Review Remnants

Remnants
by Erratica
Created And Directed by Patrick Eakin Young
Based On The Memoir The Stone Fields By Courtney Angela Brkic
Composed by Christian Mason and Shelley Parker

Beneath The Surface 
http://www.the-print-room.org/

When terrible events occur, it can feel to those involved that the world is divided up into those who have gone through such trauma and those who have not, with no bridge to cross over from one to another.

Remnants combines real-life verbal testimony, dance, original electronic music and Balkan folk song to give a very particular history of a family in Croatia and Bosnia Herzogovina.

It is based on the family history and experiences of a first generation American, Courtney Angela Brkic, whose father and relatives endured the Second World War in Sarajevo and then saw both within the country and from the vantage point of the USA, the collapse into civil war in the 1990s and its aftermath.

The remnants of the title are both the clothes of the massacred and the individual and communal memories of lives - and deaths - stretching back to the Second World War and all are excavated during the course of the performance.

Created and directed by Canadian Patrick Eakin Young, a cast of five evoke the double layered tale of the 1940s and the 1990s.

Fabiola Santana is Brkic's representative on stage with close cropped hair and angular choreographed movements (choreography by Jamila Johnson-Small) which also convey the dislocation of the land of her childhood visits.

The recorded words of Brkic bear witness to her own literal part in the excavation as a forensic archeologist after the late 20th century civil war which ripped the country apart set against her grandmother's and father's lives in the Balkans and America.

Starting from Brkic's relationship with her father, the piece moves fluently between the young woman's work as part of the forensic team trying to identify the human remains and clothing of the Srebrenica massacre victims.

Brkic's words and projections of family photographs also lead us back to the village in Herzogovina of her father, uncle and grandmother. The four sisters, played by Emma Bonnici, Victoria Couper, Eugenia Georgieva and Olesya Zorovetska are introduced using music, percussion and haunting voices in song.

With musical direction by Jamie Mann, a soundscape by Alex Groves and electronic music  by Christian Mason and Shelley Parker, the cohesions and factures of the family are then traced after the narrator's widowed grandmother moves to Sarajevo with her two young sons. In the city she strikes up a relationship with the son of a Jewish shopkeeper before the catastrophe of the second World World War and a fate which reflects back on the civil war of the 1990s. 

The story is outlined with sensitivity with an abstract black and white set lit by Burke Brown and  designed by Ana-Ines Jabares-Pita, with minimal props but enough to conjure up the ways in which women were left without any certainty about the fate of their husbands, sons and other male relatives.

While the production is smooth and abstract, it's a raw, horrific story and sometimes one longs for a little more context even if the tale of an individual family draws us in.

There are a series of events and an exhibition accompanying this piece and the affecting performance does feel like a threshhold stimulating a curiosity to find out more and it is careful not to try and bridge the divide with sentimentality.

It's a compact and clear meditation taking us beneath what might otherwise seem like cliché and we give it an amber/green light.

Review Out Of Blixen

Out Of Blixen
Created by Riotous Company
Dramaturg/Writer Paul Tickell

Behind The Veil
http://www.the-print-room.org/

Cryptic yet enchanting, Out Of Blixen is a devised production inspired by the story telling and life of 20th century Danish adventuress and author, Karen Blixen, who famously ran a Kenyan coffee plantation.

Mixing verbal and physical theatre, accompanied by piano and percussion of Nikola Kodjabashia, it's a piece tailor made for the dilapidated gilt glamour of the Print Room At The Coronet and this tangential introduction to the life of this intriguing figure.

Some of her life, in Africa, has already been chronicled in a 1985 movie starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford but TLT and her own sidekick in theatre adventures has never seen it nor read any books of Karen Blixen (aka Isaak Dinesen)

So it came as surprise to find that Blixen wrote intricate fables - if we were to find an equivalent English author, maybe, somewhat to our surprise, the Oscar Wilde of The Happy Prince and other tales would be the nearest in our minds but also with a playfulness of Laurence Sterne in Tristram Shandy.

The production reflects the delicacy but sabre-edged tone of four Blixen stories and in between we have tiny fragments of Blixen's life thrown in like piercing glass shards.

Floating white voile curtains descend from the ceilings in a simple but evocative set designed by Luis F Carvalho and lighting by David Plater picking out the flashes of colour amidst the theatre's pillars and decadent ornamentation.

Flashes of colour come also with the appearance of a small girl (Kathryn Hunter who also directs) in blue Edwardian sailor dress who bonds with a young cabin boy (Marcello Magni) on shore leave before the couple are torn apart.

The piece includes integrated moments of aeriel silk work (Mia Theil Have) at a point where birds, angels and a graceful young woman on a swing meets.  Sea voyages, Russian sailors, Persia, Scheherazade-like linking of tales through the frail figure of Blixen (Kathryn  Hunter again) and the cruelties and expediencies of 18th century feudal Denmark with a mother's self-sacrifice all figure.

The latter with the well-travelled rational nephew of a Danish feudal estate owner  (Femi Elufowoju jr) who is sorrowful but keeps in mind the intial injunction of the reminiscing sailor in play's first few lines, "We must all look after ourselves!

At just about 80 minutes, this is an elliptical take on an enigmatic writer who eventually may have expired from syphilis (par for the course in the artistocratic circles into which she was born) or may have been infected by the cult of celebrity which eventually enveloped her. The piece unpacks itself like a set of exquisite Chinese boxes and we award our own jewel-like green light for Out Of Blixen.

Review A Lovely Sunday For Creve Coeur

Francis Beckett bathes in the nostalgia and delusion of a late Tennessee Williams' play set in America's deep south and is equally beguiled by the historic Coronet Theatre. 

A Lovely Sunday For Creve Coeur

by Tennessee Williams

Beer And Skittishness

http://www.the-print-room.org/

The Print Room at The Coronet is one of those places which tell you that there is still hope for London. Even  without the full refurbishment it deserves, it is magnificent. 

Arriving for a performance of the 1970s' Tennessee Williams' play A Lovely Sunday At Creve Coeur,  I started in the bar, standing with producer Veronica Humphris on a fiercely sloping floor surrounded by walls in a deep shade of red, huge and ornate doors, and eccentric wall hangings. 

She told me about plans to restore it to its former glory, if the money can be found. The theatre had a  distinguished early career after its opening in 1898, graced by the likes of Ellen Terry and Sarah Bernhardt.

It became a cinema in 1923, then narrowly escaped closure and conversion into a McDonaldshamburger joint  An energetic campaign saved it for theatre and, while it now has smaller scale performance spaces run by a charity, it's still a wonderful temporary compromise.

At this performance the great red columns of the original theatre merge seamlessly into the red walls of a beautiful and meticulous set (designer: Fotini Dimou.) for the one-act drama set in Missouri directed by Michael Oakley.

We are in a small apartment in 1930s' St Louis, shared by the lovely Dorothea, who is desperate for a husband, and the frumpy Bodey, who has given up hopes of a husband and is desperate for nephews and nieces.

Dorothea is a fragile Southern Belle, not unlike Tennessee Williams’s more famous Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, is in love with a man whom we are sure (correctly) from the start will turn out to be a scoundrel . 

She exercises furiously in an effort to maintain her allure. On her the evening turns, and she is brought to magnificent and entirely believable life by Laura Rogers, who will be the fittest woman in London by the end of the run.

Debbie Chazen as Bodey offers exactly the right mix of resignation and disappointment, hope and kindness. Hermione Gulliford is excellent as the scheming, manipulative Helena, who threatens to disrupt their lives, and there is a nice cameo of demented neighbour, Miss Gluck, from Julia Watson.

Yet the character who came to life most strongly for me was a character we never meet, Bodey’s brother Buddy. Bodey and Buddy are of German ancestry. Both are overweight, but Buddy encourages his expanding girth with plentiful daily supplies of beer and bratwurst, while he indulges a cigar smoking habit.   

He appears to be a solid citizen, not just physically, and, encouraged by his sister, he has set his sights on getting Dorothea to share his life. Having reduced  his daily beer intake, he vows to cut it down even further.    

But one suspects that this is more his sister’s project than Buddy’s own, and it is her dreams of nephews and nieces she can nurture which will really be shattered if it does not come off.  At the end, it looks as though it might come off, and the author seems rather to approve of this outcome; I beg to disagree with the author.

The play is a little predictable, but we quickly learn to care about what happens to Dorothea and Bodey.  It does not offer the emotional charge of Tennessee Wiliams’s more famous work, but it has a charm and humour which they lack.  It’s a good evening in the theatre; a green light from me.

Review Deathwatch

Deathwatch

By Jean Genet

Death And The Maiden

 http://www.the-print-room.org/

A criminal hardman awaits execution by guillotine for murder locked up in a cell with two petty criminals who, in spite of everything, have their lives ahead of them. Or so they think ...

Directed by Geraldine Alexander, Deathwatch has  a set designed by Lee Newby with  the feel variously of a circus ring, musical box, birdcage and cage fight venue.  

This dream-like mix of the artificial, the violent and the abstract is heightened by a ringmaster/complicit prison guard figure (Naomi Frederick) - known as The Watch.

Green Eyes (Tom Varey) towers above his two cell companions in strength and audacity, but only he awaits the death sentence for the gruesome murder of a young woman during sexual intercourse. Illiterate, he depends on another to pen his letters to his girlfriend.

LeFranc (Danny Lee Wynter) acts as his secretary, reading out and writing letters for him while teenager Maurice (Joseph Quinn) hovers round the two, engaged in a feud with LeFranc while eroticizing Green-Eyes.

From their cell, they can hear the clink of the prison keys and the sound of "the slicer" as it ends the life of another prisoner.

It's a well-paced, carefully choreographed production with evocative lighting by David Plater and sound by Simon Slater.

Jean Genet wrote the first version of Deathwatch under the title Pour La Belle in 1942 while jailed in Fresnes prison.  Indeed this production of the play is accompanied by an exhibition of  Brixton prisoners'  art.

But at the time of writing, France was under Nazi occupation. Fresnes prison contained petty thieves like Genet but also resistance fighters, whether Communists or those with more right wing sympathies, many of whom were murdered by the Nazis or the Vichy regime French militia. 

Genet's own Trotskyite communist lover was to die on the barricades in 1944 at the hands of the militia while Genet flirted with the aesthetics of fascism.

In this tangle, the play eventually became Haute Surveillance, although by the 1960s Genet was inclined to dismiss it. However in 1985, a year before his death and having taken up the causes of the Black Panthers and the Palestinians, he cut and reworked it. This is the version David Rudkin has now translated as Deathwatch.

And, while not knowing the original, it feels like a faithful translation. Not only conveying the murky intense experience of three men in a prison cell power play but something more.

What came over to TLT and her own cellmate (and we're not sure whether it was an experience we enjoyed) were the complications of Genet's life as criminal and writer emeshed in dangerous criminal,  political and literary associations.

Indeed, while the name Snowball is that of a black prisoner also under sentence of death and kingpin equal to Green-Eyes on the jail block, TLT immediately thought of Animal Farm and the amalgam of Trotsky and Lenin in a character in George Orwell's book with the same name. 

Could it be that the nickname Snowball was making the rounds?! It also fits in with the themes of betrayal, power yet mistrust, certain death - and surveillance - in the play.

Maybe this immersion in imminent execution, a state punishment then in both France and the USSR,  still strikes true - a horrible inevitable real-life ritual, but it is a difficult play to love. Yet the fetishism of murder, eroticism, sexual ambiguity and sadism transformed into sacrament feels horribly accurate.  An amber/green light for a visceral evening.