Review What Shadows

A portrait of a politician notorious for his views on race relations provides Francis Beckett with a telling glimpse of 20th century post colonial Britain.

What Shadows
by Chris Hannan

His Country, Right Or Wrong
https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/

One of the watershed moments in community relations in Britain – perhaps the most important one – was a widely publicised speech by a senior Conservative, the MP for Wolverhampton South West, Enoch Powell, in 1968.

He quoted a constituent as saying: “In this country in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.”

He talked of a white woman going to the shops and being followed by “children, charming, wide-eyed, grinning picaninnies.” He said: “We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents.”

Chris Hannan’s What Shadows is a serious and thoughtful play about Powell himself, the circumstances in which the speech came to be made, and the effect it had.

To the author’s great credit, he does not take the easy and widely accepted route, in which Powell is at worst a monster, at best a man cynically or foolishly unleashing monstrous forces, and Powell’s opponents are, universally, defenders of decency.

The play sets out its stall quickly, opening with a scene years after the Powell speech in which a distinguished black academic goes in search of a white colleague whose career she once helped ruin for expressing sympathy with Powell.

Both are performed here with just the right mix of rage and cynicism by, respectively, Amelia Dankor and Joanne Pearce. They agree to team up and try for an interview with the now very elderly politician.

When we meet Powell, he is picnicking with his wife and their old friends Clem and Marjorie Jones. The story of the friendship and the falling out between the Powells and the Joneses is a true one.

Clem Jones was editor of the Wolverhampton Express and Star: a warm human being, but a man who in the end put his principles before both his career and his friendships.

Indeed, playwright Chris Hannan acknowledges the help of Clem Jones’s son Nick, a former BBC industrial and political correspondent and a man known, as his father was, for the sort of integrity that sometimes infuriates editors and politicians.

Nicholas Le Prevost and Paula Wilcox are excellent as the Joneses, an entirely believable couple whose fate we care about. Joanne Pearce plays Powell’s wife (combining it with her role as the white academic) and does it well.

However I was not quite as convinced by Ian McDiarmid’s Powell.

He looks right, and in the first act at least he sounds right. And yet, for me, he wasn’t quite right.  Powell had a markedly deliberate manner and an elaborate stillness.

In contrast, McDiarmid has him moving restlessly all the time, sometimes gabbling a bit, sometimes even seeming a little camp.

Roxana Silbert directs with sensitivity and authority, though, occasionally, she has her actors shouting a little too much and the play gets just a little too wordy  towards the end.

However, despite my rather uncomfortable perch on the Park's vertiginous balcony, this proved to be a gripping evening. It's an amber/green light for a finely-crafted, thought-provoking and important play.

Review Winter Solstice

Winter Solstice
by Roland Schimmelpfennig
Translated by David Tushingham

A Suitable Case For Treatment
https://www.orangetreetheatre.co.uk/

May you live, so the Chinese saying goes, in interesting times.  Brexit, Donald Trump, a pensions' crisis, an oil and gas conundrum, a network of global and individual loans and debts, currency speculation, a housing crisis, an exploding population, an ever-expanding media bubble, constant conflict.

Except it's all a load of tripe. Not the pensions, the conflicts, the currency, the loans. As far as we know, they exist. No, there is no such Chinese saying. Somebody made it up and decided to put an ancient mythic spin on it and attributed it to the Chinese. And now, with the economy as it is, it has taken on a political life of its own.  And you probably thought it really was a Chinese saying. TLT did, until she did the research.

An unexpected Christmas visitor also brings in an apparently seductive pseudo-mythic script of his own in  Roland Schimmelpfennig's Winter Solstice. Written in 2013 and first produced two years later, it is now a new Orange Tree Theatre and Actors Touring Company co-production in a translation by David Tushingham.

It's a snowy Christmas Eve and the household of a German middle-class, liberal couple Albert (Dominic Rowan) and Bettina (Laura Rogers) is in minor disarray as they argue over her mother's arrival -  she wants to cut her off, he feels caught in the middle.

Still, she's the only grandmother of their one child - little Marie - and Corinna (Kate Fahy) is now in the house with the "old-fashioned, wealthy, middle-class doorbell" asking for soap and putting on her new. expensive dress of dubious origins.

With a set by Lizzie Clachan, it's doesn't seem so much a household as an office with the remnants of a party or a rehearsal room for a table read of a script.

Long meeting tables with melamine tops and office chairs serve as the skeleton of scenery. And we get not only the dialogue but narration in the form of  film script action and character description.

Albert is a pill-popping publisher, sociologist and author who has graduated from writing books  on the Holocaust to short story fiction. Bettina is a lithe, ambitious film maker. Inevitably it is Albert who loses out during the play for we learn Bettina has become a bit of a know-all who no longer reads his books - "she knows what's in them or she thinks she knows".

Corinna's apparent previous chance encounter on a broken-down, unheated train ushers in Rudolph (Nicholas Le Prevost), a distinguished elderly doctor who, uh-oh, comes from Paraguay.

He plays Chopin and Bach beautifully and speaks with sweeping gravitas of unity and community to the rapt Corinna, Bettina and their artist friend Konrad (Milo Twomey).  The latter, it turns out, is dependent on and in debt to Albert whose voice becomes diminished over time.

Directed by Ramin Grey, the juxtaposition of narration and dialogue with the movement swinging diagonally like clockhands makes for a mostly perky script, sparking off humour. The performances are taut and precise but at nearly two hours played straight through, there are nevertheless moments in the latter stages when there is a fall-off and its just words whizzing by.

For our English ears, there was a touch of the JB Priestley about the situation - the parable of the stranger entering the household, the eventual fracturing of time and all save for bookish Albert (except someone has sat on his reading glasses!) developing rhinoceros hides as Rudolph's not-so-subtle fascist agenda emerges.

Except how does one differentiate what's in Albert's mind - after all, Rudolph seems to have a Baron Munchausen youthfulness - bristling with hostility and pharmaceuticals and what's a threat? What's improvisation and what are on-the-hoof changes and what is deliberately thought out? And could it all lead to the same dangerous outcome? As Bettina tensely remarks at the beginning, there's always someone who is out to change the script.

We could have done with it being shorter and some of the allusions being, well, a bit less cryptic and secretive. A divided Germany, post World War Two and during the Cold War, developed a unique psychological take on its past, some of it imposed by occupying countries. This play, we think, tries to bring the story up to date as a fresh screen-led generation is more and more distant from those world-shattering traumas.  An amber/green light for a play which serves to show us we live, of course, in interesting times. 

Review How The Other Half Loves

How The Other Half Loves

By Alan Ayckbourn

How Clean Is Your House?

http://www.trh.co.uk/

TLT has a confession to make - she and her joined-at-the-chassis companion have now seen the latest production of How The Other Half Loves, an early 1969 Ayckbourn once, nay twice ... Rather appropriate for a play with twin scenery mash-up (of which more later) focussing on two households on the same stage.

For it seemed only fair and rather apt to have  a re-view rather than just a review of a preview (are you keeping up?) as, on top of the usual farcical choreography, the split between households make it fiendishly difficult fto stage. And according to this Terri Paddock podcast the play has only had three weeks' rehearsal with veteran Ayckbourn director Alan Strachan.

It's the late sixties and Frank Foster (a magnificently dangerously bumbling Nicholas Le Prevost) and Bob Phillips (watchful wide-boy Jason Merrells ) work in the same - never-named - firm. In fact they live only a short bus ride away, but they might as well be living on different planets except for one thing ...

While Bob's wife Terry (Tamzin Outhwaithe in dayglo mini dresses and shiny pink plastic boots!), short for Theresa, neglects the housework, penning feminist letters to the Editor of The Guardian in between baby feeds and nappy changes, Bob occupies himself with Frank's cut-glass beauty wife Fiona (Jenny Seagrove).

The regime of bickering accusations and underhand dealings in the Phillips' household and imperial old-school-tie combined with expert  hostess with the mostest, whose dress sense ranges from chic-Barbara-Castle to French couture, in the Foster's seems set to continue for ever ... Ah, except for one thing ...

Both Fiona and Bob invent an alibi for a Wednesday evening tryst involving accountant William (tyro-husband and obsequious employee Matthew Cottle)  and his mousey put-upon wife Mary.

Lives and dirty dealings unravel in a royally messy twin-time scale debacle with dinner parties on consecutive nights but played at the same time. And  the unwitting Featherstones swivel on their chairs through time and space, going from the Fosters' colonial cuisine to the Phillips' far-from-electrifying 1960s' supermarket convenience foods.

Was it worth seeing the show twice? Very definitely yes. Nicholas Le Prevost is an  experienced hand whose performances are finely judged down to the position of his napkin,  keeping the production pivoting around him. Ditto for Jenny Seagrove, utterly convincing when switching tactics with an (almost) unflappable glacial ease as the diplomatic adulterous wife.

But it's the Phillips and the Featherstones who profit most from the three days' interlude between TLT's visits. The moves tightened and quickened up on the large Haymarket stage with the relationships and subtext  deepened.

The accountant and his wife react  to the dual dinner party as if operated by an electric switch to swap between dining rooms and houses with design by Julie Godfrey. Upper class Surrey imperiousness  flashes to  upwardly mobile conflicted welfare state semi-detached and back again.

There's also something very instinctively spot-on about  the brutal sadism lurking  beneath Philips' and  Featherstone  husbands' treatment of their wives, both of whom, in their different ways, begin to assert themselves while having to put up with their men's limitations.

Tamzin Outhwaithe puts in a punchy performance as Terry with flowing golden locks,  presiding  over a dysfunctional Last Supper as the crossed wires untangle themselves.  Equally Gillian Wright's  Mary gained greatly from a second viewing, finally achieving a mix of strength, pathos and  her own diplomatic expediency as she embarks on her personal march to wifely freedom.

To be honest,  the deep Haymarket stage is a tough call for a farce originally developed for theatre-in-the-round  and there's still the potential for more speed and tightening up. But, judging from the change from preview to press night, TLT feels this will come. A classy production of a multilayered play with all characters pulling their weight (and  wine corks!). So  it's a psychedelic 1960s' green/amber light from TLT.