Review B

B
by Guillermo Calderón

Rebel, Rebel
https://royalcourttheatre.com/

To B or not B, that is the question at the centre of Chilean playwright's Guillermo Calderón's absurdist comedy drama.

 Two young women anarchists, Marcela (Aimée Ffion-Edwards) and Alejandra (Danusia Samal) rendezvous in a borrowed apartment ready to make a token protest against a nearby financial institutution.

Each, it emerges has a backstory, making their revolt against the state a more serious affair than their seemingly inept steps towards rebellion.

However, while their bickering turns to the ridiculous, the arrival of a ultimately more devilish partner-in-crime (or liberation, depending on your point of view) ultimately pushes the story towards tragedy rather than comedy.

In spite of the duo's disavowal of any kind of hierarchy, the older masked stranger (Paul Kaye) pulls rank, claims their plan needs his approval and orders more extreme action.

In the meantime, ambushed by a nosy neighbour Carmen (Sarah Niles), the women concoct inconsistent stories on the hoof to explain their presence and to keep her away, in vain, from their preparations.

B appears to be a small play straining allegorically to cover large swathes of Chilean, South American and Spanish history, alongside an international perspective.

However, in the end, the play falls between  a number of stools. It states rather too emphatically the differences and connections, benign and malign, between two generations of would-be revolutionaries.

More interestingly, at one point it seems to start to touch on the generation gap and the nature of packaged artistic creation in an increasingly globalized world.

Even so, it lacks the courage of its convictions and becomes what is seeks to criticize -  a dead end world tips over into a dead end drama.

Each character at various times has a monologue to explain their motivations linked by expanded two, three and four-handed scenes.

The action takes place on Chloe Lamford's stone and plywood set, caged in scaffolding, and festooned with black balloons. There's also  a neat trick with t-shirts (albeit there appear to be how-to videos on the internet - don't click on the link if you don't want a spoiler).

However there are moments when Sam Pritchard's production feels as if it has become a little too enamoured by visuals such as the masks, the black balloonsm a red and white striped gift box and other quips.

Taken at face value (B is translated from the Spanish by William Gregory), it remains a play of separate parts, speeches and jokes rather than a rigorous exploration, comic or serious. 

All in all, this is an "almost" play. A would-be political and artistic allegory, "This is supposed to be a party. Good story though."

It's also an terrorist satire where secret code insures nobody calls a spade a spade. A drama where an attempt to use the media short circuits and the only appreciative audience for the aspiring revolutionaries appears to be the prison population.

A comedy where a pen is misused but even then does not fulfil the skewed function to which it's put. The self-appointed terrorist chief literally becomes a talking head speaking at times in the rhythms of Once In A Lifetime and the young women intermittently sound like some anarchist Alias Smith & Jones who never want to kill anyone.

Despite some modern terrorist references, the play does have an old-fashioned vibe - it did send TLT and her motorised comrade scuttling to Google to find out if GK Chesterton, author of The Man Who Was Thursday, an Edwardian thriller about an imploding anarchist cell, is known in Chile and the Spanish speaking world.

It turns out  a conference on him was held in Chile this year. And the writer is popular enough in the Spanish language to merit a landmark copyright ruling in Spain.

If it is an influence, there's nothing wrong with using an early 20th century text as inspiration. However this is a play with an anarchic structure which never quite follows through on its scattergun lines of thought. It's an amber light.

Review Dr Angelus

Dr Angelus
by James Bridie

The Ladykiller
http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk

Set in 1919, but written 28 years later, Dr Angelus is a comedy thriller about a Glasgow family doctor with murder in mind.

Originally conceived by James Bridie (the pen name for doctor turned playwright and screenwriter Osborne Henry Mavor) as a vehicle for character actor Alastair Sim and Sim's protégé George Cole, it was a big success and was even recorded the following year for the BBC.

Based on the real-life 19th century case of Dr Edward William Pritchard, but updated in the play, Dr Angelus (a suitably flamboyant and sinisterly humorous David Rintoul) has just taken on a new English junior partner, George Johnson (Alex Bhat in a nicely-judged performance).

While George is grateful for the partnership, there are niggles, shared by a seductive lady patient in a seemingly unhappy marriage, Mrs Corcoran (Lesley Harcourt) whose businessman husband has had dealings wih Dr Angelus over share dealing and insurance policies.

Nevertheless, George, eager to make a success in his first position as a general practitioner suppresses any disquiet he has about the plain weird behavour of the senior partner.

However he still finds himself embroiled in suspicious circumstances when Angelus's off-stage mother-in-law and then his wife (Vivien Heilbron) die in quick succession and, in a Dr Shipman-like twist, Dr Angelus asks the young medic to sign the death certificates.

A psychological thriller, Dr Angelus is as much about the mentality of a medical profession built in hierarchy and, in the case of general practitioners, where money was usually needed to buy into a practice

The consultant Sir Gregory Butt and the police inspector McIvor (Malcolm Rennie playing both roles) only serve to underline the oddity of a self-regulating profession and the curious calculations of a constabulary when it comes to medical malfeasance. 

We found it interesting that this beautifully-constructed play was written on the cusp of the introduction of the National Health Service in  the year a separate National Health Service (NHS) bill was passed for Scotland. Dr Angelus himself, we learn in passing, had refused to join the previous government National Health insurance scheme (covering mostly working men and excluding married women).

Set the year after the First World War's end, it's also reasonable to assume Johnson may have served in the armed forces. So the play seems deliberately positioned to echo the position of 1947 ex-soldier-doctors and welcome the National Health Service with the Secretary of State taking over ownership of medical records and giving a degree of supervision over GP practices.

At the same time, this is an enjoyable old (post) war horse - including a deliciously duplicitous serving maid cum lover (Rosalind McAndrew) - with some strange, fascinating twists and a kind of social conscience contrasting the explicitly explained help given to the young doctor and the implicit fate of the servant.

Despite the elements of Gaslight-style  melodrama, Dr Angelus seems ripe to be considered as a predecessor to some of the major Ealing Comedies. Not least for the overblown character of Dr Angelus himself and the identification with issues about the welfare state consensus. Jenny Ogilvie's production perhaps could do with a little more pep and confidence in the first act, but it's an amber/green light for a solid revival of an interesting play.