Review Bodies

Peter Barker is intrigued by a play tracing a global transaction which a London couple hopes will bring them the child of their dreams.

Bodies
by Vivienne Franzmann

Great Expectations
https://royalcourttheatre.com/

Clem and Josh are desperately trying for a baby. However the well-off middle-class, middle-aged media couple are paying for the creation of a baby who would not otherwise exist.

The egg donor comes from Russia, while across the world an impoverished woman in India is the surrogate mother carrying the egg fertilized by Josh's sperm.

Bodies is a new play from Vivienne Franzmann examining the purchase of parenthood and the bringing to life of another human being with a genetic connection as a paid-for hybrid commodity.

Unable to conceive their own child, Clem and Josh allow their longing for a family dictate their actions without regard for the welfare of and consequences for others around them. 

These others include surrogate mother Lakshmi in India, Salma Hoque skilfully managing wide-ranging shifts of emotions, and Philip Goldacre's touching portrayal of Clem's cantankerous, stroke-stricken, trade unionist father who nevertheless sticks to his socialist values.

Many would regard the situation of the London couple (Justine Mitchell and Jonathan McGuinness) as a first world problem, motivated by dubiously selfish concerns. Unlike the Sex Pistols' song of the same title, the problem and solution is not forced on Clem.

Scientific advance is now a gateway to unprecedented arrangements and Franzmann's play examines where respect for our own and other people's bodies begins and ends.

It also poses the question about what personal fulfilment in our advanced technological age should mean.

The play provides a skilful framework for these questions and issues with a poignant fantasy as a dramatic device. Clem meets and speaks with the unborn child, a young woman of 16 years in a sure-footed, striking performance by Hannah Rae.

This daughter can cross psychic and physical boundaries, moving from Clem's English house to the dormitory of the surrogate Indian mother. The child becomes like an inverse ghost of Hamlet's father, also a victim of other people's actions, but looking to the family's future instead of the past.

Within such an emotionally overwrought situation,  there is nevertheless state intervention,  counterbalancing the illusion that our deepest desires, consumerism and the market are the only factors in a seemingly endless case of supply and demand.

Director Jude Christian, designer Gabriella Slade with Joshua Pharo on lighting  convincingly stage digital connectivity enabling clear changes of scene and context in a fast-moving plot.

Slade's beige softwood set with sliding doors makes for an effective contemporary backdrop with a round window smoothly transforming into a screen with videos created by Meghna Gupta.

However the play at 90 minutes, despite cuts to the published text,  does seem overlong. There is also some clunky dialogue and the final pay off felt confusing, but Franzmann does have the ability to spring surprises and drive the story forward.

The affluence of Clem and Joshua's life, the exploitation of the less advantaged at home and abroad, fertility, loss, and motherhood are all deftly handled. It's an amber/green light for a compelling tale which impressively mines the social and emotional implications of surrogacy.  

Review The Resistible Rise Of Arturo Ui

A World War II play written when Bertolt Brecht fled to the US is still a potent analysis of dictatorship, but Peter Barker wonders if a new adaptation's jokey approach and Trump analogy lessens its impact. 

The Resistible Rise Of Arturo Ui
by Bertolt Brecht  

Market Forces
https://www.donmarwarehouse.com/ 

Bertolt Brecht wrote The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui in 1941 during wartime exile from Germany in the United Sates. Last year, we had the National Theatre's take on Brecht and Kurt Weil's 1920s' musical critique of capitalism, The Threepenny Opera. 

Now, after a new wave of crowd-pleasing demagogues and fake news has crashed on the shores of Western democracies, director Simon Evans and adaptor Bruce Norris have turned again to Brecht in an attempt to drew their own analogy with our times.

The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui presents fascism as gangster-like capitalism, with Lenny Henry in the title role. The play’s premise is easy to understand: it’s an allegory of the rise of the 20th century’s not-so-great dictator.

Market trader Ui is Hitler who, using and destroying the corrupt Cauliflower Trust, takes control. Among his henchmen and victims are Ernesto Roma (Giles Terera)  representing Hitler's ally and then rival Ernst Röhm. Givola (Guy Rhys) is Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. Betty Dullfeet (Justine Mitchell) is Engelbert Dollfuß, assassinated Austrian Chancellor,  and  deceitful, profiteering Trust chief Dogsborough (Michael Pennington) is the Prussian junker president, Paul von Hindenburg.

The play catalogues the rise of  Ui and asks the question -- what should we do to stop history repeating itself, once more, as tragedy?

In fact, this staging poses that question to the audience very directly. There is a great deal of audience participation, with members co-opted to play arsonists, those assassinated, a rigged jury, a dead body, a framed innocent and other victims.

There are genuinely horrible, as well as horribly funny, moments; as Henry’s Ui is coached on diction and stance by an actor (Tom Edden), it is chilling to see how Ui picks up the gestures and stance of the Berchtesgarden bully. It is not at all subtle. It is a screaming political allegory repeated again and again and again.

And that is how it should be, in my opinion. Not comfortable, but something resembling a physical assault by a bully armed with a cosh and a knuckleduster.

This production achieves that punch, to its credit. My only reservation is that this version of the play is a bit too much fun; it is almost too good-natured in places. Perhaps even, dare I say it, too English, needing more sourness and anger. The National’s Threepenny Opera last year had the same feeling about it -- it was too nice at times.

Henry as Ui leads the rest of the ensemble cast. He convinces at beginning as the slouching rough beast, who slyly takes a mile when barely an inch is offered and gives in return lies and violence. He also has bags of charisma.

The Donmar is transformed by Peter McKintosh’s intricate, detailed set into a Chicago speakeasy where the audience is seated on saloon chairs on all sides. It’s theatre in the round and a few chairs, benches and tables are used at various times for the different scenes.

Yet the production makes one serious mistake. It directly links Donald Trump and Hitler.

Many may see Trump as a liar, a bully, an incompetent, a misogynist, a racist, a narcissist, a demagogue, a chauvinist, a failed businessman, an evil spirit conjured up through media manipulation, a urophile  -- but he is not Hitler, and I don’t believe it aids public understanding of Trump to liken him to the Nazi dictator.

Perhaps there is a danger now that Trump has become too easy, and too often an inaccurate,  shorthand which in this case diverts attention from Brecht's bruising analysis of the circumstances which brought Hitler to power.

While not an unflawed production, this version of the Brechtian classic has an undoubtedly visceral Arturo Ui in Lenny Henry and merits a green light.

Review The Plough And The Stars

The Plough And The Stars

by Seán O'Casey

A Terrible Beauty

https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/ 

What a strange and devastating play, Seán O'Casey's The Plough And The Stars turned out to be. Turned out, because TLT and her own little theatre patriot did not know the piece and for three quarters of this drama, played out against the background of the run up to and during the 1916 Easter Uprising in Dublin against British rule, they did wonder where it was going. 

And then came an event that put everything into a terrible perspective and made us go over and re-evaluate what had gone before and why. The production at the Lyttleton Theatre, co-directed by Howard Davies and Jeremy Herrin, is not perfect but it does the business effectively.  

The Plough and The Stars is the flag first used by the Irish Citizen Army 12 years before the Easter uprising, O'Casey was born John Casey of Protestant working class stock  and was once a member before disillusionment at the abandonment of a more global socialist cause..  

The play was first produced in 1926 amid controversy and riots at the Abbey Theatre, where it was staunchly defended by Lady Gregory and William Butler Yeats,who had self-censored his own poem on the Rising, only privately circulating it, "All changed, changed utterly/A terrible beauty is born."

For feelings and politics were still raw and O'Casey's play touches on events many setting up the new Irish state  would rather have had forgotten. The drama is set squarely amongst the working class, many of whom were on the breadline and barely surviving in the Dublin tenements, once the homes of rich Georgian merchants under British imperial rule, now run-down multi-occupancy buildings. Many of these tenants, if not content, had enough to deal with without disturbing the status quo of  prospective Home Rule.

Living there are the charwoman Mrs Gogan (Josie Walker) with her dying consumptive daughter Mollser (Róisín O’Neill) - Mrs Gogan whom we first encounter as she chances upon the delivery to young bride Nora Clitheroe (Judith Roddy) of a fashionable hat which the char takes as a sign of the younger woman's snobbery and spendthrift ways. 

It is in fact a gift from Nora's husband, bricklayer Jack (Fionn Walton), far more deserving of Mrs Gogan's condemnation as he sulks for being passed over, he believes, for promotion within the Citizen Army and fails to understand the savagery and danger of the call to arms. 

Nora's elderly labourer uncle Peter (Lloyd Hutchinson) preens himself in a ceremonial uniform and  Covey (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor), a young cousin, buttonholes anyone he can with worthy socialist sentiments without possessing the charm or wit to convert those around him who are either scraping a living or swept up by divisive nationalist sentiment.  

Protestant neighbour Bessie Burgess (Justine Mitchell), whose son is away fighting for the British in the First World War, brawls with Mrs Gogan in the local pub while from the window we see the shadowy outline of the speechifying political leader exalting the blood letting in the global conflict  in a crescendo of words, a means of rousing Dublin men to fight British rule. 

There's a certain inpenetrability to some of the accents in the first part of the play but the characters still hold. In many ways, they are stock types. Look there, and there's Orphelia and isn't there even a touch of the Leopold Bloom in Fluther Good (Stephen Kennedy), the carpenter who fixes doors and helps arrange funerals.  

At the same time, there's something profound about how the characters merge into  literary types as if we can see the sordid realities of history turned into the myths of the forthcoming Irish nation before our eyes, yet then we go backwards behind the myths as  the play ends with shattered buildings and bodies.

For it's not just that Mrs Gogan and Bessie Burgess come together, using a baby's pram to loot the shops in the chaos of the Uprising. Or the unfurling of the starry plough flag in the ignoble surroundings of the pub while prostitute Rosie (Gráinne Keenan) and carpenter Fluther carouse as the bloodthirsty speeches continue outside. 

When Bessie yells "We've all been Shanghai'ed", O'Casey is looking back from 1926 when a year before police fired on Chinese workers in a labour movement protest  against imperialism in the international compound of the Chinese city. 

Evocative revolving sets from designer Vicki Mortimer give physical embodiment to  the claustrophobia of eavesdropping neighbours and events both in 1916 and in the 1920s. So it's a green light for an angry play which cannot offer any solutions yet resonates with the tiny acts of solidarity amidst  treachery and bloodshed.