Review Richard III

Richard III
by William Shakespeare

Living The Dream
http://www.arcolatheatre.com/

Near the end of the Arcola Theatre's Richard III we gained a glimpse of what this production could have been.

Richard (Greg Hicks) has just been visited in his sleep by those he has wronged and murdered. Suddenly the pangs of conscience cripple him. Hicks's Richard in a nuanced soliloquy envelops us with the cold sweat of the villain as both his past and future merge and he turns his frightened gaze round the audience.

It's a highlight of an otherwise mostly over-emphatic production directed by Mehmet Ergen which nevertheless has other instances of clarity and ingenuity.

Mark Jax's suddenly repentent murderer is both comic and affecting. There's a modern chime to Jim Bywater's Mayor of London, puzzled but then expediently adapting to all the twists and turns, as well as when we hear from Peter Guinness's savvy Buckingham the reaction of the London crowd and the city wives.

Annie Firbank's fine Duchess of York, Richard's mother, conveys a clear-sighted doughty aristocrat, becoming a spokeswoman for the grieving Royal widows dislodged by the son she abhors.   

However, at other times we found the inconsistency of the mash up strange and distracting.

The start of the play places us in Italian café society with Richard in black leather  - part mafiosi, part Stasi - sipping on wine and spinning a tiny top. When he stands up to the cawing of crows, we see the chain extending from flexed foot to his hands to help him walk. Bespectacled Matthew Sim as Catesby extends the sense of a Communist apparatchik or Fascist henchman carrying out Richard's instructions.     

At another time we wondered whether we were in the midst of artisans who decided a change was needed from usual mystery plays, deciding instead to put on the arch-Machiavel's story. Yet the concept seemed tried  - and then left behind.

The overpowering television-style sound effects also struck us as intrusive, sometimes unnecessarily disturbing the rhythm and tension of the play.

We've nothing against a production paced television thriller style. But we were far too aware of the sound effects rather than the sound being seamlessly part of the background. In one instance, a very loud cock crow was followed by the information that - er - a cock had crowed.

Anthony Lamble's two tier design is fine as far as the lower space goes, surrounded by the audience on three sides. However, sitting in the seats stage left, we had major sightline problems for the upper tier. The raised walkway running above our seats blocked our view of the second tier at the back of the space and the actors above mainly had their backs towards us. This felt like a thoughtless piece of staging.

Hicks certainly has the potential to be a great crow-like Richard III but we felt he was hampered by more than his chains in an uneven production which needed more variety in its pacing. Individually there were some fine performances and good moments but overall it's an amber light.

Review Drones, Baby, Drones

Drones, Baby, Drones
This Tuesday
by Ron Hutchinson and Christina Lamb
The Kid
by David Greig

In The Drones Club
www.arcolatheatre.com/

 "If you could register the Predator for president, both parties would be trying to endorse it." So spake US senator Bill Bilbray back in 2011 to the LA Times - Predator being a make of unmanned drone missile.

Well, on the eve of the Tuesday American presidential election, TLT and her automotive weapon of constructive criticism made their way to the Arcola Theatre for a double bill under the collective title of Drones, Baby, Drones.  

This Tuesday by Ron Hutchinson and Sunday Times journalist Christina Lamb tackles remote control warfare in a political thriller format running in real time. A female government adviser (Anne Adams) suppresses her maternal instincts when faced with staying by her druggie daughter's hospital bedside or getting the face-to-face go-ahead from the President for a drone strike to take out a terrorist attending a wedding in Pakistan. It's deliberately hard to differentiate whether she's insanely high on the adrenalin of the chase, even at the cost of being with her child, or if she has a unadulterated wish to defend the nation.

Meawhile, married Doug (Tom McKay), about to attend the meeting promoting the strike,  extracts himself from his habitual tryst in the Watergate Complex with his student intern lover Meredith (Rose Reynolds) who challenges him over his deception of his wife and the killing of many innocents along with individual guilty terrorists - but without changing anything for her or anyone else.

Across town, two men compete and lay out opposing arguments during an early morning basketball workout for and against using unmanned missiles rather than Special Forces' "boots on the ground" to take out the terrorist.

As they change from sports wear to formal dress, the lover of ancient Greek classics with the strange rhetorical phrasing turns out to be a general (Sam Dale) while the younger man (Raj Ghatak) falls into line as the hispanic adjutant captain handing him the file for the meeting

Despite clear and effective direction from Nicolas Kent to lift a dramatically static script, this portion of the evening feels under-achieved, even if there is an interesting, couched attempt to cover  what drones have meant in the past. However there's no doubting the power of the final image when those about to lead the President into a decision to strike line up outside, presumably, the Oval Office.

The more successful and interrogative play is David Grieg's The Kid (a title with both movie and sacrificial connotations), directed by Mehmet Ergen. A pair of military drone operators (Anne Adams and Tom McKay) and their respective partners (Joseph Baldramma and Rose Reynolds) have come together on comfy sofas over popcorn and wine.

Shawna and Pete are relaxing, having just completed a seemingly surgically successful mission and are eagerly grilled by Ramon, thilled to be six degrees of separation away from the "boom".

Pete and Alice have their own happy event to announce. However Alice, who at first seems the voice of common sense Alice-in-Wonderland logic and a moral compass, comes to realise the implications. Her attempt, as those around her sit passively, to reconcile her life with drone warfare spins the compass into unreason.  

Using his trademark verbatim theatre, Kent introduces the real-life figure of civil rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith (Sam Dale) at the start and before the second play to bring to our attention  the waiving of all regulations over the CIA, as opposed to the Pentagon, drone programme and also the criteria for British involvement, just in case we think that it's all the Americans. 

The title Drones, Baby, Drone comes from a 2011 quote  at a Washington DC event, with hefty corporate sponsorship, raising money to distribute to families of CIA officers killed in action.  Robert Gates, the then Republican Secretary of State for Defense, ended his speech on a high, using hippy language to tell the assembled diners: "“So from now on, the watchword is: drones, baby, drones! 

However, The Arcola has previously covered the same subject in Anders Lustgarten's visceral Shrapnel, over at the Gate Theatre, there has been George Brant's Grounded and going further back there's even been Joe Penhall's Landscape With Weapon at the National Theatre.

Nevertheless, the unknown quantity of  an impending new White House incumbent  may have created now an added urgency. There's a strong cast for Drones, Baby, Drones  - over both plays Joseph Balderrama stood out for us as a convincing legal counsel and drone pilot's excitable partner.

The production uses drone-style black and white camerawork videos (lighting and video design by Richard Williamson)  to ram home that in the end everyone could be vulnerable, but the first half of the evening especially needed a more original, less schematic premise.

The sometimes subtle, sometimes not so subtle insertion of literary references overall made us wonder at times whether the plays together would push also towards George Steiner's suggestion that, far from acting as a civilising influence, immersion in literature and, by extension, intellectual pursuit in any field can have a dehumanizing effect. Yet this never quite comes to fruition.

At the same time, as the use of remote control drone technology, passing over into the private sector, is ratcheted up in every aspect of our lives and with the ushering in of a new Presidential era, this may still prove a timely piece.  It's an amber light from your own peacenik, if unelected, duo.

Review Clarion

Clarion
by Mark Jagasia

Drop The Dead Newspaper
http://www.arcolatheatre.com/

Over eighty years ago Ben Hecht and Charles McArthur, both seasoned hacks, wrote “The Front Page”  With several classy movie adaptations, and despite the plethora of satiric plays and films since then on the press, they remain a tough act to follow. 

They are of  course American and we in Britain now have had the phone hacking scandal. With the print newspaper industry on the ropes, journalistic practices have themselves  become the news story and subject of plays such as the National Theatre farce Great Britain by Richard Bean.

So does Mark Jagasia, first-time playwright, formerly of the Daily Express and Evening Standard,  bring anything new to the newspaper office genre? 

The play follows one day in the life of The Clarion trumpeting out its Little England headlines. Morris Honeyspoon (Greg Hicks in fine full-throttle, bulldozer mode) is the bigoted, rampantly imperialist editor pandering to the lowest common denominator in an “issue-led” paper.

His sparring partner is Verity Stokes (a magnificently despotic Clare Higgins), veteran foreign correspondent churning out columns in a permanently whiskey-sodden haze at The Clarion offices, allowed (rather out-datedly?)  a long leash for her expenses. 

On a lower rung are "immigration correspondent" Joshua Moon (Ryan Wichert) and news editor Albert Duffy (Jim Bywater) with evangelical executive Clive Pumfrey. (a nicely-judged performance from Peter Bourke) heading the London office. 

At the top of the pyramid is never-seen bottom-line proprietor Benny Panagakos, newspaper, topless hamburger chain and care home mogul.  

Last, but not least, lawyer’s daughter, fresh out of a degree course, Pritti Singh (Laura Smithers), the ambitious work experience trainee determined not to be sidelined.

TLT’s automotive companion surprisingly confessed to always having dreamed of being an intrepid reporter stepping into the shoes of an elegant foreign correspondent like the late James Cameron or, even in this often tawdry new media world,  a strictly ethical investigative journalist as in Lou Grant. 

And not even slight disillusionment when TLT informed the prospective press corps' member that Lou Grant does not exist, and no true hack should mix up fact and fiction, has dimmed the petite limousine’s idealism.

So our theatregoing buggy was especially keen to see what this new piece would bring to the journalism-themed table!

In our opinion, the script, especially in the first act, often had the feel of a well-worn sitcom. At the same time, although the characters are ones we may recognise, the actors up the entertainment value, clearly relishing meaty roles and providing the laughs. 

They launch themselves into a striking, updated Hogarthian or Gillray cartoon, with the visual taking precedence – the image of Morris strutting around in full Roman helmet regalia, the louche Verity, complete with gilt handled walking stick to prop her up, the bluff but craven news editor Albert, the ditzy but pushy would-be young showbiz reporter Pritti, all tight skirt and tottering high heels.

The emphasis on the visual perhaps explains a filmic feel to the script and short scenes, proficiently directed by Mehmet Ergen. Despite later more theatrical darker plot twists, this felt like movie or TV to TLT and sidekick rather than a play.  

The take-over of showbusiness and celebrity (an impressive performance by Laura Smithers which, ultimately,  made us wonder if the play might once have meant to be A Work Experience Girl’s Progress!), the change from trade to graduate career, the selective reporting, political incitement, the deracinated nature of journalism as its former purpose disappears into the internet ether – no one would doubt these are all issues on the boil in the pot of journalism, even if they are well-known.

But TLT and her bonneted companion (who wouldn’t mind an old-style pork pie press hat ;) ) are in two minds about this play  – reflecting its own split personality.  Maybe the writer’s own experience of journalism has given way a little too much to conventional playwriting tropes and self-conscious literary antecedants. Or maybe the lurches from sitcom to drama would work better on screen. 

Yet in our opinion the market for satire on the media and the tour-de-force opportunity for the actors playing the main protagonists will probably be enough to give it a life beyond this run. An amber light for a characterful piece.