Review Ready Or Not

Carolin Kopplin finds a new play by a Bruntwood Prize-winning playwright touches on urgent issues of isolation and community in the age of social media.

Ready or Not
by Naylah Ahmed

Virtual Truth
https://www.arcolatheatre.com/

When a young man knocks on the door of a retired primary school teacher in a British suburb, he little expects to be lured into a home-made torture cell.

Yusuf (Adam Karim), a Muslim, is collecting signatures for a petition against drone warfare. His captor, Pat (Joan Blackham), has seen news of yet another terrorist attack, this time in the German city of Frankfurt am Main.

One of the perpetrators has supposedly fled to the UK and Pat immediately suspects Yusuf to be one of "them".

This political thriller by Naylah Ahmed deals with how "We have to be vigilant" can mutate into violent paranoia fuelled by the bubble of social media and "alternative facts".

Blinded by her addiction to the internet, fake news and her own anti-Muslim prejudice, Pat puts her thoughts into action by taking Yusuf as her hostage.

She interprets his refusal to eat her oxtail soup, along with his traditional garb, to be further proof of his guilt. She destroys his mobile phone with her cricket bat and pours the oxtail soup over his head.

Yusuf remains admirably calm and tries to reason with his captor, to make her see him as a fellow human being: "There aren't just ISIS and western warmongers, there's stuff in between".

There is humour in these exchanges but, under the circumstances, they do not come across as particularly funny, even if one views the play as a dark comedy.

As Pat and Yusuf debate terrorism and security, drone warfare and collateral damage, Pat's temper occasionally flares up and she turns to home-made torture instruments, including a bowl of dishwater, to get back at Yusuf.

Some of the argument seems rather stilted even though valid points are made. Yet Yusuf's memories of growing up with the sense of being an unwanted stranger in his own country does feel very real as is Pat's antagonism towards people who do not conform to her narrow ideas of being British.

The play raises some very important questions but Helena Bell's production lacks tension and cohesion. The intense dialogue between Yusuf and Pat is interrupted by video projections with voiceovers, featuring letters from Pat's late son Jack, from whom she was estranged, that were never sent.

Just when there seems to be some kind of rapport between the two characters, their conversation is interrupted by an interval that precedes the arrival of a third character.

Jack's girlfriend Holly (Natasha Rickman) enters. Whilst Yusuf is locked up in the cellar, the focus shifts to the relationship between Pat and Holly, bickering about Jack's letters.

Joan Blackham convinces as Pat, now grieving as she lives cut off by choice, her life ruled by the internet and fake news. Adam Karim gives an engaging performance as outgoing Yusuf, eager to communicate with people to reach a better understanding.

Sophia Lovell Smith's set is very plain, a domestic space where a person just exists, not really lived in or cherished as a home. Although the voiceover and letters disrupt the trajectory of the play, Daniel Denton's video design is skilful.

This is an intriguing drama raising vital issues. Even if the playwright would have done better to keep the focus on Yusuf and Joan without an interval, it's an amber/green light for a thought-provoking evening.

Review Finders Keepers

Finders Keepers
Devised And Performed By Hot Coals Theatre

Bringing Up Baby
https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/

The set is small scale delight, Pharoah & Daughter's Junkyard combining the vibe of a tree house, Wendy house with a climbing frame and even an ensuite of sorts which provides a recognition of the mundane with laughs.

The good things continue: the starlit sky, the slightly mucky friendly rodent-like creatures. One is very definitely the harried and sometimes stern but still affectionate comically bespectacled father figure of the scavenging household (Clare-Louise English in ratty Groucho Marx nose and glasses).

The other is the daughter (Jo Sargeant) who hides a bear, with baby accoutrements, in a trunk that she mothers. But she then has to put those skills and her own affections to work after an unexpected discovery, accompanied by a note expressing words even those with very basic reading skills can understand.

There's the repetition of equally basic everyday activities which any child and grown up can also recognize  causing giggles and guffaws of delight.  Another character is graceful and dignified enough to entrance but is very definitely a human  young woman (Claire-Louise English again) in a coat and scarf.

By the end of the play, directed by Caroline Parker, the daughter has had the strongest arc but a sense of loss was nicely dispersed by the final energetic final bow of all the characters and puppet back together and smiling.

But then ... We really weren't at all sure about the relevance of the title Finders Keepers - however much we tried to make it fit in our minds. The same goes for the story of Moses in the bulrushes on which the show is said to be based.

It perhaps wasn't such a good idea to provide the bible story premise before the show, as it was a source of mild frustration for TLT and her Sunday Schooled jalopy to find that the biblical story didn't correlate that much with what was placed before us.

Far better, we thought, to let the audience be intrigued by the name of the junkyard and a newspaper headline, picking up their own clues and, maybe, such disparities wouldn't matter so much.

Also, if, for instance, parents read the original story with their child beforehand as either a secular or religious text, knowing that they were going to this show, both might end up rather confused. This bewilderment rather overwhelmed the more grown-up elements introduced in the titles of books held up for us to see.

In fact, there were times, especially with the costuming of the young human lady that it felt more like a World War II  evacuation or a refugee story.

There are lots of wonderful moments with a lovely picture-book set (original design Laura Merryweather, adapted for the Park Theatre by Jo Seargeant and James Humby with lighting by Marine Le Houëzec), but we felt this was a play more targetted at the very young with its repetitions and very slight storyline.

The puppetry was delightful with a feel-good subtext that anybody can be part of a loving family, even if not blood kin.

However the play was more about character than story and once the characters were established, it felt as if there were nowhere to go. It might also be worth mentioning, while it does have an all-female cast, the roles are traditional with Dad venturing out to the outside world every day.

As a barometer, the kids in the audience, from very small to top primary school age loved the initial establishment of the junkyard daily routine (as did we!) but seemed to also sense that the story lost its way at times.

Nevertheless the happiest and saddest parts were pitched at the correct level for the children, even if it felt like a jigsaw not quite fitting together but quite colourful and characterful enough to attract a TLT 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 Dr Angelus

Dr Angelus
by James Bridie

The Ladykiller
http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk

Set in 1919, but written 28 years later, Dr Angelus is a comedy thriller about a Glasgow family doctor with murder in mind.

Originally conceived by James Bridie (the pen name for doctor turned playwright and screenwriter Osborne Henry Mavor) as a vehicle for character actor Alastair Sim and Sim's protégé George Cole, it was a big success and was even recorded the following year for the BBC.

Based on the real-life 19th century case of Dr Edward William Pritchard, but updated in the play, Dr Angelus (a suitably flamboyant and sinisterly humorous David Rintoul) has just taken on a new English junior partner, George Johnson (Alex Bhat in a nicely-judged performance).

While George is grateful for the partnership, there are niggles, shared by a seductive lady patient in a seemingly unhappy marriage, Mrs Corcoran (Lesley Harcourt) whose businessman husband has had dealings wih Dr Angelus over share dealing and insurance policies.

Nevertheless, George, eager to make a success in his first position as a general practitioner suppresses any disquiet he has about the plain weird behavour of the senior partner.

However he still finds himself embroiled in suspicious circumstances when Angelus's off-stage mother-in-law and then his wife (Vivien Heilbron) die in quick succession and, in a Dr Shipman-like twist, Dr Angelus asks the young medic to sign the death certificates.

A psychological thriller, Dr Angelus is as much about the mentality of a medical profession built in hierarchy and, in the case of general practitioners, where money was usually needed to buy into a practice

The consultant Sir Gregory Butt and the police inspector McIvor (Malcolm Rennie playing both roles) only serve to underline the oddity of a self-regulating profession and the curious calculations of a constabulary when it comes to medical malfeasance. 

We found it interesting that this beautifully-constructed play was written on the cusp of the introduction of the National Health Service in  the year a separate National Health Service (NHS) bill was passed for Scotland. Dr Angelus himself, we learn in passing, had refused to join the previous government National Health insurance scheme (covering mostly working men and excluding married women).

Set the year after the First World War's end, it's also reasonable to assume Johnson may have served in the armed forces. So the play seems deliberately positioned to echo the position of 1947 ex-soldier-doctors and welcome the National Health Service with the Secretary of State taking over ownership of medical records and giving a degree of supervision over GP practices.

At the same time, this is an enjoyable old (post) war horse - including a deliciously duplicitous serving maid cum lover (Rosalind McAndrew) - with some strange, fascinating twists and a kind of social conscience contrasting the explicitly explained help given to the young doctor and the implicit fate of the servant.

Despite the elements of Gaslight-style  melodrama, Dr Angelus seems ripe to be considered as a predecessor to some of the major Ealing Comedies. Not least for the overblown character of Dr Angelus himself and the identification with issues about the welfare state consensus. Jenny Ogilvie's production perhaps could do with a little more pep and confidence in the first act, but it's an amber/green light for a solid revival of an interesting play.