Amongst Friends at Hampstead Theatre

Despite a reference or two to MPs expenses, April de Angelis’ new play feels rather like something that has been lingering in a desk draw since 1987. And perhaps it would have been better off being left there.

In Amongst Friends, Helen Baxendale plays Lara, a glamorous tabloid columnist who has recently developed agoraphobic tendencies. Her husband, Richard, is a former MP who has turned his hand to writing crime fiction but who soon hopes to be reinstated in a safe seat. Together they live in a glossy glass and exposed brick apartment, part of a gated community in a run down part of south London – a fortress-like complex complete with spas, bars and a flotation chamber.

For reasons that make very little sense other than to set up a source of conflict, they have invited their former neighbours over for a dinner party. Caitlin is a breast care nurse, who has written a book about her experiences, and her partner Joe is a drugs counsellor with aggression issues. They provide a reminder of the life Lara and Richard have left behind in their scramble up the social ladder and there is a sense of hostility between them from the start.

It is not long before their world is further punctured by the arrival of Shelley, a woman from the local council estate who attempts to milk them all for money on behalf of her recently deceased son Lee. She claims she is able to communicate with him psychically and that each of the four may well have known the boy in some capacity. Guilt buttons duly pushed, she helps herself to some of their champagne and waits for them to donate to her unfortunately acronymed charity, PENIS. It’s a con, of course, but it doesn’t really matter, nor does Shelley matter – her jarring working class presence is only required to act as a catalyst for the dredging up all kind of buried secrets among the four main characters. And what do you know? Love affairs and past liaisons are soon being confessed to at a rate of knots.

While Shelley, as a character, has all the nuance of a Vicki Pollard – hair scraped back into a pony tail, gold jewellery clinking round her neck and her g-string visible over the back of her too-tight white jeans – the others are not far behind in the stereotype stakes. Baxendale’s Lara is all elbows and teetering designer heels; Aden Gillett’s Richard is an oil slick of a man and Emma Cunniffe’s Caitlin is a hippy-drippy, soft-hearted type, though not above using her patients’ emotive stories to forward her own career. Only James Dreyfus’ cranky, difficult Joe seems a bit more interesting, a bit less of an obvious ‘type.’

None of them feel like real people, nor does their dialogue ever convince. They don’t talk so much as hurl words towards each other, speaking in would-be clever phrases that might pass muster on paper but sound clunky on the tongue. With a few notable exceptions, the jokes clang to the ground like cannon balls. Clang, clang, clang.

It’s not that the cast aren’t any cop but having been assigned such simultaneously flat yet nasty characters, they all seem to be going through the motions, hitting their cues, speaking their lines, but doing little more.

There is, of course, a lot to be said about social division, about the way people with the means often seal themselves off from the problems they don't want to handle, but this play, though it occasionally teeters on the brink of being interesting, wastes its time with dud jokes, implausible twists, and slightly offensive working class caricatures.

Reviewed for musicOMH. It gives me little pleasue to be so negative, but, yeesh, did anyone actually read this before they agreed to put it on stage?

A Doll's House at the Donmar

Review now up over on Theatermania.

England at Whitechapel Gallery

Look. A man and woman dressed anonymously stand side by side in a gallery. They are our guides.

The man and woman are Tim Crouch (he of An Oak Tree) and Hannah Ringham, co-founder of Shunt. They tell us a story, speaking together, two voices, one journey.

We do not know the name, job or even the gender of the narrator. We are told only that their boyfriend is a rich art dealer who speaks several languages and that he/she/they are unwell, seriously ill, possibly dying. A heart transplant is their only means of survival.

The play is divided in to two parts. The first half plays out in the recently reopened Whitechapel Gallery’s current exhibition of works by Isa Genzken (Open Sesame!, a collage of urban materials: glass, metal, fractured concrete blocks standing on slender pedestals). Though this choice of exhibition seems entirely fitting, the play was written to be performed in any gallery space and was originally staged in Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery in 2007 and has played in several other spaces since.

Look, but don’t touch, we are repeatedly told as we move among the exhibits, watching, listening. Occasionally Crouch and Ringham will move around the room, causing the audience to shuffle after them in an ambling gallery manner, like a group of tourists on a guided tour. Depending on where one is standing, the performers’ faces are sometimes framed by Genzken’s dauntingly solid yet fragile concrete sculptures, an image that seems perfectly in keeping with their tale of human breakability.

The second half of the play takes place in the gallery’s lecture theatre. The change in locations coincides with a shift in the narrative: a transplant, a new heart, a life is saved, while another ends. We are now in some unnamed country, listening as the narrator converses with the widow of the donor through an interpreter, who also supplies her replies. The trade in artworks and organs are explicitly linked; life and art – two things beyond price – have become the stuff of transaction.

The play, though captivating, has a, while not exactly clinical quality, a kind of distance to the way it is performed. In the first half both voices share a sense of wonder; having faced death and survived the world has become full of gifts and everything is something that it’s possible to be thankful for. The second half has a more conventionally dramatic feel, as the recipient of the heart confronts the wife of the man whose death gave them life.

The lecture theatre setting of the second segment is rather drying, coming as it does after the milling, shifting first half. This has the effect of emphasising the rather cerebral, head-driven nature of the piece. An hour long, England is a meditation on art, health, survival, on all the things that can be – and are – bought and sold. It leaves its audience with much to digest and with a small seed of wonder within.

Reviewed for musicOMH.

Time and the Conways at the National

It is difficult to enter the world of J.B. Priestley’s Conway family without thinking of Virginia Woolf’s Pargiters. The Years was published in 1937, the same year that Priestley’s play was first staged, and charts the fortunes of a similarly sized family over several decades.

But while it is the linear passage of time that interests Woolf – the toll it takes, the way people age and change – Priestly has a more idiosyncratic take on time, very much influenced by the theories of J. W Dunne, that time is eternally present, that our pasts, presents and futures somehow exist simultaneously and that, therefore, we are all our moments, the best and worst of them.

The Conways are a large brood: four daughters, two sons, and a mother recently widowed. Spanning the years between the wars, Time and the Conways opens in 1919, on the night of Kay Conway’s 21st birthday. Everybody is dressed up and gathered together, party games are being played, the younger son Robin is home on leave, the mood is celebratory, optimistic about the future.

The second act of this hefty three act play (three hours, two intervals) allows a glimpse of this future. There is a leap forwards, of almost twenty years; the bright young things are now world-worn and disappointed. Marriages have crumbled, promised novels have never been written, the family is beset by money problems and death has robbed them of one of their number. The dominant mood is one of bitterness, the once close family have fragmented, and petty resentments are harboured.

This scene is a kind of premonition, glimpsed by a frightened Kay from her place in the past, a reflection of things to come. It seems fitting that a door, a window and a mirror occupy prominent positions on Laura Hopkins set, one on each wall; in the party scenes the music and laughter from the other unseen room drift in like memories.

Though Rupert Goold’s compelling production is, for the most part, naturalistically played, each act ends with an imposed moment of visual invention – a freezing, a fracturing – that echo the ideas expressed.

However if you remove the theorizing, much of what is left is familiar family saga stuff. The National reinvigorated Priestley’s An Inspector Calls with their renowned 1992 Stephen Daldry production, but Goold doesn’t quite manage to replicate that here. The play remains a stubborn thing, its fusion of ideas and narrative always feeling a little forced. The Conway daughters in particular are rather thinly drawn and it’s all too easy to reduce their characters to one-word descriptions: the beautiful one, the artistic one, the academic one and the youngest, innocent and good – the mechanics of the writing are, at times, too obvious and Priestley seems almost to be enjoying setting up young dreams only to dash them.

Some superb acting helps to counter these difficulties and to make the production compelling despite its length. The whole ensemble is strong, especially when required to age convincingly for the second act, something most of them achieve. The smoke-throated Francesca Annis makes a formidable matriarch, unable to hide her disappointment that some of her children have not lived up to her ambitions for them, and Paul Ready is also quietly impressive as older brother Alan, with his slight stammer and his ever present pipe, content to live an uneventful life even if it means being scorned by his mother. It is Alan who gets to act as Priestley’s mouthpiece, explaining his ideas on time to Hattie Morahan's Kay, consoling her at a point in life when all seems impossible.

Both the magical mirror sequence that ends act two and Goold’s striking coda, with the characters caught up in their very own dance to the music of time, feels somewhat tacked on, reiterating rather than adding anything new, garnish on what is an otherwise straight down the line revival, with the grandfather clock tick-tocking in the hall as the Conway family walk (clockwise) into their future.

Reviewed for musicOMH

Romeo and Juliet at the Globe

Youth is the dominant force in Dominic Dromgoole’s new Romeo and Juliet, his opener for the Globe’s Young Hearts season. His star-crossed pair are like children playing at passion, fuelled by hormonal urgency.

When Juliet learns from her nurse that Romeo has agreed to meet her she scampers round the stage in glee, and during the balcony scene, Romeo practically vibrates with excitement whenever Juliet calls him back, Rosaline’s brief flame already extinguished in his mind.

In this one, bright moment, standing beneath his window, Juliet is his all, his everything, and he can scarcely contain his pleasure that the attraction is mutual.

By emphasising the youthfulness of the lovers, Romeo and Juliet ceases to function as a sweeping love story and becomes a study of adolescent impulsiveness, of two people, tangle-handed, skidding down a path towards a lethal drop, unable to stop themselves (while the adults who may be able to stop them from plunging over the edge are either occupied elsewhere or unintentionally complicit).

Dressed demurely in schoolgirl blue, Ellie Kendrick’s Juliet is a plausible fourteen year-old, (but then the actress, who played Anne Frank in the BBC’s recent adaption of the diaries, is still on her gap year). She is a bright eyed thing taken to prostrating herself full length on the floor before her displeased father, a shining child, but with a flash of womanhood within her. One suspects she might be a skilled sulker.

Adetomiwa Edun’s Romeo has the air of the cool kid in the classroom, yet the façade is all too easily peeled away. When faced with the reality of Tybalt's death he curls in a ball on the floor and cries.

Philip Cumbus’s Mercutio has a melancholy quality that couples surprisingly well with his boisterousness when over-liquored, while Penny Layden, though younger than is usual in the role, makes an agreeably earthy nurse, devoted to her young charge.

Dominic Dromgoole’s production has a bell curve quality: it takes a while to find its feet, to warm up, hits a high, but then rather fumbles the dual death scene. The young actors, so confident in earlier scenes, end their lives with little more than a shrug and sigh. And, from the side I was sitting on at any rate, it was impossible to see Romeo’s dead form on the floor as it was totally obscured by Juliet's funeral bed. Juliet’s face, as she realises the fate of her husband of less than a day, was also hidden.

The comedy is rather bluntly handled. No reference to weapons or tools is allowed to pass without an accompanying spasm of frantic groin thrusting or a sword being wielded in a phallic manner. It strayed beyond bawdy and felt as if Dromgoole were throwing out cock joke cookies to the crowd for putting up with all the poetry.

Fortunately this is countered by some atmospheric music and some amusing, if tentative, use of the pit. Dromgoole doesn’t take over the space with same degree of invention as Lucy Bailey has in the past with her Titus and Timon, but there are some nice touches. Juliet in her death-like slumber is carried over the heads of the audience and Friar Lawrence makes his entrance by placing a blessing hand on unsuspecting heads as he files through the crowd to the stage.

Reviewed for musicOMH.

Interiors at the Lyric

In Interiors the audience are separated from the performers by a clear plastic wall. This does two things: it serves to emphasise the inherent voyeurism of the onlookers and it also acts as a silencer so that the audience cannot hear what the characters say, they can only sit and watch.

Inspired by Maurice Maeterlinck's symbolist play Interior, Vanishing Point’s production is set in an unnamed northern country where the nights are long and people require rifles to venture outdoors.

It is in fact the longest night of the year and a dinner party is being thrown to mark the occasion by Andrew, an elderly gent in a red waistcoat and silk neckerchief.

Various friends arrive including middle-aged Myra who affects to know much about wine; thirty-something couple Aurora and Barnaby; tall, awkward Damir, a stranger to most of those present; and Davide the boyfriend of Sara, Andrew's granddaughter.
Despite the surreal touch of the rifles in the corner it’s a very familiar, domestic set-up: corks are popped, gifts are given, pleasantries are exchanged. Except, of course, the audience hears none of this and the absence of dialogue allows for a keener focus on the interactions of the characters, the small gestures, the hidden grimaces, the forced smiles.

At first events unfold in near-silence, the only sound the whirling wind and snow outside the house, but after a while a woman’s voice begins to comment on what’s going on. Her tone is gently mocking, a little mischievous; she is eventually revealed to the audience as a figure in white, like them an outsider looking in. This woman directly addresses the audience, pausing to stare in at the windows.

Though experimental in form, the production manages at the same time to be a hugely entertaining and accessible thing, very, very funny in places especially when a degree of wine has flowed and, warm of blood, Aurora and Barnaby start dancing exuberantly to Video Killed The Radio Star (though the dialogue can’t be heard, the audience can hear the music). It’s also very poignant, at times quite acutely moving: an unwise proposal is rejected, a relationship that has barely bloomed starts to fade.

The international cast work well together; resisting the urge to overplay the visual, their movements and interactions feel natural, necessary. The production as a whole has the appeal of a walk through a city at night, all those small human stories unfolding in lit windows, a family sitting down to dinner, a couple watching television, everyday occurrences that become fascinating at a remove, viewed fleetingly through glass.

By the end of its 80 minutes, it does end up overstating its case a bit, hammering keys that before had been struck softly, tugging a little too forcefully on emotional strings, but this doesn’t dull its message that for all the pain, regret and disappointment in life, both big (the loss of love) and small (the receiving of pork stew for dinner when you’re a vegetarian) once you’re on the outside there’s no going back.

Reviewed for musicOMH.

Another Little Link

A Guardian blog over here, sparked in part by Helen Smith's recommendation of Simon Callow's biographies of Orson Welles.

Country Magic at the Finborough

One can see what drew Phil Willmott to Arthur Wing Pinero’s fable The Enchanted Cottage and made him think it a suitable case for rescuing. For buried beneath the sentimentality of the age, which is laid on pretty thick in places, there is something truly touching.

Written in the early 1920s, Pinero’s play concerns itself (and was one of the first to do so) with the aftermath of the Great War for those left alive: the widowed and the maimed. Having been left permanently disabled, Oliver Bashforth has moved away from London, moved away from his old life, and settled in a secluded country house where he can better avoid the attentions of his overbearing family.

Out of exasperation at their continual interference in his affairs, Oliver decides he needs a wife and proposes a marriage of convenience to Laura, a friendly local woman, who though kind of heart is not much to look at. She is, at first, justifiably hurt by the assumption that she is somehow less of a woman than the pretty city things he once associated with, but she accepts his offer all the same.
They duly marry but soon afterwards something curious happens. The couple become convinced they have fallen under a spell, an enchantment; that they have both undergone some glorious physical transformation. The truth of the matter is obvious enough, but it takes their blind neighbour Hillgrove, another war casualty, to make them see it.

Though the play has been pruned and retitled by Willmott, there’s still a good degree of syrup to wade through. The characters of Bashforth’s family and the local rector and his wife are flat as pancakes, but there are other, more interesting things going on which Willmott brings to the surface. The play is populated with physically and psychologically damaged men trying to find new ways of living. There is a strong background sense of a country reshaping itself, of the struggle faced by those returning home physically and emotionally altered. In this way, the classes have much in common, for Hillgrove’s valet Rigg is missing an arm and the husband of Bashforth’s housekeeper Mrs Minnett died on the battlefield.

But, for all that, it’s not really a play about loss, in fact it’s full of hope that people will heal each other, through love, through friendship; that England will, eventually, heal. That doesn’t excuse it being as stiff and plodding as it is at times – something not helped by Robin Don’s narrow, expressionistic set, with its jags of barbed wire and moody shadows, which doesn’t give the actors much room to move and makes for a rather static staging. The central device, this idea of enchantment, also stretches things to silliness. That such apparently intelligent people would believe such a thing seems absurd, fable or no.

The three central performances help to raise it up a level. As Bashforth, Daniel Abelson is suitably bitter, sharp tempered and cantankerous, stalking around the stage with his walking stick. He seems reluctant to sit still, as if to do so would be a sign of weakness. In the original, Bashforth was supposed to be disfigured, facially scarred as so many were, but here it is his temper that makes him ugly. Victoria Gee, as Laura, perhaps overstates the gawkiness of her character initially but she successfully fleshes out a rather thinly written role.

It is Jamie Hinde who leaves the strongest impression, in a role that could so easily be utterly clichéd, as Hillgrove, the wise, blind neighbour. There is something in his manner that suggests a sea of emotions going on beneath the ever placid surface: true fondness for his friends, recognition of his own loss and, again, that elusive idea of hope.

There is some attempt in the programme notes to connect the play with more recent events, more recent conflicts, but that seems unnecessary. The play is too time specific for those connections to be more than superficial, but that’s not to say the play isn’t resonant, it’s just a more diffuse resonance and, for all its stiffness and sentimentality, there is something very warm and potent about the production.

Reviewed for musicOMH.

Once and For All We're Going To Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up and Listen at BAC

The title is a misnomer for there’s a lot more showing than telling in this collaborative show between Flemish theatre companies Ontroerend Goed (the company behind the wonderful Smile Off Your Face) and Kopergietery.

The cast is made up of thirteen teenage performers, not one of them older than eighteen. As the audience enter and take their seats, obscenities are screamed from the wings, there is jeering and screaming, lewd acts are suggested by young tongues.

The stage is naked except for thirteen mismatched chairs. As the production gets underway, the kids stream on, they bicker and brawl, they flirt and toy with one another, they loll in their seats, tilting to the point where they topple (exactly what you were warned against doing at school). Two kids play with a bin liner; one bashes another with her bag, jokingly yet hard enough to hurt; one chalks words on the floor; while another sits aside quietly playing with her doll.

Their behaviour is familiar, boisterous and chaotic, raucous playground stuff – except it’s not as chaotic as it seems. As the scenes repeats itself to a changing soundtrack, patterns are revealed, a sense of order asserts itself. The production, which grew out of a series of workshops led by director Alexander Devriendt, is incredibly well choreographed: the most casual of gestures are shown to be part of some greater thing, seemingly spontaneous behaviour is shown to be anything but. It reminded me of John Moran’s recent Soho Theatre show where a seemingly random collection of moments and utterances were revealed to be mapped out to the smallest beat.

It perfectly evokes the repetition, the monotony, of one’s schooldays. Beneath all this noise, all these allusions to anarchy and chaos, there is a strict sense of order. This original scene, this opening series of movements and interactions, is them repeated in various different ways, as a comic ballet, to pounding dance music, and then, ingeniously, with no performers at all, just with the props thrown on as necessary. An attempt to do the scene once more but this time only with boys, fails as the boys become coy and uneasy alone on stage.

Occasionally one of the performers comes forward and addresses the audience, tries to explain his or herself, but these moments are brief and the bulk of the production is dominated by the physical. At times there is an undercurrent of unease, the fear for bruised and bashed young limbs, the worry that there is something, not exploitative, but certainly external at work here. We are being invited to look but are unsure where the invitation comes from.

Reviewed for musicOMH

Brief Encounter at Richmond Theatre

Somehow missed this one despite its long residency in London, finally rectified in advance of Don John.

As one Kneehigh production arrives in London (Don John, their latest show, which opens at BAC this week), another sets out on tour.

Following the mixed critical reception to Emma Rice’s adaptation of Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death (a reception that indirectly sparked the whole 'dead white men' debate), the company, undaunted, turned their attentions to another cherished British film, to David Lean's Brief Encounter. Rather wonderfully their version was originally staged at the Cineworld Haymarket, a central London cinema, an apt loaction if ever there was one given that this is a stage production concerned very much with film. And though Rice’s take on this cinematic classic is full of familiar Kneehigh tropes, this time around they manage to chime with the material in a more sympathetic way than in Life and Death where the excess of things ended up overwhelming the story.

Brief Encounter started life on the stage, being based on a short play by Noel Coward, Still Life, one of nine that went under the banner of Tonight at 8.30, and Coward’s voice runs through this theatrical reclaiming – literally, as his songs are peppered throughout the production. At various points the characters pause to sing snippets of No Good at Love, Room with a View and Mad about the Boy, in arrangements by regular Kneehigh collaborator Stu Barker whose distinctive contributions weren't as jarring as they have been in the past.

But though the story of Laura and Alec’s short-lived liaison began life on stage, what Kneehigh are presenting here is a stage version of the film. Rice’s Brief Encounter is both celebratory and gently teasing in its approach. It is full of allusions to cinema: black and white images of waves and wind are projected on the back wall, as are close ups of Laura’s tormented face as she plays Rachmaninoff on the piano. On a couple of magical occasions the characters actually appear to plunge into the cinema screen, becoming one with the filmed footage.

Anyone familiar with Kneehigh’s work will recognise many of the devices Rice employs: miniature steam trains chug along the floor, puppets stand in for Laura’s two young children, there are occasional acrobatics, and the stage is always cluttered with characters. The staff at the railway tea room where Laura and Alec meet are fleshed out, their roles developed so that eventually there are two additional love affairs on display, running in tandem with Laura and Alec’s. The crucial difference is of course one of social class. These characters are far less inhibited, they flirt and cavort in a way the thwarted couple cannot.

This point quickly becomes laboured and there is a sense of relief when Rice finally hones in on the main characters in the production’s more emotive second half, but the beefing up of the supporting characters does make a valid point about the outside (and inside) pressures to which the couple are subject. Like Isabel Archer in Portrait of a Lady, they are driven to do what is good and right, even if their own happiness suffers as a result. Laura’s husband is not an Osmond, he is not a cruel man, just a little dull and stuffy, if also kind and clearly baffled by the sudden distance he feels between himself and his wife.

While Rice’s production riffs and tussles with certain aspects of the story, it also understands when to leave alone and, in the end, remains true to the spirit of the film. Brief Encounter was released in 1944 but set in 1938. Ideas of duty and sacrifice weigh heavily on the couple and it is inevitable that in the final heart/head face off, the head wins out and the heart packs its bags and takes a job in Johannesburg.

This touring production features a new cast, with Hannah Yelland’s Laura in particular standing out. With her wide eyes, era-appropriate cheekbones and clipped vowels, she somehow managing to convey waves of hidden passion even while dangling from a chandelier.

Reviewed for musicOMH.

Tusk Tusk at the Royal Court

Polly Stenham’s new play Tusk Tusk feels very much like a companion piece or even a prequel to her debut, the acclaimed That Face.

It's near impossible to discuss Stenham without making reference to her youth, to the fact that That Face was written when she was 19 and, that when it transferred from the Royal Court to the Duke of York’s Theatre, she became the youngest woman ever to have a play staged in the West End.

The pressure to produce a second play of similar power must have been intense and she has chosen not to move away from the subject matter that gave birth to That Face but to mine it further, to dig deeper into the same ground.

Both plays deal with emotional neglect and the complexities of child-parent relationships, the crucial difference being that while the figure of the mother dominated the first play – as the vampiric centre of her son’s life – here the mother, though still a potent force in her children’s lives, is an absence rather than a presence.

Eliot, Maggie and their little brother Finn have been left alone. They have just moved in to a new London flat and their possessions are all still packed up in boxes. It quickly becomes clear that they have no idea where their mother is or when she will come back. They keep watching their phones, hoping she will call. Such vanishings are, we soon gather, not entirely unusual and, initially at least, they remain confident she will return. Their aloneness soon becomes a kind of game: they sleep through the day, they eat Chinese take out for breakfast and they use what little money they have to buy a strobe light. Their plight brings to mind the adult-less world of numerous children’s books, though with the added 21st century shadow of social services separating them if they find out about the situation; at one point Maggie even comments that their lives have become like a bad Enid Blyton novel.

Eliot, the oldest at fifteen, clearly needs to believe that their mother will return and that nothing is really amiss. Whenever fourteen year old Maggie attempts to talk of their mother’s pill-popping, her depressions, her unreliability, he bats her words aside. His tie to his mother is obviously a complex, mutually needy one; beneath the nonchalance he seems far more dependent on her than his sister. In this way the family dynamics – the doted-on boy child, the daughter pushed to the side – mirror those of That Face, though here there is no chance of the father arriving white knight style at the end to rescue them, as he’s dead, carried off by cancer when they were young. “Fucking cliché,” as Eliot says. The only adults that puncture this world are the intensely middle-class Katie and Roland, friends of the children’s mother – but they bring with them their own set of complications.

Stenham’s play feels, if anything, more sure of itself than That Face. Though her teenage characters converse with a level of eloquence that at times borders on the implausible, she creates a world in which it is possible to accept that. The sparring between the two older siblings is sometimes uneasily flirtatious, sometimes stubborn and silly; but beneath their volleys of “arrows tipped with wit” there are things that don’t quite sit right, little niggles. For one thing, if there mother has been this unstable and unreliable all their lives, it seems odd that they wouldn’t be better able to fend for themselves, practically as well as emotionally.

And then there’s Cassie, the girl Eliot briefly dallies with, who it is immediately apparent is from a less well off background then the main characters. Though quite thinly sketched in comparison, she is an interesting addition, a more grounded individual who has a job, who supports herself. We never learn what absences she has in her life. But, though one can see why Stenham included her, she feels like something of an interloper, both into the siblings’ self-circling world and within the play itself.

In the end the play survives by the performances of the young cast (all roughly the same ages as their characters). And the three siblings, who are rarely off stage, are pretty amazing. Toby Regbo, as Eliot, mixes adolescent bravado and self conscious coolness with something more desperate and dangerous. Bel Powley, as Maggie, seems older than her years yet also endearingly childish at times. Finn Bennett as seven year old Finn feels utterly at home on the stage.

Though the early scenes, when it seems the play will just consist of sibling bickering, cause alarm bells to ring, the play soon becomes something bigger, darker and more compelling. It does however definitely gain something from watching it with That Face relatively fresh in the memory.

Reviewed for musicOMH

Edward Gant's Amazing Feats of Loneliness at Soho Theatre

Edward Gant is a travelling showman of the Victorian era, a self proclaimed prodigy, soldier, traveller and poet. Dapper in topper and tails and impeccable of moustache, he awes his audience with freakish tales of broken hearts and suppurating skin.

This revival of Anthony Neilson’s 2002 play is a mish-mash of things. Presented as a recreation of a stage show of 1881, The Amazing Feats of Loneliness of the title, it is, initially at least, a blend of the grotesque and the crudely comic, full of nudge-nudge humour and waves of pus and vomit.

A young woman afflicted with acne finds that her face has the capability to produce pearls; a man hikes to the Himalayas to have the images of his dead love literally drilled out of existence; a (human sized) stuffed bear recounts its abandonment by its owner.

It is like The League of Gentlemen at their most perverse, veering at times into Little Britain territory as bodily fluids gush over the floor. But as with Neilson’s other recent plays, the disappointing God in Ruins and divisive The Wonderful World of Dissocia, there are different layers of reality at work here. As with both those productions there is a Pirandellian fracturing of the world we are presented with. There are jarring pauses, as Gant’s fellow performers grow increasingly uncomfortable with their opium-addicted boss. The play begins to pick itself apart, to reveal something unexpected and altogether more human and questioning beneath the sticky veneer.

That said, this late detour doesn’t quite emerge clean from the grossness of the earlier scenes; it remains tainted. The audience never learn enough about Gant and his troupe to fully engage with this new turn of events. There are intriguing hints of a friendship forged on the battlefield between Gant and Sam Cox’s Jack Dearlove, but given the time devoted to pus and pimples in the early half of the play, this remains frustratingly thinly sketched. There is also an attempt to raise the question of what one wants theatre to do: encapsulated in a poem that pits whimsy against hard reality. But again this feels secondary to the yucky stuff. The final revelation, when it comes however, is still quite potent.

The cast are excellent. Simon Kunz has just the right amount of swagger as Gant and Sam Cox, Nicholas Ludd and Emma Handy, leaping between roles, are all equally strong, the latter impressively managing to emote from behind a mask of acne. Tom Scutt’s Victorian set is full of lovely details and, to be fair, the audience seemed to be laughing a great deal, for it is at times wickedly, weirdly funny. But it is impossible to shake a sense of frustration that this could have been far more interesting were it to focus less on gross excess and more on the characters that populate this intriguing world.


Reviewed for musicOMH

Dido, Queen of Carthage at the National

Is it wrong to snigger at self immolation? I suspect it is. But it was difficult to keep an entirely straight face watching Anastasia Hille’s distraught Phoenician queen build a pyre of John Lewis throw pillows before dousing herself in liquid, lighting a match and waiting for the ‘roaring flames’ sound effects to kick in.

Michael Billington has asked we celebrate a straightforward staging of a rarely performed work, but making Marlowe dull takes a fair bit of doing and this does it. It’s not so much the length – 3 hours, despite what the programme says – but James MacDonald’s staging which seemed almost wilfully old-fashioned and unadventurous. That’s perhaps a little harsh. I did think that Hille, as Dido, and Mark Bonnar as Aeneas gave strong, at times moving performances but I found so many of the design and directorial choices got in the way of the play rather than making it live.

The yellow shower curtain that formed the main backdrop was one such niggle, especially as the performers often left gaps in it when pulling it closed. Some of the costumes had the whiff of the dressing up box to them too, one kept in the attic by an aunt and full of odd scarves and skirts, and I couldn’t fathom why Mercury – who seemed to be wearing sock-suspenders – seemed to address the mortals via one of those devices that serial killers use to disguise their voices when taunting the police (or that’s at least what it sounded like).

There were some moments of lightness and invention but things – especially in the later stages of the play, as Aeneas was compelled to depart and Dido fretted and raved, her thoughts turning to death – felt more laboured than anything else and the climactic conflagration, when it came, was something of a damp squib. Billington has a point, in that I did enjoy seeing this play lifted off the page, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that more could have been done with it. The West End Whingers were spotted departing hastily at the interval (no doubt via the bar).

A little link

More on Over There over here.

Tanja Liedtke's Twelfth Floor

In a typically passionate manner Andy Field blooged recently over on the Guardian about the potency of dance. I've also been finding that some of the most memorable and exciting things I've seen recenly have been movement based - dance. I don't always write about them though, not here; I think I watch dance in a different way - or at least I tell myself I do, I suspect it's more to do with the worry that there is a particular way of writing and discussing dance and I might expose my gaping ignorance of such things more so than normal.

But. Anyway. The most recent thing I saw and enjoyed was Twelfth Floor, choreographed by Tanya Liedtke, a compelling, frequently amusing and ultimately rather disturbing hour of dance set in an unspecified institution.

The walls are painted a muddy mix of cream and green and the lone window is shuttered. Two men, clad in sloppy T shirts and track-suit bottoms, spar and play-fight while another chalks words onto the walls seemingly lost in a private world – it is possible to glimpse the word ‘escape’ among his scrawling.

A nurse-like figure escorts a fourth person into the room, a young woman. Though there are obvious parallels with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Liedtke’s piece does not mirror it too closely. Her nurse is not nearly as formidable as the Big Nurse of Ken Kesey’s novel. As danced by Amelia McQueen, she is a skittery, jittery thing in a pink uniform with neat little socks. Her movements are intricate yet jerky: robotic and repetitive. Her finger constantly jabs the air as if independent of the rest of her, seeking out transgressions, admonishing her charges.

The remaining characters sometimes stand up to her but at other times they cower in the corner, jiggling like pepper pots left on a washing machine during its spin cycle. A battle of wills plays out between them – inmates and nurse – and small victories are celebrated on either side. There is much humour in Liedtke’s work – especially during a well-timed sequence involving a revolving door and, later, when the inmates mock the nurse’s mannerisms – and at times it feels cartoonish, even approaches slapstick in places, but, always, there is this sense of tension just beneath the surface: the under-toad is lurking.

The piece makes clear that while it is possible to win in the short term, a certain status quo remains: there are lines that can’t be crossed and the consequences of attempting to do so are severe. The caged human has a capacity for aggression and violence and as the piece progresses the levity of earlier scenes is replaced with something much darker and more unsettling. The power games cease being games.

Though Twelfth Floor is walking on oft-visited ground and at times it tip toes fairly close to cliché, is in places formulaic, it manages, in the main, to remain fresh and exciting to watch. The production as a whole isn’t as successful as some of its individual moments, but there is much to revel in: Liedtke’s ability to convey character through movement, to build a rich and complex world, is considerable.

Knowing this, it's all too tempting to be side-tracked by Tanja Liedtke’s own poignant story (she had just been appointed Artistic Director of the Sydney Dance Company when she died in an accident in 2007 - this was her only full length piece) but the work stands on its terms and that is the important thing. However one can't quite escape the feeling that this is an early work - shot through with youth - and that hers was a talent that would have, given more time, matured and evolved and created even better things.

Over There at the Royal Court

The Royal Court’s Off the Wall season of plays about Germany continues with Mark Ravenhill’s unsettling Over There.

The play is a strongly allegorical piece about two brothers, identical twins, who grow up on separate sides of the Wall.

Though they live apart - Franz lives with his mother in the West while Karl has remained in the East his socialist father - they are still connected by the filaments of their twin-ness, they can feel each other’s pain, each other’s joy.

When the Wall falls the brothers are reunited and Karl comes to stay with Franz in what was the West.

He is initially excited by this prospect, by this opportunity to binge on things, but he also still clings to his Eastern way of thinking. He can’t marry the two, and a divide remains in his mind.
In a delicious piece of casting, the brothers are played by identical twins Luke and Harry Treadaway, with only a slight difference in hairstyle and different coloured underwear to mark them apart; so when they face each other on stage and joke about it being like looking in a mirror, it is indeed so.

Once they start living together, the relationship between the two brothers quickly starts to deteriorate. Karl finds his new life a struggle and starts to imitate his brother, to wear his (shiny, shiny) suits and to teach Franz’s young son Russian, to blur the line between himself and his twin. Ravenhill uses this device to convey the crisis of a country trying to create a new vision for itself, one of a united future, and the cultural and ideological divisions that remain even after the wall has been torn down.

Co-directed by Ravenhill and Ramin Grey, the production has a pared down aesthetic. Johannes Schutz’s set is a stark white box filled with further boxes: brands haphazardly stacked, a jumble of plastic condiment bottles and serial packets, all labelled with familiar names, the detritus of the West.

This spare way of presenting things extends to the performances, and to the very texture of the piece. The Treadaways, frequently speaking in unison, deliver their dialogue in an oddly detached fashion. That is not to say their delivery is empty of emotion, but what emotion there is feels intentionally askew. There is a flatness to their line readings, sentences end bluntly, rather than trailing off naturally, and when they speak in foreign languages – Franz in English or Karl in Russian – we hear a string of nonsense words instead. This manner of staging, playful, teasing and stripped of the unessential, is reminiscent of the Court’s recent productions of work by German playwright Marius von Mayenburg, The Ugly One and The Stone, which began the Off The Wall season.

As the play proceeds, this notion of things being ‘stripped down’ is taking to its logical conclusion and the final scenes see the two men utterly exposed, their skin smeared with food, with sauces and condiments, the contents of tubs and bottles and packets.

There is a pleasing absurdity to some earlier scenes. A yellow sponge stands in for Franz’s son (appropriate since he is not a character, not a person, but a thing, a pawn between them), while a bag of flour temporarily becomes their father’s ashes, and, in a brief prologue set in California, an American waitress is played by Luke in a blonde wig and heels. But this lightness of tone is replaced by something altogether more disquieting in the play’s later moments.

There is something quite repellent about the mess they make, writhing in gunk, skin sticky and slick: it speaks of all manner of fluids spilled and is, at times I found, difficult to watch (literally - I became acutely interested in my shoes at one point). As a metaphor it is not unsuccessful, for the brothers’ relationship is far from tidy, nor is the path of the reunited country free of debris – you can’t stitch a wound that deep overnight. “Your world can’t exist,” Franz tells Karl. “There’s only my world.” And, seeing this, Karl starts to sink, to lose his grip.

Both actors, onstage throughout, throw themselves into demanding roles, and there is an undeniable potency to proceedings. But in the end Ravenhill's approach is too heavy-handed and obvious, it hits its audience over the head, yells in their faces: West eats East. Point made. We get it.

Reviewed for musicOMH.

A double booking error meant that at one point it seemed as if I might have to watch the show sitting on Charles Spencer's lap - but fortuntaley an usher was able to find me a spare speat seconds before the play started.

Burnt by the Sun at the National

With his current role at the National, Rory Kinnear has been given a gift of a part. He plays Mitia, a charming and playful character, who is also highly enigmatic and a little sinister; a man of layers and hidden things, a wearer of masks and disguises.

Mitia was once in love with Maroussia, the daughter of his music teacher, but one night he left, vanished without a word, and has not been seen since. Now, twelve years later, he has returned to a world not dissimilar to the one he left.

Though the music teacher is now dead, his family still live as they once did, a gentle and rather Chekhovian existence, sipping tea and singing songs in their summer dacha.

They are allowed to continue in this gentle facsimile of pre-Revolutionary life because Maroussia has, in the years since Mitia left, married Colonel Kotov, a celebrated Bolshevik hero who – literally – has a direct line to Stalin.

So while the family waft around their airy home in linens and silks, it is only the stream of MASH style loudspeaker announcements (“Comrades…”) and the passing troupes of beaming, red-sashed Pioneers, that show that life beyond the dacha has changed so completely.

Kotov meanwhile lumbers round the place in his grey flannel breeches looking bear-like and out of place. The family sniff about his rough habits – he prefers to use the old fashioned steam house rather than the bathroom – but there is clearly an unvoiced pact between them, a harmony which Mitia’s return threatens to undermine in the most brutal fashion.

Nikita Mikhalkov’s Oscar winning Russian film has been adapted for the stage by Peter Flannery and as with many screen-to-stage transfers there have been a number of inevitable and necessary changes. Flannery’s version (based on the screenplay by Mikhalkov and Rustam Ibragimbekov) makes explicit many of the things that are merely danced around in the film. At one point, as the family bemoan the things they miss from their old way of living, Kotov asks them outright: “why didn’t you fight for it?”

The film filtered the complex tangle of adult relationships through the eyes of Kotov and Maroussia’s precocious young daughter Nadia. Here, while Nadia is still a delightful presence, the emotions of the adult characters are pitched closer to the surface, they are more exposed.

Michelle Dockery is quietly impressive as the stricken Maroussia suddenly torn between the man she once adored and her current husband, who she also cares deeply about. Ciaran Hinds, however, feels oddly underpowered as Kotov. He is suitably gruff but there are too few glimpses of the feared and revered leader of men or, for that matter, the man who charmed Maroussia. Rory Kinnear, of course, benefits from the showier role but though clearly revelling in his character’s propensity for dressing up, playing the piano and tap dancing, he never overdoes it. He maintains a careful balance and there is always the sense of pain and loss under the veneer of playfulness, an aura of danger about him. When the truth behind his long absence is revealed it is very chilling indeed.

The supporting cast are also very strong, particularly Stehanie Jacob as Mokhova the eternally virginal maid, prone to howling on the stairs when upset.

Howard Davies’ production works well, gently and divertingly building to a tense and moving conclusion. It is powerfully played and compelling and yet there are the usual niggles when translating something that worked so well in one medium to another; there are a number of key images and scenes that can’t be replicated on stage, so the production doesn’t attempt to. The balloons bearing a huge image of Stalin’s face, a central motif in the film, simultaneously unsettling and slightly absurd, is here reduced to a throwaway reference. The atmosphere of terror on the horizon, of a world about to be overturned, is not so pervading.

But, taken on its own terms the production works well, it is initially funny and charming, before successfully shifting to something much darker in the later scenes, as a larger tide washes away this small golden world forever.


Reviewed for musicOMH

I once again coaxed my mother out of the house for this one and am rather glad I did. As a girl she once was a beaming, red-sashed Pioneer and that, combined with pre-show and mid-show wine and standing next to the "pretty one from the History Boys" at the bar, made it one of her preferred theatre experiences of this or any other year I expect.

The Miniaturists

Confession: I have never been to a Miniaturists at the Arcola before. Oh sure I have considered it, I have talked about maybe possibly doing so one day, but thus far I have utterly failed to get myself over to Hackney on a Sunday due to my own ingrained indolence. Until, that is, this past weekend, where the chance to see one of Helen Smith’s plays properly staged (with strawberries and cornflakes and everything) proved too tempting to resist.

And it was more than worth grappling with the broken Northern Line to get there: six short plays, none longer than 20 minutes, a lovely variety in terms of style, tone and approach, a fair higher standard of performance than one would expect from pieces with such a short rehearsal time and the pleasure of knowing that for every coconut cream you bite into there’s likely to be a piece of praline along in a minute. Or something. Just go with it.

Anyway there was wine and there were Whingers and there was the lovely Stephen Sharkey who took the time to stop and say hello and generally be charming despite presumably having much more pressing things to attend to.

There are some more words over here if you’re interested…

A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Rose

My mother hasn’t featured on this blog for a while, simply because I haven’t been able to persuade her to come to the theatre with me in some months. The idea of traipsing into London on a cold night just to see a play is not her idea of fun; preferring as she does a kind of semi-hibernation in winter months involving lots of Cabernet Sauvignon and selected DVD box sets (she is quite taken with Mad Men).

Though she gets a kind of stricken look on her face every time I so much as pick up a copy of Time Out or the Guardian Guide in her presence, last week she, without prompting, mentioned that she might quite maybe want to see that thing with the Scottish chap in it (that Scottish chap being Ken Stott, we eventually established after further discussion and not James McAvoy). Her enthusiasm trailed off a bit when she realised I was serious about arranging tickets but I was not going to let such an opportunity pass.

The Rose in Kingston is the nearest theatre to where she lived and they happened to be playing host to Ed Hall’s all male theatre company Propeller who were doing A Midsummer Night’s Dream in tandem with The Merchant of Venice. The former seemed like a fair comprise. My mother was less sure, having not enjoyed the last few Shakespeares I subjected her to, but I mentioned that there was a large bar and I absolutely, definitely would not make her sit on the floor as I sometimes do at the Rose (the cheapest tickets, the best views and even at home I usually opt for the floorboards over the sofa anyway – so it works for me). There was an unspoken agreement that pre-show drinks were on me.

The production is broadly performed and entertaining, a bit laboured in places but good fun. It’s an all male company and the performers playing female roles do little to signify femininity except for putting on skirts and speaking in a higher tone of voice: the actors all sport close cropped hair and stubbled chins. There’s some neat playing about with gender roles: when squabbling in the forest, Hermia and Helena square up like football fans in a pub brawl while Demetrious and Lysander scrap like schoolgirls in a playground. Puck wears stripy tights, a tutu and a pair of glittery ruby slippers. But other than that it’s a pretty straightforward run through, not quite as bawdy and well-paced as the Globe’s recent production. My mother looked a little perplexed at times but I think she may just have been working out the logistics of nipping downstairs for an interval cigarette.

At the end her verdict was: “OK”, “quite funny in places” and “not as long as I thought it would be.” All of which is more positive than I expected. She couldn’t quite fathom why the woman next to us was “laughing like she wanted everyone to notice she was laughing,” but this is an improvement on the time she spent much of a (admittedly fairly pedestrian) production of As You Like It glaring at the large man who was taking up more than his fair share of the bench they were sharing and scribbling notes throughout – who turned out to be Peter Hall.

She has tentatively agreed to come and see something else with me in a couple of weeks provided it's not another Shakespeare, though she says she must first “check the work diary” which I think is a euphemism for seeing if she can’t find something better to do, but still – I’ll take that as a yes.

Going Solo

Just wanted to direct you to this piece over on the Guardian Theatre Blog about an unintended private performance I attended last week at the Courtyard Theatre.