Review The Red Lion

The Red Lion
by Patrick Marber

When Saturday Comes
 http://www.atgtickets.com/shows/the-red-lion/trafalgar-studios/

TLT's family once dabbled in the beautiful game, before the advent of big money footie, when a teenage schoolboy relative and friends once blithely decided to form a junior league football team.

This momentous moment in soccer's history didn't take place in a pub and, as far as TLT knows, noone involved was a freemason.

However, little did these newcomers know the already fraught atmosphere they were entering: football scouts circling, a notorious opposing team manager taking a swing at the naive father who had taken on the role of manager. After all, who did they think they were? Schoolboy amateurs?!!

This revival of Patrick Marber's 2015 The Red Lion sets the dressing room drama three-hander in the North East where a struggling semi professional team is looking for a saviour.

The manager Kidd (Stephen Tompkinson), harassed by money worries after a failed marriage and without a roof over his head, desperately needs success whether on the field or in financial wheelings and dealings beyond the white lines.

In the dressing room, old guard kit man Yates (John Bowler) is not in such a rush, ironing carefully and methodically shirts for the next game, placing them on hangers lined up on the players' hooks, ready for the next game.

In their own ways, they are both waiting for a player who will save the club and bring at least a sprinkling of past glories - if they ever existed.

The Red Lion tries to encapsulate three generations of footballing and British social change seen through the prism of the dressing room.

It harks back to organized football's amateur origins with its Victorian founding fathers through local councils and small-town business involvement when footballers were paid a meagre wage and had no pension to the current global professional marketplace. 

TLT remembers thinking during the previous incarnation of the play in 2015 that there was very much a conflation of football and the parliamentary expenses scandal in the play.

Certainly this is a drama which quietly positions itself as a state-of-the-nation, as well as a state-of-the-game play.

Yet Marber never quite finds the right balance between the male sentimentality about the game,  delusions of influence with the sport increasingly a by-product of financial transactions and a genuine, potent spiritual love for the game.

This production, originating in at Newcastle Upon Tyne's Live Theatre, doesn't manage quite to overcome what still feels like rather a schematic piece with the themes announced as patently as a linesman's flag going up.

Nevertheless Dean Bone brinngs the right mix of confusion, over optimistic naivety yet guile to the role of rising star Jordan.

Stephen Tompkinson's performance feels slightly over-egged, although TLT can perfectly believe such characters with sneering personality swings do exist.

However in the intimate surroundings of the smaller Trafalgar Studios space, director Max Roberts could have pulled him back a little to allow the later moments of hurt to emerge more fully.

Yates who has gone through the whole gamut as fan, player, manager and what seems at first to be a sinecure as kit man, is probably the best written of the three roles.

John Bowler's grizzled features and deliberate movements, carrying out traditionally female tasks elevated in male eyes by association with the beautiful game, make for a compelling performance.

There's also a nicely-observed grubby white brick set from Patrick Connellan and terrific sound design from Dave Flynn, providing atmosphere and pace between scenes. 

It's a flawed play which has its moments and still, of course, has a relevance and resonance as further British scandals emerge.

TLT does wonder whether an expanded version might work on TV but in the meantime it's an amber/green light.

Review Le Grand Mort

Le Grand Mort
by Stephen Clark

Guess Who's Coming To Dinner
http://www.atgtickets.com/venues/trafalgar-studios/

Like the comedy duo of the 1970s and 80s Little and Large, there are apparently two sizes of morts. La petite mort meaning - hide your eyes, dear reader, of delicate constitution - an orgasm. And then, rather ungrammatically, there is le grand mort.

A quick google reveals le grand mort here and here meaning the big exit, death, but it seems it needs la petite mort in this double act. One defines the other. Of course, we theatre afficianados aka blasé snobby intellectuals are well accustomed to the ambivalent Shakespearean meaning of dying!😉

After  that circumlocutory linguistic diversion, TLT and her little sidekick with the big  - um -  theatrical heart will now cut to the chase. What do your own theatregoing pair  think of Julian Clary's performance in this two hander (apologies to the other acting half James Nelson-Joyce for this shameless piece of celebrity lionisation)?

Considering this is a verbose, red herring of a play, Mr Clary acquits himself elegantly, remembering his lines and managing to cook an aromatic pasta  puttanesca in a frying pan all at the same time. 

Yet the play, by the late Stephen Clark better known for his musical theatre librettos and lyrics, is a distinct oddity which surely is a first draft rather than a polished play?

Played out in a gleaming stainless steel kitchen set designed by Justin Nardella, Clary's at first unnamed character is preparing for his prospective dinner guest and for our delectation. Yes, he chops and he slices and peels while regaling us - in verse - with his own circumlocutory diversion about voyeurism, fetishism and necrophilia.

TLT and her companion though almost let out a joyful toot when his dinner guest - James Nelson-Joyce - finally arrived and the play GOT ON WITH THE STORY (sort of). 

From then on, it was a case of guess who's coming to dinner because, by the end of the play, TLT & co was still trying to work out the who, whys and wherefores. 

Finally, we could only come to the conclusion that this was some kind of writer's or actor's exercise about lying, storytelling, sex, death and murder which should have remained in the rehearsal room.

All of which is a shame because Clary possesses considerable stage presence and his voice has a clear, versatile tone, all of which deserves a much better vehicle. 

His camp star quality is of course for many the main attraction. However his smooth, bespectacled, sometimes more subdued, demeanour gave a glimpse of an actor who could be cast against type.

Nelson-Joyce is fine, as far as it goes, as the foil, Tim, who apparently can hold his own in intellectual role-play. His Liverpuddlian accent at first caused your theatregoing pair to wonder whether this was a riff on Brian Epstein and a lover. Then, when the talk turned to murder, Jo Orton and Kenneth Halliwell.

In other words, and my oh my there were lots of words!, a whole gamut of popular, arty farty, cod history and literary referenccs strung together. Lucien Freud got a mention, Bacon got a mention, allthough luckily it eschewed a frying pan pun about freud bacon 😉.

Of course Freud, especially, was famous for his nudes and potential punters may want to be alerted that full frontal male nudity is briefly part of the action.

Director Christopher Renshaw imposes a clarity of structure on muddled proceedings aided by Jamie Platt's lighting and Ed Lewis's filmic soundscape.

It  might be a fun night to share a pasta puttanesca and glass of wine with friends and then go and see the show. So Le Grand Mort may still be a recipe for success!  However for TLT it remained a potential crime mystery play more "Strewth!" than "Sleuth" and it's a lower range amber light.

Review Late Company

A compelling dinner party drama laced with dark humour grips Peter Barker with its dissection of parental responsibility and grief. 

Late Company
by Jordan Tannahill

The Blame Game
http://www.atgtickets.com/venues/trafalgar-studios/

Late Company is a searing tale of how adults and their teenage children behave when driven by anger, grief, love, and confusion.

Debora (Lucy Robinson) has arranged a dinner party so that she and her husband Michael (Todd Boyce) will finally meet Bill (Alex Lowe) and Tamara (Lisa Stevenson), as well as their son Curtis (David Leopold), a classmate of the hosts' son  Joel. 

It's a year since, at the age of 16, Joel killed himself leaving heart-broken and uncomprehending parents.

The Canadian playwright Jordan Tannahill sets this  drama in contemporary Toronto where Joel's father Michael is an ambitious Ontario government minister while mother Deborah is an artist, producing challenging  molten metal sculptures.

A work she calls “Thatcher" looks  like a cross between a Francis Bacon painting and a failed chemistry experiment.
 
The son of the guests, Curtis had by his own admission, along with others, bullied Joel, a self-proclaimed gay outsider. 

Debora has taken a leaf out of a psychology self-help book and the dinner is part of the plan inspired by it for all of them to move on. This proves a recipe for disaster.

Yet under the surface charm and social graces,  Robinson in a compelling performance as the grieving Debora is both frightening and fragile. Eventually as the meal progresses, her rage drives the action.

In spite of their barely suppressed sense of superiority beneath a polite exterior, the hosts are wrongfooted when they discover Bill has the same level of university education as Michael. 

Director Michael Yale serves the playwright well, carefully pacing the 75 minutes one act play as Tannahill unravels with skill a complex situation, ranging from the viciously funny to the thoughtful knotting and unknotting of issues and personalities.

Michael is a smooth and initially somewhat unsympathetic politician.

However, Boyce's performance also gradually and effectively conveys his hurt and how deeply he cares matching Debora's vulnerability under her priggishness..

David Leopold as Bill and Tamara's hockey-playing son is a stand out. He captures a teenager's surly intelligence as he is forced to confront the reality of his involvement in a death and watch adults all at sea with the situation. 

His moroseness, insecurity, innocence and finally tenderness become the foil sharpening Debora’s anger and ultimately beginning the process of melting that anger.

As Curtis's father, Lowe gives three-dimensional life to a man dealing straightforwardly with an intractable situation.

Stevenson's Tamara reaches out to Debora. However she finds the total desolation of what has happened too much to handle and here one of the play's most wrenching, visceral truths emerges.    

Late Company is as much, if not more, drama than comedy. However like Mike Leigh's Abigail's Party and Moira Buffini's Dinner, Late Company is driven by a strong woman in a grotesque, self-made situation as the engine for the action. Nevertheless Debora eventually gains the audience's sympathy as a multi-faceted woman. 

Tannahill wrote this play at the age of 23 and it's an impressive, accomplished piece fully deserving its transfer from the Finborough Theatre to Whitehall's Trafalgar Studios.

It's a green light for the twists and turns in this absorbing, stimulating production where the dinner party leads the bereaved couple to discover solace in an unexpected place. 

Review Apologia

Apologia
by Alexi Kaye Campbell

The Last Supper
http://www.atgtickets.com/shows/apologia/trafalgar-studios/

It's a luxurious country kitchen on the birthday of Kristin, an American-born divorced Marxist academic in her sixties. She's awaiting a fellow veteran of radical 1960s' politics and  her two sons, whom she hardly ever sees, with their partners for a celebration dinner

Peter who is in banking arrives punctually with his physiotherapist girlfriend Trudi while Simon, preceded by his TV actress wife, creeps in more surreptitiously.

Kristin was an activist during the anti-Vietnam war marches in Grosvenor Square and the Paris student demos of 1968. A bundle of hurt and recriminations soon emerges triggered by Kristin's just published memoirs, which she claims were written only to chart her professional life, where her two children fail to get a mention. 

This play was originally staged in 2009 on the intimate stage of the Bush Theatre before it moved to its present venue. It may be something is lost in a larger venue. There's nothing wrong with what is there, but this family drama feels frustratingly under-developed.

Frustrating especially because the juxtaposition of banking, evangelical Christianity, television fame, academia and the legacy of 1968 with the personal cost to a woman and her family is an attractive and thought-provoking premise. 

Nevertheless it remained for TLT  a play of five characters in search of a plot.  Jamie Lloyd directs a solid, straightforward production. There is a marvellously detailed widescreen set from Soutra Gilmour with just a glimpse of a corridor through an open door and a Renaissance portrait with a young woman's telling glance.

However while Stockard Channing is fine as blinkered old leftie and mother Kristin, she is a curiously passive character around whom the others circulate and comment.

Laura Carmichael as Christian evangelist Trudi shines brightest of the satellites with a naturalness in  turning often unforgiving lines into thoughtful responses in  this family drama.

Otherwise Joseph Milson doubles as Kristin's sons, Peter and brother Simon, both isolated in their own way by their parents' actions. Freeman Agyeman is the actress, increasingly estranged from Simon, who reveals her own motivations in life as well as art. Desmond Barrit makes the best of a stereotypical wisecracking gay best friend, a veteran also of the 1960s' protesting frontline.

Our googling reveals the term apologia - from the Greek - to be "A formal written defence of one's opinions or conduct", a rhetorical format not to be confused with apology as an expression of regret.

In some ways, TLT felt, this play tries to combine the two with the unrepentent activist having put forth in print a defence of what she calls her professional life and her sons yearning for something more from her - perhaps something less a defence and more an apologetic understanding of what has happened to all of them.

Yet the nitty gritty exploration is not there - the trial, just or unjust, a show trial or a genuine investigation - never comes. We're never quite sure about the nature of Kristin's past actions or her perceived fault in anything but the most general terms.

The characters are there, but the issues seem thinly drawn with digressions, even if we may suspect the play teeters on the verge of asking whether if she were a man and a father instead of a mother, the same reproaches would be there.

The potentially most interesting relationship is that between Kristin and her prospective American daughter-in-law Trudi, who doesn't pretend to be an intellectual and met Kristin's son Peter at a prayer meeting. However this is a drama which may have looked better on the drawing board than on stage. 

Practically each character has his or her own moment of "apologia" but, for us it felt stretched out and it's an amber light.

Review Kiss Me

Kiss Me
by Richard Bean

Brief Encounters
http://www.atgtickets.com/shows/kiss-me/trafalgar-studios/
 
In this enigmatic and delicate one-act play Richard Bean reverses the film censorship in the years following the First World War.

While both the silent movies and the talkies eschewed the physical realities of intercourse in favour of the iconic cinematic kiss, the couple in Kiss Me find themselves subject to a different kind of censorship by the woman doctor who has brought them together. 

The stiff upper lip son of a manufacturer with interests in the West Indies  and a woman munitions' driver with a Louise Brooks' bob meet for the first time in her bedsit.

We spy on the couple, learning the surprising reason for the meeting. The play then runs perhaps a little predictably as writer Richard Bean divvys up the pair's background, but it would be churlish to give away the initial surprise.

Suffice to say the scenario involves a process, found in the bible and the subject of speculation and royal intrigues, recorded as practised at least since the 19th century, even though it may have been often carried out in an unethical rather than cooperative manner. 

The direction by Anna Ledwich and the performances of Claire Lams, demure in box pleat skirt, blouse and cardigan,  and Ben Lloyd-Hughes in city gent three-piece-suit, bowler hat and umbrella are seductive with the whoosh of almost a ghost story.

This seductiveness draws us away at times from some surely deliberate discrepancies.  Set, according to the programme, in the year of the Wall Street Crash, 1929, there is a time travelling feel to the script and social stigma seems more of hinderance than money.

There are also echoes of literary and screen references from Lady Chatterley's Lover to the apparently very-much-in the-future Brief Encounter. The man glancing at a fob watch and the simple but effective set design by Georgia Lowe with three large mirrors tarnished at the edges, behind a double bed, also seem to point towards the two Lewis Carroll "Alice" books.

There is, maybe, a very light touch subtext of travelling through political history as well. However the central preoccupation is also very 21st century.

Perhaps it's a piece which doesn't bear too much cold-light-of-day analysis as to how it all hangs together. Nevertheless, it did charm during our brief 75 minute acquaintance with it and it's a green light. 

Review Out There On The Fried Ridge Road

Tim Gopsill passes the time watching a hit-and-miss redneck comedy set in rural America.

Out There on Fried Meat Ridge Road
by Keith Stevenson  

Welcome To The Motel West Virginia
http://www.atgtickets.com/shows/out-there-on-fried-meat-ridge-road/trafalgar-studios

Out There on Fried Meat Ridge Road - wacky name for a wacky comedy that feels like a sitcom set in rural southern America. For a British equivalent, think The Young Ones rather than The Good Life, with the same compulsive lowlife-ism.

Fortunately it is short, just over an hour and stops before the buffoonery starts to pall. If anything does, it is the relentless good humour and benevolence in the way the characters interrelate.

Writer Keith Stevenson couldn’t go wrong when he decided to assemble an oddball set of characters around big bearded, tartan-shirted country hick JD. He's rumoured to be the offspring of immaculate conception via an Italian prostitute. In reality he's actually conceived, written and played by Stevenson, a true West Virginian.

So take a quiet, liberal unemployed out-of-towner (Michael Maloney) looking for a room share. Add the over-the-top violent sexist poet (Alex Ferns), his screaming crack addict painter girlfriend (Melanie Gray), a brutal racist landlord (Michael Wade) and the big gentle benign drop-out who just happens to believe he is the Son of God.

Then plonk them in a squalid motel room on a remote and weirdly-named road which really does run straight through Stevenson's home town.

This sketchy but affable one-act hillbilly farce started off in Los Angeles where it was something of a success with the metropolitan audience spawning two sequels, eventually given the collective name of The Fried Meat Trilogy. Its broad brand of humour has now crossed the pond, first to Kennington's White Bear Theatre and now at Whitehall's Trafalgar Studios.

Director Harry Burton has everybody leaping about and thunderously slamming doors to a degree that almost appears to endanger Simon Scullion's wood panelled set on the tiny stage of the venue's smaller studio space. 

Ferns as the manic trouble-seeking gangster/poet Tommy exudes the most menace and Melanie Gray as his girlfriend Marlene gets the most laughs. She whines at Tommy’s infidelities that they are all with women called Marlene “because he’s too dumb to remember any other names”.

The current one, she yells, weighs 500 pounds and “can’t get out of the door of her trailer.” Indeed Tommy has to demolish it for the purpose; he puts the other Marlene in the back of JD’s car which he’s “borrowed” and then runs out of control down a hill and flattens someone’s gazebo. Yes it’s that kind of humour.

Maloney as Mitch is the nervy, nicely understated straight man to the caricatures around him. There is plenty of embarrassingly funny stuff which does elicit chuckles and guffaws. Nevertheless if you are easily offended at sexist and racist gags uttered by some sexist and racist characters, you might want to give this show a miss.

Out There On The Fried Edge Road does have a very good joke at the end. However, much as I laughed, my traffic light theatre rating is firmly stuck at an amber light.

Review The Philanthropist

The Philanthropist
by Christopher Hampton

Through The Looking Glass
http://www.atgtickets.com/shows/the-philanthropist/trafalgar-studios/

First performed in 1970 at the Royal Court,  The Philanthropist, which TLT and her automotive graduate protegé have now seen for the first time, seems curiously prescient.

For nearly a dozen years later, a ruthless civil war erupted in Cambridge University's English faculty. Not that anyone would ever confuse Philip - lead character in the then young Christopher Hampton's early play - with academic Colin MacCabe and his travails

But the mix of naivety, preciousness, viciousness,  potential for violence and grotesque undertones do give a snapshot of a bygone age of ivory tower academia. For this was when students cushioned by grants became postgraduates and then lecturers with relative ease.

Safely ensconced in secure tenure and often given university accommodation, it was possible for a don to have little, if any, experience of outside life and financial worries. All of which didn't preclude some very weird mindsets, vicious infighting and a rash of student suicides.

Philip (Simon Bird) is the embodiment of his linguistic specialism. His very name Philip has partly the same root as his subject, philology. His literal minded manner is not so much honesty, but concentrating solely on words in isolation is his sole compass in life.

Hampton's inspiration was the Molière "type" where a misanthrope is misanthropic, a miser is miserly, a hypocrite hypocritical and Phil the philologist is defined by his love of words. - literally, as philology is from the Greek for "love of language".

The play begins when a would-be playwright (John Seaward) has buttonholed both Philip and Philip's colleague Donald (Tom Rosenthal), known of course, very literally, as Don, for an opinion on his play. The play and the writer's dramatic fate echoes all through the play, as do various iconic staples of French and English literature.

There is a death, a dinner party, a couple separates, another love affair begins and so it goes. While Molière may have been The Philanthropist's inspiration, the most gruesome parts of the play have much more in common with the satiric tales of Saki, author of short stories, novelist and political sketch writer.

For The Philanthropist struck us as a covert state-of-the-nation play written when membership of the then European Economic Community seemed a distant prospect and theoretical academic clashes had taken to running battles in the streets of continental Europe but left England's ancient universities almost untouched. 

It is very much a period piece from an age when Oxbridge and the political establishment seemed to be in an infinite loop -  and in that respect we were reminded of another later play from the Royal Court Theatre, Magnificence.

However the cast of television actors in this production directed by Simon Callow skate over the intricacies of the play and flatten out its complexities. Simon Bird's Philip is sufficiently gawky and chirpy but it's a permanent glaze without any inner moments of anguish.

Tom Rosenthal's Don gives the most spirited performance with a mixture of cynical languidness and puppyish excitement at new developments. As Philip's fiancee, Charlotte Ritchie is suitably brittle with cool, clear banter but never gives any indication as to why she would have been with Philip in the first place.

Lily Cole's damaged nymphomaniac Araminta with an impossibly posh voice certainly has visual stage presence and there's a neat moment when she reminded us of Liza Doolittle after her transformation into a lady (The Philanthropist, we noticed, is a comedy with a very heterogeneous approach to its literary references).

There's also a grand entrance by Matt Berry as infuriating novelist Braham in luscious velvet suit but he also infuriatingly falls into a rhythm, losing much of his lines' meaning. And both he and Cole have problems with pacing and pauses.

Intertwining English and French literature, the play requires razor-sharp timing combined with a shallowness which masks deep despair. This production is apparently the first one which casts all younger actors who are the ages specified by the playwright.

Well, we feel the director of the first production may have understood that the otherwise implausible relationship of academic Philip and his graduate fiancee Celia needed the age difference to conjure up the febrile tutor-tutee atmosphere.

Equally designer Libby Watson's gleaming white set  may reflect the elegant lines of 17th century furniture in 1970s terms but it felt way too chic and abstract for a 1970s' suite of college rooms.

All in all,  this production overall loses its perspective rather than showing an academic life which has lost all sense of perspective. We had but brief glimpses of what it could have been in a better paced production.

Maybe it's only a matter of time before there is a comedy drama on the shenanigans in 1980s Cambridge when the lid came off the pressure cooker of Eng Lit academe, but in the meantime it's a lower range amber light for a superficial take on Christopher Hampton's absurdist comedy of manners.

Review No Villain

No Villain
by Arthur Miller

Look Back In Anger
http://www.atgtickets.com/shows/no-villain/trafalgar-studios/

The year 1936 was an unhappy time for many Jewish immigrant families in America. Yet at the same the children of immigrants, albeit often cash-strapped, were receiving the kind of education their parents and grandparents could only dream of growing up in European and Russian towns and villages.

Children like Arthur Miller who took up playwriting and penned No Villain only as a means to receive an Avery Hopwood award to finance his journalism major college fees.

He was given the award, swapped to playwritng and the rest of course is history.  But in a feat of literary excavation, nearly 80 years later, director Sean Turner has unearthed this remarkably mature and complex previously unstaged piece by the 20 year Miller  in the University of Michigan archive.

Following an initial sell-out run at the Old Red Lion, No Villain has now transferred to the Trafalgar Studios. Abe Simon (David Bromley) has risen out of piece work garment making in New York to become the owner of his own furriers' workshop.

Yet to expand, like many others in the manufacturers' trust of which he is a part, he has taken out bank loans,  working with the tightest possible margins.

The line between prosperity and defaulting is worryingly fine and when rag trade shipping clerks who transport the coats to retailers go on strike, the situation is desperate.

So much so, Abe is even willing to taken advantage of workplace workhorse Frank (Michael Lyle) who ends up bloodstained after attempting to smuggle boxes of coats through the picket lines.

At home, Abe lives with wife Esther (Nesba Crenshaw), his daughter Maxine (Helen Coles), son Ben (George Turvey) and his elderly father-in-law (Kenneth Jay), the bridge between the old world and new world of business.

In the 1927 movie The Jazz Singer the protagonist in dispute with his father cuts himself off. There is no such rift in No Villain between Abe and his synagogue-going father-in-law.

But when elder son Ben, who has dedicated himself to the firm, eventually breaks away from an arranged marriage and the traditional father-in-law, son-in-law financial set up, he tears the fabric of his family apart and more

This is a sly, certainly not face-value play. With the benefit of hindsight, some may be  quick to assume it is a juvenile work blocking an examination of it as a stand-alone play with its own mix of ingenuity and irony.

Brother Arnold (Alex Forsythe) returns home for college, head stuffed full of theories and tries to shoehorn  his mother's legitimate fears into the latest psychiatric theory.

The shipping clerks on strike could just as well be commandeered to destroy the small-time businessmen on loans (something charted in Jerome Weidmann's almost contemporary 1937 novel I Can Get It For You Wholesale).

By 1936 US moneylenders were calling in their loans from Europe and Russia. Successful immigrant businessmen (they were mostly men!), like Carl Laemmle of Universal Pictures, could no longer send back money to fund their home towns and regions, including the pension funds.

Nearly every Jewish immigrant family, many of whom had lost everything during the Wall Street Crash, were receiving letters from  relatives scapegoated in the lands of their birth, begging for a sponsor and a shipping line ticket to allow them to emigrate.

No Villain with its disclaimer of a title in an America and Europe filled wth corporate states and inter-nation loans is an important, astonishingly mature work, albeit with its echoes of Clifford Odets's Waiting For Lefty,  for a 20 year old journalist major.

With the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War and, above all, the betrayal of the show trials and purges, often targetting Jews, in Russia, Miller heeded the calls of a desperate people seeking escape while facing  the reality of  life in America.

Of course the Miller family's experience including losses in the Wall Street Crash informs this play, even taking his own mother's surname for the fictional grandfather's surname.

Yet it feels reductive and blinkering to over-identify the play with autobiography. There is a playwright's hand behind the artful concertina of family and world events.

If the call to action at the end feels rushed and hollow after a funeral and foreclosure, that's probably because, with world  events as they were, it was meant to be - political affiliation the best option but, many knew by then, not a solution.

This is not a perfect production, sometimes suffering from over-gesturing and a caricatural feel,  but it is a clear one with an atmospheric hallway and living room  set by Max Dorey transforming cleverly and simply into the factory floor

It also benefits from  an outstanding performance by George Turvey as Ben. An amber/green light for an uneven but crisp production of a play which should now become a staple of theatrical programming.

Review The Maids

The Maids
By Jean Genet

Off Their Heads
http://thejamielloydcompany.com/our-shows/the-maids

To be honest, when TLT and her own non-curtseying domestic vehicle went along to the Trafalgar Studios to see Jean Genet's 1947 play The Maids late in the run, they were going to pass on doing a review. But then we saw the understudy Chereen Buckley had stepped in for Zawe Ashton and it felt as if fate had stepped in.

Of course, there is a certain amount of blogging self-importance here and no doubt the maids in Benedict Andrews and Andrew Upton's translation would call us "patronising c***s". But which other reviewer has a sidekick with a bone fide MOT certificate? Because if you  are reading this, you exist, TLT exists and of course our soft-top motor with a full tank of critical acumen exists!

Anyway back to Jean Genet and The Maids. Apparently he always denied it is loosely based on a real-life 1933 murder case, that of the Papin sisters, which fascinated the literati, even 14 years later.

At the start an avalanche of rose and white petals tumble down from above on a set designed by Soutra Gilmour.  A mistress (Chereen Buckley) and a maid (Uzo Aduba), both black, circle each other on the four-poster bed of a stage in heavy dark wood with gilt twirls in the style of Louis - Louis something or other.

At least we think it is a mistress and maid from a Southern US state or a dresser and a drag queen, the latter in blonde wig and trying on a frock of - is the original French the ambiguous - Madame? But it turns out to be two sisters, domestic servants (or maybe employees in this post-Obama-age translation) play acting in their wealthy employers' bourgeois bedroom.

Solange (Aduba) stocky and laconic, Claire (Buckley) more slender and fragile but with a vicious if imaginative streak manifesting itself in anonymous letters to the authorities about the male head of the household. Accusations which have led to his arrest and, we learn from a phone call, his (maybe temporary) release on bail.

The mistress (Downton Abbey's Laura Carmichael), a sort of Blue Jasmine, sashays in like a catwalk diva in fox fur, bling silver mini-skirt suit and striped stockings echoing both French revolution garb and a more contemporary military uniform.  With the references to Catholicism, TLT did wonder if it were set in New Orleans,  where the mega rich in serious party gear live side by side in a city with the poverty stricken.

The maids parallel their female employer with Marie Antoinette, but instead of the guillotine, set out in vain to poison her. She, when believing her spouse still in jail, offers them her fox fur and Marianne cap-red McQueen dress. However learning from the maids eventually, her husband is free, the offer is quickly forgotten and the old hierarchy returns with a seemingly fatal difference.

Only two years later, Samuel Beckett was writing Waiting For Godot and, for TLT and her loyal companion, this play in some ways shares similarities. Post war France had undergone the trauma and treachery of collaboration and peacetime retributions.

When the faux "mistress"  in this production removes her blonde wig and reveals short cropped hair, it could reflect wartime liaisons followed by tarring and feathering for the women branded sexual traitors. In Godot there is the servile bondage of Lucky and Pozzo - and  also a male character who never appears.

We are glad to have seen The Maids at last but, while all the performances have clarity and power, we wonder about interpretation by director Jamie Lloyd.

Not having seen the main cast or any other production of this play we wouldn't have known if it hadn't been pointed out by notices leading to the auditorium that there was an understudy in the house. And somehow the predicament (and in this case success) of the understudy makes an apt segue with this self-consciously theatrical play.

The translation,without knowing the original, and although updated and probably necessarily with some adjustments, seemed ok to us. However, there were times when this production felt frantic and rather shouty, although these gave more force to the quieter moments when they eventually came.

Maybe the original impetus behind Genet writing the play, the bourgeois fascination with the criminal  psychology of the Papin sisters (Genet's denial seems disingenous),  the crime shoehorned into fashionable theories, is rather lost.

And the over-blown TV crime thriller flashes and shouty nature of the first quarter irritated, although we could understand the reasoning behind this with the text indicating the maids (or employees) obsessed with popular crime magazines.

A one act play running at one hour and 45 minutes, it felt long. Still, the characters compel and it would be interesting to see the same script in another kind of production.  An amber/green light from we partners-in-crime.