Review A Lovely Sunday For Creve Coeur

Francis Beckett bathes in the nostalgia and delusion of a late Tennessee Williams' play set in America's deep south and is equally beguiled by the historic Coronet Theatre. 

A Lovely Sunday For Creve Coeur

by Tennessee Williams

Beer And Skittishness

http://www.the-print-room.org/

The Print Room at The Coronet is one of those places which tell you that there is still hope for London. Even  without the full refurbishment it deserves, it is magnificent. 

Arriving for a performance of the 1970s' Tennessee Williams' play A Lovely Sunday At Creve Coeur,  I started in the bar, standing with producer Veronica Humphris on a fiercely sloping floor surrounded by walls in a deep shade of red, huge and ornate doors, and eccentric wall hangings. 

She told me about plans to restore it to its former glory, if the money can be found. The theatre had a  distinguished early career after its opening in 1898, graced by the likes of Ellen Terry and Sarah Bernhardt.

It became a cinema in 1923, then narrowly escaped closure and conversion into a McDonaldshamburger joint  An energetic campaign saved it for theatre and, while it now has smaller scale performance spaces run by a charity, it's still a wonderful temporary compromise.

At this performance the great red columns of the original theatre merge seamlessly into the red walls of a beautiful and meticulous set (designer: Fotini Dimou.) for the one-act drama set in Missouri directed by Michael Oakley.

We are in a small apartment in 1930s' St Louis, shared by the lovely Dorothea, who is desperate for a husband, and the frumpy Bodey, who has given up hopes of a husband and is desperate for nephews and nieces.

Dorothea is a fragile Southern Belle, not unlike Tennessee Williams’s more famous Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, is in love with a man whom we are sure (correctly) from the start will turn out to be a scoundrel . 

She exercises furiously in an effort to maintain her allure. On her the evening turns, and she is brought to magnificent and entirely believable life by Laura Rogers, who will be the fittest woman in London by the end of the run.

Debbie Chazen as Bodey offers exactly the right mix of resignation and disappointment, hope and kindness. Hermione Gulliford is excellent as the scheming, manipulative Helena, who threatens to disrupt their lives, and there is a nice cameo of demented neighbour, Miss Gluck, from Julia Watson.

Yet the character who came to life most strongly for me was a character we never meet, Bodey’s brother Buddy. Bodey and Buddy are of German ancestry. Both are overweight, but Buddy encourages his expanding girth with plentiful daily supplies of beer and bratwurst, while he indulges a cigar smoking habit.   

He appears to be a solid citizen, not just physically, and, encouraged by his sister, he has set his sights on getting Dorothea to share his life. Having reduced  his daily beer intake, he vows to cut it down even further.    

But one suspects that this is more his sister’s project than Buddy’s own, and it is her dreams of nephews and nieces she can nurture which will really be shattered if it does not come off.  At the end, it looks as though it might come off, and the author seems rather to approve of this outcome; I beg to disagree with the author.

The play is a little predictable, but we quickly learn to care about what happens to Dorothea and Bodey.  It does not offer the emotional charge of Tennessee Wiliams’s more famous work, but it has a charm and humour which they lack.  It’s a good evening in the theatre; a green light from me.

Review Richard II

Richard II

by William Shakespeare

Through The Looking Glass

www.arcolatheatre.com

Order, order! Along to the Arcola Theatre cum House of Commons for this updating of Richard II for the Netflix, boxed set generation directed by Jack Gamble and Quentin Beroud.

It's a pared down version, structured around 24 hour BBC-style breaking news (video design: Sofi Berenger), shoehorned into a US-type political thriller format along the lines of the West Wing or House of Cards (US or UK).

After the death of a political heavyweight, King Richard (Tim Delap) is called on to arbitrate between his two cousins, Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk (David Acton), and Harriet Bolingbroke (Hermione Gulliford) - the latter a blonde female power player, all sharp suits and stilleto heels. Richard fails to grasp the threat posed by this family rift and leaves himself open to rebellion and a coup.

It's a pity the reimagining remains so reliant on pre-existing formats. For  looking more closely at the parliamentary set up, the bars, the debates and question times, the division bell and so on might have reaped benefits for the logic of the tale.

As it is, we have to accept a parallel universe where cousins like Cameron and Johnson (yes, they really are cousins!) do not simply jibe with words and where murder is not out of place.  Where (the closest to a death-in-office we could think of) the death of a party ;leader like John Smith is definitely not from natural causes.

The play starts promisingly with Shakespeare's own lines talking  of receipts echoing the expenses' crisis and disenchantment over a country "leased out", giving reasons why the nation might be ripe for change.

But it's the characters who are more credible than a shaky political drama format and this unbalances the play. Nevertheless, Hermione Gulliford is a striking tactical female Harri Bolingbroke.

Her ascent up the greasy pole gives the play its trajectory and allows also a tantalising glimpse of Richard's wife Isabel (Natasha Bain) as a politician trying to galvanise her born-into-the-role husband.

Yet the change of sex for Bolingbroke also sets up scenarios which feel, to us, like missed opportunities.

When Richard is dislodged by nefarious means, we were waiting for a glimpse of vulnerability from Harri. As a woman in a violent man's world, a politician who fears the situation has run away from her and the possibility striking her she might be being used and could be sacrificed.

But this never materialised and the transfer of power for Harri appears a seamless upward trajectory  regardless of gender.

Ignore the plot holes, concentrate on character,and you can appreciate the disciplined, careful performances, including those  of Tim Delap's Richard II and  Hayden Wood's Bagot, even if they feel sometimes out of context. 

This looking glass world is just a little too cracked and undetailed to hold our attention as a story. Still characters do have resonance, so in the end an amber light.