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 Mr Foote's Other Leg

Mr Foote's Other Leg

By Ian Kelly

Perruques And Prosthetics

http://www.trh.co.uk/

You couldn't make it up - an actor-manager and satirical playwright Samuel Foote should surely have been a character in one of his own plays. Running with a fast and ruthless upper class crowd, including the future George III and his brother the Duke of York, Foote loses his leg taking on a bet. Yet he made a comeback as a one-legged thespian with the apt singular surname  worthy of the celebrated Peter Cook and Dudley Moore sketch which his story may have inspired.

And there's an amputation scene, strenuous but not unduly bloody, yet TLT did wonder whether Mr Clint Eastwood or Mr James Caan might want to take on the role for an American production ...

Ian Kelly adapted his own biography of Foote into the play "Mr Foote's Other Leg", now transferred from a sell-out run at the  Hampstead Theatre to its natural home at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. For Samuel Foote, played in this production by Simon Russell Beale with Kelly striking as his patron Prince George,  operated from the Little Theatre In The Hay with a Royal Patent in the 18th century, a forerunner of the current venue. 

In addition, he managed to evade the licensing and script censorship of the Lord Chamberlain  by claiming amateur status for his company, charging for tea or chocolate at his "tea parties" rather than audience tickets and performing improvisations including his own drag acts. 

TLT and her horse powered carriage was particularly intrigued by the theatrical premise of the play, having discovered the torrid rivalries of official and unofficial theatre companies doing research for her review of The Beaux Stratagem. 

And sure enough the play does encompass rivalries between Foote the comedian and David Garrick the tragedian (a finely judged performance by Joseph Millson), the competition from opera and  Hanoverian import G F Handel and the rise of the pleasure garden entertainment.  

Alongside themes emerging from Foote's possibly ambiguous sexuality, his relationship with his leading actress Peg Woffington (Dervla Kirwan), his surgeon John Hunter (Forbes Masson), his Jamaican dresser Frank Barber (Micah Balfour)  and scientist and American statesman Benjamin Franklin (Colin Stinton). Not forgetting Foote's big theatrical break after the manslaughter of actor Mr Hallam (Joshua Elliott).

Past and modern literary, light entertainment, historical and current affairs parallels punch well beyond the 18th century into our present day.  But it's the gamut of themes, allusions and characters, each worthy of their own play, which proved problematic for us. 

The play is directed at a filmic lively pace by Richard Eyre with sumptuous design and costumes by Tim Hatley.  Russell Beale holds the play together as best as he can, but  it did feel like a skate through heterogenous elements of several plays and then some alternative comedy yoked self-consciously together rather than an organic whole.  

Perhaps there's a clue in the mention of Laurence Sterne's shaggy dog story Tristam Shandy but the play lost its focus for TLT and her sidekick.   The night time search after Foote's death for his amputated leg among the pickled relicts of medical student curiosities never fulfilled its initial promise of concentrating on Foote, the man exchanging the law for the stage yet embroiled in a complex web of interests including his own.  

Nevertheless TLT did catch some more thought provoking strands such as Miss Chudleigh, a pleasingly cast Sophie Bleasdale stepped fresh out of a Gainsborough portrait.  First an ingenue actress and then a cackling villainess - at least as filtered through Foote's viewpoint as we never hear her side of the story. But such possible complexities never reach an apex and are easily missed. 

So an intriguing story and although there are glimpses of something darker drawing modern parallels, the play pulls in too many directions despite the best efforts of actors, including a distinctive performance by the playwright himself, director and crew. An amber light.