Review Trouble In Mind

Trouble In Mind
by Alice Childress

Black And Blue
http://www.the-print-room.org/

Earlier this year, an entertaining and thought-provoking new play by a young American writer riffed from a modern perspective on racist stereotypes in a 19th century play, An Octoroon, considered controversial in its time.

The new play seemed original and striking but playwright Alice Childress's 1955 drama Trouble In Mind is in many ways a much braver piece, taking on contemporary theatre and movie stereotypes of the 1950s during the time of civil rights turmoil and the Hollywood blacklist [sic].

Wiletta Mayer (Tanya Moodie) had and still has dreams of stardom on her own terms. She's a veteran of stage and screen dramas and musicals  - in minor roles defined by her colour and the perameters of roles allocated to black actors by even the most liberal part of the theatrical and film establishment.

But Wiletta turns from compliance to increasing anger during rehearsals for a misguided if well-intentioned anti-lynching play, focussing also on the right to vote.  Chaos in Belleville is directed by WASPish haughty Al Manners (Jonathan Slinger) who seems blind to the insulting portrayal of the play-within-a-play's black characters.

Childress's backstage comedy drama was a groundbreaking piece of its time, not only grappling with race but gender and the treatment of actors in a precarious profession dominated by money from several different directions.

It acutely observes the minutiae of reheasal room politics with the swallowed responses to slights and the power play. Indeed the exchanged glances and desperation endured in silence make it a very televisual play - something which seems to be acknowledged with recorded canned audience applause in a satirical side swipe in the latter half of Trouble In Mind.

Laurence Boswell's production is a transfer to London from Bath with several roles re-cast, athough Tanya Moodie reprises the part of  the actress with the Germanic sounding name, Wiletta Mayer, in a carefully calibrated central performance.

Seeing this in preview, there was a sense that perhaps the play and ensemble needed to bed in on the Print Room At The Coronet stage, although the individual performances pick out every nuance in a play that cleverly mixes broad brush and method acting styles.

After all, a new member of the Belleville cast, John Nevins (Ncuti Gatwa) has, he says, been going to acting classes.

He hardly heeds the warning of experienced Wiletta that the white directors prefer to think of black actors as "natural", and by implication uneducated, performers.

It's an ingenious dramatic debate about theatre types, in all senses of the word, with even the white-haired Irish doorman (Pip Donaghy) sliding into type but explaining another legacy inherited from colonialism.  

For the black performers the prospects are limited. The mutual humorous teasing between Wilmetta and Millie (Faith Alabi) about this has a bitter edge. Millie, says Wiletta, has played all the flowers in the garden, Petunia, Chrysanthemum, Gardenia, while Millie bats back with "And you've done the jewels ... Crystal, Pearl, Opal ..."

Meanwhile the fellow veteran of racist typecasting and manoeuvring, Sheldon, is also constantly wary. Both Wiletta and Sheldon, who are cast as a black mammy and her sharecropper husband,  try to warn actor John not to get too familiar with the director's choice of female lead, pretty privileged white acting ingénue Judy (Daisy Boulton), straight from Yale.

Geoff Leesley  gets under the skin of an old guard actor who teeters on the verge of racism, as much because his life revolves around words put into his mouth as a wish to blank out anything that may interfere with his career.

There's able support from the uncomprehending but ambitious stage manager (Andrew Alexander) and a deft set design from Polly Sullivan with  the director Manners disappearing into the upstairs office with actress Judy.

Trouble In Mind is a sophisticated, finely wrought and humane play about crude times and attitudes still recognizable, even if it feels like period piece. There are a few lags but the layers of artifice and the reality of the situation come through on many levels. For a play and production  absorbingly and fiercely twisting up racial and professional concerns, it's a /green light.

Review The Mentor

The Mentor (Der Mentor)
by Daniel Kehlmann
Translated by Christopher Hampton

The Blagger's Guide To Playwriting
https://www.nimaxtheatres.com/vaudeville-theatre/the_mentor

A celebrated veteran playwright (F Murray Abraham) at the moment finds himself mostly in movie development hell. His most famous work is the stuff of college syllabuses rather than current productions, but he has now received an invitation.

He arrives at a picturesque villa in the German countryside, complete with its own Greek chorus of chirruping birds and ribbiting frogs, as the paid for guest of literary benefactors to mentor a young dramatist (Daniel Weyman).

The younger man's career, maybe on the strength of one adulatory - or perhaps puff-atory depending on your degree of cynicism - review, has gained momentum and seems a suitable case for philanthropy. 

Like some well-worn latter-day Oscar Wilde the older vainglorious Benjamin Rubin, with unnaturally dark hair matched with a grey goatee, at first throws out aphorisms he has concocted, probably as old as his most well-known work.

However Rubin quickly clashes with his not-so-willing pupil Martin Wegner, also a paid for guest, who is accompanied by his cool blonde museum chief and art historian wife Gina (Naomi Frederick).

Tempers fly and there's no way to measure who, out of Rubin and Wegner, is the greater talent or whether they have just negotiated their way through the politics of the playwriting hierarchy.  

The playwright, Daniel Kehlmann, is a hugely popular German-born novelist and playwright and this is a sharp  comedy of manners, positioned as a memory play, written in 2012. 

It's an elegant, lucid performance both visually and aurally from Murray who turns into a kind of comico-tragic Hamlet as directed by Laurence Boswell. Yet we weren't at all sure about the play as a whole, even though the smaller role of frustrated abstract painter-turned-arts administrator Erwin Rudicek (Jonathan Cullen) also made an impression and is a deftly drawn character. 

The set also partially reflects a certain abstraction. We couldn't place the location although we read afterwards it was meant to be Germany.

To our eyes the design (by Polly Sullivan) with its layered perspectives and pink villa reminded us more of a Danish or maybe a Tuscany villa than German Jugendstil also known as the-turn-of-the 20th century nouveau art.

The set is  elegant and ingenious with indications of an unpainted rough draft outline alongside a naturalistic cherry blossom tree. However its indeterminate location may take away from the  meaning of the play.

Indeed we have some sympathy with Rubin's frustration with the Scottish whiskey served by the foundation's administrator - The Mentor is like a blend in landscape and ideas rather than pure spirit.
 
Benjamin Rubin is presumably Jewish (at least on his paternal side) and it appears speaks fluent German which begs a question.

A foundation set up by a German industrialist and his family owns the villa, which itself may beg questions about the Second World War past, and runs the mentoring scheme.  Against this context the profession of Wegener's attractive wife as a history of art expert and museum curator is also a loaded matter.

There are some other clues (the links contain spoilers if you're going to see the show), some rather cryptic and obscure - an allusion to a classic Austrian short story, a reference to an award named for a German Jewish critic famous for his feuds and possibly another to a celebrated German author who admitted late in life SS membership.

This may make this play, with clarinet riffs between scenes by composer Dave Price, more than a slight story of literary egos over a couple of days. But blink, and you'll miss these hints.

It's 80 or so minutes long and before the final moments we were re-imagining it as a movie, mildly in the style of A Bigger Splash, where a director could relish the landscape and plant visual clues.

As it is, in a play, the allusions to German language literature in the early twentieth century and a rather savage subtext feel way too subtle and the comedy drama too abstract.

It would make sense if it were envisaged as going on to be a movie.  Yet, as indicated, albeit couched in the flashback to a comic battle between the older and younger generation, The Mentor does evoke unexpectedly the feel of past ghosts and unresolved matters.

We think we are justified at teasing this meaning out, bearing in mind the playwright Kehlmann's own background with a father who survived  partly as a beneficiary of a confused paper trail laid out by the writer's grandparents.

The geographical vagueness does the play no favours, but we did laugh at the playwriterly neuroses and pondered the change from pen and ink to scripts on computer and possible connections to Greek comedy. It's smart, sophisticated and a well-performed entertainment, but also unsatisfying, so it's an amber light.