Review The Odyssey

An adaptation of The Odyssey with a bijou cast and inventive outdoor staging delights Peter Barker.

The Odyssey
Adapted by Phil Willmott From Samuel Butler's Translation Of The Ancient Greek

More Hit Than Myth
http://bit.ly/TheOdysseyTheScoop

Mythic characters from ancient Greek literature spring to life in this year's free open-air performance at The Scoop amphitheatre on the South Bank by London City Hall

The Odyssey is a Greek epic attributed to Homer. Now writer/director Phil Willmott has adapted Samuel Butler's Victorian translation and presents a fast-moving, enjoyable version of The Odyssey in three parts, each lasting one hour with intervals in between.

Unless London experiences a Greek summer weather-wise, warm clothing and a thermos of something hot or cash for food and drink stall purchases are recommended. Cushions and blankets are available for rental - otherwise again bring your own. 

The first part during the early evening, A Great Big Greek Adventure, is pitched at children.

Odysseus, the poet king of Ithaca, played by a muscular bearded Henry Wyrley-Birch, leads his band of warriors to victory against the Trojans before the homeward-bound journey to the strains of The Lightning Seeds's Three Lions with the words slightly adapted - "The Greeks Are Going Home".

The Power of Love, the second part at sunset leads us into the dangerous enchantments of the bewitching Sirens and seductive goddesses trying to tempt Odysseus and his ship’s crew who struggle to keep on course for Ithaca.

Finally night-time brings The Homecoming. Years have passed and Odysseus returns to Ithaca, only to have to fend off many suitors for Queen Penelope before reunion with his wife and the son who has grown up in his absence

Wilmott directs a pacey production with a versatile cast. Nine players playing multiple characters and breaking the fourth wall when they become a chorus commenting on events.

The three-level plywood set, painted with a map of the Aegean, designed by Philip Edolls has a pop-up feel. The styling with costumes by Penn O'Gara and the choreography of movement director Francesca Bridge-Cicic are also reminiscent of easy-to-understand cartoon versions of the Greek myths created for children,.

Staging, with lighting by Phil Supple and sound by composer Theo Holloway, is done with small resources but much imagination.

Odysseus and his crew's encounter with the many-headed sea monster Scylla - Lawrence Boothman - and the giant Cyclops - Lincoln James - encompasses inventive physical theatre as well as puppetry. Billowing blue sheets conjure up the clash with the sea god Poseidon while the battle where Queen Penelope's numerous suitors are driven off is both ingenious and magical.

Rebecca Laydoo is a dignified and beautiful Penelope while Adrian Decosta proves his versatility as Oydysseus's loyal son Telemachus while also winning the audience's hearts on all fours (mostly) as Odysseus's loyal playful dog Argos.

Molly Crookes makes a blonde and lithe goddess Athena and PK Taylor is both the sea witch Circe and Odysseus grown old. However the cast are an ensemble and plaudits must also go to Toyin Ayedun-Alase and Alec Porter who equally take on several different roles.

The Odyssey at The Scoop is certainly a pleasure to watch with an easy-going drop in and out ethos where anyone can choose to stay, leave and then even return again (like Odysseus!) at will.
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This is fun evening, that passes far quicker than its three-and-a-half-hour running time. It's highly recommended for families, children and adults. And, just as good, it’s free, so it's definitely a green light!

Review Incident At Vichy

A lesser-known Arthur Miller play where the playwright tackled the fate of the Jews during the Second War receives a fine production, says Francis Beckett. 

Incident at Vichy 
by Arthur Miller  

Miller's Jewish Question
http://www.kingsheadtheatre.com 

Arthur Miller may be the greatest English-language radical playwright of the twentieth century. His 1949 play Death of a Salesman is the most accurate and effective indictment of American capitalism I know, and Miller himself was summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Yet, on his own admission, he was for years tone deaf to the Second World War persecution of the Jews. In Italy in 1947 he glimpsed a group of Holocaust survivors on their way to Israel but could make nothing of it.  “I was talking to burnt wood, charred iron, bone with eyes” he wrote later.

Yet he was a Jew.  (He told a story about taking his second wife, Marilyn Monroe, to meet his parents, who offered her matzo balls to eat on three consecutive days.  “Isn’t there any other part of the matzo you can eat?” she asked.)

In the 1960s Miller at last began to see the Holocaust clearly, and to relate it to all the things he had fought against all his life.  This short play is one of the results.

It takes place after the fall of France in 1940, when the northern part of the country was under  the direct rule of Nazi Germany. The French government under Marshal Pétain was allowed nominally to rule the rest from the spa town of Vichy. However Pétain’s authority was very limited, and relied on his willingness to do the victors’ bidding in most matters, including implementing Nazi race laws.

So some strangely assorted men are gathered in a police station in Vichy, most of them having been picked up on suspicion of being Jews, and they will have their noses measured, and their penises  inspected to see if they have been circumcised.

Three of them are not Jews. One man has been picked up as a communist, another is a gypsy, and a third an Austrian prince who, we are encouraged to believe, is probably a homosexual.

It’s a very strong and effective play even at that level, the level of telling a gripping story.  These men are not saints. They are fully-drawn human beings, with human weaknesses, and as likely to show solidarity in the face of dreadful danger as you and I.

But it’s the politics of the play, and its contemporary relevance, which most interest director Phil Willmott, who says he was “amazed to discover that the play had always been presented realistically.”  So for the first time, he says, it is now performed without a naturalistic set.

I don’t buy Willmott’s view that Miller didn’t intend us to believe in the play as a representation of what might easily have happened in Vichy France in 1940 or 1941.  But it doesn’t matter.

The set designed by Georgia de Grey is quite naturalistic enough to convince in a fringe venue like the King's Head, which doesn't need all the naturalistic bells and whistles a West End audience demands.

Willmott moves his cast around economically and with calm assurance. That’s to say, he doesn’t insult the audience by supposing constant movement is needed to keep our attention. If, for instance, the dialogue demands the actors sit still for minutes on end, that’s what they do.

Standouts for me in a strong cast were Laurence Boothman as a terrified and neurotic painter; Edward Killingback as the Austrian prince; Brendan O’Rourke as a communist electrician; PK. Taylor as an actor; and Timothy Harker as the Nazi doctor, saying dreadful things in a calm and bureaucratic tone.

But all twelve actors were excellent; there isn’t a weak link. And just pause at that number for a moment. Twelve actors in the Kings Head, which would be crammed to the gunwales if 118 people turned up, and the venue insists they pay every actor, at a special rate agreed with the actors’ trade union Equity.

Paying actors a regular wage is almost unheard-of on the fringe, and the King's Head is much to be congratulated on doing it. Before the performance on press night artistic director Adam Spreadbury-Maher made a charming and amusing plea for funds and I saw quite a few banknotes being thrown into the buckets his staff held out as we left.

Good as that was to see, it still seems wrong that we now live in a society where you can only pay actors for a fine production like this by rattling a charity box.

Still, you’ll help them by going to see Incident at Vichy; and you’ll see a fine production of a really interesting play, for which a green light is the least I could possibly award.

Review Incident At Vichy

Incident At Vichy
by Arthur Miller

No Exit
http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/

"Hope", wrote American poet Emily Dickinson, "is the thing with feathers-/That perches in the soul-/And sings the tune without the words -/And never stops - at all - ...".

Is this what was in playwright Arthur Miller's mind when the mute Old Jew (Jeremy Gagan), called to the front of the queue and facing extinction in 1942,  stands up and feathers scatter around the room from the homely pillow cover he has been clutching?

For it struck us that Miller's 1964 play Incident At Vichy is about human hope in the face of almost certain disaster. Set in "unoccupied" France, French police have rounded up eight men and a boy and are handing them to the Nazi regime.

Almost all of them turn out to be Jews on false papers. They clutch at whatever slim chances present themselves. They also deceive and lie to themselves and others all for a sliver of hope that they will survive.

The artist Lebeau (Lawrence Boothman), for example, tries to persuade himself and others that he has some agency, that it was not him, but a parent clinging to material goods who stopped him from escaping in 1939 on a US visa.

But even this seemingly simple situation has complex layers. He admits to feeling guilt, but it may be misplaced.

What is unsaid is that the elderly had far less chance of obtaining a visa and being allowed into other countries than the younger generation. Their children often had to make the anguished decision whether to stay behind with them or leave the country. He may be lying to preserve his own sanity in the face of certain death.

For it seems to us Incident At Vichy is very much a psychological play, the very human trait of human beings believing their beliefs and actions mean something and can directly lead to survival - and that their survival is not a random blip but says something about them. Transforming them from human beings buffetted by fortune that they cannot control into symbols.

Miller himself described the origins of the story behind Incident At Vichy in the vaguest of terms but named the person who relayed it to him. It's a story about "a friend of a friend" who is the recipient of an extraordinary selfless act by a fellow human being.

An incident  every Jew, every human being, must hope would happen to them if he or she was in such a position. A story everyone would want to hear even if it were a one-off or an urban legend (Losey's later movie Monsieur Klein is another kind of riff on the theme).

Although it was first staged at the Lincoln Center, this play feels very much as if it were written for  radio or a TV play (Twelve Angry Men may be a different subject with a different outcome but it's also a play similarly centring on persuasion and realisation).

Phil Willmott directs a production of great clarity with outstanding performances from Edward Killingback as dilettante gentile Austrian nobleman Von Berg and PK Taylor as an actor who tries to convince himself that confidence in his own performance both as actor and human being will win through.

We did wonder whether a production with an even more diverse cast would open up the universal themes and knotty problems contained in this play more.

The script at times feels slightly clunky as the issues are laid out - this is very much an issue-led play. Nevertheless the issues lead to no simple conclusions where devastating realities set against the nature of human relationships and politics form a web catching every class and type.

While Leduc, the psychiatrist (Gethin Alderman) seems the clearest sighted, he also has his own blind spots. At one point he blames his wife for his situation and at another time views others, not himself, as being as conditioned as Pavlov's dog.

Incident At Vichy is a play set in the year the USA entered the Second World War but also examines issues of power and responsibility which remain live in our times. Both Von Berg's belief in old pre-war feudal structures where he could proffer personal protection and Leduc's belief in education and self-awareness prove illusory. 

It's an amber/green light for a timely production with a discussion of issues always with us including industrial success achieved by using free labour and slavery rather than on its own business merits.

Review Anyone Can Whistle

Anyone Can Whistle
Music & Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim
Book by Arthur Laurents

You Just Put Your Lips Together And Blow
http://www.uniontheatre.biz/

Taken at its simple level, the plot of 1964 musical Anyone Can Whistle sounds like it could be a lost Preston Sturges satire. An American town has fallen on hard times.

There's a drought, the factory has closed, the mayoress's unpopularity is at an all-time high and the most flourishing business in town is the local lunatic asylum.

In the midst of the economic slump and adverse weather conditions, the mayoress and her cohorts concoct an elaborate scam to turn their town into the American equivalent of Lourdes.

A magical stream of water suddenly spouting from a rock with the aim of attracting tourist pilgrims and revitalising the factory as a "miracle water" bottling factory.

In practice, it became one of Stephen Sondheim's and Arthur Laurents's worst received musicals running for just nine days and seeing it, it's not hard to tell why.

Instead of sticking to the basic story, it feels like a piece where intertextuality has gone - well - mad. Or maybe a musical which, while musically experimental, feels as if it is equally a testing board for the stories of several potential musicals drawing on the successful plays and musicals of previous years.

All it needs are a couple of characters called Steve Sondheim and Artie Laurents squabbling over which story to use and maybe it would turn into a piece called something like - oh we dunno - Work in Progress ...

The Union Theatre production directed by Phil Willmott is efficient without doing anything to  bring clarity to a piece which may be about political and show business confusion but needs something more to sort it out.

Acoustically speaking, Oliver Stanley as the hapless "practising idealist" Hapgood, a new quixotic patient who masquerades as a doctor, seems to find the correct volume in the Union space.

Rachel DeLooze's Nurse Faye Apple, who falls in love with the new medic and determines to expose the fraud, sings Anyone Can Whistle touchingly and brings a sense of energy and fun in her own French disguise in "Come Play Wiz Me". But sometimes words are lost.

We did wonder also whether a race element to the musical was played down. Certainly a bit of research revealed that one of the patients/citizens Martin was originally meant to be played by a black actor (even if we did enjoy Mitchell Lathbury's performance).

But some of Nurse Apple's lyrics as well could take on a different resonance with a black actress in the role as would the kiss with Hapgood. Having said that, Barbara Streisand was originally mooted for the role in the first 1964 production which was eventually taken by Lee Remick.
 
As regards the intertextuality, on the plus side Mayoress Cora Hoover Hooper (Felicity Duncan) parades like Hello Dolly's Dolly Levi gone rogue. But then, uh-oh, there's a look back to Gypsy, the embryo of a St Bernadette story, a touch of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, more than a tad of the whimsy and politics of Finian's Rainbow,  a sudden short lived comparison to the opening of the Suez Canal (?!!!).

Are there also gestures towards Sylvia Plath's novel The Bell Jar? And then  Maurice Maeterlinck's The Bluebird seems to pop up and also Noel Coward's medley of one-act plays Tonight At 8.30.

They line up like coralled citizens and psychiatric patients in Anyone Can Whistle. Then there are the plethora of themes:  a political subtext touching on the US electoral system, the invidious position of those caught up in the change of policy towards the Soviet Union triggered by the Cold War and even a nuts and bolts injunction to "tear up the records" adding to the mix. 

Mind you, Dr Detmold (Richard Foster King) of the Cookie Jar, the mental home for the socially pressured, does say at one point he's writing a story, so maybe the Sondheim/Laurents characters are there piled into one character.

This doesn't make the book any less muddled. As one song goes: "Who is who?/Which is who?/Who is what? Which is who?"

Having said that, the choreography by Holly Hughes, considering the small space, is pretty spectacular combining in minature the balletic vibe of Carousel with the verve of Seven Brides For Seven Brothers - we really can't help joining in the references to other works! And the three-strong band of electric guitar, drums led by Richard Baker on piano feels spot on.

This could well have been the pathway to more successful musicals by Sondheim in other collaborations and also ahead of its time in that politically driven psychological strategies of confusion are now arguably exposed for all to see.  But it is difficult to argue that folks will want to flock to see a plain weird piece of musical theatre.

It has its moments with the songs There Won't Be Trumpets and  Anyone Can Whistle, so it's an amber light for a piece which has proved a hard nut to crack even for Sondheim and Laurents - who was the first production's director - themselves.  Oh and in case you don't recognize the quote in our strapline, we just can't resist giving a link to a strangely apt Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart scene from To Have and To Have Not.

Review Three Sisters

Three Sisters 
by Anton Chekhov
In A New Version by Tracy Letts

Home And Away
http://www.uniontheatre.biz/

The world in this spare adaptation of Chekhov's penultimate play, kept by playwright Tracy Letts in an early twentieth century milieu, turns in jerks and starts like the beat in The Clash's Should I Stay Or Should I Go which marks the final note of this production.

The three sisters, brought up in Moscow, come from an army family, their late father a general sent to a provincial garrison town.

Schoolteacher Olga (Celine Abrahams) and Masha (Ivy Corbin), who married young but has grown to despise her husband (Steven Rodgers), chafe against their rural life. The youngest, romantic Irina (Molly Crookes) works at the telegraph office. Her nostalgia for Moscow is the most intense, like her sisters feeling herself a cut above her local neighbours, longing to and believing she will return to the bright lights of the populous city.

The military stationed in their town, with a round of social events, provides the sisters' chief distraction, albeit, as happeed once to their own family, they can be moved on at any time. However, the sisters also pin their hopes on the sole son of the family, their violin-playing brother Andrey (Benjamin Chandler), whom they believe has the wherewithal to become a professor.

Masha has become romantically attached to commanding officer Vershinin (Ashley Russell), trapped in an unhappy marriage. Officers, gentle piano-playing Tusenbach (Ian Malmed) and aggressive Solyony (Hugo Nicholson), pursue flighty Irina.

They barely register at first how their brother has rooted himself in the town, becoming entangled with local girl, the ill-educated but ambitious Natasha (Francesca Burgoyne).

 With the title shortened to the more casual, less portentous Three Sisters (originally The Three Sisters), this play aims to cross the time divide by shorning the piece of most of its specifically Russian social and literary references.

This has both positives and negatives. The production at the Union Theatre, directed by Phil Willmott, has a cinematic quality - voices drift from rooms off the in-the-round stage, actions halt in meaningful glances and pauses.

Small but effective moments, verbal and non verbal, are scattered across the play like sharp visceral pin pricks. Irina's superior grimace, for example, when exiting the room containing the socially awkward Natasha, little knowing the relationsip with Andrey.

Nevertheless, there are drawbacks. There is an unevenness in tone in the denuded script with its many pauses. Its spareness feels at the expense of the relationship between the three sisters, along with the plot and a flattening of the drama's natural ebb and flow.

Natasha's role with the most strident lines as she gains in power becomes magnified, the self-reproach of the elderly doctor Chebutykin (despite a relaxed and engaging performance by JP Turner) is diminished, the turning point fire loses dramatic urgency the relationship between characters viewed from the outside rather than felt from the inside.

At the same time, there's no doubting the visual and verbal appeal of the strong cast, along with lucid design - costumes by Penn O'Gara and a soundscape by Sebastian Atterbury. The production slips purposefully from the brightly lit family drawing room to a simple bench in twilight gloom with hints of a railway station caught in time.

Letts is probably best known otherwise for his tale of family torment, Pulitzer Prize-winning play and then film, August: Osage County. Moments of zest and delicacy have impact in Three Sisters, but finally this adaptation of the play seems just too subtle and filmic and it's an amber light for an interesting if somewhat impaired version of the Chekhov classic.
   

Review Road Show

Road Show

Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim 

Book by John Weidman

Brothers Up In Arms

http://www.uniontheatre.biz/

Underneath the arches this time - a trip to the Union Theatre for a lesser known Sondheim musical, Road Show, directed by Phil Willmott, accompanied by a three-piece band led by musical director Richard Baker on piano with accompanying drummer and violinist.

With no less than three former incarnations as Wise Guys, Gold and Bounce, it's based on the true story of American Addison Mizner and his brother Wilson, entrepreneurs or crooks, dependent on your point of view, in the first half of the 20th century.

It's a "can't live with him, can't live without him" tale with the indissoluble ties and irreparable rifts of the two men, artist and conman, at the centre of the story, used as a reflection of American aspiration. 

Urged on by their dying politician father, "It's In Your Hands" and their ambitious mother, the two men take to the road to make their fortunes. Suffering the vicissitudes of won and lost riches as gold prospectors, in gambling dens and various ill-fated business ventures, they finally make their mark with over hyped Florida real estate  - before the property bubble bursts.

TLT and sidekick are "we know what we like" audience members rather than musical theatre experts. And drawing on their previous theatregoing, this musical struck them as having some of the same assets and liabilities as Jerry Herman's Mack and Mabel. The same awkward uneasy see-saw between two protagonists with no consistent focus. A dark true tale  but at the same time a shoo-in archetypal story in conflict, rather than integrated, with the accurate history.

Nevertheless there's a lot to like in the Union production. Howard Jenkins takes on the role of architect Addison, the fall guy compared to the opportunist rogue Wilson, played with relish by André Refig, variously a gambler, prize fight promoter, playwright and Hollywood screenwriter.

Jenkins as Addison, who finally finds success as an architect of kitsch Spanish-style mansions for the wealthy, leads the audience through the story,  even if he is more youthfully slimline than at least one line of the lyrics suggests.  Steve Watts is suitably authoritative both as the older Addison and the Mizner brothers' father. Meanwhile Cathryn Sherman makes the most of the role of spikey Mama Mizner and Joshua LeClair brings an emotional power to the role of love interest Hollis.   

The problems, like Mack and Mabel, seem to be mostly with the book. Maybe the key lies with the original conception. According to internet sources, Sondheim first came across the story of the Mizners in the 1950s in the New Yorker magazine, but found  the rights to their biography already snapped up by Broadway producer David Merrick. Merrick had Irving Berlin, who had known Addison, on board to write the songs when it was mooted as a possible vehicle for comedian Bob Hope.

It came to naught and Sondheim stepped in again in the 1990s intending to use the template of the popular wisecracking "Road" movies with Hope and crooner Bing Crosby.  A kind of double act Rake's Progress, scenes from lives and eras: the gold rush, to India and then Hawaii, Guatamala, New York and finally Boca Raton, Florida.

If  the Road movie framework had remained  as more of an ironic commentary, maybe it would  have given Road Show a steelier structure and consistency of tone rather than leaving the bare bones linear story of the two men. As it is, designer Nik Corrall introduces a tarnished gilt mirror or picture frame in the background on the ragged Union stage, which along with suitcases and a typewriter, gives a desolate riches to rags "Citizen Kane" feel to the production.

Overall, TLT and her own road companion enjoyed the show, even if at times the choreography felt a little over egged and the story sometimes like a house with ad hoc extensions.

But it was a pleasure to hear unmiked singing in the intimate venue and additionally individual cameos such as Damian Robinson's boxer ensured an engrossing 105 minutes without interval. So it's an amber light for an uneven but enjoyable show.