A Rose In Bloom

A whole bunch of years ago (OK, maybe three) I went along to the Rose Theatre in Kingston, when it was still in its unfinished state to see Peter Hall’s As You Like It which was being staged in the raw auditorium, with its exposed concrete and pipes (and Portaloos, as I recall). And this was rather exciting, not so much for the production, which was decidedly Peter Hall-y. But for the space, which felt fresh and full of potential and, also, crucially, local to where I was living at the time, so no long, crawling train from the depths of Surrey to worry about.

Roll on 2008 and, having been dogged with delays, mainly funding related, the theatre is finally open. And the finished space is really quite something. It has a layout modelled on the original Rose Theatre in Southwark and seats around 900. It's most notable feature is a pit area in front of the stage where more limber audience members can come and sit on the floor for around £7 a ticket (the theatre's website recommends bringing your own cushion). It won’t please everyone - there have already been online grumbles about sightlines and whatnot – but I thought it was an attractive and elegant space. It just seems a shame that they’ve chosen to fill it, for this, its debut production, with a stiff, if dependable, production of Uncle Vanya, once again directed by Hall.

Solid. I think that’s the best way to describe it. Solid and sturdy. This is a production that delivers exactly what it was designed to deliver. But, presumably because it is intended to tour and has not been specially created for the Rose, it failed to use the great sweeping stage in an imaginative way. The acting was fine (particularly Loo Brealey's Sonya), the simple set, with its single autumnal tree, was attractive enough, and it did have its moments, its solid, sturdy, dependable moments, but it was too gentle to be truly moving and I just wish they could have christened this space with something a bit more, well, more.

Certain parties will, however, be cheered to know that the bar area is sizeable, spacious and very reasonably priced, if rather lacking in decent seating.

A case of watch this space.

A Lucky Escape

This Thursday gone I took my first trip of the year to Theatre 503. Their current show is a thing called Mad Funny Just, a devised piece being staged as part of the Old Vic, New Voices award scheme.

The story it tells is a not an original one. A girl is dead and her brother, friends and teachers attempt to come to terms with it. Plot-wise that’s about it, but it’s lifted off in unexpected directions by the manner of its staging. The dark and poky studio space above the Latchmere pub has been made over to resemble a rehearsal room, complete with kettle and pack of chocolate biscuits in the corner. Props are kept to a minimum, ditto costumes, and the telling of the tale is left to the performances, all of which are nuanced and well-observed.

Shifting rapidly between characters, the five actors – who along with the director of the piece, Sarah Tipple, are part of a collective called Creased – bring to life the world of Louise, the dead girl in question. The cast are particularly adept at the adolescent mannerisms of her friends and Becci Gemmell in particular is superb as a nervy and quivery voiced old lady who finds herself reinvigorated after a trip to the hairdresser.

More a collection of character sketches than a play proper, not everything it attempts works – there were too many heavy-handed fantasy sequences for my liking – but, despite that, this is an exciting and energetic piece, exuding potential and invention. The story it tells may not be particularly original and the method of its staging leaves little room for the characters to grow. But in terms of performance and sheer creativity, it’s a delight. And did I say there was no set to speak of? Well, that’s not quite true. The production has a sweet little surprise saved for its closing minutes, but to say more would spoil it.

It seems that the theatre gods were really smiling on me last week as, as well as seeing this, I managed to miss out on seeing An Audience With The Mafia at the Apollo when technical difficulties caused the performance I was down to attend to be cancelled. Having since read the reviews, I realise what a lucky escape I had.

Blood And Oranges

Back to the Lyric last night for Gecko’s The Arab And The Jew, a near-wordless two man examination of the Arab Israeli situation. This is part of the London International Mime Festival and the piece is indeed free of dialogue in the conventional sense, if not of speech entirely. Instead, the performers utter odd words here and there, coupled with some unintelligible murmuring and garbled interjections. But, in the main, the physical dominates over the verbal; as the performers dance and tumble and claw at the ground.

It begins with a bang, as the two performers, Al Nedjari and Amit Lahav, friends who grew up on either side of the divide, tumble into the sand. What follows is a galloping collage of inventive scenes, each underscored with the idea of conflict. I particularly enjoyed the sudden segue into music hall skit, where the men play with toy drums and toy guns to the strains of You Always Hurt The One You Love.

As Andrew Haydon also mentioned over on Postcards, a lot of what I’ve seen so far this year has been on the short side, an hour or less, this show included. If I don’t get an interval soon, I may have to rename this blog. The Arab and The Jew ran for around 55 minutes, but even then the concept felt a bit bitty and stretched. However there was so much going on, so many arresting visual images that my attention never wavered. It just felt more like a series of, wildly inventive, but very individual moments rather than a cohesive piece.

I will admit that my appreciation may have been, er, enhanced by the two teenage boys behind me who exuded an air of I Really Would Rather Be Elsewhere from the beginning, with their constant checking of their watches and murmuring of ‘was that supposed to be funny, or what?’ accompanied by a soundtrack of incessant bag rummaging and the repeated fastening and unfastening of Velcro. But, as has happened before, some inner limpness on my part prevented me from turning round and telling them off. I always wish I had my flatmate with me at such moments; she is a secondary school teacher and has perfected an over-the-top-of-her-glasses stare of death that can silence most boys in a second. Most people for that matter. That’s a trick I’d like to learn.

A Mother's Love

The Hackney Empire is a grand old thing. It’s also one of the few theatres in London I haven’t visited before. So, striding up to the entrance (on time and not out of breath, for once), I found myself feeling rather excited. Then I spotted the large and unwelcoming chains that were holding the doors closed. Hmm. I scrutinised my notepad and noticed the word ‘studio’ scribbled in amongst my other random doodlings. So I wandered around to the side of the building and found the correct entrance, joined the queue waiting (and waiting – they didn’t let us in until almost fifteen minutes after the start time) to see A Mother Speaks.

This one-woman show, written and performed by Judd Batchelor, tackles gun crime in London and its awful aftermath. Batchelor uses broad humour and shock tactics to hammer home her message. Dressed in a tatty toweling dressing gown, she describes her life as the mother of a young son. In a casual, chatty style, she talks about his birth, his first day at school, the first time she realized he was having sex. And then, bang, his life is over, ended, cancelled out by a bullet - and the play, up until then a rambling monologue, flips into something different and darker. To the point where the whole thing was in danger of pitching into the ridiculous.

This twist – the bereaved mother is no passive figure here, instead she acts out a brutal revenge on her son’s killers – is unsubtle in the extreme and I struggled to take the play seriously as a result. But though Susie McKenna’s production is rather basic in its staging and in its dramatic approach, it clearly connected with the mostly young and local audience on the night I was there. Fidgety and noisy at first, there were audible gasps and whimpers as the play progressed. So it was clearly working on some level, even if it left me cold. The closing photo montage, a collage of young lives lost through gun or knife violence on the streets of London in the past year, had its own power and though I found the play pretty heavy-handed stuff, the shocked and uncomfortable faces I noticed as I left the theatre, forced me to put my own responses into context.

Second Chances

While I will happily sit through a film I like several times over, enjoying the peeling back of layers, the subtle revelation of new details, I rarely return for a second visit to anything I’ve seen at the theatre. This is not through lack of desire, there have been a number of shows over the last couple of years that I would have gladly revisited, but time and financial constraints plus my magpie-eyed attraction to the shiny and new, usually get in the way of my wish to see something a second time around.

On the list of things I was keen to go back to, the production of Metamorphosis by David Farr and Gisli Orn Gardarsson at the Lyric, was admittedly not high. I remember enjoying certain elements of this physical retelling of Kafka but being rather disappointed with the show as a whole, something about it just didn’t click with me. Still I had a friend who was super keen to go, and I was curious to see how it might have changed with a new cast in place.

The person I went with previously was a theatre-literate sort, a friend who knew her Kneehigh from her Frantic Assembly. We’d gone along to see Metamorphosis on the back of seeing several other physical theatre productions that we’d both really enjoyed. And we both came out feeling slightly disappointed, admitting to a certain sense of ‘seen it all before.’ The dangling from ropes and the acrobatics, though impressive, were just too over-familiar to really wow us. I remember chatting with her in the bar afterwards and discussing how our expectations had been incredibly high. We’d read the names of the companies and individuals involved and gone in there with our critical hats firmly in place, hungry to be elevated and shown something new. Going to the theatre remains one of my life’s key pleasures; it can still make me childishly giddy with excitement at times, and yet seeing as many shows as I do, it can make you, if not exactly cynical, then certainly a fussier customer than most.

So it was refreshing to return to the show with someone who was going in clean as it were, who’d not been to the theatre in a good year or two, and was thoroughly engrossed and amazed by what they saw. It was an infectious feeling and I found myself feeding of their enthusiasm. I still don’t love the production, I still find it flawed, but having seen it again, I think I appreciated it more.

On an unrelated note I’ve just checked my stats and noticed a number of people arriving here, I expect on the back of the last but one post, after searching for ‘nice girl spanking,’ ‘naked belly dancing’ and ‘shiny pants.’ There's not really much I can add to that, is there?

Four Angry Men

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

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

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

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

Buses And Belly Dancers

This was the second time in a row that I’d arrived at the Arcola breathless and flustered and in need of a steadying glass of something. The Victoria line had inconsiderately ground to a halt and I was forced to bus-hop frantically across London to make it on time. (Though it’s pleasing to note that, despite considerable Christmas indolence, I can still run pretty fast if circumstances require)

Anyway, the Arcola. Their first new production of 2008 is an odd one. The British Ambassador’s Belly Dancer is written by Craig Murray, the former ambassador to Uzbekistan, together with his partner Nadira and Alan Hescott. Murray, of course, was very publicly sacked for exposing human rights abuses. During the same period, he also left his wife for an Uzbek dancer, Nadira, who worked in a gentlemen’s club he frequented.

The subsequent media blitz has already made it to the stage, as part of Robin Soans’s wobbly verbatim piece Life After Scandal at Hampstead Theatre, and, as this play notes, there was a time where the couple had “Noam Chomsky on Hotmail and David Hare in the kitchen.” But that was a while ago (and Nadira never got her promised Nicole Farhi dress).

This current play comes across as Nadira’s attempt to tackle the way she was treated in the tabloids, to speak for herself, to tell her own story. So she performs, as well as co-writes, sitting before us wreathed in her black silk dancer’s garb and a pair of clumpy desert boots. And her story is both fascinating and harrowing. Her family were plunged into poverty after Uzbekistan became independent and, as a result, her father developed a drug habit. Though trained as a teacher, Nadira ended up dancing in a strip club to keep herself and her family afloat. Later, she was twice raped by the Uzbek police. She describes all this in a calm, matter of fact fashion, peppering her account with the occasional wry comment about Murray’s fondness for spanking and her struggles to source sheep fat in Shepherds Bush so she can prepare her favourite Uzbek dishes.

She is now taking acting classes. This is a woman who knows how to survive, to keep her head above water, to make the most of every opportunity. And one can hardly blame her. But on theatre terms this is still a strange exercise and one that smacks of indulgence. Nadira’s accented delivery is sometimes hesitant and the piece is full of contradictions: she wants to be taken seriously, yet intersperses the piece with bursts of belly dancing. Her story is compelling but I wondered if a show like this was the best way to present it. I must admit I left the theatre feeling more puzzled than enlightened. I gather its bound for the Arts Theatre after its stint at the Arcola though.

Another Menier Musical

OK then. Finally some theatre, as promised.

On Tuesday I ventured out of the warm cocoon of my flat to visit the Menier Chocolate Factory for the final preview of their revival of La Cage Aux Folles. This was due to open an age ago but the press night had been much delayed due to the illness of Douglas Hodge and an understudy had been playing the role of Albin (Spencer Stafford, who according to my flat mate who saw the show before Christmas, was excellent).

The Menier has been rejigged to include a red-curtained entrance tunnel and a number of cabaret style tables at the front of the stage, as well a strip of quite spectacularly ugly carpet, in a stab at recreating the 1970s St Tropez club in which the show is set.

I’d only encountered La Cage previously through its non-musical American film incarnation, The Birdcage, which I’d managed to sit through despite a severe intolerance to Robin Williams, but the plot remains much the same. Jean Michel, the son of nightclub owner Georges (played by Philip Quast) announces his intention to marry the daughter of a rightwing politician. The future in-laws need to meet, but Jean-Michel insists that Georges’ lover Albin – who performs nightly in the club as Zaza – needs to be elsewhere and that his real mother be present instead, this despite the fact that it is Albin who has raised him.

Though it has a degree of rough-around-the-edges charm, Terry Johnson’s production seems to take an age to set this up. There was some fun business with the club’s troupe of dancers, La Cagelles, though, unobservant me, I took an age to notice that one was in fact a woman, and I liked the way the show focused on the still-strong passion between the middle aged couple but, on the whole, this was a flabby and fluffy thing. Quast and Hodge were decent in their roles but neither knocked me out, the pacing was occasionally awry, and the orchestra, seated in an alcove at the side of the stage, often seemed to fighting against the vocals, the music rather overwhelming the lyrics. There even appeared to be a large piece of duct tape holding the set together in one corner – was this a part of the design?

There was a degree of audience interaction, which I quite liked. Those opting to sit at the front tables are likely to have their head caressed or be fed olives by Quast, but these moments felt rather rehearsed and I’d have liked to seen them push this aspect of the show a little further.

The core of the story, about acceptance, about what constitutes family, is still potent, but though I left humming Jerry Herman’s lyrics, I wasn’t as excited by the production as I’d hoped to be.

The show was playing to a full house though, which allowed me to experience the Menier seating scrum properly for the first time. (The unreserved seating policy meant that a bit of elbow action was required to secure a decent perch). Also, when filing out at the end, my friend and I got to overhear the orchestra loudly deconstructing that night's performance: “OK, next time I think we need to be faster on au revoir.” And we also got to see a six foot tall Germanic tranny sit on Toby Young. Which had entertainment value, certainly.

Procrastinating

What, is it 2008 already? How the hell did that happen? It seems like Christmas was just yesteday, but then I'm from a Serbian family, so Christmas actually was yesterday. Still, a more diligent blogger may have filled this space with an informed and/or amusing breakdown of the theatrical highlights of the coming months, but then the more diligent bloggers already have.

Anyway there’ll definitely be some theatre related content here in, ooh, some days. Definitely.

The Inevitable End Of Year List

OK, it seems that this time of year calls for a list of some sort. I can so do that. I like lists. So, in no particular order, the things that have moved and delighted me most this year were:

Elling, Bush Theatre
The Ugly One, Royal Court
Nakamitsu, Gate Theatre
Dealer’s Choice, Menier Chocolate Factory
Othello, Donmar Warehouse
The Brothers Size, Young Vic
Subway, Lyric Studio

That’s a rather hastily composed bunch. I’m sure there are plenty of things I’ve forgotten. There are certainly things I wish I’d had a chance to have a second crack at; I really regret that I wasn’t able to tackle The Masque Of The Red Death with the energy it deserved.

There are also a number of things I missed completely due to disorganisation and bad luck, Rupert Goold’s Macbeth being the one that springs most immediately to mind, and a number of things I am determined to squeeze in next year: principally Women Of Troy and War Horse. There were also a good few hours of my life that I'd have liked back, but I shan't dwell on the negative now.

This is also probably the time to mention how blogging has, over this past year in particular, enriched my life no end. Not only has it been the springboard for contributing to the GU arts blog but, perhaps more significantly, it has also brought me into contact with a great number of lovely people – many, though not all, of whom are called Andrew – and led to many a pleasant wine-fuelled evening. With a bit of theatre thrown in, of course. That’s a given.

Here’s to more of the same in 2008.

Happy Christmas.

Lady Disdain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bah Humbug!

I feel somewhat torn. On one hand I am glad that a company like the RSC is willing to work with someone like Anthony Neilson, to do something a bit daring, a bit experimental, to take a chance on a more collaborative – and initially script-less – way of working. (Brian Logan goes into the details of the creative process on his GU blog).

But then I get to the show itself, the finished product, God In Ruins, which I saw last night at Soho Theatre with my friend Juice, and my enthusiasm wavers. I just didn’t think it was all that good. It didn’t even seem like a brave failure, more a muddle of ideas, many of which I’d seen better executed elsewhere. While Neilson’s previous work, The Wonderful World Of Dissocia managed to be compelling and infuriating in equal measure, this new one was – cardinal sin in Neilson’s book – kind of on the dull side: there was something rather tired and lifeless about the play, beneath all the swearing and shouting.

It starts with a mildly amusing prologue in which Ebenezer Scrooge, now fully redeemed after his encounter with his three ghosts, turns out to be just as insufferable in his new perky and life-loving incarnation as his old bah-humbug self. This did make me chuckle a little, but it was essentially one joke, and a rather over stretched one.

The play then jumps forward to the present and we meet Brian, a divorced, alcoholic reality TV producer. Having been rude to his ex-wife and failed to tip a pizza delivery man, he has his own Scrooge moment when he is visited by the white-suited ghost of dead dad, there to help him reconnect with his estranged daughter. Even at this early point in the evening there’s a seen-it-before feel to the set up: a heartless TV exec forced to confront his mortality, wasn’t that Scrooged? Even his reality shows have a ring of the familiar to them, like Chimp Monastery – Monkey Tennis, anyone?

There’s also an internet porn sequence that reminded me of Closer, even more so when the truth behind it is revealed, and a not–quite-as-funny-as-it-could-have-been interlude where two small boys discuss the fact that Santa is actually dead and it’s their parents that really buy the presents, which features liberal use of the underused put down ‘pooh head.’

This is followed by a bizarrely studenty, post-modern moment when the characters become aware that they are in a theatre and that they are being watched by an audience. A further layer of artifice is then peeled away as a ‘real’ homeless man bursts into the auditorium and interrupts proceedings, claiming to be an ex-soldier, just back, oddly, from Iran. If this was meant to indicate a slightly futuristic setting, it passed me by – I was too busy wondering why Scrooge from the opening sequence had popped up to help Brian on his way; was he a ghost? A drunken hallucination? Did it even matter?

To be fair, there were a handful of good gags, but most of the laughter I could hear was of the uneasy ‘this is supposed to be a funny bit, right?’ type – forced and awkward. As a whole, the production often seemed to be striving incredibly hard to be anarchic, and coming nowhere near. Brian, eventually finds his daughter, in Second Life, but as Juice pointed out to me in the bar afterwards, he was actually desperate to get in touch with her at the start and was only unable to because he was pissed out of his head, so it’s not much of a redemption. Though there’s also a suggestion that Brian’s unhappiness might be down to some latent homosexuality on his part.

I don’t know, I hate to tip a bagful of negative over a work that takes risks, that tries something different, but none of the disparate elements of this show seemed to fit well with one another and, on top of that, there was a sense of over-confidence to the thing – a touch of swagger about it – that I found very off-putting.

Put Out The Light

So then. Othello, Donmar Warehouse. You know the story. Sell-out run, tickets swapping hands for sky-high sums on eBay, and so forth and so on. There’s been more than enough words devoted to all that. To the point where it seems almost in danger of overshadowing the production itself. Which is a shame, as this is a completely enthralling production, even if it is rather conventionally staged.

First up, there's Ewan McGregor playing Iago, who Charles Spencer and others were so mean about. I genuinely wonder if he perhaps had an attack of the jitters on the night the press were in, because he had ample charisma when I saw him, at last Thursday’s matinee. Yes, he was probably a tad too inscrutable in the role and it was difficult to gauge his motivations, but there was something appealingly sly and underhand about his performance. As an actor, he has charm and presence, but he can also switch it off if he chooses, can blend into the background; he’s not a starry actor – and I suspect that disappoints people.

However McGregor could probably turn cartwheels in the background if he wanted and it would still be Chiwetel Ejiofor’s performance that made the greatest impact on the audience. Again, many words have already been written about his nuanced and sympathetic take on the role – and most of them are on the money. He is strong and dignified, yet vulnerable – a man out of place. He makes each line come alive and does so with a skill that is considerable yet not showily so.

Kelly Reilly’s performance as Desdemona, on the other hand, has proved as divisive as McGregor’s. And while she is rather girlish and fluttery in earlier scenes, after the interval she seemed to bloom in the role. Having spent most the evening cinched and uplifted in a beautiful dress (made, according to the programme, by someone with the too-delicious-to-be-true name of Elspeth Threadgold), she is slowly and poignantly stripped of her corsets and stockings by Emilia, until she is clad only in a shapeless, white nightgown. I found this scene incredibly moving, and by the end she looked so vulnerable, so exposed, ready to give herself to her husband in what proved to be a particularly effective death scene. Indeed, I don’t think I’ve been to a production this year that had my so physically gripped. I was edged forward in my seat, silently pleading with Othello to listen to her, to heed her protestations of innocence. I wasn’t alone either; I could hear the breath catching in the throat of the girl in the seat beside me, feel the tension radiating from her. Incidently, she had queued for her ticket on the day and found the experience fun, if a little tiring, and - judging by her enraptured response - more than worth it.

Indeed, there's an interesting and increasingly demented debate going on about the ticket situation on the GU blog after Peter Bradshaw commented that such a production should be filmed to make it accessible to all.

Happy Families

I tend to gravitate towards corners. It is my default setting in most social situations and so it was last night at a performance of the Royal Court’s Family Plays, a double bill of works from Sweden and Ukraine all neatly wrapped up in an one hour and fifteen minute package (complete with bar break).

For the first piece of the evening, the Court’s upstairs space has been painted a bright, sunny yellow and the bench seating arranged around the walls, with a dining table, a comfy sofa and some garden furniture scattered around the room. It’s all very light and airy and Swedish-looking, though my corner perch wasn’t the most sensible – I was watching the actors’ backs for a good chunk of the time.

Anyway, the play. The Good Family, by Joakim Pirinen, is perhaps one of the tensest things I’ve seen on stage in a long while. In it we are presented with family: a husband and wife and their two adolescent children, who are as perky and content as it’s possible to be, enraptured by everything around them, no matter how mundane – and it’s astonishingly unnerving. I felt myself expecting – and nervously waiting for – something awful to happen – for someone to say something vile or for one of the character’s to spectacularly lose it and stab all the others with a salad fork, but this moment doesn’t come. Instead they play dice and sing songs and compliment each other incessantly, saying things like: “The potatoes are extraordinarily well-cooked” and “Your hair is really light and vigorous looking.” At one point, the father goes off to take a phone call, and the tension is almost unbearable, as we wait for him to return with some atrocious news.

This was a fascinating play; one that achieved a number of things. It’s satirical, certainly, but it also made me question why I was reacting in the way that I was; why did this image of familial bliss make me so anxious? What was it about this portrait of intense happiness that I found so difficult to process? Why was I searching so desperately for something dark and rotten at the centre of it?

After the interval we returned to the theatre to find that all the Scandinavian pleasantness had been swept away, literally – the furniture was now stacked at the back of the room, leaving the audience to sit on seat cushions or on the floor. Earlier, as we headed to the bar after the first piece, Andrew Haydon commented that the next piece was probably going to be “Blasted, it’s all going to go Sarah Kane.” And while Natalia Voorzhibit’s The Khomenko Family Chronicles isn’t nearly so extreme, he wasn’t too far off the mark.

In a visual twist that reminded me of The Wonderful World Of Dissocia one wall had been opened out to create a grim little hospital room. On a metal bed, a bald-headed child sits attached to a chemotherapy drip. His parents come to visit, his mother is heavily pregnant, in white leggings and purple spike-heeled boots; his father wears a football shirt and carries a bottle of beer. They bring their son chicken soup and reminisce about how they first met, using references to Chernobyl and September 11 to colour their stories. Chernobyl and its resulting radioactive rain represents a pleasant memory to them - they appear to make no connection between this event and their son's illness.

But what stood out most for me about this second piece was Lewis Lempereur-Palmer’s superb performance as their young son Lyosha; in a dream-like sequence during the play’s closing minutes he is required to speak a lengthy monologue while running around through the seated audience, and he was quite brilliant.

Oh, though a small point, it's still worth noting that the dramatic change of set between plays means that anything left on the seats during the interval will be gathered up and tidied away - as I discovered after leaving my book under my chair.

A South African Double Bill

Right, there was going to be a lame intro here about the imminence of Christmas and how generally unprepared I am, but it was Not Very Interesting and has gone the way of the delete key. So instead I shall simply cut to the chase. Yesterday I was at the Young Vic to see both shows in their double bill of South African re-workings of familiar stories. First up, A Christmas Carol or Ikrismas Kherol if you will. This opens with one of the most visually striking sequences I’ve seen in a while; it made me jiggle in my seat with pleasure. Starting in darkness, a group of miners, guided by the torch beams of their helmets, stomp down from the galleries above the stage, and proceed to use chains and drums to replicate the cacophony of life in the mine. It’s unsubtle and rather batters the senses, but it works – works better than perhaps any other element of the show, where pesky things like narrative start getting in the way.

Scrooge is played by singer Pauline Malefane, a mezzo-soprano I believe, who won acclaim as Carmen a couple of years back. She is, in accordance with the story, visited by three ghosts. The first of these spirits is a lady in a prim white suit who shows Scrooge images of her impoverished childhood. These, in an interesting touch, are projected on to a white screen across the back of the stage, having been shot on digital video. They reveal that Scrooge’s mother died when she was a young age and that she had a sister who was forced into prostitution in order to support them both, who then also died. These scenes, filmed in the townships of South Africa, are played out in silence with the performers adding sound-effects, vocals and narration where necessary. They also provide a dramatic counterpoint to the show’s opening, where the workings of a gold mine were conjured so vibrantly; these video sequences have the opposite effect. What we see is ‘realer’ but also, conversely, more distant, less alive. The production devotes a good chunk of its running time to these videos as well, which I felt rather knocked it off balance.

Because this is A Christmas Carol, one cannot escape without a moral message being rammed home before the curtain falls (or, rather in the case of this show, before the upbeat percussive finale) but they just about managed to swing these scenes, using bundles of cloth to make the 'every three seconds a child dies of want and ignorance' line less hectoring than it might have been.

I also caught the second production, which will be playing in rep with A Christmas Carol, a version of Mozart’s The Magic Flute by the same company, with Malefane now playing the Queen of the Night. Now, opera remains one of my cultural blindspots, so I have no other productions to compare this to. But I enjoyed it a lot, everything was done with a degree of visual flair. I have no idea why there was a trio of ladies in lavender suits with angels’ wings but I know I liked it. And the children I could see in the front row were bouncing along happily rather than sullenly swinging their legs, a fairly good indicator of how well a show like this is working.

However, perhaps to invoke appropriately wintery feelings in the audience, it was absolutely freezing in the Young Vic for both performances. Take a coat - and be prepared to wear it.

Some Kind Of Bliss?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pretty In Punk

The Bush Theatre is on the tiny side, I know this. But I've never had another person near enough sitting in my lap as I did last night. The place was packed, and having inadvisably chosen to sit on the highest level of seating, I felt rather squeezed in. But I suppose the crush of bodies is fitting given the subject matter of the current production.


Mike Packer's play is about a punk band called tHe dYsFUnCKshOnalZ! (also the name of play, which I'm sure will go down a treat with arts page subs). This particular band burned briefly in the 1970s and then faded from view after a messy post-gig brawl left one of their number, lead singer Billy Abortion, minus a lung. He is now working a shelf-stacker with only a cupboard full of pharmaceuticals for company. But though his screw-the-system attitude still very much intact, when an American credit card company offers the group a substantial sum of money to use their best known song in a commercial, his principles don’t prevent him from taking their cash. Then it transpires there's even more money to be had if they're willing to perform at the launch party gig – the only catch is they'll have to trade their punk garb for logo-covered turtlenecks and sing new, corporate-approved lyrics.

It’s a neat set-up, but once Packer has all the narrative elements in place it begins to feel as if he’s actually not really that sure whether his characters' adherence to the punk credo of their youth is admirable or pathetic. And, as a result, it is difficult to care overly in their predicament. The play also has an awkward ratio of ‘funny’ to ‘not funny’ – in places it’s very entertaining indeed, but there are large chunks that fell flat, whole scenes where you got a sense that you should be laughing, that you were supposed to be sliding of your seat in mirth at the irony of it all, only you weren’t, because the material wasn’t quite strong enough.

Fortunately some inspired performances help to flesh out the occasionally thin writing - Pearce Quigley, as the band’s dishevelled drummer, has this superbly stoned, stuttering delivery that turns nearly every line he utters into a punch line. And Rupert Proctor, as Billy, is so aggressively energetic that during one particularly frantic rant I worried he might pop something vital.

The actors get to perform the band’s songs too, and did so rather impressively, I thought. I also liked the fact that the set design, a collage of faded gig posters, had been extended down the stairwell and into the Bush’s teensy box office area.

As for the play, I suspect it may work better in a West End setting, where its broadness and occasional lapses into sentimentality wouldn’t be so glaring; on the miniscule Bush stage it felt unwieldy, but I could see how it might appeal to a wider audience.

A(nother) Night At The Orange Tree

There are many reasons not to like the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond. It’s in Richmond for one thing. And it stages safe, solid productions designed to appeal to Richmond audiences. These tend to be done in period costume on naturalistic sets, which usually take an age to change between scenes, as there is always much twiddling with side-tables and crystal decanters and silverware. There's also a faintly irritating all-in-the-family taint to the productions too, which nearly always star Octavia Walters, daughter of the theatre’s founder and artistic director Sam Walters.

And yet, for all this, I feel considerable affection for the Orange Tree. It doesn’t tend to experiment or to surprise, but instead it does a particular thing and does it very well. In the main this means staging rarely performed plays with some kind of social weight to them. Last season was all about the work of GBS and his contemporaries, this season it’s a more loosely linked collection of plays by women dramatists.

The last thing I saw there was Daphne du Maurier’s The Years Between, perhaps not an amazing bit of writing, but still a gripping story, well-told, that questioned a woman’s position, both in the context of marriage and in society in general, in a manner that I found quite resonant.

The current production is Elizabeth Barker’s Chains was written in 1909 and is about duty and responsibility. It concerns Charley Wilson, a ‘quill-pusher’ in the City, who’s life is stirred up by the announcement of a colleague that he’s going to quit his steady job and chance his luck in Australia. Though Charley’s existence is one of hard graft and ceaseless routine, living from Sunday to Sunday, it takes his friend’s decision to really wake him up to how unhappy he is with his lot. His dilemma is reflected against that of his sister-in-law Maggie (played by – well fancy that – a certain Octavia Walters – who admittedly is pretty good in the role). Unlike Charley’s wife, who is an uncomplaining, eternally optimistic sort, her sister Maggie has fire inside her; though she is engaged to marry a wealthy man, and is, as a result, guaranteed a comfortable life, she burns to do something more, to see something more of the world – to live. She sympathises with Charley’s predicament and urges him to follow his instincts, despite the upset it might cause.

Much of the play focuses on Charley grappling with the decision to stay or to leave, to do what’s expected of him or to take a chance - to do ‘the done thing’ or the right thing - but though this eventually became a little repetitive, I loved the rather dark way Barker chooses to end things, twisting what should be a happy announcement into something far more ambiguous.

Though it was very Orange Tree - in every sense - this was a strong production, and it passed the crucial in-the-round test: despite the cosiness of the venue, the stately pacing of the drama and the average age of the audience, I didn’t spot a single sleeper – not always the case at this particular venue.

Lateness Averted

On bus. Slow bus. Checking watch. Getting rather too close to start of play for my liking. Bus still slow. And doing random loop through back streets I swear it has never taken before. Crap. Finally jump off bus, pelt down street, pass Kingsland Road shouty drunk, and reach theatre. Attempt to appear marginally less flustered than I actually am as I request my ticket. Fail. Enter theatre. Just in time.

Phew, I never usually cut things that close. I am much better organised than that. Oh, yes. Anyway, the play, the point of all that dashing: Tim Stimpson’s One, Nineteen, currently being perfomed in the Arcola’s baby back alley studio on a stage bare bar the odd sandbag and folding chair.

The title refers to the date of a catastrophic storm that devastates an area of England. But though it touches on the implications of climate change, this is not a post-apocalyptic, the whole-world’s-going-to-hell type play, but a more familiar media satire, taking the events in New Orleans as a cue to explore how the media responds to a disaster of this scale.

So Stimpson presents us with a series of characters, often in conversation with invisible interviewers. First up we get a few blanket-clad survivors, then he settles on individual stories: an environmental activist, a politician who becomes something of a scapegoat, a self-satisfied rock star who is quick to spearhead a huge concert at Wembley to raise aid, and at the heart of all this, a young mother who was separated from her three children as the waters rose, and whose story has inadvertently become the human interest hook on to which all the journalists cling. These children’s names, "Sam, Jack and little Chloe" – it's always ‘little’ Chloe – become something of a mantra throughout the play in a depressingly plausible manner. The satirical elements are at time rather heavy-handed, but I enjoyed the way the stories intersected, the pacing was taut and it managed to touch on the subjects of climate change and environmental upheaval without being preachy or overly doomy.

Plus, and here's praise, it was engaging enough for me to - just - about be able to blot out the noise from above. I‘ve not seen Jenufa which is playing in the Arcola’s main space, but from the sounds of things, it has a cast of possibly around three hundred.

Oh, and there's another "enjoyably off-the-wall" Observer post over here.

Brotherly Love

“Oh, she may be weary. And them young girls they do get weary…”

Oh, don’t they just. But, while I was in something of a melancholic slump when I arrived at the Young Vic last night, it soon lifted – their current production can’t help but lift you up. The Brothers Size by Tarell Alvin McCraney pulls elements of Yoruba myth into an American setting. In practice this results in one of the more vibrant, tingle-inducing things I’ve seen this year.

The production is simply staged, in-the-round (or, actually, in-the-square as the Whingers would no doubt point out), the audience seated around the four walls of the Young Vic’s Maria studio. There is no set. Just a black floor, onto which a circle is chalked in the opening minutes. A handful of red chalk is then thrown down into the same space and this then marks the actors’ clothes and skin as the evening progresses. There are no props either and the actors speak their stage directions as well as performing the actions. This sounds a little dry when described, but all these elements contribute to the distinctive rhythms of the play, its particular texture and flow. Ditto, the live musical accompaniment.

McCraney’s play concerns two brothers: Ogun and Oshoosi Size. Ogun, the eldest, is the solid, responsible and hard-working type, who has built up a successful auto-repair business. The younger Oshoosi is more flighty and easily-swayed. He has just been released from prison, so Ogun sets him up with a job in his shop, to Oshoosi’s initial displeasure. Their reunion is threatened by an ex-cell mate of Oshoosi’s, Elegba, who turns up with an old car to flog and something menacing in his demeanor.

The actors playing the brothers, Nyasha Hatendi as Ogun and Obi Abili as Oshooshi have a superb rapport, most overtly displayed when they launch into a wonderful duet of Otis Redding’s Try A Little Tenderness, singing and dancing – and doing air piano – along to the recording. It’s a brilliant moment.

Dreams too play a large part in the narrative – a dream state indicated by a red cross being shone through the chalk circle. But McCraney manages to blend these more stylised aspects with a story that truly hooks you; the brothers’ love for each other, their reliance on one another and the lengths they’d be willing to go for one another, are powerfully and movingly portrayed throughout. All this in an interval-less ninety minutes as well.