Review Sleeping Beauty

Sleeping Beauty

by Eric Potts
Director Chris Jarvis
Choreographer Katherine Iles
Musical Director Pierce Tee

The Wake Up Call
http://www.atgtickets.com/shows/sleeping-beauty-2016/richmond-theatre/

"Turn off your mobile phones and turn up the volume of your children," booms an off-stage voice at the start of Richmond Theatre's Sleeping Beauty. And the assorted kiddies in the stalls within our sight range certainly seemed enchanted with this traditional picture book version of the fairy tale at a glorious Frank Matcham theatre.

Maureen Lipman, channelling her back catalogue of Agony, Joyce Grenfell, BT adverts with a nod to Mozart and a current political leading lady,  is the star attraction for adults in sparkling slinky black, slit to the thigh, but additionally doing the business for the children as wicked fairy Carabosse.

Cbeebies' Chris Jarvis, who also directs, as Chester The Jester ably corralls the audience into fits of laughter, along with Nursie, Matt Rixon (who last year was an ugly sister with his Dad Matthew Kelly) as dame, cracking those groan-inducing jokes with verve.

It's probably fair to say this family-friendly show is squarely aimed at the Cbeebies' age group, with  topical and Richmond-based gags added for others. The costumes are delicious as if the characters had just stepped out of a lavishly illustrated picture book.

A villager - part of the dance troupe - somersaults in the first few moments of the show during an energetic routine choreographed by Katherine Iles with the faery tale towers in the background. A  blonde pretty-in-pink princess - Lauren Hood - and a valiant prince - Dan Partridge - even if he is a bit of poseur, both display strong voices and nifty footwork.

The usual bit of audience participation, in this case gently done, adds spice for a panto equally gently drawing on some of the golden age of variety and vaudeville. A touch of the Max Wall drum rolls in a hide and seek scene. The Bandwagon's Triplets in the nursery scene and even some Will Hay mortar boards during a schoolroom scene.

There's also a fair sprinkling of time travelling songs, accompanied by a live orchestra, among them a Whitney Houston standard, a Rocky Horror Show hit and even drawing on the 1920s  for the opening sequence of the second act. This is the kind of panto where sketch comedy scenes, ticking all the boxes of panto, drive the plot.

The little girls, at least the little girl sitting near me with her Mum, will adore the pink and white and glittery princess dresses. Nursie also goes through her own fashion time machine, a pink wellie Glastonbury grunge outfit or a 1960s' blond(e) beehive compete with glittery pink mini skirt amongst others.

Tania Newton also hit all the right notes, as Queen Britney. A commoner consort for old codger and straight-out-of-a-playing-card-set, King Hector - Graham James. While Tilly Ford as the Lilac Fairy mitigates the evil spell with graceful aplomb.   

The spontaneity of the four kiddie audience volunteers - Hermione, ad-libbing Solomon, Sapphire and the little lad whose name I didn't quite catch - brought a different kind of delightful energy on stage, skilfully compèred by Chris Jarvis.

For me, the panto felt a little template-ish with turns neatly inserted. At the same time, it's still a magical introduction to live theatre for children in a TV and internet age and the chance to see the ever-popular Maureen Lipman.

Cheerful about all the generations from the Sugar Plum Fairy dance of the toys sequence to a zimmer frame oldies' routine,  it obviously aims to fit like a comfortable slipper (to mix our panto metaphors).

So with singalongs, boomeranging toilet rolls (not guaranteed every night but you might strike lucky!),  jokes ranging from those darn corny Christmas cracker puns through twerking to Honey G and, inevitably, Donald Trump, it's an amber light for an altogether wide-awake sunny midwinter treat of a Sleeping Beauty

Review My Mother Said I Never Should

We at Trafficlighttheatregoer Towers are pleased to welcome Francis Beckett, author, journalist, playwright, contemporary historian - and now guest reviewer on trafficlighttheatregoer.com :) Find out more about the newest addition to our team at http://www.francisbeckett.co.uk/

My Mother Said I Never Should

By Charlotte Keatley

A Woman's Century

http://www.stjamestheatre.co.uk/

Four generations of women, the eldest a baby before the First World War and the youngest starting life almost three-quarters of a century later. Each does the best she can for her daughter and herself  - within the limitations imposed on them by the society into which they are born.

This beautifully-observed and carefully-researched piece records, without comment, the decisions they make. Decisions which sometimes appear incomprehensible only a few years later, yet at the time they seem like the only responsible paths to follow.

Despite earnest attempts in the programme to bill My Mother Said I Never Should as a worthy feminist piece, the play, set in Manchester, Oldham and London, is far more interesting. As much an account of a changing yet still cruel society by a woman playwright who understands that inequality and unfairness, while certainly penalizing and punishing women, punishes men too.

Written more than 30 years ago in 1985 when Charlotte Keatley was just 25, it still comes alive as if fresh-minted with the magnificent performances at the St James Theatre in Victoria.

There’s the always wonderful Maureen Lipman as Doris – no one in the world does a cantankerous mother better. Alongside her, Katie Brayben as granddaughter Jackie, Caroline Faber as Jackie's mother Margaret and Serena Manteghi's great granddaughter Rosie. All young performers who match Lipman's presence and professionalism.

It’s a testing play for actors who must age purely physically, as any gap is too short to allow for the application of make up. Yet the audience easily recognizes when, for example, Katie Brayben's Jackie is four, 14 or 40 years old before she even opens her mouth.

It may not be a perfect play, nor for that matter a perfect production. At the start, director Paul Robinson introduces some abstruse movement and stamping of feet which made me fear that the evening was going to sink under the weight of mysterious symbolism. 

Occasionally the odd line is a little too deliberately trying to be a tearjerker – “You’ll never call me Mummy,” cries Jackie as she hands over her baby.

But at these moments, the production always manages to recover its equilibrium quickly and this absorbing, sometimes very funny, evening in the theatre easily earns a green light.

Review Harvey

Harvey
by Mary Chase
http://www.trh.co.uk

What's Up Doc?

The pastel coloured, chubby-cheeked winged cherubs of the rococo Theatre Royal ceiling, floating in their nappies around the rose chandelier, seemed to have an earth-bound twin as TLT and motorised companion watched Mary Chase’s American 1944 play "Harvey" from up in the gods. 

A chubby-cheeked cherubic James Dreyfus as amiable alcoholic but financially well-endowed Elwood P Dowd ambled on and it also struck us “Harvey” has all the elements of an eighteenth century sentimental comedy of manners.

Such plays often have the threat of the “family” (usually males) having the (usually female) beneficiary of family money detained. So bedlam may lurk beneath the shenanigans of wooing before eventual final act resolution. 

Except that eighteenth century plays such as She Stoops to Conquer or The Rivals don’t often, if ever, include a six-foot-plus, invisible, “pooka” rabbit, the eponymous Harvey, with or without knee breeches and tricorne hat.  

And Elwood remains resolutely set on the bachelor life, while still reading out loud Jane Austen’s famous Pride and Prejudice dictum,  “... a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”

Yet this Janus-faced play (and later movie), as has been noted, could equally well look forward towards Joe Orton’s high-octane 1960s’  carry-on  What The Butler Saw.

Elwood, to the shame of sibling Veta (Maureen Lipman) and niece Myrtle Mae (Ingrid Oliver), both eager to fit in with the town’s social elite (embodied in a brief but memorable performance by Amanda Boxer), not only fritters his life away in local bars but claims an invisible lanky bunny as his drinking companion. 

Veta and Myrtle Mae therefore seize the chance to take control of family finances aided by family attorney and town judge Omar Gaffney (Desmond Barrit).  The dream of selling up and moving away, leaving their relative, they fondly imagine, in the considerate hands of the psychiatrists at the local private asylum, seems within their grasp.  

But the best laid plans go awry. Callow young psychiatrist Lyman Sanderson (Jack Hawkins) is  let loose by negligent hands-off boss Dr Chumley (David Bamber) on town citizens.  Sanderson wrongly assumes the family seeks relief from its elderly female relative, Veta rather than the hallucinating Elwood. 

Veta  does eventually escape permanent incarceration. But only when lax Chumley, married to a blonde bombshell (Felicity Dean), while preferring  his women prone and silent, realises the possible consequences of illegal detention. The rest of the action revolves around the psychiatrists seeking to contain liability supported by  bewildered Duane, the heavy of an asylum orderly (a galumphingly charming Youssef Kerkour)  and compliant  young nurse  Ruth Kelly (Sally Scott). 

All of which, set down so plainly, makes the play seem a much darker comedy than it plays in Lindsay Posner’s gently sedate production, staged with an affectively detailed music box turntable of a set designed by Peter McKintosh. 

James Dreyfus, after a self conscious start, settles into his role and eventually convinces as the tippler allowed free licence in the town. Linal Haft gives a pleasing cameo as cab driver who acts as the 20^th century equivalent of the deus ex machina. Maureen Lipman and David Bamber as Elwood’s sister and chief psychiatrist respectively give polished performances but, like the whole production, are hampered by pedestrian pacing. 

The grim reality, compared to theatrical comedy, of such “private” parish detentions without trial must now be archaic tragedies in Britain  with medical records  the property of a boss accountable to all of us, the Secretary of State for Health 

Still, on the day we attended the trials and tribulations of Elwood P Dowd and his sister Veta, the family of a woman activist murdered in Afghanistan reportedly were told to claim by police she was mentally ill to avoid reprisals against them.  

It seems stories like Harvey still have the barbs to reflect current events, but the dark undercurrents are muffled in the stately pacing of this production.  So don’t sell your grandmother to buy a ticket, but there’s enough there to keep an audience watching, if not entirely engrossed, and wondering what a sharper production would reveal. An amber light.