Review Richard III

Richard III
by William Shakespeare

Living The Dream
http://www.arcolatheatre.com/

Near the end of the Arcola Theatre's Richard III we gained a glimpse of what this production could have been.

Richard (Greg Hicks) has just been visited in his sleep by those he has wronged and murdered. Suddenly the pangs of conscience cripple him. Hicks's Richard in a nuanced soliloquy envelops us with the cold sweat of the villain as both his past and future merge and he turns his frightened gaze round the audience.

It's a highlight of an otherwise mostly over-emphatic production directed by Mehmet Ergen which nevertheless has other instances of clarity and ingenuity.

Mark Jax's suddenly repentent murderer is both comic and affecting. There's a modern chime to Jim Bywater's Mayor of London, puzzled but then expediently adapting to all the twists and turns, as well as when we hear from Peter Guinness's savvy Buckingham the reaction of the London crowd and the city wives.

Annie Firbank's fine Duchess of York, Richard's mother, conveys a clear-sighted doughty aristocrat, becoming a spokeswoman for the grieving Royal widows dislodged by the son she abhors.   

However, at other times we found the inconsistency of the mash up strange and distracting.

The start of the play places us in Italian café society with Richard in black leather  - part mafiosi, part Stasi - sipping on wine and spinning a tiny top. When he stands up to the cawing of crows, we see the chain extending from flexed foot to his hands to help him walk. Bespectacled Matthew Sim as Catesby extends the sense of a Communist apparatchik or Fascist henchman carrying out Richard's instructions.     

At another time we wondered whether we were in the midst of artisans who decided a change was needed from usual mystery plays, deciding instead to put on the arch-Machiavel's story. Yet the concept seemed tried  - and then left behind.

The overpowering television-style sound effects also struck us as intrusive, sometimes unnecessarily disturbing the rhythm and tension of the play.

We've nothing against a production paced television thriller style. But we were far too aware of the sound effects rather than the sound being seamlessly part of the background. In one instance, a very loud cock crow was followed by the information that - er - a cock had crowed.

Anthony Lamble's two tier design is fine as far as the lower space goes, surrounded by the audience on three sides. However, sitting in the seats stage left, we had major sightline problems for the upper tier. The raised walkway running above our seats blocked our view of the second tier at the back of the space and the actors above mainly had their backs towards us. This felt like a thoughtless piece of staging.

Hicks certainly has the potential to be a great crow-like Richard III but we felt he was hampered by more than his chains in an uneven production which needed more variety in its pacing. Individually there were some fine performances and good moments but overall it's an amber light.

Review Roundelay

Roundelay
by Sonja Linden

A Lion Of A Play Tamed
http://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/

Even if performances of Arthur Schnitzler's La Ronde proliferate, we have a confession to make. No, we haven't made a threesome with your husband/wife/partner, TLT, the motorised dominatrix and - No, no, no! Our confession is that we have never, ever seen a production of La Ronde before.

So we were looking forward to Roundelay, a waltz of short plays linked by one character jumping from one to the next, from Visible, a theatre company of older actors. For this was inspired in structure by the risqué Viennese classic.

However having done a bit of research and on the strength of this production, we are inclined to agree with Andrew Haydon's 2009 analysis of British versions. They are just rather tame, sow's ears rather than silk purses.

For this seemed like a dutiful rather distinctive adaptation by playwright Sonja Linden. Yes, there is a would-be edgier historical, political and showbusiness subtext. Although  maybe subtext is too strong a word  - gestures towards a subtext being more apt.

We are invited in by the "ringmistress" (Clare Perkins), complete with lion and tiger tamer's whip, to the "circus of life".  Nothing wrong with a cliché as long as it's developed in more surprising twists and turns than in this production. While gestures towards a circus ring include a smidgeon of aerial acrobatics, this ring of seven plays unfortunately does not set the bar so high using predictable soap opera tropes.

Lives revolve around weddings, sexuality, divorces, illness and decline and sudden deaths with the ringmistress commenting on the interlocking tales.Again nothing wrong with that but the stories are curiously old fashioned and lack wit and originality.

While there is one business theme, noone worries about money. The expiration of a visa should feel topical but simply feels like an inserted plot device.

The piece tries hard to achieve a fable-like quality and we did wonder whether it might work better as a musical, of which more later. Still, Perkins as our hostess makes the most that she can out of the on-the-nose dialogue and wrings humour out of the interaction with the audience.   

While the circus antics and pierrot musicanship  (Ru Hamilton) inject a little liveliness into the proceedings, this feels like a play which has its structure ready-made, but doesn't know quite what to do with it.

In fact, the circus theme also feels like out-of-date whimsy, while the pierrot  draws on 1960s' Marcel Marceau's Bip The Clown act and the craze for fey miming that it spawned.

If the circus were in some way integrated into the script during the show, with a meaning for the lives we encounter, it would feel more pointed. But it seems to be an external flourish. The stories could quite happily stand without the stock worldly wisdom of the ringmistress narrator's comments.

The more colourful,  active framework with the pierrot playing a range of instruments - a highlight setting up an emotional heart sorely missed elsewhere - only serves to emphasize the plodding nature of the stories it contains

While we've said the stories are predictable, it seems a tad unfair to give them away if you want to go and see for yourself. Suffice to say, sex, desire, love and dementia are dominant threads (but no hint of the venereal disease which the original La Ronde implied) .

The strongest, most relaxed performance, and probably the most sympathetic role, comes from Annie Firbank as Evelyn the attractive widowed landlady to Francophone African architect trainee Daniel (Elan James).

It did strike us that it felt like a work gagging for some songs to inject some emotional weight. We wondered indeed whether Stephen Sondheim or similar  had ever considered La Ronde for musical theatre. Googling afterwards we found that indeed there is the possibility that A Little Night Music was influenced by La Ronde.

It transpired there was a flop 1969 musical from Jerry Douglas and Hal Jordan which ran for a total of 11 performances but it now turns out a John La Chiusa musical based on La Ronde, Hello Again, is being transformed into a movie.

We certainly had the best will in the world to see a play dedicated to the "third age" succeed and the 10-strong cast gave it their best shot.

In the end, on its own merit regardless of age, this felt like a rather effortful and, despite the addition of aerial acrobatics from Anna Simpson and plenty of red noses on display, flat evening.

The sub-Cabaret framing device needed more development by director Anna Ledwich to bring out the tiger in this work and it's a rather regretful lower-range amber light from TLT