Review Mrs Orwell

Mrs Orwell
by Tony Cox

Gentlemen's Relish
http://www.oldredliontheatre.co.uk/

Post-Second World War. In the Soviet Union citizens were used to everything being in short supply and whispered about the corruption of those in authority who got more than their fair share plus access to foreign goods.

In Britain, paper rationing had just ended in 1949 but other rationing continued. The writer known as George Orwell had become the author of a bestseller Animal Farm, having eventually hit a post war Cold War zeitgeist, and then 1984, a sensation in the western publishing world.

The bio-drama Mrs Orwell begins with the male writer and essayist rather than the eponymous second wife, Sonia Brownell.

She is a 31 year old, glamorous blonde, as luminous and perky as a sunflower and the efficient literary magazine assistant editor to which Orwell was a contributor

Mrs Orwell, as the title and name implies (although George Orwell was a pseudonym), is for good or ill defined by George Orwell.

Orwell of course was a pseudonym (or  "mask" as one character remarks) for novels and especially essays which caught the imagination of a post-war generation - the persona of a plain speaking Englishman with socialist tendencies espousing values of decency.

This play by Tony Cox rather cleverly but far too subtly, in the opinion of TLT, seems to be a dream of Sonia as conjured up by George Orwell (né Eric Blair) and the male gaze.

Cox is light touch on Sonia who was the writer's second wife, marrying him in his hospital bed three months before his sudden death from a haemorrhage, who hasn't always had a good press.

It is also believed, the author partly based the character of Julia in his most famous novel 1984, although the play decides not to explicitly mention this.

Instead  Cressida Bonas has the difficult task on stage of embodying Sonia Brownell through the filter of Julia - becoming a creature of the famous writer's imagination addled by illness prescription drugs and eventually also a Scotch haze. 

In this Bonas, suitably svelte and cut-glass, does exceptionally well, as far as it goes, in spite of it being a tough ask.

But there is a vacuum at the centre of the play. In this, by coincidence, it rather resembles the fictional matriarch of Apologia where a reputation precedes a woman with hardly any supporting evidence..

Nevertheless in the case of the play Mrs Orwell and real-life perceptions of Sonia as a stereotype grasping and unstable widow in charge of the literary estate after her husband's death, this isn't necessarily wholly a criticism.

The personality of the excitable Orwell (or should we say Blair) is far more filled out  matched by a beguiling performance from Peter Hamilton Dyer who embodies the public schoolboy enthusiasm, including a taste for comfort food such as dumplings and Gentleman's Relish, which turns interestingly into something more hard-edged in the second act.

Rose Ede as the nurse has to cope with a stereotyped role but still manages to give a glimpse of underlying scepticism about the various visitors filing in to see the celebrity writer whose work Hollywood was by this time clamouring to put on screen.

She also shares a moment with the writer's new wife where the audience can glimpse the generous, practical side of Sonia's nature.

Publisher Fred Warburg is portrayed by playwright Cox and played by Robert Stocks as a stolid, methodical businessman balancing the interests of Orwell and keeping some secrets for Sonia yet excluding her from the male club.

This part of the play doesn't always add up  (and is somewhat at variance with the real Westminster School, Oxford-educated, First World War army officer publisher) but may again be explained by the prism of Orwell's imagination. Even so, he is given a clunky expositional speech in the second act which rather breaks up the fluidity of the production.

Edmund Digby Jones gives a charismatic if creepy performance as artist Lucian Freud. Yet he's introduced to us first with Orwell which again rather skews the audience's view of Sonia's close relationship with him. We never get to know that she had known Freud from her days as an artist's model.

So Sonia remains an enigma with her radiant photogenic film star good looks. No mention is made of her shared heritage with Eric Blair, both born in colonial India before returning to England. Or her schooldays with future film star Vivian Leigh, although it may explain an otherwise cryptic desire specifically referenced at the end of the play.

Mrs Orwell is neatly directed by Jimmy Walters keeping up the momentum with Jeremy Walmsley's music bridging the scenes. There's a deceptively simple and effective hospital room design by  Rebecca Brower. Nevertheless the corridor windows also transform themselves almost into cinema screens for some of the action.

However there are a few elements which marr the theatrical experience, chiefly the assumption that an audience new to the story will be able to pick up on the name dropping. By the same token, it may be  a play that has been thinned down and some necessary information left out.

Whatever, lack of background sometimes leaves holes in an otherwise skilful  patchwork and out-of-context jusxtapositions do undermine a more complex dramatic and humanly credible analysis.

It needs a little more like the piquant moment when Sonia is dragged by her husband, his publisher and Lucian Freud, who sees the opportunity for a loan, into a business arrangement and when we realise just how vulnerable and how potentially dangerous the situation is for her. An amber/green light.

Review Danny And The Deep Blue Sea

Peter Barker applauds the acting and direction in an American one-act play which uses dance and music to enhance the action. 

 Danny and the Deep Blue Sea
by John Patrick Shanley

Barroom Encounter
http://www.oldredliontheatre.co.uk/

The latest play at the tiny upstairs Old Red Lion Theatre stage is an intense but hopeful two-hander set around the relationship of two lonely and damaged people in a grimy and noisy New York.

The two castaways thrown up by the ocean of life, Danny (Gareth O’Connor) and Roberta (Megan Lloyd-Jones), meet while seeking solace in a seedy bar in the Bronx district of the city.

John Patrick Shanley wrote this short, 75-minute play in 1984 but it still feels contemporary. The play’s arc, two people meeting in darkness, pain and anger and travelling towards light, happiness and hope, may be conventional, even sketchy, but it still works.
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Danny is scarred, bruised and bloodied after a brawl when he came off the victor but fears repercussions. Roberta’s scars are not so visible, but she has a childhood secret for which, although the innocent party, she blames herself.

O’Connor’s Danny conveys the brutishness and the uncommunicative nature of a man trapped within his aggression. Lloyd-Jones brings the right sassiness and hurt to the role matching Danny’s physical violence with a strength which still has a vulnerable spot, her neediness.

One of the strongest parts of the production are the two episodes of superb choreographed music and dance by the pair  (choreography by Kate Lines set to music by Ross O’Connor) which also manages to move the plot and action along. It’s a joy to see some dance in a production like this.

This reminded me of the Sea Interludes in Benjamin Britten's opera Peter Grimes communicating gracefully internal storms and passion. Indeed Danny is much like Grimes, lacking eloquence and on the outside of society, needing to be understood, even if the play's ending is much more upbeat than the opera.

Nevertheless, the play feels rather slight, lacking the length and breadth of a more substantial play and the drama, however well-acted, suffers a little for its brevity.

Shanley is probably best-known as screenwriter for Hollywood movie Moonstruck, but also won a Pulitzer for his play Doubt, A Parable, soon to have a London revival.

Director Courtney Larkin keeps this revival's action fast moving, playing to its strength, the robustness of language. The minimal set is suitably seedy as a bar with cheap tables and worn seats, and later a messy bedroom.

The ending, it has to be said, stretches the bounds of credibility. However it would be mean-spirited to ignore the strengths of this production -- both the performances and the choreography --  outweighing the limitations of Shanley’s story, and raising this production to an amber/green light.

Review Dyl

Dyl
by Mark Weinman

Troubled Waters
http://www.oldredliontheatre.co.uk/theatre.html

Dyl is a hallucinatory, kidulting comedy drama ambitious in concept, but clumsy in execution. James is a pent-up young oil rig worker in the once thriving oil-rich city of Aberdeen.

Earning good money, his life revolves around the "two weeks on, two weeks off" cycle of labouring on the rig, then returning from the sea to dry land.

This debut play of writer Mark Weinman attempts to mix different genres and marry them with modern pressures on a young man's psychic space.

So there's some odd couple humour with his Aberdonian flatshare, the physicality of his job is on display as well as the tentacles of  the literary along with pop music, television and movies invading and wrapping themselves around the mind of a twenty something.

What emerges are some perfunctory, but still effective, laughs interspersed increasingly with still moments of visual anguish which work like televison close ups before an abrupt change of tone and the final reveal.

However this all feels very stretched out over the two-act play, with the plot points very far apart and various strategies used to fill in the gaps with issues parachuted in.

Lurking behind it all, Weinman has something worthwhile to say about our boom and bust era and a generation immersed in computers and screens. 

This is reflected in the slick, click together set designed by Jemima Robinson, even if the play's jigsaw construction doesn't quite click together as fluently and feels clunky.

Director Clive Judd brings together two alumni of his enjoyable production of a 1960s' classic about pent-up young men, Scott Arthur as Welshman James in his own Never-Never Land and Laurie Jamieson as the Scottish office worker flatmate from whom he rents a room on shore.

Joyce Greenaway is James's Mum trying to build an emotional bridge for her son while Rose Wardlaw is an unexpected, wish-fufilment visitor who apparently allows the various pieces to be slotted neatly into place and gives a kind of deus-ex-machina closure.

Weinman has a clever idea that can equally be a surreal shorter play or several episodes of a sharply edited TV soap.

Nevertheless, in its present form it has a frustratingly unbalanced and laboured structure, overpowering a potentially more dramatic and poignant analysis of a generation within a shuttlecock economy.

Dyl (with apologies to a famous American children's classic) is a little play that could. At the moment though, while it shows off the ample abilities of its cast, it's an amber light.