Review Poison

Tim Gopsill admires a drama where a divorced couple comes together over the grave of a child, but he finally cannot warm to the play.

Poison
by Lot Vekemans
Translated by Rena Vergano

Love And Other Toxins
https://www.orangetreetheatre.co.uk/

A middle-aged couple, a woman and man, meet up after nearly a decade of separation which started shortly after their son died. 

The man is known only as "He", the woman as "She".

“We are a man and a woman who lost a son, and then each other,” he says to her. “Who lost a son and then themselves and then each other,” she corrects.

He assents, which is the only thing they can agree on as they take their faltering steps to rebuild their love.

Poison is an 80-minute two-hander, examing the fall out of a marriage break up, acted with precision by Claire Price, a blonde sarky ex-wife and Zubin Varla as the  husband who previously walked out on her.

The couple find themselves in a reception room of the cemetery where their young son is buried. The discovery of toxic chemicals in the ground are now disturbing his supposedly final resting place.

The young boy's remains, along with those of others, have to be exhumed and reinterred and his parents have arrived to discuss the situation with cemetery officials.

This is, literally, the poison in the title – but the residue of suffering that killed their love is the real poison in the play itself

Written by Dutch writer Lot Vekemans with English translation by Rena Vergano, Poison has been an international success, playing in many languages all over the world, including New York, Berlin and, of course, The Netherlands.

It's concise and focussed, consisting solely of the conversation  between the former spouses,

Simon Daw's set is minimal: two upholstered benches, a coffee machine and a water cooler with mostly full-on lighting from Mark Doubleday.
 
The drama is driven solely by the two former partners' painful conversation, although there is a possible deception involved.

The only movement comes from the couple’s desperate gestures, but Paul Miller’s direction maintains the tension – relieved now and then by the odd nervous laugh.

There's probably a lot of truth in the reactions. The ending, when it comes, has an inevitability, yet beforehand hadn't seemed certain. 

This would make be a wonderful radio play with listeners forming their own picture of the couple in anguish.

However, despite the fine, detailed acting, it is also repetitive, with, deliberately,  the same verbal and physical expressions repeated, and it does become tedious and distancing.

As a chronicle of unrelieved grief,  it could have torn the heart, but in the end it gets an amber light.

Review The March On Russia

Tim Gopsill is drawn into a delicate yet hard-hitting 1980s' drama where family bickering reveals a deeper malaise. 

The March On Russia 
by David Storey

A House Divided
https://www.orangetreetheatre.co.uk/

Marital strife is a staple element of drama, both in life and on the stage. In either milieux it can be light-hearted or deadly serious, poignant or embarrassing; it can make us laugh or cry.

In the late David Storey’s 1989 drama The March on Russia, he managed to cover pretty much the gamut in a play that is both surprising and heart-wrenching.

At first the Pasmore couple's bitter discourse makes you laugh with their obviously well-used little digs. Then the laughter becomes more nervous with embarrassment; you start to cringe and by the end you are aching with compassion for this decent, loving couple, wracked in a torture chamber of old age, isolation, claustrophobia and regret.

Ian Gelder's retired coal miner Mr Pasmore aggravates with his mock bowing and scraping at his wife’s supposed bossiness. Sue Wallace's Mrs Pasmore whines at his persistent failure to respect her house proud values.

This grim routine is disrupted by surprise guests on their 60th wedding anniversary. Their three middle-aged children, without telling each other, have all decided independently to visit  their Mum and Dad at the same time.

The occasion for this seemingly contrived, but ultimately satisfying, scenario is the old couple’s diamond wedding anniversary. 

David Storey was a master at drawing intense drama from everyday life. His reputation, revived at his death only six months ago, was made with a  gritty tough-guy drama, This Sporting Life, whereas the March on Russia is as gentle and subtle as you can get.

Yet contained within the countless opportunities for nostalgia, resentment and recriminations, the dialogue  becomes truly painful.

The Orange Tree's in-the-round stage space perfectly suits James Perkins' atmospheric set evoking the couple's Yorkshire bungalow. It maps out their home -  the sitting room with its fireplace, sofa, table and chair, the utilitarian rear kitchen with work top, fridge and sink. The invisible walls between rooms and people become solid and real for us. 

The longer the play goes on, the more frenetically the spaces are used. Yet in Alice Hamilton's sensitively directed production, after all the anguish, you feel the real affection beneath the surface tension.

It's a slow burner and all the more effective for it. The arrival of the siblings is restrained, not to say repressed, before it boils over in a pointless row over an anniversary gift, unleashing hitherto hidden depths of resentment.

Sarah Belcher is the discontented local politican daughter, Wendy, her tongue loosened by drink, speaking her mind. Connie Walker's more conciliatory housewife and mother, Eileen, and Colin Tierney's morose, workaholic academic son, living a life a world away from his working class roots, complete the homecoming.

The March On Russia, we learn, really happened. It's the stuff of a First World War anecdote often recounted by the elderly Pasmore, an eye-opening episode in the otherwise routine life of a working man. It's the only outside subject the couple have to talk about but also a resonant reflection of failed ventures and thwarted lives. 

 David Storey's portrayal of the wounded heart of a family speaks eloquently nearly 30 years after its first production at the National Theatre and more than matches playwrights like Harold Pinter and John Osborne whose works are more frequently revived.

This is a welcome revival and director Hamilton and the fine cast gives it the nuanced green light production it deserves..

Review The Lottery Of Love

The Lottery Of Love
by Pierre Marivaux
Translated by John Fowles

Love In The Dock
https://www.orangetreetheatre.co.uk/

Marivaux is a lesser-known literary figure this side of the Channel. Even if his sentimental novel La Vie De Marianne had an influence on the development of the novel in England and he wrote more than 30 plays, many of which broke the mould in 18th century France.

The Orange Tree is now presenting the world premiere of John Fowles's 1984 translation of the French playwright's best known play, written in 1730,  Le Jeu de l'Amour et du Hasard, renamed in Fowles's version The Lottery Of Love.

Fowles transferred the story of a somewhat reluctant would-be man and wife foiled by their own ruses to Jane Austen's England where indeed a lottery for money, as well as literary trials' and tribulations" for prospective marriage partners, also flourished.  

For Marivaux, life and money had been somewhat of a lottery, his wife's dowry lost in a disastrous investment in the New World, then her early death after childbirth.

The Lottery Of Love deals with life's viccissitudes, cruelty and economics under a sophisticated veneer of  social comedy centring on Sylvia  (Dorothea Myer-Bennett), an independent-minded young woman who fears the marital alliance her father has arranged.

On hearing her prospective husband Richard is coming to visit her for the first time, and with the agreement of her father, she and her maid servant Louisa (Claire Lams) swap roles  to view and put on probation the future spouse's qualities (Ashley Zhangazha).

However it turns out, she herself will be a victim of her suitor's similar ruse. While both of them become the playthings, albeit in benevolent interests, of the inside epistolary dealings of her father (Pip Donaghy) and naval officer brother Martin (Tam Williams), with out-of-sight Richard's father. 

Le Jeu de L'Amour et du Hasard was revolutionary in not setting up two united lovers against the world overcoming obstacles.

It starts from a woman alone reversing social norms, saying no to any marriage unless she feels secure with a husband who will cherish her. In fact, sbe almost adopts the forensic probing of a prosecution lawyer in her reasoning.

In director Paul Miller's delicate confection, the cast conduct an intricate verbal minuet where multiple disguises and a farcical comedy of manners collide. Designer Simon Daw keeps it simple with single upside down roses and gently flashing tea lights suspended from the ceiling above the in-the-round stage.

There's symmetry but also violent disruption in The Lottery Of Love and we couldn't help remembering that by the end of the same century it was written, France itself was riven by a violent revolution. There's plenty to cherish in this handsome version of Marivaux's play but much of the underlying violence and cruelty feels sucked out of it.

Maybe it's because the Orange Tree Theatre space itself doesn't lend itself to French farce's slamming doors as the two lovers disguised as their own servants (there, we've given it away!) enter and exit.

Even so Myer-Bennett does have a touching vulnerability along with a blue-stocking control of her vocabulary. Zhangazha also shines as a deliberately slightly stolid but good-hearted suitor and master who finds his disguise more punishing and painful than he first expected. 

Fowles goes through the literary houses in his translation flirting with Shakespearean comedies, Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The Rivals and even inserting a touch of Dickens in his characterisation of valet John Brass (Keir Charles).

It's a delightful, very pretty production but we felt the darkness lurking beneath was a little too lightly mined. Mind you, this version does have the insurance of Sylvia's brother Martin's brooding, caddish presence, if not absolute actions, of a villain in the shape of slightly dishevelled Tam Williams.

At the same time, its flurry of love, chance, misunderstandings and trickery with a happy ending for master, mistress and servants does work its magic and we give it a mixed posy of amber/green. 
 

Review Low Level Panic

Low Level Panic
by Claire McIntyre

The Order Of The Bath
https://www.orangetreetheatre.co.uk/

Ah, 1988 ...  when Kraft was cheese and Heinz was beanz and never the twain would meet. A merger was arranged between breakaway Social Democrat and the Liberal Party. Margaret Thatcher was on the throne in office. Topless Page Three girls still boosted sales of The Sun newspapers. Comic Relief launched Red Nose Day on TV. The church was discussing the possibility of female vicars. Kids and adults were gripped by the video game craze.

And Clare McIntyre's curious collage of a play Low Level Panic was first performed at The Royal Court.

The play ostensibly covers  a night and a day in the life of three young women. A comedy drama,  part soap gone radical, probably influenced by Nancy Friday's influential tome My Secret Garden on women's sexual fantasies, and a nexus for a cocktail of 1980s' pressures, personal, political and commercial contradictions. 

In a well-paced and nuanced revival, the entire play is set in the bathroom of an all-female house-share. Rosanna Vize's clever four-cornered design, complete with avocado bath, toilet, free-standing door and vertical neon lit rails rising like outsize towel racks to the ceiling, gives director Chelsea Walker and movement director Ita O'Brien enormous flexibility.

The play's opening coup de théâtre still makes a - ahem - splash. Plumpish and shaggy-permed Jo (Katherine Pearce) and her more intense slim blonde housemate Mary (Sophie Melville) are relaxing in the bathroom. Mary, cigarette in hand, is perched on the toilet cistern at an open window. And Jo is starkers, naturally, as she's soaking in the bath using all the hot water.

Jo is also baring all as regards her fantasies laced with Hollywood-, pop video- and advertising-style luxury where the body, upmarket cars and sexual partners she yearns for are perfect specimens of the human race. All of which falls away when she mounts the scales.

While demure and groomed Celia (Samantha Pearl)  could either be a beautician or have just stepped out of a beauty parlour complete with an array of beauty products. The main strand of the plot follows Mary, the only one whose career we glimpse freeing herself from the shackles of a past sexual assault.

In spite of this, there are a fair amount of laughs - some things never change for women and in house-share bathrooms ;). There's some terrific dialogue between the women and the embarassment of parties rings true. But the monologues, despite the best efforts of sound designer Richard Hamarton and lighting designer Elliot Griggs to create a separate psychic space, do feel clunky.

It's a slick production and it struck us maybe back in 1988, it was a little more raw and makeshift. Still, the issues raised of body image and the use and abuse of women sexually in the global marketplace are still with us.

So there's plenty to reflect on and some very ingenious staging by Walker. Certainly at 80 minutes, it's a play well worth seeing without outstaying its welcome and its an upper range amber light from TLT and her own little luxury limousine. 
 

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 Sheppey

Sheppey
by Somerset Maugham

Jesus Wept
 https://www.orangetreetheatre.co.uk/

It seems Charlie Chaplin's barber in 1940 movie The Great Dictator was at least third, possibly fourth in line, in introducing a barber with a revolutionary streak. His own brother Sydney before that had created a barber who takes on an oppressive regime. And Charlie Chaplin himself settled out of court with a writer who claimed plagiarism.

But in 1933 Somerset Maugham wrote his last play bringing to the stage Sheppey (John Ramm in this production, while originally, some would say, miscast with Ralph Richardson directed by John Gielgud).  Sheppey's a Camberwell barber in this deceptively gentle piece with a razor sharp subtext.

Sheppey's only vice, apart from the more than occasional drink in a neighbouring pub, is buying a ticket produced by printers for the Free Irish State-government-sanctioned Irish Sweepstakes.

Although not spelt out in the play, this was ostensibly raising money for Irish hospitals but was eventually exposed as often lining private pockets.The sweepstake was illegal in Britain and the United States but the authorities turned a blind eye, even so far as allowing the results to  appear in newspapers.

Well, Sheppey has one more barber shop vice, although some would call it a commercial virtue,  persuading customers to buy a German hair restorer, sold at the Jermyn Street premises of his boss (Geff Francis) where he dreams of one day becoming a partner. Promising a medical miracle, he's got a neat line in salesman patter to persuade gullible hair-challenged clients to part with their cash. 

His other modest ambition is to lodge his family in a cottage on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent. A happy-go-lucky long-term employee, he nevertheless finds himself troubled when asked to be a witness in a Police Court case where he suddenly develops a social conscience, believing the assortment of criminals he sees in the dock being victims of circumstance during an economic slump rather than villains.

When his Irish Sweepstakes' ticket comes up with the princely sum of over £8,000, he, perhaps unwisely for an illicit operation, allows himself to receive publicity in the press but also determines not to keep the winnings for personal profit but to follow the example of Jesus, who as he points out was only a carpenter, just as he is a hairdresser, and distribute them to the needy in his local parish.

He gives a home to petty thief Cooper (Tom Peters) who inspired his channelling of money for relief of the poor. Prostitute Bessie LeGros (Dickie Beau  giving an added frisson to the female role), his drinking partner, also enters the household - is her name a sly dig at Hollywood actress Joan Crawford, originally Lucille LeSueur?

Yet Sheppey's plan goes horribly wrong when his prospective son-in-law, county council teacher and aspiring politician, Ernie (Josh Dylan), with a very different view of community, and daughter Florrie (Katie Moore), who has quit her job in the City to be married, dragging along Sheppey's wife Ada (Sarah Ball), conspire with family doctor (Brendan Hooper), presumably a pre-NHS panel doctor, who makes it clear his motive is commercial, profit rather than welfare.    

Sheppey has the construction of an old fashioned play - it may move a little slowly for some tastes now  - but with very modern concerns and a twist in the tale late on worthy of the much later musical Cabaret in Paul Miller's production.

John Ramm makes a convincing Sheppey, almost coming across as a more benevolent Alf Garnett in his rhythms and justifications.  Katie Moore as the upwardly mobile typist daughter Florrie nicely combines lurking vulnerability with  steely determination that nothing will get in her way. Sarah Ball's Ada manages the tricky balance between loving, long suffering wife who still gives way to the plot against her husband without losing our sympathies. .

Director Paul Miller retains the three-act structure in a careful production, aided by Max Pappenheim's sparingly and effectively used soundscape.Simon Daw's design neatly conveys the tiled barber shop with advertisement billboards above the in-the round stage area, while a subtle use of phrenology gives added resonance in the second and third act set.

There's a touch of the supernatural reminiscent of HG Wells's short stories combined with the sharp satire of Saki, while other literary references are explicit.

Certainly the audience doesn''t need to know the history of Irish Sweepstakes to be drawn into a secular fable of gambling, greed and then altruism brought down. Even so,  it becomes far more double-edged and reflective with an understanding of the subtext of 1930s' world politics, economics and possibly the abuse of parish-based mental asylums when national public scandals rise to the surface.

This is a well-cast seemingly simple piece of a certain pre-World War Two genre,  but also accompanied by a more complex undertow. It's an amber/green light for a precise production with a sting in its tale.

Review Blue Heart

Blue Heart
by Caryl Churchill

The Discreet Harm Of The Bourgeoisie
 https://www.orangetreetheatre.co.uk/

Ah, it turns out Boris Johnson was only following in the footsteps of Caryl Churchill in presenting alternate scenarios in writing.

For the first play Heart's Desire, part of a double bill under the title Blue Heart, does exactly that in director David Mercatali's sparky revival at the Orange Tree Theatre in association with Bristol's Tobacco Factory Theatres.

First performed successfully in 1997 (and we suspect the politics and events swirling around at that time underpins the two plays), Heart's Desire and Blue Kettle turn out to feel just as perky in 2016.

Equally interestingly in different ways the plays leave space for the audience to almost become an expectant character, write its own script and achieve a kind of satisfying dissatisfaction with its own interpretation.

We should of course mention the plays are also very funny.

In Heart's Desire, a family on the verge of a meal together await the return of a 30-something daughter from Australia. But this becomes a kind of Groundhog Day moment without the upbeat trajectory or memory of previous occasions.

Dad Brian (a lugubrious turn from Andy De La Tour), grounded Alice (Amelda Brown) and girlish Auntie Maisie (Amanda Boxer) seem doomed to repeat the same scenario again and again.

At first the variations are obvious. The subtle rumble of a tube train (sound effects Max Pappenheim) trails a phone call any family would dread. But afterwards in the repetition controllable verbal sparring becomes more flagrantly random and is interrupted by another wildcard arrival of alcoholic son Lewis (Alex Beckett).

When daughter Susy (Mona Goodwin) finally arrives, she has the cut glass tones of a Noel Coward character before - yes, it's all cut off for another round of our expectations fulfilled and then denied.

We certainly don't want to spoil the spontaneity but a visit from a Pinteresque totalitarian bureaucrat, an outsize bird in need of a manicure and a firearms' episode all figure, along with a Beckettian-crossed-with-Kafkaesque carnivorous human version of a dog chasing its own tail.

The second play of the evening Blue Kettle eats into itself in another way. A middle-aged man Derek (Alex Beckett) sets out to con several elderly woman from different stratas of society that he is the baby each of them gave up for adoption many years previously in the hope of money and property.

But at the same time there's just a touch of the patronising superior actor or even playwright about him, policing the women thinking he can measure and control their reactions. As his plans implode, words take on a linguistic life of their own and finally break down, just as painters can eschew photographic realism with outlandish colours and disintegration on the canvas.

This is an unsettling yet invigorating evening with a fine cast in a pared-down effective set from Angela Davies and lighting from Chris Swain sharply defining scenes.

It's a green light for plays with enough of a hook in shared human experiences to wrench us out of the comic absurd into more achingly human personal and political territory of trust and betrayal.

Review Jess and Joe Forever

Jess and Joe Forever

by Zoe Cooper

A Rural Gavotte

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

Once TLT lived in a one-horse village (the horse belonged to someone else). There was a pub, a few residential roads, the overgrown tracks  of disused ralway lines axed by the Beeching cuts and a bridge from which the  occasional de-nested fledgling used to fall which she tried to nurse back to health. 

You had to climb over several stiles through fields of sheep or cows - according to the season - to reach the next village. Here was the church, the post office cum shop and the primary school, so small two years were put together in one classroom (Old fogyishly she declares: "it never did us any harm!" ;))  So we felt amply qualified for Jess and Joe Forever, set in a Norfolk village.

Except of course in TLT's past house prices hardly moved,  credit was scarcely discussed and  banks were for the monthly salaries of parents (mostly fathers) or for businesses. Secondary schools were the big town secondary modern or the two single-sex public schools. The latter were kept afloat by fees which the armed forces paid outright for the children of the military and the local authority's payments for local kids like yours truly who passed the eleven plus. 

Joe is a scrawny motherless farmer's son, while Jess is a "townie" whose parents have a holiday home in the unnamed hamlet, a villa on Lake Garda and a live-in nanny for their plump, good-natured daughter.

In some ways, this is a play which touches on the new class system: the self-conscious Jess knowing but not quite understanding why she is better travelled, has an Eastern European nanny and why her boarding school is viewed as a superior sort of establishment.

  

Meanwhile Joe has a secret, revealed late in the hour long play which makes him less rash, more reserved and watchful than Jess who is a little girl eager to please and impress and a tad lonely. She is almost like some over-eager playwright or screenwriter, for even at nine (and three quarters), she knows the term "inciting incident".

Indeed it struck your apple-cheeked theatregoing duo that this little tale of class, nature, changing seasons, prejudice,  literature and economic downturns might work very well as a movie. Rooted in Norfolk, but surely equally at home in Florida or the deep south of America?

Like a lot of new writing nowadays, it has a slightly studied but pleasingly rhythmic script self-consciously threaded with Ovidian and novelistic references. Yet it also allows for charming, well-paced performances, as the protagonists awkwardly dance verbally around each other - Nicola Coughlan as blonde Jess and Rhys Isaac-Jones as dark and thoughtful Joe.

It's precisely paced by director Derek Bond on James Perkins' formal pastel grey, green and yellow chequer board set, heaped with untidy earth from the almost-opening scene as Joe digs cattle troughs interrupted by the curious, friendly Jess.

The scenes over the years are delineated by a rather self-conscious clicking of fingers and flash of lights. We are introduced into the geography of the village. At its centre the church with the lacuna, left by a vicar dealing with more than one parish, filled by those in the vilage who feel qualified to be lay preachers and provide the village's moral compass.

Meanwhile the children's lives seem to be mapped out by their education - Jess to a fee-paying boarding school, while Joe's position appears more nebulous. 

There is at least one glimpse of an above-average intelligence but a rather more puzzling reference to more mundane school affairs which makes him seem a unique pupil - the reasons for which are eventually revealed.

Jess and Joe Forever is a likeable jigsaw of a play with strong central performances. The writing could afford to relax a little, over intent sometimes on breaking the fourth wall. 

Nevertheless the sensitive production and the script's appealing grace attracts an amber/green light from your yeoman theatre reviewer TLT and her little automotive sidekick ploughing the theatrical furrows.

Review The Philanderer

The Philanderer

by Bernard Shaw

Breaking Up Is Hard To Do

www.orangetree.co.uk

Poor Leonard (an elegantly gawky bearded hipster Rupert Young). He's had his wicked way with two women. Cool blonde widow Grace Tranfield (svelte Helen Bradbury), daughter of a drama critic (meticulous old fogey Mark Tandy), and fiery redhead Julia Craven (curvy Dorothea Myer-Bennett) whose Dad is retired Colonel (Michael Lumsden).

And now poor Leonard is forced to plot to break off at least one relationship and his conduct over the second seems more than dubious, leaving a lot to be desired.

Or maybe Leonard's not so poor - we never learn the state of his finances. But in the cold light of day he's a pretty nasty piece of work despite a polished, witty literary exterior.

This isn't the latest Netflix, Sky or Amazon boxed set or even a French farce.

This is one of the Plays Unpleasant of Mr G Bernard Shaw (he never liked the "George"), first performed privately in 1905 to avoid the censor. 

Bring to the fore the "New Woman" at a time when women only could divorce if fault was proven or the man, in the words of the play, was a drunkard, criminal or imbecile. Indeed, the seedy profession of private detectives grew out of the courts and divorce cases.

Directed by Paul Miller, with a pitch perfect cast, this is an updated staging of Shaw's early play on a marble tiled-in-the-round stage, simply but cleverly furnished, with a subtle mash up of delicious costumes (designer Simon Daw, costume supervisor Clio Alphas).

Isabel Waller-Bridge provides a light touch but effective score and this three-act play also manages smooth location changes in the manner of the recently-seen I've Been Here Before with two intervals.

Leonard is a  - wait for it, it's a juicy word! - philanderer. That's not philanthropist  - many would say quite the opposite. Philanderer took on the meaning in the 18th century, the era which witnessed the birth of the often "sentimental" British novel for a female market, of a serial womanizer. 

Until then philanderer had the meaning, from the Greek, of "fond of men", according to my internet resources. Perhaps Enlightenment marketeers  realised such a rolling-off-the tongue word was perfect for the bodice rippers devoured in private by ladies in their boudoirs!

As for Leonard, he is a wisecracking but charming vulture who feeds off the women including Sylvia (Paksie Vernon), Julia's decidedly unsentimental younger sister,  who are all of "advanced views" and members of that "cock and hen" (note the order, not hen and cock) society, The Ibsen Club. 

This is a society where Henrik Ibsen is viewed as Superman (there is a glorious well-oiled design joke which we won't spoil). Where every member is required to be equally nominated and guaranteed by a man and woman in the name of equality and a hollow-eyed runner (Joe Idris-Roberts) brings the latest messages. For centuries before "Nordic Noir" hit our screens, another Norwegian ruled the roost. 

And with Dr Paramore (Christopher Staines) who has condemned Grace's retired colonel, a veteran of Indian and Sudan campaigns, to an early death from his eponymously named disease, Shaw can't resist a potshot at one of his favourite subjects, The latest medical scientific theory in the British Medical Journal, this time that of malign microbes This later surely influencing this Monty Python sketch?!

TLT and her vehicle of choice, with the dangerous liaisons' tinted windows hiding Lord-knows-what ;), did wonder though whether this very cleanly designed and acted version of The Philanderer could be more  - well - low down and dirty. Or in the words of journalist Rachel Cooke's programme introduction in another context, could afford to loosen the stays of both women and the vain men.

After all, the origin of Ibsen's A Doll's House, a clear influence, isn't the nicest of stories. According to the play's Wikipedia entry, Ibsen himself even played a role in the real life downfall of the woman writer who inspired it

And the language of money, share dealing, gambling, the court room, the buying and selling of women and even copyright, rather than the language of love, infects The Phlanderer's script. 

Meanwhile Leonard, a Jack Tanner prototype, increasingly watches like a puppet master the domino chaos he sets off. 

Furthermore, the implication by the end is that women can only get their rights as women and as writers  by marrying a male writer and, like the pension of the time endowed in the husband,  a financial portion by supporting the husband's success rather than given their own royalties!

Shaw's lines when characterful debate and rhythm is drained out of them, can lead to accusations of the prolix. And for an audience more used to short attention span current day scripts, there are always occasions where the concentration may lapse during arguments. 

But this production manages to crack Shaw's characterful conversational, debating style, even if the play itself, sometimes a deliberate trot through different literary styles, is not as polished in verbal sparring as, say, the later St Joan.   

While some of Shaw's work is in the public domain in Canada and the USA, the world rights reside with the Society of Authors until 2020. 

We can therefore expect more of the patter of tiny feet of experimental Shaw productions. And also judging from Lawrence After Arabia, portrayals of Shaw himself, long lived from the Victorian times to the late twentieth century. So the Shaw Society may well find itself in demand! 

In the meantime this is a classy, highly enjoyable, clear production of an early work heedfully modernised, from which the audience emerged with smiles on their faces. A green light.

Review The Brink

The Brink

by Brad Birch

The History Boy

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

It's  a tough life as a teacher - one moment you're Superman for all the kids, but then starts the dark descent into the shallow grave of marking, academy politics and dreaming the top secret Second World War bomb under the playing fields explodes.

History teacher Nick (Ciarán Owens) can't sleep, having woken from his recurrent school nightmare but finds a handy cube to sit on.to eat his breakfast.

The glowing cube is one of four on an interesting set designed by Hyemi Shin introducing us to Planet Nick with s floor full of dark gray shards - almost as if a bomb had - well, never mind ...

The Brink by Brad Birch is a vigorous 80 minutes without a break, fleetly directed by Mel Hillyard, as Nick's life is put on reverse through the school system. 

Time slips away and we're not sure if we're being treated to an inside out skewed view of the world through Nick's mind, or if he, to use The Archers mot de jour, is being gaslighted.

Or if there really is a bomb under the playing fields.

And as her little motorised 'A' grade student companion remarked to TLT, aren't school playing fields being sold off to developers? But perhaps that's the point of why we've come to The Brink.

Yet the play struck us as a rather cold exercise with studied jokes, a bare bones' gallop through an educational breakdown with movie references. But again, perhaps that's part of the point. The exercise of theory in education?

TLT doesn't know whether she's been infected by the Francophone feel enveloping many of this season's plays but she did wonder whether  a French context might be more resonant with its  history of left wing (nay, communist) history teachers, militant university student surveillants, and pride in secularism.

At the same time, there are clever ideas, even if The Brink doesn't quite know whether it wants to invite sympathy or be a harshly modern Hogarthian storyboard satire. As it is, it's ticking off of the issues, plot points and jokes may be satisfying for some.

 Owens embodies an engaging mix of intellectual analysis, puppyish vulnerability and bouncing-off-the-wall paranoia. There's able support from Shvorne Marks doubling as Nick's partner Chloe and school pupil Jessica, Alice Haig as fellow teacher Jo and Vince Leigh as Chloe's hotshot boss Martin and shifty headmaster Mr Boyd. 

So it's not quite an A grade from TLT but it's definitely a not-fail amber light.