Review The Diary Of A Nobody

The Diary Of A Nobody
Based On The Novel
By George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith
Adapted For The Stage By Mary Franklin

Keeping Up Appearances
http://www.kingsheadtheatre.com/

There's a queer old cove and his family who've moved into The Laurels in Holloway. We know we're in the second half of the nineteenth century and we daresay he's good-natured enough.

But he's decidedly middle-class, of the lower grade, rather than a blueblood or an easy-going Bohemian.

And to top it all, he's decided to keep a diary, first in Punch magazine and then published as a book, as if he were a toff of a politician or an imperial adventurer or some such thing!

Of course he may be some kind of relation to "J" of Three Men In A Boat fame. His descendants possibly also include Adrian Mole, Bridget Jones, and a late twentieth century factional column about a beleaguered father, Hunter Davies, Father's Day, in Punch again and also turned into a book.

Lor', he may even be a distant cousin of Mrs Hyacinth Bucket from a distinctly low form of entertainment, the situation comedy. And, although noone could ever accuse us of being patronizing, he-may-even-have-voted-for-----Brexit! Thank goodness his wife doesn't have the vote!

Yes, it's The Diary of A Nobody in an all-male production at the King's Head with Jake Curran as the upwardly mobile head clerk Charles Pooter. He who takes the train everyday to the City and then back to the brick suburb specially built to be rented to employees such as him.

He also has Jordan Mallory-Skinner as his charming if somewhat repressed wife Carrie, who laughs (mostly) at his terrible schoolboy Victorian Christmas cracker jokes and whose family is possibly of a tad better stock than the Pooters,

Hence Mr Pooter finds himself a little disconcerted with his exhausting, ne'er-do-well, scapegoat but strangely resilient son. The latter announces that he's been "chucked out" of a banking job and is henceforth adopting his mother's family name of Lupin rather than keeping the name William, the name of a paternal relative.

Lupin, otherwise known as thespian Loz Keystone, also has a propensity to propose marriage to rather unsuitable young(ish) ladies with - speak softly lest the neighbours hear! - theatrical connections.

Indeed, maybe a theatrical parent has been just a little too generous with his or her favours, for, along with live-in maid Sarah and several uppity tradesmen, the ladies all bear a distinct resemblance to actor Geordie Wright.

It's a fun evening, with a surprisingly contemporary resonance in our uncertain times, which maybe goes on slightly too long.

Mind you, that tallies with the original episodic structure of the original text by Gilbert & Sullivan actor George Grossmith with his brother Weedon sticking to atmospheric illustrations.

The Diary first appeared as a serialization in Punch which tickled the late Victorian reader while reflecting comically the anxieties of a newly educated generation with a mixture of almost-cruelty and affection.

Adapted by director Mary Franklin, the show is held together by Curran's Pooter, with blond-red hair and beard,  whom it is easy to take for granted.

He's an almost delicate presence, even during his clumsy faux pas, and the most disciplined actor in the cast. It is he who keeps the show on track as a comical play when it threatens to turn into an alternative comedy sketch show.

Designer Christopher Hone adapts the book's original pen-and-ink illustrations, keeping a balance between the realms of the imagination and comic flesh-and-blood stage reality.   Meanwhile parlour music on piano and guitar completes the ambience.

There's also a goodly amount about entertainment in The Diary Of A Nobody and maybe there is a subtext about the theatrical life in the pretensions of the Pooters and their reliance, while trying to retain their dignity, on tradesmen.

But ultimately this was a mocking column, dashed off each week for a magazine as a light-hearted divertissement.

It happens that a wish-fufilment bricks-and-mortar happy ending is just as pertinent, if not more so, in current times. Anyway, for  a spirited production with just the occasional dip in energy, it's an amber/green light.  

Review Coming Clean

A brittle comedy drama revealing the cracks in a seemingly stable relationship provides a funny and wistful evening for Peter Barker.

Coming Clean
by Kevin Elyot

The Love Knot
http://www.kingsheadtheatre.com/

Long-standing gay couple Tony and Greg are celebrating their fifth anniversary in a Kentish Town flat.

Greg is a worldly, acerbic academic, while would-be writer Tony and unattached serial cruiser friend William enjoy partying.

Tony and Greg have an open relationship, tolerant of each other's one-night stands, but the two men still remain serious about and committed to each other 

That's until the arrival into their domestic milieu of buff young "resting" actor Robert whom they hire to clean their flat. Finally Tony begins to realise that he might want something more out of his relationship with Greg.

Coming Clean was first put on in 1982 at the Bush Theatre, the debut play of the late playwright and actor Kevin Elyot .

This was 12 years before the playwright's most successful play My Night With Reg brought him to playwriting prominence..

The earlier play asks, in the era before AIDS but after 1967 decriminalisation of private homosexual acts,  when does an open relationship cross the line into infidelity?

Now this thought-provoking and touching play has been revived at Islington's King's Head.

Jason Nwoga is the college lecturer, Greg, Lee Knight is his partner Tony who finds their relationship severely tested, Tony Lambert the domestic help of the love triangle and Elliot Hadley is comically engaging as William.

The plot, issues and humour of Coming Clean have worn well and it remains a witty and insightful look into the nature of relationships, love, loss and betrayal with believable characters.

Adam Spreadbury-Maher has assembled an excellent cast on the detailed set designed by Amanda Mascarenhas.- a Kentish Town flat of the early 1980s complete with sofa, hi-fi, kitchenette, Lady Di tea caddy and Mozart records.

Elyot, who came from Birmingham and was a former choir boy,  originally called the play Cosy after the Viennese composer's Cosi Fan Tutte.

Spreadbury-Maher's direction is assured and sympathetic. Even though the drama includes darker issues, bitterness and recrimination, the play and performances remain funny, warm and natural and part of a green light production.

Review Incident At Vichy

A lesser-known Arthur Miller play where the playwright tackled the fate of the Jews during the Second War receives a fine production, says Francis Beckett. 

Incident at Vichy 
by Arthur Miller  

Miller's Jewish Question
http://www.kingsheadtheatre.com 

Arthur Miller may be the greatest English-language radical playwright of the twentieth century. His 1949 play Death of a Salesman is the most accurate and effective indictment of American capitalism I know, and Miller himself was summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Yet, on his own admission, he was for years tone deaf to the Second World War persecution of the Jews. In Italy in 1947 he glimpsed a group of Holocaust survivors on their way to Israel but could make nothing of it.  “I was talking to burnt wood, charred iron, bone with eyes” he wrote later.

Yet he was a Jew.  (He told a story about taking his second wife, Marilyn Monroe, to meet his parents, who offered her matzo balls to eat on three consecutive days.  “Isn’t there any other part of the matzo you can eat?” she asked.)

In the 1960s Miller at last began to see the Holocaust clearly, and to relate it to all the things he had fought against all his life.  This short play is one of the results.

It takes place after the fall of France in 1940, when the northern part of the country was under  the direct rule of Nazi Germany. The French government under Marshal Pétain was allowed nominally to rule the rest from the spa town of Vichy. However Pétain’s authority was very limited, and relied on his willingness to do the victors’ bidding in most matters, including implementing Nazi race laws.

So some strangely assorted men are gathered in a police station in Vichy, most of them having been picked up on suspicion of being Jews, and they will have their noses measured, and their penises  inspected to see if they have been circumcised.

Three of them are not Jews. One man has been picked up as a communist, another is a gypsy, and a third an Austrian prince who, we are encouraged to believe, is probably a homosexual.

It’s a very strong and effective play even at that level, the level of telling a gripping story.  These men are not saints. They are fully-drawn human beings, with human weaknesses, and as likely to show solidarity in the face of dreadful danger as you and I.

But it’s the politics of the play, and its contemporary relevance, which most interest director Phil Willmott, who says he was “amazed to discover that the play had always been presented realistically.”  So for the first time, he says, it is now performed without a naturalistic set.

I don’t buy Willmott’s view that Miller didn’t intend us to believe in the play as a representation of what might easily have happened in Vichy France in 1940 or 1941.  But it doesn’t matter.

The set designed by Georgia de Grey is quite naturalistic enough to convince in a fringe venue like the King's Head, which doesn't need all the naturalistic bells and whistles a West End audience demands.

Willmott moves his cast around economically and with calm assurance. That’s to say, he doesn’t insult the audience by supposing constant movement is needed to keep our attention. If, for instance, the dialogue demands the actors sit still for minutes on end, that’s what they do.

Standouts for me in a strong cast were Laurence Boothman as a terrified and neurotic painter; Edward Killingback as the Austrian prince; Brendan O’Rourke as a communist electrician; PK. Taylor as an actor; and Timothy Harker as the Nazi doctor, saying dreadful things in a calm and bureaucratic tone.

But all twelve actors were excellent; there isn’t a weak link. And just pause at that number for a moment. Twelve actors in the Kings Head, which would be crammed to the gunwales if 118 people turned up, and the venue insists they pay every actor, at a special rate agreed with the actors’ trade union Equity.

Paying actors a regular wage is almost unheard-of on the fringe, and the King's Head is much to be congratulated on doing it. Before the performance on press night artistic director Adam Spreadbury-Maher made a charming and amusing plea for funds and I saw quite a few banknotes being thrown into the buckets his staff held out as we left.

Good as that was to see, it still seems wrong that we now live in a society where you can only pay actors for a fine production like this by rattling a charity box.

Still, you’ll help them by going to see Incident at Vichy; and you’ll see a fine production of a really interesting play, for which a green light is the least I could possibly award.