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 946: The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips

946: The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips
Adapted by Michael Morpurgo & Emma Rice
Based on the novel by Michael Morpurgo

Jiving For Victory
http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/

On a balmy August evening, it was off to the South Bank and Shakespeare's Globe for an adaptation of Michael Morpurgo's Second World War children's novel.

This family-friendly play with songs focuses on 12 year old Lily (Katy Owen, last seen as Puck in A Midsummer's Night Dream)  and her cat Tips (a puppet expertly handled by Nhandi Behebe). Lily's father, a Devon farmer, has been called up, leaving Lily, her Mum Dorothy and her Grandpa to tend the farm and the animals.

That is, until American GIs descend upon their villages and towns in preparation for the D-Day Landings in 1944 when all the residents are ousted from their homes to create a military training ground.

This is a bustling, rumbustious play directed with broad brush strokes by Emma Rice. In an era when often small-scale plays are often over expanded to fit large stages, this design by Lez Brotherston triumphantly fills the space with musicians on the balcony above, huge aircraft propellers on the pillars activated by chain pulleys and sandbags on either side.

Michael Morpurgo was inspired by a real-life tragedy when a landings' rehearsal with an American convoy, left exposed when a British vessel went into port for repairs and a SNAFU over radio frequencies, killed nearly a 1,000 American soldiers and sailors off the Devon  coast.

With a mash up of songs, some original (composer Stu Baker) and some from the decades after the the Second World War, energetic jitterbug choreography (Rice with Etta Murfitt) and broad comedy, there's a lot to enjoy for all kids and grown ups. At the same time dramatically there is sometimes a piecemeal feel.

Several stories deal with important personal and huge subjects: A young girl's special relationship with her cat and the up-and-down relationship with her absent father; War; The arrival of black GIs in Britain and their reception by country folk; evacuees coming from the cities; A French Jewish refugee; The taking away of homes by the military; Coping with bereavement and coming forward in time the parent-child relationship after the mother's working life is over and the generation gap.

These are all there but sometimes feel skated over even though there are soe moments of charming insight and much of the more touching sentiment is loaded into songs movingly sung by American GI Harry (Nande Bebhe again).

In fact, one episode of war imagined by the young girl in the 1940s as a playground competition between Hitler and Churchill certainly had a germ of truth for your own true Brit duo.

An elderly relative who lived in France during World War II as a child once told TLT that when she heard about "La Guerre" (the war), she thought French leader Pétain and Hitler would go somewhere with their ceremonial uniforms and swords and fight a duel, explaining that was all she knew from the books she had read.

In the computer game world, young boy Boowie (Adam Sopp who also plays evacuee Barry) doesn't care for keeping a diary like his Gran (Mike Shepherd) as a young girl, although he's persuaded to read it eventually. We could have done with more of these moments integrated into the story. While the comedy was welcome, it also sometimes outstayed its welcome rather than pushing the story along.

Nevetheless this is first and foremost a children's show and, while it may be worth asking when booking tickets for little ones about sightlines in The Globe, it's certainly a brisk and fun take on a moment in history.

Plus seeing actors take on different characters, then puppeteering or picking up musical instruments and also being given an explanation of why the all-singing, all-dancing Blues Man (Adebayo Bolaji) is all seeing may well give kids an insight into stagecraft. So it's an amber/green light from your own fly-the-flag-of-world-0f-theatre duo!

Review A Midsummer Night's Dream PREVIEW

A Midsummer Night's Dream
by William Shakespeare

Monster Midsummer Mash Up 
http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/ 

A joyful beginning to Emma Rice's tenure at The Globe for a gender-crossing xx best exotic Marigold xx A Midsummer Night's Dream where TLT and her garlanded companion found themselves groundlings in a wonderland just outside of Hoxton.

The tone is set from the start as tambourine-shaking parishioner Rita Quince (bespectacled Lucy Thackeray), in Globe volunteer uniform, clambers on the stage from white-tableclothed restaurant tables, introducing Nick Bottom (Ewan Wardrop) Health & Safety Officer.

Up above is the sitar-playing Sheema Mukherjee perched on a balcony and this parish has obviously now gone global in search of funding as is the wont of parishes nowadays ...   

*Flashback Alert!* 

We must confess to loving AMND (as we will shorten it from now on) since having our first magical experience at Regent's Park Open Air Theatre. Not without it's Indian tinge too, since one of the co-directors was Kashmir-born David Conville (along with Richard Digby-Day, a partnership still it seems going strong, and Christopher Biggins!)  But at the time we were chiefly excited by seeing pre-Big Brother, post Rock Follies Rula Lenska as Titania and Liver Bird Elizabeth Estensen as beanpole Helena. 

Anyway fast forward to the present!  

*End of Flashback Alert!*  

It's a hybrid AMND (hold on to that acronym!), a trifle self-conscious but none the worse for that. A cross between Bollywood, 1960s' Performance (without the gore), Sgt Pepper, Ugly Betty, trademark Kneehigh puppetry and aerial  flourishes (although also playful gestures to Peter Brook's legendary "Empty Space" AMND with Alan Howard and Sara Kestelman) 

Fresh from the "blow up sex doll" Measure for Measure (doncha just love the TLT blog archive, just to be able to say and link to that?! Put that in your pipe and smoke it, broadsheets!;)), Zubin Varla is a middle-aged Indian Mick-Jagger-type (parentheses and acronym alert, wait a moment Mick Jagger is now an OAP!) gangster cum restaurateur cum Duke Theseus.

He has captured the initially Scottish Hippolyta (Meow Meow clad in leopard skin slinky dress and coat) from a rival although she, by the end of the play, having brought her stilletos to the conference table, changes nationality.

A Glasto Indian sixth-former Hermia (AnjanaVasan) and an indy Brit wannabe Kerouac cum Brando cum Calvin Klein pecs' Lysander (Edmund Derrington) plan to elope. While a Brooks Brothers' (we really should get sponsorship for this!) ambitious smoothie Demetrius (Ncuti Gatwa), rather sinister in setting his sights on Hermia, is pursued by his old flame (and first aider - don't ask, go see!) Helenus (no. it's not a spelling error, it's Ankur Bahl!).

Bottom is the male cock of the walk surrounded by lady volunteers (*Minor Quibble Alert* he could insure he has a few all-eventualities' put-downs for good-natured heckles when he poses rhetorial questions to the audience!). 

And they are a comely bunch of variously talented am dram menials from Bottom's vainglorious would-be Olivier, via Snout's (Alex Tregear) ingeniously "wittiest partition" cereal packet wall to the rather proficient Thisbe/Flute (a hard call to make clear an amateur is really rather good but Margaret Ann Bain pulls it off). 

But wait - we can't forget the faerie world and mischieviously Puckish (surely a tautology?!) Puck (Katy Owen) - part Pinocchio, part Tinker Bell - who also transforms herself into stern father in a wheelchair Egeus cum gangsta ?music producer with Sophia Loren sunglasses. 

Voodoo zombie fairies (Nandi Bhebhe, also Metro-reading Starveling) and Cobweb (Tibu Fortes), amongst others, do Oberon and Titania's bidding with Varla and Meow as is usual doubling up the royal roles. 

We're past the time of phrases such as "unashamedly populist" (why should it be anything else?). There have been enough updatings and adaptations of Shakespeare to make even a Globe in-joke about "fidelity to text" a wee bit dépassé when it's now broadcast in your own series or be damned in the groves of academe. But it's all none the worse for that. 

Maybe Bottom's transformation into an ass scene - seen by your Pen and Tell twosome in broad daylight - could have been more magical but, again, that's a minor quibble (we've had enough of alerts - once used they're no longer a novelty!). 

A great bubble of laughter and little toots of pleasure from TLT's sidekick engulfed The Globe (with even a bit of Bowie and was that a touch of cod Sondheim?!) in this first production of a new regime. Tanika Gupta's lyrics  and dramaturgy including a smidgeon of John Donne acknowledging the new Globe's American origins and Stu Barker's music prove charming crowd pleasers. 

So we take away a green light served up by The Globe's "wedding special" menu and wish the happy coupling well!