Review Albion

Albion
by Mike Bartlett

Stab In The Book
 https://almeida.co.uk/

Successful entrepreneur Audrey Walters gives up a life in metropolitan London, buying back a family home amid the birdsong of  the English countryside, bringing cynical but supportive husband Paul and Cambridge graduate daughter Zara in tow.

She becomes evangelical in her rather desperate mission to revive a once-celebrated garden created in the twilight decades of the British Empire and remembered from her youth in the 1970s.

Albion is a strange, bitter mishmash which strives to be a weighty history and state-of-the nation drama. In fact, for TLT and her own 21st state-of-the-art motorised sidekick, it felt rather dated despite the insertion of a few Brexit references.

Audrey (Victoria Hamilton), having founded an apparently flourishing furnishings business, appears to have had her head turned in a Bovaryesque way by literary romance and a very British deluded concept of family heritage.

She rushes in where many a lesser soul would fear to tread and becomes an unwitting agent of change in the village.

From the title, Albion, an ancient name for Britain also adopted by Romantic poet William Blake, you might expect an exploration of Britishness. However Mike Bartlett's drama deals more in on-the-nose (or should that be nosegay?!) metaphors and token gestures towards its many themes. 

There are plenty of literary references but nothing to copyright home about. It could have been an agile, sly but touching satire. However it becomes a scattergun, lumbering play with contrived conflicts and simplistic viewpoints.

Directed by Rupert Goold most of the characters - and they are explicitly identified with past literature and a rather troubling ultimate identification of the feminine with novelistic insanity without any proper context  - give expositional speeches.

That's all, except for Audrey's bestselling novelist friend Katherine (Helen Schlesinger) whose words, in contrast  need to be treated with caution. As with Audrey's business, the nature of Katherine's talent and her financial set up appear somewhat hazy. However she appears to churn out novels with romantic aplomb without an editor or any such mundane publishing accoutrements.

Zara (the name of a shop! the name of a royal!) has aspirations to be - what else? - a writer. Despite her mother's achievements, Zara (Charlotte Hope) embodies the work and housing problems of graduates eternally on placements, never getting a job, and sleeping on a friend's couch. Ha, another theme ticked off!

Meanwhile the garden with its tall and sturdy English oak, is haunted by the ghosts of two male wartime casualties (shades of another property-based play, Clybourne Park with its Korean veteran ghost), separated by a century.

Nevertheless, for TLT, Albion remained inorganic despite the best efforts of designer Miriam Bluether,  with a turfed traverse stage alongside lighting designer Neil Austin and sound from Gregory Clarke, to give it a cycle-of-the-seasons feel.

In its machine-like churning out of themes - and its length! - it did bear some resemblance to A Day By The Sea, currently on a run in South London - but far more smug.

While something again of a stereotype, the most interesting character and the story with the most promise is that of Krystyna (Edyta Budnik), the go-getting Polish cleaner who has set up her own efficient company.

She obviously has clients outside the boundaries of the rather tiresome house and grounds and there is the question mark over what will happen to her beliefs and business after 2019. 

Albion seems like a play that has been stretched out in all directions to be a big, meandering state-of-the-nation play, rather than growing some potentially interesting relationships into satisfying integrated drama.

The literary metaphors feel very self-consciously, rather than wittily, tacked on, so it becomes a case of spot-the-literary-reference.

The actors do their best with this big, baggy monster of a play but nothing can disguise its overblown nature for TLT and it's a lower-range amber light.    

Review Ink

Ink
by James Graham

It's The Sun Wot Won It
https://almeida.co.uk/

At this very moment one of the UK's main news agencies is developing robot reporters for local news coverage.

James Graham's Ink looks back to another age when reporters on local newspapers were hungry to reach Fleet Street, every newspaper had its own watering hole and the print unions in control of the hot metal ruled the roost. More ink and less inc.

And The Sun newspaper ousted The Mirror, grabbing its traditional working class reader base as Britain's bestselling newspaper after new proprietor, Aussie outsider Rupert Murdoch, took over in 1969.

Ink charts the transformation of The Sun from an ailing left wing broadsheet to a cheeky chappie, aspirational tabloid with its infamous topless Page 3 model, focussing on Murdoch (Bertie Carvel) and, above all, its first editor, the son of a Yorkshire colliery blacksmith, Larry Lamb (Richard Coyle).

We're in at the start of a legend, that of The Sun, and also just before Margaret Thatcher's ascension to Prime Minister and the move to Wapping where the play ends.

Ink mixes variety japes - it even begins with the old Max Bygraves' catchphrase "I wanna tell you a story" - with the towering personalities of owner and editor as The Sun became "The Soaraway Sun".

Yet Graham's and director Rupert Goold's approach feels scattergun. There's an introduction to reporting through the five W's of journalism - What, Who, Where, When and Why - for the unintiated.

Giant Ws then remain on Bunny Christie's deliberately and evocative ramshackle two storey offices. Murdoch and Lamb dine out on lobster (although documented as true, it's ironic as lobster has its own place in newspaper slang) in a Covent Garden restaurant where they map out the future of The Sun.

Murdoch of course gives Lamb, at last in a prized editor's chair, an impossible deadline which he fulfils in equally ramshackle fashion. Lamb gathers together a group of journalistic ne'er-do-wells and sidelined hacks, apparently after Fleet Street veterans with bulging contacts' books had rejected his offers.

There's certainly a feel of the mix of older oddballs and new generation hacks and photographers with the heady rush of ideas, plucked out of the air or the result of expediency,  at the first editorial and executive meetings. The musical hall/variety thread continues with pop ditties of the time and the cast, caught up in the euphoria of the moment, breaking out into song and dance.

But, despite darker true episodes with the abduction of the wife of a Sun executive, Ink never really digs deep and is more of a scrapbook than an integrated play.

As is sometimes perhaps inevitable with real people in the frame, the performances of Carvel and Coyle as Murdoch and Lamb at first do feel studied. However they do eventually come into their own as personalities on stage in their own right.

As we've indicated there's the trademark Rupert Goold song and dance with choreography by Lynn Paage, but this sometimes feels like wallpaper for a lack of strong story narrative. Many of the jokes are heavy-handed. It's broadbrush and often fun but never seems truly to bring together a substantial story.

It's the clever characterisations from the strong cast that hold it all together - besides Coyle and Carvel, there's David Schofield's Mirror old guard Hugh Cudlipp, Tim Steed's fastidious deputy editor Bernard Shrimsley while Sophie Stanton is a firmly feminist women's page editor in a man's world, Joyce Hopkirk and Pearl Chanda is the first Page 3 girl, Stephanie Rhan.

Ink is mostly bright and breezy and also gives due regard to a tragic episode, but it never really amplifies its tale, preferring often to make passing references than to be truly thought-provoking. So it may not make the colour scheme with any tabloid revamp but it's an amber/green light.  

Review Richard III

Richard III

by William Shakespeare

Hard Hatted Richard

http://www.almeida.co.uk/

Would any Royal parent even consider naming their kid Richard? It doesn't look like we'll be having Richard  IV any time soon with William Shakespeare's fictional creation colonizing our minds for centuries.

Then again, we haven't had a James recently either, so that debunks that theory - a bit like Richard III Shakespearean literary theory - a view  pushed forward, then replaced by another but its reptilian hide can take whatever current fashions throw at it.

For if you remember, the skeleton of Richard complete with poor twisted spine was uncovered in the full glare of the media spotlight in 2012 and it is with a re-enactment of this image that the Almeida production directed by Rupert Goold begins, together with an audio snippet of a BBC news report.

Indeed the last Plantaganet king's lair and Kingdom is sunk far below the Leicester City Council car park on the Islington stage with a giant drill bit, or is it a outsize crown - or is it a UFO - suspended on high?

For TLT and her cohort-in-crime have to admit they spent the first twenty minutes or so of this Richard III trying to work out exactly what Hildegarde Bechtler's design was. 

Luckily it didn't distract us from following the twists and turns of the legend that is Richard  (Ralph Fiennes) but we did find this a strange production.

We are all for innovative settings and time mash up, but we think we should have been more caught up in the play rather than our brains working overtime to decipher what the setting and the costumes signified. 

The turtle neck jumper and dark suits? Is this some gesture towards Jan Kott's Shakespeare Our Contemporary, a glance towards communist totalitariansm? Or is it collaborationist France or some computer game mash up where skulls are collected on the back wall? Still the final battles are satisfyingly in full armour with a particular burnished glow.

When Richard comes forward on the dimly lit stage and grasps the audience by the scruff of the neck, "determined to prove a villain", it feels like a coherent take on the play. The drills have unearthed a cave where Richard is destined to act out his villainy again and again, trapped in his own subterranean theatre for time immemorial.

But a diplomat he ain't. Sure he confuses young Lady Anne (Joanna Vanderham), widow of Prince Edward (senior) whom he has murdered, but he's - literally - up front about the unadulterated power he has over her and she's far more coerced than reluctantly charmed.

It's not only the audience that understands his double dealing (even though sitting mid stalls a couple of times we missed the action in a pit in the stage because of poor sight lines) but all the characters,  perhaps not realising howfar he can and does go. 

In this stage world of uneasy alliances, the ascent to power starts with his own brother. Clarence (Scott Handy) does not believe his sibling would betray him, not so much out of filial ties but he cannot see the advantage to Richard. When faced with Richard's treachery, he, entirely plausibly and calculatingly, pleads for his life and never loses hope of living on before he is drowned (we won't spoil it for folks who don't know the exact method).

Do we admire Richard in this production? Perhaps if we had not seen other productions or read the text it would have fallen better with us. But there is a lot of use of types and tropes familiar from TV and cinema which do not serve the detailed ambiguities of this devilish Shakespeare text. He does not seem so clever but more a man of brute force on the verge of lunacy by the end whom others allow to gain power by either backing down or thinking they can use him.

Our couple of moments of empathy were physical. During horseplay after the young Prince Edward and the Duke of York (Lukas Rolfe and Oliver Whitehouse on the night we attended) arrive on the scene when the whole audience gave a collective "ouch" as the weakness of Richard's body was exposed. And just watching Richard sitting in profile, the furrows of the lines in his forehead deepening as he planned his next move.   

The expedient world of murder continues when the murderer (Daniel Cerqueira) brings into  the Royal boardroom a head chopping block as if it were a portable barbecue, just a tool of the trade purchased from a famous shopping website. The victim this time is Hastings (James Garnon), too busy always looking at the latest gossip on his mobile phone and finishing off the paperwork to catch the zeitgeist and threat around him.

There are plenty of such individual performances which catch the eye and ear but to our mind the production failed to hang sufficiently together overall The distraction of wondering why oh why sometimes just became too much.

Just why, oh why, was Vanessa Redgrave as Queen Margaret dressed in a boilersuit? But hers was an interesting interpretation, a dementia grandmother, yet her first exit conveying it was perhaps a front to save herself when she could not save other wives and mothers from her sidelined fate.

The two other female roles, redhead Queen Elizabeth (Aislín McGuckin), widowed by the death of King Edward (David Annen) during the play, and the Duchess  of York (Susan Engel), mother of Edward, Clarence and Richard, are both distinctive presences, sharply defined. 

Nevertheless, again they suffer from having to compete with a production filled with recognizable types and tropes, however well performed,  from TV and cinema, which simplify the nuances and ambiguities of the Shakespearean text.

At the same time, Buckingham (Finbar Lynch recently seen in the National's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom) is a compelling partner in crime with Richard, held like the murderers by Richard's purse and promise of future rewards. 

This is an extremely clear production with flashes of sound in between, and sometimes during action in, scenes like a Law and Order episode. 

Its point may be the flattening over the centuries of Richard's flesh and blood into literary legend with television last in a long line of culprits. However ending the play with the 2012 excavation did not leave us with a rumination on the vagaries of power or Richard as the villain having all the best tunes or the fate of women in the play or how literature or vested interest history has treated Richard..  

Rather we wondered whether it will work better for us when it is an NT Live broadcast and we shine an amber light on this Richard III of great clarity set in a surreal landscape.