Review What Shadows

A portrait of a politician notorious for his views on race relations provides Francis Beckett with a telling glimpse of 20th century post colonial Britain.

What Shadows
by Chris Hannan

His Country, Right Or Wrong
https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/

One of the watershed moments in community relations in Britain – perhaps the most important one – was a widely publicised speech by a senior Conservative, the MP for Wolverhampton South West, Enoch Powell, in 1968.

He quoted a constituent as saying: “In this country in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.”

He talked of a white woman going to the shops and being followed by “children, charming, wide-eyed, grinning picaninnies.” He said: “We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents.”

Chris Hannan’s What Shadows is a serious and thoughtful play about Powell himself, the circumstances in which the speech came to be made, and the effect it had.

To the author’s great credit, he does not take the easy and widely accepted route, in which Powell is at worst a monster, at best a man cynically or foolishly unleashing monstrous forces, and Powell’s opponents are, universally, defenders of decency.

The play sets out its stall quickly, opening with a scene years after the Powell speech in which a distinguished black academic goes in search of a white colleague whose career she once helped ruin for expressing sympathy with Powell.

Both are performed here with just the right mix of rage and cynicism by, respectively, Amelia Dankor and Joanne Pearce. They agree to team up and try for an interview with the now very elderly politician.

When we meet Powell, he is picnicking with his wife and their old friends Clem and Marjorie Jones. The story of the friendship and the falling out between the Powells and the Joneses is a true one.

Clem Jones was editor of the Wolverhampton Express and Star: a warm human being, but a man who in the end put his principles before both his career and his friendships.

Indeed, playwright Chris Hannan acknowledges the help of Clem Jones’s son Nick, a former BBC industrial and political correspondent and a man known, as his father was, for the sort of integrity that sometimes infuriates editors and politicians.

Nicholas Le Prevost and Paula Wilcox are excellent as the Joneses, an entirely believable couple whose fate we care about. Joanne Pearce plays Powell’s wife (combining it with her role as the white academic) and does it well.

However I was not quite as convinced by Ian McDiarmid’s Powell.

He looks right, and in the first act at least he sounds right. And yet, for me, he wasn’t quite right.  Powell had a markedly deliberate manner and an elaborate stillness.

In contrast, McDiarmid has him moving restlessly all the time, sometimes gabbling a bit, sometimes even seeming a little camp.

Roxana Silbert directs with sensitivity and authority, though, occasionally, she has her actors shouting a little too much and the play gets just a little too wordy  towards the end.

However, despite my rather uncomfortable perch on the Park's vertiginous balcony, this proved to be a gripping evening. It's an amber/green light for a finely-crafted, thought-provoking and important play.

Review Wait Until Dark

Wait Until Dark
by Frederick Knott

Double Dealing
http://www.atgtickets.com/venues/richmond-theatre/

This 1967 play by the son-of-Quaker missionaries, Frederick Knott may seem like a dated traditional thriller, Yet it is really far more of a psychological helter skelter riff on the horror genre and product of a psychedelic and actorly age.

This seam was mined more fully in 1967, the year  following its stage premiere, in a suspenseful movie version directed by Terence Young, like Knott born in China, when it was a successful vehicle for Audrey Hepburn as the blind heroine in a Greenwich Village basement flat.

This, however, does not necessarily make this play a gripping piece for a 21st century audience.

Set now in London, a young woman is home alone in a basement flat where she is terrorized by a trio of criminals, with one murder already under their belts, searching for a stash of drugs.  

Sight impaired actor Karina Jones is Susy, both quivering victim and resourceful 1960s' hip chick, who gradually realises the utter implausibility of what she is being told by a series of characters impersonated by the wrongdoers.

Yet this seems part of a consciously double layer of implausibility. The plot is triggered by a husband (Oliver Mellor) who naviely agrees to bring a doll from Amsterdam to London for an attractive fellow passenger with a sob story about a sick child.

A naive young fellow you may think? Well, in this case it's a photographer. In the 1960s.  A seasoned traveller who doesn't realize any of the dangers. Hmm. 

Skip over this far fetched initial scenario, just as the farce audience should lose itself in laughter, this melodramatic wind up relies on surprise, excitement and satisfaction as a series of sadism and shocks are lined up for resilient Susy to knock down.

The play was directed first by Arthur "Bonnie and Clyde" Penn on Broadway with Lee Remick, quickly followed by a West End production with Honor Blackman in the starring role.  

Maybe one day some enterprising theatre bod can transform it into a satisfying semi parodic (somewhat in the style of Joe Orton's Loot) stylistic success.

But for the time being it remains, at the very least, both an extremely knotty play and a creaky period piece with longeurs.  It may also need a more heightened radiophonic soundscape to reflect Susy's experience as she grows in awareness. 

Knott, a Cambridge law graduate and ex-army man, is said, famously, to have hated writing. However he still managed to pen two workmanlike plays out of a very small output which were turned into classic movies - Hitchcock's Dial M For Murder starring Grace Kelly and Wait Until Dark

His first success came when a play which failed to find a producer was picked up by the BBC and after its first TV transmission was passed on to Alfred Hitchcock for a movie.

TLT and her cohort in theatrical crime couldn't help feeling that maybe by the time of Wait Until Dark, Knott was pitching at a movie deal from the start. As a play, it's far more suited to radio, a medium in many ways more closely allied to cinema than the stage.

It's not hard to see why Knott's writing was congenial to the styles of Hitchcock and early James Bond director Young. This is a plot which has to work like a clockwork thriller equivalent of farce.

The mechanics have to whirr inexorably round and the shocks slot into place with a satisfying frisson. A vein of humour in the play shows an awareness of its artificiality and artifice.

It seems to TLT and her quick-change-artiste automotive pal that Wait Until Dark can only work if the villains are understood to be both villainous and a cast of actors playing sadistic tricks in 'real' life.

 Actors with a mix of styles ranging from barnstorming melodrama to method acting straight out of The Studio.

Is this possible? Not on the evidence of this uneven producton directed by Alastair Whatley and the most recent productons, it seems. Even the actor Peter Sallis who played the chief villain in the original West End production directed by Anthony Sharp said it was "a difficult play to read and a difficult play in a way to put over".

It remains the original Cold War chiller thriller - a fridge or ice box plays a huge part in a rather confusing denouement. It does seem mightily stretched out over two acts and two hours and 20 minutes. In terms of tension, it's decidedly lukewarm rather than a red hot crucible.

Having said that, there are good performances from Jones and her young poppet of a neighbour, as strapped up as Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz, Shannon Rewcroft. Jack Ellis does convey effectively increasing doubt over his role in the drugs' plot and Tim Treloar makes a menacing Roat adding considerable pep in the second act.

This is a touring production, in Richmond until Saturday and then moving to runs in Cheltenham, Cambridge, Salisbury, Exeter, Lichfield, Malvern, Southend, Ipswich, Cardiff, York and Guildford.

As a historical piece in a gallery of theatrical curios, it is interesting. As a piece of drama, it does fall short for today's savvy audience and we can only give a red/amber light. 

Review The Ugly One

Tim Gopsill finds a satire on identity and the body beautiful catches a zeitgeist but fails to fulfil its full potential.
 
The Ugly One
by Marius von Mayenberg

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

Marius von Mayenberg's 2007 black comedy is resonant in our age of selfies and self-branding,  revolving round the conceit anything can now be replicated  and mass produced.

In fact this German satire centres on a solo main premise and joke and, luckily, it is a clever one, even if there is a clunkiness about the accompanying gags and plot development.

When Lette (Charlie Dorfman), a brilliant electronics engineer, is considered by his bosses too ugly to promote his own invention, his assistant Karlmann (Arian Nik impressive in his debut professional role) gets the job and accompanying perks.

Lette then opts for what he assumes is an exclusive solution, plastic surgery turning him into the acknowledged most handsome man in the world and giving him back the gig for which he was originally so unceremoniously turned down.

However  he doesn't foresee the plastic surgeon (T'nia Miller) capitalising on the success of the brand she has created out of him and profiting from mass production, effectively making Lette obsolete.

His assistant and subsequent rival Karlmann emerges with an indentikit face. The two even end up competing for two women, Lette's wife Fanny and a businesswoman (both played by Indra Ové).  

The female roles involve a good deal of squirming and slinking about in a seductive fashion  at which, it must be said, Ové excels.

Lette's spouse Fanny gets most of the really corny laughs. As Lette’s invention is some kind of hardware plug, Fanny, in her seductive passages,  has so many cringeworthy gags about plugs, sockets and the like that it all skirts dangerously near to the tiresome.

Director Weise's and designer Loren Elstein’s staging is ingenious, using the Park 90. the smaller studio space, filling it with a square rostrum functioning as work desk, table and bed.

Meanwhile the floor space is also a projection screen (projection designer Louise Rhoades-Brown).

Weise has plenty of boisterous comic physicality in his production, but his direction also lacks a light touch.

The play deals with such an abstract issue in Maja Zade's translation, greater subtlety and a tad more whimsy in both the acting and the direction would have been welcome. Instead everything  feels rather signposted and heavy-handed.

The plot eventually takes its narcissistic logic to the extreme and this certainly is a play with an intriguing premise. It's energetically directed and acted by Weise and its four-strong cast with lighting by Amy Mae and sound by Giles Thomas.

However it needs more nuance, along with much sharper, pacier timing, to make the satire really sting and The Ugly One therefore gets an amber light.

Review Dyl

Dyl
by Mark Weinman

Troubled Waters
http://www.oldredliontheatre.co.uk/theatre.html

Dyl is a hallucinatory, kidulting comedy drama ambitious in concept, but clumsy in execution. James is a pent-up young oil rig worker in the once thriving oil-rich city of Aberdeen.

Earning good money, his life revolves around the "two weeks on, two weeks off" cycle of labouring on the rig, then returning from the sea to dry land.

This debut play of writer Mark Weinman attempts to mix different genres and marry them with modern pressures on a young man's psychic space.

So there's some odd couple humour with his Aberdonian flatshare, the physicality of his job is on display as well as the tentacles of  the literary along with pop music, television and movies invading and wrapping themselves around the mind of a twenty something.

What emerges are some perfunctory, but still effective, laughs interspersed increasingly with still moments of visual anguish which work like televison close ups before an abrupt change of tone and the final reveal.

However this all feels very stretched out over the two-act play, with the plot points very far apart and various strategies used to fill in the gaps with issues parachuted in.

Lurking behind it all, Weinman has something worthwhile to say about our boom and bust era and a generation immersed in computers and screens. 

This is reflected in the slick, click together set designed by Jemima Robinson, even if the play's jigsaw construction doesn't quite click together as fluently and feels clunky.

Director Clive Judd brings together two alumni of his enjoyable production of a 1960s' classic about pent-up young men, Scott Arthur as Welshman James in his own Never-Never Land and Laurie Jamieson as the Scottish office worker flatmate from whom he rents a room on shore.

Joyce Greenaway is James's Mum trying to build an emotional bridge for her son while Rose Wardlaw is an unexpected, wish-fufilment visitor who apparently allows the various pieces to be slotted neatly into place and gives a kind of deus-ex-machina closure.

Weinman has a clever idea that can equally be a surreal shorter play or several episodes of a sharply edited TV soap.

Nevertheless, in its present form it has a frustratingly unbalanced and laboured structure, overpowering a potentially more dramatic and poignant analysis of a generation within a shuttlecock economy.

Dyl (with apologies to a famous American children's classic) is a little play that could. At the moment though, while it shows off the ample abilities of its cast, it's an amber light.

Review Normal

Normal
by Anthony Neilson

Sanity On Trial
http://www.styx.space/

The gruesome tale of serial killer Peter Kürten, The Düsseldorf Ripper, executed in 1931, is surely a gift for any playwright with a mind to mine German language literature.

For the story, as related in a 1930s' sensationalist press and subsequent books including one by the trial psychiatrist, has so many echoes of literary classics. The Struwwelpeter scissorman, the grimmest of Grimm Fairy Tales, Wagner's Lohengrin, Kafka's The Trial as well as contemporary German and Hollywood horror films at a time when the two industries were intimately connected.

Yet Anthony Neilson, in one of his earliest playwriting successes, chose to interrogate the story through more forensic if also fantastical means. Normal is a memory play filtered through the mind of Kürten's defence lawyer, Justus Wehner, who finds himself in an amusement arcade outside Germany with his children many years later with a sideshow dedicated to his erstwhile client.

Normal then becomes  an exploration and critique of the law, the legal profession, psychiatry and the media through a unique trio of characters. In this it parallels Fritz Lang's celebrated 1931 movie M, also inspired by Peter Kürten's crimes, where gangland has as much legitimacy, if not more, than the police.

Wehner (Corey Montague-Sholay) is a lawyer straight out of law school who is given a quasi-masonic leg up by his colleagues. They hand him the prestigious role of defence lawyer for Kürten (Richard Ede) when the trial is the subject of national and international curiosity.

His aim is to prove that self-confessed killer Kürten is not a "normal" murderer in control of all his faculties but a lunatic who has conducted a macabre stabbing, fire raising and murder spree. In this, it seems, he is willing to go outside Germany, enlisting the help of his parents to bring the anti capital punishment Humanitarian League to pressurize the authorities.

However his mission to convert his parents, the public, the jury and even the intractable Kürten to the cause thinly veils the overweening ambition of a swot. His subsequent emotional turmoil may even contribute to making a more monstrous situation as he succumbs to a version of himself which he believes Kürten has moulded.

A three-hander,  it is the real or imagined character of Kürten, juvenile delinquent, petty thief, animal molester and slaughterer, sexual deviant, torturer, killer, trade unionist, husband and apparent respectable member of the community, who dominates.

Ede's dapper, grey-suited Kürten is naturally then at the centre of this universe with, as satellites around him, Montague-Sholay's buttoned up but easily corrupted lawyer and Cathy Walker's Frau Eva Kürten, the wife with a past.

Occasionally there is the danger of the plot becoming lost in over-stylization but for the most part the cast give elegant and visceral performances of great clarity. 

And in the midst of it all there is also the suggestion of other plausible scenarios against the accepted version of the story, even if they seem like throwaway remarks: there may be copycat killings or  Kürten may be part of a group of more than one killer.

As we have indicated, Emma Baggott's fluid yet sturdy production, like Blasted in the same season, opts for a stylized rather than naturalistic portrayal of violence, which mostly chimes well with a Germanic expressionist style.

While the subject matter is straight forward, if macabre, writer Neilson's exploration of post World War One Germany's complexities and a subtext relating the murders to the rise of National Socialism lifts the play over and beyond a mere chiller thriller. The lawyer, we are told somewhat ambigiously, managed to leave his homeland before he had blood on his hands.

A subtle, pulsing soundscape from Giles Thomas and a spare black-walled set from Grace Smart, with a chandelier of scissors hanging from the ceiling, a dining table with a chair at each end and a metal trolley prove a flexible background for the action.

Ciarán Cunningham's ingenious lighting almost becomes another character - flickering and flashing to reflect mental states.  Regimented rows of lights on the table also dig into the psyche.

An illuminated  wall transforms the action into a silent film. A sheet covering a body takes on a translucent quality reminiscent of horror movies like Frankenstein.

In short, an amber/green light for a thoughtful and forcefully-choreographed piece which we would recommend for strong performances as part of an agile, striking production probing troubled times and warped spirits. 

Review Wish List

Wish List
by Katherine Soper

Stand And Deliver
https://royalcourttheatre.com/

Are we all now living in a pipe dream Wish List economy since state terminology changed us from citizens to customers?

From the health service, through education,  the workplace and benefits' system, dominated by  computerization and the internet,  Katherine Soper's Bruntwood prize-winning play Wish List strikes a timely Kafkaesque note

Agency worker Tamsn (Erin Doherty) is setting off for her first day at a fulfilment centre. No, it's not a place where all her dreams will be fulfilled but the storage and packing warehouse of an internet mail order company.

She's taken a zero-hours' contract job while her mentally ill younger brother Dean (Joseph Quinn) has had his benefits suspended and possibly taken away altogether.

Allocated a role packaging goods from the conveyor belt,  she finds the heat is on - both literally and figuratively in the oppressively hot working conditions.

She dons the hi-vis vest and uncomfortable plastic boots provided but it's a job where she's just as much a consumer as a worker, paying for a locker and accruing points, although these are not for loyalty but penalties working like warnings which can lead to dismissal.

And rather than simply being computer programmed, the productivity targets seem deliberately set up for failure and to keep the worker psychologically cowed.

Even though they are in competition, she forms a bond with fellow worker Luke (Shaquille Ali-Yebuah). He can afford to be more of more ducker and diver, indulging in apparently undetected petty theft from the firm and covering for Tamsin's relatively inept efforts. For he is off to join another, but less bottom-of-the-pile, conveyor belt, to college and a job in the ambulance service.

Directed by Matthew Xia, Erin Doherty gives a finely tuned performance as Tamsin, a teen dealing with problems which would break many a seasoned adult. Ali-Yebuah has a boyish charm as co-worker and her brother's former schoolmate Luke.

This is in some ways a perfunctory play with plenty of facts written to a template with a seemingly realistic structure giving way to something more fantastical after a bout of drinking, a dream and with the now almost-obligatory-in-new-writing rendition of a song from recent pop culture, in this case Meatloaf's Bat Out Of Hell.

There are also elements which beg basic practical questions. Wouldn't Tamsin have gone to the Citizens Advice Bureau rather than trying to cope alone? Where is Dean's GP? How can Dean afford an internet connection and to keep a bank account as well as the copious amounts of hair gel he orders for his obsessive compulsive disorder? It does sometimes radiate an actorly concentration on character at the expense of some of the practicalities.

Nevertheless, it's the arrangement of ideas behind this play that does herald an original voice, even if the execution of the script feels a little clumsy and the play overlong. There is a clever merging of school, the health service, benefits' system and the warehouse work - in short, much of life - in a bingo game of chance and cheating.

It also reminded TLT that in the 1950s a flurry of time-and-motion style baby "experts" advised, impossibly, that babies should only be fed and picked up at set times and other mechanical tips.  Ready, some critics of this type of parenting said, for working in factories.

It seems that the times have come full circle in this twenty first century play without the increasing affluence that accompanied the post Second World War economy. It's an upper range amber light for a promising debut play from a writer who brings an understanding of how this working environment is now  moulding lives outside the warehouses in a work-unfair state.