Interview: Filter

Somewhat belatedly I'm posting a link to my interview with Filter's co-artistic director, Ferdy Roberts, who's currently playing Puck in the company's gleefully chaotic production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Lyric. He talks about the differences in creating Filter's text-based and devised work and gets excited about the prospect of messing about with Shakespeare. Read the rest over at Exeunt.

The Heresy of Love at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

A woman born with the gift of poetry was, according to Virginia Woolf, until ever so recently, “a woman in strife against herself.” The world did not permit her to pick up a pen. And if she persisted to kick against the way of things, to write despite all the obstacles stacked against her, she was usually met with suspicion, distaste, and ridicule. To stand any hope of living a creative life, a woman needed space, time and money: that elusive room of her own coupled with considerable strength of will.

For Sister Juana Ines de la Cruz, the seventeenth century poet and playwright, her room took the shape of a nun’s cell. For her the convent was both a confining and a freeing place. Though physically caged, living out her life behind gates and bars, she was able to study, to feed her intellect, to achieve a form of independence and amass a significant library, not just texts of theology and devotion, but of the whole world and its workings.

She was well liked at court where her play, House of Desires, was performed and she was a particular favourite of the Vicereine. But though she also had her supporters within the church, she had – inevitably perhaps – her detractors, those who were alarmed by the idea of nun writing secular poetry and works of entertainment, who were wary of the idea of a woman writing in any form. Helen Edmundson’s play for the RSC is alert to the complexities of Sister Juana’s predicament: the divisions between church and court and between Spain and what was then still New Spain, now Mexico. For a long time her creativity was tolerated, encouraged even, but the special status accorded to her sparked disquiet both within the convent and beyond its walls. Eventually she was obliged to halt, to lay down her pen, stem the flow of words and renew her vows.

As Sister Juana, Catherine McCormack is passionate, yet serene. She is a woman driven; writing is part of her nature and to not do so would be to deny some vital aspect of her character. Though McCormack’s portrayal is radiant and intelligent, it is not an unshaded performance: there are un-nun like traces of vanity and pride in her too, a thirst for acclaim. She is most at ease in the company of Catherine Hamilton’s Vicereine and together they convey the intensity of the women’s friendship, their need of each other and understanding of one another as women both isolated by circumstance.

The play’s male characters are more broadly drawn. Geoffrey Beevers is kindly and warm as the full-hearted Father Antonio, a man who despite his affection for Sister Juana is easily cowed and swayed. Raymond Coulthard plays the duplicitous Bishop whose admiration for Sister Juana turns to repulsion when he finds himself becoming attracted to her. Stephen Boxer is suitably stern and threatening as the hair-shirted Spanish Archbishop who views Sister Juana as an affront to his faith and can barely bring himself to look on a woman for fear of being in some way tainted. It is in Boxer’s character that the play’s modern parallels are made most explicit: in any society peopled by authority figures who view women as a source of corruption and contagion, the act of writing becomes a subversive and powerful one.

Nancy Meckler, who previously directed House of Desires during the RSC’s 2004 Spanish Golden Age season, gives the material a solid if over-emphatic production. A retractable gate is used to convey a sense of Sister Juana’s cloistered existence, but it also helps to keep her distant. Though never less than compelling, at almost three hours in length the play occasionally sags (a sub plot involving Sister Juana’s niece is rather drawn out), the constant rattling back and forth of the separating gate eventually becomes repetitious and the staging itself is a little flat and unadventurous. The otherwise simple set, dominated by Christ’s looming face, is beautifully lit by Ben Ormerod – the stage suffused with soft golden light, evening sun – but it’s McCormack’s performance that gives this play its heat.

Reviewed for Exeunt

She Stoops to Conquer at the National Theatre

Oliver Goldsmith was not reputed to be a great conversationalist. Dr Johnson remarked that “the misfortune of Goldsmith in conversation is this, he goes on without knowing how he is to get off.” Surrounded by the great talkers of the age, ‘Noll’, with his fondness for fine things and his funny, sunken face, tended to gabble and was the subject of mockery and affection in equal measure.

Marlow, the dandyish protagonist of Goldsmith’s frothy 1773 comedy, is also socially ill at ease, at least in certain circumstances. Presented with a woman of fortune, his tongue ties itself in knots and he becomes so overcome he can barely bring himself to look her in the face; show him a comely barmaid however and he turns into Blackadder’s Flashheart in a lemon yellow frock coat, all thrust and trouser. So in order to snag her prize (or at the very least have him look at her), Kate Hardcastle, the daughter of a country squire, decides to adopt a broad accent, an apron and a playful manner, something she is only too happy to do.

Though he’s a keen observer of snobbery and pretension, Goldsmith’s play is intriguingly free of malice or cruelty, his satire soft-edged. The characters, though flawed, are all amiable in their way, and even the central misunderstanding, in which Marlow mistakes the Hardcastles’ home for a country inn and his potential father-in-law for its landlord, is the result of a mischievous rather than malicious prank. The humour comes as much at the expense of the town fops as the country folk and even Kate’s spoiled, layabout half-brother Tony Lumpkin is not a bad sort, not really.

The playing is by necessity pretty broad. There is little room for nuance here, but some lay it on thicker than others. Harry Hadden-Paton and John Heffernan make a sublime double act as Marlow and his friend Hastings, the two city interlopers. They give the impression of friendship – there’s a scene where the two are eating fruit where they spark wickedly off one another – and, Heffernan in particular, conveys a sense of basic decency and concern for Marlow’s happiness.

Steve Pemberton resists the urge to turn the eccentric Mr Hardcastle into a League of Gentlemen grotesque and is instead genial and (mostly) good-humoured in the role; this is in stark contrast to Sophie Thompson’s performance as Mrs Hardcastle, which is so far over the top that the top is now just a little speck in the field below. She is less a character than a collage of Tourettian facial tics and extravagant vowel-mangling in attempt to demonstrate to her guests that she is not just another one of the ‘rustics.’ Katherine Kelly takes a far more naturalistic approach as Kate, suggesting that her ‘barmaid’ persona is an existing facet of her character and, as a result, lessening the sense of deception in her behaviour. The production also sidesteps the slightly murky aspect of Marlow’s thirst for women lower down the social ladder than he.

These fluctuations of tone and pitch eventually start to have an effect on Jamie Lloyd’s production, which feels less cohesive than it might. But what it lacks in tightness and lightness it makes up for in occasional joyous flourishes, in well-staged musical interludes, in the interplay between Hadden-Paton and Heffernan (there can be few actors who can milk as much as he from a single utterance of the word ‘booby’) and in its abiding sense of generosity and warmth.

Reviewed for Exeunt

L’immediat at the Barbican

It begins with a crash. A spotlight smashes down from above, narrowly missing a performer. Created by Camille Boitel, L’immediat presents a world where things tumble and buckle and crumble with regularity; where nothing is fixed, nothing safe.

The opening skit is recognisably domestic. A woman arrives home from work. As she starts to unpack, first the table, then the bed, and then the entire room start to fall apart around her. Chunks of wall start to collapse. The table concertinas into a pile of wooden slats: even her trousers are disobedient, ending up around her ankles. It’s farcical and ingeniously choreographed, yet also melancholic, shoulder-shrugging, resigned to chaos and upset.

Then the whole stage starts to unpick itself, coming undone like a game of Mousetrap in reverse. Towers of cardboard boxes fall to earth, the lighting rig plummets, the stage becomes a sea of things: clutter, mess to be swept away. It’s astonishing to watch, heart-in-mouth stuff, at times seemingly perilous, as the Barbican stage is slowly stripped bare. In such moments the piece achieves a glorious union between the choreographically audacious and the thematically potent: nothing is solid, nothing is steady; if you lean on something it will only collapse under your weight.

It’s a hard balance to sustain and the production doesn’t manage it, though nor does it seem to try to. Subsequent sequences involve limbs which seem to rebel against their owners and even the stage seems to sway like a ship at sea, a pinball world on permanent tilt. Eerie dissonant sounds spill from some corner of the stage, cracked and fractured, a needle stuck in its groove. The performers, rendered bear-like and genderless under heavy fur coats hop in and out of hungry wardrobes; they writhe and wriggle on their bellies, they bend in odd, improbable ways.

These later scenes have a faintly post-apocalyptic whiff: after the fall, comes the levelling. The performers scrabble around the stage, stuck, repeating the same sets of movements. Sometimes they are ambushed by furniture; one woman seems in danger of floating away entirely and needs to be physically held down, grounded.

There’s wit and brilliance in much of this, particularly in the pervading sense of chaos and decay that, by necessity, must require a huge degree of precision and care to pull off. But the production seems to sail past a number of possible end points, galloping onwards but never quite replicating the gleeful, gasp-inducing effectiveness of that first scene of collapse. Running gags are overused with a sense of diminishing returns (there’s only so many times a startled man leaping out of a wardrobe can raise a smile) and though Boitel skilfully knits the philosophic with the farcical, there’s a – perhaps apt – sense of burnout before the piece is through.

Part of the London International Mime Festival. Reviewed for Exeunt.

Lovesong at the Lyric Hammersmith

It’s a strange sound: the damp rabbity snuffling of a roomful of people attempting to hold back tears. It’s a sound that runs through much of Frantic Assembly’s moving new production, twining with the music: Abi Morgan’s play is often incredibly tender and touching, but there are times when it feels a bit mechanical in its methods, a little too insistent on making the audience weep.

As a screen writer, Morgan’s work includes both Steve McQueen’s Shame and recent Thatcher biopic, The Iron Lady, and – political subject matter aside – her latest work for the stage shares some common ground with the latter film in its delicate exploration on the erosion of aging.

A married couple, Margaret and William, are shown at two points in their life: in the early years of their marriage, after their emigration to the US, and in what turns out to be their last days together. The optimism of youth slowly seeps out of them as life’s many small disappointments take their toll. Their new life in America isn’t as glittering as they’d hoped and though they both want to have children, they never come. Margaret takes a job, against her husband’s wishes, and both of them toy with the idea of having affairs. These scenes are interlaced with those of them at a later point of their lives. The elder Margaret and William have led a comfortable, if childless, existence, have come to terms with the hand that has been dealt to them and now face the prospect of life without one another

Some of the most piercing moments are wordless. Frantic Assembly’s Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett allow the couples to catch glimpses of each other across time. Siân Phillips, who plays the elderly Margaret, is shown dancing with Edward Bennett, her husband as he once was, bearing each other’s weight and leaning into one another. The four performers, pyjama-clad, tumble in and out of each other’s grasp; clasping each other, clinging to each other, but unable to hold on for long.

The cast all give well-judged performances even if the script doesn’t give Bennett and Leanne Rowe, as the younger Margaret, quite as much to work with. Philips’s performance is the most wrenching; at one point she is shown trying on a pair of once-treasured shoes, but she’s unable to walk in them and the frustration and anger she feels at her frail and disloyal body is painful to watch. Sam Cox, in comparison, exercises admirable restraint as the older William making his moments of emotional eruption all the more potent.

This is a production that walks a very fine line. Inevitably, given the subject matter, it has the capacity to tap into people’s personal experiences of loss and there are times when it feels too overt in its manipulation of the audience’s emotions. It deals unashamedly in sentiment and at times can feel a little thematically overcooked: there’s a lot of talk of dead things, ancient cave paintings and the linearity, or otherwise, of time. The movement sequences too, while beautifully executed, are occasionally distracting. The piece is at its strongest as a portrait of the way in which a relationship evolves over the years. The older Margaret and William have come to know each other’s habits intimately. The sense of familiarity which the younger William saw as a source of suffocation has become a comfort. These two people have reached a point in their lives when they have only each other – and now they must prepare themselves to part.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Twelfth Night at the New Diorama Theatre

In a scene, perhaps not owing overmuch to Shakespeare but none the worse for it, Orsino and his courtiers are first glimpsed hanging out together in a sauna clad only in white towels, while a disguised Viola hovers amongst them, shifting from foot to foot, fully (cross-)dressed and uncertain where to look. Before she can make her departure, she even receives an unexpected glimpse of her master’s assets which makes her go as pink as the polo shirt she now sports as Cesario.

It’s one of many playful and inventive touches in Faction Theatre’s hugely endearing production of Shakespeare’s comedy, the first in an ambitious repertory season that also includes Schiller’s Mary Stuart and Strindberg’s Miss Julie.

The company previously tackled the play in 2009 and many of the same cast return, albeit in different roles. Stripping the performance space back to a bare black box and using hardly any props, Mark Leipacher’s production has a pleasing visual unity: the eleven-strong company come together to create the box tree behind which Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek conceal themselves, their fingers fanning like branches gently blown by the breeze; they also become the waves which wash Viola and Sebastian onto Illyria’s shores and, in a particularly chilling touch, they crowd together to create the oubliette within which Malvolio is confined, their seemingly disembodied hands curling around his body and pressing against his face, creating an intense sensation of claustrophobia.

Gareth Fordred’s militaristic Malvolio stands out among a capable ensemble cast. He wears his hair greasily slicked to one side and his leg in a calliper, which brings an extra degree of rigidity to his movements and manner and makes the moment when he believes Olivia has praised his gait feel all the more cruel. His bug-eyed, manic delight on receiving this misleading epistle is quite wrenching to watch and, dignity swiftly abandoned, he all but treads on the front row’s toes as he gleefully recalls each one her compliments; as a result his later, hobbling humiliation is all the more piercing.

As Belch and Aguecheek, Richard Delaney and Jonny McPherson transcend their respective moustaches (one sports a ratty Chaplin toothbrush, the other the salt-and-pepper lip-wig of a gouty colonel) to form a lively double-act. The production also neatly conveys the sense that these men, and Malvolio too, are veterans of a past conflict. Derval Mellett’s Olivia revels in her post-coital undoing at the hands of Sebastian, switching the black of mourning for something more vibrant with almost unseemly haste, her hair tumbling around her shoulders and her eyes brimming with bedroom heat. In comparison Kate Sawyer makes a rather understated Viola and appears as bemused and alarmed by Olivia’s advances towards her as by Aguecheek’s wobbly attempt to engage her in a duel. Lachlan McCall’s Feste brings a contemporary freshness to the play’s songs, plucking them out on his banjo.

There’s an occasional roughness to the verse speaking, and the odd dropped line, but this economical, intelligent take on the play doesn’t suffer for it. Indeed the rawness helps the audience to connect with the text and to get swept up in the plight of the characters. Through the company’s easy, relaxed way with the play – and the simple fanning of hands – a door is opened and you are invited in.

Reviewed for Exeunt

The Snow Queen at the Rose Theatre

The set alone is a source of wonder. Paper artist, Su Blackwell, in her first design project for the stage has created a delicate, wintry world of trees, cottages and lampposts that appear to have been snipped from the pages of a paperback. Black lettering nests against white, making an apt and charming backdrop for Charles Way’s adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s classic fairy story.

Young Gerda is a nervy girl, prone to panic attacks and terrified of her bad-tempered schoolmaster father, Mr Overskou. When her classmates take turns to dance in front of one another, she can’t bring herself to join in and her best friend Cei has to calm her down. Though Cei and Gerda have been friends and playmates all their lives, Mr Overskou disapproves of the boy’s dreamy ways and forbids them to see one another; it is then that Cei falls under the Snow Queen’s spell. A shard of mirror pierces his heart and he becomes cold and cruel before being whisked off to the Queen’s winter palace and forced to piece together the shattered fragments of her magic mirror. But though the townspeople believe Cei to have drowned, Gerda refuses to accept this and sets off to find him.

Way’s adaptation has Gerda travel through the changing seasons with winter forever on her tail. In spring she encounters talking flowers and a secateurs-wielding gardener; in summer she encounters a gaggle of Hooray Henry types and in autumn she encounters a robber gang and an ageing reindeer. There’s much wit and invention in the visual detail (umbrellas turn into autumn leaves, paper butterflies alight on paper trees, billowing white fabric is used to create a downhill sleigh ride) and some gentle humour in the writing. Gerda grows slowly in confidence and strength as the story progresses, declining to give up her red boots to the spoilt Sloaney teen princess and taking on the robber queen in a dance contest, but the production doesn’t overplay her emotional growth and this aspect of the writing is handled with a pleasingly light touch.

If anything Natascha Metherell’s production is too gentle and sedate. It has its moments of comedy and its moments of chill but there are a few too many slack patches that cause outbreaks of fidgeting amongst the younger members of the audience. Sara Stewart’s towering, ice-eyed Snow Queen is also the source of some genuine cries of alarm and, in one child’s case, a fountaining of frightened, urgent tears. The production seems better pitched at slightly older children than at the very young.

Some strong performances help compensate for occasional failings in pace. Bettrys Jones is compelling as Gerda, her initial anxiety and fretfulness slowly transforming into maturity and strength, and there is some good support from Michael Matus as the menacing Mr Overskou (who also cameos as a decidedly camp daffodil) and Deirdra Morris as the archetypal kindly, wise grandmother. What’s missing, despite all its considerable polish, is any real emotional tug or genuine sense of peril; it’s all a little too neat and tidy and lacks the wild fringes of the best children’s theatre.

Reviewed for Exeunt

The Ladykillers at the Gielgud Theatre

Though Graham Linehan’s stage adaptation of this classic 1955 Ealing comedy is superficially appealing on a number of levels, taken as a whole it doesn't quite satisfy.

Peter Capaldi plays the reptilian Professor Marcus – first revealed to the audience in silhouette – the head of a criminal gang who hides out in the Kings Cross house of kindly Mrs Wilberforce (Marcia Warren) under the pretence of being members of a string quintet.  

It's hard to fault the cast, but while the film celebrates the triumph of something fundamentally English in a murky post-war world, Linehan seems far more interested in mining the story for its comic potential. As a result the production is stuffed with recurring gags and physical comedy, but there's something very broad about the way the whole thing is pitched and it only really hits its stride in the second half, when the robbery has been committed and the silliness gives way to something more sinister. As tension mounts between the gang members and they begin to turn against one another, Sean Foley’s production takes on the dark air of a fairy tale. There's also more than a trace of the contemporary heist movie to proceedings: Reservoir Dogs is cited as an inspiration and there’s even, I believe, a visual reference to The Taking of Pelham 123. 

Linehan deviates from the film in some entertaining ways; a sequence in which the gang are forced to perform for Mrs Wilberforce’s elderly friends and have to try and pass their ineptitude off as musical experimentation is particularly amusing. But the piece never sustains this level of invention and at points comes close to pantomime.  

Michael Taylor’s gloriously skewed, expressionistic set creates a sense of physical and moral subsidence which the production never fully capitalises on but the cast are clearly enjoying themselves which goes some way to compensate for the occasional sags in pacing and the overlabouring of some of the jokes. Warren is deliciously dithery as Mrs Wilberforce, fragile yet far more formidable than the men around her will credit, and Capaldi clearly relishes his villainous role, stalking the stage like a Lotte Reiniger shadow puppet, revelling in each hike of an eyebrow and each long-legged stride. Clive Rowe, James Fleet, Ben Miller and Stephen Wight are also on good form as, respectively, the slow-witted but well-meaning One Round; the nervy Major with a fondness for women’s formal wear; the volatile Romanian gangster with a near pathological dislike of old ladies; and the amphetamine-driven Harry, who comes across like a more docile version of Brighton Rock’s Pinkie Brown with a penchant for housework.

Reviewed for Theatermania

Riot Acts at Richmix

A collection of words written in response to Penned in the Margins' Riot Acts, itself a form of response to the summer's riots. The evening featured new work in scratch form from Luke Wright, The Hurly Burly, Sophie Woolley and Greg McLaren. You can read the full piece on Exeunt. 

Judgement Day at The Print Room

Ibsen’s last play, When We Dead Awaken, takes the form of a heightened and poetic piece of self-examination, a man looking back at his life and work through a convex lens. A sense of finality pulses through the writing, a kind of breathless urgency.

Condensed and retitled by Mike Poulton, the play concerns Arnold Rubek, an aging sculptor who, having made both his reputation and his fortune many years ago with his masterwork, Judgement Day, is now enjoying the trapping of his success. Though he is respected and materially well off, Maia, his attractive and (much) younger wife resents him and he is all too aware that his days of producing great work are behind him.

He contents himself on commercial projects, corporate hackwork, sculpting bankers and merchants, and has tied himself to a young woman who bores him. In private moments he invites her to sit on his knee with a rather queasy Humbert Humbert tilt to his voice, but it’s clear that whatever affection once existed between them has long since turned to dust.

When his former muse, the mysterious Irena, appears at their mountain retreat, he is obliged to look back at the man – and the artist – he once was. Irena is a living ghost, a limbo-locked figure who feels that Rubek’s use of her image, her life, was an act of violation. While he has moved on without a backward glance, she has remained, trapped, drifting wraith-like through the mountain mist like an ageing Lucy Westenra; Rubek has drained something vital from her and she can neither forgive nor forget. She refers to his masterpiece as “their child” and is appalled at the thought of its existence apart from herself.

Rubek is obliged, for the first time it seems, to consider her role in its creation. The play pulls no punches in its depiction of the sculptor as a supremely self-involved and emotionally blinkered individual. Michael Pennington plays him with a calm naturalism, his voice rich and telling, providing a solid balance to Penny Downie’s more heightened and manic performance as Irena; shrouded in white, the pins working their way loose from her hair, she is by turns menacing and pathetic. Though at times her performance feels too stylised, there is a potent energy when she is on stage with Pennington. They both feel gripped by some deeper force. As a result the relationship between Sara Vickers’ Maia and her would-be lover, Philip Correia’s randy Baron, is eclipsed.

Poulton brings out the humour and humanity of Ibsen’s play, grounding it in the recognisable and counterbalancing its more abstract passages. James Dacre’s production is intense without being unrelenting. It takes this big, at times unwieldy play and makes it work in a small space. In this he’s aided by Mike Britton’s elegant traverse set which provides a sleek and contemporary frame of cool mountain blue for the period costumes (the wine-red of Maia’s skirts look particularly striking against this background). A single rock and a building mist are all it takes to transport the characters to a place precipitous in more than one sense. As the play draws to a close, Rubek and Irena are left to face each other and the unknown, reaching upwards into night.

Reviewed for Exeunt

We are Three Sisters at the Rose Theatre

“We are three sisters.” It is like an incantation. Surrounded by wind-lashed moorland, with tombstones looming at the window, the Brontë sisters wrote words that would survive them, in the process becoming semi-mythic themselves. Blake Morrison’s play for Northern Broadsides acknowledges the pull that the sisters’ lives still exert, the need to keep repeating and retelling their story.

Morrison draws deliberately on Chekhov’s Three Sisters, transporting events and people from the Brontës’ lives into a Chekhovian framework. It’s an elegant device, particularly because the parallels between the two sets of women were not entirely accidental and Chekhov may, at least in part, have been influenced by the inhabitants of the Haworth parsonage.

Though the play stands up well on its own as a piece of biographical drama, there’s pleasure to be taken in appreciating the many ways Morrison has woven together the Brontës’ world with that of the Prozorovs: the sibling harmonies and rivalries, the proximity of death – both plays begin with the remembering of a parent’s funeral. But it doesn’t adhere to its source too closely, breaking away from the template altogether in the later stages of the play; Morrison refers to it as a “shadow text”, one that inspires rather than dictates.

Though the timeline is condensed, Morrison’s play takes place at the most pivotal point in the sisters’ lives, when their books had finally found publishers and Charlotte in particular was starting to experience the first glow of literary success. This was to prove exposing and disconcerting to Emily who was content to shelter behind her pseudonym and pointedly did not join her sisters on their first tentative journey to London. Though London is a place the sisters ache for, it is a subtler form of longing than Chekhov’s sisters feel for Moscow, and Emily in particular makes her ambivalence felt.

Natasha’s ill-advised green sash in Chekhov’s play has become a dress the colour of limes, a retina-searing garment which stands out a mile next to the palette of matt browns and greys of the Brontës. The dress may as well have been Jezebel red, such is its effect; its wearer, Mrs Lydia Robinson, is Branwell’s older, married lover, here depicted as a cruel and manipulative woman with few redeeming traits (we know she is no good because she’s nasty to Tabby, the Brontës’ frail and ageing housekeeper).

Morrison has his Mrs Robinson paying a fictional visit to the sisters, much to their shock and displeasure. The other interlopers into their guarded world are all men – and all found wanting. John Branwell plays the local doctor, poignantly sporting a soft spot for Anne because she reminds him of her dead mother, whom he once loved. Marc Parry plays a rather feeble curate and director Barrie Rutter plays a self-promoting teacher to generally humorous effect. Fittingly it’s those playing the sisters who stand out. Rebecca Hutchinson’s Anne gets to escape her elder sisters’ shadows and speak of her own hopes; Catherine Kinsella’s Charlotte is the most grounded and subtly ambitious of the three and Sophia di Martino captures Emily’s volatility but also conveys a touch of knowing wit.

The play is less strong at providing social context and the references to events outside the parsonage walls, the Chartist riots for example, often feel heavy-handed; the same can be said of the handling of some of the background biographical detail. Branwell’s rapid decline into a stumbling drunk with a penchant for dipping into the family funds is also rather forced. The play is far better at sketching the tensions between the siblings, as that famous family portrait, with Branwell’s face blotted out by his own hand, watches over them from the far wall.

Rutter’s production can feel a little slow-paced and stiff; it sometimes lumbers rather than glides, and it lacks the energy and physicality of Shared Experience’s exploration of the same narrative ground. But it never feels like mere intellectual exercise; the play has an elegance of expression and an – eventual – emotional power as the three sisters, already coughing ominously, look ahead to their shared future.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Next Time I'll Sing To You at the Orange Tree Theatre

The stage is naked except for a small raised platform and a deflated air mattress. The ceiling glitters with fibre optic stars. Beneath these, a group of characters debate the nature of existence and reality, using theatre and the nature of performance as a broader metaphor for life (and death). Their conversation, which is studded with intentionally bad jokes and poetic digressions, swings back and forth but never settles.

First performed in 1962, James Saunders’ play was inspired by the story of the hermit of Great Canfield, a man who spent over three decades living in almost total isolation in a tiny hut. Was he some kind of contemporary saint or was he just a lonely old man prompted to reject the world after the young girl with whom he was fixated rejected him?

The play was the first ever directed by the Orange Tree’s Artistic Director, Sam Walters, and Saunders went on to have a strong association with the theatre throughout his life. Saunders’ next big project, according to the programme, was a stage adaptation of Iris Murdoch’s novel, The Italian Girl, which seems apt as there is a lot of thematic overlap – but Murdoch usually embedded her philosophical exploring within a stronger structure than Saunders uses here.

The piece constantly comments on itself, picking itself apart. The performers remark on how they are going through the same motions, night after night, and on how nothing much has actually happened yet. “Yes, we get the metaphor,” is the weary reply. The director takes on the mantel of creator, the ultimate auteur, while the performers are deemed to be somnambulistic figures, neither fully awake nor asleep, with the exception of one man who eventually starts to merge with the figure of the hermit. There’s plenty of Pirandello here; Beckett and Ionesco too. You can almost see the spines lining Saunders’ library. Though frequently witty and undeniably smart, the play at times feels like a collection of his interests and obsessions, a primer in existential thinking, rather than anything more cohesive and relatable.

The cast cope well with the particular tone and rhythm of the play. Brendan Patricks is elegantly arrogant as Dust while Aiden Gillet succeeds in bringing out the spiritual quality of his director figure, Rudge. Roger Parkins’ character Meff, there primarily to provide relatively light relief, has dated far less well though he does his best with what he’s been given, and Holly Elmes, as Lizzie (one half of a pair of interchangeable identical twins), is required to do little beyond look almost permanently bewildered.

Unfortunately along with all this 1960s intellectual enquiry, the play comes with a hefty dose of 1960s chauvinism, complete with jokes about rape. Anthony Clark’s production attempts to counteract this by turning it into a period piece, complete with corduroy trousers and snug black turtlenecks, an ashtray quickly filling with the remnants of skinny cigarettes. But by rooting it so firmly in time, the light that shines around the edges of the text is dulled. The play becomes a fixed, rigid thing rather than something questing and illuminating. It’s easy to see what excited people about this play and how it came to influence other writers. At times it is still possible to feel the electricity of ideas at work, but in framing this as a heritage piece Clark has neutralised the play in more ways than one.

Reviewed for Exeunt

The Changeling at Southwark Playhouse

Snip, snip. Snip, snip. Michael Oakley’s production of Middleton and Rowley’s Jacobean tragedy has taken the secateurs to the text. Gone is the madhouse subplot, leaving only the story of the duplicitous Beatrice-Joanna and her murky sexual entanglement with the bitter, volatile De Flores. But this secondary narrative strand does more than provide a comic counterweight to the central story, it feeds into it, shadowing it, paralleling it. Insanity takes many shapes, many forms in this play.

Oakley’s second conceptual experiment is to take the play’s many asides and turn them into pre-recorded voice over. Oakley, a past JMK Award-winner, admits in his programme notes that this is a risk, and the resulting disconnect between the internal and external is problematic. In theory the idea does chime nicely with the play’s use of doubling, but the recorded sequences seem flattened out and the production never quite solves the problem of how the cast should interact with them – they occasional resort to brow furrowing and other ‘thinking’ signifiers.

The production has been given a contemporary setting complete with seemingly obligatory CCTV monitors. There’s something vaguely 1980s about the aesthetic with its grubby filing cabinets and Beatrice-Joanna’s skin-tight black lace dress; a collision of Basic Instinct and Sliver. But the surveillance theme isn’t really picked up on, the monitors are only really brought into play during one scene, and the production suffers from a lack of claustrophobia, from a sense of these two people being unable to escape each other’s hold.

David Caves simmers as De Flores, a born gentleman forced to serve others; resentment permeates his every gesture and when he gets a chance to right what he sees as a slight, an insult, he leaps at it, relishes it. He seems to compensate for both his reduced circumstances and his marked face, his perceived ‘ugliness’, through hyper-masculine behaviour. He is not a hunched Caliban figure, muscles bulge beneath his short-sleeved white shirt; he even (just about) pulls off De Flores’ penchant for glove-sniffing.

Fiona Hampton is not quite as convincing as the fickle Beatrice-Joanna, a woman happy to manipulate De Flores into getting what she wants (having the unfortunate Alonzo iced so she can marry the dashing Alsemero), but who fails to anticipate the repercussions of her actions. While she is stronger in the early scenes, clearly enjoying the power she has over him, and she succeeds in showing how Beatrice-Joanna’s initial distaste for the man evolves into something more complex and interesting, as the situation escalates her performance seems to lose power.

Again, claustrophobia – or the lack of it – is an issue. Shorn of context, Beatrice-Joanna no longer seems backed into a corner by circumstance and her choices make even less sense. By ditching the madhouse subplot, the more blackly comic elements of the play, particularly the delicious absurdity of the virginity test, feel adrift and more than a little silly. There’s a strong case to be made for updating The Changeling; with its themes of social hierarchy – Beatrice Joanna’s sense of entitlement pitched against De Flores’ resentment – it has a particular contemporary resonance; but Oakley’s production is neither as sexually or as emotionally charged as it might be and while his approach to sound design is intriguing it also doesn’t quite make a case for itself.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Memoirs of a Biscuit Tin at Jackson's Lane Theatre

This house is a lost house; cobwebbed, dilapidated and dusty, it has been forgotten. The old woman who once lived here has disappeared but no one has come looking for her; she is remembered only by the house itself. The chimney, the wall and the floor are given physical form. Clad in Miss Havisham rags, simpering and mugging like Playschool presenters they pine for their lost owner. Slowly, using objects scattered around the abandoned house they piece together the life of the missing woman: they give her a name, a past, a story.

Maison Foo’s poignant if rather broad-brush production was inspired by the performers’ experiences of working with the elderly. There’s something very touching in the way the fragments of a person who has been diminished and eroded by dementia are pieced back together, making them whole, even if the company have saddled both the piece and themselves with an awkward and overly elaborate narrative framework. The performers spend a very long time establishing that it is the house itself that is telling the story: so we see the floor getting overexcited at the memory of the hoover, while the chimney alternates between soot-clogged coughing and minor flirtations with the front row.

The stagecraft is impressive, blending elements of clowning and physical theatre with puppetry, and there is something particularly satisfying in the way they utilise every prop to create a recognisable world: a balloon and a piece of fabric become a small child, a coat-stand becomes a dashing young suitor, a picnic blanket and a straw hat create a fleeting yet idyllic afternoon in the sun. But while these shards of memory, these glimpses into the past, are often genuinely moving, in the favouring of the archetypal over the specific, the production is self-limiting. Mrs Benjamin, the woman who is both the absence and the presence at the centre of the piece, is not so much an individual as a portrait of every aging person whose sun-flecked past has faded to grey.

While it’s well-intentioned (the company are touring the work in partnership with Dementia UK) and well-executed, there is something a little twee in its presentation. It’s at its strongest when exploring the cruelty of dementia, conveying a strong sense of bewilderment, decay and increasing distress, but the depiction of life leading up to this moment is more formulaic, the milestones obvious and the storytelling simple: courtship, marriage, bereavement. The method of telling is visually appealing but dramatically the piece is rather narrow, and while the concept of the house as narrator is a resonant one, it feels too blunt, too literal.

The strongest sequences are also the darkest and most jarring, scenes that elegantly evoke loneliness and decline in old age, social isolation and its consequences, but elsewhere the company rather hammer their point home in a way that teeters on the edge of being patronising. It’s when they unshackle themselves from this tendency and trust their material and their audience more, that the production’s considerable charms become clear.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Revenge of the Grand Guignol at the Courtyard Theatre

The centrepiece of the London Horror Festival is Revenge of the Grand Guignol, a series of four vignettes inspired by the plays of the infamous Parisian Theatre and, in particular, by the work of the Grand Guignol playwright André de Lord.

The first piece, The Laboratory of Hallucinations, is the most explicitly linked to the French original. In an isolated clinic, a scientist is conducting brain experiments on terminal patients, tapping their frontal lobes, tinkering with their internal machinery. His wife decides she can no longer stand to stay with him, to be menaced and threatened, to listen to the screams emanating from the basement, so along with her somewhat unreliable lover she plots her escape. It takes a while – perhaps too long – for the premise to be established, but the piece eventually comes together, combining a campy Hammer quality with a lick of David Cronenberg-esque unpleasantness, but while this was the most faithful adaptation it was also the weakest; it did, however, serve as an interesting counterpoint to the pieces that followed.

By contrast, the second play, Stewart Pringle’s As Ye Sow, is the most successful of the four. An elderly man (a well-pitched performance by Jeffrey Mayhew) is visited by his daughter in the care home where he now resides, having been in decline since his wife’s disappearance eight years ago. His daughter has a scheme to remedy their financial worries, but when she explains it to her father he becomes increasingly fretful and upset. Elegantly blending elements of J-Horror – technology offers no solace here, the television and the radio are not your friends – with domestic drama, the piece contains some proper jolts but it’s the small details, the things half-glimpsed and half-heard, which really unnerve.

The third piece, Hero, sees de Lorde’s 1902 play Au Téléphone updated to the age of Skype. A medical student conducts a web-cam conversation with his girlfriend who is halfway across the world, working as a teacher in Russia. The student (nicely played by James Utechin), we eventually learn, is concealing another woman in his room, and what begins as the most light-hearted play of the night, soon begins to wrong-foot its audience; the initial jokiness falls away in favour of a drawn out, stark conclusion. Though Tom Richards’ update introduces a visual component and thereby opens up what was originally one-sided and left to the imagination, it doesn’t diminish its effectiveness – in fact it feels very much in keeping with the original’s suggestion that the devices designed to connect people can end up emphasising the distance between them.

The Blind Women, the final part of the varied quartet, has an air of Ballardian disconnect. It’s ostensibly set during the Blitz, but could easily be set during some future conflict; it has a floating, unsteady quality which is only enhanced by the harsh, jarring industrial sound effects. A young woman comes to work at a wartime munitions factory staffed predominantly by blind women where she immediately triggers the resentment of Greta (a menacing Scarlet Sweeney), a woman hardened, scarred, and more than a little unhinged. It’s the most overtly horrific of the four plays but interestingly, despite the escalating tension created by the proliferation of sharp things, it’s not as effective as the previous two pieces.

The production as a whole has a pleasing tonal variety, though possibly more could have been done to compensate for the lengthy set changes. And, in lieu of a David Warner or a Robert Powell figure to knit everything together, some form of title card might have better helped to shape things, to mark out the lines between each separate play. But, these small concerns aside, what impresses most of all about the production is its avoidance of cheap laughs and easy scares in favour of a focus on the psychology of horror, and the way in which the most successful of the plays here manage to tap into contemporary fears while still honouring their Grand Guignol origins.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Interview: Ché Walker

My interview with actor, playwright and director, Ché Walker, about directing John Patrick Shanley's two-hander, Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, is now up on Exeunt. We talked about his being a 'rehearsal room baby' and the challenges and pleasures of directing in a space like The Vault at Southwark Playhouse. You can read the full interview here.

Earthquakes in London at Richmond Theatre

As Mike Bartlett’s 13 opens at the National Theatre, this earlier foray into the apocalyptic and multi-stranded is currently on a UK tour. Earthquakes in London is a huge, sprawling play, both in time and scope, a cocktail of stylistic devices and narrative possibilities.

The snaking staging and immersive nature of Rupert Goold’s original production has been flat-packed for a proscenium stage by tour director Caroline Steinbeis, but it still throbs with energy. Music permeates the piece; there is a burlesque sequence, a chorus line of cloned Sloanes in black sunglasses and some spirited drunken dancing to Arcade Fire.

Bartlett’s play has a kaleidoscopic quality and the story only gradually comes into focus; the connections between the characters are revealed gradually, scene by scene. At the centre of the play are three sisters: Sarah, the eldest, is a Liberal Democrat minister; Freya is lonely, heavily pregnant, and grappling with her fears about brining another life into a broken world; while the youngest, Jasmine, is unanchored in every sense – she has recently been kicked out of university and feels increasingly estranged from her family and surroundings, swigging Ouzo from the bottle in an effort to blot things out. The sisters’ climatologist father abandoned them years ago after their mother’s death leaving Sarah to raise Freya and Jasmine alone; he now lives an equally isolated life in a remote part of Scotland, convinced the world is on the brink of imminent environmental collapse.

Occasionally the characterisation veers close to formula. This is particularly true of the character of Tom, a student protestor whose family in Eritrea are dealing with the tangible effects of climate change. He is the polar opposite of Jasmine, whose half-baked piece of protest performance art seems like a childish attempt to get her older sister’s attention rather than anything more reasoned. Tom’s anger seems justified but it walks hand in hand with a rather sniffy sense of self-righteousness; his fury sings out yet his methods are underhand. As characters they seem too carefully fixed at different ends of the apathy/engagement scale.

The character of Lib Dem Minister Sarah is more intriguing. A woman in a senior role in government with a slightly rocky home life, her principles being slowly eroded, she could so easily have been a caricature but in Bartlett’s hands she is a shaded creation, confident and capable in the political arena yet not devoid of warmth or humour, qualities only enhanced by Tracy-Ann Oberman’s well-judged performance.

Having established this complex and engaging web of characters and stories, the play becomes even more ambitious in its aims, sending out feelers into the future, dabbling in dream sequence and origin myth, a quasi-Biblical reboot of a broken world. For all its audacity it doesn’t quite come off. The play works better as a pluralised portrait of contemporary unease, the growing tide of anxiety, the groping for a solution. This is echoed in the choreography, which is often jagged and robotic. From the identikit Hampstead housewives to the department stores sales assistant who matches her make up to the store’s lighting scheme, the play is stuffed with automatons, consumers, cogs in a machine on the verge of crashing, fussing over their Fair Trade ‘good coffee’ as the world collapses around them.

One suspects that some of the production’s visual originality is reduced by being forced into a more conventional space: seven people frugging in neon wigs does not a wild party make, particularly when framed by a proscenium, and the revolve is decidedly arthritic, audibly wheezing and creaking as it turns. And while the thrust and ambition of Bartlett’s writing is undimmed, little can disguise the fact that the play starts to unravel well before the end.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Terror 2011 at Soho Theatre

Terror isn’t quite the word. Disquieting? Yes, perhaps. Creepy? In places. This collection of short plays doesn't really come close to creating genuine terror in its audience, but then nor does it seem to be trying to: it seems to prize the nervous, slightly grossed out chuckle more highly than the scream of real dread and distress.

This peripatetic annual celebration of the macabre and unsettling, last seen at Southwark Playhouse, has been rehomed in Soho Theatre’s basement cabaret space and this relocation seems to have informed the production as a whole because the musical interludes are given almost as much time and room as the plays themselves. The songs, co-written by Desmond O’Connor and Cabaret Whore, Sarah-Louise Young, are spectacularly off-colour: a country and western ditty about abortion, a ballad about anorexics in love. The resulting laughter is often halting and awkward, slow to flow, arriving in guilty little bursts. But by addressing and involving the audience, the songs knit together a production that might otherwise have felt too tonally choppy, too disparate in approach and execution.

Of all the playwrights on the bill, Lucy Kirkwood has taken this merging of music and theatre furthest. Her contribution to the evening is a piece of burlesque, conceived with performer Eleanor Buchan, in which a be-tasselled dancer falls under her own dark spell. It juxtaposes a jokey, nod-wink style with something distinctly icky but doesn’t really leave itself anywhere to go once the premise has been established.

The opening piece, Dave Florez’s The Waiting Mortuary, is similarly stuck. Two nineteenth century doctors debate whether the body laid out on the slab before them has actually expired. The tone of the play – more of a sketch really – is weirdly pitched, a pastiche that seems unsure quite how seriously it wants the audience to take it. Carl Grose’s comic verse monologue, Wormy Close, performed by Amanda Lawrence achieves a far better balance between the horrible and the comic. It’s a silly but endearing piece, a kind of goryJackanory that benefits from Lawrence’s strong sense of timing and delivery. Tom Holloway’s play, If I Stay I Would Only Be in Your Way, is a two-hander that owes a debt to Chuck Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters. It’s more genuinely unsettling but it over-plays its hand. There’s something to be said for taking something beyond what appears to be its natural end point and stretching it further than good sense or taste might dictate, but it’s not a gamble that quite pays off, and the resulting laughter is fitful and diminishing.

The most unnerving piece of the night, and also the most successful, is Jack Thorne’s The Gong. Thorne is a writer who knows how to create tension, who understands how to feed information to his audience in the most potent way possible before confirming their worst fears. A torch-lit Ciaran Kellgren stalks around the room, smoking intensely as he recounts his experience of being working class at Cambridge University, and the lengths he will go to fit in, to prove he belongs. It’s a jarring and unpleasant piece, and one that achieves in words what the other plays never quite manage even with all their splatter and seepage and shrieking.

Reviewed for Exeunt

The Two Gentlemen of Verona at the Royal & Derngate, Northampton

The Duke of Milan strides round the stage in a pair of be-ribboned PVC knee boots, his hands sheathed in fingerless black leather gloves. This is a Milan of flashbulbs and high fashion overseen by a Karl Lagerfeld-esque colossus, the kind a man who tweezes sushi into his mouth while barking at hapless underlings. Music pounds and bodies writhe and somewhere beneath the din and the flicker there is a trace of Shakespeare.

There’s a sense of disconnect to Matthew Dunster’s new production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, a piece made in collaboration with RashDash. Dunster is clearly enamoured with the company – after seeing their work at the Edinburgh Fringe, he was determined to create something with them – but while many of their most appealing traits, their energy, their physicality, have made their way into this broad reworking of Shakespeare’s early comedy, so have some of the company’s limitations, the messiness of intention, and, chiefly, the way in which they knit together – or rather frequently fail to – the text with the choreography.

There were similar issues with RashDash’s previous pieces, Another Someone and Scary Gorgeous. The imaginative physical sequences always seemed to sit above and apart from the narrative – and the same is true here; only when working with an established text, rather than a piece of their own devising, it feels all the more marked.

The production is lively and bright, musical and colourful, but there’s often a sense that the words are secondary to the visuals. RashDash’s Abbi Greenland and Helen Goalen play, respectively, Julia, Proteus’ homely Veronese sweetheart, and Sylvia, the glamorous daughter of the Milanese Duke; while Julia flutters over her lover’s every letter, Sylvia is the pouting, strutting object of much male attention and fascination, a woman on a – literal – pedestal, with her near-naked image splashed across banners.

In comparison to the throb and debauchery of Milan, Verona is depicted as suburban and small fry, a town populated by beaming kids in well-pressed khakis; in the over-stretched opening scene, the titular two gentlemen brandish guitars and sing a peppy song about seeking fortune and freedom elsewhere. There’s wit and invention in such devices, but a lack of subtlety, the point is forced home, the comparisons are laboured. There are long periods given over to music and movement where no one speaks a word of verse, and there’s an adolescent quality to some of the humour, a seeming belief that all this cussing and snorting and stripping is more daring than it is.

Clemmie Sveaas plays Proteus’ inept servant, Launce, as an escapee from Ugly Betty toting a plastic lapdog in a designer handbag, but her scenes soon start to grate and this is before she ends up relieving herself in a plastic cup. By making this clownish secondary character female and by focusing the audience’s attentions firmly on Julia and Sylvia over the various gentlemen, the production seems to be tugging in an interesting direction, but this is neither a fully feminised or feminist account of the text and some of the choices seem to have been made for visual appeal rather than to make a particular point.

In fact there seems to be two conflicting desires at work here. On one hand it feels like an attempt to stage a frothy homage to the play, in the vein of Ten Things I Hate About You or Clueless, and in these moments the text feels like an obstacle. This is frustrating, as some of the more successful episodes come when the background noise subsides and the words are given room. This is most evident in the morally knotty final scenes when Sylvia is threatened with rape and then seemingly bartered; Dunster’s production plays up the sinister implications of this transaction, but then undoes the power of these closing moments by ending on a song and giving the women back their voices.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Interview: Tena Štivičić.

My interview with Croatian playwright, Tena Štivičić, about her latest play Invisible, a co-production with the New Wolsey Theatre in Ipswich, is now up on Exeunt. We discussed the idea of migration as theme and as context and she talked about her work for the Ulysses Theatre on the Croatian Island of Brijuni. You can read the full interview here.