Review The Skriker

The Skriker
by Caryl Churchill

The Goblin Free Market
 http://www.styx.space/tickets/the-skriker-at-styx

Ropes of algae hang from the ceiling - like tresses of hair from Grimm fairytale princess Rapunzel but also like  an entrance into the forehead of the young woman, Josie (Briony O'Callaghan), sitting at the bottom of the uneven plaits. 

The warehouse space at The Styx becomes a ragged stage with several banks of chairs for the audience at angles to the shadowy, sunless playing space.

First produced in 1994, Caryl Churchill's modern fairy tale intertwines cascading words, a discernable everyday world and a dark, choreographed ancient underworld. At the same tim traces of folk tales and other literature including Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market inhabit the tale.

Josie, it seems, has been incarcerated in a mental home for infanticide, the killing of her new born baby.

It's worth noting that infanticide is a legal definition formulated in Victorian times directed at women. It has the unusual distinction of being both a crime and a defence, a woman who has committed an evil act, but also a mother possessed by lunacy.

Churchill, we think, pursues this duality, a recognisable world alongside destructive, poisonous spirits. 

Between Josie, her pregnant friend Lily (Jenny Swingler) emerges The Shriker (Phoebe Naughton), a mythical shape-shifting goblinesque wild and amoral spirit and also a portent of death. She's a patient with Josie, a fretful child, a piece of furniture, a potential boyfriend for Lily,

The Shriker is a creature also both caught between and stalking the two women as Josie seeks in her desperation to shift The Shriker away from her at any cost.   

The play works like a dramatic verbal and choreographed symphony (rather like a feminine theatrical equivalent of Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, "haveth childers everywhere") ebbing and flowing,

It swirls together the elements of a world askew, psychologically, politically, economically and environmentally, a Midsummer Night's Dream without a happy ending 

Despite some inventive design and a hard working cast of almost mute sprites and spirits, it did strike us that perhaps this production was over concentrating on the look, to the detriment of the text.  

This production certainly benefits from Phoebe Naughton's dynamically malign Shriker as she slips from shape to shape. Callaghan as Josie also gives a thoughtful, intelligent performance with moments of touching vulnerability.

Meanwhile Swingler as Lily brings clarity with a down-to-earth maternal instinct amid an upside down world, tending her baby in an ominously black cradle swinging from a tree branch. 

But this also feels like a work-in-progress. There's the potential of a powerful dramatic nightmare picture book quality in the design of David Curtis-Ring. However we were often left literally in the dark. 

Indeed, we felt that less might have been more in this kind of space, allowing the audience its own mental space to think about and follow the text and choreographed parade of grotesques. It's a lower range amber light for an overemphatic production which  nevertheless has some striking moments.

Review Escaped Alone

Escaped Alone
by Caryl Churchill

Apocalypse Some Time
https://royalcourttheatre.com/

"Good fences," the American poet Robert Frost once famously said, "Make good neighbours.". In Escaped Alone, which returns to the Royal Court after a successful run in the beginning of 2016, a jaunty Mrs Jarrett (Linda Bassett) pops through an apparently random open door in a fence where, she tells the audience, "inside there are three women I've seen before".

In this way we are introduced into designer Miriam Buether's bucolic walled garden, an almost medieval oasis for three seated 70 something ladies with a chair for Mrs Jarrett as they trade gossip over tea on the state of things in their neighbouring lives.

It may not be the Bretton Woods Conference or even a Parliament of Housewives, but it is a mental and, apparently, physical space apart from the hustle and bustle of life in the street outside and their own everyday existence.

The host is retired medic Sally (Deborah Findlay) whose phobia about cats makes them sound more like an arm of state surveillance akin to computer chips than familiar felines. Gentle Lena (Kika Markham) seems to suffer from agraphobia, even if she grasps the mechanics of soap opera when others descend into emotion - "... but you're meant to think that ...". Meanwhile hairdresser Vi (June Watson) turns out to possess not only a sharp tongue but to have handled something sharper with fatal consequences.

Their superficially meandering chit chat ranges over a pot-pourri of subjects: Their famlies; carpentry; new technology; marriages - happy and unhappy -, old shillings and pence, the changing face of the High Street, the latest series (soaps and dramas rather than cricket), a snippet of an old 1960s' song that became an advert jingle earworm.  At the same time they also cover waves, particles and microbes.

A generation caught in the transition 'twixt book and screen, the women's chat is divided into sections by the outsider, Mrs Jarrett, stepping again outside the garden into a blackened space framed by red glowing skeins, possibly screen edges.

Here, outside of the blue sky women's world, Mrs Jarrett conjures up destructive visions of biblical proportions, almost like an alternative comedy standup taking fragments from our lives, recent history and turning them inside out into ironic prophesies of doom laced with wit.  

The title Escaped Alone comes from the epilogue of the apocalyptic whale-hunting classic nineteenth century American novel Moby-Dick with its ur-source in the biblical Book Of Jonah. Like the narrator of Moby-Dick, Mrs Bassett forms an immediate relationship with the audience while stepping into the walled garden and digressing into poetic monologues.

At a short, sharp 55 minutes, directed by James MacDonald, this is no Moby-Dick of a play and feels like a fragment.  But it's a sharp, satisfying fenced off little play with an inner rhythm keeping up the momentum, each of the actors as the neighbours in the walled garden having their moment in the sun. We enjoyed it and it's a green light for a Carly Churchill's secular addendum to the bible, the Book Of Mrs Jarrett.

Review Blue Heart

Blue Heart
by Caryl Churchill

The Discreet Harm Of The Bourgeoisie
 https://www.orangetreetheatre.co.uk/

Ah, it turns out Boris Johnson was only following in the footsteps of Caryl Churchill in presenting alternate scenarios in writing.

For the first play Heart's Desire, part of a double bill under the title Blue Heart, does exactly that in director David Mercatali's sparky revival at the Orange Tree Theatre in association with Bristol's Tobacco Factory Theatres.

First performed successfully in 1997 (and we suspect the politics and events swirling around at that time underpins the two plays), Heart's Desire and Blue Kettle turn out to feel just as perky in 2016.

Equally interestingly in different ways the plays leave space for the audience to almost become an expectant character, write its own script and achieve a kind of satisfying dissatisfaction with its own interpretation.

We should of course mention the plays are also very funny.

In Heart's Desire, a family on the verge of a meal together await the return of a 30-something daughter from Australia. But this becomes a kind of Groundhog Day moment without the upbeat trajectory or memory of previous occasions.

Dad Brian (a lugubrious turn from Andy De La Tour), grounded Alice (Amelda Brown) and girlish Auntie Maisie (Amanda Boxer) seem doomed to repeat the same scenario again and again.

At first the variations are obvious. The subtle rumble of a tube train (sound effects Max Pappenheim) trails a phone call any family would dread. But afterwards in the repetition controllable verbal sparring becomes more flagrantly random and is interrupted by another wildcard arrival of alcoholic son Lewis (Alex Beckett).

When daughter Susy (Mona Goodwin) finally arrives, she has the cut glass tones of a Noel Coward character before - yes, it's all cut off for another round of our expectations fulfilled and then denied.

We certainly don't want to spoil the spontaneity but a visit from a Pinteresque totalitarian bureaucrat, an outsize bird in need of a manicure and a firearms' episode all figure, along with a Beckettian-crossed-with-Kafkaesque carnivorous human version of a dog chasing its own tail.

The second play of the evening Blue Kettle eats into itself in another way. A middle-aged man Derek (Alex Beckett) sets out to con several elderly woman from different stratas of society that he is the baby each of them gave up for adoption many years previously in the hope of money and property.

But at the same time there's just a touch of the patronising superior actor or even playwright about him, policing the women thinking he can measure and control their reactions. As his plans implode, words take on a linguistic life of their own and finally break down, just as painters can eschew photographic realism with outlandish colours and disintegration on the canvas.

This is an unsettling yet invigorating evening with a fine cast in a pared-down effective set from Angela Davies and lighting from Chris Swain sharply defining scenes.

It's a green light for plays with enough of a hook in shared human experiences to wrench us out of the comic absurd into more achingly human personal and political territory of trust and betrayal.

Review A View From Islington North

A View From Islington North
Five Political Satires
The Mother by Mark Ravenhill
Tickets Are Now On Sale by Caryl  Churchill
The Accidental Leader by Alistair Beaton
Ayn Rand Takes A Stand by David Hare
How To Get Ahead In Politics by Stella Feehilly

The State We're In 
 https://artstheatrewestend.co.uk/

A View From Islington North seemed a promising title. Maybe, we thought, containing some of the irony we detected in John Osborne's lawyer narrator in the other political play seen the same day.  But what emerged was a curiously neutered set of playlets with Caryl Churchill's Tickets Are Now On Sale a slick but dispiriting reflection for us of the show itself.

For those who go often to the theatre, all these writers' names are "brands" and certainly their styles in these playlets fo the most part are instantly recognizable. Something Churchill's brief play oddly, if maybe unintentionally, reflects on.

In front of a window, with a countryside scene straight out of a healthy yoghurt or cholesterol lowering margarine commercial, sits a tall, dark and handsome man (Steve John Shepherd). A frisky blonde (Sarah Alexander), modern (she wears shapely, tight fitting trousers!) comes into his space periodically to discuss their relationship in glossier and glossier business and advertising-speak, divided by airy chimes as if sections of their love talk were an advertising break.

It's simple, quick and effective, but in the words of German poet Hans Magnus Enzenberger, We know we know ...  And all that talk of brands, well it crossed our mind, that was exactly what was happening here. Rather than a dissection of attitudes across the smallest but arguably one of the most influential constituencies in the country, the evening felt sold on names and left behind by regular topical sketch shows such as long-running Newsrevue

Like Caryl Churchill's play, Mark Ravenhill's play The Mother had its premiere at The Royal Court theatre some years ago.

Two soldiers, one an older woman (Jane Wymark), the other a young man (Joseph Prowen), have arrived at the home of a soldier to break the worst possible news to his mother (Sarah Alexander).

Well, the mother turns out to be a dressing-gowned dysfunctional, a diagnosed depressive who uses a series of expletives and reverses her status from victim to aggressor before expressing, alone, her pain. It's a good idea but the stereotype "woman on a sink estate" makes for a less than convincing satire.

In fact, the far more intriguing female character is the 50 something childless female informant, a career soldier whose few words made us wonder about her life.  And what about the toll on the informants and the relationship between them as they go from door to door, if the same folks are used all the time? 

One of three new plays The Accidental Leader by Alistair Beaton  felt like well-worn territory, ground already covered by Yes Minister and The Thick Of It when parliament as sitcom still felt newish.  Albeit even with the latter we'd already had The New Statesman and (the British) quasi satirical House of Cards An MP (Bruce Alexander) is coordinating the troops to oust the Labour leader when the best-laid plans fall apart with the biggest blow when even youngster Ollie (Joseph Prowen) understands whose goose is well and truly cooked.

Ann Mitchell's big and blowsy Russian-accented Ayn Rand considerably livens up proceedings in David Hare's riff on the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Steve John Shepherd with perhaps deliberately some of the same mannerisms as Mr Perfect in Carly Churchill's earlier piece) and Theresa May (Jane Wymark) given lessons in novelistic free market politics and economics. But once we catch on to the premise, any wit seeps away to leave only the performance (albeit a memorable one).

The reverses of fortune in Stella Feehily's How To Get Ahead In  Politics  also have a familiar feel with Bruce Alexander as an MP again but this time a successful Chief Whip protecting at any cost the party's reputation,  covering up for habitual sexual harassment offences and chronic alcoholism.

We struggled to find any conclusions or questions posed about the view from Islington North. The plays ranged from the predictable to the slick and,, directed by Max Stafford-Clark, the staging was skilfully unobtrusive. Yet it felt more like a scattergun display of wares, ending with a chorus of Billy Bragg's No Buddy, No, than pieces, either individually or overall, with real bite.  If you go, determined to be entertained by star name writers, it may well work for you. But otherwise it only just about slips into an amber light.