Twelfth Night at the Roundhouse

An antiquated slam-door lift, a revolving door, a scattering of battered lobby sofas: David Farr’s Twelfth Night – the second instalment in the RSC’s Shipwreck Trilogy – is set in a hotel, which makes a superficial sense: this is a place where the people of the world wash up and interact, a place of transience and displacement. Jon Bausor’s set has the trappings of 1920s New York establishment, a touch of faded art deco glamour, but everything is askew and decaying; water laps at the floorboards, a bed rests near vertically against the back wall – it is as if a storm has raged through the place.

It’s an intriguing thematic canvas but its potential is never fully exploited – though that lift gets a good work out. Farr’s production is, instead, one of broad laughs and pratfalls. Belch and co indulge in the obligatory drunken carousing – complete with disco lights – and Kirsty Bushell’s rather manic Olivia soon trades in her veil and her mantle of mourning for more earthly pleasures.

In the midst of all this, Jonathan Slinger gives a deliciously scene-eating turn as Malvolio. He is the very picture of buttoned up pomposity, his pale hair slicked to his skull, every follicle regimented, his nose held permanently aloft, his gaze withering. A mixture of the monkish and the managerial, he is officious with his clipboard, part Hitler youth, part snooty otter. He’s the type of man who wears a corporate name badge at all times, even on his dressing gown. When he emerges on stage lavishly cross-gartered (after descending in the rickety lift), he sweeps backs his blazer with a flourish to reveal the kind of outfit only available from specialist retailers before pursuing Olivia around the stage with creepy insistence. It’s a cheap scene in many ways, a heavy-handed device, but one which Slinger manages to make psychologically plausible – and very, very funny.

The trouble with his performance is that it leaves the rest of the production looking flat and patchy. Emily Taaffe is rather underpowered as Viola and Farr oddly chooses to make little of the obvious physical mismatch between her and her ‘twin’, Stephen Hagan’s Sebastian. Jonathan McGuinness’ strangely uncharismatic Orsino also fades into the background and there’s little sense of attraction between him and Viola; when he claims her at the end it feels like a bit of an afterthought. Bruce MacKinnon is a far more endearing presence, playing Aguecheek as a Tim Nice But Dim type, posh and gangly with wide, kind eyes and a shock of blonde hair. Kevin McMonagle’s melancholy Feste handles the songs well – the music has been inventively reworked by Adem Ilhan – but seems less comfortable at other times, an old school comedian out of time and given to mumbling.

Though there are individual comic scenes that really work on their own terms, the production feels tonally inconsistent and the relocation to this dilapidated hotel world thematically superfluous. Slinger’s nuanced, exposing, and often hilarious performance as Malvolio would stand out in any production, but here – where everyone else seems to be drawn in the broadest of lines – he towers.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Democracy at the Old Vic

Written in 2003, Michael Frayn’s Democracy depicts the intriguing relationship that developed between two men, Willy Brandt, the West German Chancellor for much of the 1970s, and his assistant, Gunter Guillaume, who while seemingly devoted to his boss was later exposed as a Stasi double agent.

Though physically and politically they initially seem to be polar opposites, the two men are more alike than they first appear and the play explores the curious bond that builds between them over time. There is, of course, a broader metaphor at play here about Germany as a divided country – a land cleaved in two but still connected – but it’s the substance of the men’s relationship in which Frayn’s dense, layered play seems most interested, though in a kind of clinical and rather detached way.

Brandt is a charismatic leader who understands the potency of the big symbolic gesture, but he also has a tendency towards black moods, bouts of insecurity and is a notorious womaniser to boot. Guillaume is permanently rumpled and crumpled, something of a comedy figure, but someone who clearly excels at his job. But despite their superficial differences, the men have many things in common. Both Brandt and Guillaume were exiles, they were both also fatherless, and – perhaps as a result – very driven and committed. While his convictions never falter, Guillaume grows incredibly fond of the man he is spying on and Brandt comes to depend on Guillaume in more ways than one.

Paul Miller’s production was originally staged at Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre as part of their Michael Frayn season, alongside productions of Copenhagen and Benefactors, but it feels oddly remote on the Old Vic stage, marooned against the black, back wall. There’s a static quality to the piece and it doesn’t really hit its stride until the two men are united on a train touring the country and the relationship between them starts to evolve.

There’s a pleasing John le Carré-esque quality to the atmosphere evoked, all muted 1970s colours, secret dossiers, and intrigue, wreathed in cigarette smoke. But there’s something flat and inert to the staging, a lack of momentum – even when the characters are travelling by train this stillness prevails. Though the all-male ensemble cast do a good job of fleshing out the world of the play, the production is at its strongest when it’s just the two men together, on a family holiday in Norway.

Aidan McCardle is an endearing presence as the bushy-haired Guillaume, talkative in a nervous way; a figure one might so easily overlook and underestimate, the “hat stand in the corner” in his ill-fitting suit, with his shirt collar always a little askew. The collision between his political beliefs and his personal feelings is subtly but convincingly conveyed. Though Patrick Drury never quite comes across as the larger-than-life figure the other characters paint Brandt as, he, with equal subtly, conveys the divisions between Brandt the politician and Brandt the man. Ed Hughes, in the obligatory polo neck and leather jacket, provides a necessary textural and temperamental shift away from all those suits as Arno, Guillaume’s contact in the East.

The play is intellectually exciting and never less than engaging; the lines about the troublesome nature of coalitions have also acquired an unintended resonance. It’s easy to see why Miller opted for this stripped down style, foregrounding the text, but the human drama at the heart of the play gets a little lost against that vast, flat expanse of black.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Tender Napalm at Southwark Playhouse

In and out. In and out. A pulse. Like sex, like breath. A man and a woman sit facing each other, physically distant but intensely connected, with hunger in their eyes. They taunt each other, tease each other, joust and spar. Their weapons are words: sexual, charged, violent yet also tender. They describe fantastical happenings, island adventures, bedroom explosions, fractured and layered, wild and exuberant but never entirely untethered from reality.

Philip Ridley’s play takes the form of a power struggle, a bloody battle for control on a remote desert island populated by armies of monkeys and the occasional dolphin-shaped dildo. The pair become warriors, a pair of gladiators in jeans and white vests, their imaginings getting ever more lurid and glorious: she becomes a multi-tentacled thing; he gets whisked off by aliens.

In contrast to this verbal battle royale, Ridley depicts the couple’s first tentative meeting at a country-house party, a world tinged with loss and pain, an aching place. He roots their fantasy landscape in the real, anchoring their passion in familiar things. They find their escape in one another. Catharsis comes through the sharing of stories. The bond between them is a constant. No matter how aggressive their language, how violent their fantasies (with their lubricated grenades, with their copper wire and garden shears) there is a connection, an abiding affection, a mutual sense of tenderness and concern.

David Mercatali’s stripped-down duet is kinetic and poetic in equal measure. Both Tom Byam Shaw and Lara Rossi give performances of immense energy. Shaw sprints backwards and forwards across the wide, white space of the stage, slaughtering imaginary serpents, thrusting and diving until the sweat is pouring off him. It pools in the hollow of his collarbone, pearls in his hair, drips from the tips of his beard until he collapses to the floor, red-cheeked and breathless: utterly spent. Rossi’s performance is less full-throttle in the physical sense but no less charismatic. She stalks and struts, shimmers, roars.

The two-hander returns to Southwark Playhouse cresting a wave of recent Ridley productions, including the premiere of his latest play Shivered at the same venue and an astonishing revival of the brutal, brilliant Mercury Fur which earned a deserved transfer to the Trafalgar Studios. This is the second cast to star in Mercatali’s production and he plays to the performers’ individual strengths, intensifying the chemistry between them. The stage is bare except for two chairs at opposite ends of the room and two bottles of water. It’s part combat arena (and, even though the dimensions are completely different, in this regard it brings to mind the bespoke playing space for Mike Bartlett’s Cock), part blank canvas, part virtual landscape.

Though the couple circle each other constantly, springing off one another, colliding and clashing as they negotiate the traverse stage, Mercatali only allows them to come together at the end – to wrap themselves in each other’s heat, to sink into each other’s skin, to lose themselves completely – before they pull apart and the circle begins again.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Through a Pool of Tears

"Some light puking. Straight from Weimar Germany. Starring Les Dennis."


A piece of blurb-verse formed from this year's (already somewhat torn, battered, blotted and biro-stained) Edinburgh Festival Fringe programme. Read the full piece over on Exeunt. 

The Irish Giant at Southwark Playhouse

John Hunter was a collector. In his Earls Court home, the pioneering eighteenth century surgeon and anatomist kept a menagerie to aid his studies - eagles, buffalo, zebra – and he generated enough carefully preserved and labelled anatomical specimens to fill a museum. When Charles Byrne, a young man from Tyrone who stood seven and a half feet tall in his stockinged feet and had a fondness for the bottle, arrived in London to seek his fortune, Hunter’s interest was not that of the casual gawker: he wanted Byrne’s bones.

While his colleagues in the medical profession were still enthusiastically blood-letting and fretting about the imbalance of humours, Hunter advocated careful observation of the body, its structure and its systems. Dissection was central to this process, though bodies were not easy to come by. Even in the eighteenth century, the supply of freshly executed men was limited, so his students had to use other, more questionable means to obtain their cadavers.

Byrne being a god-fearing sort believed, as many did, that if his soul was going to make it to heaven, his body needed to remain whole, intact, unsliced by the surgeon’s knife. He had spent so much of his life on display and did not want Hunter to get hold of his mortal remains, so he gave word that when he died – illness and drink would finish him at the age of 22 – he should be buried at sea in a weighted coffin. The fact that Byrne’s huge skeleton still looms large in the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons suggests that plan didn’t quite pan out: Hunter was determined to have his prize (And it was a prize: Byrne’s sizeable skeletal feet can be glimpsed over Hunter’s shoulder in Sir Joshua Reynolds’ famous portrait of him).

This is Cartoon de Salvo’s second production to mark their fifteenth anniversary year – their first was the entirely improvised, Made Up. The Irish Giant is a more conventional exercise in story-telling, a devised piece using a cast of three, some musical instruments (including a miniature piano) and a number of charming animated sequences. There’s plenty of appealing detail – Neil Haigh, as a tipsy Byrne, soothes himself with anachronistic snatches of 'Live Forever' by Oasis – as well as some playful use of stage illusion, but at times there’s a failure of integration between the various methods of narration.

The ideological rift between John and his brother William, a fellow doctor, is rather skimmed over and all the Enlightenment wrangling over the seat of the soul gets a bit lost. As with simple8’s attempt to stage The Four Stages of Cruelty, there’s a struggle to convey the Hogarthian seethe and stink of eighteenth century London, though the chilly, brick space of the Vault, littered as it is with alarming pickled things in jars, is suitably atmospheric as a backdrop.

It’s a fascinating story, one that has already been explored with her characteristic lightness of touch by a pre-Wolf Hall Hilary Mantel in The Giant, O’Brien; Hunter is a compelling figure who indirectly provided the inspiration for the characters of Drs Doolittle and Jekyll, but the potential emotional power of Byrne and his plight is left untapped. There’s little sense of tension in the brief scene where Byrne and Hunter meet and the potentially intriguing relationship between Byrne and Harrison - Hunter’s morally ambiguous Artful Dodger-esque assistant, paid by his boss to shadow the giant in his last days – is snuffed out just as it starts to become interesting.

The company - Haigh, Brian Logan and Alex Murdoch, who also directs - combine considerable charm with evident passion for the material and Rebecca Hurst’s animations are appealing and playful. The folky musical sequences, composed by Daniel Marcus Clark, are particularly well-delivered, and there's something enormously likeable about the whole exercise - but none of it quite knits together, the threads are left dangling.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Globe to Globe: Romeo and Juliet

Love is a balancing act. In this Brazilian reworking of Shakespeare’s tragic pas de deux, Juliet negotiates the stage en pointe while Romeo strides around atop flower-bedecked stilts. They move with their arms forever out-stretched and parasols held aloft as if the ground beneath them was in constant danger of shifting, unsteady, not to be trusted. When the two lovers catch their first glimpse of one another their capacity to balance escapes them; she stumbles one way while he tumbles to the floor.

Of all the companies involved in the Globe to Globe Festival, Brazil’s Grupo Galpão are the only ones returning for a second visit. Their energetic, often bawdy take on Romeo and Juliet, performed in Brazilian Portuguese, was staged at the venue 12 years ago and it remains a solidly crowd-pleasing piece: broad in its humour, thin on nuance, a rapid run-through of the text fuelled by music and song.

The company’s roots are in street theatre and, as if to emphasis this, a battered silver Volvo estate dominates the stage. The cast perch on its roof, hop in and out of its doors and use one of the windows as an impromptu puppet theatre. The performance begins in the pit, with the actors and musicians weaving through the crowd and it never quite cuts the threads. The crowd, their laughter and engagement, are fundamental to the piece’s power and it’s at its most successful when it’s at its most carnivalesque. Tropes of the circus are very much in evidence too: there are red noses, white faces, and Shakespeare himself plays Ringmaster, a benign conductor, dangling a sliver of silver moon on a fishing rod over the lovers’ heads or remonstrating with passing helicopters.

The parasols, which the performers use as balancing aids, are a recurring motif, inventively employed. Black parasols are unfurled when the Capulets assemble to mourn their daughter; whereas earlier they had been used to mask a snatched marital kiss, here they become markers of grief.

Each character is reduced to a single gesture or trait, resulting in a kind of visual shorthand; for Mercutio it’s a thrusting crotch and roaming eye, while the nurse sports a heaving silken bosom which she often squeezes and fondles like a favourite pet. The leering Friar Lawrence wears robes into which are stitched dozens of tiny votive paintings.

Some of the verbal humour is no doubt lost, which can’t help but have an impact on perception of the piece, but there are times when the broadness of tone threatens to become monotonous; there is little shading, little sense of pain or tragedy: Rodolfo Vaz’s Mercutio is still waggling his groin even in his death throes and the production’s insistence that lavishly bosomed middle-aged women are inherently hilarious soon grows wearisome. Only Eduardo Moreira and Fernanda Vianna, as the central couple, manage to briefly transcend the comic tone, to suggest the strength of connection between them and to hint at their anguish. Juliet’s death scene, her swanlike demise, successfully stilled the crowd for a minute or two, before the band struck up again and the celebratory mood resumed.

Reviewed for Exeunt

The House Keeper at Project Arts Centre, Dublin

In Morna Regan’s new play for Rough Magic, disease is strip-mined for its metaphoric potential. Corruption runs not just in the blood but is embedded in the genes: a chromosomal jinx, a lethal legacy.

Mary, a mother of three young boys, out of a job, her home recently repossessed, and without even the money to put gas in her car, has decided to claw a little something back. She has developed a fixation with Beth, a local woman who lives alone in a vast old Manhattan brownstone, cushioned by inherited wealth – a woman who looks straight through Mary whenever they pass one another on the street – and in a moment of desperation, pushed to the brink by poverty and fearful for her children’s future, she attempts to stage an occupation. She decides that she will move herself and her family in to one of the empty rooms of Beth’s towering, dusty town house. The bank took her home and now she’s the one doing the taking.

Having seemingly set up her play to act a microcosmic exploration of social division – the ‘haves’ pitched against the ‘have-nots’ – Regan takes pleasure in flipping the situation on its head. For, as it turns out Beth is not alone in her brownstone. She shares it with her ailing husband, Hal, who is slowly, very slowly, being consumed by disease and refuses any other nurse but her. In Regan’s play the sins of the fathers, the taint of generations, takes the form of a (fictional) genetic disorder called Leon Scallick’s Disease which impairs both motor function and cognitive ability. Hal spasms and tics, he struggles to finish his sentences and has been rendered doubly incontinent, life leaking out of him through “every orifice,” but the condition has not rendered him incapable of being a mean old bastard.

Hal and Beth are locked in a cycle of mutual punishment. By staying alive and staying together they’ve turned their home, a building which – much like Hal’s condition – has been in his family for decades, into a torture chamber. Hal has a barbed tongue and a cruel heart, but he is physically disintegrating; Beth – literally – holds the keys to his salvation close to her chest. She controls his flow of medication, she administers sedative release. But Mary’s presence has exploded their claustrophobic existence, she provides a glimpse of escape to them both: for Beth a chance to finally walk away, for Hal a chance to end his pain – and his life.

Mary is resistant to being co-opted in this way, despite Hal’s declaration that “the only reason you and people like you are honest is that you’ve never had the opportunity to be anything else.” Hal believes that everyone has a price and that everyone creams a little off the top, given the chance.

Regan twists things further still, shifting the power dynamics between the three, throwing new information into the mix. This is engaging to begin with but Regan overextends things, laying on one twist too far. The play is a revised version of a shorter piece originally developed for the 2008 1st Irish Festival in New York and despite a running time of 90 minutes, there are times towards the end when Lynne Parker’s production feels like it could have been tighter.

There are also moments that feel a little contrived: those conveniently unseen children, for one, dozing in the car below, and the cocktail of anti-spasmodic and sedative medication administered to Hal which rids him of his more challenging symptoms, while – crucially – keeping him eloquent, lucid and full of spite.

With his magnificent baritone bellow, Robert O’Mahoney is wonderfully leonine and imposing as Hal, though he is rather too physically robust for a man who supposedly cannot manage stairs or even swallow unaided. Cathy Belton’s Mary convincingly grapples with the situation she finds herself in, as a woman repeatedly forced to consider her moral boundaries and the lengths to which she is willing to go, while Ingrid Craigie is suitably cool and pragmatic as Beth, complicit in her own torment and as life-hardened as Mary, though in her own polished, privileged way.

The play is potent in its depiction of the frustration caused by seeing what little you have slip away from you while others coast through life, or at least seem to, insulated against hardship. But in setting the play in Manhattan (complete with occasionally wavering accents) rather than in Ireland or the UK, a degree of remove is imposed which allows Regan to play with the psychological ramifications of her scenario without it ever feeling too raw or too real. But while Regan’s humour is often ink-black and bladed and the play initially has a fist-like grip, it sinks a little under the weight of its own metaphorical baggage and loosens its hold all too soon.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Someone Who'll Watch Over Me at Southwark Playhouse

An Irishman, an Englishman and an American. The set up for Frank McGuinness’ play sounds like the opening line of a joke – which is fitting, as humour plays a vital role in this intense three-hander set during the Beirut hostage crisis. Laughter keeps the characters sane; it’s their best defence against the situation in which they have found themselves – to cry, to scream, to beg, would be to let their captors win.


The play is also a celebration of the imagination. The three hostages, Adam, an American doctor, Edward, an Irish journalist, and Michael, a widowed English academic, gain a degree of freedom in this way: through fantasy, through the sharing of stories. The men re-enact famous tennis matches, they compose letters home which they know they can never send, and they take a ride in a flying car: in this way, briefly, they soar, for a few fleeting moments they leave their dark, windowless world behind.


These three disparate men, thrown together, stripped of all they own and know, sweat-stained and unshaven, are each other’s only means of support. They come to respect one another and maybe even to love one another. Robin Soans’ Michael is the last to arrive. A bond has already formed between Billy Carter’s Edward and Joseph Timms’ Adam; they know each other’s habits, fears and dreams. Initially Michael and Edward clash, they rub each other up the wrong way, they make little digs at the other’s expense. In part it’s an Irish/English thing, a cultural chasm they make little effort to bridge. Michael in particular is written (and played), at least at first, as a stereotypically fusty, emotionally limited Englishman of a certain era, fond of tea and a nice glass of sherry, but as their situation becomes even more fraught and desperate, their relationship becomes warmer. A rare tenderness develops between the two men, the kind of connection that can only be classed as love.


The play, a fictionalised version of the hostage ordeal of Brian Keenan and John McCarthy, covers a period of years; the passing of time is marked by bursts of violent white light. There’s something Beckettian about their situation – the endless waiting, the little rituals and routines, the idea that the freedom they yearn for may never come – but McGuinness is also alert to the psychological reality of confinement. The slow erosion of Adam’s emotional strength is upsetting to watch; he turns increasingly inwards, his confident façade falls away revealing his fears and weakness.


Jessica Swale’s consistently engaging production – which marks the play’s twentieth anniversary – emphasises the venue’s capacity for claustrophobia; she uses black curtains to reduce the performance space and to force the characters even closer together. The trains which regularly rumble overhead become part of the fabric of things. As the three men cast glances at the ceiling where their unseen captors sit, the overhead roar and whine, the grind of metal on metal, takes on an increasingly ominous air.


Swale also draws excellent performances from her cast. Soans soon transcends the limitations of his buttoned-up character and Timms subtly conveys Adam’s increasing fragility, his deliberate drawing away from the others as he comes to terms with the fact that, as an American, he stands to suffer most. Billy Carter has the most complex role; as Edward, he is brash, quick-tempered and combative but also compassionate, capable of gentleness, in many ways the most robust of the three.


McGuinness’ play deliberately keeps the politics of the situation at arms’ length, but its emotional charge comes from this sharpness of focus, this blotting out of all else save for these three men, their cramped subterranean cell and the stories they tell each other in order to survive.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Misterman at the National Theatre

Enda Walsh’s plays are full of acts of retelling and returning. Characters relive the same moments over and over again, they get tangled in their own stories.

Thomas Magill, the protagonist of Misterman, has populated his world with voices, both from on high and from within. (The play is itself an act of revisiting, a revised version of a piece first performed in 1999). Through a series of tape recordings Thomas has recreated the village of Innisfree where he lives a life of quiet routine with his mother, a life of tea, biscuits, three-bar gas fires and Vicks VapoRub, and is an object of considerable local derision. Sometimes he interacts with these recorded voices, sometimes he acts out a dialogue with himself.

On the day of the Innisfree Community Dance, Thomas sets out from his mammy’s house to restock her stash of Jammie Dodgers and meets a series of neighbours along the way. Each encounter emphasises his isolation. Thomas has a very narrow view of human morality; he believes that people have strayed far from the path (“greed is our communion, sin our religion”) but they are not incapable of being saved – and that he has it in him to save them. Yet his neighbours at best fail to share his zeal, at worst they abuse and taunt him. He jots down their transgressions in a little notebook he carries for the purpose. Things finally change for Thomas when he gains a companion in his mission, an angelic figure called Edel.

There’s a degree of ambiguity to how much of Thomas’ persecution is real, how much of it delusion. The tapes seem to taunt him, playing on even when stamped on and smashed to pieces. And in Cillian Murphy’s astonishingly chameleonic performance it’s sometimes hard to spot the line between the interior and exterior voices. He really is quite something to behold, inhabiting character after character in a process of mass possession. His timing is extraordinary as he zips across the stage, keeping pace with the various recordings and shifting between moments of comedy and unnerving volatility.

The play has a purgatorial quality; there’s a sense both that Thomas has only recently fled to this desolate space following the awful events of the day just gone, and that he’s been here forever, locked in an endless loop, repeating and repeating the moments leading up to the inevitable tragedy. The use of tape recordings, with their little clicks and whines, only adds to the sense of Beckettian ritual.

Jamie Vartan’s brutal ruin of a set, a vast wasteland – as deep as it is wide – of steel shutters, skewed fluorescent strip-lights and raw concrete, does double duty as deserted warehouse and psychological terrain: an unseen hound snarls and howls outside; a crop of neon crosses glows in the murk. (Perhaps because of the Murphy connection, there are times when Christopher Nolan’s Inception comes to mind, especially when props start appearing from nowhere: Jammie Dodgers plummet from above, balloons drift and trip across the stage). This is Thomas’s dream chamber and it’s a dark, dark place.

The production is a technically intricate one but it wears it lightly. Walsh’s writing has moments of lyricism and moments of comedy, but there’s a sense of old ground being covered; the tragic event to which the play builds up is predictable and the idea of the loner made lonelier by an uncaring town, pushed to the edge by unthinking acts of cruelty, is not unfamiliar – the disco finish, with its glitter-ball shimmer and sense of foreboding, is reminiscent of Carrie in more ways than one. But this matters little when pitched against Murphy’s performance. He’s electric, kinetic, dazzling in his physicality; never still, he fills the huge space with ease.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Time has Fallen Asleep in the Afternoon Sunshine at Birmingham Central Library

We are sitting in a quiet corner of Birmingham Central Library, surrounded by the sloped spines of paperbacks. Around us there are people milling about, mindful of the library silence, casting their eyes across the shelves. The stories that encircle us belong to everyone and yet, when you open the pages and lose yourself in them, they – briefly, fleetingly – belong only to you.

Mette Edvardson’s contribution to the Fierce Festival is inspired by Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. In the dystopian America of Bradbury’s novel, books are outlawed, something to be feared, a threat removed through burning. Some people hope to preserve the stories within them by learning them by heart, committing the contents of the book to memory.

This is what Edvardson has been asking people to do, to make these books a part of themselves, to become volumes in a living library. Visitors to the library are greeted at the entrance by their chosen ‘book’; a suitable perch is found somewhere among the stacks and the story-telling begins. It’s not quite the same as being read to, though it’s an equally intimate experience, sitting side by side engaged in the sharing of stories. Nor is it quite the same as listening to a monologue, though in some ways that’s exactly what’s happening and there is an undoubted performative aspect to the experience.

The first book I meet is Bali Rai’s (Un)arranged Marriage, a contemporary first person novel, given voice by Aaron Virdee. He chose to become this book, he explains, because some of the experiences and characters it depicts struck a chord with him. He speaks the words with care and warmth, giving life and shape to the book, making me sorry when it ends. Edvardson herself has chosen I am a Cat by Soseki Natsume and while her retelling is crisper, it’s no less compelling and again there is a jolt when she draws to a halt.

The process of memorising is vital to the piece. The performers are not reading the words, the words exist within them. And it is very much a process: the act of memorising such large, uninterrupted chunks of text requires commitment, continuation. The words can fade if not spoken often; it is by no means a permanent acquisition, and the books need to be communicated to people, passed on, if they are to be retained.

Other novels and stories on the list include Bartleby The Scrivener by Herman Melville,Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson, The Trial by Franz Kafka, Crash by J G Ballard, and Aesop’s Fables. This last choice is telling. The piece evokes a pre-literate world when stories only survived through a process of oral communication, repetition and re-telling: Aesop’s Fables were transmitted in this way. It also makes you think of books as subversive, thrilling things, coded objects, with the potential to excite and incite those who come into contact with them.

Edvardson succeeds in making you think of books both as a physical objects and as vessels. There’s a potency that comes from setting it in a library too, where the act of speaking out loud creates something of a frisson and the books are often a little bruised and bent, well-travelled volumes, pages that have been read and re-read countless times. It reminds you of the vital role a library can (and should) play in a society: all these stories, all these words, all this power, just waiting on the shelves, to be borrowed, to be read, and to be loved.

Time has Fallen Asleep in the Afternoon Sunshine was part of the Fierce Festival

Reviewed for Exeunt

Filumena at the Almeida Theatre

Elegantly weathered shutters overlook a shaded Neapolitan courtyard. Vines snake up the old stone walls and light streams through the overhanging branches of an orange tree. Crickets chirrup and birds twitter. Fabric flowers sit under a halogen sun. It’s all exquisitely pretty in a strangely sterile way. But Eduardo De Filippo’s play is not big on pretty. It’s a comedy drawn from desperation, haunted by the spectre of poverty, and this tame, tasteful Tourist Board vision of southern Italy conveys nothing of that.

While it’s true that this courtyard, the home of the wealthy Don Domenico, is supposed to be a place of escape for the play’s protagonist, the one-time prostitute Filumena, a safe-haven from the ugly world outside, the production’s prevailing sense of disconnection is not just one of aesthetics. There’s something tonally amiss about the whole thing.

At the start of the play, Filumena has just tricked Don Domenico, her philandering lover of some 27 years, into a deathbed marriage. Though the minute the priest has made things official between them, she is suddenly, miraculously ‘cured.’ In the noisy fallout from her deception, it comes to light that she has three illegitimate adult sons – a writer, a tailor, and a mechanic – whom she has surreptitiously looked out for over the years. She now hopes that Domenico will assume the role of father and provider for all three.

Filumena was driven into prostitution out of desperation. Her teenage years were spent on the brink of starvation; poverty closes doors, it shrinks people’s worlds, and this was the only way out that seemed open to her. It was an act of survival. De Filippo’s play does not skirt around the issue, nor does it gloss over the tough choices she faced in bringing each of her children into the world; she has, in her own way, managed to provide for them financially, though she was never able to be a mother to them. Now she seeks security, comfort, the love that was denied to her. But while pain radiates from the writing it is rarely evident on stage.

Samantha Spiro is an actor of warmth and charisma but in the play’s opening scenes she comes across as shrill and hard-edged, a schemer. Only later, when her motivations are clearer, does she start appearing more human, more sympathetic. Clive Wood’s Domenico is all froth and bluster, a carapace of masculine menace; when he first discovers Filumena has tricked him, he half-heartedly shakes a spoon at her while spouting unconvincing threats.

There is further disconnection evident in the translation by Tanya Ronder. While it’s probably necessary to have the cast avoid Italian caricature, Ronder takes things in the other direction, revelling in the colloquial. Her translation has Filumena’s sons calling one another “twat” and “big man”, and people screeching “silly old cow.” It all sits rather awkwardly on the studiously attractive flower-bedecked set; the gap between what we see and what we hear is an increasingly difficult one to bridge.

Michael Attenborough’s production wakes up and warms up considerably in the far shorter second half. There is some genial if underpowered comic interplay between the three sons and everyone suddenly and almost unaccountably seems inclined to be far kinder to one another. But it all comes too late in the day; and the production never convincingly evokes the social polarization of post-war Naples, the creep of poverty and the lengths people will go to in order to survive. The play’s heat, its vital fire, has been damped down, its emotional potency neutered.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Ball, and Other Funny Stories About Cancer at CPT

Brian Lobel has just asked a woman to fondle his testicles. Or rather testicle: Lobel was diagnosed with cancer when he was 20 years old and as a result he only has the one. The woman is wearing a surgical glove and their encounter forms the end part of a trilogy of work, a collection of pieces dating from 2003, 2006 and 2009 respectively.

Though cancer is the subject matter this is not a battle narrative; what doesn’t kill you doesn’t by default make you stronger: it makes you sick and bald and miserable, it eats up time that you’ll never get back. The first piece of the night, Ball, is not a survival story (the fact that he’s in the room relating his experience says enough); Lobel is not out to inspire nor is he out to make his audience weep. Instead he describes his diagnosis, his response to it, and the subsequent ravages of chemotherapy, with honesty, humour and warmth. It’s often very funny – especially when he’s explaining what it’s like to jerk off in a cryogenics facility (malignancy and masturbation, he observes, are not words that usually crop up in the same anecdote) – but it’s also tender and raw.

Lobel evokes the clash of emotions that come from having to deal with serious illness at a young age, at any age, and having to grapple, not just with his cancer, but with other people’s assumptions and anxieties about it too: he spent a lot of time reassuring and comforting others. And it wasn’t enough just to get through it and get better, he had to emerge victorious, triumphant. Cancer was something to be beaten and defeated, hurled to the ground and trampled upon. Lobel dons a Lycra cyclist’s jersey to make his point. Cancer has not turned him into Lance Armstrong.

The second piece of the night, Other Funny Stories About Cancer, digs deeper into the mess of the situation, the knotty, tangled stuff, both sexual and medical – the fear and loathing – that didn’t quite fit into the first piece. He examines the differing societal reactions to his cancer – the good kind of cancer, the right kind of cancer – and to illnesses like AIDS. Sex was already up for discussion in Ball – as a 20-year-old gay virgin just what constituted the ‘normal sex life’ his doctors kept reassuring him he would still enjoy? Here, he recounts his many awkward attempts to rid himself of his virginity, and the joyous if unexpected moment, following the major abdominal surgery that might have made him impotent, he found himself getting off to Miranda from Sex and the City.

The final chapter of his trilogy, 2009’s An Appreciation, provides a playful coda to the evening. Lobel asks five audience members to come and appreciate his equipment. These five volunteers are each given a shot of whisky to drink before they glove up; then Lobel drops his trousers and invites them to have a feel. In the context of the performance such a request seems entirely apt. Lobel has already laid himself bare and he’s taken care to create a comfortable, relaxed and open environment. The actual moment of handling is brief, but somehow both intimate and clinical, tender and awkward. It brings home the physical reality of the things he’s been discussing: the body as a source of pleasure and pain, a changing, aging wilful thing, your ally and your enemy. Each volunteer is given a piece of paper and asked to jot down the word that encapsulates the experience; one says ‘squidgy’, another ‘scary’, the final one simply reads: ‘wow’.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Mustafa at Soho Theatre

There’s a chimerical quality to Naylah Ahmed’s play; there are moments where it feels unevenly stitched, a collision of things, that while individually intriguing and exciting, don’t always fit neatly together.

Mustafa, a devout Muslim man, is in prison for manslaughter. The play opens with his cell being searched and his prayer mat confiscated. In its early moments the play seems to be setting itself up as a piece of ‘issue’ theatre: it bears all the hallmarks, and it’s easy to imagine where this play, in other hands, may have ended up. But Ahmed soon upends this impression, her play revealing itself as something altogether more intriguing and unexpected. Mustafa, it seems, has been put in solitary confinement because strange things happen when he is around. At first the prison guards are happy to mark him out as a trouble maker, but it soon becomes evident that he’s the catalyst rather than the cause.

Mustafa is in prison because a boy died while under his care during what turns out to have been an exorcism ritual; he claims he was trying to free the boy from the grip of an evil spirit, a djinn, but the ritual failed, the boy died, and now the djinn seems to have acquired a new host in Mustafa. The idea of a malign, invisible force attaching itself to a man is one rich in metaphoric potential and the play acknowledges this without over-milking it.

Ahmed has written a contemporary supernatural thriller with a political edge and, though the play doesn’t quite fly, its willingness to tinker with genre and audience expectation is pleasing. At times it feels a bit like a British take on The Green Mile (without Tom Hanks’ permanently earnest expression or urinary tract issues) or like one of the more out-there episodes of HBO prison drama Oz (without Chris Meloni’s ubiquitous cock). But Ahmed is out to do more than just unnerve her audience, at times too much more. There are a couple of complicated subplots, one about female-on-male domestic violence, and another about Mustafa’s antagonistic relationship with his brother, Shabir (who is also, conveniently, his solicitor). These plot threads are intriguing – exploring ideas of masculinity and cultural identity both within prison and out in the wider world – but, as both concern events that take place beyond the prison walls, they require lengthy chunks of exposition in order to weave them into the fabric of the play, and this excess of explanation undermines the building sense of tension.

The performances are nicely balanced. There’s an endearingly paternal quality to the relationship between the older, experienced prison guard, played by Paul McClearly, and his younger, brasher colleague, played by Ryan Early. Munir Khairdin provides a calm central presence as the enigmatic, sensitive Mustafa; there’s a sense of quiet pathos to his performance which helps tame the more wayward aspects of the play, keeping the genie in its bottle.

Janet Steel’s production delivers the occasional tingle but is more concerned with the relationships between the four characters than with shocks and scares; indeed, for a play about an exorcism, there’s a surprising amount of humour on display. Colin Falconer’s caged and barred set emphasises the sense of confinement and isolation, with Mustafa’s cell swamped in blackness, figures half-glimpsed in the distance, adding to the production’s sense of a world off-kilter, a world in which dark things lurk.

Reviewed for Exeunt

The Ethics of Progress at Jackson's Lane Theatre

“Spooky action at a distance” was Einstein’s memorable description of the paradoxes inherent in quantum mechanics – and the words “spooky” and “weird” crop up more than once in Jon Spooner’s engaging one-man show about the places theoretical physics may soon take us.

As adults the vast majority of us, physicists excepted, take for grant that the world works in certain ways, and that everything is governed by a set of basic laws and rules; so to learn that the very smallest particles are not subject to these laws – in defiance of classic Newtonian physics – is a bit of a head-fuck: Spooner is clearly still spinning.

Written together with Chris Thorpe and Clare Duffy of Unlimited Theatre, The Ethics of Progress, a kind of everyman’s guide to superposition and quantum entanglement, came about following a process of conversation and consultation with Oxford University’s Professor Vlatko Vedral. Spooner describes how teleportation is theoretically entirely possible and goes on to outline what a future in which humans are capable of teleportation might be like. He draws an amusing but apt parallel with a pre- and post-wheel world: making the obvious but still persuasive observation that something which brought us so much in terms of agriculture, industry and freedom of movement is also a fundamental tool of warfare and environmental ruin. From here he extrapolates a possible future in which teleportation technology comes to be a boon in terms of global travel and the averting of humanitarian crises, but on the flip-side, there’s also an unnerving sequence in which he describes a scenario of potential genocide-by-teleportation.

Like the neuropsychologist Paul Broks, in his book Into The Silent Land, Spooner finds himself questioning what all this means in terms of the soul. If we’re all just data, a collection of transferrable particles, what does this mean for the essential stuff that is us?

It’s important, he says, to think about the social and ethical – and spiritual – consequences of new technology because it’s on its way. He uses the recent rapid advances in communication technology as an example, the way they’ve utterly and fundamentally changed the way so many of us interact. Some people find this exhilarating, others deeply troubling, but to a younger generation of digital natives it’s simply how things are. Spooner is not however advocating technophobia, if anything he’s excited about the possibilities; but he does stress the necessity for imaginative questioning. We need to think about this now, he urges, because we can’t simply turn the clocks back if the future isn’t as bright and shiny as we’d hoped (well, actually, as it transpires in the post-show Q&A with Vedral, maybe we can – but that’s another story).

Spooner’s show has a lot in common with Robin Ince’s exercises in Carl Sagan fanboyism. There’s something endearingly lo-fi about explaining scientific innovation with the help of a laptop and a couple of stools and in its own quiet, geeky way it’s like the clarion call which fills the final pages of Douglas Coupland’s Girlfriend in a Coma, a call to keep questioning things, to ask and ask and ask, because the future is coming and all we can do is be ready.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Farewell to the Theatre at Hampstead Theatre

There’s a gentle, tip-toe quality about Richard Nelson’s new play. Intentionally thin on plot, it’s less concerned with “doing” than “being” and allows its characters’ stories to unfold in a delicate rippling fashion. It’s not exactly ‘about’ the life of the innovative actor-manager, playwright and director, Harley Granville-Barker, either, rather it’s a play in which Granville-Barker features as a character. If anything it’s more concerned with the condition of the English in exile and the potency of theatre.

Granville-Barker is marking time at a boarding house in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in 1916. Having left behind the collapse of his marriage (a divorce is pending) and the trauma of the war in Europe he finds himself witness to a number of private tragedies and passions. He’s disillusioned, frustrated and contemplating giving up theatre for good – it is at this point in his life he writes the one-act play with which Nelson’s shares its name – but he can’t quite let go of the theatre, not yet, nor it of him.

The majority of the characters are, like Granville-Barker, English escapees. There’s Beatrice, a middle-aged actress deep in the midst of an infatuation with a young American student; the genial Frank Spraight, a renowned Dickens specialist; Henry, a professor at the local college, and his widowed sister Dorothy, who runs the boarding house at which Granville-Barker is staying. They each have their longings, they all have their regrets.

An unseen but much discussed production of Twelfth Night at the college where Henry teaches forms the backdrop to the play. Granville-Barker watches as Shakespeare’s comedy becomes the source of much toxic academic wrangling and acute social humiliation. It seems his presence has alarmed one of the resident professors and he, in turn, has taken it out on the hapless Henry. None of this adds up to very much but it is, at times, gently compelling, full of quiet Chekhovian melancholy. There are other times however where a little bit more in the way of momentum would be appreciated, more incident, more ‘doing.’ As it is Granville-Barker’s one moment of physical and emotional connection feels like a thunder clap on an otherwise still day.

Ben Chaplin excels at playing English men of a certain stripe – sardonic, intelligent, reserved – and he’s superb as Granville-Barker, a watchful, contemplative man, his words carefully measured. Jason Watkins is hugely endearing as Spraight, his chipper exterior concealing a deep sadness of his own; both men are adept at putting up shields, guarding themselves emotionally. Tara Fitzgerald makes for a giddy Beatrice, near-intoxicated by the blood-rush of feeling for her pretty young American while Jemma Redgrave is alternatively nervy and bold as the permanently black-clad Dorothy.

Roger Michell’s production seems to follow some of Granville-Barker’s tenets in terms of use of space and the minimal bare-board aesthetic of the stage design, but while Nelson has created some intriguingly shaded and layered characters, the college in-fighting that soaks up so much of the play feels unnecessarily laboured, Granville-Barker and the others bobbing on the surface of an ultimately slight story.

The final scene in which the characters take solace in the performance of a traditional mummers’ play, wearing dressing-up box costumes and wielding wooden swords under a bright American sun – revelling in theatre in one of its oldest forms – feels slightly tepid and tacked-on rather than in any way revelatory or transformative.

Reviewed for Exeunt

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