Review Insignificance

Insignificance
by Terry Johnson

Starry, Starry Night
https://www.arcolatheatre.com/

Who is imagining whom in Terry Johnson's flirtatiously symbolic 1982 piece Insignificance where Hollywood, politics, science and professional sport all collide?

On an evening in 1954 in a New York hotel room, the heavy-drinking Senator (Tom Mannion) is confronting the German-born Professor (Simon Rouse), denigrating him as a "Yid".

However, the politician is shrewd enough in his small-minded way to understand the capital to be had from the celebrity scientist's attendance to promote the profile of the House Of UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings.

And after the senator temporarily leaves, whoosh! In blows the platinum blonde actress (Alice Bailey Johnson). She, in turn, is eventually pursued by her heavy-hitter, in all senses of the word, sportsman husband (Oliver Hemborough).

It is of course rather disingenuous of your starstruck reviewer, who is not even  a front for anybody's organisation or cartel 😉, to leave the characters unnamed.

Except she is following the example of the playwright. For Johnson carefully keeps his toolbox of characters representative, cherry picking and jumbling details of many lives hooked in to the recognizable celebrity images who inhabit the space-time continuum in the play's Manhattan hotel room.

In this 1950s' parallel universe we cannot know if we are confronted by the spitting images of or the "real" Nobel prize winning scientist Albert Einstein,  Hollywood sex bomb Marilyn Monroe and legendary sportsman Joe DiMaggio.

Meanwhile the 1950s' villain-in-chief Senator Joe McCarthy sometimes also has difficulty separating the Hollywood double from the real thing.

Are we to believe it is a biographical episode? Is it a honeytrap using a Hollywood sex symbol to force a chain reaction for the naming of names during the Red Scare?

What is significant and what is insignificant?

Originally premièred at the Royal Court directed by Lee Waters with Judy Davis, Ian McDiarmid, Larry Lamb and William Hootkins, some aspects of Insignificance now feel dated.

The concept of starry icons brought down to earth is no longer a novel one. Bio-plays and films are now all the rage. In our internet age, imagining encounters between famous people in out-of-character circumstances does not feel outrageous.

Still, Johnson's kaleidoscope still does have something to say in our times where the precarious nature of America's celebrity shop window royalty is even more apparent.

However David Mercatali's production seems uncertain and is uneven in quality.   

The first act has some wavering accents and an opaque scientific (literally) Mickey Mouse demonstration which doesn't completely convince. To be fair, though, we are generations on from audiences knowing Walt Disney truly once was the conveyor of popular science to the masses, so maybe some of the double-edgedness is lost.

The cast feels much more at home with the emotional truths of the second act than the caricatural media images of the first.

However one act needs to bat against the other, politically, historically and dramatically, for the play to succeed. In short, the chain reaction doesn't consistently spark here and it's an amber light.

Review The Marriage Of Kim K

The attractive concept of a reality TV musical and Mozart opera mash-up is marred by technical sound issues, finds Peter Barker.

The Marriage Of Kim K
Music: Stephen Hyde
Words: Leo Mercer

Spouses Settling The Score 
http://www.arcolatheatre.com/ 

The timeless themes of love and relationships underpin this musical riff on reality television's "famous for being famous" Kim Kardashian's brief marriage to a basketball star.

The Marriage of Kim K is a clever attempt to fuse old and new - Kardashian's nuptials with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's and Lorenzo da Ponte's The Marriage of Figaro.

It's a marvellous idea with new compositions from composer Stephen Hyde, who also directs and stars, and lyrics and book from Leo Mercer. A flippant tale of celebrity culture plays alongside the Count and Countess Almaviva in the eighteenth century opera.

We follow the lives of three couples in three different, yet linked, domestic situations characterised by three different musical styles. The couple on a sofa in New York, the celebrity couple in Los Angeles and the Count and Countess in Spain.

The design by Anthony Newton divides the stage into three - the metropolitan apartment of the New York couple, the Kardashian and Humphries media blitz in Los Angeles and the Seville of the original Mozart opera.  

This set enables the action to go to and fro and run in parallel, kicked off by the different priorities of couple lawyer Amelia and composer Stephen - she is hooked by Kim's appearances on TV, he's untouched by celebrity culture and wants to listen to Mozart.

Meanwhile Kim Kardashian (Yasemin Gulumser) and sportsman Kris Humphries (James Edge)  have a tempestuous time in their private lives, publicly expressed on social media. Back in Spain, Count and Countess Almaviva  are similarly having a bit of a barney.

However the major problem of the evening (and it is a very big and unavoidable problem) was an extremely dodgy sound system, the microphoning making unintelligible much of the story and the satire of The Marriage of Kim K.

This was very frustrating, especially as iy appears to be a show full of invention directed by Stephen Hyde who, also merging life and reality, takes the part of composer Stephen with his real-life partner as his wife Amelia who also happens to be called Amelia Gabriel.

The real Stephen also has composed the music, a mixture of classical, pop and electronic,  played by a band of cello, violin, viola, percussion and keyboards.

The Marriage of Kim K is part of the Grimeborn opera season at the Arcola Theatre but the majority of the cast are from musical theatre who don't emerge well from the sound problems.

Emily Burnett as the Countess stands out among the singers. However it is noticeable she and Nathan Bellis as the Count are the strongest performers -  and the only trained  opera singers amongst the cast.

In true opera buffa style, the audience thrills at the wild swings of emotions and a satisfyingly neat and emotionally fulfilling conclusion. There was enough energy to intrigue me at times, but the overwhelming sense was of unfulfilled potential.

Even though it's a good idea and the second act was an improvement on the first, the technical blunders make it a red/amber light. 

Review Three

Three 
by Sophie Ellerby

What Will Survive Of Us Is Love
http://www.arcolatheatre.com/

The future seems brighter than ever before for one family.

A call centre promotion is in sight for eldest Rochelle (Alice Vilanculo) who is going steady with policeman Dan (Emanuel Vuso).

Carefree schoolgirl Tia (Ikra Ali) is on the cusp of womanhood and her 16th birthday. Maybe the middle sister Jaz (Courtney Spencer) is drifting and a bit wild, but they're all looking forward to Tia's birthday party and, even better, their Dad, released from prison, is going to be able to join them.

But that same night their lives are torn apart by a terrible event, family relationships shattered and the three young women are tainted by association, although entirely innocent.

Director Anna Niland orchestrates the 19-strong cast in a play which, while covering a range of issues, manages retain the emotional core between the three sisters at its centre.

Three is a full-length play lasting just over two hours  with actors about to graduate from the National Youth Theatre's Playing Up scheme.

There's an impressive debut by Vilanculo as the rock of the family who finds everything she thought of as solid crumbling away. There is also a delicate performance from Ali as the youngest who has to grow up quickly, while Spencer convinces as troubled third sister Jaz

But the other actors in supporting roles are also equal to a thought-provoking, ambitious piece. Jordan Bangura and Dionne Brown as an expectant young couple, Abby Russell as the publicity hungry call centre boss and Aston McAuley as a grieving son impressively mix humour and seriousness.
   
It's a tribute to the writing, directing and acting that it was only late in the play that TLT realised the drama draws loosely on the structure and characters in Chekhov's The Three Sisters. Playwright Ellerby manages to make the story her own, looping in issues but keeping the situations real with all the question marks hanging over them.

Niland carefully paces a play, veering towards screenplay with its quick-cut scene changes, drawing it back into a theatrical experience alongside movement director Kane Husbands.   A police raid and the increasing media spotlight are ingeniously and economically evoked. 

The set designed by Kate Lane makes full use of the Arcola Space. The main stage is flanked by two spaces, stage left and right, in the midst of the audience - a bedroom on one side and a bench on a patch of grass on the other.

On an upper tier composer Roly Botha like a club DJ controls  the inventive and affecting soundscape, put together with John Castle who also does lighting,

We saw it on the first night of a three-night run until July 22 and the flaws were minor - the occasional dropped voice, perhaps understandable as well with the televisual nature of Ellerby's sophisticated script.

This is an intriguing and substantial set of emerging talent, both in the acting and the script in a play which uses rather than is controlled by cliché to become truly poignant and searching. It's a green light.

Review These Trees Are Made Of Blood

These Trees Are Made Of Blood
Book by Paul Jenkins
Music and Lyrics by Darren Clark

That Was The Kidnapping And Murder That Was
http://www.arcolatheatre.com/

The legacy of the Cold War years in South America is still very much with us with issues unresolved.

In 2015, director Amy Draper with writer Paul Jenkins and songwriter Darren Clark set about putting on stage "a political musical cabaret" about the Mothers Of The Plaza de Mayo who still stalwartly protest against the terrible abuses of the Argentinian regime at that time.

We didn't see The Trees Are Made Of Blood two years ago, but now the team behind the show, led by the same director, has revived it on a two-tier cabaret stage, designed by Georgina Lowe and Alex Berry, at Dalston's Arcola Theatre.

The headscarved women in the Plaza are the mothers of "The Disappeared",  many of them student activists, abducted by the military, raped, tortured and murdered in numbers estimated, according to Wikipedia, at anything from 7,000 to 30,000 between the 1970s and 1980s during Argentina's "Dirty War".

TLT has to be honest that she found the portrayal of these terrifying times channelling a nipple-tassel drag act, magic, stand up and turns seemingly trying to emulate the Cold War era British show That Was The Week That Was less than compelling.

Yet like many a musical, it's the book rather then  the music, lyrics, musicanship and singing, arranged by the composer for the band of Rosalind Ford, Neil Kelso, Eilon Morris, Anne-Marie Piazza and Josh Sneesby, which is the weak link.

The British creators  of These Trees Are Made Of Blood (a good title but rather at odds with the cabaret concept) are undoubtedly passionate about the subject. Even so, the cabaret veers  towards the generic. It feels  as if it is borrowing its cabaret structure rather than finding its own shape and voice.

In giving little or no hints about previous Argentinian history and culture, this piece, despite all the subsequent disturbing delving into the torture chambers, feels  uncontextualised and even sometimes skewed. So, for example, a British aspect to the story late on probably unintentionally gives Britain an almost heroic status. 

The combination of satirical cabaret and the more straightforwardly affecting tale of mother (Ellen O'Grady) and daughter (Charlotte Worthing) also sits rather awkwardly together.

Yet in the latter tale, when the General with great coat and epaulets who hosts the Coup Coup Cabaret and perpetrates countless crimes, is reduced to an aged civilian in a cardigan and slacks, the narrative has the potential to become piercingly insightful.

However reduced to the thinnest outline, with too neat an ending, this part of the play was almost  drowned out by the preceding sometimes over-egged cabaret set pieces.

There are still  more thoughtful, ambiguous lines within the cabaret. For example a mother-in-law joke indicating the deep structures of anti communism and a lawyers' network geared towards cover ups - but it feels too much like a throwaway line rather than hooking into the story,

OK, not all the audience have lived through the age of the  books, newspaper articles and documentaries which emerged some years ago covering the subject. These Trees Are Made Of Blood is certainly a solid introduction to this shameful history.

Nevertheless it could be a lot shorter and more pointed with the songs part of a tighter structure.

The problems, which have also now emerged concerning the children of kidnapping and rape, the grandchildren of the Mothers, are not even touched upon. It therefore feels merely expedient to take what should be a heartfelt slogan "Never Again" to end suddenly a meandering book and we give it an amber light.    

Review Combustion

A new play set in Bradford entertains Peter Barker while tackling difficult issues with comic flair. 

Combustion 
by Asif Khan

Life In The Fast Lane
http://www.arcolatheatre.com/

The dilemmas and quickfire situations in Asif Khan's fast paced and good-hearted drama Combustion follows an honourable tradition, even if a higher profile for British Asian playwrights is only just emerging.

Showing working class regional life and masculinity, Khan is occupying a similar space to Scottish playwrights John Byrne (Slab Boys) and Peter McDougall (Just Another Saturday, and Just a Boys’ Game) from a previous generation.

Khan wittily examines the lives of contemporary working class British Asians in Bradford and their reaction to religion and the racism swirling around them. The religous tensions and violence are key parts of  both Khan’s world as it is, for example, in McDougall’s Glaswegian Orange Day march world in Just Another Saturday.

Combustion has a five-strong cast, starting out in a Bradford auto-repair garage during the Ramadan month of fasting..

The play is set against the background of  an English Defence League march leveraging the maximum amount of hate from a scandal involving the grooming of under age girls and the convictions of several Asian men.

Shaz (Beruce Khan) wants to make a success of his late father’s car repair business with his friends Ali (Rez Kempton) and Faisal (Mitesh Soni) as mechanics. Shaz’s sister Samina (Shireen Farkhoy), a student campaigner against racism, is determined to demonstrate against the EDL march and give a speech.

Mechanic British-born Faisal is considering a move to Pakistan, the birthplace of his father, away from the racism he has suffered in Britain. Ali, belligerently opposed to the rise of the fascists, is thinking of marrying Samina.

A tense atmosphere in the city turns to violence when ranting racist EDL supporter Andy (Nigel Hastings) turns up out of the blue and is assaulted. Approached by Samina, he nevertheless unexpectedly agrees to talk - or argue - with her.

The fast pace of action sees all the characters going through radical changes. Beruce Khan is charismatic as Shaz, with both Soni and Kempton also showing confident comic timing. Farkhoy gives good value as the gobby, Northern girl grappling with politics.

However as a northerner who lived in Yorkshire for several years, I missed the lyrical quality of northern spoken language, while Khan did capture much of the wit. Also, if all these people are from Bradford, why are their accents different?

Still, director Nona Shepphard keeps the pacing fast and tight, even if some of the shifts in plot seem rather implausible. Designer Mila Sanders ingeniously uses the Arcola studio's brick walled space as the basic set of  an auto workshop where tables and chairs  double up as other props such as cars and fridges. Khan’s writing is funny and often sharp in a play which faces the issues head-on, deserving an amber/green light.

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 The Plague

The Plague
after La Peste by Albert Camus
Adapted by Neil Bartlett

The Cycles Of History
http://www.arcolatheatre.com

A couple of days after Marine Le Pen, French presidential candidate, denied French state culpability for the rounding up of Jews and imprisonment in the Vélodrome D'Hiver in 1942, the French cycling stadium, TLT and her four wheeled buggy went along to Dalston to watch Neil Bartlett's adaptation of the 1947 novel The Plague.

It was rather eerie watching and hearing this tribunal-style drama and chronicle of contagious disease, written as fiction by Albert Camus,  a metaphor for amongst other things, the step-by-step poisoning of the atmosphere before the occupation of France and its colonies and the reaction of the population including post-war denial.

Of course there is always the question "What would you do?" and there is currently a play touring a about the occupation of Jersey where some UK citizens hardly acquitted themselves with glory.

But TLT knows for a fact that it was far more step-by-step -  refugee Jews were already rounded up in 1940 before the German army invaded Paris under the pretext that they were originally from "Greater Germany". In reality the were mostly stateless Jews and the women were put in the "Vél' d'Hiv'".

While this round up was more hysteria by the authorities after the invasion of France than  direct murderous intent, it was the first step towards isolating a portion of the Parisian population. 

We say this not to boast about our knowledge (although maybe that's part and parcel of being a reviewer ;)) or to condemn the French. In this play (we haven't read the novel), Camus, a Franco-Algerian was probably reflecting on the fate of the Algerian city of Oran. But it also seemed to us to trace the steps towards and then away from what had happened to Paris during the Second World War, the capital of France and a symbol of something much more than France.

The play begins like a modern press conference or, superficially, public enquiry: five citizens sit at a long table with microphones in front of them. Doctor Rieux (Sara Powell) , Mr Grand (Burt Caesar), the town hall registrar of births, marriages and deaths, Raymond Rambert (Billy Postlethwaite), a journalist, Jean Tarrou (Martin Turner), a seemingly affluent outsider with Spanish friends who lives in a hotel and Mr Cottard (Joe Alessi), a doomsayer who discovers an unexpected talent for profiteering during the plague.

The Doctor leads the enquiry from her notes, setting the agenda, as she relates the initial signs of dying rats, the first victims including an infected landlord and eventually how the city becomes a closed off ghetto and a police state.

We couldn't help thinking, despite a well-paced production directed by the book adaptor, Neil Bartlett, using the lighting of Jack Weir and sound of Dinah Mullen to maximum effect, this felt like a radio play. In a way that we never felt, for example, when many years ago we watched Peter Weiss's verbatim courtroom drama The Investigation with Rwandan and Congolese actors.

We also felt that some of the ironies and ambiguities, which surely are present in the novel, are lost on stage.

For example, the armed police entering the poorer areas, where "Arab" immigrants also live, and dragging out people, to the pleas of their families. Surely it is also about the potential for the abuse of and settling of scores with some of the uninfected under a pretext of being infected?

The rat may also well be a carrier of plague but its association with Jews and Soviet Communists would not have been lost on a 1947 readership.

Maybe it works better in musical adaptation as a trawl of youtube uncovered a 1960s' choral work The Plague using some of the novel's words.

Still the sincerely intense diverse cast gives the sense of a modern city. In fact, the term city state, with many cities now separate business entities, does not go amiss in our times and the carrying on, having to stop for some kind of hell and then resuming business as usual has a clear resonance.

We wondered whether we could even detect a more literary antecedent in its ironies with the 17th century La Fontaine satiric fable Les Animaux Malades De La Peste (The Animals Sick Of The Plague).

There's certainly a poetic rhythm to the play at the Arcola  Dr Rieux has seen the writhings of the dying, joined a committee, kept knowledge back along with other doctors, watched as the panic circulated in rumours and eventually emerged in the newspapers, the setting up of quarantine camps and experienced the failure of a pharmaeutical serum, seeing a child die in agony.

Finally she expediently recites scripted blandishments to aid the psychological reconstruction of a society and to fit in with the world status quo, saying:  "... when you live through the time of plague, ... there is more to admire about people than to despise or despair of." This is an intense and thoughtful play, even if as a theatrical experience, not totally successful and we award an amber/green light.

Review Tamburlaine

Tamburlaine
by Christopher Marlowe

War Games
http://www.arcolatheatre.com/

If there is one thing that defines Christopher Marlowe's take on Tamburlaine, it is a rumbustious manipulation of the exotic and the violent to titillate audiences.

So it seems very unusual for an East Asian theatre company Yellow Earth to strip the tale of the nomad Mongol conqueror Tamburlaine of its oriental context and place it in something sounding like an English boarding school for the well-to-do, abandoned to its posh, affluent students by its teachers.

In this version Tamburlaine (Lourdes Faberes) becomes a kind of sadistic Flashman left to run riot through the dorms. This does not imply a criticism, it just feels rather disorientating, while adding a visceral post colonial subtext. 

In fact this turned out to be a fascinating evening, albeit with a few longeurs as the catalogue of conquests is played out - the Scythian shepherd comes, is mocked by incumbent rulers who are then promptly conquered.

The cast of six, five women and one man, in an adaptation by director Ng Choon Ping, are mostly clad in tight fitting jodphurs and riding boots as if Mummy and Daddy has paid the extra fee for riding lessons or even as a passing reference to Jilly Cooper's bonkfest Riders with its fetishizing of belts and riding crops.

In fact, this is all a perfectly legitimate interpretation where the focus in the dramaturged text is on a feudal hierarchy upset by the newcomer, who having the means to enter this world, conducts his campaign with a wry serial savagery.

The two blood-and-thunder Marlowe plays about Tamburlaine have been concertinaed into two and a half hours. Tamburlaine starts off the glossy, self-conscious strutting young warrior dressed in slinky black with a silver dagger at his side and ends the weary patriarch with riding crop who has stormed through empires and transgressed religions.

Along the way he entices Theridamas (Amanda Maud) to switch sides, cages Turkish Emperor Bajazeth (Melody Brown) and Empress Sabina (Susan Hingley), slaughters pleading virgins

The action plays out on a bare stage with marbled floor and a back wall of white squares with projections naming characters when it's needed as the actors metamorphosize from one role to another.

There's a glimpse of Edward II in Lee Wan's Persian Emperor with sly costuming in the shape of a black crown with the chin strap of an Asian rice hat (design by Moi Tran). .

Yet there are also times when the staging is a little too subtle and cryptic for its own good. The sudden insertion of  a Billy Holiday jazz number and deliberately fuzzy projections of a singer and saxophonist felt just a little too cryptic.

There is, however, a nice line in sardonic wit in the costuming and addressing of the audience. The call of Zenocrate (Fiona Hampton), who becomes the reluctant consort of  Tamburlaine to save her life, for a girdle is answered with an ingenious prop.

It's a brave venture to put on the epic Tamberlaine in the Arcola's smaller space with six actors and it can be a bit hit and miss. But the stylistic mash up and exceptional Taiko drumming soundscape created by Joji Hirota do make for an evocative, often exciting and unsettling production.  So this Tamburlaine eventually conquered TLT and her chariot who pay homage with an upper range amber light.

Review New Nigerians

New Nigerians
by Oladipe Agboluaje

Trading Places
http://www.arcolatheatre.com 

An ebullient if uneven satire has landed in Hackney in the shape of New Nigerians, a dissection of political jockeying for power and deal making in Africa's most populous and oil-rich country. 

We enter this world through presidential hopeful Greatness Ogholi (Patrice Naiambana) practising his speech as the sole socialist candidate and reaching beyond the stage, speaking directly to the audience to bolster his electoral support and dream of a united Nigeria standing behind him.

The practicalities are handled by a savvy pot-smoking female colleague Chinasa (Gbemisola Ikumelo) with her own virtual Twitter and familial power base, holding her own in her inimitable way despite the male-dominated set up.

Meanwhile Ogholi finds himself thrashing out a pact with rival party businessman politician Danladi Musa, once a mortal enemy, and union leader Comrade Edobor (both played by Tunde Euba) to gain power. But he always has nationalisation, free healthcare and free education cemented in as cornerstones of his political agenda.

Briskly directed by Rosamunde Hutt, this is a garrulous, atmospheric play and production, almost bursting at the seams, resource-rich with issues, events, ideas and setbacks besetting an emerging economy.

Ironically Nigeria's name was coined by a female journalist, a distant cousin of playwright Bernard Shaw. For behind the gaudy facade and broad humour, Oladipe Agboluaje has written a quasi-Shavian play of ideas, ideals versus expediency.

Ogholi's ideals become a drill in political rhetoric,  "It is time we see our elite for what they are: a parody of our Western counterparts, rentiers and middlemen who sell off all our resources ..." But at the same time, the parody works as a two-way mirror, with echos within the play of a leadership deal allegedly struck over restaurant napkins for 'an electable candidate' in the much smaller country which was once Nigeria's colonial master.

Using our old ally Google, we also find the play is bang up-to-the-date about Nigeria: minimum wage, the foreign currency squeeze after the fall in petroleum prices. As well as on-going issues and trends such as the health travails of the President, Boko Haram, the threat of breakaway states, the division between Islam, Christianity and the atheism of the old radical left, the position of girls and women, the rise of hashtag online politics overtaking even the offline intersection of football and politics.

We do have our own particular issue over Chinasa's supposed enjoyment of a sexual practice converted into a gag but this may be part of a drug haze male delusion. Structurally also the play sometimes seems to lose its way in its effort to cover a lot of ground and run Ogholi's marital problems as a parallel plot, but it is redeemed by the brio of the characters and the vitality of the subject matter.

If the meaning of the term 'new world order' has always been nebulous, surely many imagined after the collapse of the Soviet bloc that the nation state and supra-national organisations would fill the vacuum.

Instead, many would say, the current state of flux is more in tune with Margaret Thatcher's comment, in hindsight double-edged, in the 1980s equivalent of a twitter feed, magazine Woman's Own: 'There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first'.

New Nigerians stays energetically in the African context as a reflection on the state of the world. It's certainly raw and not without its flaws but it's an amber/green light for its vigorous embrace of matters which affect us all.

Review Drones, Baby, Drones

Drones, Baby, Drones
This Tuesday
by Ron Hutchinson and Christina Lamb
The Kid
by David Greig

In The Drones Club
www.arcolatheatre.com/

 "If you could register the Predator for president, both parties would be trying to endorse it." So spake US senator Bill Bilbray back in 2011 to the LA Times - Predator being a make of unmanned drone missile.

Well, on the eve of the Tuesday American presidential election, TLT and her automotive weapon of constructive criticism made their way to the Arcola Theatre for a double bill under the collective title of Drones, Baby, Drones.  

This Tuesday by Ron Hutchinson and Sunday Times journalist Christina Lamb tackles remote control warfare in a political thriller format running in real time. A female government adviser (Anne Adams) suppresses her maternal instincts when faced with staying by her druggie daughter's hospital bedside or getting the face-to-face go-ahead from the President for a drone strike to take out a terrorist attending a wedding in Pakistan. It's deliberately hard to differentiate whether she's insanely high on the adrenalin of the chase, even at the cost of being with her child, or if she has a unadulterated wish to defend the nation.

Meawhile, married Doug (Tom McKay), about to attend the meeting promoting the strike,  extracts himself from his habitual tryst in the Watergate Complex with his student intern lover Meredith (Rose Reynolds) who challenges him over his deception of his wife and the killing of many innocents along with individual guilty terrorists - but without changing anything for her or anyone else.

Across town, two men compete and lay out opposing arguments during an early morning basketball workout for and against using unmanned missiles rather than Special Forces' "boots on the ground" to take out the terrorist.

As they change from sports wear to formal dress, the lover of ancient Greek classics with the strange rhetorical phrasing turns out to be a general (Sam Dale) while the younger man (Raj Ghatak) falls into line as the hispanic adjutant captain handing him the file for the meeting

Despite clear and effective direction from Nicolas Kent to lift a dramatically static script, this portion of the evening feels under-achieved, even if there is an interesting, couched attempt to cover  what drones have meant in the past. However there's no doubting the power of the final image when those about to lead the President into a decision to strike line up outside, presumably, the Oval Office.

The more successful and interrogative play is David Grieg's The Kid (a title with both movie and sacrificial connotations), directed by Mehmet Ergen. A pair of military drone operators (Anne Adams and Tom McKay) and their respective partners (Joseph Baldramma and Rose Reynolds) have come together on comfy sofas over popcorn and wine.

Shawna and Pete are relaxing, having just completed a seemingly surgically successful mission and are eagerly grilled by Ramon, thilled to be six degrees of separation away from the "boom".

Pete and Alice have their own happy event to announce. However Alice, who at first seems the voice of common sense Alice-in-Wonderland logic and a moral compass, comes to realise the implications. Her attempt, as those around her sit passively, to reconcile her life with drone warfare spins the compass into unreason.  

Using his trademark verbatim theatre, Kent introduces the real-life figure of civil rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith (Sam Dale) at the start and before the second play to bring to our attention  the waiving of all regulations over the CIA, as opposed to the Pentagon, drone programme and also the criteria for British involvement, just in case we think that it's all the Americans. 

The title Drones, Baby, Drone comes from a 2011 quote  at a Washington DC event, with hefty corporate sponsorship, raising money to distribute to families of CIA officers killed in action.  Robert Gates, the then Republican Secretary of State for Defense, ended his speech on a high, using hippy language to tell the assembled diners: "“So from now on, the watchword is: drones, baby, drones! 

However, The Arcola has previously covered the same subject in Anders Lustgarten's visceral Shrapnel, over at the Gate Theatre, there has been George Brant's Grounded and going further back there's even been Joe Penhall's Landscape With Weapon at the National Theatre.

Nevertheless, the unknown quantity of  an impending new White House incumbent  may have created now an added urgency. There's a strong cast for Drones, Baby, Drones  - over both plays Joseph Balderrama stood out for us as a convincing legal counsel and drone pilot's excitable partner.

The production uses drone-style black and white camerawork videos (lighting and video design by Richard Williamson)  to ram home that in the end everyone could be vulnerable, but the first half of the evening especially needed a more original, less schematic premise.

The sometimes subtle, sometimes not so subtle insertion of literary references overall made us wonder at times whether the plays together would push also towards George Steiner's suggestion that, far from acting as a civilising influence, immersion in literature and, by extension, intellectual pursuit in any field can have a dehumanizing effect. Yet this never quite comes to fruition.

At the same time, as the use of remote control drone technology, passing over into the private sector, is ratcheted up in every aspect of our lives and with the ushering in of a new Presidential era, this may still prove a timely piece.  It's an amber light from your own peacenik, if unelected, duo.

Review The Kreutzer Sonata

The Kreutzer Sonata
by Leo Tolstoy
Adapted by Nancy Harris

Legal Fictions
http://www.arcolatheatre.com/

Sometimes it helps, when writing our little critiques, to sum up a play in an imaginary news headline. In this case, "Councillor stabbed wife after finding her with piano tutor" Or maybe not ... For like most news stories confined to a headline and a few paragraphs there's something more to this case.

That passenger, opposite you in the train, turns out to be the released local government official. Why has he been released so early? And his defence, the provocation of his wife seems a little rich. .

Pozdnyshev (Greg Hicks), part of the landed gentry and trained in law,  buttonholes you in the carriage chugging across the Russian countryside.  At first he's intent on emptying his pockets - the Swiss fob watch, the silk handkerchief, the expired first class train ticket.

It's a virtuoso piece for an actor - a monologue play driven by music and with much in common, we thought, with Robert Browning's My Last Duchess where the power of art spills  into real life - but through an unexpected byway - with tragic results for the woman.

When the novella, which writer Nancy Harris adapted in 2009 for this monologue,  was first published in 1889, Tolstoy, the father of 13 children borne by his long suffering wife Sofiya, found himself at the centre of a storm. Indeed there seemed to be almost a tug of war between admirers such as the Tzar himself and the condemnation of  Russian and American censors.

And just as the Russian ruler and societies based on an institution of marriage, which Tolstoy viewed as destructive, were at odds over a piece of art, Pozdnyshev is split. Over his not unusual first sexual encounters in whore houses before meeting an innocent wife in an arranged marriage whom he first views as a timid gazelle trained to entrap and then, as the years progress, as a coarser creature.

We have to admit it took a while for us to feel caught up in this monologue - it had the feel at times of a radio piece. It took the combination of Beethoven's radical sonata with its violent duelling and sexual undertow and a surge of words turned into actions to turn it all around into a thrilling crescendo.

Backed by pianist Alice Pinto and violinist Phillip Granell, the mania of  Pozdnyshev, clearly driven insane by jealousy yet ironically in his acquittal protected by the law, does indeed  tear down  marriage as a financial and dynastic institution, even if it takes the ripping of a frail female body to do it.

The woman who has done her duty and given numerous heirs finally, it seems for a brief moment, could settle down to enjoy music for its own sake tutored by Pozdnyshev's childhood friend. A woman who seems wilfully determined not to live out the stereotypes of literary adulteresses but ends up a corpse with her posthumous public image shaped by her lawyer and local politician husband.

For all that, it seems an odd choice for adaptation even if it makes a change to be faced with a mad husband rather than a mad wife - in terms, that is, of playwriting tropes.

It did feel to us somewhat overlong, even though every word had its place in the build up to as guesome and visceral layer by layer description of a murder as ever we've heard in any play. But it also meant we pondered inordinately as well on matters such as, did they really have boiled broccoli in nineteenth century Russia? It's not meant to be facetious, just our honest experience of the piece.

Nevertheless in the end the clenched jaw and hurt, savage eyes of a character who could be termed a legal murderer under the direction of John Terry just about swung it dramatically for us and it's an amber light for the train - eventually - reaching the platform.

Review Cargo

Francis Beckett experiences the lives of young refugees forced to flee their homeland and plunged into uncharted waters. 

Cargo 

by Tess Berry-Hart

It Could Be You

http://www.arcolatheatre.com

When the lights go down at the start of Cargo in the small Arcola studio, they leave us in complete darkness – not the semi-darkness we expect in the theatre – and they leave us there for what seemed like minutes, but was probably only seconds, hearing only what sounded like a vast engine. 

When at last someone spoke, it came as a relief. I was tense, and had a little of the child’s fear of absolute darkness, just as the writer and director had intended I should be. 

I had a small inkling of what it might be like to be young human cargo, trafficked in darkness from the unbearable to, if you are lucky, the merely unpleasant.

Playwright Tess Berry-Hart is also coordinator of Calais Action, which takes necessary supplies to refugee camps. She has visited camps in Northern France, and the characters in Cargo are based on the children she met there.

The twist is that her play is set in the future, and the sectarian civil war her characters are fleeing takes place not in Syria or Iraq, but England. 

It’s not such an outlandish idea, especially post-Brexit. As one of her characters says, we fear refugees because they make us realise how fragile is our own peace and comfort. It’s Iraq and Syria today – largely, as Sir John Chilcot has reminded us this week, because Britain destabilised Iraq in 2003 – but there is no reason why it should not be us tomorrow.  

It is an interesting idea, and Cargo is a very good play.  It’s not a perfect play – the story is a little disjointed, and there’s the odd moment when you think: no, she wouldn’t do that. But it tells a strong story, and the characters are real people you can believe in and care about, brought to life by four talented young actors, Jack Gouldbourne, Debbie Korley, John Schwab and Milly Thomas. 

It’s directed with earthy intensity by David Mercatali, and is well suited to the small, cramped theatre space of the Arcola’s small studio.  The action, set in a container ship in a set designed by Max Dorey, is always very close, and frequently the actors move within touching distance.

Just once, I rather regretted that.  I chose a seat right beside a vast cooking pot, not knowing it was the pot which was to do duty for the refugees’ lavatory. I discovered this when Debbie Korley made a very realistic show of emptying her bowels six inches away from me. 

So here’s a green light to rush off and see an excellent production of an intelligent play; but  take my tip, and avoid the corner seat in the front row on the left hand side, furthest from the entrance.

Review Kenny Morgan

Francis Beckett is engrossed by the relationships at the centre of a new play about the fate of celebrated playwright Terence Rattigan's young lover.

Kenny Morgan

By Mike Poulton

The End Of The Affair

http://www.arcolatheatre.com

The playwright Terence Rattigan had a long love affair with a young actor called Kenny Morgan. Morgan left Rattigan for a younger, bisexual actor who in turn left him, and Morgan killed himself in 1949. On this basis of fact, playwright Mike Poulton, who adapted Wolf Hall for the stage, has built a fine, gripping, sometimes very funny and occasionally flawed play directed by Lucy Bailey.

The three men at the heart of the love triangle, on whom the play depends, are carefully and sensitively drawn so that we care about what happens to each of them, and they are brought to life in three fine performances: the wealthy, slightly cynical but ultimately caring and vulnerable Rattigan by Simon Dutton, the louche young lover Alec by Pierro Niel-Mee and the clinging Kenny – the most important of the lot, and the hardest, for it’s very easy to lose patience with people who wail “But I love him!” – by Paul Keating. 

The minor characters are a different matter. There are two small parts for women, and they are both sloppily written. 

Kenny’s landlady is a monster in her scenes in Act One, and then all motherly concern at the end of Act Two, with no plausible explanation for the change offered; Marlene Sidaway does the only thing she can do, which is to say her lines with total conviction.   

The young woman Alec sleeps with has one brief scene when she is required to stay on the stage far longer than is plausible because it suits the author’s convenience. Lowenna Melrose performs it well, but can’t make it credible.

Kenny’s neighbour Mr Ritter is a Jewish refugee, a struck off doctor – we never quite understand why he was struck off. He is there principally, I think, to make the point to Kenny that Jews in Germany just half a decade previously had no choice but to die; while Kenny has the choice, and talk of suicide is somewhat self-indulgent.

 “Are you a psycho-analyst?”   “No, but I was brought up in Vienna.”   

George Irving plays him thoughtfully, but gives him an accent which I could not place - not the light, charming Mitteleuropa accent he would actually have had.

The only minor character who hangs together, and whose back story we understand, is Kenny’s other neighbour Mr Lloyd, well played by Matthew Bulgo.

Mike Poulton has given us a good play, but with a little more attention to detail he could have given us a better one. 

Characters light cigarettes in a room which, we have just been told, is full of gas, where no one should strike a match; Kenny’s backstory – since this is 1949 and he met Rattigan ten years ago – must surely include time in the army, or time avoiding going into the army, but it is never mentioned; doctors cannot be called out because they have to be paid for, but this is 1949, and the National Health Service was founded the previous year, still a cause of wonder, awe and gratitude.

Taking these factors into consideration, this play is too flawed quite to deserve top marks. So, it's an amber/green light for Kenny Morgan, but a good evening in the theatre all the same.

Review After Independence

After Independence

by May (Mwewe) Sumbwanyambe

The Lie Of The Land

http://www.arcolatheatre.com

The country, a former colony, at first is unnamed. A farmer's family, husband Guy (Peter Guinness), wife Kathleen (Sandra Duncan) and daughter Chipo  (Beatriz Romilly)  all born in Africa, alone on their farm in the bush. 

Any night time rustle may signal imminent danger, not from nature but from maurauding gangs of former soldiers. And the name of the farm? Independence.

Part family saga, part fable, we learn eventually this is modern Zimbabwe with a civil servant (Stefan Adegbole)  making the trek to the farm with an offer to buy. An offer, so far, refused.

We never learn the ins and outs of funding and earning from the farm in a post colonial state. But this gives the play an archetypal feel and greater reach, stretching beyond Zimbabwe with implications of post colonialism for economies, property and families further afield..

This is the debut produced full-length play from May Sumbwanyambe. It sometimes feels  like an apprentice work, as put together as a film script rather than theatre. but it has a pleasing clarity and intellectual rigor which keeps the attention.

At the same time, there is a tendency to over-explain and some clunky symbolism loaded mostly upon the mother Kathleen.

Yet focussing as much on young Africans, black and white, as the legacy left by older generations, it is directed with clever stylistic precision by George Turvey. 

The lingering poses of the actors  convey the vast vistas,  entrenched self-dramatizing positions, alongside centuries of resentments . The enclosed wooden crate design by Max Dorey lit by Christopher Nairne also allows a feel of the ample raw resources, punishing labour and the open spaces beyond the wooden slats.

So it's a curious mixture of the over emphatic and the skilfully placed justaposition. The struggle for rights may be, as forcefully put, about the struggle for land. 

But there is also a recognition there are some legacies of colonialism that are not just a matter of simple ownership reversal. A hint of the new tribe, having emerged  from  European exploitation,   in the  double edged comment of the daughter Chipo to bureacrat Charles:

"My family line may not go back in this country as far as yours, but we are all seedlings from the same tree, Charles. Only some are dark and some are light."

The myths of two separate peoples, in reality yoked together, clash in this intriguing if flawed work. Meanwhile the current predatory global  search for property, whether for individual or collective enrichment, make the disquiet over  government, employment, business, contracts and disenfranchisement hit close to home. An amber/green light.

Review Richard II

Richard II

by William Shakespeare

Through The Looking Glass

www.arcolatheatre.com

Order, order! Along to the Arcola Theatre cum House of Commons for this updating of Richard II for the Netflix, boxed set generation directed by Jack Gamble and Quentin Beroud.

It's a pared down version, structured around 24 hour BBC-style breaking news (video design: Sofi Berenger), shoehorned into a US-type political thriller format along the lines of the West Wing or House of Cards (US or UK).

After the death of a political heavyweight, King Richard (Tim Delap) is called on to arbitrate between his two cousins, Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk (David Acton), and Harriet Bolingbroke (Hermione Gulliford) - the latter a blonde female power player, all sharp suits and stilleto heels. Richard fails to grasp the threat posed by this family rift and leaves himself open to rebellion and a coup.

It's a pity the reimagining remains so reliant on pre-existing formats. For  looking more closely at the parliamentary set up, the bars, the debates and question times, the division bell and so on might have reaped benefits for the logic of the tale.

As it is, we have to accept a parallel universe where cousins like Cameron and Johnson (yes, they really are cousins!) do not simply jibe with words and where murder is not out of place.  Where (the closest to a death-in-office we could think of) the death of a party ;leader like John Smith is definitely not from natural causes.

The play starts promisingly with Shakespeare's own lines talking  of receipts echoing the expenses' crisis and disenchantment over a country "leased out", giving reasons why the nation might be ripe for change.

But it's the characters who are more credible than a shaky political drama format and this unbalances the play. Nevertheless, Hermione Gulliford is a striking tactical female Harri Bolingbroke.

Her ascent up the greasy pole gives the play its trajectory and allows also a tantalising glimpse of Richard's wife Isabel (Natasha Bain) as a politician trying to galvanise her born-into-the-role husband.

Yet the change of sex for Bolingbroke also sets up scenarios which feel, to us, like missed opportunities.

When Richard is dislodged by nefarious means, we were waiting for a glimpse of vulnerability from Harri. As a woman in a violent man's world, a politician who fears the situation has run away from her and the possibility striking her she might be being used and could be sacrificed.

But this never materialised and the transfer of power for Harri appears a seamless upward trajectory  regardless of gender.

Ignore the plot holes, concentrate on character,and you can appreciate the disciplined, careful performances, including those  of Tim Delap's Richard II and  Hayden Wood's Bagot, even if they feel sometimes out of context. 

This looking glass world is just a little too cracked and undetailed to hold our attention as a story. Still characters do have resonance, so in the end an amber light.