Review Home Truths (Cycle Two)

Veteran journalist Tim Gopsill has worked in newspapers and radio, reporting, reviewing and editing before becoming editor of The Journalist until 2009. Now, after 50 years in journalism,  he joins us at TLT Towers and reviews Cardboard Citizens' second trio of plays bringing home the struggle of finding somewhere to live.     

Home Truths
The Table by Lin Coughlan
Put In The Schwarzes And De-Stat It by Nessah Muthy
The House With The Yellow Front Door by Anders Lustgarten

The Foreclosure Of A Dream
https://www.bunkertheatre.com/

“A house is not a home, it’s a dynamic”, says the exuberant mortgage adviser Steven (Mitesh Soni) to the gullible 1980s' council tenant Michael (David Hartley), who believes him – and. more to the point, believes Margaret Thatcher – who buys his home, takes on more and more debt and ends up ruined.

The play is The House With The Yellow Front Door by Anders Lustgarten with tenants-turned-owners suddenly free to paint their entrance whatever colour they like, signifying that the property is now all theirs.

The House With The Yellow Front Door is in the second cycle of three 45-minute dramas that comprise Home Truths, a series of nine plays presented by Cardboard Citizens at Southwark's Bunker Theatre.

All the plays focus on housing problems, particularly for younger people through the 20th century up to the present day.

The obvious risk with enterprises of this kind is to lapse into didacticism or worse: propaganda. The evening opens with the company of ten players strutting through a rather predictable and wooden routine drawing on Gus Elen's Cockney music hall classic If It Wasn’t For The Houses In Between, segueing  into the first piece, Lin Coughlan's The Table, set in the south London of 1919.

But The Table is a clever and finely crafted piece, contrasting a young couple's idealism looking for a post-World-War-One Home Fit for Heroes  with a confrontation between same-sex partners in 2017 over their divergeant attitudes to housing, one being a home-maker, the other a wanderer.

The two scenes, skilfully directed by Adrian Jackson, run parallel, on the same open stage, interweaving but never confusing. There are strong performances from David Hartley again as Eddie, the idealistic husband in 1919, and from Cathy Owen as Freda, the housewifely contemporary woman.

The same two-plays-in-one format works in the second playlet, Put in the Schwartzes and De-Stat It by Nessah Muthy, which tackles the scourge of 1950s' and 1960s' "Rachmanism", named after its allegedly most notorious perpetrator.

Landlord practices to extract maximum profits included moving in nearly arrived unwitting Afro-Caribbean immigrants to force out long-standed rent-protected white tenants, stoking racial tensions in the pursuit of profit and leading to the Notting Hill Riots.

These are clues to the problematic and racially sensitive theme of the piece: the exploitation of poor people, black and white alike, by unscrupulous West London landlords in the  1950s and 1960s..

Here the two-plays-in-one are not a century apart but precisely contemporary and in the same place:  two rooms in the same building, with a black and a white couple, pawns in the same game, whose lives intertwine but never meet, not even in the final ghastly representation of the race riots.

This is dangerous territory but director Caitlin McLeod steers firmly through the racial minefield, and the piece is ingeniously introduced with pastiche Pathé newsreels projected onto the wall to establish the background.

Endy McKay and Adrian Skeete as Eliza and Lyron Emmanuel are convincing as the bewildered newcomers, a Jamaican couple who cannot comprehend the racism. “We will have to be nicer to them,” she says.

The House With The Yellow Front Door, the third play, is a parable on greed and does veer in the direction of caricature: the plausible agent, the dumb home-owner and the violent Northern Irish debt collector with his baseball bat. But this is political theatre, after all.

The strength of these plays is that they don’t preach about housing policy but use it as the setting for deeper human dramas: jealousy, envy, loyalty and moral dilemmas. It's an amber/green light for an  absorbing evening of drama about a necessity for us all.

Review The Sugar-Coated Bullets Of The Bourgeoisie

The Sugar-Coated Bullets Of The Bourgeoisie

By Anders Lustgarten 

China's Got Talent

http://www.arcolatheatre.com/

A trip to Dalston's Arcola Theatre to be whisked away to China - at least, the China inhabiting playwright and activist Anders Lustgarten's mind in The Sugar-Coated Bullets of The Bourgeoisie  directed by Steven Atkinson in this new play. 

The title is taken from a 1949 Mao Tse Tung quote warning revolutionaries to guard against "sugar-coated bullets". Although before learning that, TLT and her film buff jalopy did wonder whether it was an echo of Luis Bunuel's French film The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie - yes, we're at it again, seeing French in everything this season!

We follow the fortunes of Chinese hamlet, Rotten Peach, from 1949 to the present day on the multi-layered set designed by Lily Arnold.

A gray stone-fronted, turretted lavish home of the local potentate landlord also opens up to become a military office, a balcony for Chairman Mao and a police cell. Meanwhile on either side  of the stage, smaller sets double up as a ancestral shrine, a factory floor and a fast food outlet in modern China. 

Against this impressive, if squeezed in, backdrop, a cast of eight, some of whom triple and quadruple up, are peasants, the silk-clad landlord, policemen, factory girls, gamers and a hall-of-mirrors cluster of Chairmen Mao (the original played by Siu Hun Li).

From the beginning, we root especially for the mud-brown downtrodden peasant women -  prostitute Lotus Blossom (Anna Leong Brophy), Horseface (Rebecca Boey), daughter of an unfeeling Gao (Sara Houghton) branded by a birthmark with a clubfoot (maybe an oblique reference to foot binding)  and the downtrodden slave-wife  (Alice Hewkin) of peasant Jiao (Stephen Hoo).

And relish the brief reversal and achievement of new rights  when the People's Army in the shape of Xu (Andrew Leung) and Tang (Louise Mai Newberry) sweep into the village.  

While the agitprop influence on a political playwright like Lustgarten (who has both visited China and has a PhD in Chinese studies) is doubtless Bertolt Brecht, TLT's own little movie fan of a  People's Car told her how it called to mind  the 1937 Hollywood movie, "The Good Earth".

Not least because the play sometimes draws together situations in China and Britain, just as the film draws together China and dustbowl America.

This looking at China though a Western filter is implicitly (if slightly disingenously) acknowledged in Lustgarten's introduction to the published play.

We have always found Lustgarten's plays provocatively interesting if flawed, and this felt to us as much an excursion through different Western generations' perceptions of China, as they seek to influence and interfere, as a brisk canter through Chinese history.

While it holds the attention, it's unfortunate that, keeping up with the news, a sudden introduction of an LGBT storyline is almost the final impression left (no pun intended) of the play. Its clumsiness, artistically speaking, almost overwhelming a far cleverer and more insightful finale, a modern perversion of an "I'm Spartacus" moment,  encompassing regional competition and mass production. 

But the basic bones of a fascinating play are there, with an admirably clear summary of one history of a vast country with its global implications.

In an era when many a new work struggles to fill a large stage, it's a rare occasion when TLT wonders if a slightly revamped The Sugar-Coated Bullets Of The Bourgeoisie on a larger stage with a larger cast would solve some of the problems of pacing. And bring a new dimension to an epic struggle and ambitious play. An amber light.

Review Lampedusa

Lampedusa

by Anders Lustgarten

A Trip to Poor Law By-The-Sea

www.sohotheatre.com

Anders Lustgarten’s Lampedusa, while craftily inserting slivers of the Italian island’s history, refuses to confine itself to national boundaries but spreads its reach across the globe. 

The one-act 70-minute play of course includes the isle itself, once a  tourist paradise by the Mediterranean, now an over-burdened gateway to Europe for African, Middle Eastern and Asian migrants. Yet the piece also encompasses Leeds in the British Isles, Portugal and the West African former French colony of Mali.

Corporations and even state pension funds with so-called legal personalities as “persons” are allowed to roam the globe in search of greater revenue. But the play charts the sordid tale of the citizens, the human beings, who pay people smugglers to leave their birthplaces in unsafe boats only to drown on Lampedusa’s shores. They may flee conflict, persecution, natural or man-made disasters or seek adventure or to improve their economic lot.  

The play is structured around the monologue of two characters: an Italian fisherman Stephano (Ferdy Roberts) turned either official or unofficial (as far as we could tell, it’s never quite determined which) coast guard, recovering the bodies of drowned migrants, and Denise (Louise Mai Newberry), a half Chinese/half British female payday loan debt collector, apparently taking time off her university studies to earn money, doorstepping those who have reneged on their payments.

How reliable and verifiable what these two say is left hanging. The two stories also intersect but the characters remain apart in their own space. In one, the verdict of an inquest is never revealed, in the other we never know how many of the deaths are even registered, never mind linked to records in their countries of birth. 

Having seen the almost concurrent Shrapnel at The Arcola, TLT and her faithful four-wheeled sidekick are presumptuous enough to think they are beginning to understand how Anders Lustgarten (great name, by the way, for an English guy!) works as a playwright. 

Judging from the two plays, his dialogue, theme and characterisation are carefully balanced – not so much politically as structurally. Character, issues and history are weighed in together giving the plays a distinctive, absorbing style and emotional punch. They lay out concerns and contentions with precision and sometimes a simplicity which, on analysis, may crystallise a nexus of knotty unsolved issues.  At its best, this  provokes and makes us think, whatever one's politics, about the all-too-ominous relevance of the heartbreaking stories behind what would otherwise often be a barely-noticed fleeting headline.

With two monologues almost inevitably sometimes giving  the feel of a radio piece, the play is directed fluently by Steven Atkinson and the audience sits in an extremely effective wooden bench boat-like design by Lucy Osborne circling a mostly-bare stage.. 

And we Sherlockian pair also suspect that like Grounded by George Brant recently at The Gate, this play may need some  detective work from the audience. A digging under face-value statements, incidents  and taking in the resonance of images such as the brief glimpse of a rucksack on the back of a Leeds-based character.

In a world, some would say, thrown into disarray by economic policy, this two-hander struck us as pinpointing a grotesque Dickensian Poor-Law-type haggling between nations over responsibility for citizens. Indeed, we recalled how Charles Dickens pointed out in Oliver Twist, the deception of parish officials almost immediately after the passing of the 1834 Poor Law, when other rules regarding keeping families together clash with the Act’s contractual profit-making agenda.
 

The play neatly encapsulates two individual stories and a cultural legacy of literature and theories, all of which may have ironically partly led to this strangely modern yet also potentially backward suicidal and murderous situation in this play manacling countries around the world.

It may not suit all tastes, some of the party political jibes felt clunky and the best writing seems reserved for Stephano with his Homeric turn of phrase,  but when a play compels TLT and her automated companion to discuss, debate and, even, God knows ;), argue on the way home, it’s a unanimous green light!

PS UPDATE  It has come to TLT's attention the link to the Charles Dickens' quote on the 1834 Poor Law separation of couples and familes into "individuals", in a legal contortion to fit the paperwork after many families had been deported back to the parishes of their birth, does not come up on those new-fangled devices known as "mobile phones" ;)

One may wonder today what Mr Dickens would have made of political electioneers announcing the "slashing of inheritance tax" for (non mortgaged?) "family homes" in the estates (with otherwise no debts?) of couples (do they both have to die together?) passing to the child (the division between children is not touched upon). It is noticeable the word "couples" was used by Mr Cameron, not parents.  Anyway, the quote in full:  

"They made a great many other wise and humane regulations, having reference to the ladies, which it is not necessary to repeat; kindly undertook to divorce poor married people, in consequence of the great expense of a suit in Doctors' Commons; and, instead of compelling a man to support his family, as they had theretofore done, took his family away from him, and made him a bachelor!"

Review Shrapnel

Shrapnel: 34 Fragments of a Massacre
by Anders Lustgarten
http://www.arcolatheatre.com/

Indefensible   

What to make of Shrapnel – part sly fable, part dramatic slide presentation but also – tragically –   real-life, real-time events when a drone-inspired air strike killed 34 unarmed civilians in 2011 on the Turkish-Iraqi border?

This piece, pivoted on the Roboski Massacre of mostly teenage boy smugglers of Kurdish origin, starts with the schoolchild Kemalist pledge of allegiance to the Turkish Republic and unfurls with stately pace towards a final school register-like roll call of  victims. 

A TLT diversion: During the Cold War, nuclear weapons , if not exactly instruments of peace, were deemed  ultimate defensive deterrents. Any use of the atomic bomb would lead to  inevitable Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), went the narrative, and no side would be MAD enough to use them.  

But what if governments storing end-the-world bombs to keep the peace give way to the fragmentation of private arms firms exporting technology and weapons, picking out random inhabitants outside villages like Roboski, regardless of their rights as citizens? TLT and her thoughtful jalopy pondered these weighty issues after sitting through this aggressively fragmented play by Anders Lustgarten.  

Snapshot scenes roll out on a precise set – variously the garden of a Turkish Kurd village, the mountain passes, an army camp and interrogation chamber, a TV studio, venues for a media awards ceremony and weapons’ company shareholder AGM and the design shop floor of an arms factory.  

Wooden frameworked entrances on one side stand below a huge drone computer screen focussing on fuzzy specks – human beings -  in its viewfinder, in a design by Anthony Lamble.

Meanwhile, on the opposite side, another smaller screen, sticking out like a signpost, gives a Turkish translation of the pithy dialogue.  Interesting because, even without a knowledge of Turkish, the staccato style lends itself to the audience trying to match the English lines with the Turkish. 

Six actors take their places on the stage as narrators, villagers, Turkish soldiers, media workers and personalities, arms’ company executives, drone operatives and British technicians, all living in their own villages  around the globe. 

Director Mehmet Egen manages a tricky balancing act in a finely measured production, ranging from the poetic to the polemic. Lucid performances from a confident ensemble cast also have the benefit of carefully-judged lighting and video design by Richard Williamson and sound by Neil McKeown.  

So back to our original question: What to make of all this? It’s not a bundle of laughs but a prickly pear of a play. For even if the sweeping unfairness of Lustgarten’s “we are all complicit” provocation sets one’s teeth on edge, is it any different from the "strike first, ask questions later" nature of the Roboski massacre? Maybe deliberately too elliptic, both as Turkish history and analysis of world powerbroking and economic leverage, the fragments are still sharp edged enough  to cut. An amber to green light for a play that reveals the skull beneath the skin of new technology.