Review Against

Against 
by Christopher Shinn

A Silicon Valley Candide
https://almeida.co.uk/

In a world of quicksand, more and more divorced from "real" life by the screen, Luke emerges to tackle Something Big.  

We know tantalizingly little about him. He's a new tech billionaire. He's built his fortune on rockets, solar power, artificial intelligence. He was born abroad and his Dad died when he was young. 

And, he says, God has spoken him directly and told him to go where there is violence. 

Christopher Shinn's new picaresque drama is itself tantalizing and frustrating. It's set in America, a country which has always been an artificial construct of affiliated states. Once, it could be said, the perception of citizens was that the country was bound by the American Dream and family values. 

Now, this play seems to say, it's perceived as bound by motiveless violence and corporatism. As a college student says after a tutorial which has turned from her work to the social network of the tutor, "It feels off".

Shinn has written a play and a series of encounters where everything feels "off", where technology and higher education instead of increasing discovery and a sense of community makes everyone, whether they like it or not, adopt a self-enclosing agenda.

Ben Whishaw plays Luke who grows  literally more and more self-conscious as the story progresses. He's not so much a messiah as an ideal of neutrality and empathy which in the end he cannot possibly sustain.

In a world increasingly dominated by the binary and virtual reality which nevertheless cannot deny the frailty of flesh, Luke emerges unknowable and yet a human being brought up in strange times. 

A world where everyone can tell competing stories but many feel they have no voice. A world of ruthless competition, often under an over-polite exterior.  

Luke's journey starts in his own workplace and ends in the corporate warehouse of a business rival. His encounters begin with the parents of a schoolboy who has gone on the rampage at his school. 

Then a prison where a prisoner has become a victim. Here he also meets the gun-toting father of a child abused by a basketball coach before he moves on to a college campus with a history of mishandlng complaints of rape where a student latches on to him. 

He then listens patiently to the Big Ideas of a client of a drug dealer. His journey ends in an Amazon-like warehouse where the employees, at the mercy of an arbitrary hierachy where many are bosses but nobody is the boss, wear Guantanamo orange polo shirts packing goods and pricing them.

If this all sounds intangible, TLT has done her job in conveying what Against feels like. It has the sterile atmosphere of a human being, the undoubtedly delicately charismatic Whishaw, enmeshed in a computer game going from level to level. 

As is TLT's wont, she wondered whether it would work better on screen. Yet the play, directed by Ian Rickson, does remain, or maybe is pulled back to be, distinctly theatrical in shape even if it starts with a typical police procedural or TV news story crime scene. 

But, despite the fine performances and a structure shaped for the stage, it's also deeply unsatisfying at a rather deep psychological as well as theatrical level.  Maybe it's because it manipulates vocabulary and character in a rather algorithmic way.

Besides Whishaw, there's intricately calibrated work from Naomi Wirthner's anguished mother of a killer,  Kevin Harvey as a rather dangerous professor in charge of student minds, Adelle Leonce as a conflicted warehouse worker, Emma D'Arcy as the student who becomes a boy scoutish acolyte of Luke and Fehinti Balogun, as the fellow student of the school shooter, who admits to trying to manipulate his friend's emotions.   

There's pared back design by ULTZ using the brick walls of the  Almeida - a simple wooden floor, often only chairs and eventually a white bed rising up in the second act keep it simple. 

Yet this is a play and a Candide-like fable in the end held together by characters and their traits while the plot remains not just elusive but irritatingly so. It's an amber light.

Review The Goat, Or Who Is Sylvia

A wonderful cast, director and designer cannot totally redeem for Francis Beckett a play that milks one idea over the course of nearly two hours.

The Goat, Or Who Is Sylvia
by Edward Albee

For The Kid
http://www.trh.co.uk/

A man is having an affair and his wife finds out. It’s a commonplace story. Except that the co-respondent is a goat.

That’s all really. Except that the couple’s gay son is as shocked and angry as his mother, and there’s a rather melodramatic denouement which I shall not disclose.

As it happens, just around the corner from the huge, splendid Haymarket Theatre, you can see Edward Albee’s masterpiece, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, also featuring a husband and wife tearing chunks of flesh out of each other, at the much less grand Harold Pinter Theatre. I have not yet seen that production, but it’s a magnificent play, and I wondered whether Who Is Sylvia would match up to it.

It doesn’t. It’s entertaining, gut-wrenching in parts, and magnificently served by cast and production team, but Who is Sylvia? is not Albee at his best.

There is a lot of clever, witty dialogue, and the comic possibilities of a distinguished architect explaining his sexual liaison with a goat are milked mercilessly.

Making him erudite and pedantic is also a useful way of getting additional laughs from the situation. It allows the author to have him interrupt the most emotional or horrified outpouring with a grammatical correction.

Having him go to a support group provides a richly comic scene, beginning with his wife’s description of it as “goatfuckers anonymous.” Of course, all the people at the support group have had affairs with different animals.

A lot of the time, it’s wonderful fun.  My fear is that Albee intended the play to be something much more elevated than wonderful fun. Every so often I felt I discerned a message creeping malignantly around, but I was never sure what it was.

But Albee did subtitle it “Notes Towards a Definition of Tragedy”, and a programme note from Dr Helen Eastman of Oxford University tells us the play looks “right back to ancient Greek tragedy and reinvents the form for our chaotic times.” I expect it does, squire, but I’m damned if I saw it.

“No doubt” continued Dr Eastman “it made Albee smile that the word ‘tragedy’ (trag-ōdia) in ancient Greek  literally means ‘goat song."  No doubt it did.

What I saw was quite an entertaining evening at the theatre, watching over-the-top but mostly almost believable characters.

In less capable hands, I fear this play could be tedious, for it makes one idea stretch almost to breaking point.  But director, designer and cast combined to make this a truly magnificent production.

As architect and wife, Damian Lewis and Sophie Okonedo turn in wonderful, noisy, hilarious, sensitive performances.

In the hands of these masterly performers, simple events like Lewis forgetting the name of an old friend’s son or Okonedo smashing a plate in anger can make you laugh and cry at the same time.  And though it is an all-English cast, the American accents of all four actors are flawless.

Director Ian Rickson makes the best possible use of the space, of the actors, and of Rae Smith’s brilliant set, all spacious living and bare brick, unmistakeably the home of a prosperous American architect.

Not quite top marks, but an amber/green light for an interesting and entertaining evening at the theatre, watching top-class actors at the top of their game.

Review Evening At The Talk House

Evening At The Talk House

 By Wallace Shawn  

Farewell To The Theatre

http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk

TLT and her jalopy have never entered The Gay Hussar restaurant but somehow images of mahogany panels with its Cold War intrigues came to mind looking at the set of the Talk House dining club of Wallace Shawn's new play about the thespian world. 

But in the alternative science fiction universe of The Talk House, the theatre of war takes on a sinister turn enveloping the whole of showbiz.

A decade on from the premiere  of theatre flop Midnight in a Clearing with Moon and Stars, composer turned jingle writer Ted (Stuart Milligan) has arranged a reunion at a once favoured post theatre venue, The Talking House, run by blowsy bohemian Nelly (Anna Calder-Marshall), helped by waitresss/resting actress (Sinéad Matthews),  Caught in time, somewhere in the no man's land between New Haven, the Royal Court and The Princess Bride.

In an opening monologue author Robert (Josh Hamilton), now a successful TV screenwriter, describes the fantastical medievalesque premise of his play. But this is already unsettling - more reminiscent of a now mundane open-ended computer game than a play by a promising writer.

Alongside Nellie, seemingly vulnerable waitress/resting actress Jane welcomes star actor Tom, a suavely convincing Simon Shepherd, with Joseph Mydell's producer and talent agent Bill playing every twist and turn to the hilt. 

Also accompanying Ted, wardrobe supervisor Annette (Naomi Wirthner), whose  fashion sense, although not her murderous activities when entertainment sector employment is hard to find, is reminiscent of a recent newsworthy figure.

And then from under the rug on the couch emerges cartoon-like Dick, embodied by Wallace Shawn as some bruised down-and-out Simpsonesque Mr Burns. Once a star of sitcom and advertising, now an apparent loser until he grasps the opportunity to read a speech from the play with all the aplomb of a writer as well as an actor or perhaps an actor making the most of what he is given.  

Alliances and careers have prospered, foundered and may still reverse. No talk here of marriages, divorces and children or even  about the artistic content of current media successes. 

This is an entertainment Parliament or Senate discussing the market and stock value of individuals and companies, where products feel more like snacks rather than the main meal and everyone may devour the other at any moment.   

And are we really to take at face-value Robert's speech to the house, his dismissal of the "theatre going impulse" (What?! This is Trafficlighttheatregoer!) and jarring interpretation of the theatre audience experience as a group of passive staring cows chewing cud?

Smartly directed by Ian Rickson with evocative set design by Stephen and Timothy Quay, it's an odd hotch potch of a piece with an actorly improvisational feel which, like many pieces on stage now, may well work better in the close up, edited medium of film, even the first episode of a scifi soap.   

Nevertheless, TLT and her horsepower chariot rather liked it, even if they did not love it. It's curmodgeonly, it's spikey with themes and an atmosphere that stays with you. And as we are all in a way actors now in front of surveillance cameras and repositories of valuable data for advertisers, there is the sensation of, if not the definition why, the play is relevant.

Not easy-listening at the Talk House but worth catching the last couple of performances before Christmas and then it runs until March 2016. An amber light.