Review Insignificance

Insignificance
by Terry Johnson

Starry, Starry Night
https://www.arcolatheatre.com/

Who is imagining whom in Terry Johnson's flirtatiously symbolic 1982 piece Insignificance where Hollywood, politics, science and professional sport all collide?

On an evening in 1954 in a New York hotel room, the heavy-drinking Senator (Tom Mannion) is confronting the German-born Professor (Simon Rouse), denigrating him as a "Yid".

However, the politician is shrewd enough in his small-minded way to understand the capital to be had from the celebrity scientist's attendance to promote the profile of the House Of UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings.

And after the senator temporarily leaves, whoosh! In blows the platinum blonde actress (Alice Bailey Johnson). She, in turn, is eventually pursued by her heavy-hitter, in all senses of the word, sportsman husband (Oliver Hemborough).

It is of course rather disingenuous of your starstruck reviewer, who is not even  a front for anybody's organisation or cartel 😉, to leave the characters unnamed.

Except she is following the example of the playwright. For Johnson carefully keeps his toolbox of characters representative, cherry picking and jumbling details of many lives hooked in to the recognizable celebrity images who inhabit the space-time continuum in the play's Manhattan hotel room.

In this 1950s' parallel universe we cannot know if we are confronted by the spitting images of or the "real" Nobel prize winning scientist Albert Einstein,  Hollywood sex bomb Marilyn Monroe and legendary sportsman Joe DiMaggio.

Meanwhile the 1950s' villain-in-chief Senator Joe McCarthy sometimes also has difficulty separating the Hollywood double from the real thing.

Are we to believe it is a biographical episode? Is it a honeytrap using a Hollywood sex symbol to force a chain reaction for the naming of names during the Red Scare?

What is significant and what is insignificant?

Originally premièred at the Royal Court directed by Lee Waters with Judy Davis, Ian McDiarmid, Larry Lamb and William Hootkins, some aspects of Insignificance now feel dated.

The concept of starry icons brought down to earth is no longer a novel one. Bio-plays and films are now all the rage. In our internet age, imagining encounters between famous people in out-of-character circumstances does not feel outrageous.

Still, Johnson's kaleidoscope still does have something to say in our times where the precarious nature of America's celebrity shop window royalty is even more apparent.

However David Mercatali's production seems uncertain and is uneven in quality.   

The first act has some wavering accents and an opaque scientific (literally) Mickey Mouse demonstration which doesn't completely convince. To be fair, though, we are generations on from audiences knowing Walt Disney truly once was the conveyor of popular science to the masses, so maybe some of the double-edgedness is lost.

The cast feels much more at home with the emotional truths of the second act than the caricatural media images of the first.

However one act needs to bat against the other, politically, historically and dramatically, for the play to succeed. In short, the chain reaction doesn't consistently spark here and it's an amber light.

Review The End Of Hope/Even Stillness Breathes Softly Against A Brick Wall

Peter Barker relishes two very different one-act plays about romantic relationships, both stylishly directed and performed.    

The End Of Hope
by David Ireland
Even Stillness Breathes Softly Against A Brick Wall
by Brad Birch

Coupling
https://www.orangetreetheatre.co.uk/

An evening at the Orange Tree Theatre sees the revival of a pair of intense two-handers - a comedy by established Belfast playwright and actor David Ireland and a poetic drama from young writer Brad Birch. 

The End Of Hope charts a night of casual sex between Dermot (Rufus Wright), apparently "Ireland's greatest living poet",  and Janet (Elinor Lawless), a supermarket worker with low self-esteem about her looks.

This is set against a Northern Irish backdrop and, yes, there is a Catholic and Protestant element but the focus is on an unlikely romance between a man and a woman with a dark, comedic twist.

Janet hides herself behind a mouse mask, even if she proves eventually to be a ballsy personality  and disclosures about a past relationship reveal a bizarre secret.

Ireland’s script is witty, outrageous, surreal and inventive, providing an entertaining and sometimes shocking hour of theatre on an effective simple set, a bed in the middle of the space, from designer Max Dorey.

Wright and Lawless have terrific chemistry, commanding the audience's attention as an odd couple -  atheist, Protestant, former Catholic, mouse impersonator, married man.

Ireland's play can be tricksy, as well as entertaining, and director Max Elton confidently handles the pacing, laughs and tricky changes of tone from jokiness to threat and back again.  All in all, a play and production meriting a green light.

Brad Birch's play, first seen at the Soho Theatre in 2013, is a far more serious drama, but not without moments of wit.

Even Stillness Breathes Softly Against a Brick Wall has a serious intent, examining the emptiness of modern life. However the playwright's bold ambitions are undermined by a hackneyed scenario.  

We are drawn into the mundane lives and thoughts, through soliloquies, of Him and Her, a young city worker couple (Orlando James and Georgina Campbell) utterly disillusioned with their stale, flat and unprofitable worlds.

This is a play from a young writer about 20-somethings, ruled by the clock, technology, bills and everything else that makes up modern life.

However, for those who remember it, there is a feel of Reginald Perrin territory, admittedly with more swearing and less middle-aged, in the rebellion against their repetitive, corporate-driven life: "This isn't reality, this is the f****ing office".

We are given their diurnal round -- waking, eating, travelling, working, drinking, sleeping played out on another strikingly effective and ingenious Max Dorey set.

Two benches are the only furniture serving as desk, bed, barricade, office. The two rebels grasp the eye-catching splash-of-colour orange props waiting for them on hooks hanging from the ceiling.

Under director Hannah De Ville’s focussed, rhythmic direction , there's enough momentum to allow us to accept the artificiality of the the characters breaking the fourth wall relaying their innermost thoughts. 

However this piece's structure, rather than the direction,  after establishing with energy its questions about modern life, lets the play down. The ending feels downbeat and unsatisfying after the previous pace and exuberance and it's an amber light.

These two plays, with lighting by Stuart Burgess and sound by Richard Bell, form part of a Directors' Festival  showcasing directors on  the Orange Tree Theatre and St Mary's University Theatre Directing MA.

Judging by these productions, it's well worth grabbing one of the £7.50 tickets and seeing any of the plays before the festival ends on Saturday, July 29.

Alongside the pieces I saw, the run includes Albert's Boy by James Graham directed by Kate Campbell, Misterman by Enda Walsh directed by Grace Vaughan and Wasted by Kate Tempest directed by Jamie Woods.

Review Luv

Luv
by Murray Schisgal

The Graduates
https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/

The spelling of Luv, according to the New York Times, as "luv" was popularised by New Yorker Murray Schisgal's 1963 manic lampoon on the vagaries of marriage, divorce, success and failure in life. So covering more or less - er - everything.

The play, first produced in London before opening to great acclaim in New York the following year, is a period piece, in its satire firmly rooted in the theatre scene of the 1950s and 1960s and the sensibility of "GI Bill" East Coast writers.

Two former college buddies meet fifteen years later by chance on Brooklyn Bridge. Time has not treated the once brilliant scholar, now desperate, dishevelled would-be suicide Harry (Charlie Dorfman) kindly. It seems life has see-sawed in favour of stockbroker Milton (Nick Barber).

However Milton, who is unhappily married and unable to divorce his wife to live with his lover, sees an opportunity amongst the trash and detritus of Harry's (single) life.

It's less murderous than the later comedy "Throw Momma From The Train" (based on Hitchcock's Strangers On the Train),  but Milton engineers a swap.  Milton, certain they will hit it off and marry, determines to (and does) transfer his wife Ellen (Elsie Bennett) to Harry.

Sure enough, his plan comes to fruition in the absurdist manner of the play which combines social and sociological satire using vaudeville and musical theatre tropes.

Luv turns out to be a rather quaint piece, in many ways an extended sketch, even if a bitter cyclical political and economic allegorical strain lies beneath,  It seems to be drawing on the same atmosphere as Cole Porter's Too Darn Hot  where The Kinsey Report, a sociological report on sexual behaviour, merited a mention in the lyrics.

Even so, while being thoroughly steeped in New York from the same pool as SJ Perelman,  Neil Simon and Woody Allen,  French intellectualism comes in as an equal runner in the parody stakes - in the shapely form of Ellen (name shortened to Elle), over-educated for a housewife but torn between a wish for motherhood and a career.

Set against Max Dorey's evocative backdrop with sunset sky and grey bridge girders, this is a play depending very much on sharp direction and the timing and talent for farce displayed by the three-strong cast.

Nicely stylized in both performance and costumes, and despite a short break owing to technical difficulties on press night, the attention to detail pays off.

Nick Barber's Milton changes from flatpack 1920s' jock to a more complex 1960s' creature. Meanwhile Charlie Dorfman manages to embody childlike Harry saved from drowning with deadpan physical humour.  Elsie Bennett as the put-upon Ellen turns from sneering fur-coated kept wife to Left Bank intellectual hottie with aplomb.

We can't pretend we didn't find this a determinist sketch stretched out to two acts, but it still held us all the way through. It's a curio of a play which is just as iconic of a cultural moment as The Graduate.

Yet as TV invaded the homes of citizens then, so we are now living in the age of the internet. There's still room for Luv to resonate in our computerized times and it's an upper range amber light from TLT.

Review Cargo

Francis Beckett experiences the lives of young refugees forced to flee their homeland and plunged into uncharted waters. 

Cargo 

by Tess Berry-Hart

It Could Be You

http://www.arcolatheatre.com

When the lights go down at the start of Cargo in the small Arcola studio, they leave us in complete darkness – not the semi-darkness we expect in the theatre – and they leave us there for what seemed like minutes, but was probably only seconds, hearing only what sounded like a vast engine. 

When at last someone spoke, it came as a relief. I was tense, and had a little of the child’s fear of absolute darkness, just as the writer and director had intended I should be. 

I had a small inkling of what it might be like to be young human cargo, trafficked in darkness from the unbearable to, if you are lucky, the merely unpleasant.

Playwright Tess Berry-Hart is also coordinator of Calais Action, which takes necessary supplies to refugee camps. She has visited camps in Northern France, and the characters in Cargo are based on the children she met there.

The twist is that her play is set in the future, and the sectarian civil war her characters are fleeing takes place not in Syria or Iraq, but England. 

It’s not such an outlandish idea, especially post-Brexit. As one of her characters says, we fear refugees because they make us realise how fragile is our own peace and comfort. It’s Iraq and Syria today – largely, as Sir John Chilcot has reminded us this week, because Britain destabilised Iraq in 2003 – but there is no reason why it should not be us tomorrow.  

It is an interesting idea, and Cargo is a very good play.  It’s not a perfect play – the story is a little disjointed, and there’s the odd moment when you think: no, she wouldn’t do that. But it tells a strong story, and the characters are real people you can believe in and care about, brought to life by four talented young actors, Jack Gouldbourne, Debbie Korley, John Schwab and Milly Thomas. 

It’s directed with earthy intensity by David Mercatali, and is well suited to the small, cramped theatre space of the Arcola’s small studio.  The action, set in a container ship in a set designed by Max Dorey, is always very close, and frequently the actors move within touching distance.

Just once, I rather regretted that.  I chose a seat right beside a vast cooking pot, not knowing it was the pot which was to do duty for the refugees’ lavatory. I discovered this when Debbie Korley made a very realistic show of emptying her bowels six inches away from me. 

So here’s a green light to rush off and see an excellent production of an intelligent play; but  take my tip, and avoid the corner seat in the front row on the left hand side, furthest from the entrance.

Review No Villain

No Villain
by Arthur Miller

Look Back In Anger
http://www.atgtickets.com/shows/no-villain/trafalgar-studios/

The year 1936 was an unhappy time for many Jewish immigrant families in America. Yet at the same the children of immigrants, albeit often cash-strapped, were receiving the kind of education their parents and grandparents could only dream of growing up in European and Russian towns and villages.

Children like Arthur Miller who took up playwriting and penned No Villain only as a means to receive an Avery Hopwood award to finance his journalism major college fees.

He was given the award, swapped to playwritng and the rest of course is history.  But in a feat of literary excavation, nearly 80 years later, director Sean Turner has unearthed this remarkably mature and complex previously unstaged piece by the 20 year Miller  in the University of Michigan archive.

Following an initial sell-out run at the Old Red Lion, No Villain has now transferred to the Trafalgar Studios. Abe Simon (David Bromley) has risen out of piece work garment making in New York to become the owner of his own furriers' workshop.

Yet to expand, like many others in the manufacturers' trust of which he is a part, he has taken out bank loans,  working with the tightest possible margins.

The line between prosperity and defaulting is worryingly fine and when rag trade shipping clerks who transport the coats to retailers go on strike, the situation is desperate.

So much so, Abe is even willing to taken advantage of workplace workhorse Frank (Michael Lyle) who ends up bloodstained after attempting to smuggle boxes of coats through the picket lines.

At home, Abe lives with wife Esther (Nesba Crenshaw), his daughter Maxine (Helen Coles), son Ben (George Turvey) and his elderly father-in-law (Kenneth Jay), the bridge between the old world and new world of business.

In the 1927 movie The Jazz Singer the protagonist in dispute with his father cuts himself off. There is no such rift in No Villain between Abe and his synagogue-going father-in-law.

But when elder son Ben, who has dedicated himself to the firm, eventually breaks away from an arranged marriage and the traditional father-in-law, son-in-law financial set up, he tears the fabric of his family apart and more

This is a sly, certainly not face-value play. With the benefit of hindsight, some may be  quick to assume it is a juvenile work blocking an examination of it as a stand-alone play with its own mix of ingenuity and irony.

Brother Arnold (Alex Forsythe) returns home for college, head stuffed full of theories and tries to shoehorn  his mother's legitimate fears into the latest psychiatric theory.

The shipping clerks on strike could just as well be commandeered to destroy the small-time businessmen on loans (something charted in Jerome Weidmann's almost contemporary 1937 novel I Can Get It For You Wholesale).

By 1936 US moneylenders were calling in their loans from Europe and Russia. Successful immigrant businessmen (they were mostly men!), like Carl Laemmle of Universal Pictures, could no longer send back money to fund their home towns and regions, including the pension funds.

Nearly every Jewish immigrant family, many of whom had lost everything during the Wall Street Crash, were receiving letters from  relatives scapegoated in the lands of their birth, begging for a sponsor and a shipping line ticket to allow them to emigrate.

No Villain with its disclaimer of a title in an America and Europe filled wth corporate states and inter-nation loans is an important, astonishingly mature work, albeit with its echoes of Clifford Odets's Waiting For Lefty,  for a 20 year old journalist major.

With the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War and, above all, the betrayal of the show trials and purges, often targetting Jews, in Russia, Miller heeded the calls of a desperate people seeking escape while facing  the reality of  life in America.

Of course the Miller family's experience including losses in the Wall Street Crash informs this play, even taking his own mother's surname for the fictional grandfather's surname.

Yet it feels reductive and blinkering to over-identify the play with autobiography. There is a playwright's hand behind the artful concertina of family and world events.

If the call to action at the end feels rushed and hollow after a funeral and foreclosure, that's probably because, with world  events as they were, it was meant to be - political affiliation the best option but, many knew by then, not a solution.

This is not a perfect production, sometimes suffering from over-gesturing and a caricatural feel,  but it is a clear one with an atmospheric hallway and living room  set by Max Dorey transforming cleverly and simply into the factory floor

It also benefits from  an outstanding performance by George Turvey as Ben. An amber/green light for an uneven but crisp production of a play which should now become a staple of theatrical programming.

Review Last Of The Boys

Last of The Boys

by Steven Dietz

Publish and Be Damned

http://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/

When does protecting one's interests turn into a massacre? When does commemoration turn into a commercial opportunity and even fetishism? When does accountability turn into expedient contrition with no penalty?

Weighty topics which, we felt, are all touched on in the European premiere of Steven Dietz's atmospheric 2004 play Last Of The Boys about two Vietnam War veterans, written a year after the start of the Iraq War.

At the same time, rest assured there is a leavening of wit and laughs along with the ingredients for a slippery drama given a careful production by director John Haidar.

In an abandoned Californian trailer park lives Ben (Demetri Goritsas), a Vietnam veteran, and the last man standing after all the other residents have sold out to a company also responsible for polluting the land.

Ben  is haunted not so much by the ghosts of his Vietnam comrades, but split by his late father's own link with the Secretary of State of Defense, former Ford executive Robert McNamara who knowingly presided over the sending out of hundreds of thousands of young men whose lives were cut short in Vietnam. Many years after the war, he put his recriminations into print. 

Academic Jeeter (Todd Boyce), inextricably linked to Ben, has built a career teaching "The 60's" with a book deal in the offing. He makes his annual summer pilgrimage to see his former comrade in arms. But this time he's come straight from Ben's father's funeral and is now accompanied by  35-year-old Salyer (Zoë  Tapper) whose arrival is quickly followed by the entrance of her feisty mother, Lorraine (Wendy Nottingham).

Jeeter himself has followed The Rolling Stones around on tour and, while  a fan, his main concern is to hold up a painted sign with a surprising piece of resonant advice on it providing a rueful laugh out loud moment.

The play, stretches right back to political and national icon Abraham Lincoln, setting in perspective  the mythologising of govermental misjudgements into a containable catharsis for a traumatized generation..

While the men jostle, bond and josh, the women are more functional and rather - well - male. It is to impress the younger generation in the shape of  goth-like Salyer that Ben commits the ultimate bond-breaking plagiarism while her mother swigs scotch and survives.   

Nevertheless, for most of the play, we were engrossed in the give and take between all the characters, including a ghostly soldier (Cavan Clarke) supporting and briefing Ben, transformed into McNamaara justifying military tactics..  

Yet TLT and her buddy are wavering whether the final portion of the play is a clunky jarring avalanche of liberal affront at Vietnam or a more ironic comment on mantras repeated on both sides like a needle stuck in a record groove.

We are inclined to think the latter but this isn't clear in an otherwise finely-acted and directed play. Maybe those last scenes would work better in a movie (Keanu Reeves for Ben came to mind!). Still, for an intricate production, with an evocative set by Max Dorey and lighting by Christopher Nairne,  an amber/green light from TLT and her own hippy camper van. 

Review After Independence

After Independence

by May (Mwewe) Sumbwanyambe

The Lie Of The Land

http://www.arcolatheatre.com

The country, a former colony, at first is unnamed. A farmer's family, husband Guy (Peter Guinness), wife Kathleen (Sandra Duncan) and daughter Chipo  (Beatriz Romilly)  all born in Africa, alone on their farm in the bush. 

Any night time rustle may signal imminent danger, not from nature but from maurauding gangs of former soldiers. And the name of the farm? Independence.

Part family saga, part fable, we learn eventually this is modern Zimbabwe with a civil servant (Stefan Adegbole)  making the trek to the farm with an offer to buy. An offer, so far, refused.

We never learn the ins and outs of funding and earning from the farm in a post colonial state. But this gives the play an archetypal feel and greater reach, stretching beyond Zimbabwe with implications of post colonialism for economies, property and families further afield..

This is the debut produced full-length play from May Sumbwanyambe. It sometimes feels  like an apprentice work, as put together as a film script rather than theatre. but it has a pleasing clarity and intellectual rigor which keeps the attention.

At the same time, there is a tendency to over-explain and some clunky symbolism loaded mostly upon the mother Kathleen.

Yet focussing as much on young Africans, black and white, as the legacy left by older generations, it is directed with clever stylistic precision by George Turvey. 

The lingering poses of the actors  convey the vast vistas,  entrenched self-dramatizing positions, alongside centuries of resentments . The enclosed wooden crate design by Max Dorey lit by Christopher Nairne also allows a feel of the ample raw resources, punishing labour and the open spaces beyond the wooden slats.

So it's a curious mixture of the over emphatic and the skilfully placed justaposition. The struggle for rights may be, as forcefully put, about the struggle for land. 

But there is also a recognition there are some legacies of colonialism that are not just a matter of simple ownership reversal. A hint of the new tribe, having emerged  from  European exploitation,   in the  double edged comment of the daughter Chipo to bureacrat Charles:

"My family line may not go back in this country as far as yours, but we are all seedlings from the same tree, Charles. Only some are dark and some are light."

The myths of two separate peoples, in reality yoked together, clash in this intriguing if flawed work. Meanwhile the current predatory global  search for property, whether for individual or collective enrichment, make the disquiet over  government, employment, business, contracts and disenfranchisement hit close to home. An amber/green light.