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 Raising Martha

Raising Martha
by David Spicer

Shallow Grave
https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/

Traffic Light Theatregoer here - your detective inspector of plays. And here's a clue that's been mildly puzzling for your theatrical bobby and her thespian vehicle.

School dissection of frogs - that had disappeared from TLT's curriculum by the time she got to Biology GCE.  So the mention of 'O' Levels rather than GCSEs certainly felt strange in David Spicer's intermittently funny farce at the Park Theatre set in a contemporary farm for breeding frogs  so that school kids can cut them up.

Hands up all schools which still dissect frogs?

We're not sure they still exist, so it's not surprising that Gerry Duffy (Stephen Boxer), a tune in, drop out left over beatnik from the '60s and '70s, has decided to diversify after jointly inheriting the farm from his deceased mother, the eponymous Martha.

It's the grave of Martha, the frog farming matriarch, which has also been targeted by clod digging and hopping eternal student-type animal activists. That's Jago (Joel Fry), so aggressive we wondered he might be an agent provocateur (we're not giving anything away), and his passively sweet accomplice Marc (Tom Bennett). They're out to close down the farm using Martha's remains as a ransom bargaining chip dug up on the upper tier of designer Rebecca Brower's two-tier set.   

Then back to Gerry who, as we have said, has seen the market for dissection and vivisection vanish  Ah, maybe he's gone into farming culinary veterbrates, you may think. But no. Be prepared to suspend disbelief again. Using the  dwindling market for educational frogs as a front (?!!!),  he's gone straight across to breeding psychoactive toads alongside growing pot, producing a particularly hallucinogenic form of wacky baccy.

We have to admit, even in the fantastic world of farce, we were a little bemused by this leap (leap, geddit, ribbit?) in logic, but we were willing to suspend disbelief. Even if the never-mentioned leap in electricity and water usage and the bills might have been a clue for the blundering but politically savvy Ortonesque Detective Inspective Clout (Drop The Dead Donkey's Jeff Rawle).  After all, it could be a Gerry hallucination in his drug-addled existence.

Besides all this, there's Gerry's brother, co-beneficiary and snobbish would-be entrepreneur Roger (Julian) who has a hate-hate relationship with his brother, and Roger's daughter Caro (Gwyneth Keyworth) who has her own agenda in this amphibian environment.  

Director Michael Fentiman, along with the cast, have obviously put in a lot of very hard work to keep the momentum of this farce going. But there's no disguising a script where often the gags and set-ups have come first, shoehorned in rather than placed for coherent reasons, even in this caricatured environment.

There are also more cryptic serious elements introduced regarding policing and even an askance look at the Cold War. But these do not feel especially organically thought through in the plot. And some parts of the plot, such as the six-foot amphibians, feel more suited to sketch comedy, radio or cartoon than a stage play

It may have worked for us if it had been shorter and tighter. But as a two-act comedy, it is a play held together by the fragile algae of an energetic cast and diligent direction. So it's an amber light for a froggy piece that doesn't manage to reach princely status, but remains a bit of a tadpole.

Review Home Chat

Home Chat

by Noël Coward

Everybody's Fault

http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/

Home Chat, after being passed by the censor, had its first and only outing in a stodgy West End production in 1927. Noel Coward tried to brave the boos by bounding on stage after the curtain went down. "Rotten,"  cried hecklers,"We expected better' to which Coward replied with his characteristic wit couching a clear-sighted realism, "So did I".

Director Martin Parr has now stylishly revived this comedy drama, giving it the production it deserves in a traverse staging at the Finborough Theatre. The wife of an acclaimed novelist Janet Ebony (Zoë Waites as the svelte tomboyish socialite) finds herself unjustly accused of adultery after a French train crash reveals she was travelling - for entirely innocent reasons - with old friend Peter Chelsworth (Richard Dempsey) in a wagon lit.

While the newspapers never accuse her of being caught in flagrante, the court of public opinion and, along with it, her complacent husband Paul (Tim Chipping), his sharp tongued mother (Polly Adams), her naturally defensive  mother (Joanna David) and - keep up those at the back! - Peter's fiancée Lavinia (Nelly Harker) all presume this celebrity's wife is guilty and the writer is the innocent party.

Subject to such unwarranted, if veiled, attacks Janet with Peter's collusion determines to teach her husband and relatives a lesson. The two pretend to fulfil the suspicions, with Lavinia as somewhat unfortunate collateral damage, without fully thinking out the consequences of their actions.

The plan causes a revolution in the Ebony household, as Janet skates on thin ice in this private but increasingly serious game with the subtlest of subtexts indicating her husband, a serial novelist, may not be such an innocent party, even apart from his seemingly platonic dalliance with widow Mavis (Clare Lawrence Moody).     

The play is structured like a game of consequences - he said, she said and the world in general said mixed  with the adversarial fictions of the law courts. The prosecution with false evidence in the First Act, the defence in the Second and in the Final Act, a false verdict, although an ostensible happy ending. The whole less Chinese boxes than dog chasing its own tail

Written in the years during which Coward was travelling back and forth between the United States, as well as France, and England, there are obvious echoes of both Coward's life and literary influences. Beneath the wit and japery, the hurt and artifice of the divorce courts before the age of "no fault divorce" loaded against the woman is also threaded through the play.

The men can all afford to nonchantly go along with Janet or in the case of Paul pursue their own careers using women's predicaments as a tool of their trade. For Nora from Ibsen's A Doll's House is specifically name-checked in his latest opus "The Gods Decide". The woman, as in the plays of  Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw, has far more to lose.

Yet TLT and her automotive companion (a purely platonic gas guzzling relationship, my dear reader) were also reminded of the in flagrante situation of another writer.

That stalwart of the printers' pension fund, Charles Dickens, was not only beastly to his wife. But he relied on the silence of newspapers and his own circle on another matter. He and his young mistress, actress Ellen Ternan, were caught up in a fatal train crash but the press only reported his heroic actions in helping passengers.

So as well as the rights of women, it seems to us the play reflects the roundabout of the book trade in its use of women.

The play is directed by Parr with control and pace with Rebecca Brower's set design, lighting by Christopher Nairn, Peter Malkin's sound and costumes by Charlotte Espiner giving a seamless period feel to the piece. 

The matriachs David and Adams, all too easily swayed by literary stereotype and public gossip who lament prematurely the state of their children's marriage catch the rhythm and twists and turns precisely. There is an evocative addition to the published text with  Robert Hazle as man-servant bringing pertinent musical interludes singing carefully chosen Coward songs.

All in all, this revival shows the strength of Coward's compact wit and stagecraft with a polished production. We're defintitely going to defy the early twentieth century hecklers by giving this newly recut gem a green light.