Review: Heisenberg: The Uncertainty Principle

Freelance writer, editor and journalist Elizabeth Ingrams, now joins the TLT team and is taken with a fragile new love story where opposites attract.  

Heisenberg: The Uncertainty Principle
by Simon Stephens

Physical Attraction
https://www.delfontmackintosh.co.uk/tickets/heisenberg/

Two strangers, an American woman and an Englishman, meet accidentally on a London train station platform  and embark on an unlikely and unexpected unrelationship. 

There are waves of false starts, lies, confusions and sheer luck for Alex, a tango-teaching South London butcher in his 70s and Georgie, a much younger middle-aged primary school teacher.

Georgie's opening parry so confounds Alex's expectations, after his half a century of celibacy, he agrees to date her.  By the second half of this two-hander, 90 minute play, it is Georgie who has her expectations confounded by Alex.

And so begins a slight but attractive love story, a Brief Encounter for the 21st century filled with expectation on every level,

The drama directed by Marianne Elliott unravels on the no-man’s land white space of designer Bunny Christie’s minimalist set, saturated with the ingenious, pulsing coloured lighting of Paule Constable.

How does Heisenberg come into it? Any expectation this play is about physics and a Nobel Prize winner, deviser of the eponymous theory of uncertainty, should certainly be parked outside the theatre.

And don't sigh and think this has as much to do with the play’s title as the title of the film Beethoven has to do with the German composer (in case you don't know the movie's about a St Bernard dog).

Or that that this might closely mirror one of those discussions on Brexit, in the words of The Clash song, "Should I stay or should I go"? There is something subtle that’s worth waiting for here.

Uncertainties do abound: Georgie’s self-invented identity; the whereabouts of her missing son and her former partner; Alex’s uncertainty over the sale of his failing butcher’s business, and, more crucially, what to make of Georgie.

Thus it is that Heisenberg’s Principle, which can be crudely paraphrased as,  ‘the more we look into something, the less we can predict how it will turn out, or when,’ is woven into the play's fabric.

Stephens has always been a master of dialogue, allowing him to build his plays on the slightest of premises. Here, though, he allows meaning to emerge from between, rather than in, the lines.

The unexpected happens in plenty of inventive, witty and touching ways - Alex's post-coital classical music treat, Georgie's propensity, perfectly timed by Anne-Marie Duff, for screeching unexpectedly which brings the house down.

Is Georgie truly smitten or a calculating, mercenary opportunist preying on an old man? Is Alex a dotard or a wily fox picking up a younger woman for his own future benefit?

The play delicately leaves questions hanging in the air. The feature film-length, one-act play's slender structure immeasurably benefits from the cast, Anne-Marie Duff’s performance as Georgie - a brash, sometimes raucous New Jerseyite - and Kenneth Cranham’s shy-but-cuddly butcher.

Cranham’s strangled-cat vowels only finally emerge into full voice in the second half of the play when Duff's Georgie shows us her tango and the final dance of these two lonely hearts binds several negatives into a positive and a TLT amber/green 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 Threepenny Opera

The Threepenny Opera

by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill

In collaboration with Elisabeth Hauptmann

In a new adaptation by Simon Stephens

Pickpocket Follies

www.nationaltheatre.org.uk

Even before Bert Brecht and Kurt Weill adapted The Beggar's Opera, a pioneering eighteenth century English satiric ballad play, later a huge London success in 1920 adapted by Nigel Playfair and Arnold Bennett from John Gay's original, there was a Berlin connection.

Gay had used commonly known folk airs and tunes from popular operas such as those of German-born George Frederick Handel. And the arranger of Gay's songs was Berlin-born John Christopher Pepusch. Of course, the king of Britain was also German-born, still reigning over Hanoverian domains. 

But by the time Berlin-born Brecht, using Marxist principles as a springboard, and composer Weill wrote Die Dreigroschenoper for their company of actors and cabaret artistes, Germany had lost the First World War and its empire and ousted its own Royal family - cousins of the British royals - in favour of a war-reparations' blighted republic plagued by political and gangland street fighting. And of course Marx and Engels had lived in England and kept the British Empire in mind for their analyses of capitalism.

So what do we get for our equivalent of 3d entry fee, the £15 Travelex, at the National Theatre? Simon Stephens has been recruited by the National Theatre's artistic director Rufus Norris, who also directs, to write a new version of Brecht and Weill's adaptation of John Gay's (keep up those at the back!) musical, this time set in a time-limbo Limehouse and Soho.

We have never seen another production of the German classic, but it seems the mix of Dickensian and Jack The Ripper London has given way in this update to a mash up London. The coronation of Victoria (another German speaker!) is now that of an unnamed King who by the fashions worn and the references made could be a fictional collage of anyone from Edward VIII to Prince Harry. 

Polly Peachum (Rosalie Craig), accountant daughter of Soho gangland boss Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum (Nick Holder)  and his sozzled but scheming wife Celia (Haydn Gwynne), has secretly married Captain MacHeath (Rory Kinnear), an ex-soldier gangster who served with the soon-to-be crowned King in the army and knows where the bodies are buried. His army connections serve him further with another crooked ex-army colleague being Chief Inspector "Tiger" Brown (Peter de Jersey). 

Nevertheless his marriage to  Polly, while he continues to frequent brothels and doesn't break off with the police chief's daughter Lucy (Debbie Kurup), starts  a chain of events which sees his own criminal empire gradually unravel before - well, you'll have to go and see it to find out what happens.;)

The Beggar's Opera itself amalgamated sly digs at the vogue for opera with political satire against then prime minister Robert Walpole and incorporating outlaws such as real life double dealer Jonathan Wild as part of a criminal ruling class deliberately equated with the political class. So in that sense Brecht and Weill were following a traditional route in creating their updated thieving-class opera for the opening in 1928 of Theater am Schiffbauerdamm following the success of The Beggar's Opera in London.

Designed by Vicki Mortimer, the current production has a set with paper and wood scenery flats, easily torn by characters climbing centre stage for their theatrical moments. Scaffolding, a crescent moon  and ladders also draw attention to the theatricality of the piece which even those with the only the slightest, and second hand, acquaintance with Brecht's work know as his trademark.

Although the ladders, judging by a programme note, may possibly, along with Peachum pere's apron also be masonic symbolism with a gesture towards Mozart. Kinnear makes MacHeath a hard-bitten stocky military veteran rather than a decadent charmer.

The star for us was Rosalie Craig's Polly Peachum whose voice rose above a rather busy production (making it difficult to assess the strength of the script) where we found many of the songs did not have the clarity and impact we expected. However the show's most famous song, Mac The Knife, is sung clearly by George Ikediashi's Balladeer (by-the-by, surely an influence on Sondheim's Assassins?) at the beginning and yes, it's true to say, MacHeath does have an extremely large knife ...

Drawing attention in my second hand interpretation of Brecht to my text as text in this critique :), I had exactly the same feeling as fellow blogger Rev Stan that I would have liked to have seen an earlier translation to compare with this one. This show felt a tad predictable and imprisoned rather than reaching out with bite and resonance. Almost, dare one say it, a production for those who want to recognize and tick off with satisfaction what they view as Brechtian elements.

While DW Griffith' was portraying Limehouse in at least one of his silent moviea, this production makes the decision to bring in Keystone cops and have at least one Buster Keaton moment. While this is a fictional London, surely there is a rich seam in its history to be mined and fictionalized? 

Soho's past with its notorious porn squad, even elements of Lord Lucan's disappearance and in the current day the changing of London into residential investments for the super rich and international institutional pension funds - surely there is scope for these or other matters without distracting from the original story in its enduringly flexible framework?

OK, we haven't seen that much Brecht - Schweyk in the Second World War in the 1980s and Mother Courage in 2009, both at the National - or Weill (One Touch of Venus and Lady In The Dark). But these all had the ability to surprise. This felt safe rather than dangerous and stimulating and unlikely to attract the cross section of audiences the original 1928 production lured into the theatre. So we're still looking for an updated Beggar's and Threepenny Opera for our times but, in the meantime, for this version an amber light.