Review All Our Children

All Our Children
by Stephen Unwin

 Lives in Their Hands
 http://www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk/

In 1942, four months after the USA entered the Second World War,  President Franklin D Roosevelt spoke to the nation in a radio address:

"Yet ... we can make, if we choose, a planet unvexed by war, untroubled by hunger or fear, undivided by senseless distinctions of race, color, or theory. Grant us that courage and foreseeing to begin this task today that our children and our children's children may be proud ..." 

One of the then senseless distinctions of theory was the German National Socialist regime's espousal of eugenics beginnning with a "euthanasia" programme in 1939. It targetted the mentally and physically disabled, children and eventually adults,  and anyone deemed to have a "life unworthy of life".  

Stephen Unwin's moving play focusses on the doctor, Victor Franz (Colin Tierney) in charge in an imaginary Rhineland paediatric clinic, one of many in Germany to which parents were encouraged to send their handicapped children.

Yet time is running out for Franz as his own health deteriorates, alongside the children, placed in his clinic by often loving but impoverished parents without the means or the time to look after their needs.  Children who, at first unknown to them,  suffer a terrible fate in what has been termed a rehearsal for later mass murder  

There is a lot packed in to the one-act play. This sometimes feels as if it could be a fragment of a larger, longer piece where the juxtapositions could be more pointed for the audience to work out more fully the vested interests, power struggles, compromises and cowardice.  

However the generation gap and an understandable, if detestable, callousness of inexperienced youth is plausibly delineated with the callow 23 year old ambitious Lutheran assistant to atheist Franz, Eric Schmidt (Edward Franklin).  

Germany in fact had an advanced social and welfare system, having been the first country to introduce social insurance to take care of all citizens, even though it lost its Empire and much of the means to fund the scheme after the First World War. 

The perpetrators therefore at first tried to keep the killings a secret, issuing death certificates with fake causes of death.  While there have been some documentaries, this is all a lesser known part of the National Socialist killing machine. 

The revelation of the brazen extortion involved in the subsequent bureaucracy covering up the deaths, exposed by an angry and helpless working class mother Elizabetta Pabst (Lucy Speed), elicited horrified gasps from the audience.  

A glimmer of  hope still flickers in this bleak picture when the scarlet robed aristocratic Bishop von Galen (David Yelland) comes on behalf of some of his constituents who, like Elizabetta, have come to understand what is happening. 

This is in some ways the most intellectually searching part of the play in a Shavian-like private encounter between the Catholic primate and the medic who may be compromised by his own political past. It puts the audience through almost the same process as a parent who retains hope that there can be some trust in an authority somewhere.

The Catholic bishop is a skilled theologian who holds out a sprig of hope and constructs elegant arguments condemning events he knows to be inhuman, but keeps it all carefully away from the public domain, dashing our own hopes of any moral touchstone or heroic behaviour.

Trapped between the tricked parent, the duplicitous but tormented doctor, the lofty churchman and the blinkered assistant administrator is the maid, Martha (Rebecca Johnson). She also wants to trust and find reassurance in her Catholic faith and authority figures. 

However she is still forced into harbouring justified doubts about some aspects of the regime and its perversion of communal values.

Stephen Unwin himself directs bringing clarity and precision to the proceedings. A  handsome set from Simon Higlett has shelves of grey lever arch files containing the fatal paperwork breaking up the warm wood panelling of the clinic's office. 

This is a harrowing tale of how narrow the medical profession's line can be, slipping too easily from sustaining to destroying life. While it sometimes feels a little truncated, it's a green light for a play which also challenges the ease with which we separate past actions from current-day concerns.

Review Love's Labour's Lost

Love's Labour's Lost
by William Shakespeare

The Lost Boys
https://www.rsc.org.uk/haymarket

Set in the last heady summer before the First World War, this exquisitely designed production of Shakespeare's early comedy Love's Labour's Lost, directed by Christopher Luscombe, is now presented as a delicious Christmas confection, part of a double bill with Much Ado About Nothing.

Determined to create his own celibate male academic haven, the King of Navarre (Sam Alexander) persuades his comrades to join him in his stately home where he sets up his own personal Oxbridge with turretted ivory towers, ordering all women to be kept at bay.

At the heart of the play is a hierarchy of lovers as the best laid plans come to naught. The King and the Princess of France (Leah Whittaker). The King's bluff confidante Berowne (Edward Bennett) and the French noblewoman Rosaline (Lisa Dillon).

The Kiplingesque bespectacled Longaville (William Belchambers) and the French Katharine (Rebecca Collingwood) and aesthete Dumaine hankering after Maria (Paige Carter).  Then Costard (Nick Haverson), an aproned buffoon of a gardener, yet not to be underestimated, and the affected Spanish fop Don Armado (John Hodgkinson) vying for the love of milkmaid Jaquenetta (Emma Manton).

This elegantly-costumed version with musical score by Nigel Hess and live orchestra fuses a whole plethora of literary, variety, theatre and film influences. Gosford Park rather than Downton Abbey with music in the style of Ivor Novello, Noel Coward and Gilbert and Sullivan. 

There is also a touch of The Importance of Being Earnest in the archness of the Princess of France and her female entourage, dollops of Brideshead Revisited (or maybe its inspiration, the Evelyn Waugh/John Betjeman Oxford set), echoes of Peter Pan  and even some zany Marx Brothers' antics with a glancing reference also to the Edwardian epitome of male physical prowess, Eugen Sandow.

Nevertheless the Shakespearean verse still shines through and it's an enjoyable lucid production with the Edwardian environment thought through but spreading its net further. Moth (Peter McGovern) has the look of a Winslow Boy naval cadet while Costard, the bowls' playing parson (John Arthur), schoolmaster Holofernes and constable Dull could have stepped out of The Vicar of Dibley.

Designer Simon Higlett's handsome stately home and halcyon outdoor sets provide a handsome and vibrant backdrop with lighting by Oliver Fenwick. There are some curious contrasts stemming from the wide variety of references, with a touch of modern alternative comedy thrown in, and the polished singing.

But this hardly matters in a bright and breezy production until the final moments when it switches to the poignant. It's a populist winning production, and we award a sparkling Christmas bauble of a bright green light

Review Hobson's Choice

Hobson's Choice

By Harold Brighouse

Free Willie

http://www.nimaxtheatres.com/vaudeville-theatre/hobsons_choice

It's off to Salford via the Vaudeville Theatre on London's Strand for the Theatre Royal Bath's production of Harold Brighouse's Hobson's Choice, first produced in 1915 in New York. 

Yes, this product of the Manchester School of playwrights seems to be a global play at home around the world with its pompous merchants and rags-to-riches tale. Indeed in 1965 Sir Laurence Olivier took an Old Vic National Theatre production of Hobson's Choice to Moscow.

In 1880s' Lancashire, family patriach, master shoe and bootmaker and heavy-drinking freemason Henry Horatio Hobson (Martin Shaw) keeps his three dependent daughters, Maggie (Naomi Frederick), Alice (Florence Hall) and Vickey (Gabrielle Dempsey), as, well now we would say, unpaid interns in his successful shoemaking and retail concern.

And open the flap down to the basement, you'll find, like some Morlock of HG Wells, the timid, illiterate, low paid but talented craftsman Willie Mossop (Bryan Dick) originally an Oliver Twist-like "workhouse brat" apprenticed to Hobson.

Maggie, bookkeeper and saleswoman (unpaid), having reached the ripe old age of 30 (!!!) is "on the shelf", or so widower Hobson insists, knowing she is the brains behind his business. 

Meanwhile Hobson's refusal to provide dowries for Alice and Vickey stops them from marrying their beaux, solicitor Albert Prosser (Joe Bannister) and corn merchant's son Freddie Beenstock (Ryan Saunders) respectively.  

Whether by chance or otherwise, a wealthy female customer Mrs Hepworth (Joanna McCallum), similarly encumbered with daughters, sets off a chain of events where Maggie seizes her chance, takes Willie in hand and engineers a transfer of power which also allows her sisters to marry.

At the same time, Hobson's former status as head of his own shoe empire does not prevent the possibility of him sharing the fate of the destitute widow in Brighouse's earlier short play Lonesome Like   

As we noted in Horniman's Choice, it's a mistake to underestimate the sly sophisticated playwriterly skill, disguised under a stage Lanacastrian accent, of Brighouse, a Guardian newspaper reviewer and textile trader,

By coincidence, in fact, TLT and her jalopy settled down with the popcorn recently and watched Joy, a rags-to-riches merchandising tale which, amongst other similarities, even has a widow - Isabelle Rossellini - putting up the capital for a product and a father - Robert De Niro - whose factory benefits from his daughter's - played by Jennifer Lawrence - bookkeeping.

Instead of elements of music hall, it takes on the tropes of TV soaps alongside a change in the balance of power in a household and the themes of wage slaves,  legal chicanery and its own Hobson's Choice.

So this is an enduring comedy as much a Chekhovian and Pygmalion tale as King Lear with a salty Salford twist wherre everyone knows each other's business on Chapel Street. Hobson tries to hang on to his business alone beyond his term, without taking on the requisite son-in-law to take over his business and by doing so unwittingly gives more power to his daughters.

Yet this particular production of Hobson's Choice, directed by Jonathan Church,  overall needs a harder edge, although the central trio of Martin Shaw's Hobson with his Biblical rhythms of speech, Naomi Frederick's Maggie and even Bryan Dick's Mossop all acquit themselves with a steely core when called for with the necessary, almost Darwinian, ruthlessness.

No wonder, John Braine, we realised, took the title of his 1957 novel about a  go-getter climbing the greasy corporate pole from a line in this play.

Produced for the first time on Broadway two years before the USA entered the First World War, at the heart of the play remains a Dickensian mystery - who exactly is Willie Mossop to have been given these chances? 

In spite of his lowly status, he is also the object of attention from his landlady and her daughter (a finely judged cameo by Emily Johnstone) until he is grabbed by the ear, literally and metaphorically, by Maggie.

This production has its highlights, not least a detailed set by Simon Higlett which uses the revolve to magnificent effect to enhance the psychic space of the play in the second act. 

Nevertheless, there are times when it does drag between the moments of reversal, as if by wanting to reach the dots, some of the lines in between are neglected. Still, it's a legitimate interpretation and a solid production of a classic play and so a TLT amber light.