Review Albion

Albion
by Mike Bartlett

Stab In The Book
 https://almeida.co.uk/

Successful entrepreneur Audrey Walters gives up a life in metropolitan London, buying back a family home amid the birdsong of  the English countryside, bringing cynical but supportive husband Paul and Cambridge graduate daughter Zara in tow.

She becomes evangelical in her rather desperate mission to revive a once-celebrated garden created in the twilight decades of the British Empire and remembered from her youth in the 1970s.

Albion is a strange, bitter mishmash which strives to be a weighty history and state-of-the nation drama. In fact, for TLT and her own 21st state-of-the-art motorised sidekick, it felt rather dated despite the insertion of a few Brexit references.

Audrey (Victoria Hamilton), having founded an apparently flourishing furnishings business, appears to have had her head turned in a Bovaryesque way by literary romance and a very British deluded concept of family heritage.

She rushes in where many a lesser soul would fear to tread and becomes an unwitting agent of change in the village.

From the title, Albion, an ancient name for Britain also adopted by Romantic poet William Blake, you might expect an exploration of Britishness. However Mike Bartlett's drama deals more in on-the-nose (or should that be nosegay?!) metaphors and token gestures towards its many themes. 

There are plenty of literary references but nothing to copyright home about. It could have been an agile, sly but touching satire. However it becomes a scattergun, lumbering play with contrived conflicts and simplistic viewpoints.

Directed by Rupert Goold most of the characters - and they are explicitly identified with past literature and a rather troubling ultimate identification of the feminine with novelistic insanity without any proper context  - give expositional speeches.

That's all, except for Audrey's bestselling novelist friend Katherine (Helen Schlesinger) whose words, in contrast  need to be treated with caution. As with Audrey's business, the nature of Katherine's talent and her financial set up appear somewhat hazy. However she appears to churn out novels with romantic aplomb without an editor or any such mundane publishing accoutrements.

Zara (the name of a shop! the name of a royal!) has aspirations to be - what else? - a writer. Despite her mother's achievements, Zara (Charlotte Hope) embodies the work and housing problems of graduates eternally on placements, never getting a job, and sleeping on a friend's couch. Ha, another theme ticked off!

Meanwhile the garden with its tall and sturdy English oak, is haunted by the ghosts of two male wartime casualties (shades of another property-based play, Clybourne Park with its Korean veteran ghost), separated by a century.

Nevertheless, for TLT, Albion remained inorganic despite the best efforts of designer Miriam Bluether,  with a turfed traverse stage alongside lighting designer Neil Austin and sound from Gregory Clarke, to give it a cycle-of-the-seasons feel.

In its machine-like churning out of themes - and its length! - it did bear some resemblance to A Day By The Sea, currently on a run in South London - but far more smug.

While something again of a stereotype, the most interesting character and the story with the most promise is that of Krystyna (Edyta Budnik), the go-getting Polish cleaner who has set up her own efficient company.

She obviously has clients outside the boundaries of the rather tiresome house and grounds and there is the question mark over what will happen to her beliefs and business after 2019. 

Albion seems like a play that has been stretched out in all directions to be a big, meandering state-of-the-nation play, rather than growing some potentially interesting relationships into satisfying integrated drama.

The literary metaphors feel very self-consciously, rather than wittily, tacked on, so it becomes a case of spot-the-literary-reference.

The actors do their best with this big, baggy monster of a play but nothing can disguise its overblown nature for TLT and it's a lower-range amber light.    

Review Against

Against 
by Christopher Shinn

A Silicon Valley Candide
https://almeida.co.uk/

In a world of quicksand, more and more divorced from "real" life by the screen, Luke emerges to tackle Something Big.  

We know tantalizingly little about him. He's a new tech billionaire. He's built his fortune on rockets, solar power, artificial intelligence. He was born abroad and his Dad died when he was young. 

And, he says, God has spoken him directly and told him to go where there is violence. 

Christopher Shinn's new picaresque drama is itself tantalizing and frustrating. It's set in America, a country which has always been an artificial construct of affiliated states. Once, it could be said, the perception of citizens was that the country was bound by the American Dream and family values. 

Now, this play seems to say, it's perceived as bound by motiveless violence and corporatism. As a college student says after a tutorial which has turned from her work to the social network of the tutor, "It feels off".

Shinn has written a play and a series of encounters where everything feels "off", where technology and higher education instead of increasing discovery and a sense of community makes everyone, whether they like it or not, adopt a self-enclosing agenda.

Ben Whishaw plays Luke who grows  literally more and more self-conscious as the story progresses. He's not so much a messiah as an ideal of neutrality and empathy which in the end he cannot possibly sustain.

In a world increasingly dominated by the binary and virtual reality which nevertheless cannot deny the frailty of flesh, Luke emerges unknowable and yet a human being brought up in strange times. 

A world where everyone can tell competing stories but many feel they have no voice. A world of ruthless competition, often under an over-polite exterior.  

Luke's journey starts in his own workplace and ends in the corporate warehouse of a business rival. His encounters begin with the parents of a schoolboy who has gone on the rampage at his school. 

Then a prison where a prisoner has become a victim. Here he also meets the gun-toting father of a child abused by a basketball coach before he moves on to a college campus with a history of mishandlng complaints of rape where a student latches on to him. 

He then listens patiently to the Big Ideas of a client of a drug dealer. His journey ends in an Amazon-like warehouse where the employees, at the mercy of an arbitrary hierachy where many are bosses but nobody is the boss, wear Guantanamo orange polo shirts packing goods and pricing them.

If this all sounds intangible, TLT has done her job in conveying what Against feels like. It has the sterile atmosphere of a human being, the undoubtedly delicately charismatic Whishaw, enmeshed in a computer game going from level to level. 

As is TLT's wont, she wondered whether it would work better on screen. Yet the play, directed by Ian Rickson, does remain, or maybe is pulled back to be, distinctly theatrical in shape even if it starts with a typical police procedural or TV news story crime scene. 

But, despite the fine performances and a structure shaped for the stage, it's also deeply unsatisfying at a rather deep psychological as well as theatrical level.  Maybe it's because it manipulates vocabulary and character in a rather algorithmic way.

Besides Whishaw, there's intricately calibrated work from Naomi Wirthner's anguished mother of a killer,  Kevin Harvey as a rather dangerous professor in charge of student minds, Adelle Leonce as a conflicted warehouse worker, Emma D'Arcy as the student who becomes a boy scoutish acolyte of Luke and Fehinti Balogun, as the fellow student of the school shooter, who admits to trying to manipulate his friend's emotions.   

There's pared back design by ULTZ using the brick walls of the  Almeida - a simple wooden floor, often only chairs and eventually a white bed rising up in the second act keep it simple. 

Yet this is a play and a Candide-like fable in the end held together by characters and their traits while the plot remains not just elusive but irritatingly so. It's an amber light.

Review Ink

Ink
by James Graham

It's The Sun Wot Won It
https://almeida.co.uk/

At this very moment one of the UK's main news agencies is developing robot reporters for local news coverage.

James Graham's Ink looks back to another age when reporters on local newspapers were hungry to reach Fleet Street, every newspaper had its own watering hole and the print unions in control of the hot metal ruled the roost. More ink and less inc.

And The Sun newspaper ousted The Mirror, grabbing its traditional working class reader base as Britain's bestselling newspaper after new proprietor, Aussie outsider Rupert Murdoch, took over in 1969.

Ink charts the transformation of The Sun from an ailing left wing broadsheet to a cheeky chappie, aspirational tabloid with its infamous topless Page 3 model, focussing on Murdoch (Bertie Carvel) and, above all, its first editor, the son of a Yorkshire colliery blacksmith, Larry Lamb (Richard Coyle).

We're in at the start of a legend, that of The Sun, and also just before Margaret Thatcher's ascension to Prime Minister and the move to Wapping where the play ends.

Ink mixes variety japes - it even begins with the old Max Bygraves' catchphrase "I wanna tell you a story" - with the towering personalities of owner and editor as The Sun became "The Soaraway Sun".

Yet Graham's and director Rupert Goold's approach feels scattergun. There's an introduction to reporting through the five W's of journalism - What, Who, Where, When and Why - for the unintiated.

Giant Ws then remain on Bunny Christie's deliberately and evocative ramshackle two storey offices. Murdoch and Lamb dine out on lobster (although documented as true, it's ironic as lobster has its own place in newspaper slang) in a Covent Garden restaurant where they map out the future of The Sun.

Murdoch of course gives Lamb, at last in a prized editor's chair, an impossible deadline which he fulfils in equally ramshackle fashion. Lamb gathers together a group of journalistic ne'er-do-wells and sidelined hacks, apparently after Fleet Street veterans with bulging contacts' books had rejected his offers.

There's certainly a feel of the mix of older oddballs and new generation hacks and photographers with the heady rush of ideas, plucked out of the air or the result of expediency,  at the first editorial and executive meetings. The musical hall/variety thread continues with pop ditties of the time and the cast, caught up in the euphoria of the moment, breaking out into song and dance.

But, despite darker true episodes with the abduction of the wife of a Sun executive, Ink never really digs deep and is more of a scrapbook than an integrated play.

As is sometimes perhaps inevitable with real people in the frame, the performances of Carvel and Coyle as Murdoch and Lamb at first do feel studied. However they do eventually come into their own as personalities on stage in their own right.

As we've indicated there's the trademark Rupert Goold song and dance with choreography by Lynn Paage, but this sometimes feels like wallpaper for a lack of strong story narrative. Many of the jokes are heavy-handed. It's broadbrush and often fun but never seems truly to bring together a substantial story.

It's the clever characterisations from the strong cast that hold it all together - besides Coyle and Carvel, there's David Schofield's Mirror old guard Hugh Cudlipp, Tim Steed's fastidious deputy editor Bernard Shrimsley while Sophie Stanton is a firmly feminist women's page editor in a man's world, Joyce Hopkirk and Pearl Chanda is the first Page 3 girl, Stephanie Rhan.

Ink is mostly bright and breezy and also gives due regard to a tragic episode, but it never really amplifies its tale, preferring often to make passing references than to be truly thought-provoking. So it may not make the colour scheme with any tabloid revamp but it's an amber/green light.  

Review Mary Stuart

Mary Stuart
by Friedrich Schiller
A New Adaptation by Robert Icke

A Matter of Speculation
https://almeida.co.uk/

It starts with the spin of a coin. The same trick as the matches in the RSC's Dr Faustus but this time cast in female mode with a coin - the decision of who gets to play victor Queen and who gets to play victim Queen. Except in its sober suited arena, a modern political court, in all senses of the word, the role of the coin, of currency adds a contemporary sense of the precarious.

We must confess (it's not a beheading offence!), we'd heard but never read or seen Friedrich Schiller's 1800 verse play, so we bring an eye unversed in other versions. On press night, the resonant "Heads" meant that Juliet Stevenson undertook the role of unwed Elizabeth I and Lia Williams that of the thrice-married and widowed doomed Catholic Scottish Royal, both with short hair, mirroring each other in matching silk shirts and trouser suits.

This is a deft production - a male cabinet government led by a woman, who knows exactly when to glance into the mirror of her compact, takes measured and then increasingly agitated steps across the round wooden stage to spindly metal benches at its edge (set and costumes Hildegard Bechtler).

The curved brick walls of the Almeida both serve as the prison of Mary and enclose the machinations of Elizabeth's court.  Screens chart the compressed time line with a rumbling soundscape in the background (sound Paul Arditti). Director Robert Icke's verse adaptation has an admirable clarity and the modern references are sparse and judicious.

Elfin Mary has been incarcerated with her maid Hanna (Carmen Munroe) for nearly 20 years, having enchanted one jailor (Alan Williams with an old Labourite "This House" vibe) , she must start once again with his more rigid, worried replacement (Sule Rimi).

Her calculations in the world of flux, where she ended up by accident not design on Britain's shores, mean  she claims the legal status of modern international victim rather than nationalist political power player. Nonethless, unlike Elizabeth, she was recognized as legitimate and a Queen from her birth.

Schiller, a Protestant republican in a then patchwork of royal and ducal German states, had lived through the age of the American Independence and the hope, then terror of  revolution in neighbouring France, providing a power vacuum for Napoleon's rise.

So we were interested to see Schiller's take on a turbulent piece of British history. or rather English and Scottish history. As a whole, the Almeida Mary Stuart is lucid and gripping, but in an arc where the faults, foibles and humanity in the two women are kept mostly binary.

There are flashes of anger, unruly emotions rising up in the two women, which feel dangerous and reckless. The reluctance of the more dry Elizabeth to be directly connected through paperwork and action to Mary's death slices through the centuries to current times.The reminders that Mary is a younger, more attractive model.

But we are looking in on life and death issues turned into a political thriller where the parliamentary career politics of our time somewhat overwhelms the differences between the women.

So it is the fictitious character of unstable Mortimer (Rudi Dharmalingam), introduced by Schiller as the nephew of Mary's jailor, who injects a rush of passion into this version. And it is because of him that we feel most keenly the manic flipside, focussed on the female body, of the cool conspiring male court.  His character also felt to us the most successful nexus of age old and modern concerns.

The subtle choreographed movement, the exaggerated courtly bows, the increasing theatricality to mask political manoevres and executions are visceral and resonant. And reticence and accuracy are no protection  as courtier Davison (David Jonsson) discovers.

Visually the move from the illusion of rational cabinet government to a masque dictatorship, where the familiar trappings of the Virgin Queen nevertheless indicate powerlessness rather than power, is another nimble piece of staging, even if we weren't convinced by the accompanying song.

We, of course, only saw one configuration of the relationship between Mary and Elizabeth. And our appetite is now whetted to see other interpretations of the same play. We give an amber/green light for a modern dress Schiller thriller which proved thought-provoking and multi-faceted for our first encounter with the German playwright.

Review Richard III

Richard III

by William Shakespeare

Hard Hatted Richard

http://www.almeida.co.uk/

Would any Royal parent even consider naming their kid Richard? It doesn't look like we'll be having Richard  IV any time soon with William Shakespeare's fictional creation colonizing our minds for centuries.

Then again, we haven't had a James recently either, so that debunks that theory - a bit like Richard III Shakespearean literary theory - a view  pushed forward, then replaced by another but its reptilian hide can take whatever current fashions throw at it.

For if you remember, the skeleton of Richard complete with poor twisted spine was uncovered in the full glare of the media spotlight in 2012 and it is with a re-enactment of this image that the Almeida production directed by Rupert Goold begins, together with an audio snippet of a BBC news report.

Indeed the last Plantaganet king's lair and Kingdom is sunk far below the Leicester City Council car park on the Islington stage with a giant drill bit, or is it a outsize crown - or is it a UFO - suspended on high?

For TLT and her cohort-in-crime have to admit they spent the first twenty minutes or so of this Richard III trying to work out exactly what Hildegarde Bechtler's design was. 

Luckily it didn't distract us from following the twists and turns of the legend that is Richard  (Ralph Fiennes) but we did find this a strange production.

We are all for innovative settings and time mash up, but we think we should have been more caught up in the play rather than our brains working overtime to decipher what the setting and the costumes signified. 

The turtle neck jumper and dark suits? Is this some gesture towards Jan Kott's Shakespeare Our Contemporary, a glance towards communist totalitariansm? Or is it collaborationist France or some computer game mash up where skulls are collected on the back wall? Still the final battles are satisfyingly in full armour with a particular burnished glow.

When Richard comes forward on the dimly lit stage and grasps the audience by the scruff of the neck, "determined to prove a villain", it feels like a coherent take on the play. The drills have unearthed a cave where Richard is destined to act out his villainy again and again, trapped in his own subterranean theatre for time immemorial.

But a diplomat he ain't. Sure he confuses young Lady Anne (Joanna Vanderham), widow of Prince Edward (senior) whom he has murdered, but he's - literally - up front about the unadulterated power he has over her and she's far more coerced than reluctantly charmed.

It's not only the audience that understands his double dealing (even though sitting mid stalls a couple of times we missed the action in a pit in the stage because of poor sight lines) but all the characters,  perhaps not realising howfar he can and does go. 

In this stage world of uneasy alliances, the ascent to power starts with his own brother. Clarence (Scott Handy) does not believe his sibling would betray him, not so much out of filial ties but he cannot see the advantage to Richard. When faced with Richard's treachery, he, entirely plausibly and calculatingly, pleads for his life and never loses hope of living on before he is drowned (we won't spoil it for folks who don't know the exact method).

Do we admire Richard in this production? Perhaps if we had not seen other productions or read the text it would have fallen better with us. But there is a lot of use of types and tropes familiar from TV and cinema which do not serve the detailed ambiguities of this devilish Shakespeare text. He does not seem so clever but more a man of brute force on the verge of lunacy by the end whom others allow to gain power by either backing down or thinking they can use him.

Our couple of moments of empathy were physical. During horseplay after the young Prince Edward and the Duke of York (Lukas Rolfe and Oliver Whitehouse on the night we attended) arrive on the scene when the whole audience gave a collective "ouch" as the weakness of Richard's body was exposed. And just watching Richard sitting in profile, the furrows of the lines in his forehead deepening as he planned his next move.   

The expedient world of murder continues when the murderer (Daniel Cerqueira) brings into  the Royal boardroom a head chopping block as if it were a portable barbecue, just a tool of the trade purchased from a famous shopping website. The victim this time is Hastings (James Garnon), too busy always looking at the latest gossip on his mobile phone and finishing off the paperwork to catch the zeitgeist and threat around him.

There are plenty of such individual performances which catch the eye and ear but to our mind the production failed to hang sufficiently together overall The distraction of wondering why oh why sometimes just became too much.

Just why, oh why, was Vanessa Redgrave as Queen Margaret dressed in a boilersuit? But hers was an interesting interpretation, a dementia grandmother, yet her first exit conveying it was perhaps a front to save herself when she could not save other wives and mothers from her sidelined fate.

The two other female roles, redhead Queen Elizabeth (Aislín McGuckin), widowed by the death of King Edward (David Annen) during the play, and the Duchess  of York (Susan Engel), mother of Edward, Clarence and Richard, are both distinctive presences, sharply defined. 

Nevertheless, again they suffer from having to compete with a production filled with recognizable types and tropes, however well performed,  from TV and cinema, which simplify the nuances and ambiguities of the Shakespearean text.

At the same time, Buckingham (Finbar Lynch recently seen in the National's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom) is a compelling partner in crime with Richard, held like the murderers by Richard's purse and promise of future rewards. 

This is an extremely clear production with flashes of sound in between, and sometimes during action in, scenes like a Law and Order episode. 

Its point may be the flattening over the centuries of Richard's flesh and blood into literary legend with television last in a long line of culprits. However ending the play with the 2012 excavation did not leave us with a rumination on the vagaries of power or Richard as the villain having all the best tunes or the fate of women in the play or how literature or vested interest history has treated Richard..  

Rather we wondered whether it will work better for us when it is an NT Live broadcast and we shine an amber light on this Richard III of great clarity set in a surreal landscape.     

Review Uncle Vanya

Uncle Vanya

by Anton Chekhov

A New Adaptation by Robert Icke

Here's Johnny

www.almeida.co.uk

Uncle Vanya gets a meandering updated filmic treatment in Robert Icke's new adaptation which he has both adapted and directed. While this is a British accented production, this struck TLT and her little gas guzzler as having an American setting.

Icke translates Uncle Vanya into Uncle Johnny, as apparently Vanya is a diminutive of Ivan, the Russian enquivalent of Russian equivalent of John. 

Paul Rhys's Johnny almost appears to have stepped out of a celibate Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf. The same simmering frustrations of academic and sexual jealousy directed against the returning widower  Alexander (Hilton McRae) of Johnny's late sister, a professor of the Arts, now remarried to the much younger beautiful disenchanted Elena (Vanessa Kirby), reminiscent of a Hollywood starlet in sunshine yellow later turned to bohemian black.

This could almost be an artists' or academic or, dare one say it, actors' commune in its final days with Johnny and his niece Sonya (Jessica Brown Findlay), the daughter of the first marriage managing the day-to-day running and financial affairs against the overwrought backdrop.  

Set on a stage revolving (creakily like cracking branches) by increments, the wooden pillars at each corner enclose the space designed by Hildegard Bechtler with multiple resonances of time and place.   

Michael (Tobias Menzies), a doctor, tends but despairs of his patients, his heart in conserving the forest and future vistas ending the play with a Chaplinesque touch, balancing a globe. Impoverished Telegin is transformed into Cartwright (Richard Lumsden), the Bob Dylan emulating neighbouring landowner.  

These are baby boomer characters all left cut adrift, as the elderly professor proposes to sell the estate, not in his gift to sell, along with the old Nanny (Annie Queensberry) with her knitting and offers of tea, bringing the farmyard into the house in the shape of a (well-trained!) red rooster.

It is an adaptation with a neat turn in humorous bathos as the awkward group bring their fragile egos to the farmhouse surrounded by animals and woods. Chekhov's play itself was adapted by the original playwright from an earlier version, "The Wood Demon" and Johnny's increasing dishevelment and the characters' Caliban-like animal positioning pinpoint the forest magic.

Almost all the roles carry equal weight until the final scenes with characters jumping down from the revolve to reveal their inner thoughts in monologues under spotlight. It is an adaptation and sometimes it feels that Chekhov's irony is lost and the hurt distanced in favour of a new story.

But the growing anguish of Rhys in the title role from measured administrator to maddened holy idiot as if wrongly accused of failing in life is finely judged.  And his mother Maria (Susan Woodridge), acolyte of the professor, with her androgynous short combed back white hair and glasses could equally be a party apparatchik of the 1970s as well as the protector of an academic or even acting theory.

It comes in at nearly three and a half hours so plan your journey home carefully. Still, it's divided into acts broken up by 10 minute intervals, although  it felt as if the farmyard herd was being orchestrated outside the play within the crowded confines of the Almeida as we all rushed out for drinks and a comfort break and then back!

Intriguing and reflective, this production held us just on the right side of languor as it weaved its spell. It doesn't replace other versions but it's a green light for an ensemble rumination on the strangeness of modern life.