Review Hir

Reviewer Peter Barker relishes a vivid satire charting the transformation of a dysfunctional Californian family.  

Hir 
by Taylor Mac

New World Disorder
https://www.bushtheatre.co.uk/

Hir is a provocative and darkly funny look at nation, family and masculinity in contemporary America. It's also one of the highlights of my theatre year so far, thanks to a witty script, taut direction and four outstanding performances.

Isaac Connor is an American marine who was previously tasked while stationed overseas with gathering body parts of military casualties for repatriation.  Now he himself is repatriated, discharged dishonourably and back home.

He had left an identikit Californian working-class family home in an identikit working-class suburb, albeit on reclaimed landfill.

His father Arnold struggled to make a living as a plumber. Sister Maxine was a tomboy on the cusp of adolescence. Isaac's mother Paige, a battered wife, was also beaten down by the sheer bloody awfulness of it all.

Isaac left home to fight a war and he appears to have come home to another one, as gender roles are reimagined and past wrongs revenged.

His mother Paige has thrown off her shackles and ruthlessly rules the household, while father Arnold, cut down by illness and bizarrely costumed by his carers, now sleeps in a box, fed illicit female hormones mixed with his prescription stroke medication.

The soldier's sister has become his brother Max with the Hir of the title being the preferred pronoun, a mixture of his and her, for the transgender sibling.

However, playwright Taylor Mac, a Pulitzer Prize nominee, has created a surreal comedy for serious purposes. He uses this gender change and violent family chaos for a pungent state-of-the-nation analysis after decades of no-wage growth and, yes, the death of the American Dream.

Indeed I felt it has a parallel in Requiem For A Dream, the movie from Hubert Selby Jr's novel chronicling the personal and national drug-fuelled undercurrents in US life. 

Arthur Darvill plays out the trauma as bewildered war veteran Isaac, with his disorientation powerfully culminating in a fit of visceral violent rage.

Ashley McGuire’s mother is a grotesque but uttering some of the funniest lines. Yet she also has a justified anger while providing a tough foil and strop for Isaac’s rising emotions.

As Isaac's made-obsolete father, Andy Williams has a powerful, near-mute brooding presence suffering fresh daily humiliations at the hands of his newly liberated spouse.

Griffyn Gilligan's teenager is the distilled symbol of change in Hir, able to use hormones purchased on line to transform hir-self but writer Mac manages to take all the changes within the family to unexpected places.

Designer Ben Stone's traverse set forces the audience to face each other  across the battleground of a prefab home in disarray that, like the family, has been beaten up and is falling apart.

Nadia Fall directs this kitchen-sink satire with gleeful discipline, keeping up the laughs and, especially in the second half, its anarchy, tension and adrenalin-fuelled pace.

In the end, it seems as if Isaac may be America's sacrifice just as another biblical Isaac is Abraham's intended offering. Unlike his namesake, Isaac Connor may never be able to surface from the chaos around him, yet the fate of his mother and sibling at the play's finish hangs tantalisingly up in the air.

For all its mining of serious issues, Hir remains an absurdist social comedy - if an unsettling one. It finally transforms itself into a green light meditation on a grotesque topsy turvydom reflecting individual, family and national upheavals.

Review Guards At The Taj

A tale of 17th century young soldiers experiencing comradeship and peril guarding a shining jewel of India architecture exposes for Francis Beckett something about our times.  

Guards At The Taj 
by Rajiv Joseph

If You Seek A Monument, Look Around
https://www.bushtheatre.co.uk/

The fine new £4.3 million theatre space the Bush now has at its disposal is perfectly suited to this stark, simple two hander by American playwright Rajiv Joseph about two soldiers assigned to guard the Taj Mahal while it is being built, and to make sure no one sneaks a look at it.

After its construction in 1643, there is a story that the emperor Shah Jahan had the architect killed and cut off the hands of all 20,000 construction workers, so that nothing of comparable beauty could ever be built again.

Most historians seem to think it’s not true, but it’s believable of an absolute ruler who flung all the resources of his country into a monument for his favourite wife, and it makes a marvellous premise for this play.

For me, the great thing about this 80-minute drama is that the two young men, who must keep their backs to the building they guard and never look at it, on pain of death; who are subject to brutal and arbitrary discipline, and who serve a brutal and arbitrary emperor, and who are eventually assigned to cut off the hands of the workers, are just two ordinary young men.

Humayun and Babur are friends, who care about each other, one more rebellious and adventurous than the other, more inclined to believe that those in charge know best.  They have moments of black, unintended humour:

“Wait, wait, wait. He’s going to cut 20,000 hands off?”

“40,000.”

The theatre space fits the play like a glove, with a little help from designer Soutra Gilmour and director Jamie Lloyd who build the oppressive environment in which the two young men laugh - and fear.

But this is a play which depends crucially on the two actors, and it is blessed with brilliant performances, sensitive and sure-footed, from Danny Ashok and Darren Kuppan.

The chemistry between them is just right, and whatever terrible things either of them do, we care what happens to them, from the moment we meet the two young men to the moment they lose each other.

They may be in India in the 17th century, but they could be from Wandsworth this April.

As definite a green light as I’ve ever awarded.

Review Right Now

Right Now

by Catherine-Anne Toupin

Translated by Chris Campbell

 

Noises Off 

www.bushtheatre.co.uk

 It's a tough life as a famous literary character. One century  you're pushed down  a rabbit hole, then narrowly escape losing your head. And just when you think you're safe from out-of-control monarchy,you step through a looking glass. 

And when you survive that, some playwright not content with leaving you on the bookshelf, gives you a twenty first century makeover as a bourgeois stay-at-home hallucinating, silk dressing-gown-clad  housewife.

Originally entitled A Présent,  this 2008 French-Canadian dark farce has now received an English translation from Chris Campbell as Right Now, possibly giving it a  political slant.

Doctor's wife Alice (Lindsey Campbell, last seen by TLT in The Harvest with the same director) spends her life currently sleeping and dreaming fitfully on the couch in an apartment she and her husband have themselves apparently given a chic makeover despite only being tenants.  

Life seems to follow mechanically the same pattern: Hubby Ben (Sean Biggerstaff) goes to work at the hospital while Alice either dozes off or, far more worryingly, is plagued by the sound of an offstage crying baby.

Until  a sudden knock at the double doors draws the couple into the surreal erotic world of vampish Juliette (Maureen Beattie), apparently newly returned from travels with suavely lustful author-come- medical researcher husband Gilles (Guy Williams) and oddball grown-up son, still-living-with-the-parents, François (Dyfan Dwyfor, also in The Harvest) across the hall.  

Fluidly directed by Michael Boyd, the production benefits from a simple but evocatively coloured set from Madeleine Girling, psychologically visceral lighting from Oliver Fenwick and the hint of ballet mécanique in piano interludes from David Paul Jones.

With French names retained for all except the doctor, it's a studied "what if" 80-minute without interval piece. Maybe in addition to literary and surrealist painting references, there's a cinematic touch of Gaslight,  So Long At The Fair  and Belle De Jour, made somewhat predictable by signposting near the beginning of the play the exchange at the end.

But for all that, the predestination, gallery of grotesques and mirroring gives an energy to the performances and the play, despite some sagging in the second half,  before the finale marked by perfect symmetry. An amber light for a piece where everything slots into place.