Review Queen Anne

Francis Beckett delights in a play on Britain's last Stuart monarch which is both perceptive about its two real-life heroines and a tremendous theatrical success. 

Queen Anne
by Helen Edmundson

A Right Royal Drama
http://www.trh.co.uk/

Queen Anne was in many ways a tragic figure.  She had seventeen pregnancies, but gave birth to only three live children, none of whom lived beyond the age of eleven. Her biographer Anne Somerset writes in the theatre programme that she was “poorly educated, chronically shy and disabled by agonising arthritic attacks.”

She did her best nonetheless to fulfil the duties imposed on her by the iron laws of heredity, and to cope with the vigorous and vitriolic political atmosphere of the time.

Indeed, Helen Edmundson’s play opens with a guilty pleasure, an appallingly hurtful but hilarious satirical song about her inability to have children. This has her trying to deliver a child, but delivering only something unnamed which apparently rhymes with art.

The drama focusses on her relationship with Sarah, wife of John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough, from whom Sir Winston Churchill was descended. Sarah was the opposite of Anne: clever, beautiful, confident, ambitious. The two were the closest of friends, then the bitterest of enemies.

This tense, tightly written and tautly plotted play charts their relationship. Its respect for the known facts would surely win the approval of Hilary Mantel, but it also weaves them into a gripping yet often very funny play.

From the start we are on the side of the needy and manipulative Anne, yet never cease to care about what happens to the brave and manipulative Sarah, whose sophisticated political antennae seem to abandon her after the death of her son.

The script has not a single unnecessary word in it – nothing is spelled out if it can be left to the audience to work it out – and Natalie Abrahami’s direction in this RSC production reflects that economy. Hannah Clark’s set is splendid yet discreet. It knows its place. It is there to supplement the dialogue, not substitute for it.

Yet it is the two central performances on which the evening stands or falls - Emma Cunniffe’s Anne and Romola Garai’s Sarah -  and they are both wonderful.

Cunniffe and Garai capture both the humanity and the political power struggle in a way that easily stands comparison with Mark Rylance’s Cromwell in Mantel's Wolf Hall.

This is one of the best and most gripping evenings in the theatre I can remember for a long time. That's not just because I know a little of the history. For I took with me a South African cousin who knew nothing of Queen Anne, and she was as gripped by the human and political drama as I was. A green light to rush to the Theatre Royal Haymarket.

Review Sand In The Sandwiches

Francis Beckett admires both the subject of the one-man play and the actor playing him but feels the two are not a perfect match.

Sand in the Sandwiches
by Hugh Whitemore  

Betjemanland
http://www.trh.co.uk/

I so wanted to love Sand in the Sandwiches.

John Betjeman’s a guilty pleasure for me. A left wing chap of a certain age doesn’t like to admit that he’d rather have Betjeman than fellow poets Auden or Spender any day, but I would.

I admire Edward Fox, whose long acting career has provided us with many memorable performances, and who is now admirably sustaining a one-man performance as Betjeman in the vast Theatre Royal Haymarket at the age of 80.

The mix in this play about Betjeman’s life and work as he approached his fiftieth birthday,  was about right, with some qualifications.  It is a judicious mixture of old favourites – the show starts, as is only right and proper, with one of his best known poems Miss Joan Hunter-Dunn – and some less well-known works, together with lengthy extracts from Betjeman’s verse autobiography Summoned by Bells, plus some extra biographical information.

Into the mix, writer Hugh Whitemore has chucked a few funny stories with a pretty flimsy connection to Betjeman, such as what Winston Churchill said when he saw a picture of the woman Labour politician Tom Driberg was to marry: “Well, buggers can’t be choosers.”

So what’s the problem?  The problem is that Edward Fox doesn’t convince as Betjeman. It’s not just that he’s quite unlike Betjeman physically – though he is.  It’s that he is like Edward Fox - tall, elegant, handsome, slightly raddled Edward Fox, with a lovely voice and distinguished longeurs.

When he ends a love poem on a note of despair – “Little, alas, to you I mean/ For I am old and bald and green” it makes complete sense coming from the portly, untidy Betjeman, but none at all coming from neatly elegant Fox. 

When he describes his schooldays, you can see that the boy in the poem – unsporty and aesthetic – grew up to be John Betjeman.  The boy who might have grown up to be Edward Fox is Betjeman’s nemesis, not mentioned in this show:

“Percival Mandeville, the perfect boy
“Was all a schoolmaster could wish to see –
“Upright and honourable, good at games,
“Well build, blue eyed; a sense of leadership
“Lifted him head and shoulders from the crowd.”

So it is, to some extent, with the selection of Betjeman’s poetry offered here. We learn from the play that Betjeman had a patrician distaste for post Second World War state planning – as he did.  We do not learn that Betjeman disliked Thatcherite capitalism even more:

“You ask me what it is I do. Well, actually, you know,
“I’m partly a liaison man and partly PRO.
“Essentially I integrate the current export drive
“And basically I’m viable from ten o’clock till five.”

A lifetime ago, when I was a sixth former, I found in the local library a recording of Betjeman reading Summoned by Bells.

Some poets do their own work no favours when they read them – think of that ancient scratchy recording of Hilaire Belloc massacring Tarantella – but Betjeman read his poetry wonderfully, and made Summoned by Bells an extension of his rather quirky, if sometimes disingenous, personality.

Hearing Edward Fox recite it beautifully, I yearned to hear Betjeman recite it less beautifully. Still, Fox does recite beautifully.

Director Gareth Armstrong moves him about the stage enough to make it interesting, and not so much as to make it distracting, and Fotini Dimou’s simple set is just what it should be – a moody backdrop which knows its place and doesn’t try to take over.

It’s not as good as the real thing, but it’s an enjoyable evening in the theatre, well worth an amber/green light.

Review The Goat, Or Who Is Sylvia

A wonderful cast, director and designer cannot totally redeem for Francis Beckett a play that milks one idea over the course of nearly two hours.

The Goat, Or Who Is Sylvia
by Edward Albee

For The Kid
http://www.trh.co.uk/

A man is having an affair and his wife finds out. It’s a commonplace story. Except that the co-respondent is a goat.

That’s all really. Except that the couple’s gay son is as shocked and angry as his mother, and there’s a rather melodramatic denouement which I shall not disclose.

As it happens, just around the corner from the huge, splendid Haymarket Theatre, you can see Edward Albee’s masterpiece, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, also featuring a husband and wife tearing chunks of flesh out of each other, at the much less grand Harold Pinter Theatre. I have not yet seen that production, but it’s a magnificent play, and I wondered whether Who Is Sylvia would match up to it.

It doesn’t. It’s entertaining, gut-wrenching in parts, and magnificently served by cast and production team, but Who is Sylvia? is not Albee at his best.

There is a lot of clever, witty dialogue, and the comic possibilities of a distinguished architect explaining his sexual liaison with a goat are milked mercilessly.

Making him erudite and pedantic is also a useful way of getting additional laughs from the situation. It allows the author to have him interrupt the most emotional or horrified outpouring with a grammatical correction.

Having him go to a support group provides a richly comic scene, beginning with his wife’s description of it as “goatfuckers anonymous.” Of course, all the people at the support group have had affairs with different animals.

A lot of the time, it’s wonderful fun.  My fear is that Albee intended the play to be something much more elevated than wonderful fun. Every so often I felt I discerned a message creeping malignantly around, but I was never sure what it was.

But Albee did subtitle it “Notes Towards a Definition of Tragedy”, and a programme note from Dr Helen Eastman of Oxford University tells us the play looks “right back to ancient Greek tragedy and reinvents the form for our chaotic times.” I expect it does, squire, but I’m damned if I saw it.

“No doubt” continued Dr Eastman “it made Albee smile that the word ‘tragedy’ (trag-ōdia) in ancient Greek  literally means ‘goat song."  No doubt it did.

What I saw was quite an entertaining evening at the theatre, watching over-the-top but mostly almost believable characters.

In less capable hands, I fear this play could be tedious, for it makes one idea stretch almost to breaking point.  But director, designer and cast combined to make this a truly magnificent production.

As architect and wife, Damian Lewis and Sophie Okonedo turn in wonderful, noisy, hilarious, sensitive performances.

In the hands of these masterly performers, simple events like Lewis forgetting the name of an old friend’s son or Okonedo smashing a plate in anger can make you laugh and cry at the same time.  And though it is an all-English cast, the American accents of all four actors are flawless.

Director Ian Rickson makes the best possible use of the space, of the actors, and of Rae Smith’s brilliant set, all spacious living and bare brick, unmistakeably the home of a prosperous American architect.

Not quite top marks, but an amber/green light for an interesting and entertaining evening at the theatre, watching top-class actors at the top of their game.

Review Much Ado About Nothing

Francis Beckett admires a beguiling Benedick and distinctive Don John in the RSC's Much Ado About Nothing but finds the 1918 setting unconvincing

Much Ado About Nothing
by William Shakespeare

Making A Home Fit For A Hero 
https://www.rsc.org.uk/haymarket

The decision to set Much Ado About Nothing at the end of the First World War sounds like a good idea, since the play starts with the men returning from war.

But, like a lot of good ideas for making Shakespeare work better for audiences nowadays, it struggles to survive its confrontation with parts of the text. 

There are some splendid things in it, the best of which is Edward Bennett's witty, sardonic Benedick with a touch of self-mockery and impeccable comic timing.

The first scene of raillery between Benedick and Beatrice is very well done, with every ounce of humour extracted from Shakespeare's very clever dialogue.

When hidden Benedick is gulled into believing Beatrice has declared her love for him, it is laugh-out-loud funny. This is achieved by making the best use of Shakespeare's own funny dialogue and building the business round it.

But it's followed by a dreadfully unfunny scene where the comic possibilities are overlooked in which the same happens to Beatrice. And the relaxed, urbane Benedick contrasts strangely with Lisa Dillon's stressed and ambivalent Beatrice.

The clowns don't work at all. Director Christopher Luscombe seems to have taken the view that the words are not especially funny and he needs to extract his laughs by means of rather too forced and over-the-top slapstick. 

Nick Haverson's Dogberry roars out his lines, and does his best to make us laugh by imitating disabilities which are not at all funny. At one point I was left with the impression he was pretending to have Parkinson's Disease.

Any version of Much Ado About Nothing has to address one main problem: How to make believable and acceptable Hero's passive and grateful acceptance back of the fiancé who, on the flimsiest of evidence, so brutally denounced her in public, at the altar on her wedding day.

Indeed I have never seen a production without nurturing a momentary hope she will give his second proposal of marriage a two-word answer, the second word being "off".

The 1918 setting makes this even harder to pull off. It was the year women got the vote in Britain - only women over 30, it is true. 

But, while Britain was still a patriarchal society, women were not handed over to their future husbands by their fathers like cattle in the way Hero is handed to Claudio.

Rebecca Collingwood's charming but passive Hero smiles and simpers her way through the play. There's not much else to be done, it seems to me. Tunji Kasim does his best to make Claudio's stupidity believable.

The villain of the piece, the man who frames Hero, is Don John. I have always thought him one of the most interesting characters in Much Ado About Nothing, and he is here given a World War One injury that requires him to use a crutch.

Sam Alexander plays him quietly and makes him intriguing as well as menacing. But why is his brother Don Pedro played by someone - John Hodgkinson - who seems, though a fine actor, to be easily old enough to be his brother's father? 

There are many good things about this production of one of Shakespeare's best comedies, but there is too much wrong with it to merit more than an amber light.    

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 How The Other Half Loves

How The Other Half Loves

By Alan Ayckbourn

How Clean Is Your House?

http://www.trh.co.uk/

TLT has a confession to make - she and her joined-at-the-chassis companion have now seen the latest production of How The Other Half Loves, an early 1969 Ayckbourn once, nay twice ... Rather appropriate for a play with twin scenery mash-up (of which more later) focussing on two households on the same stage.

For it seemed only fair and rather apt to have  a re-view rather than just a review of a preview (are you keeping up?) as, on top of the usual farcical choreography, the split between households make it fiendishly difficult fto stage. And according to this Terri Paddock podcast the play has only had three weeks' rehearsal with veteran Ayckbourn director Alan Strachan.

It's the late sixties and Frank Foster (a magnificently dangerously bumbling Nicholas Le Prevost) and Bob Phillips (watchful wide-boy Jason Merrells ) work in the same - never-named - firm. In fact they live only a short bus ride away, but they might as well be living on different planets except for one thing ...

While Bob's wife Terry (Tamzin Outhwaithe in dayglo mini dresses and shiny pink plastic boots!), short for Theresa, neglects the housework, penning feminist letters to the Editor of The Guardian in between baby feeds and nappy changes, Bob occupies himself with Frank's cut-glass beauty wife Fiona (Jenny Seagrove).

The regime of bickering accusations and underhand dealings in the Phillips' household and imperial old-school-tie combined with expert  hostess with the mostest, whose dress sense ranges from chic-Barbara-Castle to French couture, in the Foster's seems set to continue for ever ... Ah, except for one thing ...

Both Fiona and Bob invent an alibi for a Wednesday evening tryst involving accountant William (tyro-husband and obsequious employee Matthew Cottle)  and his mousey put-upon wife Mary.

Lives and dirty dealings unravel in a royally messy twin-time scale debacle with dinner parties on consecutive nights but played at the same time. And  the unwitting Featherstones swivel on their chairs through time and space, going from the Fosters' colonial cuisine to the Phillips' far-from-electrifying 1960s' supermarket convenience foods.

Was it worth seeing the show twice? Very definitely yes. Nicholas Le Prevost is an  experienced hand whose performances are finely judged down to the position of his napkin,  keeping the production pivoting around him. Ditto for Jenny Seagrove, utterly convincing when switching tactics with an (almost) unflappable glacial ease as the diplomatic adulterous wife.

But it's the Phillips and the Featherstones who profit most from the three days' interlude between TLT's visits. The moves tightened and quickened up on the large Haymarket stage with the relationships and subtext  deepened.

The accountant and his wife react  to the dual dinner party as if operated by an electric switch to swap between dining rooms and houses with design by Julie Godfrey. Upper class Surrey imperiousness  flashes to  upwardly mobile conflicted welfare state semi-detached and back again.

There's also something very instinctively spot-on about  the brutal sadism lurking  beneath Philips' and  Featherstone  husbands' treatment of their wives, both of whom, in their different ways, begin to assert themselves while having to put up with their men's limitations.

Tamzin Outhwaithe puts in a punchy performance as Terry with flowing golden locks,  presiding  over a dysfunctional Last Supper as the crossed wires untangle themselves.  Equally Gillian Wright's  Mary gained greatly from a second viewing, finally achieving a mix of strength, pathos and  her own diplomatic expediency as she embarks on her personal march to wifely freedom.

To be honest,  the deep Haymarket stage is a tough call for a farce originally developed for theatre-in-the-round  and there's still the potential for more speed and tightening up. But, judging from the change from preview to press night, TLT feels this will come. A classy production of a multilayered play with all characters pulling their weight (and  wine corks!). So  it's a psychedelic 1960s' green/amber light from TLT.

Review Mr Foote's Other Leg

Mr Foote's Other Leg

By Ian Kelly

Perruques And Prosthetics

http://www.trh.co.uk/

You couldn't make it up - an actor-manager and satirical playwright Samuel Foote should surely have been a character in one of his own plays. Running with a fast and ruthless upper class crowd, including the future George III and his brother the Duke of York, Foote loses his leg taking on a bet. Yet he made a comeback as a one-legged thespian with the apt singular surname  worthy of the celebrated Peter Cook and Dudley Moore sketch which his story may have inspired.

And there's an amputation scene, strenuous but not unduly bloody, yet TLT did wonder whether Mr Clint Eastwood or Mr James Caan might want to take on the role for an American production ...

Ian Kelly adapted his own biography of Foote into the play "Mr Foote's Other Leg", now transferred from a sell-out run at the  Hampstead Theatre to its natural home at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. For Samuel Foote, played in this production by Simon Russell Beale with Kelly striking as his patron Prince George,  operated from the Little Theatre In The Hay with a Royal Patent in the 18th century, a forerunner of the current venue. 

In addition, he managed to evade the licensing and script censorship of the Lord Chamberlain  by claiming amateur status for his company, charging for tea or chocolate at his "tea parties" rather than audience tickets and performing improvisations including his own drag acts. 

TLT and her horse powered carriage was particularly intrigued by the theatrical premise of the play, having discovered the torrid rivalries of official and unofficial theatre companies doing research for her review of The Beaux Stratagem. 

And sure enough the play does encompass rivalries between Foote the comedian and David Garrick the tragedian (a finely judged performance by Joseph Millson), the competition from opera and  Hanoverian import G F Handel and the rise of the pleasure garden entertainment.  

Alongside themes emerging from Foote's possibly ambiguous sexuality, his relationship with his leading actress Peg Woffington (Dervla Kirwan), his surgeon John Hunter (Forbes Masson), his Jamaican dresser Frank Barber (Micah Balfour)  and scientist and American statesman Benjamin Franklin (Colin Stinton). Not forgetting Foote's big theatrical break after the manslaughter of actor Mr Hallam (Joshua Elliott).

Past and modern literary, light entertainment, historical and current affairs parallels punch well beyond the 18th century into our present day.  But it's the gamut of themes, allusions and characters, each worthy of their own play, which proved problematic for us. 

The play is directed at a filmic lively pace by Richard Eyre with sumptuous design and costumes by Tim Hatley.  Russell Beale holds the play together as best as he can, but  it did feel like a skate through heterogenous elements of several plays and then some alternative comedy yoked self-consciously together rather than an organic whole.  

Perhaps there's a clue in the mention of Laurence Sterne's shaggy dog story Tristam Shandy but the play lost its focus for TLT and her sidekick.   The night time search after Foote's death for his amputated leg among the pickled relicts of medical student curiosities never fulfilled its initial promise of concentrating on Foote, the man exchanging the law for the stage yet embroiled in a complex web of interests including his own.  

Nevertheless TLT did catch some more thought provoking strands such as Miss Chudleigh, a pleasingly cast Sophie Bleasdale stepped fresh out of a Gainsborough portrait.  First an ingenue actress and then a cackling villainess - at least as filtered through Foote's viewpoint as we never hear her side of the story. But such possible complexities never reach an apex and are easily missed. 

So an intriguing story and although there are glimpses of something darker drawing modern parallels, the play pulls in too many directions despite the best efforts of actors, including a distinctive performance by the playwright himself, director and crew. An amber light.