Review Mother Courage And Her Children

Mother Courage And Her Children
By Bertolt Brecht
Translated by Tony Kushner
Music By Duke Special

Peace In Our Time?
http://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/

Thirty years is a long time in politics and showbusiness, but it's much, much longer and far more cutthroat and arbitrary for citizens and subjects having to cope with the on-off Thirty Years War (1618-1648).

Hannah Chissick now directs Tony Kushner's translation of Bertolt Brecht's play Mother Courage And Her Children with music by Duke Special, first seen in the National Theatre's production eight years ago.

The play spans the war that ravaged the European continent with Josie Lawrence in the main role in a traverse staging in transformed warehouse, Southwark Playhouse.

The audience enters the battlefield through a trench-like tunnel with grimy, grey-white plastic tarpaulin hanging from metal poles. 

First the good points - Josie Lawrence is magnificent, a force of nature with a tremulous gleam in her eye, determined to survive, run a business and hold together her children, no matter what.

Her singing and acting experience also gives her the voice, along with some of the other theatre veterans in the cast, to negotiate an acoustically difficult space.

In this production, it is a play of two halves with the decision to adopt regional accents in the first act making some of the actors with lighter voices almost unintelligible in a space where there needs to be perfect pitch to be heard.

The uneven nature of the first act  may lose a few camp followers in the audience which would be a shame because post-interval the accents are suddenly discarded and the ensemble comes together in a far more heartfelt and stinging second act. The problematic acoustics do not quite go away but they become far less of a problem.

Besides Lawrence's Mother, the most consistent performances of the night come from Julian Moore-Clark as her terminally honest and loyal son, Swiss  Cheese,  David Shelley as the chaplain and Ben Fox as the Dutch cook.

For those who have not grown up with the German history school syllabus of 1939 and the religious and political battles, Mother Courage And Her Children needs to hit the correct increasingly frantic notes along the route of Anna's picaresque travels with her increasingly disintegrating family.

This only comes about in the second half  when the seemingly heroic but self-destructive act of Phoebe Vigor's Kattrin is truly powerful and the lighting of Robbie Butler comes into its own. The decision to ally the play with imagery and sounds from the First and Second World Wars is also a wise one.

After all, Brecht and other citizens had experienced an on-off battle to survive economically in Germany from the First World War onwards which became something else after 1933 and the seizure of Germany by the National Socialists.

Barney George's design keeps it simple, tarpaulin and metal poles with the cart dragged by Mother Courage able to move across the space.

However the decision to have an upper balcony on one side may have seemed logical, putting the (temporary) victors and actor musicians on high. But it means in addition to acoustic irritations, one half of the audience might feel discriminated against, having to continually turn around to see the action.

So this is a production which eventually finds its balance in an unhinged world. Josie Lawrence and a few others are tremendous but it needed far tighter direction to keep other members of the cast on course in the first act. It's an upper range amber light.   

Review A Day By The Sea

A Day By The Sea
by NC Hunter

The Sense Of An Ending
http://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/

Taken at face value, A Day By The Sea is a languid post Second World War family drama, crafted, apparently, to mimic a Chekhov play. 

A fusty middle aged career diplomat Julian, a bachelor, has left his Paris posting for a short break with his widowed mother and his frail uncle at the family's seaside Dorset home.

In a past era, he and a playmate ranged over the beach and cliffs in a picture book childhood and there's certainly an elegaic feel to director Tricia Thorns' handsome production at Southwark Playhouse designed by Alex Marker.

But surely the piece's Chekhovian vibe is deliberately just a little over the top? For it's a curious piece, even with solid individual performances from a 10-strong cast. Yet as a play, written in the 1950s just before the advent of kitchen sink drama, it almost verges on a coded parody of its own genre.

The stock literary characters meander in stage left and right.

There's the dry stick diplomat Julian (John Sackville) who finds his assured position at home and abroad is in jeopardy. His mother Laura (Susan Tracy), as fit as a fiddle, tending the garden, apparently unembittered at being pushed aside from home ownership in an act of primogeniture arranged by her late husband and the white-haired solicitor (David Gooderson).

Ah, yes, the doddering solicitor whose sinecure seems to involve becoming energised by a tenant's expensive new - er - pigsty.

Ailing uncle David (David Whitworth) remembers real or imagined colonial adventures sitting in his bath chair. A doctor (David Acton), over fond of gin, is kept on to care for the old man but, we are told, is in an 'ambiguous' position.

The welfare of the unwitting medic is, in turn, the unasked-for concern of lovelorn spinster governess (Stephanie Willson). She looks after the children of outcast divorcee (Alix Dunmore) who came to the house as an orphan and now returns as a sophisticate.

So it's a house over-stuffed with literary and movie stereotypes and glimpses of other plots.

They, eventually, decide to take a picnic and the children scavenge for a shell on the oil-free idyllic beach, after Julian hears bad news from the office conveyed by a colleague (Hugh Sachs) and loosens up.

Yet the news, in spite of the play receiving its first performance back in 1953, two years after seismic Anglo-Soviet happenings in the foreign office, is hardly front page stuff.
 
TLT and her own motorised aide cannot believe that a 1950s London audience, also au fait with the lead actor's involvement in a real life scandal just before the opening night, would not have recognised a certain deliberate desperation and hollowness in the whole scenario of A Day By The Sea

The play itself feels like a workmanlike piece,  where each role is written in such a way that every actor can have his or her "turn" - in this, TLT supposes, it does also reflect a "Chekhovian" style.

Sackville as diplomat Julian and Dunmore (a dead ringer for Emma Thompson) as divorcee Frances are pitch perfect with good support from Stephanie Willson as governess Miss Mathieson, David Acton's private live-in doctor and David Whitworth as the invalid uncle. Susan Tracy grapples well with the slippery part of the mother. 

However this production could have done with a little more speed and vigour as the family's losses finally start to bite in the more hallucinogenic final scenes of what amounts to the fourth act in the old-fashioned structure of the play.

Maybe there should have been a little more left field thinking about how to pace the play for  the 21st century.

Even so, there's nice work in styling the production from costume designer Emily Stuart but the star of the show is truly Alex Marker's exquisite blue sky, warm brick and late summer glow design with its photo album framing.

Was it  TLT's overactive imagination which glimpsed something of the iPad and its "Do Not Disturb" crescent moon in the framing adding a welcome extra dimension to the play? If it were an accidental effect, it still worked well for us!

A Day By The Sea is an interesting piece set in the context of the 1950s. There's a parallel to contemporary British movies  with subtexts of imperial decline, Britain thrown back on having to cultivate its own garden and Soviet and American Cold War politics.

But it's also an insight as to why a new post-Second-World-War generation might have felt it was time to stop the London and civil service establishment occupying theatres and sneaking in home truths - but only for their kind of audience.

TLT began to feel the criticism of writers like ex-army man NC Hunter by critic Kenneth Tynan and the Royal Court generation had a pertinent literary point.

A fellow critic, Bernard Levin, remarked in a 1958 review of another Hunter play in The Spectator, "... for all its dabbling in grave social questions (are the rich really parasites? is it their fault?), [it] is only another of the machine's products.

"Everybody, as is the way with the machine, is made of cardboard, and although the cardboard is tricked out very nicely it remains cardboard ... only the dialogue, which is a cut above the general level of the play, saves the evening ... And the acting, of course."

After sitting through A Day By The Sea, the TLT machine thinks we know what he means and it's an amber light.

Review Doubt, A Parable

A fraught adversarial situation between nun and priest within a New York Catholic school during a time of social change fully engages Peter Barker. 

Doubt, A Parable
by John Patrick Shanley 

Truth And Consequences
http://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/

Sister Aloysius Beavier is the sternly upright conservative headmistress of a New York Roman Catholic school in 1964 which has just accepted its first black pupil from the working class population of the Bronx.

Now purely circumstantial evidence leads her  to suspect a young, progressive priest with an otherwise attractive personality, Father Brendan O'Flynn, may be guilty of molesting the new boy.

John Patrick Shanley's play tackles the nature of faith in oneself as well as in others and in self-policing, hierarchical institutions.

Doubt swirls around the allegations, but Sister Aloysius, the principal of a school attached to the local Catholic Church, does not allow herself to entertain any uncertainty.

She sets out to prove his guilt, not so much Miss Marple as a Miss Wimple who has already drawn her conclusions and now is working backwards to find the proof.

She's a small but steely and tenacious figure against the taller frame of the urbane Father Flynn, marking the division between the two not only in personality but in a hierachy.

For the priest always outranks the nun and the protocols for handling discomforting complaints easily turn into a dead end process and a means of suppression.

Both a melodrama and a witty thriller mystery, writer John Patrick Shanley's 2005 play therefore pits the austere female principal, played by Stella Gonet, against Jonathan Chamber's charismatic priest.

Doubt is a four-hander play with three women and one man structured around a series of duologue scenes punctuated by monologues, among which are sermons delivered to a congregation.

It's a tense 90 minutes revealing unexpected but all-too-human complications and the atmosphere of an era - the USA's first Catholic president John F Kennedy had just been assassinated.

Even the title Doubt, A Parable has an ironic 21st century ambivalent edge - for when was a parable ever uncertain? -  as nun and priest battle it out verbally and manoeuvre on the stained glass floor under the chandelier of PJ McEvoy's ecclesiastical set design.

Directed by Ché Walker, there are terrific performances from the whole cast which also includes Clare Latham as the idealistic, enthusiastic young teacher Sister James and Jo Martin's mother of the alleged victim who has her own understandable reasons for not making waves. 

Doubt is a tautly constructed play where no character has the monopoly on probity and the Catholic Church's powerful reach brings unexpected but logical reactions when religion becomes a team game.

This is highlighted in a compelling scene between Sister Aloysius and the mother of the allegedly abused boy who, focussed on a better life for her son, is willing to accept some risk as long as the boy benefits.

However, this is a production that falls at the very last hurdle. Instead of leaving the question of the priest's guilt or innocence open, it seems to interpret a final ruse by the nun followed by the priest conceding to her as an indication there is no room for doubt.

The actors play this as a cut-and-dry situation and this ending jars, given the complexities of the situation presented beforehand. Nevertheless for everything else in a demanding, pacey and thought provoking play, it's a green light. 

Review Dangling

Dangling
by Abigail Hood

Charlotte's Web
http://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/

Dangling tries to cover a lot of issues - missing children,  fathers who are wrongly suspected, those who may have and those who have committed crimes, abusive relationships, the effect on marriages, all interlaced with hints of recent sex abuse news stories.

Charlotte is a London escort girl who may once have been a runaway and has ended up in the hands of a manipulative pimp Matt (Christopher Lane). Her world collides with Greg (Jasper Jacob), a teacher and father of a missing girl and then also Greg's wife, Jane (Tracey Wilkinson).

Seemingly running parallel are the lives in Oldham of Danny (Philip D McQuillan) and his younger sister, Kate (Charlotte Brooke)  with an unstable mother Helen (Maggie Saunders) and a violent jailbird father Ken (Ian Gain).

This new play by Abigail Hood. who also plays Charlotte, attempts additionally to include a psychological filter of 20th century screen culture through Danny's friend Kev (Stephen Boyce) and parent Helen.

Dangling has a strong cast and some powerful moments. However ultimately this is is a play that becomes a prisoner of its own concept and has what feels like a mix of devised drama shoehorned  into a schematic framework.

On hooks from the ceiling dangle objects from the characters' lives and director Kevin Tomlinson uses long grey benches at first effectively to create the different stage spaces on an otherwise minimal set with few land-level props.

Nevertheless the scene changes with different bench combinations, alhtough ingenious, become a little wearisome when this theatre piece reveals itself increasingly to be written mostly as a televisual and not a stage drama

The actors also have to grapple with clumsy shifts in tone. In addtition to soap style drama and melodrama, there are some, admittedly quite subtle, surreal time shift mash ups and the sudden introduction of an element which reminded TLT of a celebrated plot from now defunct soap Brookside with a touch of Tennessee Williams  and Joe Orton  thrown in for good measure.

TLT did wonder whether the lives of blonde Charlotte and dark haired Kate might eventually merge into one as there is the implication of a circular trajectory to the piece, but this never happened, at least not explicitly.

Instead there are  heartfelt moments, with some effective lines probably garnered from research, and every member of the cast is given an opportunity to shine at some point during the play.

However it's a patchwork of issue driven drama about missing and abused children, while certainly all subject  matter deserving examination, and ready-formed characters yoked uneasily together rather than an organically grown plot.
 
There is an intriguing ambivalence in the character of Greg but ultimately this feels like the first draft of possbilities for a TV drama trying to adhere to a stage format  rather than a thought-through stage drama in its own right and it's an amber light.

Review Dessert

Dessert
by Oliver Cotton

The Last Supper
http://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/

There's a real hunger for plays with a new take on financial inequality and the state we're in. But there has to be a fresh insight and Oliver Cotton's new play, Dessert, directed by Sir Trevor Nunn, seems curiously dated and unrigorous in its analysis.

Financier Sir Hugh Fennell (Michael Simkins) and his wife Gill (Alexandra Gilbreath) are domiciled in the UK in a palatial spread surrounded by a collection of paintings.

They are entertaining an equally affluent Connecticut business associate Wesley Barnes (Stuart Milligan) and his blonde, dippy wife Meredith (Teresa Banham).

And they've just reached dessert.

Loyal factotum Roger (Graham Turner) is about to serve the cheese, after they've gorged on something delicious in a tarragon sauce, when their smug bonhomie is suddenly plunged literally into darkness.

Afghanistan veteran Eddie (Stephen Hagan), terribly maimed during active service, invades their dining room with a gun, having disabled  the mansion's electricity and security system.

He's demanding justice for his stroke-ridden newsagent father who had put all his and his wife's life savings into a Fennell company which subsequently collapsed and from which Sir Hugh had walked away.

We were wondering about the dramatist's choice of the newsagent trade for Eddie's Dad - itself under siege from supermarkets for its core products - print newspapers (which have their own problems), cigarettes and lottery tickets.

However this never developed into anything, although there was, late on, peculiarly a variation on the six Ws, taught to all trainee journalists, which also appears in Ink this season.

We guess it was deliberate that at the start a meal was made, in all senses of the word, of a variety of culinary herbs and that Sir Hugh's surname is Fennell, but we don't for the life of us know why. It's that kind of show.

If it had then become a full-blown satire, with or without herbs, it might have gripped us. But even the trigger event for Eddie seems wildly implausible in a jarring way.

Newsagents have a professional association which also gives some financial pointers. Presumably Eddy's parents were not the only alleged victims of Sir Hugh and his (unmentioned) lawyers and accountants.

Surely, in the age of the internet, those who had lost their money would organise themselves into a pressure group and even, heaven forbid, contact the press? 

But it seems that Eddie's Mum and Dad instead flailed from solicitor to (self) regulatory bodies which were mentioned.

This is a bit of a clunky criticism on our part, picking on what some might see as a small part of the play. Nevertheless, we do feel it's indicative of the comedy drama's force-fed scenarios which simply do not hang together.

In the midst of being held hostage, each of the diners, the hostage taker and the Man Friday launch into speeches filled with a set of under developed, under researched passing references to issues.

Not even a moment when a tap on a glass chimes like the New York Stock Exchange bell can save this play. We get the soundbites but no fresh insights.

On the plus side, a fine cast do what they can with the woefully underdeveloped material and thinly-drawn characters they've been handed. There's also a handsome set from Rachel Stone evoking the mansion and its picture gallery.

Yes, there's been Enron, Bernie Madoff, the Sir Philip Green, Dominic Chappell and the Pension Protection Fund affair and now, tragically, the trail of bank-backed companies involved with the Grenfell Tower fire, amongst many others.

However Dessert feels like simplistic political agit-prop rather than an attempt to grapple wittily and dramatically with the landscape of global finance, wars in the name of defence and public goods falling into private pockets. So it's a famine rather than feast red/amber light.

Review Superhero

Superhero
Book by Michael Conley
Music by Joseph Finlay
Lyrics by Richy Hughes

Mad About The Girl
http://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/show/superhero/

Colin Bradley (Michael Rouse) has arrived for a hearing at the Royal Courts Of Justice. He's in one of the modern pine courtrooms (a simple but very effective set design by Georgia De Grey), nervously reading from the index cards he has already prepared.

Colin's also trying to obey the instructions of his solicitor, Rupert, even though he's the one supposedly instructing the solicitor. It's a tug-of-love case as Colin is trying to win custody of his young teenage daughter Emily whose career-minded Mum Christine wants to emigrate with her to the USA.

The show, directed by Adam Lenson, traces Colin's own journey starting with him being part of a happy family, leaving a job in his parents' construction industry business to becoming a stay-at-home Dad.  Then he has his head turned by apparently unexpectedly landing a leading role in an amateur theatre production and his life as a divorced Dad follows.

There is a committed performance from Michael Rouse as Colin and an excellent three-piece band led by musical director Joe Bunker on piano. Molly Lopresti on percussion contributes much to the play's atmosphere and Stephen Street is on bass.

Thinking about it, TLT has probably only seen one other one-man musical when Benjamin Scheuer came to London with The Lion, a very personal musical memoir of his own relationship with his father.

Superhero is a fictional story told in flashback but it draws mightily on stereotyping the Fathers For Justice campaign and Colin, although the double-edged nature of support from a more militant Dad might have been intriguing if more explored.

Otherwise Superhero follows a fairly predictable path with some clever elements allying Colin's own story with the am dram musical which triggers his adultery and the break up of his marriage. It also puts together a number of recognizable musical theatre styles - Boubil and Schönberg among them - with a few stand out songs, including Other People's Parents and All American Dad. We just wished we could have liked it better as a whole.

It seemed to miss putting some interesting junctures into song in favour of more obvious moments, so for us there was a feel of plodding cliché. We thought also perhaps some of the songs may have come  first and the plot followed after.

The atmosphere of the am dram company is amusingly enough conjured up with the traditional fey director but the Victorian atmosphere of the Royal Courts of Justice and the lone man in the echoing Gothic building foyer is nowhere to be found. The court room could be anywhere in the world and we weren't convinced by the evocation of some London landmarks.

Colin is full of hope for the hearing but then the court's decision seems to fall into a pre-decided template and creates a worse situation for him. We're sure these peaks and troughs are indeed the genuine experience of many such fathers.
 
So it's a pity the see-saw of hope, the beginning of suspicion, the attempt to will away the suspicion, the realisation that nobody is listening and the reality dawning isn't embodied more viscerally in a song. 

This appears to be very much a narrative musical blending a fairly traditional estranged parents and beloved daughter scenario, a transatlantic and European subtext and a breakdown with a wish-fulfilment ending.

However the way the content of the show is arranged made us feel we were always on the outside looking in and much of the narration contained within the songs felt strangely flat.

Still the performance, direction, design, lighting by Sam Waddington and sound by Andy Hinton are all fine. But it felt like a pitch for a show rather than the show itself. It's an amber light.

Review The Island

The Island
by Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona

Sentences For Life
http://www.southwarkplayhouse.co.uk

The Island is a 1973 play of the Cold War South African Apartheid era. Two men are imprisoned on an unnamed island lashed under the regime of a brutal guard. Brutalised by pointless hard labour during the day, they return to each other's company in a cell with only rolled up mats for bedding and a pail in the corner

The gruelling and cruel routine is about to be disrupted - the prisoners have obtained permission for a concert and John (Mark Springer) persuades his cellmate Winston (Edward Dede) to join him in a two-hander production of Greek tragedy Antigone. But the biggest disruption comes from news John receives which threatens the solidarity of the pair. 

The drama charted the experiences of imprisoned actors Norman Ntshinga and Welcome Duru which included a production of Antigone with Nelson Mandela playing King Creon.  Robben Island is always unnamed in The Island, not for any abstract artistic reason, but because any indication of a connection with contemporary places and events in the 1970s would have landed everyone with a sentence - on Robben Island.

The current production, directed by John Terry, proves that The Island has lost none of its power, even if there is now another 21st century context for the audience.

Designer Sammy Dowson's spartan in-the-round raised plinth set triples up, aided by the effective lighting of Alexandra Stafford. First there is the punishing hard labour on the beach where the men, forced to be mute, are set to digging and building up mounds of sand; then the prison cell;  finally the performance space for the play-within-the-play.

The play was a collaboration between writer Athol Fugard with improvisations by actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona. They used material given to them by actor Ntshinga, who was arrested for his political activities on the eve of a production of Antigone in 1965 and was replaced by Kani, and Duru.  

At the time Fugard was working with the group of black actors, the Serpent Players, based in New Brighton, a township just outside of Port Elizabeth, putting on European classics including Sophocles's Greek tragedy and Jean Genet's Deathwatch.

The Island has a tough-minded tenderness. It deliberately grows in complexity both artistically and in ideas as it progresses, while conveying a real situation. In this it shares, somewhat ironically bearing in mind the Cold War situation, the inguenuity of plays produced under Soviet oppression.

Terry wisely takes The Island at face value in a straightforward production which leads the audience from  the grunts of tormented physical effort on the seashore, through the incoherence as they first collapse in the cell.

We partake in the gradual regaining of their humanity and humour, going from monosyllabism to their recollections of life off the island, both accurate and imaginative, debate  and eventually to the resonant script learnt by the characters for the  performance.

The personalities of the two prisoners gradually emerge with engrossing performances by Mark Springer as the single-minded play impressario John and Edward Dede as the increasingly eloquent, put-upon Winston.

Circumstances have obviously changed since this courageous play was first put on but the honesty of the piece still cuts through the years.

The play works on several different levels. The figure of Antigone embodies both weakness and strength. There's also the bravery of the original collaborators (in the best sense of the word) in acknowledging the play's own distance from prison life - neither Kani nor Ntshona ever served prison sentences, as far as we can tell - and the ruthlessness men needed to survive.

For The Island tackles apartheid oppression, injustice and the law, questions of responsibility. However it also exposes the unfair hierarchies within the ranks of the oppressed. For a play that poses uncomfortable but necessary questions, showing why drama at its most truthful is both uncomfortable and necessary, it's a green light.

Review The Cardinal

The Cardinal
by James Shirley

Les Liaisons Dangereuses
http://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/

We have to admit our knowledge of theatre history has hitherto jumped from the Revenge Tragedies to the Restoration plays, and left out the drama of the Caroline era. That is, the era when Charles I ruled before Oliver Cromwell engineered Chaxit and closed down the theatres.

So we are indebted to director Justin Audibert and his cast of James Shirley's 1641 tragicomedy for a sure-footed introduction to this witty chessboard of a play, The Cardinal.

Set in a Spanish court, yes, there's a more than an echo of John Webster's The Duchess Of Malfi with a touch of Measure For Measure.

But playwright Shirley turns out to be a real discovery for us. His own chequered background as a Catholic convert and the uncertain times in which he lived produces a shrewd assmilation of past masterpieces, but also a grasp of contemporary politics, a refreshing attitude to women and lucid, pointed verses.

The widowed Duchess Rosaura (Natalie Simpson), beautiful and smart niece of the King of Navarre (Ashley Cook) has been promised that she can marry the man of her choice. Nevertheless she finds herself coerced into a marriage with rough-hewn Columbo (Jay Saighal), the nephew of the scheming Cardinal (Stephen Boxer).

By hook or by crook she determines to marry the handsome Count D'Alvaraz (Marcus Griffiths) and, by legitimate if tricksy means, achieves her goal except that on her wedding day ...

Ah, dear blog reader, you'll have to skidaddle to Elephant and Castle's Newington Causeway and Southwark Playhouse to find out the often murderous twists and turns which have all the cliffhangers of a boxed set thriller.

Simpson (last seen as Cordelia in the RSC's King Lear) is a slender but tough Duchess, as sharp as the silver edge of a rapier matching the cynical wit of Boxer's scarlet-robed Cardinal with a wily but sceptical turn of phrase.

Timothy Speyer also gives good value as the Secretary evaluating a quick-changing situation. Ashley Cook's King has the stillness and dignity of a portrait amidst a fast moving plot when the country was still weighing up the worth of their own monarch. 

Shirley himself gained the favour of, without being fully a part of the court of, Charles I and his French wife Henrietta Maria.

There is a particular astuteness and scepticism which marks Shirley, also a grammarian and schoolmaster as well as a playwright, apart from those other playwrights he draws upon, making him appeal to a modern sensibility.

Anna Reid's light gray marble set gives a sense of the echoing halls of the Caroline era where swords clash in Bret Yount's excitingly choreographed fights   And surely those were not the chimes of Big Ben we heard in the midst of the chorals in Max Pappenheim's subtle echoing soundscape?

For a new perspective on an era and a remarkably clear-sighted play given a production of elegance and wry humour, we eschew the scarlet for a green light.    

Review The Diary Of A Teenage Girl

The Diary Of A Teenage Girl
by Marielle Heller
From The Graphic Novel By Phoebe Gloekner

Minnie In Sexland
http://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/

There's something rather askew about the production of The Diary Of A Teenage Girl currently running at Southwark Playhouse. That's not just because of Andrew Riley's ingenious set and the deliberately comic strip aura.

There's just a damned sight too much sweet in what is at heart a very sour story and while 1970s' tweedom works for a while, we longed finally for the set to fall away and the reality of the back wall to intrude.

The play is adapted from Phoebe Gloeckner's 2002 graphic novel which was turned into a play eight years later by movie director Marielle Heller before directing a well-received movie.

This ostensibly is a San Francisco coming-of-age tale of 15 year old Minnie Goetz (Rona Morison), aspiring to be a cartoonist with a new age single Mom (Rebecca Trehearn). With an ex-step-father Pascal (Mark Carroll), an editor of scientific journals, on the sidelines, Minnie half initiates and half is sucked into a life of underage sex with Monroe (Jamie Wilkes) whose doctrince seems to be bed the Mom, bed the daughter (without Mom's knowledge). 

There's something more to this play than simply the  life of a girl as we think we caught glimpses of something as weighty as the late 20th century history of the comic strip and the McCarthy-like criticism of the comic book and push towards French continental-style censorship in the 1950s' The Seduction Of The Innocent 

However structurally it's rather an awkward piece written as if were a series of comic book frames which doesn't quite come off on stage. As it is, this production, directed by Alexander Parker and Amy Ewbank, relies heavily on the strength of Rona Morison's central performance. Skinny, pale-skinned, auburn-haired, she definitely fits the bill, even if the play itself remains somewhat effortful.

There's rather a disconnect between the audio diary - dictated to a retro cassette player - and the projected cartoons (video designer Nina Dunn, additional drawings and animation Emma Abel), Minnie's ambition in life. It struck us she would have been more likely to have poured everything into her comic strips. Indeed it's rare to see her pick up a pen and draw - all the cartoons including the action within the play seem ready-made for her.

The play also rather bombards us with signposting that THIS IS THE 1970s rather than allowing the story to breathe. The story of Patti Hearst and her Mom's empathy for Patti obviously means something but it feels thrown away.

More uncomfortably, the play itself never quite hits a tone which makes us truly understand Minnie's point of view. In some of its unintended flippancy (and goodness knows there is plenty of intended flippancy) as a pornographic comic book world envelops her and her friend Kimmie (Saskia Strallen), it can seem like salaciousness rather than the viewpoint of the young woman. 

In other words, we felt, without knowing the original comic book or the successful movie, the play is maybe less dramatically successful in bringing to life the complex crossover between the social events and news stories of the time, the rise of pornography and drugs alongside the recording industry and the peculiar and rather askew vision of Cold War psychiatry and psychotherapy.

Still, the cast is excellent, the soundtrack packed with memorable songs from the 1970s  and the pacy direction from Parker and Ewbank keeps the attention.  Even if this TLT upper range amber light play feels as if it needs a more raw social and political dimension than a polished nostalgic evocation.

Review Roundelay

Roundelay
by Sonja Linden

A Lion Of A Play Tamed
http://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/

Even if performances of Arthur Schnitzler's La Ronde proliferate, we have a confession to make. No, we haven't made a threesome with your husband/wife/partner, TLT, the motorised dominatrix and - No, no, no! Our confession is that we have never, ever seen a production of La Ronde before.

So we were looking forward to Roundelay, a waltz of short plays linked by one character jumping from one to the next, from Visible, a theatre company of older actors. For this was inspired in structure by the risqué Viennese classic.

However having done a bit of research and on the strength of this production, we are inclined to agree with Andrew Haydon's 2009 analysis of British versions. They are just rather tame, sow's ears rather than silk purses.

For this seemed like a dutiful rather distinctive adaptation by playwright Sonja Linden. Yes, there is a would-be edgier historical, political and showbusiness subtext. Although  maybe subtext is too strong a word  - gestures towards a subtext being more apt.

We are invited in by the "ringmistress" (Clare Perkins), complete with lion and tiger tamer's whip, to the "circus of life".  Nothing wrong with a cliché as long as it's developed in more surprising twists and turns than in this production. While gestures towards a circus ring include a smidgeon of aerial acrobatics, this ring of seven plays unfortunately does not set the bar so high using predictable soap opera tropes.

Lives revolve around weddings, sexuality, divorces, illness and decline and sudden deaths with the ringmistress commenting on the interlocking tales.Again nothing wrong with that but the stories are curiously old fashioned and lack wit and originality.

While there is one business theme, noone worries about money. The expiration of a visa should feel topical but simply feels like an inserted plot device.

The piece tries hard to achieve a fable-like quality and we did wonder whether it might work better as a musical, of which more later. Still, Perkins as our hostess makes the most that she can out of the on-the-nose dialogue and wrings humour out of the interaction with the audience.   

While the circus antics and pierrot musicanship  (Ru Hamilton) inject a little liveliness into the proceedings, this feels like a play which has its structure ready-made, but doesn't know quite what to do with it.

In fact, the circus theme also feels like out-of-date whimsy, while the pierrot  draws on 1960s' Marcel Marceau's Bip The Clown act and the craze for fey miming that it spawned.

If the circus were in some way integrated into the script during the show, with a meaning for the lives we encounter, it would feel more pointed. But it seems to be an external flourish. The stories could quite happily stand without the stock worldly wisdom of the ringmistress narrator's comments.

The more colourful,  active framework with the pierrot playing a range of instruments - a highlight setting up an emotional heart sorely missed elsewhere - only serves to emphasize the plodding nature of the stories it contains

While we've said the stories are predictable, it seems a tad unfair to give them away if you want to go and see for yourself. Suffice to say, sex, desire, love and dementia are dominant threads (but no hint of the venereal disease which the original La Ronde implied) .

The strongest, most relaxed performance, and probably the most sympathetic role, comes from Annie Firbank as Evelyn the attractive widowed landlady to Francophone African architect trainee Daniel (Elan James).

It did strike us that it felt like a work gagging for some songs to inject some emotional weight. We wondered indeed whether Stephen Sondheim or similar  had ever considered La Ronde for musical theatre. Googling afterwards we found that indeed there is the possibility that A Little Night Music was influenced by La Ronde.

It transpired there was a flop 1969 musical from Jerry Douglas and Hal Jordan which ran for a total of 11 performances but it now turns out a John La Chiusa musical based on La Ronde, Hello Again, is being transformed into a movie.

We certainly had the best will in the world to see a play dedicated to the "third age" succeed and the 10-strong cast gave it their best shot.

In the end, on its own merit regardless of age, this felt like a rather effortful and, despite the addition of aerial acrobatics from Anna Simpson and plenty of red noses on display, flat evening.

The sub-Cabaret framing device needed more development by director Anna Ledwich to bring out the tiger in this work and it's a rather regretful lower-range amber light from TLT

Review The Tempest

Shakespeare's enchanted isle weaves its rich and strange spell on Carolin Kopplin in an enticingly musical, cross-gender production.

The Tempest
by William Shakespeare

Bewitched, Bothered And Bewildered
http://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/

This pared-down version of William Shakespeare's final play provides a rather superficial but still engaging production with some outstanding performances.

Actor musicians greet the audience as they seat themselve on three sides of stage, providing an exotic and welcoming atmosphere. Then the drumming ceases abruptly as Prospero (Sarah Malin) makes her entrance for her first monologue.

The sorcereress, Prospero, ruler of this strange island, is the rightful Duchess of Milan, overthrown by her treacherous brother Antonio (Gemma Lawrence) and his accomplice King Alonso of Naples (Stanton Plummer-Cambridge).

When Prospero learns that her enemies are sailing past the island she conjures up a storm to shipwreck them with the help Ariel (Peter Caulfield), one of the spirits on the island who was imprisoned by the witch Sycorax before Prospero freed him to use his services for her own needs.

Directed by Amy Draper, this production proffers a fresh approach combining Shakespeare's language with beguiling dance and music, creating a magical world solely with percussion (excellently performed by Andrew Meredith) and sound effects (music Candida Caldicot) on an otherwise bare stage. Yet this version's short running time leaves very little room for character development which works against the performers.

The cast, save for Sarah Malin and Peter Caulfield, all play a variety of characters. Minor costume changes imply sudden switches into different characters which can, at times, be somewhat distracting but are usually well-executed.

Malin's Prospero rules with a quiet authority, using the graceful Ariel and the crude Caliban at her pleasure. Caulfield's Ariel is a delicate, vulnerable creature. Yet he remains detached and understated, with a sweetly ethereal singing voice, moving swiftly across the stage despite being wrapped in a strait jacket.

Meanwhile Plummer-Cambridge's Caliban is a damaged creature, dethroned like Prospero and therefore bitter and resentful, yet too ignorant to progress. Benjamin Cawley's Ferdinand is so full of life that Miranda, played by Gemma Lawrence, quite understandably falls head over heels in love with him.

The clown scenes involving Trincula (Lawrence again) and Stephano (Cawley) are well devised and the comedy works, particularly the image of the four-legged monster created by Caliban and Trincula.

Another highlight is the wedding dance performed by Prospero, Miranda and Ferdinand and accompanied by a myriad of invisible inhabitants of the island. Nevertheless, the most touching scenes belong to Ariel and Prospero, defining their unique relationship. So, even if this truncated version has its flaws, there is still enough humanity and enchantment to merit an amber/green light. 

Review punkplay

punkplay
by Gregory S Moss

Mean Boys
http://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/

Ah, the 1980s,  still the age of the compact music cassette. When yours truly would untangle her favourite mix tape which had unravelled after heavy duty use  using the high tech method of a pencil pushed into the take up reel. Those were the days!

Written in 2009, punkplay (which has adult content) harks back to the era before the fall of the Berlin Wall, when trickle-down economic theory and Star Wars defence systems courtesy of President Ronald Reagan ruled the roost. By the 1980s, the punk movement had gushed up like a juddering spluttering geyser before entering the mainstream pool of culture. But this play seems to ask,  was it allowed its day, then trained and diverted?

Somewhere in small town America (maybe in Oregon to judge by a T-shirt)  resides early teens' Mickey in his own room. Not luxurious by any standards but his own room. Into this tumbles Duck, thrown out by his Dad for refusing to go to military school and ravenous, gulping down the sweets that Mickey offers him.

They watch the images which bombard their lives - chiefly TV and video, while flaliling and spurting out their teenage rage (rage, we would say, rather than angst). Snapshort scenes follow snapshot scenes - a playlist, we're told of the punk era.

Or as Gregory S Moss, the playwright in  a quote from the progarmme introduction says: "The Land of P|unk was, and is an aspirational place, just over the rainbow where weirdos congregate and make angry, funny subversive for each other in opposition to dominant culture."

It struck us, it would have great to have been there at the origin of the play - the first reading, awesome for the actors who first created the roles.  But if the play was only about the rebellious punk movement, it would have been a grim irony if it were given more than one performance, cloned from a set script.

This is a play as much about the Regan era and the psychological impact of video (and musical instrument) technology. The age of the Russians in Afghanistan, of freak shows, of unprecedented access to porn before the advent of the internet.

It's superbly acted (sll on  roller skates - a 1980s' craze which found its way into Kander and Ebb's The Rink and Lloyd Webber and Stilgoe's Starlight Express) by Matthew Castle as Duck and Sam Perry as the more gawkey, geeky bespectacled Mickey.

From the outside comes Jack Sunderland as first wave punk Chris, an object of adulation but also division for the boys. And an object of desire, in goth-like attire apart from the pink bow and pom pom, Aysha Kala as Sue Giki, a mistress of the pose and pause.  

It's directed with verve by Tom Hughes who manages impressively to pace the 85 minute onc-act play which needs some exquisite timing, although we admit to finding a few longeurs in the latter half.

Still, the undisciplined anger of the play comes through with energy and humour in their own DIY bedroom gigs. Even the cryptic arrival of a hardcore duo from Montreal (also Sunderland and Kala), a  phantasmagoric episode prompted by sexual frustration and substance or alcohol abuse with a Toni-Basil like cheerleader (Kala again) with the head of - no, we won't give it away - go see!

And, hey, let's not forget the pathos.

Cécile Trémolières' set is almost cassette-shaped with its flat wall with windows on either far side and a middle with a chewed-chewing-gum coloured heavy curtain in the middle. The latter draws back to reveal reams of magnetic gold strips hanging down behind a set of drums and an electric guitar which are all part of our twosome's rite of passage.

This is a play which, it seems to us, tries to encapsulate the anarchy of a brief few years, but also, how counter to this, the impetus was eventually harnassed and its out-of-context manic qualities brought disturbingly into the military and academia.

It's a curious amalgam of a show full of potent images, a coming-of-age story, so beloved of the 1980s and later, and more fearfully, charts rage and sexual frustration to  be used or abused. So it's not all mohawk hairstyles, spikes and safety pin fashion - an upper range amber light from your own energetic, theatre-pogoing twosome.

Review Allegro

Allegro
Book and Lyrics Oscar Hammerstein II
Music Richard Rodgers

Notes From A Small Town
http://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/ 

A new day and a new musical - new to us, that is! Allegro, a lesser known 1947 Rogers and Hammerstein show which followed Oklahoma!, the movie musical State Fair and Carousel in their canon and before they thematically travelled outside the United States for South Pacific.

In Rodgers and Hammerstein terms, it was a flop, although still notched up a respectable 315 Broadway performances and even, according to some accounts, made a small profit, although it failed to transfer to London for a run.

Inspired in theme by Our Town, the plot follows the life of Joseph Taylor jr (Gary Tushaw), the son of a doctor (Steve Watts), in rural small town America.

In a kind of Portrait of The Medic As A Young Man (and maybe influenced by Scottish novel The Citadel),  we're taken on a psychological and literal journey from Joe's birth in 1905 to his midlife crisis  after he finds his medical ideals tarnished by Chicago hospital boards, trustees and big business.

And in Thom Southerland's engaging production, it feels like a transitional piece, a show deliberately exploring and willing to confront unfinished business.

After a quick Google about American politics in this period, we feel, in some ways, the trajectory of this musical with unresolved finale reflects a question mark hanging over American government at the time.

Harry S Truman had become president following FD Roosevelt's premature death and was trying to push through his "Fair Deal" with its call for universal health insurance, never enacted during his tenure, and the giving of federal aid for the construction of hospitals in poorer areas of America. 

Indeed there may even be a direct political musical reference with the first song Joseph Taylor Jr reminding us of a July Garland hit, written by Harold Rome, Franklin D Roosevelt Jones.

Allegro, of course, is an Italian word, both a musical term for "fast, quickly and bright" and a dance term meaning brisk or fast steps incorporating any step where a dancer jumps. The choreography for the 16-strong cast by Lee Proud is equally bright and breezy with Dean Austin leading a band of eight with keys, bass, drums, reeds, trumpet, trombone and French horn. 

Played in the traverse, it dawned (we hope correctly!) on TLT and her own little motorised helpmate that the mobile ladders and configurations designed by Alexander Lamble reflected musical, as well as wooden, staves so that the cast itself becomes part of a visual musical notation.

So this innovative show with fragmented songs and choric commentary works on several levels.

A visual musical composition, a straightforward, some would say hokey tale, of a young man drawn away from his vocation to keep up an affluent lifestyle which had become far more precarious since the Wall Street Crash, the career and compromises of Rodgers and Hammerstein themselves and the politcal atmosphere of the time.

While some may criticise the lyrics of songs like"A Fellow Needs A Girl", it struck us with harder edged songs such as The Gentleman Is A Dope sung with characterful verve and vigour by Kate Bernstein as Nurse Emily West and the title song Allegro about the tempo of modern life and money, there's more to this piece than a homely fable. Juxtaposition brings irony and hope.

This is an enjoyable production of a rarely-seen piece. Emily Bull brings depth and takes the audience along with her in  the role of wayward, ambitious wife Jennie while Julia J Nagel displays soaring vocals as watchful mother Marjorie.

It's perhaps not a perfect show, but then life ain't perfect either and we give Allegro an uncompromised green light for a delicately precise and tender production.       

Review Vassa Zheleznova

Vassa Zheleznova

by Maxim Gorky

in a new version by Emily Juniper

Turning The Tide
http://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/show/vassa-zheleznova/

TLT still thinks fondly of The Onedin Line, the Liverpool-based shipping saga on the BBC in the 1970s, originally envisaged as a contemporary tale but eventually transposed to the nineteenth century when the creator found shipping companies at the time to be run by anonymous corporate boards instead of dynamic entrepreneurs.

TLT's own landlocked hatchback sailboat  also gives a gentle reminder how we relished greatly the cheesily enjoyable Onassis which still managed to elegantly illustrate dramatically networks of oil pipelines.

Playwright and artist Emily Juniper has now adapted Maxim Gorky's play Vassa Zheleznova, with the eponymous  matriarch (played by Siân Polhill-Thomas) ruling a 1990s' Liverpool shipping dynasty.  

She married into the family after being seduced when an underage groupie by her husband Sergei (Luke Shaw), who had briefly found fame as a rock star.  Now, in the midst of the 1995 Liverpool dockers' strike, Vassa desperately attempts to hold business and family together after the death, in which she has a hand, of her criminally depraved and publicly shamed husband.

Maxim Gorky based Vassa on real-life pre Russian Revolution upper class female shipping magnates. In his play she presides over a family losing its grip on power amidst blackmail, murder and child molestation.

The Liverpool dockers' strike, which had international ramifications, was actually about a privatised dock company (albeit with a substantial government shareholding)  and the sacking of hundreds of dockers for secondary picketing rather than involving a family-owned business. Juniper makes an interesting attempt to fuse state, local government, unions and political factions into one woman and her family which doesn't quite come off.

Vassa Zheleznova is played out in the smaller black box Southwark Playhouse studio on a modular stage which is unclipped and shifted during the 90 minutes' running time. Vassa sits in her office silently smoking, echoing the famous low down and dirty image of Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct. Around her, on the docks, the dockers in sou'westers man the picket lines, their undefined mutterings possibly also the sound of radio messages on global marine highways.

So far, so good but the production as the story gets underway is marred, especially at the start, with some characters' voices dropping (too much like film acting!) and the meeting point of Scouse accent and audibility not always found. We were sitting in the third row and occasionally the sightlines were poor, causing us to miss some vital moments.  

The story itself is strong and the melding of Liverpool with the Russian named characters gives an international flavour. But, having determined to follow an overblown (in the best sense of the word), soap opera/thriller style, the production seems to lose the courage of its convictions.

What could be, at least at first before descending into mayhem and pathos, a carnival of fascinating and witty grotesques living a shameless monied existence never lives up to its potential. 

Polhill-Thomas as the eponymous anti-heroine who shoots seagulls for fun does what she can but her repartee lacks the necessary demonic wit to fascinate us. There's good work from Andy McLeod as Vassa's dissolute army veteran brother, also once part of Sergei's rock combo, who dreams drunkenly of a come-back. Equally so from Christopher Hughes, as a double-dealing company spy (reflecting real-life infiltration of the Liverpool dockers) and boyfriend of the public school dropout daughter Natalia played by Nicole Hartley. 

Amelia Donkor also impresses in her doubling as the sexually harassed office junior Lisa and Rachel, environmental activists' leader (again weaving in neatly a real-life situation) and Vassa's daughter-in-law. As Anna, Kate Sawyer is the recognisably sensible personal assistant in a world gone wrong, while Joss Wyre is the second daughter with fey idealistic notions.

So the concept is terrific, the clumsy execution less so.  There are highlights, particularly a tableau near the end when director Rachel Valentine-Smith brings the circle of corruption and vulnerability into visual focus. So, those times of insight and the general concept  of this adaptation just about gain the production an amber light.   

Review Darknet

Darknet

By Rosie Lewenstein 

Living The (Virtual) Dream 
www.southwarkplayhouse.co.uk

There's a marvellous quote in the publicity of Rosie Lewenstein's unicorn drama Darknet: 

 "You’re not even a fully formed person yet. Your face is still changing and your bones are still growing but already there’s a detailed map of your personality out there ..." 

Somewhere out there, there's a monstrous spawn of data embryos being farmed, literally millions of little corporate bodies with the most slender but tenacious of umblical cords attached to the wallets of all citizens from birth. And we are all uncertain, soft-boned unformed adolescents in this man-made commercially-driven virtual universe. 

The sprawling, scattergun 140 minute play though doesn't live up to the promise of the incisive hook-in, lacking the rigour to follow through fully its implications and the wit to make us to make us catch our breath and re-examine our fetters to this interconnected, cross-referenced cybersphere.

The "real" Darknet, for the uninitiated, is the deep web, an anonymous, uncensored space hidden by encryption. Misused by criminals to sell drugs, weapons and child abuse images. But also a conduit of free expression for human rights' activists, dissidents and journalists seeking to expose corruption. 

Darknet the play is a busy production with frames,  video screens and ipad puppetry, although with scene changes directed with some fluidity by Russell Bender. 

Eventually all the characters in this piece do interconnect, curated into a transatlantic parallel courtroom scene but too often thought-provoking analysis is cut short. Still, there are glimpses of potentially interesting characters and fascinating situations if the play were heavily pruned.  

Jim English catches distinctively something of the public perception of hacker Gary McKinnon and leaves a strong impression as lanky, intense teen bedroom hacker Jamie with Robin Berry as his harassed Dad.  

Ella McLoughlin has a persuasive sweetness and confusion as adolescent Kyla who turns out to have the dubious honour of having a computer virus named after her. 

Despite a conventional webcam sex trade story, Greer Dale-Foulkes' Candy also manages to connect touchingly with the audience, as well as Gyuri Sarossy's evangelical US tech company executive Allen. 

But, among other weaknesses, the script fails to develop Allen's central role and allows him little leeway as more than a tool for entry into the world of home technology gone rogue, mental breakdown and a very, very questionable (well, actually, plain wrong - see Myth #5)  conclusion about data dumped in the "public domain". 

Naveed Khan fares better with the sharper-scripted Asian boss John, in contrast with his other thinner role of jailed veteran hacker Gary. 

There are a few acute one-liners to match the publicity quote - the male simulcrum (Robin Berry again) who lets his master know "I am programmed to be a feminist". Also some hints of programmed phrases and computer studio set ups. And there's a brave attempt to fuse form and content.  

There's the initial auspicious premise of unicorn start up's Octopus Inc advertising blurb of pseudo-empowerment: "The more you share, the more you earn.. you're rolling in data!" set against Kyla's Mum Stacey (Rosie Thomson), trying to wean herself off heroin, but worried how her online Octopus id and rating might be affected.  

But these are over-powered by a curiously dated feel to the storylines. TLT and her tech savvy hatchback were sometimes reminded of the 1995 movie Hackers,  with Darknet's East European storyline and  name-and-shame perversion of the game show seeming also like well-worn themes. And the new technology comic set scenes even managed to remind TLT of 1960s' sketch show Rowan & Martin's Laugh In joke wall!

So there may still be space for a play about how far copyright of our data souls should be a human right and not corporate property. In the meantime, Darknet is more stimulating than chatting to a chatbot but it only just slips into an amber light.