Review Kiss Me

Kiss Me
by Richard Bean

Brief Encounters
http://www.atgtickets.com/shows/kiss-me/trafalgar-studios/
 
In this enigmatic and delicate one-act play Richard Bean reverses the film censorship in the years following the First World War.

While both the silent movies and the talkies eschewed the physical realities of intercourse in favour of the iconic cinematic kiss, the couple in Kiss Me find themselves subject to a different kind of censorship by the woman doctor who has brought them together. 

The stiff upper lip son of a manufacturer with interests in the West Indies  and a woman munitions' driver with a Louise Brooks' bob meet for the first time in her bedsit.

We spy on the couple, learning the surprising reason for the meeting. The play then runs perhaps a little predictably as writer Richard Bean divvys up the pair's background, but it would be churlish to give away the initial surprise.

Suffice to say the scenario involves a process, found in the bible and the subject of speculation and royal intrigues, recorded as practised at least since the 19th century, even though it may have been often carried out in an unethical rather than cooperative manner. 

The direction by Anna Ledwich and the performances of Claire Lams, demure in box pleat skirt, blouse and cardigan,  and Ben Lloyd-Hughes in city gent three-piece-suit, bowler hat and umbrella are seductive with the whoosh of almost a ghost story.

This seductiveness draws us away at times from some surely deliberate discrepancies.  Set, according to the programme, in the year of the Wall Street Crash, 1929, there is a time travelling feel to the script and social stigma seems more of hinderance than money.

There are also echoes of literary and screen references from Lady Chatterley's Lover to the apparently very-much-in the-future Brief Encounter. The man glancing at a fob watch and the simple but effective set design by Georgia Lowe with three large mirrors tarnished at the edges, behind a double bed, also seem to point towards the two Lewis Carroll "Alice" books.

There is, maybe, a very light touch subtext of travelling through political history as well. However the central preoccupation is also very 21st century.

Perhaps it's a piece which doesn't bear too much cold-light-of-day analysis as to how it all hangs together. Nevertheless, it did charm during our brief 75 minute acquaintance with it and it's a green light. 

Review An Octoroon

An Octoroon
by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

Down The Brer Rabbit Hole
https://www.orangetreetheatre.co.uk/

Playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is a product of the US educational system - a graduate with a masters in drama from New York University, he's additionally an alumnus of a Julliard playwrights' programme. And he also happens to be black.

His 2014 play An Octoroon scoops up out of the syllabus a populist nineteenth century melodrama of almost the same name, The Octoroon. Wikipedia terms Irish dramatist Dion Boucicault's play an "anti slavery potboiler" and it scored a pre-Civil War success at the playwright's Winter Garden Theatre in New York in 1859.

Jacobs-Jenkins satiric comedy drama begins very firmly in the 21st (ok maybe 20th century) with playwright BJJ (Ken Nwosu)  - ah, yes of course Jacobs-Jenkins comes out of a university course! - in therapy for depression of the psychological rather than the economic kind

Whether the therapist is black or white, we never know but she or he suggests the playwright writes a riff on The Octoroon, a top hat and crinolines' barnstorming melodrama. The heir to a bankrupt antebellum Louisiana plantation falls for demure, but in legalistic terms racially flawed, Zoe (Iola Evans) and villainous shenanigans are afoot in the shape of a nouveau riche ex-overseer.

BJJ mounts a production but this means unexpected if not entirely unforeseeable casting difficulties. The playwright finds himself uncomfortably forced to double and triple up and don white face, even if a ressurrected Boucicault (Kevin Trainor) becoming a literal red face Native American redskin, takes it all more casually as part of the theatrical stock-in-trade. 

Jacobs-Jenkins seems to share something of Boucicault's canny commercialism and eye on the main chance when he put together An Octoroon. This is not a criticism - 'twas ever so in theatre and An Octoroon's mix of middle-class academic high japes, cinematic commercialism, low comedy and genuine melodramatic potency makes the play something of a quadroon itself.

Before we mix you up with all these 'oons, we should explain, dear reader, our terminology. Originating in the time of slavery, an octoroon is of one eighth black descent. A quadroon is someone of one quarter black descent. These were legal definitions with huge ramifications, for before the abolition of slavery unless the octoroon had been proveably freed from slavery, he or she remained a slave.

We felt the biggest influence, in its melding together of race, finance and sharp ironies, irrationalities and humour, was Chinese-American David Henry Hwang's ingenious and rather more compact earlier Yellow Face.

But of course black history in the US is its own very particular often brutal, back and forth history. Directed by Ned Bennett with set by Georgia Lowe, threaded through this baggy, thought-provoking play is also a tale of black performers - minstrelsy, their representation in folk tales, abolitionist novels, cinema - finally emerging in the age of sub prime mortgages.   

Where Jacobs-Jenkins scores is the recognition that melodrama renovates the creaky house of realism. It strips it of its pretention to rationality, with lives inside and outside fiction assailed by irrational desires and dangers.

The 21st century play An Octoroon may be clunky and self-conscious, but there is also strength in its raw red marrow uncovered.

By the end of An Octoroon, the focus has shifted away from the problematic beatification of  octoroon Zoe and away from the men including the middle class playwright to the two dark skinned slave women, Minnie (Vivian Operah) and Dido (Emmanuella Cole)

Their initially peripheral situation and dependence for their existence on auctions and melodramatic paperwork devices provide a knotty resonance for more contemporary crises.

Faced with forces beyond their control, they raise An Octoroon from mere parody or a clever intellectual exercise about the black experience into a resonant piece about skin colour, women and property in modern America. In one stroke, An Octoroon becomes a much braver and original green light piece of work.   

Review The Patriotic Traitor

The Patriotic Traitor

by Jonathan Lynn

Men Of Destiny

https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/

How to define the tormented character of wartime France? Jonathan Lynn, best known for co-writing goverment sitcom Yes Minister, uses two real life French soldier politicians, judged differently by history, to draw together many elements in his ambitious play The Patriotic Traitor.

Marshal Pétain  (Tom Conti), a farmer's son from the Pas-De-Calais, became a First World War hero. However he later led the French Empire's very own "Parexit" from the Allied to the Nazi cause, accepting the premiership of the now notorious collaborationist anti-semitic government headquartered in the spa town Vichy.

General De Gaulle (Laurence Fox) was a proud nationalist, monarchist, Jesuit intellectual and writer, initially regarding the older man as his technical military mentor

But after fleeing to London, De Gaulle and the Free French disowned the "legal" French government. Following Allied victory and Pétain's post war conviction for treason, the younger man held the power over Marshal Pétain's life or death in his hands.   

Directed by Lynn himself, the set is deceptively simple, but it is also exquisitely designed by Georgia Lowe with pastels reminiscent of Saint Exupéry's Le Petit Prince illustrations or even the gray wash of Jean and Cécile De Brunhoff's benevolent dictator, Babar.

The play begins as Pétain, a womanising, tough Celt, whose geniality hides a streak of ruthless expediency, in Conti's incarnation, backed by a map of France and surrounding countries, awaits the verdict of his trial and it is seemingly structured as a series of his flashbacks told to a priest.

The apprentice simplicities of the first act fuse into a far more complex second act. As Pétain's viewpoint retreats, De Gaulle's sense of his destiny and his literary image of himself washes over the play. 

Finally a compliant Pétain, whose life De Gaulle saves in a manner modelled on Napoleon's exile, even accepts his former subordinate giving him the words to describe his punishment.

The play, in TLT's humble opinion, belongs to De Gaulle, allowing Fox to excel, even when talking, as became De Gaulle's wont, in the third person. And it is De Gaulle's particular sensibility, writerly imagination and politics which grow to dominate the play.

TLT and her petite bagnole were struck by echos of several parallel European histories and also some graceful tableaux in the course of the action. As if an artist had recorded events with every nuance in an upmarket populist political bande-dessinée before the age of the flash bulb press photographer.

Charting the lives of the two men and their relationship to France, Lynn chooses a dramatically difficult literary and historical path shaded with pastiche. For, despite the seriousness of the subject, there's a skein of humour strained across the continuum of events. 

At the same time, Lynn could have paced  his own work more effectively to tap more fully the dramatic potential of the intricate structure and ritualistic power exchange. 

There is able, precise support from Niall Ashdown, James Chalmers, Tom Mannion with Ruth Gibson as De Gaulle's wife, Calais-born Yvonne, elegant daughter of a biscuit maker and mother of his three children. Nonetheless, mixed feelings remain over this production's strategy and its mapping of the handover of power. 

A slow burner, it eventually rewards an attentive audience in the second act, having woven its coolly intricate web with gunpowder flashes of emotion. But, especially in the first act, this feels like a radio play with Andrea J Cox's sound effects or a piece preparing for a TV drama series or movie, so it's an amber light from TLT.

PS As left wing French intellectuals manqué with a taste for the existential ;), it tickled TLT and her mechanical filly that this production's De Gaulle, five years before his own birth, should watch out for his own uncle  - the would-be assassin of the French president in 1973 movie The Day Of The Jackal ... ;)