Circa: Beyond, Spiegeltent, Norwich

These animal men – and women – hang suspended from the ceiling, limbs taut. Silks twine around ankles; bodies bend in unnatural ways before dropping to the floor, gasps gusting from the audience.

Beyond, the new circus show from Brisbane-based company Circa, attempts to explore the ‘animal’ element in us all. To this end they often wear oversized bunny heads and cuddly bear suits while pushing their bodies to the edge of their capabilities. It sounds absurd, but this dash of the cartoonish syncs with the feel of the piece, a little bit dreamlike, a little bit skewed, a little bit silly.

Broken down into a series of sequences set to music, the show features contortionism, aerial work and a nerve-racking balancing act. The performance as a whole is incredibly athletic and physical and, as with the company’s previous work, the body’s frailties are as much on display as its strengths. In the intimate tent setting it’s possible to see the performers’ muscles pulse, their arms tremble with the effort involved and the sweat course down their faces.

Group displays are interspersed with solo turns. A plastic water bottle is used to replicate the spinal creaks and cracks as the performers twist and jerk around the stage, voodooing each other, and even though we can see the source of the sound, the audience still wince as one with each little crick. One of the performers arches her back and Linda Blairs around the room in the most unnerving manner, later she slithers towards the roof in a reptilian fashion.

Failure, or at least the potential for it, is written into their work. A balancing act featuring tin cans and a set of boxes threatens to go wrong – and at one point one box does drop to the ground – but the fact that we can see how difficult it is to achieve, and can read the strain on the performer’s face and in their eyes, makes it easier to appreciate the skill involved. If it was completely seamless, smooth and slick as sticky-backed plastic (or Cirque du Soleil), it wouldn’t be quite so entrancing.

On the other hand, when things go to plan, it’s pretty astounding too. In one of the most staggering sequences a performer almost casually completes a Rubik’s cube while her co-stars hurl themselves at her, clambering over and up her as if she were a tree.

Familiar stunts are rewritten. The act of squeezing through a stringless tennis racket is twisted by having it performed by one of the troupe’s female members. In lace stockings and a beribboned basque, she edges it over her body, but the sexual/striptease elements of the act are turned in on themselves. Her breasts refuse to play along and she has to shove and smush and force them through the racket’s aperture. She ends up with the racket resting around her hips, its handle waggling like a phallus.

This is a warmer show than some of their previous productions, the backing music including Frank Sinatra and Amanda Palmer playing Radiohead on her ukulele. The introduction of the human voice into the mix softens the overall aesthetic, creating points of connection and juxtaposition. The bear suits and bunny heads add to this effect, though as a device they feel underdeveloped. The thematic focus on the human/animal divide is fascinating in theory, but having set out their terms, the company don’t mine this seam as much as they might. This results in a captivating display of contemporary circus, but one that doesn’t fully tap into the promised beyond.

Reviewed for Exeunt

The Weir, Donmar Warehouse

Conor McPherson’s 1997 play is one of words not actions. Stories are told, traded like currency; talk becomes an art form. The Weir is set in a rural Irish pub, beautifully evoked by designer Tom Scutt, a building of old stone wreathed in thin mist, with tatty rattan lampshades and walls the colour of old men’s thumbs.

The Guinness pump is on the fritz so garage-owner Jack is forced to grapple valiantly with the bottled stout. He’s one of a number of lonely souls who congregate nightly for a couple of pints and a ‘small one’ or two. Drinking with him is Brendan, the pub’s relatively young landlord, and Jim, the local handyman whose life revolves around his aging, fading Mammy. But the pattern of this particular evening is disrupted by the arrival of Finbar, a local businessman, who having flitted to the city, now sports a cream linen suit and an air of urban flash; he is accompanied by Valerie a “blow-in from Dublin” who has just bought a house in the area.

In an effort to appeal to this stranger in their midst, a rare female presence (the alarmed response when she requests a glass of white wine is one of the production’s funniest moments), the men start to tell stories, to conjure a landscape steeped in myth and memory. There is talk of fairy roads, of strange nocturnal knockings, of still, staring figures spotted on stairs or in graveyards. They each relate their own small encounter with the uncanny, moments – whether frozen or fevered – when they seemed to glimpse something beyond.

These are stories, one senses, that have been trotted out often before, fetched up on dark nights, spun out over a succession of glasses of stout. In many ways they’re fairly pedestrian, nothing to truly prickle the skin. The pleasure’s more in the telling than the tale.

While the men start out trying to charm Valerie, and maybe even to tease her a bit, after a while their stories become less about local ghosts and more revealing of themselves and their regrets, wants and losses. It’s a subtle shift, so when Valerie, buoyed by such talk, begins to tell her own harrowing tale, the delicate balance of things is upset as she careens into a place of true pain and heartbreak. It pulls all the men up short but it doesn’t entirely capsize the night, instead this interloper is gently enfolded into their small world.

Josie Rourke’s production is also a delicate thing, an environment in which any one false note would ring loud. The performances are all measured and knit well together. Ardal O’Hanlan’s slightly dim Jim conveys a kind of baggy sadness while Dervla Kirwan’s Valerie moves from nervy, girly outsider to centre of attention, without ever letting the character get eaten up by grief; her performance is anchored and steady. The play’s true masterstroke is in not letting Valerie’s moment of revelation crown the night, instead it comes full circle, letting Brian Cox’s craggy bachelor Jack weave the last story, describing one tiny act, one small gesture of kindness in a time when he thought he was lost, and a chance he let slide through his fingers years ago but which nags at him still, the ghost on his shoulder, the thing he will have to carry throughout his days. While his first story is told for show, this last one comes from some deeper place: he gives it to her.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Othello, National Theatre

My, but she takes a long time to die, Desdemona, twitching on her barrack mattress, doll-blonde and bare-legged, as her husband crushes the breath from her. Just when he thinks the deed is done, she splutters back to life, pleading. He could stop then, could maybe save her, but he’s gone too far, so he plunges on, laying his weight on her until she is still, his hands wrapped round her delicate neck. It’s awful and protracted and upsetting – as it should be – with Nicholas Hytner’s production making much of their physical disparity, the brutality of it: she’s so fragile-looking and exposed, in her knickers and the tiny child-like T-shirt she wears to bed, his muscled, uniformed form all but obliterating her.

It’s sexual too, all that writhing, there on the contested bed. Adrian Lester’s Othello doesn’t rape her, but there are intimations of reclamation in the methodical way he goes about putting out her light, still palpably, physically drawn to her, even when he his sniffing her sheets to detect traces of betrayal.

Hytner’s production is the third in a sort-of triptych, together with his Henry V(starring Lester) and hisHamlet (starring Kinnear) and it shares a similar contemporary earth-toned aesthetic. At its best it succeeds in saying some interesting things about the weaponisation of men in the military, with Othello, the career soldier, pinwheeling from love-struck to rage-fuelled in half a heartbeat, his jealousy so intense it makes him vomit. And though Iago tries to rationalise his hatred, it seems to spring from some deeper, primordial place, controlling him rather than the other way round.

With their faces close-cropped and deep shadowed, their eyes burning out at you, the NT poster campaign pits Lester and Kinnear against each other like prize fighters, the Rumble in the Olivier if you will, and it’s difficult not to look at it through this frame, though it seems reductive to do so as both performances are powerful, both rich in their own way. Lester’s Othello is commanding and full of fire – he has a voice you could warm yourself by and hulks out convincingly, flipping over a table with a flick of his wrist whilst roaring with rage – but it’s perhaps the nature of the play that Kinnear’s Iago is the more compelling figure (though it’s in no way inevitable that Iago should dominate – Chiwetel Ejiofor in the Donmar’s 2008 version remains one of the most intense, controlled Shakespearean performances I’ve seen), coming across as a bit of a bruiser, Phil Mitchell with added smarts, driven, cold-eyed and calculating but with a dash of the schoolboy in the way he air-punches and victory shimmies when he gets one over on the object of his malice. As with his Hamlet, Kinnear’s performance has a kind of ease to it, there’s a clarity of intention to his delivery, and he juggles the verse as if he spoke that way every day, though there are times when the mechanics of it all feel a bit too visible.

Olivia Vinall’s Desdemona fades into the background a bit, but that’s again perhaps a consequence of the role. (In making Desdemona an absence, The Q Brothers’ Othello the Remix – performed as part of the Globe to Globe festival last year – was one of the more interesting readings of this play and the placing of women within it). Lyndsey Marshal’s Emelia, while furious and forceful in her loyalty, seems a bit trapped in a role that feels particularly contradictory in its modern context.

For while the production’s military setting makes sense in terms of translating the hierarchies and power games – this man’s, man’s, man’s world – into a recognisable present, embroidered handkerchiefs aside, there are times when it feels a bit tired, a bit ‘done’, a rehashed Iraqistan which we’ve seen before and we will see again. It does at least allow for a great, lively and messy, mess-room scene - with a couple of bikini pin-ups the only thing to break up the bare walls - in which Jonathan Bailey’s Cassio is forced to chug down a lager fountain while being beerily cheered on by his fellow soldiers.

Vicki Mortimer’s flood-lit military base of a set is intentionally bulky and ugly, a transient space, devoid of home comforts, all concrete, harsh strip-lighting, and cheap plaster board walls: when Othello punches out in anger his fist goes straight through. Though there’s something a bit effortful about the set, with its numerous sliding panels allowing various bedrooms, offices and yards to emerge and retreat, its very blankness is an asset, for in this fenced-in place of sun and sweat and tension and little in the way of distraction which doesn’t come in a can, it’s plausible that here passions, jealousies, petty vendettas, could grow and spread unchecked like bacteria on a petri dish.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Interview: Little Bulb

The creators of Orpheus at the BAC - as well as Operation Greenfield and the gorgeous Crocosmia - on music, myth, the ensemble as family, and what it's like to live on site at the Arts Centre while developing work.

Read the full interview on Exeunt.

The Seagull, Nuffield Theatre

With his shoulders shaking and his body bent low, Boris Trigorin brings himself off as his lover Irina verbally pleasures him, praising his creative skill, his gifts as a writer. It’s a glitteringly satirical moment, the writer as wanker. Once done, he appears to mop up the resulting mess with a page from his trusty notebook, the receptacle of so much mental seed-spilling.

We’re on first-name terms with the characters in John Donnelly’s adaption of The Seagull, no awkward, tongue-teasing patronyms here; Nina bares a breast while performing Konstantin’s fevered failure of a play and everyone says ‘bollocks’ a lot. But there’s more to this reworking than a generous scattering of swearwords, while Donnelly and director Blanche McIntyre haven’t quite burned the text and built on its ashes, as Konstantin wants to do to the ‘old theatre’ that so frustrates him, they have created something that feels contemporary, a thing of now, without ever forcing its hand. It’s not aggressive in its modernity, but it makes you look at the play afresh.

The characters talk about the strange veneer of fame and what it means to be an artist in terms that are recognisable, while Masha does her self-mourning in an LBD and sunglasses before adopting, on her marriage, a shapeless cardigan, the eternal garment of defeat.

McIntyre once again shows that she is a superb director of actors. Abigail Cruttenden’s Irina is not a theatrical caricature but a woman of a certain age and type, confident of her attractiveness, her centrality to the world, but still easily threatened, flippant in her treatment of Konstantin’s artistic endeavours, capable of breaking him with a single brutally dismissive line. Pearl Chanda’s Nina is all adolescent intensity, harbouring a consuming crush on Gyuri Sarossy’s Boris, a girl all too easily swept along on other people’s waves. Alexander Cobb’s Konstantin is a contradictory figure, an earnest young man convinced he can shrug off the past and create something entirely new, that he is the one to show the world where it’s been going wrong, while also a bit of a mummy’s boy (he even calls her ‘mummy’), desperate for Irina’s approval and praise.

There is a lot of comedy in Donnelly’s adaption, the situations, characters and collisions mined for their inherent humour, and more than a dash of audacity in his approach coupled with nice line in metatheatrical commentary. McIntyre’s production makes much use of the aside, the characters stepping to the front of the stage to address the audience directly. Laura Hopkins’ minimal design places a silvery screen at the back of the stage, a lake-like still thing, like a blank page in a notebook, upon which the characters scrawl (or rather spray, as they use squirt bottles, theatrical Windowlene), its clean clear surface becoming increasingly streaked and murky. There is no set as such, just a long wooden platform on a pivot, which serves as a jetty, a dining table, and in one of the production’s only missteps, a giant see-saw. The scene in which Irina and Nina lounge on this device, occasionally over-balancing the other, feels like an exercise in overstatement; the lighting however is gorgeous and golden throughout, each scene subtly shaded.

While the anguish of Konstantin and Nina’s last meeting – the latter damp-eyed and desperate, rapidly unravelling – isn’t as gutting as it might be, and the production struggles slightly to make the transition from tragicomedy to tragedy, it does what it sets out to do: it takes a play so frequently staged –Anya Reiss’ (by all accounts pallid) adaptation was only just performed at Southwark Playhouse in November last year – and makes a case for revisiting it once more, rooting Chekhov’s concerns in a world that belongs to us.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Vanessa and Virginia. Riverside Studios

We are loving vultures, as fascinated by the hand that holds the pen, the face behind the easel, as with the words and work those people produce. We can’t keep from picking, through letters and diaries, through the layers of the lives of this small group of friends and lovers who lived a century ago, in the hope of catching a glimpse of the person who once was, who once wept and lusted and dreamed and created.

Susan Sellers’ novel Vanessa and Virginia tells the story of the Stephen sisters – the girls who would become Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf – from the viewpoint of Vanessa, tracing their complex, entangled relationship from their earliest days in the nursery through to Virginia’s suicide.

It has been adapted for the stage by Woolf scholar Elizabeth Wright, who has pared down and sharpened the original text. The fragmented poetic structure of the novel remains, though the filter of Vanessa’s thoughts is less overt; Virginia is brought more clearly into focus as a character, as a presence – she is given shape and skin, a voice, though Vanessa still speaks the majority of the lines.

The resulting play is like a series of sketches with the other members of the Bloomsbury set pushed to the periphery. The sisters are both deeply needful of one another and also envious of the other’s successes; they know just where best to prick the other to draw blood. Emma Gersch’s production captures this sibling heat, the centrality of it to their well-being, their hunger for each other’s love. On the surface Vanessa appears to be the most stable one, less prone to collapse, less brittle – she is shocked by the ice of Virginia’s tongue, the unabashedly cruel way she speaks of Ottoline Morrell, with her “great beaky face – yet she was capable of deep passion and her lasting desire for the homosexual artist Duncan Grant is shown to be a potent, painful thing, a relationship which could never come to anything beyond friendship, though it would eventually result in the birth of a daughter.

The play shows how strong and necessary the bond between the sisters was. As children they were surrounded by death and loss, their family slowly shrinking. Their mother died when they were still small and a beloved older half-sister, Stella, followed soon afterwards; their brother Thoby would also die young. They had only each other to cling to. Another step-brother George was reputedly a predatory figure and their father was emotionally remote while at the same time needy and fretful, carping over the household accounts which he expected young Vanessa to manage on her own, until he too passed away and the girls were finally able to escape the oppressive Victorian atmosphere of their Kensington home and live as and how they wished. (Within reason of course, they couldn’t do without their servants).

There are times though when the production feels like it is ticking Bloomsbury boxes, with fleeting mentions of Vita, Carrington, Maynard Keynes, and Roger Fry. In fact there are chunks of the play that might prove difficult to unstitch without at least a passing knowledge of this world, its inhabitants, and the numerous ways in which they are interconnected. In its use of soliloquy the play can feel static at times and the drama is at its strongest when the two sisters are interacting, sparking off each other, alternatively vulnerably and hostile.

The staging takes its cues from the dreamlike structure of the play, fragmented, sing-songy and drifting. At the beginning the actors, Kitty Randle as Vanessa and Alice Frankham as Virginia, gambol across the stage like little girls before gradually letting down their skirts, throwing off their pinafores and growing up, becoming women. The occasional use of dance adds to this dreamlike feel, though this does start to feel repetitious after a while. The adaptation lifts nearly all of its words directly from the book and there are some phrases that, even though they sit easy on the page, don’t work as well when put in people’s mouths, (a description of Virginia’s eyes as “snake-green”, a reference to Grant’s “seed”) but again this is less jarring in the context of an aging Vanessa looking back at her life, penning her memories.

Kate Unwin’s set, a canopy of low-hanging objects – a parasol, a mirror, a fishing net - conveys something of the Charleston clutter of the artist’s studio, while Jeremy Thurlow’s original piano score echoes the undulations of the sisters’ relationship. Randle and Frankham age and fade subtly and convincingly. Vanessa would struggle to recover from the death of her son; Virginia couldn’t bear the thought of suffering another mental breakdown: their descent into a grief they could not save each other from is movingly conveyed.

The play presents its audience with a not altogether unfamiliar portrait of these two women, it doesn’t really challenge the image of them we have come to expect, not of Virginia anyway, she remains brilliant and difficult and magnificent and aloof; Vanessa on the other hand is allowed to emerge from behind that easel, and this is where the play’s real strength lies.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Peter and Alice, Noel Coward Theatre

John Logan’s Peter and Alice – the only new play in Michael Grandage’s current West End season – trades in information. It’s all tell. Logan envisages a meeting between the elderly Alice Liddell-Hargreaves and Peter Llewellyn Davies, now a war-shattered young man. It’s an idea ripe with potential, and these two did apparently meet briefly at one point, but instead of having them engage in some form of recognisable conversation – reflecting on the characters they inspired, Lewis Carroll’s Alice and JM Barrie’s Peter Pan, and the world they feel they have disappointed by committing the twin sins of growing up and growing old – they spend much of the time exchanging potted biographies.

The results are strangely static, Judi Dench and Ben Whishaw stand at opposite sides of the stage and relate their characters’ stories and because they’re Judi Dench and Ben Whishaw, theatrical alchemists both, this is often magical and moving, but rather dramatically flat all the same.

Logan slowly starts to give shape to the pattern of their flashbacks by introducing the characters of Carroll and Barrie – the Reverend Dodgson and Uncle Jim (played by Nicholas Farrell and Derek Riddell as two similarly suited and reticent men)– and poking around in the psyche of these two complex individuals, men who seemed altogether easier and happier immersed in the world of children than of adults and who did their best to fix the objects of their particular affections and obsessions in a state of eternal childhood. Alice asks bluntly if Peter was molested, and he replies that he was not, at least not physically, but it’s clear that he regarded what Barrie did to him, what he took from him, as a kind of abuse. The play shows that both characters were, to a degree, composites – there were three Liddell sisters and five Llewellyn Davies boys, and Peter was by all accounts far more timid and nervy than his dashing and adventurous brother, Michael – but they were the namesakes and so they carried the weight of that connection.

On top of this Logan places a third layer in the form of the archetypal stage/page Peter Pan and Alice, played by Olly Alexander and Ruby Bentall, both eye-wide and arm-wide in their performances, him in a ragged green tunic with a cloud of disobedient hair, her in a broad, blue dress with long blonde tresses, a walking John Tenniel illustration. These two hover in the background, like lost shadows, and occasionally pass comment – there are sweet moments when they glance tenderly at their other selves, or smilingly reveal little hidden things, like the flask of gin in Peter’s pocket – but the relationship between the three dramaturgical layers is always fuzzy. The effect is a little like picking up a copy of a newspaper where the print colours haven’t quite synced.

Occasionally the play threatens to do something a bit more intricate, as in the scene where Dench’s Alice recalls a conversation with Dodgson in the dark room of his photographic studio, him struggling to put into words exactly what she means to him while clutching her fragile, frozen image in his hands. Later Logan seeds Michael’s probable suicide – sliding under the water of Sandford Pool with his close friend clasped to him – in a scene that shows the growing prickliness of Barrie towards the young man. But these moments are brief and over quickly.

The lead performances give the piece its weight. Judi Dench is magnificent, shucking off her initially haughty and brittle exterior like a fur stole, loosening her spine and her smile as she recalls herself as a child, giggling, gambolling – she did something similar in Peter Hall’s otherwise stiff and stately Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Rose Theatre and it’s similarly enchanting here. Beneath his tweeds, Whishaw is a black bundle of anguish, a man on all too close terms with death. Llewellyn Davies had a rough life: along with his brother’s death, he lost both his parents early to cancer – his mother’s death swift, his father’s horribly drawn out, disfiguring and pain-wracked – while another brother perished in the war. Whishaw’s Peter is at first gentle in his melancholy, soft-spoken and emotionally contained. But when he cracks and recalls his own time in the mud of the trenches, and the psychological toll of all that death and loss, it’s awful and it’s raw and it’s amazing, all at the same time.

Grandage’s production is also beautiful to look at. Christopher Oram’s set is, initially, typical of his designs at the Donmar Warehouse, all dark tones and diffused light, the sun seeping down into a book-lined room through smeared and murky glass. But as Peter and Alice go back into their respective pasts, this is replaced by a toybox of a theatre, filled with a succession of vibrant painted flats in Crayola colours that part and lift as the characters push further back into their memories; the stage becomes a Never-Wonderland of poster paint palm trees and storybook lagoons, with the face of the Cheshire cat looming above like a twisted moon. Visually fitting as this all is, it also highlights the play’s theatrical lack, its filmic bittiness, the way it strives to be elegiac and haunting – and in its best moments succeeds – but also feels like it may have been a more potent experience on screen than on stage.

Reviewed for Exeunt

The Winslow Boy, Old Vic

The emotional undercurrents of Rattigan’s plays swirl like swans’ legs beneath the clipped, clean surface of things. For all its exploration of the line between what is right and what is just, its bucking against the power of the Navy to dispense punishment as it sees fit, with no proper trial, his 1946 period piece, The Winslow Boy, is in many ways most potent as a portrait of a family in times of change.

Arthur Winslow, the Edwardian patriarch played with a silvery glint by Henry Goodman, is a superficially stern man, gruff, moustachioed and stiff of lip, but his underlying humanity is always evident. While he is willing to sacrifice both the family finances and even eventually his own health for the sake of seeing right done, he is never blind to the great cost of his actions; he comprehends all too clearly the toll his fight is taking and yet he cannot drop it, cannot let it fall. In amongst this, it his relationship with his outspoken, cigarette-smoking, suffragette daughter Catherine and their understanding of each other’s drives and beliefs, which forms the heartbeat of the play.

The play is a courtroom drama in essence though it never strays beyond the drawing room of the Kensington home of the Winslows, with its William Morris wallpaper, its mahogany side-tables, nut-brown leather wingchairs and notably charming curtains. When the youngest Winslow, thirteen year old Robbie is sacked from Osborne Naval College for the theft of a five shilling postal order, his father decides to take the case to trial, employing one of the country’s most pre-eminent barristers in order to do so. Based on the case of a young man called Archer Shee who was expelled in similar circumstances in 1911, the fight becomes bigger than the family, a cause celebre, with journalists cluttering the front steps and the parlour maid volubly reporting back on the day’s legal proceedings. In the process, Robbie, is slowly erased from his own story, dozing on the sofa as vital discussions take place over his head.

The role of the lawyer Sir Robert Morton, so dapper in his evening clothes, Sahara-dry in temperament and casual in his brilliance, is a gift of a part for actors with a tendency towards scene-eating, but Peter Sullivan’s portrayal is more delicate and realistic in proportion; he doesn’t dominate the stage, doesn’t over-balance the see-saw. So when his courtroom persona does emerge, when he aggressively interrogates Charlie Rowe’s whimpering but adamant Robbie before dangling a way out in front of him like kipper to a kitten, it’s all the more powerful.

Naomi Frederick is similarly precise in her performance as the principled sister Catherine, who sees one fiancé ditch her as the family name is smeared across the daily papers, and is forced to fend off another kindly but unsuitable suitor, all the time knowing that her age and independent spirit make her chances of marriage increasingly unlikely. Deborah Findlay clearly relishes the moment when Mrs Winslow finally gets to crack, to shed her smile and blaze at her husband about the extent of the sacrifice the family has been obliged to make as a result of his unshakeable two-year pursuit of what he holds to be right. But though Henry Goodman’s Arthur gradually weakens physically, his resolve never leaves him; his eyes shine even as his hands shake.

Lindsay Posner’s production conforms to everything you’d expect a production of Rattigan at the Old Vic to be. It’s elegant, stately, the performers moving about the stage as if moving about a stage, not a domestic space, arraying themselves in tidy semi-circles and appealing tableaux, never bunching or crowding. This choreography is somehow all the more obvious here, because while Peter McKintosh’s drawing room set has been elongated to fill the stage, it intentionally neglects the vertical, leaving a large black void above, an odd mouth. As a production, it’s all very, very solid, and very decently done, but it’s strangely cool in places, a little too slick, this despite Rattigan’s inherent warmth and charm and heart.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Interview: Refugee Boy

I recently spoke to the poet Lemn Sissay and West Yorkshire Playhouse's Associate Director Alex Chisholm about the process of bringing  Benjamin Zephaniah’s acclaimed novel, Refugee Boy, to the stage.

You can read the feature in full at The Stage.

Interview: Richard Marsh and Katie Bonna

In a back room at an empty Theatre Royal Drury Lane - which is currently under refurbishment and covered in seemingly entirely covered in plastic sheeting in preparation for the arrival of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - I spoke to Richard Marsh and Katie Bonna about dramatic poetry, the differences between assuming a poetic persona and playing a character, and their two-hander Dirty Great Love Story, which was one of my favourite shows at last year's Edinburgh Fringe.

You can read the full interview on Exeunt.

The Stepmother, Orange Tree Theatre

Githa Sowerby’s The Stepmother was given a one-off performance in 1924 but has not been seen on a London stage since then. Now the Orange Tree has done what they do best, unearthing the play on one of their regular rummages through the archives and giving it a solid, engaging if slightly stately and stodgy staging.

Sowerby’s best known play, Rutherford and Son, is frequently revived (Northern Broadsides are touring it at the moment) and anthologised, but despite being relatively unknown, The Stepmother reveals itself to be just as interesting a piece of work, full of feminist fury at the way a woman’s fate - and her fortune – can be so easily buffeted about by the whims of men.

Lois, orphaned and alone in the world, has been working as the paid companion to a wealthy spinster; now, following the death of her employer, she stands to inherit a considerable sum. But the dead woman’s grasping brother Eustace Gaydon has no intention of seeing his late sister’s money slide out of his grabby, grubby grasp.

After a rather padded prologue set in 1911, which establishes Lois’ predicament, the play leaps forwards in time by ten years to the 1920s where we discover that Eustace has solved his financial problems by marrying the unfortunate girl. The adult Lois is now a successful business woman, managing her own dressmaking company while also acting as a mother figure to his two young daughters, but despite her evident business acumen, it’s her husband who signs the cheques and has final say in how her money is spent. Sowerby’s anger at this state of affairs pulses through the play - her feckless artist father having squandered both his own fortune as well as his wife’s – and it’s this fire that gives her writing its potency,

The figure of the stepmother, so often maligned - an upsetter of nests and a terroriser of children - is here made engagingly sympathetic. Lois is little more than a child herself when she is made to take the place of a dead wife and mother (one suspects she was given little in the way of a choice in the matter) and the bond between Lois and Eustace’s older daughter Monica is delicately drawn; not dissimilar in age their relationship is one of friendship and empathy at the other’s plight, rare and refreshing in its harmony. When Eustace is at his most badly behaved and caddish, it is to Lois the daughters turn.

There are echoes of Jane Eyre here, but this is a Rochester driven only by self-interest and his own financial mismanagement. Eustace, played by Christopher Ravenscroft - normally such an avuncular Sam Waterstone-y presence - is a proper hissable villain, the kind of man who scoffs “what’s a woman’s word in business?” as he – literally – trousers his wife’s savings. The performances on the whole are as solid and reliable as they usually are at the Orange Tree, all very well-pitched for the intimate space, with Katie McGuinness conveying a suitable mixture of smarts and vulnerability as Lois and Jennifer Higham agreeably wide-eyed and kind-hearted as Monica.

Sowerby’s writing is intriguingly shaded, particularly in regards to the character of Lois, who is far from a one-dimensional victim; her eventual journey into the arms of a lover is also depicted with a refreshing amount of sympathy, an escape route from an intolerable situation - though it’s telling that he also tinkers with her finances behind her back.

Sam Walters’ production is – as ever at this venue – of a certain degree of polish and intelligence, investing the play with tension and a degree of humour too, but its power is diluted somewhat by issues of pacing; the numerous fiddly scene changes - dominated by the interminable shifting of chairs and unfurling of rugs - allow rather too much of Sowerby’s anger to evaporate.

Reviewed for Exeunt

In the Beginning was the End, Somerset House

Down we go: down one staircase and then another, down into the warren of basements and sub-basements beneath the grand Italianate courtyard of Somerset House. Tristan Sharps, director of dreamthinkspeak, has a fascination with the spaces above, behind, between and below; his new production occupies a huge swathe of hidden rooms and corridors beneath that central courtyard, the bits of the building into which few people ever venture, a series of half-glimpsed corners usually concealed behind gates and locked doors, down dusty neglected stairwells.

Somerset House is a gift of a space for a project like this, vast and labyrinthine; there’s a lovely rabbit hole-y sensation when you first file down into the dark, leaving behind the sanctioned public spaces.

The production, which takes place in three separate but interconnected parts of the building – the East Wing and the West Wing of Somerset House as well as the old engineering department of King’s College – is, in turn, roughly divided into three separate but interconnected sections. The first is flickering world full of drawers and doors; bathed in sickly subterranean light, it’s a dark alien space in which your own reflected image in a window or on a television screen occasionally catches you off guard. Machine parts litter the desks and chalk marks infest the walls: the overspillings of overloaded minds. There is a sense of abandonment about these first rooms, an eerie quality intensified by ominous humming sounds and the numerous signs warning you about sheer drops, hazardous chemicals and silent alarms.

The next phase is – in stark contrast – very clinical in design: a bright, white world. Signs inform us that this is the headquarters of an international technology company called Fusion International. As we move from room to room, an array of products are demonstrated for our benefit; there’s something sinister about this space too, this underground laboratory, with its white-coated employees speaking rapidly in a variety of tongues.

Eventually these employees start to rebel against the system that constrains them, performing an act of rejection and liberation; together they create a Biblical tableau of bodies ascending, an image which is both classical in its aesthetic and incredibly vulnerable and human at the same time.

Whereas with large scale installations by companies like Punchdrunk, if you’re not one to follow the crowd you can sometimes find yourself floating through a series of beautiful but empty rooms, missing out on the most exciting scenes and set pieces. Here, while you can and should wander off and explore, there’s less far less chance of missing something vital. While each audience member has a degree of control in how they experience the piece, everyone’s journey encompasses the same key points.

The production was inspired by what Sharps calls an ‘apocalyptic doodle’ by Leonardo da Vinci, entitled “A Cloudburst of Material Possessions”, which depicts a great flood of manmade objects, a tide of things. While this single image provided the seed that branched and grew and became In the Beginning, it’s not necessary to know this as you explore. Part of the pleasure is in joining the dots for yourself, piecing it all together, picking up on the recurring imagery – of flood, of technological obsolescence – which flow through the production. Though there are times when it all feels a little too elusive and opaque, it is full of striking images as well as a surprising amount of humour; as an experience, In the Beginning is part psychogeographic adventure, part concrete poem (in the most literal sense), a fascinating descent into a world of rooms beneath rooms beneath rooms, of city striations, the trickle of water omnipresent.

Reviewed for Exeunt

The Turn of The Screw, Almeida Theatre

The 1963 version of The Haunting is a film that really gets under your skin. It’s genuinely unsettling, and though you actually see little if anything, the eerie sound design, full of thudding doors and creaking floorboards, creates an atmosphere of almost unbearable dread. Jan de Bont’s 1999 remake on the other hand amplified everything beyond recognition, bloating the film with CGI ghosties and digital whizz-bangery, and amputating any sense of the sinister in the process.

Henry James’ novella is likewise a masterpiece of atmospheric detail and psychological ambiguity but, in this new adaptation, the Almeida has done a Jan de Bont, opting for the easiest of shocks over subtlety and complexity of character. There is never any sense that the nameless governess who is dispatched to a country house to look after two orphaned children is anything other than sane, no sense that the haunting may be emanating from her own fevered mind. The evil that plagues this house is very much manifest, with the flame-haired Peter Quint popping up at windows at every given opportunity. The sexual undercurrents of the original are here made-overcurrents, what with the constant coital howling of foxes outside in the grounds and the ghosts glimpsed rutting against the leaded window panes.

While there are some proper jolts, achieved with the help of illusionist Scott Penrose - and given the volume and tenor of the screams I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a few damp seats in the Almeida auditorium afterwards – there’s very little sense of tension or jeopardy; the battle to save the two innocent children, Flora and Miles, from the grip of a malevolent, deviant force is curiously anaemic, a tiresome tug-of-war. Lyndsey Posner’s production, the first to be presented by Hammer Theatre of Horror, is far more concerned with the sudden shock, the supposedly spooky effect. There’s some self-propelled chalk – just like in Matilda – and the tone of the piece is such that you half expect a repeat of that weird moment in the Menier Chocolate Factory’s production of the The Invisible Man when the transparent protagonist copped a feel of Maria Friedman’s bosoms; Laurence Belcher’s man-boy Miles does the honours here instead.

The set is bird-black and oppressive, like Thornfield after the fire, with a jagged slash in the brickwork through which the moon can be seen. The sound design throws in flapping bat wings, the scritch-scratch of chalk on a blackboard and the occasional piercing scream. The frequent use of the revolve, however, transporting us from room to room, from interior to exterior, slows the pacing of the piece to a crawl, diffusing what little tension had been built up. Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s adaptation does at least explore the peculiar situation of the governess: a woman trapped between worlds, who, socially speaking, is neither one thing nor the other, neither part of the family nor one of the staff, and whose class and background can always be used against her, the shadow of the workhouse a very real and frightening thing. But it also seems intent on making the sexual suggestions of the original as blatant and explicit as possible.

Anna Madeley gets off to a reasonable start in the role of the repressed governess, but she doesn’t fully convey the character’s increasing torment; the pitch of her performance doesn’t build. It’s possible to see why Belcher – seventeen but looking and playing younger – has been cast as Miles, capably suggesting a young man on the cusp of adolescence, a volatile creature, precocious and loving one moment, spite-filled and threatening the next, but it’s Gemma Jones, as the house-keeper Mrs Grose, who puts in the most solid, consistent performance, providing a necessary counter-balance to all the shrieks and the shocks and the spectral bedroom shenanigans.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Privates on Parade, Noel Coward Theatre

It’s fairly easy to grasp why Michael Grandage wanted to begin his five play season in the West End with Peter Nichols’ 1977 military comedy. It has a brilliant, glittering central presence in the character of Acting Captain Terri Dennis. Simon Russell Beale gets to glide about the stage in armour-plated undergarments and don a series of increasingly elaborate costumes, toting a Carmen Miranda fruit bowl on his head, straddling a chair in stockings and top hat, dabbing on the “day slap” and batting his mascara-black lashes. He’s flamboyant but far from waspish, kind-hearted and soft-eyed, a paternal figure even when sporting an epic Lady Bracknell bosom and a daft Vera Lynn wig.

Nichols’ partly autobiographical play about his days entertaining the troops during the Malayan Emergency – not a war, definitely not a war – depicts what happens when Steven Flowers, an inexperienced young private, joins SADUSEA (the Song and Dance Unit of South East Asia), half of whom are reputed “bum-boys.” Russell Beale’s Terri is the lead queen, brave and unapologetic about who he is, feminising everyone’s names with abandon (Clementina Attlee and so on) and raising an eyebrow at every even mildly suggestive remark. As well as being peppered with double-entendres, the language of Nichols’ play is riddled with off-hand racism – wogs, chinks and the like – and sexism, which though true to the time and the characters, doesn’t sit easy.

That said, the play is an intriguing portrait of the tail-end of empire: corruption and cynicism permeate, the air is thick with gin and mosquitos, and the senior ranks are suitably clueless while those lower down the ladder suffer the consequences. Bonds form between the men that may not have been possible at home, and the sense of camaraderie, closeness and even love that develops within the unit is gently conveyed. An attachment forms between John Marquez’s expletive-spitting Corporal Len Bonny and Harry Hepple’s Lance Corporal Charles Bishop, but tender as it is, it comes quite late in the day and, as such, it doesn’t have the emotional resonance it might.

The action is interspersed with songs, which are charismatically performed and invested with wit and charm by Russell Beale, but they’re essentially there to let Terri don yet another astonishing frock; very often they break up the narrative flow rather than moving things forward. While the standard of playing is decent enough, apart from SRB the only performance that really makes an impression is that of Angus Wright as the zealous and ever so gung-ho, Major Flack, who happily packs the men off to the jungle where danger awaits. He’s got a rich, sonorous voice of which Grandage makes full use, but when these two are off stage the pacing tends to dip and the production feels every minute of its near three hour running time. The first half in particular seems to take an age to play out.

The production looks beautiful – Christopher Oram’s set conveys a sense of decay and dilapidation, a sun-washed, crumbling space – but while the play’s structural bagginess can be read as a comment on the British presence in South East Asia, it becomes frustrating well before the end – what’s lacking is much in the way of Singapore grip. The silent servants who shadow the characters throughout – fetching their drinks, shouldering their abuse, biding their time – are shown in Grandage’s brief pay-off to get the last laugh, but instead of coming across as a final witty twist, there’s something ever so slightly sinister about the way this is framed: it leaves behind it a faintly sour taste.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Mydidae, Soho Theatre

Marian and David are a couple who are comfortable in each other’s company. She wonders around their stylish white bathroom in a faded Minnie Mouse T-shirt and a pair of turquoise knickers while flossing her teeth; he takes a long luxuriant piss in her presence. But the bathroom is a place of exposure and vulnerability – a place where people go to cleanse, to purge, to void – and it soon becomes clear that the couple’s seeming ease with one another is only superficial, that something dark and turbulent swims beneath.

Mydidae is a play written to fulfil a particular brief. Jack Thorne was tasked to create a play set entirely in a bathroom by the production company DryWrite, an exercise with shades of Oulipo: liberation through restriction. By narrowing his viewfinder in this way, Thorne has created a two-hander full of unexpected menace that probes and chips at its characters, peeling back layers of skin.

It’s not much of a surprise to discover that these two have lost something precious – Thorne drips that in early – it’s the aftermath of this loss he’s really interested in. Marian and David act out the little routines of domesticity, they fulfil their allotted roles, but there’s a hollow quality to their relationship, an absence. A would-be romantic candle-lit bath – complete with cabernet sauvignon and a shimmering mirage of tea-lights – reeks of cliché; it’s David’s attempt to convince himself that things are still as they were, that they can be again.

Performed on Amy Jane Cook’s fully-plumbed set, complete with working bath, sink and loo, the production has faith in flesh. Its use of nudity is genuinely exposing. Stripped of their clothes and neck-deep in the bathtub, there is nowhere left for Marian and David to hide, from each other’s accusing eyes, from the twisting of their own pain: their hate comes frothing to their surface; love and rage intersect and overspill.

Vicky Jones’ production delivers one brutal, awful jolt; like a shark surfacing, great white teeth bared, it rears up from the deep. Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Keir Charles handle the play’s shifting emotional tone incredibly well, effortlessly moving from the jokey, casual, almost mundane feel of the opening to the much more complex terrain of the play’s mid-section, occasionally pausing in their actions, as if caught off-guard by memory. Their nakedness is beautifully utilised too: the production revelling in the vulnerability of skin, damp and gleaming in the candlelight, the fine line of the spine, the unintentional comedy of the sheepish penis.

Both performances are incredibly measured. Waller-Bridge has a crisp, confident manner that conceals a seam of fragility, but it’s Charles’ unnerving, unblinking stare as he faces her across the bathwater – as he looks at her, into her, through her – that leaves the most lasting impression.

Thorne is adept at creating an undercurrent of unease, an incremental build-up of tension – he’s a master of what John Irving termed the undertoad – and even when Mydidae doesn’t quite ring true psychologically (it’s difficult to believe that this couple’s submarine feelings haven’t surfaced before), it’s still a potent piece of writing. While not quite as devastating as Simon Stephens’ Sea Wall, a play with which it shares some thematic overlap, in its most charged moments it still slices fairly deeply.

Reviewed for Exeunt.

The Magistrate, National Theatre

‘Tis a pretty thing, Timothy Sheader’s production of Arthur Wing Pinero’s sort-of farce of 1885: an awful lot of care and effort has clearly gone into design. Katrina Lindsay’s set unfolds like a pop-up book, its intricate fringes part city-scape, part snowflake, and the whole thing looking like an illustration by Phiz or something out of Punch: there are even ink blots spattered across the backdrop. Everything is at angles and diagonals – even bodies, even limbs, the cast tilting at windows and doorways – and everyone is coiffed to look like a living caricature.

But, pretty as it is, there’s something a little off-kilter about the piece and Sheader’s production never quite syncs with the stylised visuals: farce should appear liquid and effortless but the timing is often fractionally off, props are dropped and doors stick, making you all too aware of the mechanics, the creaking and squeaking of cogs and gears.

Nancy Carroll plays Agatha Posket, a widow who has shaved five years off her age in order to make herself more appealing to the upright magistrate, Aeneas (John Lithgow). To pull off this deception she was obliged to reduce the age of her young son accordingly, passing off her nineteen year old Cis as an ‘advanced’ fourteen year old. Trouble is it’s no longer possible to “pacify him with a stick and hoop” and despite his Eton jacket and short trousers he’s partial to a cigarette and a spot of Port of an evening and has all the women in his family’s employ out to pet and pander to him.

When Cis’s godfather, the bluff but decent Colonel Lukyn, threatens to pay them a visit and reveal her little deception, Agatha is forced to intercept him and ends up being caught up in a police raid and forced to appear in her husband’s court the following morning. To further complicate things Aenas – thanks to Cis - is also caught out of his element at the same hotel, obliged to flit to Kilburn in the middle of the night to avoid tangling with the law.

Lithgow is entertaining as Posket – his ordered world unravelling spectacularly over the course of a night – and, when he’s finally allowed off the leash, smudged and dishevelled and generally bested, he eats up his character’s main monologue with glee. But the production is never more alive than when Joshua MacGuire’s Cis is leap-frogging settees and dry-humping his piano mistress; a kind of matryoshka Tom Hollander with Willy Wonka hair, the production noticeably slumps whenever he is off-stage.

The issues with pacing are intensified by a series of between-scene musical interludes, in which a chorus of outsize oompa-loompas in stripy trews and matching Charles Dickens wigs sing about the perils of telling porkies. (“It’s the little lies that get you into trouble.”) But instead of acting as playful Dahl-esque winks, these are over-extended and plodding, hammering home messages that were already fully evident in the text. There are laughs, but they are very thinly spread, minor eruptions of mirth, and there’s an unresolved tonal disconnect between the cartoony design and the manner in which the piece itself plays out, an issue of identity, a gap which is never satisfyingly bridged.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Constellations, Duke of York's Theatre

Nick Payne’s delicate, searching play - the third Royal Court production to transfer to the West End after Posh and Jumpy - has a fractal quality. Its central love story is a splintered thing in which several possible worlds co-exist, with small and not so small details changing from scene to scene as a couple, Roland and Marianne, meet, engage in awkward flirtation, marry and then face up to the awful fact that their time together will be shorter than they had hoped.

Payne’s play is rich with ideas, about love and loss, time and its passing, the illusion of free will, themes which are echoed in the characters’ professions - he is a bee keeper, she is a quantum physicist. But what could have been merely clinical, an intellectual exercise, is made humane and moving by the wit and intelligence of the writing and the warm, nuanced performances of Rafe Spall and Sally Hawkins, as two people clinging to one another in the face of an impossible wave. Each iteration of the couple’s relationship, each small scenic shift, is subtly evoked, their timing exquisite.

Designer Tom Scutt canopies the stage with white balloons which light up with each new variation, a synaptic flickering which becomes more intense as Marianne’s mind starts to shut down, a process of aphasic unravelling.

Running at barely over an hour, it’s almost too short to do full justice to its own set-up and there are times when the play’s multiverse structure seems to fight with, rather than enhance, its emotional trajectory. But when it hits home, it hits hard.

Reviewed for The Stage

Interview: Joe Hill-Gibbins

I recently spoke to the Assistant Artistic Director of the Young Vic about his thrillingly messy production of Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling, which returns to the venue later this month. We discussed, among other things, Jacobean virginity tests, the incorporation of the mechanisms of theatre into the narrative and the thinking behind the production's jelly sex scene.

You can read the full article here.

Hero/Heroine, Etcetera Theatre

One of the most unsettling things about the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons – a place of many unsettling things, with its seven foot skeletons and pickled fingers, its pâté-like slices of cerebellum and its numerous tools of amputation – are the foetuses, the bottled babies. Neatly preserved and labelled to show the stages of development, human and alien all at the same time, things that lived but never lived: it’s this primal image that sits at the centre of Dave Florez’s troubling two-hander.

Florez is a playwright who enjoys a paddle in waters psychologically brackish. His monologue, Hand over Fist, a play about memory, identity, and its painful aching loss was a critical success at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, earning plaudits for both the writing and for Joanna Bending’s arrestingly intense performance as a woman destined to repeat the same meetings, the same conversations, over and over again, who is uninhibited in her sexual cravings and who, in a memorable central sequence, imagines herself glove-puppeted on her husband’s hot hand in a kind of ecstatically physical eruption.

Hero/Heroine, staged as part of the London Horror Festival by New Wave Theatre, is a messier piece, tangled and untidy in interesting ways. Two former lovers meet on Halloween in his grotty flat, with its sea of stains, half-drunk bottles of JD, porn DVDS and dubiously used tissues. That he still wants her in some way is obvious – when she goes to the bathroom, he leaps on her discarded boots with the filthy glee of DeFlores in The Changeling, inhaling her; it is also pretty clear that their relationship terminated in a way that was both unpleasant and abrupt.

The couple goad each other, tease each other; their shared past providing them both with a source of comfort and pain. As they shoot up and indulge in a bit of awkward masochism, clues are dropped about the reasons for their split. There are traces of Irvine Welsh to both the content and overall tone of the piece, but the nastiness is balanced with something raw and human, thanks in part to the performances of Nina Millns and Bradley Taylor, who spark nicely of one another.

Hanna Berrigan’s production builds the tension gradually and avoids the overtly horrific – until the end at least – but the writing does rather overegg things at times. A sequence where the two characters break off to discuss rejection letters and the other little let-downs of life as a writer seems incongruous and the final spiralling into talk of alien gods and the beauty of mutation doesn’t seem seeded early enough. It’s a troubling piece, a disordered love story which nods to body horror, and there are some giddy passages of writing, but there’s also an issue with overall cohesiveness, kinks in the central thread, and the final reveal is slightly fumbled, lessening its impact.

Reviewed for Exeunt

The River, Royal Court Upstairs

An isolated cabin, nestled deep in the woods, the setting for so many fairy tales and horror films, makes an apt backdrop for Jez Butterworth’s much anticipated new play. The River eschews the large canvas approach of Jerusalem for something more intimate and atmospheric, but while it is a wilfully different beast, lacking the thump and rumble of its predecessor, it too is concerned with the process of male myth-making, the stories we tell ourselves and each other.

Dominic West plays an unnamed man who has brought his new girlfriend, played by Miranda Raison, out to his uncle’s cabin to – amongst other things – school her in the art of sea-trout fishing on a moonless night. Bearded, flannel-shirted and rugged, West’s character is Jimmy McNulty with a dash of Gentle Ben; he’s gruff but far from taciturn, a poetic sort, and wonderfully capable in the kitchen to boot; he even manages to make fly fishing sound appealing, like foreplay.

Ultz’s detailed design is a study in brown: a raw-walled, rustic space, all chestnut and chocolate with a convenient stash of candles and a shelf of well-thumbed paperbacks, a gingerbread room where it is forever twilight. Despite the potentially sinister setting, there are no bloody chambers in this cabin – though that beard of West’s does make one wonder – and the only guts we see belong to a sea-trout, spilling like pink udon into a waiting bucket as West prepares it for the oven, but this place does have its fair share of ghosts; there are faint traces of other women, little tokens and leavings, echoes of distant song. Conversations are repeated, like ripples, spreading outwards, and at the centre of the play there is a sense of a man circling and searching for something he cannot find – something lost, perhaps destroyed – a sense of something aching and even, perhaps, malign.

If it’s not too crass a comparison, there were times were I found myself thinking of that episode of Sex and the City where Carrie’s new chap – the anti-Big – takes her to stay in his country cabin and she, of course, teeters around on inappropriate shoes and squeals at every woodland creature that comes within three feet of her. The cabin in both that episode and here feels like a kind of audition, a test, with West’s character enjoying the game, playing his part and waiting to see how the woman in question plays hers. The early stages of a relationship can feel like a kind of theatre, with each participant acutely aware of their words and actions, and Butterworth plays on this idea of memory as something which can be sculpted but which can also haunt someone more effectively than any external force.

The River contains some characteristically beautiful writing, the play replete with shimmering images and recurring motifs, particularly during the scene where West’s character recalls the first fish he ever landed as a boy, a delicate dream of a story, riddled with the kind of intricacy that comes from retelling, an account honed over time. This image of the dying fish, twitching and slippery, echoes throughout the play, as do those of dead birds and women viewed from a distance across water.

Ian Rickson’s measured yet engrossing production is not afraid of silence. It devotes several minutes to a scene of West preparing a meal, gutting a fish and dicing fennel, dinner as ritual, the snick-snick of knife blade on chopping board the only sound we hear. West himself is excellent, as are both Laura Donnelly and Miranda Raison as the women who flow through his life. The lighting is low and golden throughout, intensifying the sense of intimacy and the mood shifts slowly and subtly from one of warmth to something more strained. The production concludes with, not exactly a twist, but a further rippling, one which slightly undermines the delicacy of what has gone before, and Rickson’s final casting decision – difficult to discuss without giving the game away – doesn’t help matters, spelling out visually what was already fairly explicit in the text.

Reviewed for Exeunt