The Menier Misses The Mark

I was primed to like this. In common with many children of immigrants I have always had a fascination with certain English institutions and gobbled up films and novels with an Oxford or Cambridge setting as a teenager. But, despite my initial enthusiasm and despite the odd moment of poignancy, this production failed to particularly move or touch me.

Simon Gray’s The Common Pursuit, which the Menier Chocolate Factory are currently reviving in a break from staging musicals, begins in Cambridge of the 1960s. A group of students are in the process of setting up a literary magazine named after an essay collection by FR Leavis. They’re not a particularly likeable bunch but there is something appealing in their intellectual idealism, their desire to leave their mark. But, inevitably, as the years pass, compromises are made, standards are lowered, life weighs down on them – in terms of narrative we’ve been here many, many times before.

Fiona Laird’s production is a curiously blunt affair, slamming much of the subtlety out of the play, flattening it out. None of the actors really convince as students alive with creative energy in the opening scene, so, as they succumb to hack jobs at the BBC (a very Bad Thing indeed in the play’s narrow view of the world) or to extramarital liaisons at the Charing Cross Hotel with women whose names they can’t remember, there is some key thing missing, some necessary hook – it’s difficult to care that much about their various dramas and infidelities

From a performance point of view the production is very mixed bag. James Dreyfus, an actor whose appeal I’ve never really got before now, is very good indeed as Humphrey, the possibly brilliant poet whose self criticism is such he ends up unable to write, frozen, lost. He always stands a little apart from the others, keeping his distance, occasionally breaking in with a waspish comment, but drawing a line between himself and his friends. Reece Shearsmith’s Nick was rather disappointing, far broader in comparison and his various tics were very reminiscent, perhaps inevitably, of his League Of Gentlemen creations (though, in his favour, he was the only one who appeared to age in any noticeable way over the near twenty-year period that the play covers). As for Mary Stockley’s Marigold, the lover and then wife of the magazine’s editor, it’s difficult to judge her performance given how underwritten a part it is, she exists purely to provide a plot twist, a mistress in waiting.

I concede it may be an age thing but I really couldn’t grasp what it was about the production that moved Charles Spencer to tears. But having read the Guardian blog about Gray’s diaries, I suspect I may be making an Amazon purchase or two this weekend as I’ve not read them and they sound rather wonderful.

Into The Woods

I have a new hobby. It’s called jogger dodging (sush now, it’s nothing filthy). No, instead it involves side-stepping, and generally making way for, lycra clad fitness enthusiasts as they pound the pavements. Living in the neighbourhood I do, even the briefest of excursions beyond the cosy cocoon of my flat usually involves an element of such dodging, but, for the advanced dodger, there is no greater challenge than that stretch of pavement that links the National Theatre with the Globe. Here they come at you in pairs, sometimes even in clusters, iPods on, eyes fixed on an invisible goal.

By the time you have navigated your way to Globe, successfully outmaneuvering all these numerous sweaty obstacles along the way, you may find you have worked up quite a thirst. This is easily rectified by detouring via the bar on the way to take your seat and pausing to absorb the sense of satisfaction that comes with a good workout.

My most recent visit to the Globe – my first of the year – was last week to see the second production in their Totus Mundus season, a staging A Midsummer Night’s Dream directed by Jonathan Munby (who also directed Ben Yeoh’s excellent Nakamitsu at the Gate last year). This was a broad production, not exactly subtle, but solidly entertaining nonetheless.

Colour played a major role. The first thing that strikes you is that the stage itself, which has been coated with glossy blue flooring. The Athenians wear solemn black in the opening scenes, changing outfits for their later escapades in the forest, and the Mechanicals wear the whitest of white tights when they come to perform Pyramus and Thisbe. And the fairies? Well their costumes were a mish-mash of Courtney Love‘s Hole-era cast-offs merged with a dash of Rocky Horror. By which I mean lots of corsetry and ragged tutus in lurid shades of pink and purple.

The production veered perilously close to panto territory at times. No potential innuendo was unmarked: groins were thrusted, bums were waggled and nipples were tweaked. Paul Hunter, as Bottom, went all out in his death scene as Pyramus – a fabulously over the top five minutes complete with mimed eye-gouging and self-castration. It received a spontaneous round of applause from the audience on the night I was there, though I suspect this was partly due to the sheer levels of energy involved. The other playing was less frenetic which helped to balance things out. Pippa Nixon and Laura Rogers were excellent as Hermia and Helena respectfully, embracing the comic potential of their roles with more gusto than Cristopher Brandon and Oliver Boot as Lysander and Demitrius.

But I was unsure what to make of Siobhan Redmond in the double role of Hippolyta and Titania. She was perfectly fine as the former, tender and affectionate in fact. But as the bewitched fairy queen she adopted this girly, giggly voice I found rather grating. She appeared to be modeling her performance on Carol Kane’s Ghost Of Christmas Present from Scrooged - though sadly she failed to assault anyone with a toaster.

As I said, this is a solid, amusing production, one that made me laugh quite frequently. Munby doesn’t use the space with quite the same level of invention as Lucy Bailey did in her 2006 production of Titus Andronicus but there are some lovely little visual touches. I particularly liked the moment when the billowing blue backdrop was whisked over the heads of the audience in the pit. And of course the Globe is gifted with that magical quality as the sun sets overhead, capable of elevating the most mediocre of productions into something special. Not that this was mediocre, it was fun, fizzing stuff, well paced and aware of its audience, content to do its job and do it well and then fade like fairy dust as the crowds file out into the night.

The Pitmen Painters At The National

It is refreshing to encounter a play that deals in ideas and yet features characters that do not just feel like mouthpieces for particular points of view. Lee Hall’s The Pitmen Painters at the National succeeds in this regard. It deals in Big Themes and yet it manages to also be a play about people. The play charts of the history of the Ashington Group, a group of miners who took up painting and made a stir in the art world.

Having signed up for an art appreciation class, their assigned tutor Robert Lyon, having made little headway showing them slides of Renaissance masterpieces (they can’t be doing with all these cherubs and want to look at ‘proper’ paintings), decides he can better teach them about art by encouraging them to create it themselves.

Though reluctant, with Lyon’s encouragement they begin to enjoy the process and it becomes clear that a number of the men (reduced by Hall from around thirty to just five for the purposes of the play) have an aptitude for art. Their work is noticed by a local shipping heiress and art collector and soon they are staging exhibitions and being invited down to London to visit the Tate. But what drives them to keep painting, to keep producing work, is not their unexpected success, or their increasing recognition by the art world, but their sheer love of art, of the process of creation. A window has been opened for them. They are able to document their lives in a way they hadn't thought possible, to record the 'little, tiny moments of being alive,' to create something capable of lasting.

Hall just about steers these characters away from stereotype territory: there is the staunch Marxist one, the everything-by-the-book one, the dim but goodhearted one and the younger one, frustrated by his inability to land a steady job. But though these men can be neatly summed up as such, some warm playing from the actors and some sharp writing gives them greater life than that might suggest.

It’s Hall’s portrait of Oliver Kilbourn (played by Christopher Connel), that is the most affecting. The most talented of the group, he has been a pitman all his life and considers himself a good one. When he is offered a stipend to work full time as a painter, he is torn between the desire to do something he has come to love and the fear of leaving behind all he has known. Eventually the shift in identity that this would require proves too much for him.

Hall takes particular pains to drive home how open these men were to the world of art, how they came to embrace it. On a visit to an exhibition of Chinese art, where Lyon sees mere folk art and is quick to dismiss it as such, the men saw something profound in its simplicity, something not totally unrelated from their own lives. I could have done with learning something more about Lyon and his relationship with the men. As it is we get one powerful scene between Lyon and Kilbourn (which is – very coolly – conducted while Ian Kelly, as Lyon, sketches the other man, the results in full view of the audience) that reveals something of the strange mix of pride and envy he feels towards this group of men who will be remembered longer than he will ever be.

The production loses a little of its impetus in the second half, but then these are real lives with no neat conclusions. Since there is no easy ending point to the story, Hall opts to finish with the nationalization of the mines and the men dreaming of the socialist paradise to come (and having a bit of sing as they do so). The irony is obvious without Hall us being reminded of the pit closures on the overhead screens. A woman next to me tutted to her friend as she got up, said she wasn’t keen on being lectured to. But I thought this was a rather harsh assessment, I didn’t feel lectured, but enthused and excited, it left me thinking, as was intended, about what art means to me and the role of artists in society. It’s also very funny, especially in the first half, with much of this humour derived from accent-based confusion (the accent in Ashington being a particularly thick variant on Geordie known as Pitmatic).

There’s an exhibition of the Ashington Group’s work up in the main theatre and it adds much to the experience to be able to look at the paintings you’ve just seen being discussed, including the sketch of Kilbourn and the early linocuts. As I was pottering around, looking at the pictures, Jeremy Irons swept past me with a pair of large glossy dogs on leads, which has little bearing on the play or the exhibition, but was an odd enough sight to merit a mention.

Making It Up On The Spot

I was at the Lyric last night with the man who likes to be known as Barry. We were there to see Hard Hearted Hannah and Other Stories an exercise in ‘long form’ improvisation by Cartoon de Salvo. What this meant in practice, was three performers – Alex Murdoch, Neil Haigh and the Guardian’s comedy critic Brian Logan – attempting to create a full length play from a few audience suggestions and their own imaginations.

As we entered the studio the three were seated on a small stage playing songs that included Tears On My Pillow and, of course, Hard Hearted Hannah, on an array of instruments that included a banjo, a cider jug and a washboard. But this was just a precursor to the show proper. In order to get started they ask the audience for potential titles. Someone, Maxie Szalwinska I think, suggested The Obituarist – which is a play I’d happily watch but in the end they went for The Forgotten One.

They also asked the audience to pick three songs from their playlist. These three songs would then have to be incorporated in some way into the show, this pre-arranged soundtrack the only semblance of structure it would have. The story we got involved astronauts, aliens and lonesome strangers who lived in box cars (though, as is the nature of the exercise, Lyn Gardner got to see an entirely different show involving an Icelandic woman and a butler, called The Birthday Party in a wry nod to the current production in the main house). The songs included New Delhi Freight Train and Mama Told Me Not To Come. And, it was pretty funny stuff, but more fascinating by far was watching the performers, watching them pick up the narrative thread from one another and drag the story off in unexpected directions. Sometimes they appeared in sync, picking up on cues and forwarding the story together, other times they seemed to be tugging it in different directions.

There were inevitable lulls and there was also a fair bit of corpsing but the chief pleasure came in watching the thing take shape. It doesn’t – or at least it didn’t on this occasion – quite escape the ‘gag-centred’ approach of Whose Line and its like, but it was very entertaining indeed. I do wonder what would happen if they went for a more dramatic and less obviously comic set-up – that would be very interesting to see and is something that does often happen (as Logan has pointed out on the Guardian blog). The finished thing, in this case, may have been rather lightweight, but the process remained enthralling – the way the performers built on each other’s ideas, the unexpected leaps of imagination – and the piece they produced held together, a fully formed story. There is risk involved of course, the risk that the thing will fail to click together, will flounder and fall apart, but that risk is part of the appeal. I’d like to see another one if I have time. It’s a shame it’s not on for longer.

Retail Fatigue

There was a queue snaking down the stairs. It wound from the entrance of the Royal Court's upstairs theatre, down past the bar (but not through the bar, sadly) and ended up somewhere near the foyer.

Eventually, after a fair bit of milling about, they let us in. Music was blaring as we made our way into the theatre and the ushers appeared to have taken on the role of stone-faced club doormen, making us wait then reluctantly waving us in. (I presume this was for scene-setting purposes, either that or the Royal Court needs to work on its staff's charm training).

Yet again the interior of the upstairs space has been completely transformed, this time to accurately resemble a discount sportswear store on Oxford Street. So we have lots of garish strip lighting and brightly coloured signage. And instead of sitting on proper seats, the audience are made to perch on little plastic white stools.

All this is in aid of the Court's production of Levi David Addai's Oxford Street, a brash, patchily amusing comedy set in, as you may have gathered, a discount sportswear store, a place where the young staff all dream of doing something better than earning six ponds something an hour dealing with disgruntled customers and humourless supervisors.

One, Kofi (affably played by Nathaniel Martello-White) – the moral centre of the play, a decent guy with a degree under his belt who is currently working as a security guard – has hopes of becoming a journalist; another, sales assistant Loraina, wants to be a singer; while another one is studying economics at uni. Alek, the Polish security guard, meanwhile just reads his Daily Mail – a nice touch that – and glares at them all, quietly despairing of their slack attitude to their jobs.

Now, I've done my time behind the till (all through university, at various shops and department stores, though being from Surrey I was selling silverware and jewellery rather than trainers) and Addai accurately captures that world and what it's like to be tied to a soul-sappingly tedious job when you know you are capable of more. But unfortunately his plot is thinner than a thin thing, a sub Do The Right Thing dilemma about some stolen stock. There's simply not enough there to hang a ninety minute play on. The dialogue compensates somewhat, a plausible blend of patois and slang and believable staff room banter, but the characters and relationships are in dire need of fleshing out. The play has a fair amount of surface charm with some flashes of interest underneath, but I suspect were the flashy, noisy manner of its staging stripped away, it would struggle to stand up on its own.

A Smile In The Dark

I have never been very fond of lifts. Or planes. Or roller-coasters. It’s a control thing, I like to keep my feet on the floor. So as I headed over to the BAC to see (no, that’s not right. To participate in? To experience?) Ontroerend Goed’s Smile Off Your Face, I found myself feeling pretty apprehensive and at one point contemplated simply turning around and going home again. But I’m glad I didn’t, very glad I didn’t. It was an astonishing experience.

In the BAC lobby, I was seated in a wheelchair, a blindfold was placed over my eyes and my hands were tied together. Disorientated and in darkness, I was then taken through into a room where scents were wafted under my nose, incense I think, as music played faintly in the background. A woman’s voice called out from time to time. You have no idea of the size of the space you are in or what it contains, so it is impossible to get your bearings. I felt hands touch my face, gently, carefully. Then my hands were lifted to meet someone else’s face, a man’s, my fingers tracing his jaw, his lips, brushing through his hair. It was a slightly alarming experience and yet also quite wonderful, this sudden, strange intimacy with this unseen person.

At one point I was made to stand, increasing the sense of helplessness and dependency. But I wasn’t left stranded for long. Arms wrapped around me, leading me in a kind of dance. At another point I was taken to a bed where a woman laid down beside me and, in a soft, purring voice, asked me questions. The removal of the visual element helped to remove (a degree at least) of my self consciousness and I found myself sudddenly discussing the last time I’d cried.

The end of the piece is as striking a thing as I’ve seen in a long time: a haunting, near-filmic pull-back through the space itself where the constructed intimacy of all you’ve just experienced is revealed. I shan’t go on about it too much, as I wouldn’t want to dent its capacity to surprise and delight. And besides, much of insight has already been written about it (by Lyn Gardner here and Andy Field here for instance). But it was quite amazing and, despite my initial nervousness, I found it quite freeing, in every sense. After the piece concluded and daylight was reinstated, I think I spent a good five minutes just wondering aimlessly round the lobby trying to process the experience and throughout the rest of the day I kept pausing in odd places, in Waterstones, in Somerfields, standing still and thinking about it.

On The Face Of It

Whenever I suggest to my mother that she might like to accompany me to the theatre she always looks at me with a touch of anxiety in her eyes and asks: “how long is it?” It is only once she has been reassured that she can squeeze in a post-show drink and still be home in time for Newsnight, that she will then concede that, yes, she might quite like to come along.

This was the routine we went through when I mooted the idea of going to see Polly Stenham's That Face. And it was only once we'd established that it was a) less than ninety minutes long and b) that those minutes would not in any way feature Vanessa Redgrave talking about dead people (my mother was not overly enamoured with The Year Of Magical Thinking), that she tentatively agreed to the idea.

Written when she was just nineteen and originally staged in the Royal Court's 80-seat upstairs theatre, Stenham's play is about a supremely dyfunctional family. Actually dysfunctional doesn't come close to covering it. If there was a tick-list for how best to screw up your kids, every box would be filled in.

So we have a father who has run off to Hong Kong with a younger lover, leaving his former wife, Martha, to float around her bedroom in an increasingly grubby silk nightdress, swigging from a wine glass and indulging in disturbingly oedipal exchanges with her dutiful teenage son Henry. This boy is her world: she dotes on him, clings to him, calls him her 'little Russian soldier' and is fretful when he leaves her side. Her daughter Mia on the other hand, who is in trouble at her swish boarding school for dosing a classmate with Valium during a rather unpleasant initiation ritual, barely registers on Martha's radar.

Lindsay Duncan is as superb as everyone says as Martha, a woman blind to the fact that her behaviour is totally messing up her beloved son, while Matt Smith was also impressive as Henry. His was a difficult task, playing a character on the cusp of adulthood. The contrast between his taut toned physique and strange little-boy voice was striking and he even manages to pull off a scene where he has to have a complete emotional meltdown whilst wearing naught but a nightie and a string of pearls.

Though Stenham knows how to write scenes of emotional intensity, That Face is undoubtedly the work of a young person. Things frequently escalate to a hysterical pitch and the final scene is incredibly over the top. On more than one occasion it veered into Ab Fab territory, albeit with a more poignant edge, and if Joanna Lumley had floated in from the wings, hair bee-hived and ciggie in hand, it wouldn't have felt too out of place. The play did keep me gripped, despite the fact that I found these people – and their world of bitterness and privilege – so devoid of warmth, so unpleasant, that it was difficult to care overly about them. I know that's point: that Martha's extreme behaviour has left little room for normal human emotions, that damage begets damage, but I found the poisonousness of all concerned difficult to take. Again I suspect that is intended, but as a result I found the play easier to admire than enjoy.

That Face has been lauded in some corners perhaps more than is necessary, but it is still a taut, compelling piece of work. And my mother's verdict? "Not bad at all," which is actually pretty high praise by her standards.

Afterwards we headed for a nearby bar for the requisite post-play drink. Topics for discussion over said drink: Did Matt Smith have some sort of special wee-machine under his nightie or was he doing a Jane Horrocks? We presumed the former. Also, was the large, unkempt double bed that dominated Mike Britton’s set a visual reference to Tracey Emin’s bed? And were the increasing quantities of detritus, torn paper, clothes and whatnot, that Martha flung about the set a metaphor for the mess of the characters’ emotional landscapes? Or something. Maybe. Either way my mother, who abhors mess and who used to flinch in near physical pain if I so much as left a stray sock on the floor, was itching to get up there and have a good tidy. Lastly we both agreed that we were very, very glad indeed that neither of us had been to boarding school, as Stenham made it appear plausibly hellish.

Year Without End

I have always liked Joan Didion’s writing. In the 1960s and 70s, whilst her (mainly male) contemporaries threw themselves into the worlds they were writing about with abandon, Didion retained a coolness of voice and head. She was always a little removed from what she was describing, insulated from the excess, collected and considered. Part of things and yet not.

The Year Of Magical Thinking, currently at the National, is the stage adaptation of Joan Didion’s memoir of grief, the book she wrote about the death of her husband John from a massive heart attack. They were sitting down to dinner. She was making a salad. He was drinking a scotch. And then he just stopped talking.

On paper, it’s a strange but affecting read – that cool voice struggling against the rawness of loss. And the stage adaptation is stranger still. Basically it’s Jackanory. A very extended Jackanory (one hour forty, no interval, and me without a gin – bad forward planning) with Vanessa Redgrave on reading duties. An odd bit of casting that. OK, yes, she’s Vanessa Redgrave. But she’s the physical antithesis of Didion, and though she makes a vague stab at an accent and occasionally dabs at a tear, at times she appeared to be on autopilot.

Not that she has much to do but sit on a chair and quote verbatim from the book. Which begs the question, why bother to stage it at all? Any emotional resonance comes from memories of the book, of Didion’s words, rather than through having them spoken out loud.

While the book concludes a year after John’s death, the stage version covers more ground. While writing the book, Didion’s only daughter Quintana was seriously ill, in intensive care with septic shock. Though she recovered a little and was able to attend her father’s funeral, she later died from acute pancreatitis. This second huge loss is also described in the play with the same measured manner.

Though some of the small details described are highly poignant – her inability to throw out her husband’s shoes, for instance, because he will need shoes when he comes back to her; the ailing daughter asking her mother, over a hamburger, ‘will I make it?’ a question Didion cannot bring herself to address – the production is actually rather stiff, chilly, and, at times, rather dull. By it’s very nature this is a very static show, with Redgrave seated for much of her performance in front of a series of abstract backdrops, but given its subject matter it’s nowhere near as raw as you might expect. There is an absence at its heart. The only moment in this production that provides a true emotional jolt, is the photograph of Didion and her family that appears briefly at the end.

Perhaps in the smaller space of the Cottesloe, a greater degree of intimacy would have been achieved and the whole thing would have had more of an impact. But I’m not convinced this is something that needed to be brought to the stage at all (the book was a very Big Deal in the States and the production originated on Broadway which explains things somewhat) and unless you have a supreme need to see Ms Redgrave on stage, you’d be much better off just reading the thing.

The Unsettling City

There is a bus that takes me almost literally from my front door to the entrance of the Royal Court and there is something about this ease of arrival, this smooth transition – from sofa to stalls – that always puts me in an excellent mood: open, excited.

My most recent trip there was earlier this week to see Martin Crimp’s latest play The City, a strange and twisty thing indeed. The play begins with a scene in which a married couple discuss their respective days. The husband, Christopher, is anxious about the impending restructuring of the company for which he works, while the wife, Clair, describes an unusual encounter with a man at Waterloo Station, a writer with a young daughter, which resulted in her being given a diary as a present. A strong sense of tension underlines this entire exchange, as with every subsequent scene.

In the following scene, a woman, Jenny, a nurse you assume from the uniform, arrives at the couple’s house to complain about the noise their children make when playing. This has been preventing her from sleeping following her night shifts. She then tells them a lengthy story about her husband who is overseas, working as a doctor in a war in an unnamed country. Later a young girl appears – the couple’s daughter, you presume – also clad in a nurse’s uniform and the feeling of discomfort that has already been building grows even stronger. There is something about the casual exchange of smutty limericks between the Cumberbatch’s character and this child that makes you fear for this small, vulnerable person surrounded by all this unspoken aggression and anxiety.

This ninety minute play is a taut and finely crafted piece of writing where every detail, no matter how inconsequential it initially appears, carries weight. Katie Mitchell’s direction accentuates these qualities. Every nuance of speech and movement feels as if it has been carefully thought about. Disconnection is the dominant theme. Crimp’s characters seem to be permanently on the cusp of a volatile outburst and each carefully constructed scene is, as I’ve said, an exercise in tension.

An air of unreality is also apparent. The stories that the characters tell frequently fail to ring true: everything feels slightly askew. The reasons for this only become apparent at the end, when Crimp overturns what has gone before with what feels less like a revelation than a new layer seems the perfect conclusion, cementing the underlying sense of despair. The city of the title refers not only to a physical place but a place of the imagination. Clair works as a translator, dealing only with the words of others, her own attempts at creativity are lifeless, fractured – disconnected, her internal world barren

As Christopher and Clair, Benedict Cumberbatch and Hattie Morahan give excellent performances, ditto Amanda Hale as their timid, quivering neighbour. Cumberbatch in particular is proficient at giving an edge of menace to even seemingly mundane statements and all three of them speak with an intensity, a clarity that is oddly unnerving. This, as with everything else we are given, seems designed to unsettle, an effect enhanced by Vicki Mortimer’s stark, very white set and the babble of white noise that accompanies the scene changes.

The world Crimp presents us with, is anonymous yet also familiar - also very sinister. Not a place to linger long: unspecified unpleasantness lurks beneath the surface, constantly threatening to bubble up. Some parts didn’t quite click, when Cumberbatch came out in a supermarket butchers garb, it was a predictable joke, but I enjoyed the games that were being played, the knottiness of it.

On the way home, my bus took longer than unsual, going on an unexplained diversion and meandering all round the house. I didn’t realise why until I read about the shooting in Markham Square the next day, somehow this seemed disturbingly apt.

The Orange Tree and a Dubious Anniversary

Off to the Orange Tree again last week to see De Monfort, a revival of a play by Joanna Baillie. Byron is apparently meant to have said of her, that if it takes testicles to write a good tragedy, Joanna Baillie must have had to borrow some. Which I think is a compliment. Maybe. It certainly piqued my interest.

First performed in 1800, De Monfort is part of a series of works she composed under the title of Plays on the Passions, and this one was her tragedy on the theme of hatred. Now the Orange Tree has a good track record for digging up long forgotten things but, despite the fact that the Finborough are also staging a Baillie play at the moment – Witchcraft – this feels like a stupendous misfire.

The titular De Monfort is a brooding, moody chap who has long harboured a grudge against Rezenvelt for some past offence that is never really made clear. It gnaws at him, it won’t let him rest. Even his sister Jane, who rather improbably has the capacity to make footmen weak at the be-stockinged knees with her apparent radiance, is unable to dissuade him of the folly of holding onto this irrational loathing.

Eventually, after meandering along in a similar vein for (quite) some time, with Justin Avoth’s De Monfort pacing the stage, snarling and generally being disgruntled, he mistakenly comes to believe that Rezenvelt has designs on his sister and they clash with predictably messy consequences (though actually much of the mess occurs off stage). With Rezenvelt dead, you’d think that would be it, but no, sadly, the play continues on after this for some time after this with a long drawn out final scene at a monastery – replete with Latin incantations, writhing and rending of clothes, abundant nuns and midnight calls of ‘murder.’ Perhaps in other hands, this could all have been ominous and atmospheric but the production felt mis-pitched from the start and this lengthy finale simply postponed De Monfort’s inevitable demise for far longer than was necessary, leading to much seat fidgeting and watch checking amongst the audience.

The ornately costumed cast went through the motions but, with no emotional hook to hold onto, no grasp of what drove this man, his plight did not move, it merely irritated. Or sent people to sleep. Literally. I spotted a good scattering of lolling heads. Indeed the Orange Tree's nap-o-meter was set higher than I've seen it in a while and there were a couple of empty spaces after the interval. I even heard the word ‘codswallop’ being uttered by one tweed jacketed man as we were leaving. You have to love Richmond.

Oh, and, unrelated I know, but at some point while I was away in Italy this blog hit its two year mark. I shall spare you any overly introspective musings on why I blog or what I blog; I simply want to reiterate how glad I am to have met so many interesting people and made so many friends through writing this thing. Now I’m off to pour myself a glass of gin. Cheers.

Home

So. Then. Back in England. An England that appears not to have noticed that it is now well into the middle of spring and is busy hurling rain and hail and all manner of stuff in between down at the pavement – so it was with my winter coat buttoned high that I tube-and-bus-hopped my way to the Bush last night in order to see a play where (appropriately enough) Barking is underwater and Scotland is separated from England by Hadrian’s Channel.

Lucy Kirkwood’s debut play Tinderbox is set some time towards the end of the 21st century in a butcher’s shop in Bradford. The shop is run by the unpleasant Saul and his young wife Vanessa, a one time actress whose creative apex was a film by the title of Fellatio Nelson. Perchik, a fugitive and passport-less artist from Scotland arrives at their shop and is taken on as an assistant by Saul. It soon comes to light that Saul’s previous assistants have a tendency to have accidents that conveniently coincide with the arrival of a new batch of fresh meat in his under-stocked shop.

Josie Rourke’s production had an appropriately seedy feel to it but despite an abundance of bodies in sacks and much talk of maggots and flesh and digestion, I found parts of Bliss at the Royal Court far more unsettling and horrific. Though Joe Orton has been cited in most reviews what this kept reminding me of was an extended episode of The League Of Gentlemen. Very extended. It really did drag on. Two and a half hours, with interval. Initially it had a grubbily amusing quality with Kirkwood’s skewed vision of a flooded, brutal future coming through, but it soon lost direction, ambling on with the occasional comic volley of dialogue raising a laugh. Though Michael Billington wrote that it was refreshing to see a young writer “delivering a two-act play rather than opting for the comfort zone of 90 minutes,” its length really did work against it. The energy and excess needed to make something like this work could not be sustained over such a time and any points Kirkwood wanted to make about the besieged English and the retreat into nationalism were soon lost along the way as the play meandered towards its conclusion. The three main cast members were very good though, particularly the hugely likeable Sheridan Smith (from Little Shop Of Horrors and that Two Pints thing off the telly) as the deceptively dim Vanessa.

For this production, the Bush Theatre’s old L-shaped layout has been replaced with a small series of raked benches and a conventional stage complete with red curtains and a even a little glinty chandelier hanging from the ceiling. Like a West End theatre in miniature. It’s a potentially flexible space and presumably won’t always be arranged in this way; however the benches seemed to have been designed so that even the longer-legged audience members have a struggle to reach the floor – something that surely can’t have been intentional.

Away

I am Not At The Theatre again. Instead I am, or at least I was, in Italy.

Two days ago I would have been contemplating a pre dinner kir as the early evening sunshine glinted of domed roofs and ancient tiles – and now I am fretting about the whereabouts of my umbrella and wondering how best to get to the Bush Theatre now that the Central Line declines to stop at Shepherds Bush...

Normal service will resume anon.

Portraits In Time

It’s night time in Soho. People pour out of doorways, drinks clasped in hands, others queue outside clubs in weather-inappropriate attire, seemingly oblivious to the cold. I make my way to the theatre on Dean Street, and climb the stairs to the second floor. There are already a few people there, though nowhere near as many as the venue holds. The house opens and we wander in, take our seats.

I have read the odd piece about John Moran, his work, the regard others have for him, but my mind has clearly filtered it into a little used corner and I am not really sure what it is I am about to see.

The stage has been decorated like a city apartment, simply furnished with a blackboard on an easel in one corner and a guitar in the other. After a while Moran stumbles on. He looks dazed, disorientated, he sits on the floor, then picks himself up and totters off again. Then Saori Tsukada, a dancer from Japan, also appears and greets everyone with an appealing smile, but seems equally vague. I felt myself wondering: what is this? What have I agreed to sit through?

There was then some business with Saori drawing ducks on a blackboard while Moran described his youthful dabbling with a Jungian cult, and as I watched these baffling, disjointed things it became apparent that there was little about what we were seeing that was left to chance, everything was carefully cued and choreographed.

Moran describes what he does as ‘portraits in time.’ What this meant in practice was loops of dialogue to which Saori lip synched and performed a series of intricate motions. Everything we were seeing was measured out in beats per minute, each individual element of audio recorded separately. The complexity takes a while to sink but when it does it is revelatory. Even so, some people in the audience seemed unsure how to respond. There was little applause at first. The audience, me included, seemed uncertain where to applaud, or indeed, if to applaud. This, said Moran, is often a result of the fact that his work with Saori is both “super casual and super formalised.” Their shows don’t fit into any familiar boxes.

A couple of people even walked out midway through the performance, and a man and his girlfriend chatted loudly throughout the first half hour before leaving, not even appearing to give it a chance. But others sat rapt, fascinated. Andy Field , who is far more knowledgeable about such things, describes Moran and his work more eloquently than I can here. I just know I am glad I saw this strange, lovingly created thing in a half-empty theatre on cold April night.

Speaking In Tongues

There were so many moments of Natalie Abrahami's production of Anne Washburn’s The Internationalist at the Gate that I loved, that I can't quite understand why I didn't enjoy the whole thing more than I did.

For a start, the whole concept was intriguing – an American businessman, Lowell, arrives in unnamed foreign country where he doesn't speak the lingo and doesn't quite understand what's going on around him, and, because the remainder of the cast spend a good proportion of the play conversing in a made up European language, by extension neither do the audience.

The air of dislocation and jet-legged befuddlement created by the production was spot on. And I loved the inter-scene snippets of 1940s music and the neatly choreographed dream/sex sequences that complimented rather than distracted from the material. I also liked its gradual shift from quirky romance to something more sinister and vaguely nightmare-like. I suppose my main problems were with the play itself; I just felt that there were too many narrative avenues that never really went anywhere. And I was never quite sure whether my sympathies were meant to lie with Lowell – the American abroad – or with Sara, the sweet filing clerk at his firm who collects him from the airport. Abrahami certainly seems to be slanting the production towards the latter, but the play doesn’t really allow us to get to know her. There were some vague references to her being mental ill but these were rather brushed aside.

My other problem was that, once Washburn’s premise has been established – once we grasp that this is a language of her own creation onto which any number of possible meanings can be projected – the production loses a little of its impetus. I liked so much about it, there were some quite enchanting moments, but the moments never really knitted together for me.

I stayed on for the post-show talk with the Gate’s artistic directors Carrie Cracknell and Natalie Abrahami and the cast, where they discussed the unique difficulties of staging play where half the dialogue is basically nonsense (I’m sure the Whingers would have an appropriate comment to add at this point, but I shall leave it alone). They revealed that they had christened Washburn’s language Muffle – their abbreviation of Made Up Foreign Language – and Gary Shelford, one of the cast, explained how, no matter how thoroughly you rehearse the lines the brain occasionally injects an English word into the tide of gibberish and he ended up blurting “tumble drier” at an inopportune point on press night.

Wherever I Lay My Hat…

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

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

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

Blissed Out

There was a sign on the door reassuring people that there would be no audience participation. This made me smile. It was easy to see why such a statement was necessary. You could see the slight flash of alarm in people’s eyes as, on entering the upstairs theatre at the Royal Court, they were each handed a bright blue tabard with a smiley faced logo on the back and told to put it on. Dutifully donning my tabard, I took my seat. Like Andrew Haydon, I was going in to this thing cold and had little idea what was coming.

The production of Olivier Choinère's play Bliss, translated by Caryl Churchill, begins with a sharp blast of Celine Dion’s Power Of Love assaulting us over the speakers, an alarming prospect in itself.

The set has been kept simple: a row of employees’ toilet cubicles in a branch of Wal-Mart. Four actors emerge, each wearing the now familiar tabard, except for one who is neatly shirted and tied. Three of them start to tell a story to the audience, narrating rather than performing, while the fourth, Hayley Carmichael’s lank-haired cashier, sits behind them in one of the stalls, occasionally prompting them and correcting the details of what they are saying.

The actors begin by describing, in loving detail, a farewell concert given by a popular French Canadian singer of power ballads, before she retires from live performance to start a family. But this slowly shifts into something else, something quite different, the tale of a young girl who has been horrifically abused by her family. But the line between these two threads is kept deliberately foggy and the stories bleed into one another.

The play is a strange, shifting thing, designed to unsettle. The press blurb calls it ‘slippery’ and this is apt, in more than one way. There is a fondness for the graphic and horrific in the writing; in his review Andrew Haydon referenced Chuck Palahniuk, whom I also had in mind as I listened to the numerous descriptions of tumors and bile. Underneath all this there was a satirical attack on how the media casually juxtaposes the glossy, groomed lives of the famous with stories of extreme suffering and violence. But it had the good sense not to bludgeon you with this message. The tabards also served a purpose, having the dual effect of connecting the audience with the speakers and also creating the feeling of being at some strange convention or assembly.

Eventually Hayley Carmichael’s character comes to the fore, emerging from the shadows. There is something deliberately odd and other-worldly about her, she controls what we hear and weaves herself into the stories, often creeping to the front to speak intimately to the audience. The set has been designed in a way that it feels as if we are watching things through a two way mirror; reflections, and the line between the real and unreal, are significant throughout.

I must admit I found some of this baffling, and some of it quite repellent (as I’ve pointed out on the Guardian arts blog, I am a ridiculously squeamish sort) but despite this I was hooked. The 80 minutes rushed by and I felt myself needing to know how this thing would be resolved.

As we handed back our tabards at the end of the performance I heard one young American girl turn to her friend and say, in a slightly appalled tone of voice, endearingly failing to grasp the concept of translation: “well, Top Girls wasn’t like that!”

I wonder if Celine Dion's 'people' have seen this and what they make of it? Oh, and it’s a good thing I’m a vegetarian or I would now be steering well clear of prawns for a good long while.

Shot/Got Treasure

I caught my first of the Ravenhills last night at the Royal Court.

I had actually intended to see some of the previous shows in the Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat cycle, specifically the Saturday morning performances at the National, but the, ahem, excesses of the evening before ended up proving incompatible with the early start time. Fortunately the Court's offering was being staged at a more agreeable 9.30pm.

Staged in the downstairs theatre, Birth of A Nation was a satirical piece about a group of artists gathered in an unnamed war-scarred city, there to rebuild and repair through the medium of their art workshops. It was staged very simply: no set, just four chairs placed on the bare stage, the actors addressing the audience directly as if we were citizens of said city.

This is a sharp and cynical playlet that neatly skewers the familiar, righteousness platitudes of the left when it comes to war – and particularly the war in Iraq. The artists are full of patronising admiration for the 'once-great culture' of this once-beautiful city and full of impotent derision for the government that went against their wishes. Yet their own agendas clearly take precedence and their contempt soon seeps through.

If it rather hammered its point home in its final minutes, it was still very funny stuff, elevated by an excellent cast. Pearce Quigley, in particular, has one of those voices that is just innately amusing.

The plays are scattered throughout the city, at various venues, and at various times of day, so you'd have to be pretty committed to the cause (like say, Maxie Szalwinska, who is blogging the plays for the Guardian) to catch them all, however it is only in doing so that all the recurring devices and themes become apparent. This one stood up on its own though, and I hope to see some of the others if I can. The treasure hunt quality of the exercise is certainly very appealing. One thing that struck me though, the audience at the play I saw was made up of a good number of journalists and theatre types, including Mr Ravenhill himself, I think I must have recognised a good third of the people in there, making me pause and wonder if this whole enterprise, while undoubtedly exciting, is something of a case of the theatre world feeding itself.

Dark Waters

Saw a gem of a play at Theatre 503 last week. Ali Taylor’s Cotton Wool is about two teenage brothers, Callum and Gussie who have just lost their mum. It begins with them standing on a beach in their funeral suits swigging cans of nicked lager, somehow both simultaneously boys and men, alone in the world except for each other.

That is until Harriet arrives. She is from England and wears lots of black. She has been abandoned by her feckless father but pretends that doesn’t bother her. Though she is initially hostile to the brothers’ crude attempts to endear themselves to her (“are you a vampire?” Gussie asks when his chat-up lines are rebuffed), she starts to form a tender friendship with Callum. This makes Gussie jealous, as he is both attracted to Harriet himself and envious of the hold she has on his brother. He is also convinced that he can see a body floating out to sea; he talks a lot about the ‘selkie folk,’ seal spirits from childhood stories, and becomes convinced that his mum is still out there somewhere, drifting in the dark.

Cotton Wool is a touching and, at times, quite beautiful piece of writing. The brothers’ heavily accented use of language is often very poetic and there’s also much humour in their dialogue, which prevents the grim nature of the story from becoming too intense and overbearing. The simple set manages to capture the grit and mist of the coastal location perfectly.

The mythic overtones were laid on a little thick towards the end, I thought, but this is small complaint. The acting is spot on, especially from the boys, from Joseph Arkley and Owen Whitelaw as Callum and Gussie respectively, and it’s tautly directed, a good fit for the space. But while the play was set in a grim and chilly coastal Scottish town the temperature in the Battersea pub theatre was, as ever, a tad more tropical – so, while the characters complained of being freezing, there was much sweating and fanning going on in the audience.

Lit Windows

I like buses. I will always opt for a bus over a tube, even if it adds time to my travels. I’d prefer it if they smelled less of fried things but I think this is a fair trade-off for the connection they provide with the above-ground world, with the living city.

I particularly like riding the bus at dusk or thereabouts, when people have flicked on the lights in their living rooms and kitchens, and, for a fleeting second or so, you can catch an illuminated glimpse of another life, people doing their evening things, pottering about their homes, watching their TVs. I always begin my journey with a book in hand and the desire to read it, but end up distracted by this theatre of lit windows, by these copious tiny top deck dramas. This is a little voyeuristic I know, but I think the impulse is a human one.

If you were to ride a bus through Hammersmith at the moment you may spot a gaggle of theatregoers sitting on a terrace, all wrapped up against the chill of the April air. They make for something of an odd sight, all wearing these clumpy headsets and holding binoculars, staring intently at the office buildings opposite. If you were on that bus you’d stare and wonder what on earth was going on.

David Rosenberg’s new work for the Lyric, Contains Violence taps into that desire to peer into other people’s lives from afar. A bank of seating has been erected on the Lyric terrace and each audience member, on arrival, is handed a bulky pair of headphones and a pair of binoculars. On donning your headset, at first all you hear is the soothing voice of Arthur Lowe, but then a man with a microphone begins addressing the crowd, directing our attention to the offices across the street. There, in strategically lit windows, we see a man with a stuffed penguin, a woman blowing up balloons. The obvious reference point is Rear Window, but, at its best, this is like an al fresco instalment of Chris Morris’s Blue Jam. There are long, unsettling periods were little happens and we hear only the clipping of high heels on stairs, the tapping of fingers on keyboards.

Having been saddled with that title, it was obvious that there would be more to it than that – there was a need to supply some actual violence. (Though I would have rather liked it if they’d called it that, given it that title, and then simply ignored it). But, no - the violence was duly provided, though, when it came, it was all rather obvious and neither as comic nor as shocking as it was, I suspect, intended to be.

I did enjoy the barbed, rambling monologues of the microphone man, but could have done with a tad more narrative or some further exploration of the voyeuristic urge. At one point a cleaner appeared at another office window and this is where the lines blurred for me. Was she part of the show or was she a real cleaner? I wasn’t sure but suspected the latter. If so, had she been told she might inadvertently be part of this strange spectacle, that she might have all these eyes trained upon her as she went about her business? To me this was more potent a moment than the sight of a man, some floors above, being tied to his office chair.

Still, this was a fascinating theatrical exercise, an idea that can’t help but excite, even if it turned out to be slightly more intriguing in theory than in execution. And, yes, I did take the bus home.

Dealer's Choice Revisited

I don’t get to revisit shows as often as I like. I often mean to but am rather magpie-like and am usually distracted by something shinier and newer. But sometimes I do get my act together and manage to squeeze in a second viewing.

I have been meaning to see Dealer’s Choice again, since it moved to Trafalgar Studios. I had seen it – and loved it – at the Menier, but regretted that I had not gone to see it with my friend Juice who is quite the poker fiend. We finally managed to gather ourselves together on the last day of performance and get day tickets to the penultimate show, the Saturday matinee.

When we bought the tickets we were warned “you can’t be late with THESE tickets.” We only understood the meaning behind these rather stern words (surely you shouldn’t be late with any tickets?) when we arrived. Through luck rather than judgment we had snagged excellent seats, sitting sideways to action right on the stage itself, a whisper away from the actors. Had we been late we would have had to walk across the set itself.

The show itself more than stood up to a second viewing and I was able to delight in the rapport between the actors once more, more so if anything as, from our seats, we could see every subtle glance, every raised eyebrow. It was lovely being able to anticipate what was coming, to be able to focus more on the nuances of delivery and the audience reaction. My enjoyment of the play also gained much from seeing it with someone who knew the ins and outs of the game, who could scythe a path through the denser stretches of poker-related lingo.

I did wonder if, being the last day of play, there might be some end-of-term misbehaving from the cast, but there was none that I noticed - though Jay Simpson, who plays Frankie, did dash on late and breathless for the curtain call much to the amusement of the other cast members and the audience.

And finally, a question: where should one head for a post-play drink after a visit to the Trafalgar Studios, when the sky is a vile, hostile grey and you are umbrella-less?