Review Raising Martha

Raising Martha
by David Spicer

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

Traffic Light Theatregoer here - your detective inspector of plays. And here's a clue that's been mildly puzzling for your theatrical bobby and her thespian vehicle.

School dissection of frogs - that had disappeared from TLT's curriculum by the time she got to Biology GCE.  So the mention of 'O' Levels rather than GCSEs certainly felt strange in David Spicer's intermittently funny farce at the Park Theatre set in a contemporary farm for breeding frogs  so that school kids can cut them up.

Hands up all schools which still dissect frogs?

We're not sure they still exist, so it's not surprising that Gerry Duffy (Stephen Boxer), a tune in, drop out left over beatnik from the '60s and '70s, has decided to diversify after jointly inheriting the farm from his deceased mother, the eponymous Martha.

It's the grave of Martha, the frog farming matriarch, which has also been targeted by clod digging and hopping eternal student-type animal activists. That's Jago (Joel Fry), so aggressive we wondered he might be an agent provocateur (we're not giving anything away), and his passively sweet accomplice Marc (Tom Bennett). They're out to close down the farm using Martha's remains as a ransom bargaining chip dug up on the upper tier of designer Rebecca Brower's two-tier set.   

Then back to Gerry who, as we have said, has seen the market for dissection and vivisection vanish  Ah, maybe he's gone into farming culinary veterbrates, you may think. But no. Be prepared to suspend disbelief again. Using the  dwindling market for educational frogs as a front (?!!!),  he's gone straight across to breeding psychoactive toads alongside growing pot, producing a particularly hallucinogenic form of wacky baccy.

We have to admit, even in the fantastic world of farce, we were a little bemused by this leap (leap, geddit, ribbit?) in logic, but we were willing to suspend disbelief. Even if the never-mentioned leap in electricity and water usage and the bills might have been a clue for the blundering but politically savvy Ortonesque Detective Inspective Clout (Drop The Dead Donkey's Jeff Rawle).  After all, it could be a Gerry hallucination in his drug-addled existence.

Besides all this, there's Gerry's brother, co-beneficiary and snobbish would-be entrepreneur Roger (Julian) who has a hate-hate relationship with his brother, and Roger's daughter Caro (Gwyneth Keyworth) who has her own agenda in this amphibian environment.  

Director Michael Fentiman, along with the cast, have obviously put in a lot of very hard work to keep the momentum of this farce going. But there's no disguising a script where often the gags and set-ups have come first, shoehorned in rather than placed for coherent reasons, even in this caricatured environment.

There are also more cryptic serious elements introduced regarding policing and even an askance look at the Cold War. But these do not feel especially organically thought through in the plot. And some parts of the plot, such as the six-foot amphibians, feel more suited to sketch comedy, radio or cartoon than a stage play

It may have worked for us if it had been shorter and tighter. But as a two-act comedy, it is a play held together by the fragile algae of an energetic cast and diligent direction. So it's an amber light for a froggy piece that doesn't manage to reach princely status, but remains a bit of a tadpole.

Review Lawrence After Arabia

Lawrence After Arabia

by Howard Brenton

Arabian Knight 

http://www.hampsteadtheatre.com

 

It's now a few  generations since David Lean, Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif gave us Lawrence of Arabia. Now Howard Brenton nips in with Lawrence After Arabia before the Chichester Festival Theatre's production of a separate much older play by Terence Rattigan, Ross, which was jettisoned after the movie went into production.

So younger readers may have to be instructed on the background (see link),and glamour of T E Lawrence, almost a British Boys' Own equivalent of a sexless Rudolph Valentino sheik. Indeed Lawrence is described so many times in Howard Brenton's new play as "stepping back into the limelight", we wondered whether there should have been an upper case "L" and if Charlie Chaplin was thinking of producing a movie about him many years before the well-known desert epic!

Set in the early 1920s in Bernard  and Charlotte Shaw's luxury Hertfordshire cottage, Lawrence After Arabia covers  the time T E Lawrence enlisted  under a false name in the RAF, apparently trying to escape his fame (and the propaganda) as a derring-do British hero who allied himself with the Arab cause against the failing Ottoman Empire.

We have to confess  a personal interest in this, as a relative married  a Welsh Cambridge don who had also attended Jesus College, Oxford, was in the intelligence corps as an Oriental studies expert at the same time as Lawrence (and also knew his brother Arnold).

While we're no experts and have only done the slightest of research some years ago, it seems Lawrence was not as isolated and his company was much more diverse than many would assume. But this play isn't a close study of Lawrence. 

It actually reminded us a little of Ronald Harewood's An English Tragedy, we've recently seen in an amateur production, although it would of course be misleading to identify Lawrence with the same politics. We should also say, as explained in Lawrence After Arabia, Lawrence turned down a knighthood (never let a fact get in the way of a good headline ;)!)

Curiously while Jack Laskey makes a quietly indiosyncatic and charming Lawrence wracked with guilt at his part in colonial double dealing, the Shaw household has the most punch in this play. The parallels between the myth of a Shavian heroine, in a work then in progress, and the hype surrounding Lawrence make for a convincing parallel as Shaw scholarship has uncovered.

It's a pity then that an aphoristic Shaw (Jeff Rawle) and his secretary Blanche (Rosalind March) are written as rather one note. Even if the suggestion does crop up that the image of Lawrence as portrayed in the play and other literature may itself be a figment of Shaw's socialist and anti-colonial imagination. This begs further questions about Shaw and his cohorts' promotion of  Lawrence, questions which remain unasked in Lawrence After Arabia.  

Shaw's wife, Charlotte, (Geraldine James), a wealthy woman and a powerhouse in her own right, is an intriguing character who deserves exploration. 

However she is given rather disappointingly reductionist motives. Still, James does well to convey sensitive intellect despite some rather clunky dialogue. And hey ho, maybe Charlotte shares the fate of many a woman where biographers, at least in the past,  have more of a stake in the male subject than those they rate as the supporting cast.   

All in all, this feels like the bare bones of something or a pulling together of disparate elements focussing, for the moment, on Lawrence rather than a development of the Lawrence story. 

It's proficiently directed by John Dove and all the actors acquit themselves well and don't bump into the furniture in Shaw's study designed by Michael Taylor! ;) But the switch from the study to the desert feels more like a slickly attractive school primer going over well-worn ground than revelation. An  amber light.