Review The Red Lion

The Red Lion
by Patrick Marber

When Saturday Comes
 http://www.atgtickets.com/shows/the-red-lion/trafalgar-studios/

TLT's family once dabbled in the beautiful game, before the advent of big money footie, when a teenage schoolboy relative and friends once blithely decided to form a junior league football team.

This momentous moment in soccer's history didn't take place in a pub and, as far as TLT knows, noone involved was a freemason.

However, little did these newcomers know the already fraught atmosphere they were entering: football scouts circling, a notorious opposing team manager taking a swing at the naive father who had taken on the role of manager. After all, who did they think they were? Schoolboy amateurs?!!

This revival of Patrick Marber's 2015 The Red Lion sets the dressing room drama three-hander in the North East where a struggling semi professional team is looking for a saviour.

The manager Kidd (Stephen Tompkinson), harassed by money worries after a failed marriage and without a roof over his head, desperately needs success whether on the field or in financial wheelings and dealings beyond the white lines.

In the dressing room, old guard kit man Yates (John Bowler) is not in such a rush, ironing carefully and methodically shirts for the next game, placing them on hangers lined up on the players' hooks, ready for the next game.

In their own ways, they are both waiting for a player who will save the club and bring at least a sprinkling of past glories - if they ever existed.

The Red Lion tries to encapsulate three generations of footballing and British social change seen through the prism of the dressing room.

It harks back to organized football's amateur origins with its Victorian founding fathers through local councils and small-town business involvement when footballers were paid a meagre wage and had no pension to the current global professional marketplace. 

TLT remembers thinking during the previous incarnation of the play in 2015 that there was very much a conflation of football and the parliamentary expenses scandal in the play.

Certainly this is a drama which quietly positions itself as a state-of-the-nation, as well as a state-of-the-game play.

Yet Marber never quite finds the right balance between the male sentimentality about the game,  delusions of influence with the sport increasingly a by-product of financial transactions and a genuine, potent spiritual love for the game.

This production, originating in at Newcastle Upon Tyne's Live Theatre, doesn't manage quite to overcome what still feels like rather a schematic piece with the themes announced as patently as a linesman's flag going up.

Nevertheless Dean Bone brinngs the right mix of confusion, over optimistic naivety yet guile to the role of rising star Jordan.

Stephen Tompkinson's performance feels slightly over-egged, although TLT can perfectly believe such characters with sneering personality swings do exist.

However in the intimate surroundings of the smaller Trafalgar Studios space, director Max Roberts could have pulled him back a little to allow the later moments of hurt to emerge more fully.

Yates who has gone through the whole gamut as fan, player, manager and what seems at first to be a sinecure as kit man, is probably the best written of the three roles.

John Bowler's grizzled features and deliberate movements, carrying out traditionally female tasks elevated in male eyes by association with the beautiful game, make for a compelling performance.

There's also a nicely-observed grubby white brick set from Patrick Connellan and terrific sound design from Dave Flynn, providing atmosphere and pace between scenes. 

It's a flawed play which has its moments and still, of course, has a relevance and resonance as further British scandals emerge.

TLT does wonder whether an expanded version might work on TV but in the meantime it's an amber/green light.

Review Venus In Fur

Game Of Thrones' star Natalie Dormer impresses Francis Beckett, catches the zeitgeist, but turns out to be less than the sum of its parts.

Venus in Fur
By David Ives 

Of Human Bondage 
 http://www.trh.co.uk

Sometimes timing dictates what your play is about.

Harvey Weinstein was just another Hollywood film mogul when several years ago David Ives sat down to write Venus in Fur. In his play a theatre director,  who rather despises the actresses he hires or declines to hire, gets his comeuppance.

That, at least, because no play is an island, is what Venus in Fur is about right now and what the zeitgeist demands in late October 2017.

However I suspect that was not the original subject of the play Mr Ives wrote.  I think it had much more to do with sexual fetishes, sado-masochism, and the strange things they do to the brain.

Never mind. It’s the Weinstein affair, and the consequent pleasure of seeing an actress turn the tables on a male director, which will have theatregoers flocking to the Haymarket.

In addition, perhaps attraction will be the not totally unpleasant sight of Game Of Throne's Natalie Dormer’s shapely legs protruding from S&M outfits.

In Ives's two-hander comedy drrama, New York writer and theatre director Thomas (David Oakes) has had a long day failing to cast the main female part for his adaptation of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s 19th century novella.

The word masochism is coined from the author's name. The book is about a woman who makes a man her slave urged on by the man who wants to be enslaved.

Thomas is just packing up to go home when Vanda (Natalie Dormer) walks in, persuades him to hear her read for the part and turns out to know most of the lines.

He is in charge at the start, for he has a wonderful part to bestow on some lucky actress.  But slowly Vanda persuades Thomas to act out in real life the relationship she has read about in his play, to become her slave. What starts as a reading merges into role-play.

It’s a clever, witty play with a lot of blunt but resonant one-liners, like “Working in the theatre is the world’s greatest way to get laid”.

Patrick Marber, for my money Britain’s best contemporary playwright, directs with a sure touch and there is a splendidly detailed realistic set from Rob Howell.

As the director Thomas, David Oakes is extremely competent, but most of the time he’s simply a foil for a stunning virtuoso performance from Natalie Dormer as Vanda, at once a monster and an avenging angel.

So, a thoroughly engaging 90 minutes in the theatre (straight through, no interval). However, in the end, I wanted a bit more.

I didn’t care quite enough what happened to either character. Truth to tell, not quite enough did happen and Thomas’s swift capitulation strained the suspension of disbelief. So it's almost full marks; but in the end only an amber/green light.

Review Travesties

Travesties
by Tom Stoppard

The Biggest Bet
https://www.menierchocolatefactory.com/

Life is drawing to an end for Henry Carr. He's not so much forgetful or senile as bloody annoyed. He obviously wants to join the ranks of the respected, those who knew and encouraged the genius which manifested itself in Zurich during World War One.

The only trouble is that the genius, acclaimed by a deluge of accolades by all and sundry (ok, by those in publishing and academia - we're safe as the genius himself made fun of them), is a certain Mr James Joyce (1882 -1941).  We're at the start of Travesties, a 1974 play written by Tom Stoppard.

Now Henry (Tom Hollander) is forcing himself to join the Joyce (played here by Peter McDonald) bandwagon, minueting around possible biographies. He rehearses different plausible versions of the past as if preparing evidence for a court case  - or at least in case he is quizzed by a publisher, literary editor or reader. Wavering between eulogy and fury.

"Memories of James Joyce. James Joyce As I Knew Him. The James Joyce I Knew. Through The Courts With James Joyce .. To those of us who knew him, Joyce's genius was never in doubt ... an amazing intellect ..." until we get to "... in short, a liar and a hypocrite, a tight-fisted, sponging fornicating drunk not worth the paper ..."

Then on to future Soviet leader Lenin (Forbes Mason) out to commandeer artistic pursuits for the revolutionary ideals on whom, Carr having outlived them all, can only rue the day that he never laid a bet when they all lived in Zurich. Along with Romanian Tristan Tzara (Freddie Fox), founder of "anti-art" - er - art movement Da da.

As you may have gathered, this is a genre of memory play. Stoppard has taken a footnote in the magisterial Richard Ellman 1959 biography of James Joyce in which Henry Carr appears and spun it into Travesties. Carr, who like Joyce had worked in a bank, was an ex-soldier, invalided out of combat, working in a minor British consular role.

Joyce recruited Carr to play Algernon ("the other one" in  Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest) on an amateur basis in an acting troupe of which  Joyce was business manager. However, the whole affair ended in acrimony for Carr and Joyce - and in the Zurich district courts with each in the hands of lawyers.

Directed by Patrick Marber, this is essentially a high-brow farce set in Carr's lodgings and Zurich public library which like the earlier Rosencrantz and Guildernstern Are Dead becomes a play within a classic play. This time it's The Importance Of Being Earnest intricately intertwined in the action.

As in literary memoirs where fact and fiction interweave, Wilde's Gwendolen (Amy Morgan) is Carr's sister who ends up as amenuensis to the great man in this tale. That is, Joyce relies on her as he dictates Ulysses (in which Joyce exacted revenge on Carr for claiming he was owed money for his costume and allegedly libelling the author - that damn fact and fiction again!).

Meanwhile Wilde's Cecily (Clare Foster) is turned into a Zurich librarian (although in this travesty changes later on into a more male donnish lecturer on the Russian Revolution). Tristan Tzara falls for her but has to invent in Wildean manner a less radical brother due to her conservative inclinations.

"Confused?",  you probably will be. Unlike Rosencrantz and Guildernstern Are Dead, the possible tragic and human consequences of war and putting theory into practice feel mightily submerged in the wordplay and literary allusions.

Nevertheless the consequences are there. For in one sense or another, Zurich is conveyed as a city of refugees and political manipulation where art, politics and historical events of the past  all too easily solidify in a record which puts a selective import on disparate strands.

For while we may laugh at Carr's inadequate ramblings when putting together his own book, they are also recognizable as precisely the sort of literary memoirs which are the currency of literary and academic lionization.

And Switzerland's position in wartime seemingly divorced from the conflict is always there. As is Carr's butler Bennett (Tim Wallers) with his succinct diplomatic bag newspaper summaries of the situation. In reality, Bennett was in charge of Carr and the consulate in Zurich, so here as butler he is  is literally a "public servant". Even if his transformation into a PG Wodehouse type character also has resonance.

It feels both a problem and a strength that our sympathies tend to turn towards Carr as an uncanonized character in this gallery of secular saints. Nevertheless, the play relies on an inordinate amount of background knowledge which, speaking frankly, hardly seems part of the mainstream in our twentieth first century internet world.

The detailed care lavished on the set and costumes, the timing and entrances and exits, the merging of Finnegans Wake language into Carr's muddled or maybe experimental recollections make this almost a biblical theatrical text in itself. Yet it's the visuals which stick in the mind, despite quickfire, fine performances by the cast.

Carr's torment and disgust at Joyce's undisputed genius held us - the other characters filtered through Carr's mind perhaps seem less original in our own quickfire, algorithmic world. This feels now very much a play put together rather than organically grown. Lenin and his wife Nadya (Sarah Quist) may be deliberately distanced with dialogue taken from books Carr has read to make up for being in their proximity without meeting them but this adds to the collage effect.

We have to say the current public exposure of the coopting of artists into political partisanship makes the juxtapositions a little old hat now. But, it is true, a hat which like wars and revolutions and Henry Carr's boater in The Importance Of Being Earnest, always needs to be paid for. So it's a quickfire kerching! amber light from TLT and her very own car (without the double r) critic!