Review Apologia

Apologia
by Alexi Kaye Campbell

The Last Supper
http://www.atgtickets.com/shows/apologia/trafalgar-studios/

It's a luxurious country kitchen on the birthday of Kristin, an American-born divorced Marxist academic in her sixties. She's awaiting a fellow veteran of radical 1960s' politics and  her two sons, whom she hardly ever sees, with their partners for a celebration dinner

Peter who is in banking arrives punctually with his physiotherapist girlfriend Trudi while Simon, preceded by his TV actress wife, creeps in more surreptitiously.

Kristin was an activist during the anti-Vietnam war marches in Grosvenor Square and the Paris student demos of 1968. A bundle of hurt and recriminations soon emerges triggered by Kristin's just published memoirs, which she claims were written only to chart her professional life, where her two children fail to get a mention. 

This play was originally staged in 2009 on the intimate stage of the Bush Theatre before it moved to its present venue. It may be something is lost in a larger venue. There's nothing wrong with what is there, but this family drama feels frustratingly under-developed.

Frustrating especially because the juxtaposition of banking, evangelical Christianity, television fame, academia and the legacy of 1968 with the personal cost to a woman and her family is an attractive and thought-provoking premise. 

Nevertheless it remained for TLT  a play of five characters in search of a plot.  Jamie Lloyd directs a solid, straightforward production. There is a marvellously detailed widescreen set from Soutra Gilmour with just a glimpse of a corridor through an open door and a Renaissance portrait with a young woman's telling glance.

However while Stockard Channing is fine as blinkered old leftie and mother Kristin, she is a curiously passive character around whom the others circulate and comment.

Laura Carmichael as Christian evangelist Trudi shines brightest of the satellites with a naturalness in  turning often unforgiving lines into thoughtful responses in  this family drama.

Otherwise Joseph Milson doubles as Kristin's sons, Peter and brother Simon, both isolated in their own way by their parents' actions. Freeman Agyeman is the actress, increasingly estranged from Simon, who reveals her own motivations in life as well as art. Desmond Barrit makes the best of a stereotypical wisecracking gay best friend, a veteran also of the 1960s' protesting frontline.

Our googling reveals the term apologia - from the Greek - to be "A formal written defence of one's opinions or conduct", a rhetorical format not to be confused with apology as an expression of regret.

In some ways, TLT felt, this play tries to combine the two with the unrepentent activist having put forth in print a defence of what she calls her professional life and her sons yearning for something more from her - perhaps something less a defence and more an apologetic understanding of what has happened to all of them.

Yet the nitty gritty exploration is not there - the trial, just or unjust, a show trial or a genuine investigation - never comes. We're never quite sure about the nature of Kristin's past actions or her perceived fault in anything but the most general terms.

The characters are there, but the issues seem thinly drawn with digressions, even if we may suspect the play teeters on the verge of asking whether if she were a man and a father instead of a mother, the same reproaches would be there.

The potentially most interesting relationship is that between Kristin and her prospective American daughter-in-law Trudi, who doesn't pretend to be an intellectual and met Kristin's son Peter at a prayer meeting. However this is a drama which may have looked better on the drawing board than on stage. 

Practically each character has his or her own moment of "apologia" but, for us it felt stretched out and it's an amber light.

Review Guards At The Taj

A tale of 17th century young soldiers experiencing comradeship and peril guarding a shining jewel of India architecture exposes for Francis Beckett something about our times.  

Guards At The Taj 
by Rajiv Joseph

If You Seek A Monument, Look Around
https://www.bushtheatre.co.uk/

The fine new £4.3 million theatre space the Bush now has at its disposal is perfectly suited to this stark, simple two hander by American playwright Rajiv Joseph about two soldiers assigned to guard the Taj Mahal while it is being built, and to make sure no one sneaks a look at it.

After its construction in 1643, there is a story that the emperor Shah Jahan had the architect killed and cut off the hands of all 20,000 construction workers, so that nothing of comparable beauty could ever be built again.

Most historians seem to think it’s not true, but it’s believable of an absolute ruler who flung all the resources of his country into a monument for his favourite wife, and it makes a marvellous premise for this play.

For me, the great thing about this 80-minute drama is that the two young men, who must keep their backs to the building they guard and never look at it, on pain of death; who are subject to brutal and arbitrary discipline, and who serve a brutal and arbitrary emperor, and who are eventually assigned to cut off the hands of the workers, are just two ordinary young men.

Humayun and Babur are friends, who care about each other, one more rebellious and adventurous than the other, more inclined to believe that those in charge know best.  They have moments of black, unintended humour:

“Wait, wait, wait. He’s going to cut 20,000 hands off?”

“40,000.”

The theatre space fits the play like a glove, with a little help from designer Soutra Gilmour and director Jamie Lloyd who build the oppressive environment in which the two young men laugh - and fear.

But this is a play which depends crucially on the two actors, and it is blessed with brilliant performances, sensitive and sure-footed, from Danny Ashok and Darren Kuppan.

The chemistry between them is just right, and whatever terrible things either of them do, we care what happens to them, from the moment we meet the two young men to the moment they lose each other.

They may be in India in the 17th century, but they could be from Wandsworth this April.

As definite a green light as I’ve ever awarded.

Review The Pitchfork Disney (Preview)

The Pitchfork Disney
by Philip Ridley

The Way We Live Now
http://shoreditchtownhall.com/theatre-performance/whats-on

Start identifying the characters in Philip Ridley's 1991 shocker The Pitchfork Disney, and it shows how life in the 21st century has caught up with the fractured world of  brother and sister Presley and Haley.

It's a pre-internet play written, or maybe a better word is composed, when the video cassette, not yet digital, camcorder, and video game had come to dominate. 

Yet director Jamie Lloyd's intimate, site-specific production still has the ferocity and grim tenderness to take an audience by the scruff of the neck and finger wag us about grotesque spectacle with violent glee. In the age of YouTube and mobile phone footage it  lasts the course with its moving snapshots.

Parentless Presley and Haley Stray (George Blagden and Hayley Squires) live, apparently, cocooned from the world in a East End grubby family home, dark haired and white skinned like human vampires hiding from the outside.

At 28 years old, they wallow in an infantile existence, craving "chocolate" (hmm, this is probably slang) and "medicine",  bickering and trading stories over who should go out to do the shopping.

These enfants terribles compete in creating - or is it pitching? - stories of extremity and sadism of which imagining themselves sole survivors of a nuclear holocaust is a mild example. Scaring herself with her own stories, Haley is finally tucked up by Presley sucking on a dummy soused with a chemical cosh.

Oh, did we mention that this is a very black comedy - once the audience realised that they were allowed to laugh? ;)  

Presley ventures out, bringing in ethereal blond teenager, Tom Rhys Harries as  Cosmo Disney (the names surely have a significance), a macho-camp pub entertainer clad in sparkling red sequinned jacket with a grotesque variety act and a loadsamoney mentality.

He at first expertly manipulates Presley's emotions. Before he finds his own understanding stretched and moved by Presley but instead of tears leading to empathy brings in a disruptive incarnation of Presley's childkiller fantasies - the brutal, grunting "foreigner",  Pitchfork Cavalier (Seun Shote), part wrestler, part comic strip creation, swathed in black plastic from head to foot.      

Soutra Gilmour's set, arfully-lit by Richard Howell in a traverse immersive space, is spread with faded patterned carpet, keeping the audience sparsely scattered on seating at various heights.

In the basement of Shoreditch Town Hall, it's a visceral church nave-shaped design  with an old cooker, a fridge and a misted window located pertinently.

A variety of yellow lanterns with one red one at what could be the altar end light the twilight zone, alongside table electric lamps inhabiting the floors work together to give a chiaruscuro effect.

The furnishings could be left overs  of the Porters' flat in Look Back In Anger. And the church can change to a street. Or a rock concert catwalk or airplane runway or even an elongated wrestling ring or comic strip.

For all the emphasis on Ridley's art school roots, the obvious hooks in film and music and his pioneering break with the past with "In Yer Face" drama ,  this felt to us like a very literary play.

A reptile piece which may be sloughing its skin but still looks back at visual tropes and literature of times past. Even Haley at what could be the altar end, dummy in mouth, is a peverse echo of the baby Jesus without a Madonna.   

The writing betrays its background in art installation monologues. But this is also part of the play's energy when Presley and Haley as opposed to 18 year old Cosmo and Pitchfork clash into each other when 10 years presents a weird generation gap. 

To be honest it did feel a little long at an hour and a half straight through  - but that was because TLT had her own visceral problems. She had opted for a sharp edged block to sit on which unless you are heavily padded she would advise avoiding!

Nevertheless Lloyd paces the production precisely and extracts distinctive performances with staging which manages to keep Squires as Haley in our eyeline even when  almost comatose for long stretches of time on the lengthwise stage.

This play has now become a period piece, just as much as an Joe Orton play or a David Bowie or Mick Jagger movie.

But this element is also its strength for it reflects back on the start of a fast moving yet nostalgic world which has now become strangely familiar  to us. We give an amber/green light and punters may find it worth their while to examine the accompanying Rebels & Rubble exhibition of Ridley's photographs at the East End venue.

Review The Maids

The Maids
By Jean Genet

Off Their Heads
http://thejamielloydcompany.com/our-shows/the-maids

To be honest, when TLT and her own non-curtseying domestic vehicle went along to the Trafalgar Studios to see Jean Genet's 1947 play The Maids late in the run, they were going to pass on doing a review. But then we saw the understudy Chereen Buckley had stepped in for Zawe Ashton and it felt as if fate had stepped in.

Of course, there is a certain amount of blogging self-importance here and no doubt the maids in Benedict Andrews and Andrew Upton's translation would call us "patronising c***s". But which other reviewer has a sidekick with a bone fide MOT certificate? Because if you  are reading this, you exist, TLT exists and of course our soft-top motor with a full tank of critical acumen exists!

Anyway back to Jean Genet and The Maids. Apparently he always denied it is loosely based on a real-life 1933 murder case, that of the Papin sisters, which fascinated the literati, even 14 years later.

At the start an avalanche of rose and white petals tumble down from above on a set designed by Soutra Gilmour.  A mistress (Chereen Buckley) and a maid (Uzo Aduba), both black, circle each other on the four-poster bed of a stage in heavy dark wood with gilt twirls in the style of Louis - Louis something or other.

At least we think it is a mistress and maid from a Southern US state or a dresser and a drag queen, the latter in blonde wig and trying on a frock of - is the original French the ambiguous - Madame? But it turns out to be two sisters, domestic servants (or maybe employees in this post-Obama-age translation) play acting in their wealthy employers' bourgeois bedroom.

Solange (Aduba) stocky and laconic, Claire (Buckley) more slender and fragile but with a vicious if imaginative streak manifesting itself in anonymous letters to the authorities about the male head of the household. Accusations which have led to his arrest and, we learn from a phone call, his (maybe temporary) release on bail.

The mistress (Downton Abbey's Laura Carmichael), a sort of Blue Jasmine, sashays in like a catwalk diva in fox fur, bling silver mini-skirt suit and striped stockings echoing both French revolution garb and a more contemporary military uniform.  With the references to Catholicism, TLT did wonder if it were set in New Orleans,  where the mega rich in serious party gear live side by side in a city with the poverty stricken.

The maids parallel their female employer with Marie Antoinette, but instead of the guillotine, set out in vain to poison her. She, when believing her spouse still in jail, offers them her fox fur and Marianne cap-red McQueen dress. However learning from the maids eventually, her husband is free, the offer is quickly forgotten and the old hierarchy returns with a seemingly fatal difference.

Only two years later, Samuel Beckett was writing Waiting For Godot and, for TLT and her loyal companion, this play in some ways shares similarities. Post war France had undergone the trauma and treachery of collaboration and peacetime retributions.

When the faux "mistress"  in this production removes her blonde wig and reveals short cropped hair, it could reflect wartime liaisons followed by tarring and feathering for the women branded sexual traitors. In Godot there is the servile bondage of Lucky and Pozzo - and  also a male character who never appears.

We are glad to have seen The Maids at last but, while all the performances have clarity and power, we wonder about interpretation by director Jamie Lloyd.

Not having seen the main cast or any other production of this play we wouldn't have known if it hadn't been pointed out by notices leading to the auditorium that there was an understudy in the house. And somehow the predicament (and in this case success) of the understudy makes an apt segue with this self-consciously theatrical play.

The translation,without knowing the original, and although updated and probably necessarily with some adjustments, seemed ok to us. However, there were times when this production felt frantic and rather shouty, although these gave more force to the quieter moments when they eventually came.

Maybe the original impetus behind Genet writing the play, the bourgeois fascination with the criminal  psychology of the Papin sisters (Genet's denial seems disingenous),  the crime shoehorned into fashionable theories, is rather lost.

And the over-blown TV crime thriller flashes and shouty nature of the first quarter irritated, although we could understand the reasoning behind this with the text indicating the maids (or employees) obsessed with popular crime magazines.

A one act play running at one hour and 45 minutes, it felt long. Still, the characters compel and it would be interesting to see the same script in another kind of production.  An amber/green light from we partners-in-crime.