betty. The couple first meets over a packet of pork scratching in a pub, exchange texts, and go on one long, strange date over the course of which it becomes clear that this is the only night they will ever spend together.

Golaszewski really captures the tone of someone who is in theory an adult, a man, able to drive a car and buy a pint in a pub, but in reality anything but - his ideas about women and life culled mainly from Home and Away. The words fizz from him – his shock that a girl like Betty would even consider going out with him his palpable and his pain on discovering that his imagined future with her is not to be is comparably raw. The language is vivid and joyous and energetic, and the monologue is cleverly grounded in a particular time through the use of the comedy catchphrases of the day (mainly Fast Show derived).

The second play is far more ambitious in intention. The year is 2056 and a white-suited Golaszewski speaks from the perspective of an elderly man who has recently lost his wife. He talks about his marriage and the awe and excitement and oddness he felt on his wedding day. He describes the joy of fatherhood and the awful event that would tear an unmendable hole in his marriage. He speaks with bitterness about the indignity of aging, the diminishing, the growing frailty, the pain. But while the first play had vibrancy this one feels weighted by its own striving to be something more than it is.

The language - the verbal bursts and lexical dexterity - that were so appealing in the first play, feel jarring in this new context. Golaszewski over-salts the text; the words lead him rather than the other way round. His writing, which proved so effective when describing a young man, poised on the cusp of adulthood and fizzing with life, is less successful when conveying someone older, someone broken down. There are some wonderful lines, some lovely descriptive phrases, but the play feels as if it needs to be simpler, cleaner – instead it has to fight against its own verbal clutter. It’s not without poignancy and a degree of bitterness, a black thread of a disappointment and despair, but they emerge despite rather than because of the writing.

Golaszewski is an affable, energetic performer, who pitches his material well, drawing out the emotional notes, but only in the first play do all the elements come together in a truly satisfying way.

Reviewed for musicOMH

Jiggery Pokery at BAC

Amanda Lawrence has a very versatile face. With her hair upswept, her neck taut and her mouth pursed in a manner that suggest she has just become aware of a rather disagreeable smell in the room, she looks uncannily like Charles Hawtrey, the British actor best remembered for his roles in the Carry On films.

In her one-woman show based on Hawtrey’s life, Lawrence shows his evolution from an eager child actor to a lonely, bitter and gin-riddled old man who makes passes at cabbies and shouts "fawk orf" at anyone foolhardy enough to approach him.


A very private person, Hawtrey attended the Italia Conti School and played a Lost Boy on stage in Peter Pan before his film career took off with the Will Hay movies. Lawrence shows him to be something of a mother’s boy, a prim and keen young man whose once bright career hit a wall when his style and manner were deemed to be out of step with the times and only really bloomed again with the Carry Ons – though eventually his alcoholism meant that he was dropped from these too.

At the start of his career he adopted the name of theatrical impresario Sir Charles Hawtrey and sometimes claimed him as his father, though this was not the case. He clearly had a difficult relationship with his own background and yet his relationship with his mother seems to have been one of the most significant in his life. Lawrence poignantly illustrates the mix of frustration, anger and affection he feels for her and shows how her descent into senility foreshadows his own decline.

The production itself is intentionally frantic with Lawrence playing some fifty roles including Sid James and Laurence Olivier. Director Paul Hunter (of Told by an Idiot) moves events along at rapid pace; at one point he stages a conversation between three characters, Hawtrey, his mother and Madame Conti, forcing Lawrence to switch roles for almost every other line of dialogue. This she does by jumping from chair to chair, while donning and removing her round, wire-framed spectacles at an insane rate. Even though Lawrence is skilled enough to make the shift from role to role feel effortless, the direction forces the audience to acknowledge the amount of effort involved; it underlines the one-ness in the ‘one woman’ show.

Cathy Wren’s cluttered set is full of detail, some of which remain unexplained – such as the hoarded loo rolls and bedsteads of Hawtrey’s boozy twilight in Deal. From this detritus, various props are picked up and imaginatively woven into the narrative: a tasselled lamp shade becomes a hat, a shopping trolley doubles as a taxi cab (and, later, Olivier’s chauffer-driven car), and a table and a marker pen are used to illustrate an unfortunate incident when an aging, semi-clad Hawtrey had to be plucked from a burning building by a fireman.

Lawrence’s performance, the sheer skill and energy of it – her neatly pinned up hair has all but escaped by the end as a result of the physical demands of the piece – can’t be faulted. She mimes in perfect time to audio snippets of Hawtrey’s films and creates a well rounded impression of a complex, difficult and not particularly likeable man. But for all her efforts, Hawtrey remains too big an enigma; his sexuality, his disappointments - fame tasted fleetingly, the shadow of celebrity, Carry On fans still knocking on his door years later - don't quite mesh into a whole and there's a patchwork quality to the piece that, while inevitable, is also frustrating.

Reviewed for musicOMH

This Wide Night at Soho Theatre

Produced by Clean Break (who recently staged Lucy Kirkwood’s powerful It Felt Empty... at the Arcola) Chloe Moss’s play, This Wide Night, is the fruit of a playwriting residency spent at HMP Cookham Wood and is about life – such as it is - after prison, exploring the various struggles and adjustments required in order to survive on the outside.

Marie spends her days in a cramped council bedsit - swigging cheap lager while sprawled in the sedative glare of her soundless television set - and her nights doing some unspecified job that requires a lot of vigorous showering afterwards.

When Lorraine, her middle-aged former cellmate, turns up at her door in need of a place to stay she is initially wary but eventually allows her to stop with her until she gets herself sorted.

Moss delicately unfolds the complicated relationship between the two women. They are both needy yet hesitant in their affections, both volatile and capable of snapping, of sudden flares of temper. Details of their past life together are only slowly fed to the audience – there is brief mention made of care homes, violent lovers and addiction – but Moss resists the urge to spell things out; she is not afraid of ambiguity, of leaving things unsaid.

The idea of official assistance is abruptly dismissed ("they don’t really give a shit") so the two women must support themselves as much as they’re able to. In a touching moment Marie gives Lorraine a shiny shirt bundled into a plastic bag, a gift, so she has something nice to wear when she meets the son she hasn’t seen in years.

The dialogue is rich and fresh and peppered with wonderful details ("Look at you," Lorraine says admiringly of Marie, "you look like an advert for Vosene") and superbly brought to life by Zawe Ashton, as Marie, a woman hardened by the world yet whose face still lights up in delight at the thought of playing party games, and Maureen Beattie, as the older but only marginally steadier woman who, after serving a twelve year sentence, is resigned to being dealt a dud hand by life.

Director Lucy Morrison creates a sense of insularity, of a life still shaped and infected by the time spent on the inside – an impression aided by Chloe Lamford’s cramped, spare set with its tatty sofa bed and functional kitchen units - and throughout there is a plausibly awkward mix of warmth and tension between the two women; they nurture one another yet provide a constant reminder of where they’ve been and what they’ve lived through.

Reviewed for musicOMH

Cock at the Royal Court

Let's step around that title for a moment for Mike Bartlett’s latest play is a far more interesting and rich thing than such a blunt, needlessly provocative moniker might indicate.

Cock is about identity, sexual and otherwise. John has been in a relationship with his boyfriend since he was in his early twenties; now he feels they have grown apart – or, rather, that he has grown and their relationship hasn’t really allowed for this fact.

After he breaks things off with his boyfriend he finds himself in an unusual and unexpected situation: he finds himself attracted to a woman. They have sex - an unplanned, sudden and awkward encounter - yet neither wants to let things end there. Though John has never been with a woman before they feel a powerful connection and believe what happened between them was more than a one-night liaison, they believe that potentially it could grow into something strong and lasting.

Though he has real feelings for this woman, John is still closely emotionally linked to his boyfriend; they were once in love and, while that has changed, the attraction between them remains strong – they are still bound together in many ways. John must make a choice between the two people vying for his affections. This is not something he finds easy; he is drawn to both of them, for different reasons, and in making a choice it is as if he is been asked to define himself, not just sexually, but on many levels. Who is he? What does he want out of life? Marriage, kids, trips to Paris and security in old age with her or a different but no less rewarding existence with him?

He is pulled from both sides and the more they pull, the more he vacillates; he is frozen, silenced and simply unable to make the choice that, it is made clear, will steer his life in one direction or the other. There is no middle option, a decision is called for and sexuality is only a part of the picture; John is being asked to decide the whole future path of his life. This all comes to a head (so to speak) in an excruciatingly uncomfortable dinner party scene when John invites the woman to his boyfriend’s house and a kind of tug of war ensues with John in the middle and the roast beef growing cold on the table.

As specified in the text, James Macdonald’s production is incredibly stripped down. There are no props, no costumes and no conventional set. Events play out on Miriam Buether's circular stage with the audience seated on raked wooden benches around the edges; this whole set up resembles an old-fashioned operating theatre, apt as emotional pain and physical intimacy are both central to the whole production. Macdonald pays particular attention to the distances between the characters. When John has his first sexual encounter with a woman, the pair remain fully clothed, standing apart and slowly circling one another, coming closer and closer together, as if dancing. Initially bringing to mind the non-sexual sex scene in Martin Sherman's Bent, it’s a moment that manages to be comic and erotic and potent all at the same time and allows this pivotal sexual experience to be viewed and dissected in a way that may not otherwise have been possible if the staging were more literal.

John, played by the wiry, if somewhat weak-voiced Ben Whishaw, is the only character to merit a name. The remaining characters are known only as M, W and F (Man, Woman and Father) and any mention of their names is scrupulously avoided. Yet the fact he has a name makes him no more solid as a character, if anything the opposite is true. At one point he remarks that he was proficient at imitating voices as a child and that sometimes he struggled to return to his own voice, to become himself again. The question of whom John is - this quest for self-definition on which the play hangs - is a self-eating one, for John seems to become less of himself, less than himself, as the play progresses.

The proximity of the audience to the performers and the precision of the staging provide a necessary emotional focus, a honing in, otherwise John’s dithering could well become insufferable – even as it is, his near disabling indecision does start to become frustrating, to the point that you want to physically shake him. It helps a great deal that Bartlett’s play is very funny and that he’s capable of seeing the comedy in the situation.

The performances also do a great deal to fill out the play, to add bulk and colour and humour to the words. Whishaw manages to be compelling in a role that requires him to be comparatively blank and, though she’s saddled with some speeches that don’t quite ring true, The IT Crowd’s Katherine Parkinson is superbly subtle and measured in her delivery; in the final dinner party scene it’s a delight to watch her attempts to keep a handle on her temper.

Good as they both are it is Andrew Scott, as John’s boyfriend, who really resonates. His character is charismatic and energetic yet conflicted in his feelings, prone to self pity and insecure enough to invite his dad to the pivotal dinner. He somehow manages to radiate affection for John as well as bafflement and revulsion at his behaviour and pain at the thought of losing him. He’s waspish and politely passively aggressive to John’s girlfriend, yet not completely hostile, and even appears to show a glimmer of sympathy for her predicament. It’s a nuanced performance that seems completely in sync with everything that Bartlett’s play is trying to - and, for the most part - does achieve.

Reviewed for musicOMH

The Making of Moo at the Orange Tree

Context is all. When Nigel Dennis’s satirical play premiered at the Royal Court in 1957 it was met with a number of boos of outrage amid the applause. Half a century on, in Sam Walters’ revival at the Orange Tree, the play, a condensed and cynical canter through the creation of a religion, lacks the same outrage factor; it’s more like a small child making a big noise in restaurant and revelling in the attention.

In an unnamed African country, the colonial Comptons, having accidentally killed the local river god by building a dam, decide to create their own replacement to keep the natives in check. hey imbue their new project with a back-story and with commandments and, inspired by the constant lowing of cattle outside the window of their wicker-furnished sitting room, they name their deity Moo.

In the Second Act Dennis shunts events forwards a couple of years to the point where the Moovian religion has grown into a cult complete with red-robed followers who are not averse to the odd human sacrifice in order to keep their god happy. When a pair of English interlopers arrives to find out what has become of the Comptons, they are shocked and appalled by what they find. To achieve this dramatic shift, the lighting designer John Harris has bathed the Orange Tree stage in red while set designer Tim Meacock has adorned it with cows’ skulls; the Comptons’ wicker furniture meanwhile has been turned into a makeshift pulpit.

In the final scenes of the play, we are presented with the next step along the path. The Moovian faith has shed the blood-hungry and drum-beating fervour of its youth and become aged, staid and respectable. It now has deacons and missionaries to spread its message; there are even some Moovian converts in London and wealthy philanthropists arrive from abroad bearing their chequebooks – yet the play ends with a downbeat glimmer that there might be a fundamentalist resurgence on the cards, that this period of tea and cakes tranquillity is only an interlude and that Moo and its more ardent followers might soon demand more blood.

As satire, this is fairly broad and heavy-handed stuff that seems childishly pleased with the extremes to which it is willing to go (William, the Comptons’ manservant turned very reluctant Pope of Moo, is forced to wear a giant phallus and a silly hat). But its in dealing in extremes that it lets itself down; the writing contains flashes of wit and invention but Dennis seems to get carried away in his wish to give religion a good kicking and he contents himself (mostly) with swiping at easy targets and reducing complex ideas to basic generalities, rather than digging deeper under the skin of what it means to believe.

The play generates a fair few flutters of laughter and Walters’ reasonably brisk production is aided by committed performances from Philip York and Amanda Royle as the socks-and-sandals-sporting colonial engineer and his wife, turned Moovian patriarch and holy mouthpiece (therefore, for her at least, acquiring a freedom of thought and voice denied to her as a colonial wife). But it hasn’t aged particularly well; it's hard to discern the tiger-like thing that Kenneth Tynan described, as it hits its audience over the head repeatedly with its ideas - for every sharp and well-targeted dig, there are several clumsy hammer blows.

Reviewed for musicOMH

Letting in Air at the Old Red Lion

Amy likes words. Words like 'evanescent' and 'wondrous.' She likes the shape of them, the sound of them; she likes to know their proper use.

The sixteen year old meets Frank, an aging widower, outside a theatre. He has been to see a play and she pretends she has too, though he soon realises she’s lying. Still he allows her to share his taxi home and assumes that will be the end of things. But Amy is tenacious and she can’t be shaken so easily; she likes Frank, his school teacher ways and his manner of speech, she feels safe in his company, a rarity in her life. She sticks to Frank like gum to his shoe.

The presence of this young, voluble girl in Frank’s life does not go down well with his son, Adam. His mother has only just died and he has moved back to Manchester, with his girlfriend Olivia in tow, to be nearer to his taciturn dad – and now he finds this gangly, young child-woman in his father’s house, always there, hanging around. He resents her presence and fears there is something seedy in their unlikely friendship.

Having set up this complex web of relationships, playwright Becky Prestwich detonates an explosive device in the midst of things and watches the debris fly. Frank, having been driven to lose his temper by Amy’s constant jabber, lets slip a secret, a secret he and his wife held together, something he has never told anyone – especially not his son.

Amy can’t bear the burden of carrying this knowledge and she tells Olivia, who in turn feels compelled to tell Adam, a man already bristling with resentment and confusion before this new revelation tips him deeper into darkness.

Prestwich has constructed a taut, intriguing play that initially seems to balance its off-beat sense of humour with some much blacker undercurrents; it’s only afterwards, on taking a few steps back from the canvas, that the cracks become apparent. Most obviously the characters’ willingness to let this girl, however benign her intentions, infiltrate their lives so rapidly stretches credibility

The cast do a great deal to counteract the holes in plausibility. Rebecca Elliot successfully negotiates the potentially clichéd and difficult role of Amy, the damaged young girl who looks at the world askew, and brings a fresh and unexpected quality to the part. Edmund Kente gives a subtle, layered performance as Frank, a gentle and intelligent man who does not easily lose control of his emotions. It’s apparent that he feels he lost his wife some time before she died and though he clearly cares for his son and wants to do right by him, he is uncertain how to connect with him – to say what needs to be said – and is sorely aware that he has made mistakes in the past. Tessa Mabbitt is warm and personable as Olivia, Adam’s girlfriend, a character who is unfairly and abruptly dispatched when she has served her purpose.

Adam Quayle’s direction ensures the pace doesn’t flag though the shifts between scenes are a little jerky at times. He handles the moments of conflict and tension well, even when the writing doesn’t quite ring true. Prestwich has an original voice as a writer, quirky and questing, but she seems over-stretched here and can’t quite prevent the intriguing scenario that she has created from tumbling over into melodrama

Reviewed for musicOMH

Architecting at the Barbican

Architecting, an ambitious exploration of emotional and social repair, is stimulating and exciting and messy and frustrating in equal measure.

Devised by the TEAM (Theatre of the Emerging American Moment) in association with the National Theatre of Scotland the piece began life as a BAC Scratch commission in 2006 before a much expanded version drew plaudits last year at Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre in 2008 and at New York’s Performance Space 122 earlier this year.


As the audience enters the theatre a woman is already on stage crooning in country-and-western fashion as her companion strums a guitar on his guitar. A bottle of JD sits on a nearby table and, behind her, the walls are papered in Tyvek wrap; a couple of CCTV monitors flicker from the corners of the versatile wooden box that forms the centre of Nick Vaughan’s set (and, by turns, represents a New Orleans bar, a service station, and a pony cart).

Perhaps as a result of its multi-stranded structure, it takes a little while for the production to warm up. In the first few minutes numerous themes and ideas are introduced, from a thermodynamic view of history to the architectural merit of Chartres Cathedral; only after a while do the various threads (to an extent) separate themselves.

Architect Carrie Campbell arrives in a post-Katrina New Orleans to oversee the completion of a new property project – a TND (Traditional New Development) called Phoenix Meadows – that had been designed and originated by her late father. The locals, those that remain, are not altogether happy with this re-imagining of a traditional American community, this re-packaging of their city into neat, polished boxes.

This present day scenario – the battered yet proud American south – is paralleled with another period of reconstruction, the one that occurred after the American Civil War, and this is viewed through the particular prism of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. Mitchell herself is a presence on stage (played by Lana Lesley as an intelligent woman slightly unsettled by the freight train success of her novel) as is her iconic heroine Scarlett O’Hara.

Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind is further tied to the present day narrative by a storyline involving a boorish Hollywood producer who is trying to get a new production of the book off the ground; this time with a black director and with various trims, tweaks and wholesale re-writes having been made to bring it more into keeping with modern sensibilities, especially in regard to race. The producer suggests turning one of the O’Hara servants into Martin Luther King’s grandfather and making him an early campaigner for civil rights, but the director, having started to read the novel for the first time (his parents wouldn’t allow it in the house) becomes fascinated with the book and its depiction of the American South.

Rachel Chavkin’s multimedia production is hugely ambitious in scope and execution: characters both real and imagined happily interact, while music and video, dance and movement, all form a part of the collage. The performers all play numerous roles and gender and race provide no barrier to their character-hopping; at various points throughout the production every person on stage dons a hoop skirt and corset to play Scarlett O’Hara and the most famous exchange of dialogue between Scarlett and Rhett is delivered by the two male cast members.

There are numerous moments of humour that stop it from being too overwhelming, but at near on three hours, though it rarely lags, it does sometimes feel like the work of an artist who can’t help but keep adding and refining until some original clarity is lost. This is a complex but intriguing piece, a thing of many bricks, and it’s not always as coherent as it could be but in the last few minutes, as Carrie (compellingly played by Libby King, the emotional core of the show) delivers her final plea, everything else falls away and the audience are left listening to the cathedral-echo of her voice alone.

Reviewed for musicOMH.