Review Quaint Honour

Peter Barker enjoys a fine revival of a little known play pleading for the acceptance of gay relationships a decade before the decriminalization of homosexuality.

Quaint Honour

by Roger Gellert

Against All The Rules

http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk

Quaint Honour, in the first revival more than half a century after its first performance,  is a chance to see a play that championed an argument for gay equality at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain. 

Set in an English boys’ boarding school in the 1950s,  Tully is a house prefect, a liberal-minded atheist who secretly sleeps  with willing fellow pupils, among them the younger Turner. 

Turner challenges Tully to seduce another boy, the studious and naive Hamilton. Yet the relationship,  beginning during an audition for a part in a Shakespeare play where the seduction by the duplicitous Richard III of Lady Anne Neville is the audition piece, turns to genuine love.

At the moment, Quaint Honour, written in 1958, is given, superficially, a topicality by the recent swirl of sexual scandals. 

It  deals with gay relationships in a school where fagging by junior boys, younger schoolboys acting as personal servants for senior pupils, was still part of the school hierarchy. However, this is definitely not a play about the abuse of power. Nor does it advocate lowering the age of consent. 

It is instead a passionate plea for the common sense of equality.

In the wake of the Wolfenden Report recommending the decriminalisation of "homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private", the theatre censor, the Lord Chamberlain had relaxed the rules on stage portrayals of homosexuals in 1958. 

However Quaint Honour, staged the same year,with its overt sympathy for gay men and homosexual sexual relations, was still deemed too explicit, whilst still remaining a play where homosexuality was a problem. 

It could only be  presented at a subscription club theatre, the Arts Theatre Private Club, as a private performance, therefore avoiding the need for a Lord Chamberlain's licence.

The moniker Roger Gellert was itself the pen name of BBC radio announcer John Holstrom, later a script reader for legendary literary agent Peggy Ramsay. He was also a Royal Shakespeare Company dramaturg and translator of Bertolt Brecht and Jean Giradoux, as well as New Statesman theatre critic. 

Quaint Honour was his only original play and groundbreaking in many ways. Notwithstanding, Gellert's characters remain cyphers, even if used to argue passionately for sex and love with a consenting partner to be the prerogative of the individual conscience. 

Nevertheless director Christian Durham has assembled a strong cast.

Harley Viveash gives Tully both charisma and maturity, all of which makes the character’s eloquent argument for the right to a homosexual relationship a passionate and inspiring moment.

Simon Butteriss as the hopelessly out-of-touch housemaster Hallowes is a perfect fit for a tweed suit and master’s gown.

Equally, Oliver Gully's heterosexual head boy of house to Tully's deputy looks like a man who will one day be on  a cigarette card as the England opening bat, his intense gaze conveying both firmness and narrowness of mind.

In the roles of the younger boys, Jack Archer as  Hamilton and Jacques Miche as Turner give able support.

Designer Tim McQuillen-Wright cleverly reuses the set of the play running alongside it this season, an ecclesiastical office setting turned into a public school complete with battered bookcases  and paint-chipped radiator.

Quaint Honour was both hugely daring and attracted establishment critical acclaim from The Observer and The Times drama critics. It is  a period piece, but also attempts to normalise the reciprocal homosexual relationship. It's an amber/green light for a fascinating landmark drama. 

Review The Busy World Is Hushed

Peter Barker discovers a place for belief and its challenges in an  intriguing new play from across the Atlantic. 

The Busy World Is Hushed
by Keith Bunin

Father, Son And Holy Ghostwriter
http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/

The Busy World is Hushed is a discursive three hander looking at parenthood and sexuality, as well as the significance of holy scripture in the 21st century.

Playwright Keith Bunin sets the play in the New York household of a single mother.

In this case, Hannah's part of a modern Manhattan Episcopalian priesthood and an academic about to embark on a book exploring the possibility and implications of a missing New Testament gospel.

She's hiring Brandt as an assistant, a kind of holy ghostwriter,  but she's also preoccupied with her restless 20-something son, Thomas.

Both mother and son are haunted by the past, the sudden death of her husband when she was pregant with Thomas.

Her son has just returned from one of his habitual long absences in the New England wilderness, immediately hitting it off with Brandt.

Bunin's writing is intelligent and humane, intertwining theological debate with the domestic circumstances and the emotional undercurrents swirling around and motivating the characters. From this simple situation Bunin spins off a plethora of ideas.

Marc Turcich's set design, a study with its chaotically strewn bibles and Anglican works interpreting the holy texts, will be familiar to anyone who has entered a priest's study.

Director Paul Higgins keeps up the momentum throughout the play's 90 minutes by often drawing the characters on the stage into triangles of conflict. 

Kazia Pelka is the believer Hannah who nevertheless maintains a healthy scepticism about the man-made nature of the bible as text, but still cannot fathom her husband's sudden death years before.

Mathew James's Thomas conveys the febrile nature of a young man, also seeking answers about his father, who enters into a relationship with his mother's new employee. 

Meanwhile Mateo Oxley, as Brandt, is the writer who struggles to have any belief, especially with the impact of his father's serious illness. Oxley makes a convincing East Coast patrician, an urbane intellectual, both a lover and grieving son.

The two men's love affair is handled as a naturally occuring circumstance.  However, sometimes a self-conscious effort to introduce conflict feels contrived and the attitudes and actions of the characters are skewed to suit the needs of the plot.

It's not perfect but it's an amber/green light for an absorbing drama in a well-performed production. 

Review Dolphins and Sharks

Dolphins and Sharks
by James Anthony Tyler

Prisoners Of The Copy Chain Gang
http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/

On the door of a grubby Harlem copy shop is taped a notice - "Back To School Sale".

Dolphins and Sharks is set in a photocopying shop which American writer James Anthony Tyler describes as a "Fedex type of business".

Yusuf (Ammar Duffus) has just left school - that's to say college, NYU  - with a bachelor degree in Philosophy, trailing clouds of debt, courtesy of the federal government's privatised student loan scheme, and desperately needing a job.

The play, as the title itself reveals, is s a slightly heavy handed metaphor for an enconomy where everything is a fix for bosses to profit from debt. Retail as an updated Animal Farm.  Yet  it could also be a transatlantic warning about the dangers of profiteering from copying in more ways than one.

Many of the events, as the employees are pushed into harassing each other triggered by the evasions and demands of an unseen boss, do hinge on who has been to college and who hasn't, but not in the expected way.

Yusuf lands a job at the shop but never gets the expected wage to pay the rent.

Upwardly mobile, attractive Xiomara (Rachel Handshaw) never went to college and was once an ally of mother-of-three straight talkin' Isabel (Shyko Ammos). At the same time, Xiomara can talk the talk of The Apprentice and gets the promotion. And previous friendships fall away as she has to  gird herself for unexpected battles.

Danilo (Hermeilio Miguel Aquino) the janitor is another long term friend and ally who finds himself unexpectedly pushed aside. Pensioner and local activist Amenza Amen (Miquel Brown) attends community college, cadging free copies for local  causes, and is seemingly an idealistic voice in the midst of a rigged casino culture.

Dolphins and Sharks has a brilliant premise but trips itself up with an uneasy patchwork of issues and actions. The writing has the feel of a movie rather than a stage play, despite the steady momentum of  Lydia Parker's direction.

Handshaw is nevertheless excellent as the upwardly mobile Xiomara forced to become a calculating schemer. The sorry events are watched over, at a distance, by a photocopied picture of Barack Obama on the wall of Anna Driftmier's convincing and detailed inside-and-outside set. The grit, though, is often in the scenes with Ammos's Isabel who tells it as it is, yet finds herself betrayed.

Dolphins and Sharks touches on huge issues but as a stage play, it never quite gels. Still, the final address to the audience by Amenza has a hard edged ambiguous feel, as much empty rhetoric from another time as a call to action and it's an amber light. 

Review Continuity

Continuity
by Gerry Moynihan

Behind The Walls
http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/

Pádraig is a bit of an artiste - he's called upon to perform - to sing - "Once upon a time there was Irish ways and Irish laws" in the pub in the city he calls Derry on St Patrick's Day.

He's also lived through history both literally as a middle aged mechanic from Cold War to 2017 and also keeping alive the flame harking back to Oliver Cromwell's conquest of Ireland through The Troubles.

For he's still a member of what he views as the IRA - the paramilitary Continuity IRA fighting for  32 counties of a united Ireland.

Yet he's living in modern European times as well, having hitched up with a Spanish lover who works as a university administrator, even if the future is now more uncertain.

But he's never believed in the peace process, although at least one close family member has joined the Police Force Of Northern Ireland.

Meanwhile he finds himself in demand for his technical skills and as part of an alternative "legal" set up by men classified as terrorists maiming for life minor drug dealers.

Writer Gerry Moynihan has framed a neat monologue but the evening belongs to Paul Kennedy as the conflicted Pádraig who gradually realises in this 90 minute monologue that he is a man caught between two generations and cannot reconcile the two..

The core of the monologue lays out powerfully and in increments Pádraig's life. There are a few clunky movie references which sound like additional tweaks.

However the ebb and flow of  Pádraig's emotions and  his increasing understanding of others' inner lives  is effectively conveyed, sometimes touchingly and sometimes with disturbing clarity.

While history and organizations seem to have an onward continuity, the grudges and actions are part of a sordid circular internal turmoil.

This is in essence a melodrama where many of the elements may be familiar. Yet there are also some deft touches which put it in both a more global and intimate domestic context, bringing it up to date.

Director Shane Dempsey, with movement direction by Steffany George, insures the solo piece is well-paced with Anna Clock's atmospheric sound effects.

A magnetic, carefully nuanced performance by Paul Kennedy immerses the audience in a world where everyone has only a partial understanding of what is going on and what they are doing, even with a final seemingly defiant act. An amber/green light.

Review Just To Get Married

Just To Get Married
by Cicely Hamilton

How Do You Solve A Problem Like Georgiana?
http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/

Poor Georgie has a lot on her plate. If only it were a china service plate of the kind normally given as a present to brides to set them up in their new home.

Instead, with the hopes of her aunt's snobbish but shabby genteel family fixed upon her, she's still hoping, at the ripe old age of 29, that a man will make a bid for her in the marriage marketplace.

Playwright Cicely Hamilton was an actress in the early 20th century and also an active feminist concerned with freeing up the social and economic position of women.

Just to Get Married, first performed in 1911, has at its centre Georgiana Vicary, well-educated but financially and socially dependent on her Aunt Catherine and Uncle Theodore.

Her one fervent wish in life, she believes, is to take herself off the shelf and get married, despite her own misgivings.

Everybody is full of expectations when she seems to attract the attention of Adam Lankaster in possession of a fortune and recently returned from Canada, then still part of the British Empire.

What is to be done? It's a case of will he or won't he, as everyone holds their breath, as to whether the retiring, tongue-tied Mr Lankaster will pop the question bringing credit and social status to Georgie and her aunt's Grayle family.

For despite their patronage of Georgie, the Grayles also have a military son in India running up debts, another Tod, whom they can barely afford to send to Cambridge University,  and a daughter, Bertha, of 16 going on 17, approaching the age - and expense - of coming out as a debutante.

Hamilton herself was single,  the daughter of a colonial officer whose mother disappeared early from her life, possibly committed by her husband to a lunatic asylum.

A single woman's fears about her social and financial status in society, despite the introduction of old age pensions three years earlier, were of course well-founded. However, while these anxieties take centre stage in the play, we found a subtext allying the spinster's fate with the already ailing British Empire just as interesting.

There are literary influences - or are they satiric send ups? - of  Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde  and Bernard Shaw but also a sophisticated structure which, seems to us, to point towards much later playwrights like Emlyn Williams and Terence Rattigan among others.  

Melissa Dunne directs a lucid production, although the play itself has an enormous amount of initial exposition, rather going against modern tastes, until the characterful plot really kicks in.

Philippa Quinn as the tomboyish conflicted Georgie cuts a distinctively tall figure in the Grayle's drawing room.

As the blushing, decent but unintentionally male chauvinist Lankaster, Jonny McPherson manages the deliberate pauses and near-stutters beautifully and gives us a glimpse of the efficient colonial businessman beneath the gauche exterior.

The Grayle family, Nicola Blackman as the ambitious aunt, Lauren Fitzpatrick as her young cousin, a barometer of the clashing interests, Joshua Riley as her self-interested elder brother and Simon Rhodes as the mitigating, seemingly benign, Uncle also evoke the pecuniary and mercenary atmosphere.

Although we must also admit we were unduly distracted by the excessively high, but maybe sartorially accurate, collars of the menfolk from costume designer Lottie Smith!

Stuart Nunn's small role as the footman is also effective. His appearances added to the domination of male action over enforced female passivity in the household.

Designer Katherine Davies Herbst makes excellent use of the space in a well-angled elegantly simple set with neatly positioned mirror over the mantelpiece reflecting the action.

Yet the play only fully comes together for TLT and her own motorised consort when it's set against an imperial and political context.

Hamill came from an insecure background where her mother was perhaps incarcerated against her will and the play's third act (it's a two hour play with one interval) is especially ambiguous pitting possible destitution and its consequences against marriage and colonial wealth.

There's also an uneasiness about Britain's place in the world comparable to Georgie's insecurity as a woman in a world where allies are hard to find in both cases.

This was a time when imperial adventures in the Antarctic had gone sour and the monarchy and the state seemed more dependent on their dominions than vice versa.

While the leadership of the increasingly economic and politically dominant English-speaking America was still prepared to mitigate, the family of countries, the Royal Families of Europe and Russia and the family of Georgie all  seem increasingly unstable.

This makes somewhat more sense and also leaves a prescient question mark over what would otherwise be an expedient and unbelievable status quo ending. It's not a perfect play by any means.

However, it strikes us as a strange but farsighted pre First World War and Russian Revolution piece in a perilous age for women campaigning for their rights and for the state of the world . An amber/green light.    

Review Food

A tale of sibling love and rivalry set in a Tasmanian chippy is a sizzling success for reviewer Peter Barker.

Food
by Steve Rodgers

Deep Fried Emotions
http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/

Funny, dark and provocative Food by Australian Steve Rodgers fixes on women, sisterhood, growing up and sex with a firmly adult gaze. A gaze which also, of course, includes food. 

A three-hander, originally performed in Sydney in 2012, this is a skilfully-crafted one-act piece, a rite-of-passage play for two sisters in their twenties, a drama that's bleak yet finally filled with hope. 

Former wild child Nancy (Lily Newbury-Freeman)  has returned to the country town of her childhood. She and her stay-at-home sister Elma (Emma Playfair) cannot escape each other.

Still, Nancy spearheads a plan to transform their fish and chip takeaway on a Tasmanian outback highway into a sit-down eatery.

Into this world of food preparation, business expansion and sibling rivalry, yet also sisterly bonds, walks a charismatic Turkish backpacker, Hakan (Scott Karim).

Elma is quick to demonstrate to him  the fate of “bullshitters with wandering hands” utilizing a knife, named after a family matriarch.  However after he becomes hired hand, the sexual temperature within the kitchen soars.    

There are well-defined, detailed performances from Australian actors Newbury-Freeman as Nancy and Playfair as Elma. They manage to draw the audience viscerally into every tussle, even when raised voices and accents are at their loudest and broadest.

We warm equally to Karim's deliberately irritating but engaging performance - the testosterone-driven outsider both to the simmering sibling rivalry and to the Australian island.   

Structured over 90 minutes in the present and as a series of teenage childhood flashbacks, director Cressida Brown's traverse staging allows for intimacy and even for the performers to interact effortlessly with the audience.

While director Brown’s production is tight and quick moving, it still could have cut 10 minutes and lost nothing. Nevertheless, it remains constantly compelling.

Richard Williamson's highly effective lighting, Jon McLeod's sound and movement director Ita O'Brien's additions all evoke the sense of location and emotional intensity.

Hannah Wolfe cleverly keeps the design simple and fluid on an adaptable, multi-layered set with ladder and the heavy duty kitchen and catering props on wheels.

Food, both darkly raw and bright, has all the ingredients of a satisfying and thought-provoking drama.

It's a green light for a piece using food and sex to convey complex family ties alongside social and emotional challenges.

Review Footprints On The Moon

Footprints On The Moon
by Maureen Hunter

Our Town
http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/

This deceptively gentle, warm hearted play has a savage undertow about small town life on the Canadian Prairies and also the treatment of women in life - and in fiction. Indeed, we would go as far as to say that Maureen Hunter shows an ear for dialogue and subtle plotting which reminds us of Tennessee Williams.

Joannie (Anne Adams) is an attractive, girlish 30 something single mom in an on-off relationship with denim clad vodka-swigging Dunc Carr (Derek Hagen) in an isolated township.

While others, including her sulky teenage daughter Carol-Ann (Sally Cheng) and ex husband Boone (Nicholas Goh) come and go, she remains a permanent fixture.  Like the landscape, she's not "going downhill, but plateaued".

While this 1988 Canadian drama is mostly eminently theatrical, there's an alluring pensive cinematic quality to the script laced with wistful humour. Designer Charlotte Henery cleverly transforms the set of the other play running this month at the Finborough into a train station and then the kitchen of Joannie's homestead.

We also get to know the layout of Rose Coulee through the dialogue  - neighbour Beryl's purple house, the Drake Hotel, the rough and tumble Plains Inn with scrawled graffiti on the wall of the men's toilet, Joannie's Dad living nearby, the store where Joannie works, Dunc and his medically ailing mother and even the long-term dent on the fender of Dunc's truck.

Director Anastasia Osei-Kuffour deftly paces the action in an intricate, slippery piece with an ebbing and flowing soundscape by Lucinda Mason Brown and delicate lighting by Peter Harrison.

Joannie slides almost imperceptibly from the reality of her life to odd time shifts, wish fulfilment and dream.This is emphasized by Joannie's rose coloured spectacles in a prizewinning essay voice over on her home town which feels like a throwback to more successful schooldays in an original dramatic structure which the audience finds itself absorbing as if by osmosis.

As the play progresses we get larger and larger glimpses of what her life may really be like, Carol-Ann's eagerness to get away to her father in Toronto, the trap for women from which Joannie's mother seems to have escaped and Dunc Carr's mother cannot - it is all filtered through othe sensibility of the characters.

With fine performances throughout, the play revolves around Adams's wounded yet feisty Joannie. The first act feels the strongest while the second struggles a little and maybe betrays that it's natural milieu is film.

Yet with its twists and turns, this is a distinctive and touching green light drama which plays on the psychology of the audience as much as revealing what lies beneath the characters and the rhythms of late twentieth century prairie life.  

Review Jam

A troubling school reunion gives reviewer Peter Barker plenty of food for thought on bread-and-butter school issues.  

Jam
by Matt Parvin

Class War
http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk

Matt Parvin’s impressive debut full length play Jam is an intense two-hander charting a sometimes funny, sometimes ugly classroom relationship which should have ended a decade before on school leaving day. 

Former pupil Kane McCarthy (Harry Potter's Harry Melling) unexpectedly and uninvited visits his former teacher Bella Soroush (Jasmine Hyde) in an English rural comprehensive.

He's now a bit of a drifter whose words can't be trusted. He turns up with a rucksack filled with schoolday relics, - plus a bottle of vodka and a baseball bat. All of which Bella goes through methodically, as if it's back to the rebellious student and the schoolmarm emptying his bag.

Kane admits he was a bit of a twat, aggressive and abusing Bella over her Iranian heritage. Nevertheless this seems like a diversion from the deeper reason why Bella is just not acceptable to Kane and he is marked by his schooldays. 

For the past is not another country in Parvin's play - they don't do things differently there. The present repeats the past. These two are locked, however unwillingly, in a toxic relationship.
 
And the cryptic title Jam? It's not clarified in the play but Parvin's past work includes an adaptation of Alice In Wonderland during his own student days may give a clue.

Lewis Carroll's  White Queen pronounces, "The rule is, jam to-morrow, jam yesterday - but never jam to-day.", later coopted by economist John Maynard Keynes and various politicians of all hues.
 
Melling is immensely credible as West Country misfit Kane who is just not that clever. His explosions of rage are visceral, if sometimes with a little too much volume for such a small performance space.

The presence of Hyde's Bella pays dividends later on in the play when her frailties and flaws are exposed.

Her self-control and her controlling personality are brought into context as the script and Hyde's performance reveal the rawness of her emotions and her capability for violence.

An ingenious scaffold climbing frame design from Emma Bailey splits the performing space in two cleverly suggesting a room and a playground.  Alexandra Faye Braithwaite's soundscape subtly
mingles the murmurs of an outside world with the obligatory ringing of school bells.

Playwright Parvin and director Tommo Fowler, could afforded to cut at least quarter of an hour from the running time of 95 minutes, tightening the script and ratcheting up the tension.

Even so, the writer proves adept at building and then releasing tension. Yet Jam has a conclusion that is anything but a release of suspense but a surprising and skilful collapse into exhaustion. It's a green light for a thought-provoking classroom drama.

Review Everything Between Us

Everything Between Us
by David Ireland

What's So Funny 'Bout Peace Love And Understanding?
http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/

Actually there's quite a lot that can be darkly and ironically funny about professed peace, love and understanding after years of violence (don't ask us to explain a situation which has mutated over hundreds of years from Plantation colonization to now Brexit adding a new complication to a twisty history).

Northern Ireland. Yes, we're talking about Northern Ireland. As we've seen previously, playwright David Ireland (yes, it really is his name ...) charges in like the proverbial bull in the china shop, but something real and universal emerges when he refuses to glue together the pieces as if they were never broken or even to pretend that he can't see the cracks.

But enough of cryptic metaphors. Everything Between Us is a two hander. Sandra (Lynsey-Anne Moffat) has become part of the Stormont establishment, a seemingly outward looking politician who is helping facilitate a peace and reconciliation commission under the glare of the world's press.

Yet the proposed peaceful opening of the conference is disrupted, in almost reverse Dr Strangelove-style, by a wildcard in the shape of Sandra's long-lost violent sister,  blonde rock chick Teeni. She fans the flames of old hostilities, intransigently inventing new battles, albeit with occasional lapses into moments of reflection.

Everything Between Us has the trajectory of a cathartic play. However,  it never supplies any closure of or easy answers to a stand off which has different incarnations in many countries riven by civil war atrocities for whatever reason, bringing destruction, maiming and death to often innocent citizens.

While some of the references may be immediately recognizable to many as indicating which side of the Northern Ireland divide the sisters are on, the Protestant unionist side, it's left until nearly at the end for us to fully understand the siblings' affiliation.

Indeed, despite the clues laid down, the glamour of Teeni beside her more frumpy sister almost also seemed to reflect the romanticized image of the IRA successfully promoted throughout the world during The Troubles.

Is it a successful play? Well, this is an unusual review in that we don't know whether it needs to be. Dramatically it feels flawed.

Teeni pours out both venom and occasionally more perceptive, if clouded by a gleeful rage, insights for most of the play before Sandra belies her more conservative demeanour with her own hocus pocus.

The jokes are hit and miss - not so much because they're not funny but some do feel thrown in rather than emerging from character. But there's a lot that is thrown and sticks.

This applies especially to how legal structures such as tribunals and commissions after the formal end of hostilities refuse to countenance the contradictions involved in themselves.

Acoholics Anonymous becomes a metaphor for the addiction to both violence and then confessions with sponsors just as compromised as those whom they sponsor. All reflecting a world situation when a commission narrows its focus down to itself and one country rather than the global affiliations which often helped the violence continue.

It's a play that maybe doesn't fit all the jigsaw pieces together - angry, cynical, raw, jagged where political and  media-friendly vested interest smooth over the wrongs to construct an artificial right.

Neil Bull directs with a sure hand, maintaining the momentum over seventy minutes against a dishevelled backdrop of  a basement filled with now disused metal filing cabinets, trailing cables and flickering lights designed by Laura Cordery.

But it's also very clearly a play that's also a fantasy. It's difficult to imagine such a confrontation between the sisters in these circumstances. Indeed even their attitudes feel awkward for women.

And maybe there's the nub of it - Ireland the playwright has chosen two women to channel and front the very male-dominated worlds in which each of them live. And it's a strength that this seems an awkward fit because it forces us to think about what these conflict resolution processes really are.

It's a green light for a deliberately uneasy and stimulating one act play which keeps us in the room with problems we may not want to, but need to, consider.

Review Incident At Vichy

Incident At Vichy
by Arthur Miller

No Exit
http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/

"Hope", wrote American poet Emily Dickinson, "is the thing with feathers-/That perches in the soul-/And sings the tune without the words -/And never stops - at all - ...".

Is this what was in playwright Arthur Miller's mind when the mute Old Jew (Jeremy Gagan), called to the front of the queue and facing extinction in 1942,  stands up and feathers scatter around the room from the homely pillow cover he has been clutching?

For it struck us that Miller's 1964 play Incident At Vichy is about human hope in the face of almost certain disaster. Set in "unoccupied" France, French police have rounded up eight men and a boy and are handing them to the Nazi regime.

Almost all of them turn out to be Jews on false papers. They clutch at whatever slim chances present themselves. They also deceive and lie to themselves and others all for a sliver of hope that they will survive.

The artist Lebeau (Lawrence Boothman), for example, tries to persuade himself and others that he has some agency, that it was not him, but a parent clinging to material goods who stopped him from escaping in 1939 on a US visa.

But even this seemingly simple situation has complex layers. He admits to feeling guilt, but it may be misplaced.

What is unsaid is that the elderly had far less chance of obtaining a visa and being allowed into other countries than the younger generation. Their children often had to make the anguished decision whether to stay behind with them or leave the country. He may be lying to preserve his own sanity in the face of certain death.

For it seems to us Incident At Vichy is very much a psychological play, the very human trait of human beings believing their beliefs and actions mean something and can directly lead to survival - and that their survival is not a random blip but says something about them. Transforming them from human beings buffetted by fortune that they cannot control into symbols.

Miller himself described the origins of the story behind Incident At Vichy in the vaguest of terms but named the person who relayed it to him. It's a story about "a friend of a friend" who is the recipient of an extraordinary selfless act by a fellow human being.

An incident  every Jew, every human being, must hope would happen to them if he or she was in such a position. A story everyone would want to hear even if it were a one-off or an urban legend (Losey's later movie Monsieur Klein is another kind of riff on the theme).

Although it was first staged at the Lincoln Center, this play feels very much as if it were written for  radio or a TV play (Twelve Angry Men may be a different subject with a different outcome but it's also a play similarly centring on persuasion and realisation).

Phil Willmott directs a production of great clarity with outstanding performances from Edward Killingback as dilettante gentile Austrian nobleman Von Berg and PK Taylor as an actor who tries to convince himself that confidence in his own performance both as actor and human being will win through.

We did wonder whether a production with an even more diverse cast would open up the universal themes and knotty problems contained in this play more.

The script at times feels slightly clunky as the issues are laid out - this is very much an issue-led play. Nevertheless the issues lead to no simple conclusions where devastating realities set against the nature of human relationships and politics form a web catching every class and type.

While Leduc, the psychiatrist (Gethin Alderman) seems the clearest sighted, he also has his own blind spots. At one point he blames his wife for his situation and at another time views others, not himself, as being as conditioned as Pavlov's dog.

Incident At Vichy is a play set in the year the USA entered the Second World War but also examines issues of power and responsibility which remain live in our times. Both Von Berg's belief in old pre-war feudal structures where he could proffer personal protection and Leduc's belief in education and self-awareness prove illusory. 

It's an amber/green light for a timely production with a discussion of issues always with us including industrial success achieved by using free labour and slavery rather than on its own business merits.

Review You're Human Like The Rest Of Them

Three short plays by a cult late 20th century writer are a welcome introduction to his work, but Peter Barker finds these samples of his craft vary in quality.

You're Human Like The Rest Of Them
Down Red Lane
Not Counting The Savages
by BS Johnson

Bodies And Other Liabilities

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

 

A man of many parts, BS Johnson was originally an accounts clerk before becoming a novelist, poet, sports journalist, trade union activist and TV documentary maker and presenter. All this despite failing his 11+ exam as a working-class Hammersmith schoolboy. 

 

Yet he ended his life in 1973 aged just 40, and it is to the Finborough Theatre’s credit that it has brought together three of his short plays for an evening which is uneven but intriguing.
 

As works of the absurd, the three plays of course have an exaggerated and surreal quality.

 

“Down Red Lane”, inspired by the playwright's trip to Czechoslovakia, was first performed posthumously as lunchtime theatre at Charles Marowitz's and Thelma Holt's Open Space Theatre on Tottenham Court Road in 1974. The cast included Timothy West as a greedy gourmet, Simon Callow as the waiter and Martin Coveney as the diner's own dissident belly.
 

Now the Finborough Theatre tackles the same play with the diner (Reginald Edwards) daily abusing his body with a programme of oysters washed down with a Premier Cru Chablis. And it is his belly (played by Alex Griffin-Griffiths) who is the spokesman for the misgivings of his body as it collapses under years of abuse. 

 

Dark and witty,  the battle between prodigious appetite of the gourmand and the working class belly under siege is the best-written of the trio of plays.

A slightly earlier play in the Johnson canon, the faintly scandalous “Not Counting the Savages”, was originally commissioed as a BBC2 TV drama directed by Mike Newell. A wife and mother (Sarah Berger) returns home from a graveyard and tells her family how, while tending a family headstone, a male flasher ambushed her. She expects support and comfort. 

 

However her daughter Rosa (Emma Paetz) is self-centred and cold. Her son Jerry (Bertie Taylor-Smith) is a pornographic film maker, who finds her unpleasant experience a source of fun, and perhaps later of artistic inspiration. Her surgeon husband (Brian Deacon) proves totally uninterested in and uncaring about her ordeal, only elsewhere springing into action when his professional skills are required.

 

The wife should have been a character garnering support from the audience; but on the evidence of this production, Johnson fails to give her any convincing independent existence, except as a strop against which he can sharpen the exaggerated edges of the other characters.

The weakest piece is the final play, the blank verse “You’re Human Like the Rest of Them”. Originally commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1964, Johnson went on to direct it as a short film three years later.
 

The three plays are set to run two hours in the programme but in performance come out at a little over an hour. It feels as if “You’re Human Like the Rest of Them” is where the cut came. 

 

Taylor-Smith is a teacher Haakon who has a sudden revelation of the human body's peculiar structural inadequacy and his own mortality.  Despite mustering the maximum amount of  energy and plausbility, the idea of wakening to an existential reality feels somewhat juvenile and Taylor-Smith is hampered by a shallow and, unfortunately, dull  piece.

Working around the set of the other play currently running at the Finborough Theatre, the design by Rūta Irbīte also feels rather over-fussy with 1950s second-hand furniture scattered around the walls of the two-sided space.  Three-dimensional geometric shapes such as crescents and rectangles function as tables, chairs and other furnishing.  

 

The audience only has fleeting glimpses of Johnson's talent in these plays directed by Carla Kingham. A fresh outing for Johnson's work is laudable and it certainly serves a purpose for those interested in UK theatre from the 1950s to the 1970s. But this red/amber light production may not win Johnson many new fans.

Review I'm Gonna Pray For You So Hard

The British première of a whipsmart, brutal play set in a New York apartment fascinates Francis Beckett with its lacerating dissection of a father-daughter relationship.  

I'm Gonna Pray For You So Hard 
by Halley Feiffer

Portrait Of The Artist As A Raving Egotist
http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/

A young American actress, excited and hopeful after opening in a new show, comes home with her famous playwright father, and they consume a lot of drink and a lot of drugs; and he takes out the disappointments and resentments of his own life by manipulating a daughter who hero-worships him.

That’s pretty much it, really, but it adds up to an evening in the theatre which leaves you angry and emotionally drained.

The father is a man of his time, and his time is the late fifties and the sixties, so he has all the self-indulgence of that most indulged generation, plus the sort of sexual obsession that seems to grip many American men of a certain age. If he wants to be insulting about another man, he calls him a queer or speculates that his sexual organ may not be large. Dicks and pussies figure large in his discourse.

His cultural references are those of his generation, such as Death of a Salesman, but there is underlying bitterness that he never achieved the same status as the likes of Arthur Miller.  He has told his daughter his stories of triumph and near-triumph many times, but she still listens agog – and he sulks when she remembers the punch line.

He is mean about small things. She needs a cigarette and has run out; he has one alight, but refuses her because there is only one left in his packet. He teases her about her reviews, and cheers her with more drink and more drugs. He tells her “you gotta learn to drink like an adult” as he drinks like a spoilt child.

He says he loves his daughter, and in his own way he does. Would he still love her if she failed to make it as an actress, she wants to know.  Well, yes, but he’d be really disappointed. And “your mother getting ill is the best thing that could have happened to us” – for she might have got in the way.

In short, the man is such a complete shit that, despite Adrian Lukis’s best efforts in the part (and Mr Lukis’s best efforts are very good), I for one could not give a damn what happened to him.

The daughter is another matter. Jill Winternitz gives a stunning performance, believable and heart-rending from start to finish.  She is what her character wants to be – an exceptionally talented actor of star quality. We pray for her character to escape the clutches of her domineering, manipulative father, until she does, and – without giving away the end – it is not what we hoped for.

A fine play, well acted and thoughtfully directed by Jake Smith, is well worth the trek to the Finborough and earns a green light.

Review Dubailand

Dubailand
by Carmen Nasr

The Arabian Sites
http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/

When Otto Von Bismarck, the Chancellor of the German Empire, led the way in introducing the world's first social insurance for German citizens in the 1880s, it was for practical rather than idealistic reasons.

The measures could ensure a steady supply of healthy citizens for German industry, the armed forces and to compete for a workforce, reducing the debilitating mass emigration of workers to the USA where such measures did not exist.

Carmen Nasr's precise and compelling play Dubailand concentrates on a 21st century tale of economic migration and lack of employment rights: The relationship between exploited Indian migrant workers and the boom Emirate city of Dubai in the present-day global economy.

Two tales intertwine and finally merge: an Indian worker brought over to build the gleaming glass and concrete tower blocks, living in what amounts to slave conditions, unable to send money back to his family; a British PR middle manager living in luxury whose position is jeopardized by the arrival of a UK female friend, an aspiring investigative journalist angling for her big break.

With 18 short, sharp scenes, this carefully written piece, directed by Georgie Staight, unravels the lives of the Indian builder Amar (Adi Chugh) and the British media worker Jamie (Nicholas Banks) against the unreal reality of Dubai. The play has a deceptively simple feel but slyly inserts the more complex duplicitious exchange between India and Dubai states through the elegant ruthlessness of politically-savvy PR executive Deena (Reena Lalbihari),  

The minimalist design by Bex Kemp using neon vertical tubes and perspex boxes is clever. Nevertheless the production falls down in failing to follow one of the stage directions of the published text. By leaving out the portrait hanging on the wall of Dubai's ruler Sheik Mohamed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, there is  no sense of the hierarchy within Dubai and how the state distributes contracts and acts as ultimate authority.

We had to google vigorously to discover the control exercised by companies set up by the Dubai ruling family, the Department of Labour permits which construction firms have to obtain for their foreign workers and what seem to be unenforced labour regulations.

Even so, the play itself does makes oblique references to Dubai as a British protectorate, its "marzipan" managerial set-up, the world of loans and credit where ex-pats falling on hard times are as vulnerable as other migrant workers, and hidden or ignored state regulation within a smooth dramatic structure.

It certainly gave us enough information to dig up the facts from the internet and understand how the fates of the various nationals in Dubailand also reflects the role the nations play in the Dubai mosaic.

British-Lebanese playwright Nasr has done a shrewd job in distilling dramatically troubling and sometimes fatal contradictions which affect us all in the brave new world of public-private partnership and state-allowed and promoted credit and loans. In an age of Brexit uncertainty when migrant workers in the UK and Brits in continental Europe also find themselves in a precarious situation, it's an amber/green light for a slick but heartfelt drama.

Review Run The Beast Down

The latest member of the TLT community is Peter Barker, who worked on local newspapers before stints at ITN, UK and China news agency branches and on free commuter paper Metro. He now reviews a compelling new play as a City slicker fallen on tough times goes native in London's feral landscape.  

Run The Beast Down
by Titas Halder

Brush With The Wild Side
http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/

As many a London resident will tell you, foxes are a menace; unwelcome in the city, tearing into rubbish bags, looking for hidden trifles and trotting the sidewalk with a cheek that makes you want to call the hunt -  if only Tony Blair hadn't banned it, damn him!

But it’s the fox within the man that Titas Halder’s new play ‘Run the Beast Down’ pursues at the Finborough Theatre.

Arrive early in the auditorium and the inventive soundscape from on-stage DJ Chris Bartholomew working decks and computers with virtuosity will greet you.

After that, the main man, Charlie, appears in what is otherwise essentially a one-man play  -- played with vulpine good looks and energy by the charismatic Ben Aldridge.

He is truly a creature of these times, probably a sure bet for a successful life with a loving partner, a high-flying job (in the City) and the sought-after London apartment. 

OK, he may also be a TK Maxx kind of guy; clad in cheap black jeans, cheaper black T-shirt and bold-coloured sneakers. But can you tell from the outside what the man is -- what motivates him, what has shaped him, what he is?

And will he beat the pack chasing him, or get cornered?

Our rummaging through Charlie’s rubbish begins with the unexpected woes which descend on him all at once -- he loses his job and has been - sort of -  burgled. At least his girlfriend has left him, taking almost everything, apart from the curtains.

Insomniac Charlie is the filter through which we experience his increasingly bizarre environment and the people around him. Writer Halder demonstrates considerable flair, building the momentum of a fantastical mental and physical journey with a poetic wit. In Aldridge’s Charlie he certainly finds an actor who can rise to the task -- his transformations of mood and movement are seamlessly defined.

The mystery at the heart of the play, the threats, whether real or imagined, and Charlie's metamorphosis are intriguing. Yet, it must be said at the same time, he is just another one of those middle class 20-something London guys you see on the tube whom you'd assume has a good job and comes from a relatively privileged background. So he remains neither quite heroic enough to be admired nor twisted enough to be... well, admired.

But we can pity him and, when he dissolves, there is literally and metaphorically something of everybody about him.

As Charlie unravels, we see him maniacally writing a label for each new scene on the floor of the stage until, finally, there is little space left untouched. The bare plinth set, designed by Anthony Lamble, with a rear wall of thick upright metal tubes and LED lighting,  is ultimately not even covered with words, just a crowded jumble of letters.

Like the set, the lighting from Rob Mill is versatile, unintrusive, without gimmickry. Equally the electronic score orchestrated by Bartholomew and sound by Ben and Max Kingham  complements the pace of the play and makes a significant contribution to the evening.

Director Hannah Price keeps the feral drama tightly focussed, skilfully maintaining the precarious balance of Charlie's flamboyant high-wire act which must reach the end of the line before he really crashes and burns. This 80-minute debut from writer Titas Halder, developed at Canterbury's Marlowe Theatre, emerges polished and sharp in Price's production with Aldridge's gripping  performance all deserving a green light. 

Review Veterans Day

Veterans Day
by Donald Freed

The Wrong Berlin
http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/

When one talks about the military-industrial complex (surely you have constant chats about it 😉 ?), the entertainment industry perhaps does not immediately spring to mind. Yet entertaining the troops and maintaining civilian morale is indeed a show business staple. And in the USA during at least one World War and ensuing conflicts, there was always hope.

Comedian and movie star Bob Hope, that is.

Donald Freed's 1989 three-hander Veterans Day takes place in a military hospital, part of an armed forces' benefits' system, run by the Department of Veterans Affairs, separate from the Department of  Health. A trio of veterans are waiting for the arrival of the president and the awarding of medals.

Bob Hope has a minor hearsay role in this 95 minute off-kilter piece of military and commercial misdirection and misguided missiles. Yet it also reminded TLT of hit songwriter Harry Warren's bitter  quip about his relative obscurity compared to a more celebrated practitioner of the craft, Irving Berlin. "They bombed the wrong Berlin".

Only slight facial flickers and an outstretched sock-clad foot indicate signs of life in wheelchair-bound shell-shocked First War War private Leslie Holloway (Roger Braban). He  provides a mostly-mute audience for the psychodrama played out in front of him.

Younger man, John McCormack Butts (Craig Pinder) never saw active service in World War II but  was part of the World War II entertainment corps, acting, we learn gradually, as the military equivalent of a Hollywood publicist covering up armed forces' scandals.

Pinder settles down into the role of  Butts, intent on successfully stage managing the presidential visit. Butts juggles alongside knowledge of a less-than-salubrious past add concern about his family and business in the face of rival Japanese manufacturers, at first almost absent-mindedly trying to accommodate increasingly strange utterances of the third man in the room.

Colonel Walter Kercelik is a decorated Vietnam war hero (Charlie De Bromhead), a well-known media face seemingly with access to secret service dossiers on the other two who has, apparently, under the trauma of hiding wartime atrocities, gone rogue. 

Kercelik, who has in turn been an audience for Butts' rendition of war songs from Ivor Novello's Keep The Home Fires Burning to, yes, Irving Berlin's anthem, "God Bless America" keeps the persona of a detached celebrity before his plan, using Holloway as a prop and accessory, becomes apparent.

Originally started as United States' Armistice Day, Veterans Day passed into law as a November 11th legal holiday.

It was "dedicated to world peace" in 1936, a year after the introduction of United States' social insurance, bringing it in line with similar measures introduced before World War I in Europe. After World War II a campaign to  create a national veterans' day, honouring all  military veterans, was put in place.

The play Veterans Day manages to encompass the American Civil War, the First World War and the special relationship with Britain, up to the Vietnam conflict. But there's no doubt this is, intentionally, a seriously weird piece

On the one hand, it's a straightforward presidential assassination plot. On the other, it twists together government, history and state welfare, the psychological and the  medical, the military and the commercial of an America on the cusp of a post-Cold War new world order.

The Finborough revival takes place as, many would say, fact has outpaced fiction. Donald Trump, arguably or indisputedly according to your point of view, made by TV, prepares to enter the White House. At the time of the play's premiere, movie-made Ronald Reagan, albeit a more experienced politician, had just left the White House, leaving the subsequent fall of the Berlin Wall as his legacy.

In 1989 it was classed as a "black comedy".  Now the revelations and twisting and turning tales of Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden and  the internet bubble conspire to make it something else. There's even been a Secretary of Veterans Affairs with Japanese ancestry.

The acting in this production is solid and director Hannah Boland Moore manages her own juggling trick in nicely pacing a fantastical dialogue-heavy play, aided by the drifting in parade ground noises of Matt Downing's atmospheric soundscape. It also feels a good decision to exploit the play's cinematic qualities by having it run through without an interval as the protagonists strike more and more the poses of Hollywood melodrama.

This play feels like both a critique and a part of Americana, a patchwork which still has resonance. Yet a play with so many purely American references also feels for a British audience more as if it could be the inspiration for new drama to grapple with our strange times. It's an upper range amber light for a play which almost persuades us that two wrongs can make a right.

Review The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus

The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus
by Tony Harrison

Mind The Gaps
http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/

In a world where the collection of data has become inextricably linked with cultural dominance, Tony Harrison's 1988 funny yet ambiguous The Trackers Of Oxyrhnchus has a welome revival at the Finborough Theatre in a cut-down production directed by Jimmy Walters.

To our untutored classical ear, this verse play, written shortly before the end of the Cold War by Tony Harrison, cannily mixes the archaic and the contemporary, the allure of Tutankhamun-like archeological digs with the then in-the-news music and recording industry's exploitation of young musicians.

All within the framework of the lewd and bawdy satyric play with the potential for tragedy, an almost-lost theatrical form which accompanied the ritual tragedies and comedies of ancient Greece.

This strange but compelling piece is itself  divided into three fragments. An imperial 1907 archeological expedition with two dons seeking to export in crates their papyrus finds to an Oxford University collection.  A 5th century BC mythological age of Greek gods and cloven-hoofed phallicly well-endowed, part goat, part horse, part human, satyrs. And then current-day London, via National Service, the South Bank's 1951 Festival of Britain and the 1970s' National Theatre.

The two obsessed dons, Bernard Grenfell (Tom Purbeck) and Arthur Hunt (Richard Glaves) are supervising a phalanx of Egyptian workers uncovering ancient scraps on a rubbish heap.

Disappointingly for the intense Grenfell, legal petitions from disenfranchised citizens outnumber slivers of literature including a long-lost satyr play of Sophocles - every legible word matched by an equal number of illegible phrases and huge gaps in the papyrii.

Grenfell's mental state proves to be the gateway to a past mythological world where Apollo possesses the don's mind demanding the mortal puts together the lost play without any gaps where the meglomaniac Greek god is both main character and superstar actor.

Apollo also demands total control over the arts maintaining an artistic class system which excludes satyrs from creating or playing.

Nevertheless the call to excavate the long-lost play also acccompanies Apollo depending on the satyrs, lured by a reward of gold and freedom, to find his lost herd of cattle. Indeed, the herd only proves to be another gateway to the production and reproduction of music unlicensed by Apollo.

Harrison is a Leeds Grammar schoolboy who read classics, not at Oxbridge, but at his local redbrick university. The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus takes a niche piece of historical and literary excavation, tracking its wider implications.

He takes as his starting point a reality - the expedition of Grenfell and Hunt using Grenfell's historically recorded real-life mental illness to lead us finally into a world where the past, the contemporary and the mythological uneasily co-exist together.

The leader of the satyrs (Richard Glaves transformed from Hunt) brings the audience through a Good Old Days Leeds Variety type singalong. Except the audience is instructed in a smattering of Greek to sing along to as a charm to raise the  boozy, lusty satyrs. They burst out from the confines of the crated papyrii on which Sophocles wrote his satyr to erupt into a spirited proletarian clog dance choreographed by Amy Lawrence.

It's certainly a very male play, a hold broken only by the fragile yet self sufficient nymph Kyllene (Peta Cornish) bringing a statuesque female dignity, a Victorian view of nymphs, contrasting with the rumbustious satyrs as they seek Apollo's lost animals.

Mixing classical stanzas, what snobby bloggers (!!!) might call popular culture, a kind of Dr Seuss frivolously serious didacticism, the dramatic conflicts over translation and artistic creation widen and darkens into the failure of idealism, increasing suppression and censorship.

Walters' energetic direction safeguards the lively pace and comedy but also clearly delineates a grevious uncertain, repressive status quo.

Designer Phil Lindley's tattered papyrii hangings, stone slabs and one dimensional pillars ingeniously evoke the Egyptian excavation and transform into a mythological backdrop before the archeological layers are completed by projections of modern London on the backcloths.

The costumes by Alexander William Connatty are equally unfussy and effective. Last, but not least, the lighting of Tara Marricdale takes on a central communal status and tellingly obscures as the ideal retreats into more violent consequences. 

And somehow Harrison's fidelity to multiple sources, the orginal history and texts, yoked together with a fluent train of thought rather than cut and paste as they emerge into the modern world,  insures a resonance in our current digital environment. Director Walters has only to make the lightest of updates - mobile phones, capable of filming violent acts, and isolating earphones instead of boomboxes - to keep the play pertinent.

For  we live in an age where artistic creation is now subsumed into and consumed as "content". The most popular, easy-to-reach websites often dominate with one sole interpretation of events and  control of such data, whether collected by companies or the state, raises the possibility of abusive monopoly commercial exploitation.

The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus still feels seriously relevant. Even the unwieldy title seems to anticipate our cookie-tracked digital age and it's a green light for this intriguing, humorous yet troubling play. 

Review After October

After October
by Rodney Ackland

The Wolves of Hampstead
http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/

At the end of the "The Wolf of Wall Street", an ex-rogue trader holds up a pen and invites the multicultural participants in his global touring seminar to invent a good story to sell the product. (32 seconds into the video link).This scene popped into our thoughts as we watched Rodney Ackland's 1936 play, After October.

Of course, the recent movie is about financial wheeler dealing and only one off-stage character in Ackland's screwball comedy is a convicted thief, although there is some 1930s' product placement.

Still, this two-act semi-autobiographical piece is filled with stories and plots brought to the impecunious Hampstead household by the widowed, still attractive Rhoda Monkhams (a nicely judged performance of grace under pressure by Sasha Waddell), a former Gaiety Girl, and her children including playwright son Clive (boyishly intense Adam Buchanan).

The play follows the trials and tribulations of the debt-ridden family. This includes Clive's sisters Joan (Allegra Marland), a would-be artist currently the lover and secretary of hard-drinking married text book publisher Alec Mant (Jonathan Oliver);  and Lou (Peta Cornish), whose musical theatre ambitions have melted into the reality of being a taxi dancer while her charming but lightweight husband Armand (Andrew Cazanave Pin), cast adrift by his family, serves in a wine shop.

All their hopes are pinned on Clive, a Grub Street hack  and aspiring playwright, whose anti-war play is about to be put on. Even if, in a play set in 1935, during the Spanish Civil War, when Mussolini invaded Ethiopia and Winston Churchill warned about Nazi Germany, it's perhaps not the most auspicious time.

If Clive succeeds (strange as it may seem now, a West End hit at that time could turn a struggling writer into a millionaire) it could also trigger a chain reaction in other directions.

The career of his working class fellow writer,  dark and brooding poet Oliver (lugubrious Patrick Osborne), could also twist around if Clive follows through on his promise to be his financial guarantor. As it is, he's reduced to selling bristle brushes door to door and has a penchant for entering the Monkhams's home through the bay window like a spy or a burglar.

Their housekeeper Mrs Batley (Josie Kidd in a finely tuned understated performance) appreciates her treatment by Rhoda for whom she keeps unpaid tradesmen sweet. But she has her troubles, retreating to the cinema to avoid her bullying Mussolini-loving son-in-law, and could find a new role if Clive succeeds.

It's only eccentric Marigold Ivens (Beverly Klein), seemingly the woman least likely, who appears to be coyly laying little claim on Clive. He enjoys her company, even if she harbours her own, apparently vague, thespian ambitions.

Now we admit to having a soft spot for Clive, especially as he's left-handed like your very own reviewer and his chaotic paperwork with orange Allen Lane Penguin paperbacks scattered round his writing space reminded us of something closer to home.

Clive himself would like to join the moneyed rentier class, with his name up in lights over a hit play. He would also be able to marry the lodger, the  manicurist Frances (Jasmine Blackborow), whose rent helps supplement the family's meagre income, grabbing her away from stick-in-the-mud retired colonial civil servant Brian (Stephen Rashbrook). 

The snug Finborough space is transformed cleverly by designer Rosanna Vize into a light and airy Hampstead living room complete of course with bay window. After October is fluently directed by Oscar Toeman with only a few lapses of pace, perhaps owing to the almost cinematic nature  of the piece.

There's a feel of Noel Coward's Hay Fever and, transatlantically, George Kaufman and Edna Ferber's The Royal Family while retaining its own feather-light individuality.

For, despite the the superficial frothiness of the plot, there are clever meaningful literary pastiches and a subtle gender mash up. One character when told Clive has written a drama even innocently asks if it's a musical comedy or a detective story. Plus ça change ...

This proves to be far from a playwriting equivalent of a quota quickie, even if Ackland himself seemed to have suffered the burdens of and enjoyed little of the success of his illustrious playwriting circle. With its acute grasp of the entertainment industry's line of dependency and sly, sharp but humane sense of the ridiculous, After October sold itself to us and it's a TLT green light.

Review Magnificence

Magnificence
by Howard Brenton

The State We're In
http://finboroughtheatre.co.uk/

Which play links squatters, bailiffs, Che Guevara t-shirts, Cambridge University, constables, Brixton Prison, situationism, bonkbuster novel The Carpetbaggers, graffitti, public lavatories the welfare state, Edward Heath's Tory government, a revolutionary banner with a tendency to sag, John Marston's Jacobean satire The Malcontent, baked beans, the clap, the High Court, Winston Churchill ...

(Takes a breath!) ... The church,  investigative current affairs programme World In Action, Chairman Mao, the BBC, calor gas lamps, dustbin men, Hollywood stars Caroll Baker and Steve McQueen, cornflakes, Marmite, Mickey Mouse, the Paymaster General, French writer Jean Genet, the Weathermen, Black Panthers, the Apollo Moon Landing, the Stars and Stripes, the Hammer and Sickle, Benny Hill, Marilyn Monroe, Jesus, China, champagne, The House of Lords, the biblical Song of Songs and a London Times obituary?

You may have guessed by the title of this review, it's Howard Brenton's 1973 Royal Court Theatre play Magnificence. This uneven, but complex and fierce play is very much rooted in the student politics, arguments, idealism and violence of the 1960s and 1970s.

The Finborough Theatre production has certainly garnered an impressive cast of theatrical luminaries of that generation to help fund it -   Judi Dench, David Edgar, David Hare, Joanna Lumley, Tom Stoppard and Harriet Walter (in case you are the type who wants to complain, the programme/play script acknowlegments studiously avoid the use of Honours' List titles) among others.

A group of squatters during the housing shortage of the 1970s break into an empty derelict house (Phil Lindley's evocative and adaptable peeling-wallpaper set, equally a squat, a Cambridge college and an English garden).

They find themselves under siege from "murder in my heart" Slaughter the freelance bailiff (Chris Porter) acting for an unnamed landlord. An ex British mainland and colonial policeman, he's already been exposed in a TV documentary for a fatal misdemeanour, but is nevertheless backed by a philosophical constable (Tim Faulkner).

The squatters, whose first act is to spray slogans on the walls, are a motley crew, led by libertarian Jed (Joel Gillman) with his pregnant soft-hearted, homemaking girlfriend Mary (Daisy Hughes) in tow.

Plus the more easily swayed, apologetic Will (Will Bliss) with a Uriah Heep turn of phrase, "Doing our 'umble best, Ma'am, to wreck Society", denim-clad Veronica (Eva-Jane Willis) on two weeks' holiday from the BBC and the more quietly-spoken and observant Cliff (Tyson Douglas). 

The constable allows the bailiff to raid the premises. In fact,  it is the clash between the new (the police constable's concern over the health and safety of a calor gas lamp) with the old (the bailiff's subsequent unregulated private sector violence) which leads directly to Mary losing her baby, Jed's imprisonment and a final path to destruction.

In between the action switches to the rarified environs of Cambridge's ivory tower and a meeting between  don Babs (Hayward B Morse) and his smooth talking grey tinted former tutee, lover and now a new breed of managerial MP Alice (Tim Faulkner again).  

Magnificence has a  rawness, political and literary inclusiveness which are both its strength and weakness. Indeed, Brenton was fresh from writing fringe plays when he was given space at the Royal Court with director Max Stafford-Clark.

The writer using part naturalism, a part Mr Punch stylized Jacobean satiric style grapples with a mosaic of competing issues of some complexity including the archaic leftovers of another age within a new, educated society.

Even the Chief Constable of the local force (force being the operative word) has a Cambridge degree and the Special Branch have tutored the constable in the ins and outs of factional politics and theories.

In 1973 Oxbridge was also still allowed the special privilege of their own top and bowler-hatted police forces (which Cambridge still retains) and a substantial property portfolio.  Simultaneously Lord Eccles held the purse strings as Her Majesty's Paymaster General and as Minister for the Arts.

The scene which has lasted the best remains the Cambridge scene, done full justice by Morse and Faulkner, with not only the recognizably Not The 1948 Show or  Pythonesque, intellectual playfulness but also ultimately a controlled fury. 

Yet the play feels torn inside itself. It has something in common with Seán O'Casey without the dramatic polish but some of the poetry.  Finding a dramatic structure for the avalanche of issues becomes problematic and the sudden reappearance, after a considerable absence, at the play's end of Cliff with a final response (harking back to the Royal Court's two scandalous playwrights - John Osborne and Granville Barker) only serves to emphasize the flaws.

Neverthess it still has currency in our twentieth first century. It's a neat irony this Finborough Theatre revival  coincides with the hoo ha over Bob Dylan's disruptive silence regarding the Nobel Prize for Literature - Alfred Nobel being the inventor of gelignite which, along with a stylized take on literature, features largely in the play.

Mind you, the current housing crisis and the re-emergence of stories about presidential hopeful Donald Trump's landlord past also make the invalid court eviction notice and harassment of tenants still relevant.

This tragi-comic piece is directed with clarity and pace by Josh Roche benefitting from Joe Price's lighting design signalling the deliberate changes in style.

The title Magnificence with its mixed root meaning of grandeur and pomposity feels accurate for this unwieldy, experimental, hit-and-miss play. At the same  time its jabs of sporadic ferocity still hit the spot.

It's an upper range amber light from your agent provocateur reviewer and her own four-wheeled agent of revolution. 

Review The Great Divide

The Great Divide
by Alix Sobler

From Rags to Stitches
http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/

The 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York proved a turning point in American labour history: For pay and conditions; For the recognition of female trade union membership starting with the garment trade; For health and safety legislation. There was even an early  1917 Edison silent film inspired by this low point in exploitation of the American immigrant workforce.

The sweatshop manufacturing women's shirtwaists was perched on the top three floors of a 10-storey building in Washington Place employing mainly Jewish Russian and Italian iimmigrant workers. The women were for the most part plying their trade at sewing machines working long hours for a pittance, while the men were the better-paid cutters and foremen.

The title The Great Divide has multiple significance: It's the literal translation of the Havdalah, the ceremony marking the end of the Sabbath and the start of a new (working) week; the physical and psychological divide between the old country and old ways and America where a young woman could find a degree of economic independence and a more secular life; The divide between workers and bosses in the rag trade; The locked doors with fatal consequences for the workers in the Land of the Free.  

Rosa (Hannah Genesius) resolves to emigrate to America from the poverty-stricken Pale Of Settlement, This was a western swathe of the Russian Empire stretching across parts of present-day Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova and Russia, in which Jews were forced to settle.

Her brother Avram (Josh Collins), a Marxist, is equally adamant that he will stay and fight for a Communist ideal which, he believes, would liberate the Jews from pograms and economic deprivation.

After travelling with her sister Sadie (Miztli Rose Neville) across the sea in steerage, Rosa lands in New York as one of the "huddled masses" and obtains work in the Triangle workshop. Among her factory floor colleagues are blonde Manya (Emma King), characterised as "a poet" and recent Italian immigrant Sophie (Neville once more).

There is the first rush of joy at finding a job, earning their own money and being part of the great economic machine of American (neatly encapsulated by rhythmic drumming on the trunks led by foreman Max, Michael Kiersey). However the long hours, low pay and poor conditions start to take their toll.

Rosa's experience makes her open to  the message and example of union organiser Clara Lemlich (a real historical figure played by Miztli Rose Neville again). She joins the New York shirtwaist strike for better pay and conditions which predated the fire and saw violence against Lemlich by hired hoodlums and against the strikers by neighbourhood police officers 

The playwright gives a poignant and admirably clear account, as far as it goes, of the fire which had a major repercussions for the union movement, women workers and health and safety legislation. The alignment of the garment trade with Hollywood and the depiction of the fire in movies and Yiddish song make the reference to going to the pictures and Yiddish theatre relevant and resonant. 

It might however have been pertinent to ackowledge how the trades of the seamstress and tailor were already overcrowded professions in The Pale, being permitted  trades for Jews but vastly over-subscribed.An irony when it came to the over supply of garment workers from the crowded tenements of New York.

There are also times when the play feels a little too precious about theatre and literature. Rosa suddenly demands during cutter Jacob's attempt at courtship why he doesn't ask her which books she reads with the titles of classic books and plays then slip into the script.

The play also allows the characters to step out of the play and interrogate the story, But the questions posed concentrate on the manner of telling the story and the fate of individual characters. The interrogation remains somewhat superficial in not pushing serious questions about the role of competition between the numerous manufacturers, the slim profit margins,  city and state authorities' lack of building regulation enforcement, the insurance company's responsibility.

This would have added depth and rigour to the reasons why the owners escaped conviction for manslaughter. Otherwise it becomes a more convenntioal and slightly misleading one-to-one story of workers and bosses with the owners seemingly only getting off because of their lawyers' performances in the court room.

Nevertheless the most visceral part of the play is the description of the fire itself, the trapped women and men. The doors were locked, to prevent workers leaving without a search to prevent stealing, leading to horrifying and fatal consequences.

The scramble for an inadequate fire escape and the elevators and the workers forced to jump to their deaths as the flames and smoke filled the rooms in which they were imprisoned are vividly relayed. Without trivialisation, the echoes of the future 9/11 terror are inevitable.

Rory McGregor directs a fluent production with  an exceptionally effective but simple set. The jagged New York skyline wood panel designs of Sebastian Noel, doubling as the dingy surrounds of the factory floor.

Trunks serve as luggage, seats, work stations, a means of providing the sound effect for the assembly lines, The rhythmic flow of the script and wordless singing (Musical Director and composer Tim Shaw) also made us wonder whether the play had potential as a musical.

Yet, as it stands it certainly reflects as the programme points out on sweatshop fires in Pakistan and Bangladesh, as well as working conditions in other trades.

The fire's long history in movies, books and plays as well as social reform testifies to its significance even many years after social insurance has recognized women's work and legislation around the world is meant to enforce factory floor regulations. Despite this, the rollcall of avoidable workplace tragedies continue, especially with  the globalization of industry and factories and investment for profit rapidly shifting from country to country.   

The playwright takes to the heart the actions of long-lived survivor Rose Rosenfeld Freedman, whose married name serves as that of the fictional survivor, Rosa Freedman. The real Rose died in 2001, to the end of her days at the age of 107, according to her New York Times obituary, determinedly "telling and retelling the story", just as the character of Rosa in the play decides to do.

It's an understatement to say The Great Divide is a worthwhile drama, even if the script occasionally feels a little studied and over literary. It remains a cracking little one-act play which hits home and it's an amber/green light for a clear-sighted production on an issue which, sadly, still burns on.