Review Minefield

Minefield
Campo Minado
by Lola Arias
Translated by Daniel Tunnard

War, Huh, Yeah, What Is It Good For?
https://royalcourttheatre.com/

Before the outbreak of hostilities in 1982 TLT vaguely knew about the fight over Gibraltar between Britain and Spain. But the Falklands Islands and Argentina?

A "war" between a member of the European Economic Community and a South American country seemed scarcely believable to TLT in the late 20th century, knowing nothing of the islands' history.

The flag-waving, bellicose spirit that swept through public events and the media scared her. The deaths of men on both sides and the eventual uneasy conclusion puzzled her rather than made matters clearer. But life goes on.

Mounting a bilingual, verbatim play, with veterans from both sides, about what is known in the UK as The Falklands War, aka The Falklands Conflict, could have been, well, a minefield.

Indeed, Minefield, put together by Argentinian theatre-maker Lola Arias who also directs, allows the men, none of whom speak the language of the erstwhile opposing side, a voice.

They become actors, in all senses of the word, telling stories about their Falklands/Las Islas Malvinas experiences.

The cast is composed of two former Royal Marines,  a Gurkha, part of a regiment traditionally part of the British military, and an Argentinian trio: A factory worker and former conscript who rejoined voluntarily at the beginning of the conflict and two conscripts, a lawyer and a drummer in a Beatles' tribute band.

That is Lou Armour, David Jackson, Sukrim Rai and Marcelo Vallejo, Gabriel Sagastume and Rubén Otero who now look back to their younger selves.

The six relate the history of the war, as they see, saw and experienced it, on Mariana Tirantte's set that includes an enormous white screen for projections of videos, photos and magazine pages from the time and also their visit to the islands many years later.

Long-haired women's blonde and brunette wigs and feather boas hang on the mirror of a dressing table. Various other props, including a drumset, guitars and chairs, are on either side.

Surtitles translate English to Argentinian Spanish and vice versa.

So far, so matter of fact. And, in many ways, it remains so. There is necessarily a choice of what to exclude and include and, as far as is possible, Arias says she allowed the former soldiers editorial control over a now published script.

The words of each side never quite come together, but they have learned to accommodate each other as the discipline of theatre also make the six share a space.

This, of course, includes the Ghurka, part of the British Empire's legacy, whose right to British citizenship has only recently been acknowledged in an increasingly corporate world.  

There is humour, tragedy and an outlet for the grief, memories and anomalies which plague the conflict which, despite plenty of media coverage, still has an uncertain place in both nations' history.

The play also covers a generation where British pop music had been a common language in a United Nations, NATO and Cold War world.

The politicians, Margaret Thatcher and General Galtieri, are portrayed by full carnivalesque head masks with recordings of their voices from media footage.

Arias has a created a very flexible framework - however much or little an audience member may know or not know about the circumstances, he or she listens and notes the more theatrical set pieces and absorbs the words.

The sense comes from the non-sense and the relevance and irrelevance to the men's lives of the islands. An individual's reaction remains individual - both that of the actors, the ex-military, on the stage and the audience member.

For TLT, it still remains a conundrum how a generation linked by post-Second World War social insurance and a common commercial pop music culture could be coerced into killing each other.

There is a comradeship now between the men who have broken down the barriers they themselves put up against what must be called "the enemy". They are trying to come to terms with what has happened together, not isolated in separate TV interviews.

A wall has come down in parallel with the Berlin Wall and European and American occupying forces (which also played a part in the rise of The Beatles and other iconic pop groups).

Minefield also gives us a feel of a pre-Google, pre-digital camera and mobile phone which, nevertheless, is a precursor of the current global landscape. 

If there are gaps, they still satisfy as a human reaction to the violence of the fight and an incomprehensible space which can never be filled. It's a green light.

Review B

B
by Guillermo Calderón

Rebel, Rebel
https://royalcourttheatre.com/

To B or not B, that is the question at the centre of Chilean playwright's Guillermo Calderón's absurdist comedy drama.

 Two young women anarchists, Marcela (Aimée Ffion-Edwards) and Alejandra (Danusia Samal) rendezvous in a borrowed apartment ready to make a token protest against a nearby financial institutution.

Each, it emerges has a backstory, making their revolt against the state a more serious affair than their seemingly inept steps towards rebellion.

However, while their bickering turns to the ridiculous, the arrival of a ultimately more devilish partner-in-crime (or liberation, depending on your point of view) ultimately pushes the story towards tragedy rather than comedy.

In spite of the duo's disavowal of any kind of hierarchy, the older masked stranger (Paul Kaye) pulls rank, claims their plan needs his approval and orders more extreme action.

In the meantime, ambushed by a nosy neighbour Carmen (Sarah Niles), the women concoct inconsistent stories on the hoof to explain their presence and to keep her away, in vain, from their preparations.

B appears to be a small play straining allegorically to cover large swathes of Chilean, South American and Spanish history, alongside an international perspective.

However, in the end, the play falls between  a number of stools. It states rather too emphatically the differences and connections, benign and malign, between two generations of would-be revolutionaries.

More interestingly, at one point it seems to start to touch on the generation gap and the nature of packaged artistic creation in an increasingly globalized world.

Even so, it lacks the courage of its convictions and becomes what is seeks to criticize -  a dead end world tips over into a dead end drama.

Each character at various times has a monologue to explain their motivations linked by expanded two, three and four-handed scenes.

The action takes place on Chloe Lamford's stone and plywood set, caged in scaffolding, and festooned with black balloons. There's also  a neat trick with t-shirts (albeit there appear to be how-to videos on the internet - don't click on the link if you don't want a spoiler).

However there are moments when Sam Pritchard's production feels as if it has become a little too enamoured by visuals such as the masks, the black balloonsm a red and white striped gift box and other quips.

Taken at face value (B is translated from the Spanish by William Gregory), it remains a play of separate parts, speeches and jokes rather than a rigorous exploration, comic or serious. 

All in all, this is an "almost" play. A would-be political and artistic allegory, "This is supposed to be a party. Good story though."

It's also an terrorist satire where secret code insures nobody calls a spade a spade. A drama where an attempt to use the media short circuits and the only appreciative audience for the aspiring revolutionaries appears to be the prison population.

A comedy where a pen is misused but even then does not fulfil the skewed function to which it's put. The self-appointed terrorist chief literally becomes a talking head speaking at times in the rhythms of Once In A Lifetime and the young women intermittently sound like some anarchist Alias Smith & Jones who never want to kill anyone.

Despite some modern terrorist references, the play does have an old-fashioned vibe - it did send TLT and her motorised comrade scuttling to Google to find out if GK Chesterton, author of The Man Who Was Thursday, an Edwardian thriller about an imploding anarchist cell, is known in Chile and the Spanish speaking world.

It turns out  a conference on him was held in Chile this year. And the writer is popular enough in the Spanish language to merit a landmark copyright ruling in Spain.

If it is an influence, there's nothing wrong with using an early 20th century text as inspiration. However this is a play with an anarchic structure which never quite follows through on its scattergun lines of thought. It's an amber light.

Review Road

Road
by Jim Cartwright

Northern Soul
https://royalcourttheatre.com/

By 1986 the era of the bomb sites left by the Second World War and subsequent demolition was retreating but not forgotten.

This often revealed on city wastelands a cross section of a home in the rented Victorian terraces which still had tenants in the houses next door. Torn wallpaper and homely cupboards up above still visible to children playing down below in the ruins.

The North/South divide had descended and the old industrial revolution industries were either rapidly contracting or had already died a death. The Big Bang and the bank account culture were yet to take over but there were glimpses of the changes they would wreak.

This, it seems to us, is the atmosphere of Jim Cartwright's Road - dilapidation, unemployment where joining the armed forces and almost a war enconomy seemed the only alternatives, a new generation springing up out of the ruins of the old and, yes, an indominitable stereotypical humour and resilence.

Having only read the play and never seen a production, we were excited when Road came up on the schedule of the Royal Court - its original home - directed by John Tiffany to boot.

Road is a mix of communal poetry, soap opera (Coronation Street, Brookside and even Eastenders had all become popular), rage at social circumstances and an exploration of inner psychic space and society. 

We have to say we were a little surprised by a set from Chloe Lamford with a pair of monolithic streetlights towering on each side of the stage and an extremely clean red brick wall with bricked up huge arched windows as the backdrop.

This all seemed more like something out of expressionist Metropolis than a Lancashire town in the 1980s under a Thatcher government.

And instead of us travelling up and down the road with a  febrile Scullery, it's a production made static by the curious choice of a rising and lowering perspex cube giving a feeling of aliens who had just landed on Planet Lancashire.

Up the wide steps at the front of the stage, our guide, Scullery, is a very laid back Lemn Sissay, poet and actor, who takes his time to lean back and watch the action as it plays out before him.

This is not  a pulsating, changing street or a ghetto where people are trapped. It's a far more sterile environment where everybody takes their turn.

You may guess from this TLT found the Lancashire street via Sloane Square particularly lacking in atmosphere. Sometimes this view of a Northern town even felt theme park-like and kitsch rather than a hand-to-mouth existence of a street full of people  regularly cashing the unemployment benefit Giro at the Post Office.

Still, while they have to sometimes fight against some unwieldy design for the intimate scenes, there are good performances. Mark Hadfield as a Hoover-mending resident, leather-skirted Michelle Fairley propping up a passive binge-drinking soldier she's determined will give her a good time and June Watson's understated but pitch perfect turn as a girlish pensioner.  

Written by Jim Cartwright three years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Road is a map not so much of a sea change but a new era's tidal wave. It still remains an atmospheric piece of writing with beautiful, visceral use of music.

However we don't feel the overall concept of this production goes with the flow of the poetic text. It just doesn't feel raw red and wounded  enough - as if it were all behind an airless perspex box with the politics and soul sucked out. It's an amber light.

Review Bodies

Peter Barker is intrigued by a play tracing a global transaction which a London couple hopes will bring them the child of their dreams.

Bodies
by Vivienne Franzmann

Great Expectations
https://royalcourttheatre.com/

Clem and Josh are desperately trying for a baby. However the well-off middle-class, middle-aged media couple are paying for the creation of a baby who would not otherwise exist.

The egg donor comes from Russia, while across the world an impoverished woman in India is the surrogate mother carrying the egg fertilized by Josh's sperm.

Bodies is a new play from Vivienne Franzmann examining the purchase of parenthood and the bringing to life of another human being with a genetic connection as a paid-for hybrid commodity.

Unable to conceive their own child, Clem and Josh allow their longing for a family dictate their actions without regard for the welfare of and consequences for others around them. 

These others include surrogate mother Lakshmi in India, Salma Hoque skilfully managing wide-ranging shifts of emotions, and Philip Goldacre's touching portrayal of Clem's cantankerous, stroke-stricken, trade unionist father who nevertheless sticks to his socialist values.

Many would regard the situation of the London couple (Justine Mitchell and Jonathan McGuinness) as a first world problem, motivated by dubiously selfish concerns. Unlike the Sex Pistols' song of the same title, the problem and solution is not forced on Clem.

Scientific advance is now a gateway to unprecedented arrangements and Franzmann's play examines where respect for our own and other people's bodies begins and ends.

It also poses the question about what personal fulfilment in our advanced technological age should mean.

The play provides a skilful framework for these questions and issues with a poignant fantasy as a dramatic device. Clem meets and speaks with the unborn child, a young woman of 16 years in a sure-footed, striking performance by Hannah Rae.

This daughter can cross psychic and physical boundaries, moving from Clem's English house to the dormitory of the surrogate Indian mother. The child becomes like an inverse ghost of Hamlet's father, also a victim of other people's actions, but looking to the family's future instead of the past.

Within such an emotionally overwrought situation,  there is nevertheless state intervention,  counterbalancing the illusion that our deepest desires, consumerism and the market are the only factors in a seemingly endless case of supply and demand.

Director Jude Christian, designer Gabriella Slade with Joshua Pharo on lighting  convincingly stage digital connectivity enabling clear changes of scene and context in a fast-moving plot.

Slade's beige softwood set with sliding doors makes for an effective contemporary backdrop with a round window smoothly transforming into a screen with videos created by Meghna Gupta.

However the play at 90 minutes, despite cuts to the published text,  does seem overlong. There is also some clunky dialogue and the final pay off felt confusing, but Franzmann does have the ability to spring surprises and drive the story forward.

The affluence of Clem and Joshua's life, the exploitation of the less advantaged at home and abroad, fertility, loss, and motherhood are all deftly handled. It's an amber/green light for a compelling tale which impressively mines the social and emotional implications of surrogacy.  

Review Anatomy Of A Suicide

Anatomy Of A Suicide
by Alice Birch

Paper Dolls
https://royalcourttheatre.com/

Some years ago TLT reviewed a sad but tremendously worthwhile book where the author, the late Siân Busby, traced the circumstances leading to a young woman's conviction for infanticide and its impact through generations stitching them together in a remorseless thread.

The writer. who had an equally difficult childbirth experience, was more than sympathetic to the woman convicted of a charge - killing her own baby - simultaneously classified as a crime and a mental illness and a defence to the charge of murder.  The woman was Siân Busby's great grandmother.

The book came to mind watching Alice Birch's new play about three women who, it is gradually revealed, share a family link and a predisposition towards taking their own lives. However, unlike Busby's book which discussed among other matters the legal characterisation of women, there is little of the social and economic context.

So anyone coming to Anatomy Of A Suicide expecting the title to be ironic may rapidly find themselves wrong footed by the two-hour play which, rather disturbingly to our mind, seems to want to persuade us suicide is an inheritable trait.

In Birch's bleak determinist universe for at least two generations from the 1970s through the 1990s until the more disruptive 21st century future, the outcome is inevitable.

Yet they also appear to be self-inflicted, all of which for us comes perilously close to first world problems.

It's true that, and this is not to trivialise, within the same generations of men, clothes hardly undergo radical change. While the women are like paper dolls, every now and then stripped down to their underwear and re-dressed by others, as in those days before computers when we girlies lovingly snipped on the dotted line and clothed such dolls with a variety of  pre-printed paper skirts, blouses and dresses.

Yet the problems outside their psychological state seem practically non existent - 1970s' Carol (Hattie Morahan) has no worries about her financial independence or her daughter Anna (Katie O'Flynn) other later financial anomalies preventing parity with husbands, which surely has implications even for the experiment in communal living in which she dabbles with her partner.  

The three lives do run side by side as in a split cinema screen or church triptych, with sentences and dilemmas counterpointing each other like an undulating musical ensemble piece. There is a light touch theme of property and jobs in relation to the women and by the final scenes it is partly through these that a cycle seems to be broken.

There is also no doubting the intricate skill shown by writer Alice Birch and director Katie Mitchell in interlacing the three shifts of times stitching together the three women, model-like Carol, Goth Anna and more clinical Bonnie (Adelle Leonce).

Anna played by O'Flynn (last seen, somewhat intriguingly, as Laura in Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie) was distinctive for us, both for her performance and because her actions mark a more seismic change in the family.

But we can't pretend that this story, played out on Alex Eales's concrete gray set, held us for the full two hours without an interval where everyone outside the trio seemed so well-meaning, if misguided. Maybe there was a subtle political and historical thread (we're not sure), but, frankly, we're grasping at straws here.

All this  appeared to us to be buying into, rather than dispelling, a secular pseudo-scientific medicalised view of woman's biological destiny, even with the final gentle rupture.

Maybe also the title led us almost to expect an analysis through women's bodies and minds of a changing anatomy of Britain. However, if so, our pre-conceived notions, like the paper dress with tabs fitting perfectly the doll, were matched by the pre-conceived notions in the play and it's an amber light.

Review Killology

Killology
by Gary Owen

Loose Ends
https://royalcourttheatre.com/

Killology intertwines three male lives and three monologues: a troubled youngster, a middle-aged man seemingly his father and an ultra successful new media entrepreneur.

On designer Gary McCann's black box set of tangled overhead wires, humps of black coils on the ground, as well as oily slicks, the spotlight at first falls in turn on each of the trio, although eventually the lives appear to tangle with each other.

This is a play with its intense focus on each of the three men which stands and falls by the performances and the three performances are gripping. Seán Gleeson's Alan, deceptively open-faced and pleasant, speaks the first words of the drama.

Siôn Daniel Young's Davey, is a boy whose  relationships with his mother and a woman teacher and a dependent female pet are skewed by the real life violence where he lives. Richard Mylan is the glib businessman who has been given every opportunity in life made callous by the 1990s' games of his schooldays  but seeing the potential in a video game concentrating on the process rather than the result.   

The individual narrations of the characters do not slot neatly into place with each other. There are many moments which seem to stretch plausibility (although TLT may be hyper-nitpicking having covered numerous employment tribunals and inquests as a news reporter) and have no continuity.

There may be an explanation for this - the humps of black coils and broken off wires could even indicate a damaged brain or may, at a stretch, be a critique of movie and TV drama relying on editing and sensation rather than the piece being properly plotted. However this is not clear and may be an assumption on our part.

So we have a problem with the play's structure. The repetitive and open ended  nature of computer games, the papering over of the film editing process, bringing in mental health problems as a framework, in our opinion, need to have, in our opinion, an acompanying dramatic argument.

Killology is directed fluently by Rachel O'Riordan and equally fluently written by Gary Owen, but if any or all of the motives for holes in the plot, almost as numerous as stars in the sky, are what we've said, it feels a bit of a cop out because the theatrical argument doesn't go anywhere. It feels too much like fragments or the template for a movie or a TV series.

To be fair, the video games' entrepreneur does give an obviously specious reason for the morality of a game involving prolonged torture and the father's discovery of a community online suddenly reverses the power dynamics. There is a potentially intriguing confusing of the legal set up in Britain and the US in the 1970s. But these elements are introduced rather than explored. 

Killology is a term coined in 1996 by a former American soldier, David Grossman, who is now an author and trainer. Killology is defined on one website as focussing "on the reactions of healthy people in killing circumstances (such as police and military in combat) and the factors that enable and restrain killing in these situations."

Grossman, who is in the playtext acknowledgments, seems to have had considerable success  in his post-military career, lecturing to American police officers, although his theories and methodology have also attracted criticism.

Killology has the benefit of excellent performances from the cast, but maybe the mention of three scenic artists (Charlotte Neville, Phoebe Tomkin and Maren von Wachenfeldt) in the list of creatives indicate a cinematic rather than stage-geared piece. If you like this sort of thing, you're gonna love this. We found it rather stretched out to a two-act play and it's an upper range amber light.

PS TLT managed to put the wrong actor's name for video games entrepreneur Paul at first - it is very definitely Richard Mylan.

Review Manwatching

Manwatching
by Anonymous

Female Intuition
https://royalcourttheatre.com/

At this very moment, somewhere in California 60 research scientists are working on how to read your mind. OK, to be more accurate, Facebook is working on technology to type messages direct from the brain to what they term "a conversation partner" rather than to go phishing for random thoughts.

But wouldn't it be so much easier for the companies involved if we all thought within a recognized grid? A variation of 'If the mountain will not come to Mohammed, then Mohammed will come to the mountain'?

And, while we are open to new experiences, by the end of Manwatching, this thought, amongst others, entered our mind in our irritation with what seems like a clumsy gimmick with which we are supposed to alternatively identify or applaud as insightful. 

TLT and her like-minded automative Tonto do not suggest that the deliberate plan is to run roughshod over our own thought processes but it seems one logical conclusion to commercial pressures.

Manwatching the play, not to be confused with the 1980s' book club bestseller by Desmond Morris which we remember as a similarly rather bemusing read, is apparently by an anonymous female playwright and dwells on her sexual evolution from a kid to whereever she is now.

We're instructed not to give much away - there's a definite authoritarian streak to Anonymous which makes one wonder why she ever allowed the text to be published in the first place. Is it really all a weak satire? We can't tell, damnit, and we're meant to be critics!

It's a simple set up. A man, a printer, a script, a lighting operator (lighting designer Jamie Spirito) directed by Lucy Morrison.

Anon instructs that the text should be sight read by a man - in our case it was a personable young comedian called Liam Williams with a deceptively diffident, self-deprecating manner.

After a brief introduction, the man launches into the script which uneasily mixes the female writer's description of sexual desire with alleged experiences and fantasies.

It seems from the introduction to the play text (handed over only at the end of the evening) we're not the only ones to wonder if it's all a bluff written by a coven of men.

To be fair, the monologue does touch upon some serious issues but we found the approach conventional and lacklustre.  It's ok if you're prepared as an audience member to smile gamely and look serious when appropriate, which is also more or less what Williams also did.

We hasten to correct this - we obviously can't read his mind and he did prove to be an adept sight reader after a hesitant start. We guess also that the title Manwatching is double-edged as it's mostly about watching the comedian tackle the task and watching him react to the words he's given.

If you enjoy seeing an unprepared stand up comedian up close and personal embracing a female persona, this may be your bag. But for us, it's a red/amber light.

Review Nuclear War

Nuclear War
by Simon Stephens

The Waste Land
https://royalcourttheatre.com/

Let's put aside the play text  introduction by playwright Simon Stephens to the twelve pages of the Nuclear War script - quite why he wants to set himself up as a paragon for playwrights who knows how to work with a director and actors while he says others, by  implication, don't, we know not.

Suffice to say, he sets out a working methodology which doesn't feel particularly original to us. But at the same time we may have whetted your appetite to buy or borrow the play text to find out what the hell we're talking about.

And if you go to Nuclear War expecting bombs and confrontation between world powers, you may be disappointed. For, as Simon Stephens has correctly pointed out on his twitter feed, you're more likely to get that in real life. But "Guys. it's a metaphor."

Yet we must concede that Nuclear War is kinda interesting in a world where we are increasingly bombarded through technology with disembodied voices. And our own individual, as well as Britain's, place in the world, feels constantly in flux and increasingly indefinable.

Ostensibly, this is play about the loss of a loved one and  a day in the life on the seventh anniversary of time spent at a hospital bedside. A day atomized into moments filtered through the mind of an unnamed woman,"All I can hear/Are the thoughts scratched onto the inside of my head".

The room is bare, the props stark (designer Chloe Lamford). The audience is seated around the walls, so that when we hear the words, "I can't help feeling you're in my room ... Watching me.", one immediately sees the faces of others in the audience watching.

The voice comes through in a pre-recorded narration by an unnamed Scottish woman played by Maureen Beattie who sometimes breaks into "live" speech varying the mixture of textures. 

Also watching are a four-strong chorus - Sharon Duncan-Brewster, Gerrome Miller, Andrew Sheridan, Beatrice Scirroccchi. They whisper, they chant, they sing. They are like living furniture handing the woman, for instance, a cup or a biscuit.

They weave shapes and populate the mundane scenes of city life on a train, in a coffee shop and more fantastical underworld-type scenes where they mutate into black hooded prisoners or hounds like creatures out of Greek mythology.

A red heater also glows with red bars and the woman mounts a large black box amplifier, with trailing cables, at one point. She builds a shrine of bricks lit by an old fashioned fringed table lamp with a china cat and discarded flowery porcelain tea cups nearby, all seemingly from another era.

The USP (unique selling point) of Nuclear War is supposedly that the playwright is letting the director Imogen Knight, who is also a choreographer and movement director, and the actors to use the text in whatever order they choose and to bring choreography as an extra layer of meaning.

In the end, the process doesn't make much difference to the audience watching this brief piece, however much it makes a difference for those involved.  At 45 minutes, there is no danger of the piece outstaying its welcome and it does have a visceral quality with washes of red, yellow and blue light from lighting designer Lee Curran.

There are cryptic moments. For example when the chorus puts stockings bank robbery style over their heads and stuff mandarins into their mouths. But there is a story there and at one point Andrew Sheridan with headphones round his neck becomes the embodiment of the lost love.

TLT is not the only reviewer to have thought of TS Eliot in connection with the text - we saw it the day after press night.

The choreography of the chorus clad all in black does meld with atomized environment of the woman, the never being able to turn the clock  back in the striking image of grains of sand never able to fly back together after sandcastles are knocked down. And we feel the momentum of the city, no longer a whole but filled with new people and elements, always pushing forward, never looking back.

This all has an intuitive quality but we certainly won't pretend this is a piece that will suit all tastes. However it does also have an affective, sometimes threatening, sometimes poignant lyrical quality on every level and it's an amber light for the depiction of a world losing its nucleus and disappearing into darkness and movement.

Review The Kid Stays In The Picture

The Kid Stays In The Picture 
Based On the Life Story Of Robert Evans
Adapted by Simon McBurney and James Yeatman

His Wicked, Wicked Ways
https://royalcourttheatre.com/

First of all, TLT's sidekick would like to make it clear: the little car is innocent; the little car has never shared a line of coke with TLT; the sound you heard was the exhaust pipe backfiring and the little car has definitely never, ever been in ladies' pants. And if anyone says anything different, they will swiftly receive one phone call - and only one - from the little car's lawyer ...  You have been warned ...

Frankly, TLT was completely unaware of her companion's colourful past and associates between rolling off the conveyor belt and - er - theatre reviewing. But life has some strange bedfellows (and mistresses) as The Kid Stays In The Picture continually strives to assure us.

While words tumble out in Simon McBurney's and James Yeatman's adaptation, it's somehow the images, maybe totally appropriately, that dominate this collage-style stage version of Hollywood producer Robert Evans's autobiography, his heyday, demise and re-emergence from the 1950s onwards. The different film styles also indicate different eras of producer Robert Evans's life.

Several actors on the stage, some of whom clutch microphones as if recording for a post production movie voice over, act out the story.

As far as it goes, the acting is fine but there's little chance for character development as they are more narrators breaking every now and then for a role in Evans's memoir. At the same time the older Evans (Danny Huston) himself is a shadow on the backdrop, becoming as distinctive as a Hitchcock silhouette.

As part of the mythologising, we are given a swift resume of Evans's precocious and promiscuous life as a child actor (Heather Burns) before settling in with Christian Camargo playing the producer at the height of his career with biggish hair and bigger glasses.

In the midst of this we encounter, for want of a less incestuous word, a cast of characters including Henry Kissinger, Ali McGraw, Mia Farrow, Roman Polanski, Francis Ford Coppola and Marlon Brando.

Evans started life in New York where his father had a dental practice in Harlem and his mother's wealthier family were successful rag traders. First he was in radio, but his acting career stalled and he also became a salesman for his brother and his business partner's successful ladies clothing business.

That was before he was plucked from relative obscurity by old-guard Hollywood royalty Norma Shearer to star as her husband, the late wunderkind producer Irving Thalberg. Then after winning his next part, he was defended by mogul Daryl Zanuck on the set of The Sun Also Rises, against the hostility of the whole cast and writer Ernest Hemingway, when producer Zanuck confirmed: "The kid stays in the picture!".

Evans himself sure stayed in the pictures. He entered movie producing. His career soared as production head at Paramount Studios and as an independent producer, at its peak Love Story, Rosemary's Baby, The Godfather and Chinatown being in his impressive portfolio.

Anna Fleischle's spare, studio/work room design includes sliding glass screens which take the projections but also act as a glass enclosure for some of the action.

A small white fridge also transforms into a smaller projection screen (video designer Simon Wainwright) while middle-aged Evans sits in a brown leather revolving office chair. Camera dollies  propelled around the stage also provide live feeds.  

Evans's print 1994 autobiography sits somewhere between Errol Flynn's 1959 tome, David Niven's 1970s' bestsellers The Moon's A Balloon and Bring On The Empty Horses and Julia Phillips' 1991 expose You'll Never Eat Lunch In This Town Again. However, for TLT, it never quite delivered the goods.

Maybe because it's basically a grim, serious story which feels frustratingly constrained under a bragging, name dropping main story and a layer of legal advice. This rather alienating sTyle is of course open to parody, and, it has to be said, rather disarmingly Evans seems to have realised this, taking part in a fantastical cartoon version of himself Kid Notorious.

The stage version also feels constrained - but this time by its published source with no chance to expand to fit a more knowledgeable 21st century audience. Still there is at least one juxtaposition which made us think again about the 1969 murder of actress Sharon Tate, movie director Roman Polanski's wife, Jay Sebring, Wojciech Frykowski and Abigail Folger.

However this could just as well have been an accidental culmulative (wrong) impression.   As it is, this is a pretty straightforward, but glaringly partisan, rendition of a life, as already narrated in the book and a well-received documentary.

Nevertheless somewhere amongst all this, there is a strange merging of "real life" incidents and the iconic movies which is more than only interesting. It's totally disturbing and comes near to questioning, at the very least, the mental health and legality of a whole industry.

Where concentrating on the peccadillos and blameworthiness of an individual is almost seen as diverting away from something more fundamentally skewed and rotten. But, despite a link to American politics, this aspect is buried under what feels like a lot of period kitsch and oft-repeated stories inside the comfort zone. 

If you've never read a Hollywood biography or history, the roll call of sex, drugs, gangland and lawyers, contractual shenanigans, marriages and divorces, score settling, devious producers directors and writers looking after their own interests or just seeking to bring others down with them may be a revelation.

But it's what is not said which struck us as having more potential. Playwright Arthur Miller, we seem to remember, once wrote how his father, a women's clothes' manufacturer, rued the day he rejected an investment inn the then up-and-coming Paramount Pictures.

So, we feel, it would have been interesting to put into context Evans' role in the clothing industry and subsequent Hollywood career.

The anecdotes seem oft-recounted to the point of having a puppet-like non spontaneity but surely some of them can now be unravelled to give a little more away? The overlap, for example, between politics and La La Land success. The extent to which competition concentrated in one town can go far out of control. 

But, most of all, in this day and age, if they wanted to reinvigorate the Evans' franchise, we did wonder why it just didn't go straight into a Netflix, Sky or Amazon drama boxed set? Maybe it's something to do with the mooted HBO miniseries on Hollywood kingpin mob lawyer Sidney Korshack which appears to have disappeared without a trace.

Certainly,  this slightly puzzling production suffers, in our opinion, from some of the same problems as the book - it promises more than it delivers. Anyway, it's an amber light for a show which we wished had pushed the boundaries of our knowledge a little more.

Review a profoundly affectionate, passionate devotion to someone (noun)

a profoundly affectionate, passionate devotion to someone (noun)
By debbie tucker green

Back To Basics
https://royalcourttheatre.com/

Three couples inhabit the universe of this 80-minute play, but five people - or is it five proper nouns? For the title of this cryptic play comes from a dictionary definition, apparently, of that otherwise undefinable thing called Love.

We have to admit when we first saw the title we thought of that other treatise on Love - yes, the one where the granddaughter of a Nobel prizewinning physicist wanders around in a nightdress hopelessly devoted to a summer lover.

It turned out we were not so very wrong as all the couples in debbie tucker green's ping pong match of a play wander around in their jim jams and dressing gowns and express the kind of brooding thoughts which may occur in the wee small hours.

The stage and set designed by Merle Hensel in the upstairs theatre of the Royal Court are a turquoise green ledge, wall and floor raised around three sides.

The audience perches on black swivel bar stools divided into regimented lengthways rows inside, allowing a swivelling round as the voices, action (movement director Vicki Manderson), lighting (Lee Curran) and sound (Christopher Shutt) demand.

This has the effect of training the audience to physically follow the action and each other like a shoal of fish. We'd already been instructed to leave our bags in the cloakroom and enter with the bare minimum.

Directed by the playwright, the men and women also have the bare minimum in terms of their monikers: A (Lashana Lynch), B .(Gershyn Eustache Jnr), Man (Gary Beadle). Woman (Meera Syal) and Young Woman (Shvorne Marks).

Drama, the text books often say, is conflict. We're certainly pitched in to a clash between A and B where the words do the grating, while the drawing of chalk lines from what seems to be two overlapping venn diagram circles is silent.

The play itself is a series of stripped-down gendered duologues with only the briefest moments of pleasure for the couples stemming from a baby, a mutuality and a kiss. We don't know anything about their lives except for these private twilight interchanges about their relationships. 

Except watch out, the male and female attributes swap with the second couple and there's a definite feel as the play progresses that we may be within a computer program or chat bot or a space where biology and software crosses over.

There's a lyrical, rhythmic, soundtrack quality to the dialogue, sometimes with a razor's jagged edge and an underlying sense of menace about the changes afoot. There are enough hints to suggest a subtext of an automated future patterned, for good or ill, on male programming - the subject of one of the best but also ominously unfair jibes against the sour, sarcastic drained Woman.

Does the definition of love in the play's title actually exist, we wondered? Is love always about "someone"? We weren't sure. It's the individual voices that came through strongest with the Young Woman moulded by the older lives but with a resigned but quietly angry sense of a poisoned legacy which she cannot yet fully analyse.

We're speaking in general terms because, despite the precision of the acting and sharp corners of the platform ledges and the words, it is a play that rarely names specifics. The playwright does specify in the published script that the characters are black or Asian. Yet the  visuals otherwise indeed sometimes distracted from our concentration on the elastic snap of the dialogue and occasionally we turned our head and eyes, just to listen.

So when the few human spikes of recognition came, they dug deep but we also felt manipulated. It's a play that invites some satisfying taut resistance as the words bounce hard against the walls of the room. It's also secretive and frustrating.

We don't doubt there is the sharp jab of visceral prodding and the configuration of language feels both literary and computerised. But we also felt conditioned into responding and it's an amber light for a disembodied, fascinating and flawed play dictating and yet wistfully cajoling us into obeying its terms and conditions.

Review Escaped Alone

Escaped Alone
by Caryl Churchill

Apocalypse Some Time
https://royalcourttheatre.com/

"Good fences," the American poet Robert Frost once famously said, "Make good neighbours.". In Escaped Alone, which returns to the Royal Court after a successful run in the beginning of 2016, a jaunty Mrs Jarrett (Linda Bassett) pops through an apparently random open door in a fence where, she tells the audience, "inside there are three women I've seen before".

In this way we are introduced into designer Miriam Buether's bucolic walled garden, an almost medieval oasis for three seated 70 something ladies with a chair for Mrs Jarrett as they trade gossip over tea on the state of things in their neighbouring lives.

It may not be the Bretton Woods Conference or even a Parliament of Housewives, but it is a mental and, apparently, physical space apart from the hustle and bustle of life in the street outside and their own everyday existence.

The host is retired medic Sally (Deborah Findlay) whose phobia about cats makes them sound more like an arm of state surveillance akin to computer chips than familiar felines. Gentle Lena (Kika Markham) seems to suffer from agraphobia, even if she grasps the mechanics of soap opera when others descend into emotion - "... but you're meant to think that ...". Meanwhile hairdresser Vi (June Watson) turns out to possess not only a sharp tongue but to have handled something sharper with fatal consequences.

Their superficially meandering chit chat ranges over a pot-pourri of subjects: Their famlies; carpentry; new technology; marriages - happy and unhappy -, old shillings and pence, the changing face of the High Street, the latest series (soaps and dramas rather than cricket), a snippet of an old 1960s' song that became an advert jingle earworm.  At the same time they also cover waves, particles and microbes.

A generation caught in the transition 'twixt book and screen, the women's chat is divided into sections by the outsider, Mrs Jarrett, stepping again outside the garden into a blackened space framed by red glowing skeins, possibly screen edges.

Here, outside of the blue sky women's world, Mrs Jarrett conjures up destructive visions of biblical proportions, almost like an alternative comedy standup taking fragments from our lives, recent history and turning them inside out into ironic prophesies of doom laced with wit.  

The title Escaped Alone comes from the epilogue of the apocalyptic whale-hunting classic nineteenth century American novel Moby-Dick with its ur-source in the biblical Book Of Jonah. Like the narrator of Moby-Dick, Mrs Bassett forms an immediate relationship with the audience while stepping into the walled garden and digressing into poetic monologues.

At a short, sharp 55 minutes, directed by James MacDonald, this is no Moby-Dick of a play and feels like a fragment.  But it's a sharp, satisfying fenced off little play with an inner rhythm keeping up the momentum, each of the actors as the neighbours in the walled garden having their moment in the sun. We enjoyed it and it's a green light for a Carly Churchill's secular addendum to the bible, the Book Of Mrs Jarrett.

Review Wish List

Wish List
by Katherine Soper

Stand And Deliver
https://royalcourttheatre.com/

Are we all now living in a pipe dream Wish List economy since state terminology changed us from citizens to customers?

From the health service, through education,  the workplace and benefits' system, dominated by  computerization and the internet,  Katherine Soper's Bruntwood prize-winning play Wish List strikes a timely Kafkaesque note

Agency worker Tamsn (Erin Doherty) is setting off for her first day at a fulfilment centre. No, it's not a place where all her dreams will be fulfilled but the storage and packing warehouse of an internet mail order company.

She's taken a zero-hours' contract job while her mentally ill younger brother Dean (Joseph Quinn) has had his benefits suspended and possibly taken away altogether.

Allocated a role packaging goods from the conveyor belt,  she finds the heat is on - both literally and figuratively in the oppressively hot working conditions.

She dons the hi-vis vest and uncomfortable plastic boots provided but it's a job where she's just as much a consumer as a worker, paying for a locker and accruing points, although these are not for loyalty but penalties working like warnings which can lead to dismissal.

And rather than simply being computer programmed, the productivity targets seem deliberately set up for failure and to keep the worker psychologically cowed.

Even though they are in competition, she forms a bond with fellow worker Luke (Shaquille Ali-Yebuah). He can afford to be more of more ducker and diver, indulging in apparently undetected petty theft from the firm and covering for Tamsin's relatively inept efforts. For he is off to join another, but less bottom-of-the-pile, conveyor belt, to college and a job in the ambulance service.

Directed by Matthew Xia, Erin Doherty gives a finely tuned performance as Tamsin, a teen dealing with problems which would break many a seasoned adult. Ali-Yebuah has a boyish charm as co-worker and her brother's former schoolmate Luke.

This is in some ways a perfunctory play with plenty of facts written to a template with a seemingly realistic structure giving way to something more fantastical after a bout of drinking, a dream and with the now almost-obligatory-in-new-writing rendition of a song from recent pop culture, in this case Meatloaf's Bat Out Of Hell.

There are also elements which beg basic practical questions. Wouldn't Tamsin have gone to the Citizens Advice Bureau rather than trying to cope alone? Where is Dean's GP? How can Dean afford an internet connection and to keep a bank account as well as the copious amounts of hair gel he orders for his obsessive compulsive disorder? It does sometimes radiate an actorly concentration on character at the expense of some of the practicalities.

Nevertheless, it's the arrangement of ideas behind this play that does herald an original voice, even if the execution of the script feels a little clumsy and the play overlong. There is a clever merging of school, the health service, benefits' system and the warehouse work - in short, much of life - in a bingo game of chance and cheating.

It also reminded TLT that in the 1950s a flurry of time-and-motion style baby "experts" advised, impossibly, that babies should only be fed and picked up at set times and other mechanical tips.  Ready, some critics of this type of parenting said, for working in factories.

It seems that the times have come full circle in this twenty first century play without the increasing affluence that accompanied the post Second World War economy. It's an upper range amber light for a promising debut play from a writer who brings an understanding of how this working environment is now  moulding lives outside the warehouses in a work-unfair state.

Review The Children

The Children
by Lucy Kirkwood

Even Little Boy Gets Old
https://royalcourttheatre.com/

 In 1945 the nuclear bomb which devastated Hiroshima was famously called Little Boy. Whatever the morality or justification for its use, it initiated the start of the nuclear age, the source of seemingly limitless electricity. And then it came back to bite us with disquiet over the building of reactors in the Middle East, part of the road to war.

The retired nuclear scientists in Lucy Kirkwood's new one-act, nearly two-hour play, The Children, directed by James McDonald, have more immediate concerns. Robin (Ron Cook), who now farms, is a little boy grown old who is apparently intent on saving his cows.

He and his wife, earth mother Hazel (Deborah Findlay), who met in the lab, now rent, amidst power cuts and cliff erosion, a coastal cottage. Why? They've been forced to leave their farm - and the cows with their soulful brown eyes - after an earthquake and tidal wave causes a Fukushima-type nuclear disaster irradiating the surrounding area.

Ron returns every now and then, at some risk, to the farm in the exclusion zone, he says, to tend the cows while mother of four Hazel has settled down to her life, listening on a wind up radio to Radio 4, continuing with her yoga, fielding telephone calls from their seemingly needy 30-something eldest daughter and dealing efficiently with the lack of power.

Even this strange existence can become routine in the golden glow of a basic but comfortable country kitchen in which we meet first Hazel and an unexpected visitor, glamorous childless Rose (Francesca Annis). Rose has returned from the United States and is looking up her former colleagues.  Only blood is trickling down her top.

It turns out when she came up behind Hazel, the latter inadvertently bashed her on the nose. An accident but it sets up a tense dynamic between the two women who, it emerges, have a past rivalry.

We enjoyed the sparky dialogue which provided plenty of laughs from the start of the play with a witty and touching performance from Deborah Findlay as the wife who finds her routine and peace of mind shattered by the arrival of Rose.

There were times it felt overly long, as if there were an agreement to go from A to B to C etc, one point to another and some of the bits in between felt a little like padding. The relationship with almost middle-aged daughter Lauren, whose character and conversations are reported rather than verified by the audience, finally seems introduced, only to be short-circuited. 

Still, there was definitely enough in it to make us wonder whether Rose, even after supposedly revealing her reasons for surprising her erstwhile colleagues was far more deceitful and  had different plans. And to have question marks over her exact current relationship with Robin - neatly played by Ron Cook.

We only have Rose's word that her health problems needed surgery and were not the cosmetic vanity and fear of an ageing single woman. Indeed, for a play which does indeed have two juicy parts for women, the gender politics  could be interpreted as retro as the country kitchen - a male bull and two cows circling him.

Yet we did sense an intriguing incipient theme of fake, imitation and reproduction, especially in the final moments, between Rose and Hazel. It's an amber/green light for a play which got somewhere in the end with many sweet moments.

Review The Sewing Group

The Sewing Group
By EV Crowe

The Eye Of The Needle
https://royalcourttheatre.com/

Sewing, it occurred to us during this initially intriguing play by EV Crowe, has always been an essential craft for theatre and film from the earliest days. In the end, The Sewing Group is hoisted by its own petard of a premise in being rather stitched together with visible thread but still managed at first to hook us in.

We did wonder whether we had ventured into an American farming Amish or Mennonite community when a group of women soberly dressed in dark 17th century garb sat in a candle lit room lined with planks of Scandinavian-style pale wood floor to ceiling, sewing cross stitch samplers, once beloved by the daughters of gentlefolk to demonstrate their skill at the womanly arts.

But no, the accents were mostly British throughout, although maybe there was one item of purposefully inauthentic apparel worn from the start by the trio and it was all a little too clean. Through a series of short scenes flashing by, with what sounded like a harpsichord in between, we peek into an enclosed world as lace and sampler stitching develops into a very personal form of quilting from, in the words of someone outside the realm of women's needlework, "within".

One woman (most of the characters remain unnamed, described as A,B, C, D, E,F in the script) appears to assume a modicum of control even if she is a newbie. Another, apparently, is her aunt. Amother newcomer turns out to be a widow. The sole man (and a non needle worker) appears to be a village elder and preacher in a Christian parish.

Yet despite an attempt to control communal vocabulary, anachronistic notes intrude and this little Eden of embroidery begins to entertain other plots and styles. An element of whodunnit and commercial exploitation  enters the picture, as well as a more Oriental soundtrack.

If this all sounds somewhat ideas-led, that's because it's how it comes across, despite director Stewart Laing's sharp direction injecting some neat variations of pace. Nor is this any reflection on the hard-working cast who are on one level deliberately - without wanting to give too much away - participating in a yoked together clumsy mash up fiction.

Fiona Glascott as the rookie protagonist in blonde braids brings a degree of misguided authoritarianism mixed with sincerity extracting humour from the mismatch. While Jane Hazlegrove, Sarah Niles, Alison O'Donnell, Nancy Crane and John MacKay surround her, conveying plausibly the efficiency of their human quilt.

But once the vocabulary is in place and the premise exposed, there seems little intellectual or dramatic development. There's an indication that 21st century work for an ambitious woman has been so neutered that there's a nostalgia for some aspects of a female division of labour. Yet notwithstanding a more ominous final scene where male concerns take over, the whole seems a self contained verbal bubble and therefore benign, without any jeopardy.

There's certainly a Renaissance sense of anachronism. However it veers finally from cryptic to expository and then again to the cryptic, so that we had to read the script to understand some of the gender exchange going on. And, dare one say it, it seemed rather too engrossed in an incestuously mechanical patchwork of literary, film and TV references.

Of course, the aim may be to show how human imagination, which should be flexible, can be confined to a rigid grid. Nevertheless it then struggles to find a dramatically viable form to make the issues needle the audience sufficiently. It's an amber light for a sampler of work which promises more than it finally delivers.

Review Father Comes Back From The Wars

We at TLT Towers welcome Carolin Kopplin who brings continental spice to the TLT mix! Munich-born Carolin trained as a lawyer and dramaturge before living and working in the USA. She is now a writer and translator based in London and, of course, the newest recruit to the TLT team. 

Father Comes Back From The Wars (Parts 1,2 &3)

by Suzan-Lori Parks

Of Human Bondage

http://www.royalcourttheatre.com

A slave on a West Texas plantation called Hero and his personal odyssey through the American Civil War and its aftermath is the focus of Father Comes Back From The Wars. Pulitzer Prize winner Suzan-Lori Parks combines elements of Greek drama with Homer's Odyssey and a philosophical debate on the concept of freedom in a powerful trilogy of plays. 

In the first part, "A Measure Of A Man", set in 1862. Hero (Steve Toussaint) is faced with a dilemma. His master has promised to free him if Hero joins the Confederate army. But should he fight against the army that wants to abolish slavery in the South? Or should he maim himself to evade the military? And, even more importantly, will his master keep his promise? 

Hero's wife, Penny, (Nadine Marshall) urges him to stay home. His father (Leo Wringer) and many of his fellow slaves, who also make him the subject of a wager, want him to go, not just because they will face severe punishment by the "boss-master" if Hero refuses..

The second part, "A Battle In The Wilderness", takes us on to the battlefield. The Colonel (John Stahl), Hero's master, has captured a Union soldier Smith (Tom Bateman) and keeps him locked up in a tiny wooden cage.

To pass the time, the Colonel plays his banjo and forces his prisoner to sing rebel songs. But Smith changes the lyrics, the Colonel loses interest and instead challenges him on his beliefs about freedom and slavery.

Parks also uses Hero and Smith to explore the materialist culture, ruled by the rich, where the slaves will never be free: "This mark of the market will always be on us." Smith urges Hero to desert and join the Union Army to fight for his freedom. To whom should Hero give his loyalty?

The final section, "The Union Of My Confederate Parts" sees Hero returning from the war and the parallels to The Odyssey become particularly striking. Hero has changed his name to Ulysses, after Commander-in-Chief Ulysses S Grant, and his wife Penny (Penelope from the Greek epic) has been fending off wooers in his absence. 

The slaves have been sold off or died with only Penny or Homer (Jimmy Akingbola) remaining. Hero's talking cross-eyed dog Odd-See (Dex Lee) miraculously returns to fulfil the function of Messenger, reporting on Hero's journey and lightening the more sombre mood of this act.

Originally staged at the Public Theater in New York, director Jo Bonney's production now has an excellent British cast. Toussaint's Hero is an imposing presence, the archetype of a hero, yet seriously flawed. Marshall portrays Penny with strength and vulnerability. Akingbola impresses as the rebellious Homer, whose foot was cut off after he tried to run away. Bateman gives a forceful performance as Smith.  

Although over three hours' long, this skilfully directed, intriguing work never has a dull moment. Neil Patel's atmospheric set and Steven Bargonetti's bluesy music transport us straight to the American south.    

Writer Parks sets the bar high in the first three of nine planned plays, employing ancient forms to tell a still very relevant story. It's a green light for a trilogy uncovering how the precarious position for African-Americans during the long-past Civil War still resonates today.

Review Cyprus Avenue

Cyprus Avenue

By David Ireland

The Orange And The Green

www.royalcourttheatre.com

There is a Buzzfeed meme making the rounds of the internet at the moment asking "What percentage Jeremy Corbyn are you?" Well, Eric Miller (Stephen Rea), the Protestant Loyalist protagonist of Cyprus Avenue would surely point indignantly at his grandchild as one hundred percent Gerry Adams.

Notwithstanding that she's a peach of a girl and barely five weeks' old and brought to the Miller's Cyprus Avenue household by daughter Julie (Amy Molloy).  

This tragicomedy, written by East Belfast playwright David Ireland and directed by Vicky Featherstone, tackles with black humour the entanglements of an older Belfast Protestant generation. 

Despite a dangerous, searing subject and the Gerry Adamification of the granddaughter, it almost falls into the category of a conventional psychiatric-consulting room based play, if it were not for two things. David Ireland's understanding of his home city and Stephen Rea's performance as he turns and considers the issues simmering in his mind before they boil over into violence.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves, for before that there are the  flashbacks  and  the psychiatrist Bridget (Wunmi Mosaku) to talk to. See what we mean about a conventional play?  

The title mirrors that of a Van Morrison song,  but Cyprus Avenue, where Eric lives with wife Bernie (Julie Dearden), is apparently also a leafy upmarket road, almost a Bishop's Avenue of Belfast (see Page 27 of link).

This seems at odds with the confused but strangely logical deductions  of Eric, which rightly or wrongly one associates with the working class,  as he repeats to himself why he is British. Yet it's not at odds with the strangeness of this play.  

It also occurred to us the playwright, without knowing if he is Catholic or Protestant, thankful his surname is a geographical fact rather than a partisan nationality, may have rehearsed the British/Irish arguments in his own mind for many years before writing this play!

It's a dangerous, edgy piece which plays around with conventions of playwriting as well as sectarianism. 

For all that, weaker points sometimes peep through.  A pivotal encounter with a Loyalist gunman Slim (Chris Corrigan) exposes the political language hiding harsh reality seeping more and more into the play as it progresses but uses mundane stand-up jokes less successfully.

And the slightest of niggles is that this would perhaps work even better as a movie where the psychiatrist's explanations of identity in a world context at the beginning of the play would feel less expositional. 

But the effective theatre-in-the-round plain white carpeted design  by Lizzie Clachan  with its few pieces of furniture almost works as a green special effects (no pun intended!) screen. The Protestant/Catholic divide is definitely Belfast but the trip to London brings in foreign exchange and hints of other eras.

The ending is not for the fainthearted but it's a play that knows it can't put a step wrong even if the characters are in the wrong. A green light for a disturbingly funny but tragic play.