Review Posh

While Posh strikes Peter Barker as less than groundbreaking in its themes, he nevertheless enjoys the nuances in a vigorous gender swapping production.

Posh 
by Laura Wade

Pride And Prejudice
https://www.pleasance.co.uk/

The plot is simple; Riot Club members are feasting at a country pub near Oxford, where the young men intend to behave very badly,  picking up where they had left off two terms previously, before a national media exposé

Laura Wade's play was first performed by an all-male cast in 2010, focussing on a self-styled elite Oxbridge dining society.  The unique selling point in the current revival is its all female crew playing a very male cast.

The Riot Club is inspired by the sophomore antics of the Bullingdon Club, whose former members include David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson. Much of the fascination at its première was trying to discern  how much was satirical - and how much documentary.

During the play, the Club prepares to discipline a member who, by breaking its code of silence towards outsiders, has brought unwanted attention to its antics. Another student is newly initiated into the group. To cap it all, there is also a power struggle between the club president and the alpha chimp member of the group.

In some ways, Posh has been overtaken by events. At its première, the dining club boys running our national affairs was just a prospect. Now we can now look back at the reality of their time in government.

While Wade's work is clearly an exaggeration of the club's excesses, the fake news' era has given us the apocryphal story of Cameron and the dead pig's head in which many wanted to believe.

Anyway, throw in a sex worker, a pub landlord trying to earn a living and his attractive waitress daughter with a particular reason why the Riot Club boys can't pull academic rank and you have a lively two and half hour comedy drama.

Director Cressida Carré extracts the maximum shock value and wit from Wade's script. Designer Sara Perks's set cleverly uses a revolve as the diners banter round a circular table.

On reflection, the behaviour in Posh isn't just confined to toffs. I'm not upper class but I did play team sports for many years. I recognise an exaggerated version of our own antics.

But Wade's play  makes the claim, even if unoriginal, that this behaviour is bonding and binding, creating loyalties and obligations lasting a lifetime. When it comes to my sporting teammates and I, it's not significant. But it's a different matter when such  people come to run the country.

While Posh proves the English can laugh (with horror) at themselves and their government, it still plays into a snobbish obsession with aristocracy. Posh feels not so much hard-hitting as nostalgic, harking back to the stage, literary and movie tradition of  The Importance of Being Earnest, Brideshead Revisited, Another Country and If.

So, the play only partially hits the target; it is handicapped by its very English preoccupation with class and lacks an analysis of  money and power in our times which affects all of us far more.

Nevertheless, the all-female ensemble cast riot with wit, boldness and verve. Gabby Wong excels as Riot Club president James Leighton-Masters, whose well-bred manners and fundamental decency are at odds with the ruthlessness needed to preserve his presidency. Serena Jennings gives a visceral sense of the vicious and violent as Alistair Ryle. As appealing novice member Ed Montgormery, Verity Kirk brings humour.

All-female casts should really not be an exception now. Long may this kind of gender swapping continue to shed fresh light on past texts! I have some issues with the play but this production is, above all, great entertainment catching the zeitgeist of the early 21st century and deserves a green light.

Review Promises, Promises

Promises, Promises
Book by Neil Simon
Based on the Screenplay by Billy Wilder and IAL Diamond
Music by Burt Bacharach and Hal David

How To Succeed In Business
http://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/

It may be a sacrilege but TLT and her own little musical automobile wondered how many in the audience watching Promises, Promises, based on s classic 1960 movie,  were working it out ... "If I had an apartment in New York or even central London for $86.50 a month ..."

But maybe that's the point. The movie on which 1968 musical Promises, Promises is based is Billy Wilder's and IA Diamond's The Apartment. It's the lodging in the title of the film, not the emotion. Promises, Promises felt to us an unusual thing, an angry black comedy, a play, yearning and aching not to be a musical.

Accounts' man in Consolidated Life,  CC Baxter, aka Chuck, rents a snug little apartment in New York but has found his own prudential way, he hopes, to consolidate his own promotion up the slippery corporate ladder.

He lends his key on a rota to various middle aged executives for their extra-marital affairs. Even if this means roaming the streets or taking corporate hospitality tickets for sports' games while he's excluded from what should be his own private domain.

It's only when he falls, hook, line and sinker, for gamine Fran, a waitress in the executive dining room, discovers her entanglement with the boss who monopolizes his pad and the threat to her life that the blinkers of corporate advancement fall off.    

This revival follows a 2010 New York production riding on the Mad Men wave and transfering the action back to 1962. It also added two of Burt Bacharach's and Hal David's best known pop music hits, Say A Little Prayer and A House Is Not A Home, although the former, probably wisely, is cut from director Bronagh Lagan's production.

Billy Wilder, according to that tome on everyone's virtual bookshelf Wikipedia, was apparently partly inspired by Brit movie Brief Encounter where the adulterous couple, a doctor and a housewife, use an apartment belonging to a friend of the medic. But we think Wilder also looked at the way Coward changed the story from his original play Still Life where the romantic male lead in the film on stage is, to be coy ;), a prize louse.

Maybe Wilder and Diamond had an even more savage first draft of The Apartment. Or maybe book writer of the musical Neil Simon was trying to get under the skin of the movie, adding his own political and sexual subtext.

However, especially in the first act, there's a lot of talking for a musical including CC Baxter (the men are great initials' men) speaking directly to the audience making for an uneven tone. It's less moral wavering than a boastful kind of co-conspiracy, even though he's the underdog. 

So problematically, the light touch in the movie becomes heavy handed and, especially in our times, dated on stage. The bevy of attractive oven-ready (it's Christmas and there's a Turkey Lurkey Time song wih all the sexy trimmings) young women secretaries and hostesses parade before overweight, cigar chomping executives with apparently no irony. Unlike, say, Frank Loesser's earlier corporate ladder musical.

Still, Gabriel Vick as Chuck Baxter and Daisy Maywood as Fran Kubelik wisely embrace the shades of Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine with a precise delicacy in looks, word and song despite a book which feels as if it should have been thinned down.

The songs are clever enough but don't feel particularly memorable or dynamic apart from A House Is Not A Home and I'll Never Fall In Love Again, which was in the original 1968 production. However, these two songs, with their pop production values, also stand out awkwardly from the rest  of the piece.

Alex Young brings welcome relief from the dice loaded in favour of men as a feisty, funny widow picking up Chuck in a bar with A Fact Can Be A Beautiful Thing. John Guerrasio as the cooperative doctor and neighbour also brings a worldly-wise (almost TV sitcom-style) expediency into the show.

Cressida Carré's choreography and the dancing are slick and we were quite taken by Simon Wells's almost Dr Caligari-like simple but effective set with Ben M Rogers' projections. At the same time, it's an amber light for a show with a book which, strangely, feels as if it's being scuppered by being a musical.

Review Titanic

Titanic

Music and Lyrics by Maury Yeston

Book by Peter Stone

And The Band Plays On

http://www.charingcrosstheatre.co.uk/show/26/Titanic+

Watching the ever-enduring history of the Titanic passenger liner in this musical, which originally opened several months before the 1997 release of the  Oscar winning movie,  a thought began to form. What if this version of the famous story, music and lyrics by Maury Yeston, book by Peter Stone, had bundled together echos of other tales of overweening pride snd technological innovation followed by disaster?

For whatever the truth about the Titanic, and the musical follows a traditional trajectory taking on board what may be newspaper embellishments and legal fictions of the official enquiry's many vested interests, this is an archetypal Icarus story.

It charts the history of the passenger ship's ill-fated  transatlantic journey when it hit an iceberg on its maiden voyage in 1912 with the loss of over 1,500 lives. Meanwhile the chairman of the company who was on board, Bruce Ismay (a sonorous David Bardsley)  lived on to be cast in real life as the villain of the piece, an Icarus who survived.

From the start in the Yeston/Stone version, the over-confident executive boasts the qualities of the new ship as much for competitive commercial reasons as pride - a floating city to compare with the wonders of the world, but unlike them, soon to be set free from its moorings to sail the ocean.

Nevertheless listening closely to Yeston's lyrics and Stone's book, there  were delicate echoes of other stories. Fritz Lang's movie tale of technology run rampant, Metropolis and HG Wells's stock exchange fable,Tono-Bungay with the talk of "cornering the market". 

Or maybe (should we whisper it?) even the perilous and expensive act of putting on a full-scale new musical underpinned by a crazy paving of financial, intertwined with artistic, interests - and a possible closing night blame game.   

The current run is a revival of director Thom Southerland's 2013 Southwark Playhouse production,  a cut-down chamber version of the original musical with a seven man (and woman).band of strings and percussion and a 20-strong cast, some of whom double up.

David Woodhead's two tiered set of riveted metal panelling, white railings and laddered crow's nest on wheels ingeniously also uses both the stage and circle balcony to evoke the sides and different decks of the  luxurious ship. We are in the midst of a vessel's first voyage from Southampton but also what had become a habitual journey for the ultra rich and a once-in-a-lifetime experience for the moderately well-off and those, mostly poor,  seeking new lives in America.

Yet the musical is also a waterlogged dream, as conjured up by the smoke gray blue rivetted panels, plus the grainy lighting (Howard  Hudson) poking through  the portholes and the eerie ship's hums and rumbles (sound by Andrew Johnson) in the opening moments.

The ship's builder Thomas Andrews (Siôn Lloyd) sits calmily perusing his blueprints of the Titanic's brave new world  for all those seeking the fruits of an age of progress, where the future could only be  larger, cleaner, faster.

The lives of those on board are brought to the fore, with their own ties to land, either in solos, duets or choral set pieces. There's the miner Barrett (Niall Sheehy), who could have stepped out of a DH Lawrence novel, turned ship's stoker. He finds an unlikely ally in the perfectionist Marconi wireless operator Bride (Matthew Crowe). 

The latter who out of kindness and pride in his work, but maybe also in an unwitting revelation about the Royal Mail contracted ship, offers Barrett a hundred percent  "commercial discount" to send a message back to his girlfriend.  This culminates in a delightful duet as he  translates Barrett's love letter into Morse code dots and dashes.

It felt to us by sticking to the stories which circulated about the sinking, whether true or not, the feel of the instability of the legend comes through. The First Officer Murdoch (Scott Cripps), the second in command and on the bridge when the ship struck the iceberg,  confessed near the beginning  to shying away from commanding a vessel because of the responsibility involved.

The captain (Philip Rham), the master of the ship, who holds the lives of those on the Belfast-built vessel in the palm of his hand, and despite forbidding alcohol on the bridge, seems increasingly sucked into the louche partying on board and loses, literarally and metaphorically, his bearings. Yet it is Murdoch who takes the blame, as if he were bailing out water on one side, little knowing it would pour in on another, and he ends his life as if he were a guilty man.

With memorable work from the wide-eyed steward Etches (James Gant), social climbing but startling realistic Alice Beane (Claire Machin) and the three "Kates", Irish immigrant girls (Victoria Serra, Jessica Paul and Scarlett Courtney), there is a high standard of singing,  acting and dancing (musical stager Cressida Carré) from all the cast.

The world of brash overconfidence, the super wealthy, the aspirational poor looking towards a land of opportunity still exists. The stirring symphonic score spans twentieth century musical styles with hints of Gilbert and Sullivan, Irving Berlin, Rogers & Hammerstein and Stephen Sondheim amongst others. 

The angle on the well-known story presented in the musical Titanic still inhabits a recognizable world in our post 9/11, post Concorde, post credit crunch, post invasion twenty first century age. Even if it may be hubris to think that a mere musical carries such a heavy burden. 

The book of  almost documentary precision highlights how  keeping to the story as reported,  can, in a very natural way, reflect on other man-made events and disasters the audience knows to be in the future. A green light for a thoughtful and resonant ensemble piece.