Review Bad Roads

Tim Gopsill is moved and informed by a harrowing and insightful drama on civil war in the Ukraine.

Bad Roads
by Natal'ya Vorozhbit
Translated by Sasha Dugdale

Sex And Savagery In The Ukraine
https://royalcourttheatre.com/

Ordinary people are still killing each other in the Ukraine, mysteriously unreported in Britain after three years of civil war. Where media are failing, theatre is stepping in, with accounts of the traumas of war more horrifying than anything you would see on the news.

The Royal Court has a programme of co-operation with Ukrainian playwrights, supported by the British Council, and is presenting Bad Roads by Natal'ya Vorozhbit, where the conflict is seen through the eyes of women.

Bad Roads is a psychodrama with six scenes in which a number of women confront men at war as individuals; men they encounter, or want to be with, or by whom they are held captive. Some violence is involved in two of them.

The brutalisation the men have suffered is complicated and spasmodic. Loving one minute, aggressive the next. But made even more problematic when those men are  put in murderous danger.

So the encounters are not simply between belligerent men and innocent women. There is a recognition of something more complex, even a frisson of attraction towards a dirty, hungry, desperate fighting man somewhere inside the desperate women.

Likewise the men are not all-conquering. They are victims of war as well. In some of the sex scenes, enacted or recalled, their own sexual vulnerability is displayed.

This is not to downgrade  the most horrific, degrading scene which takes place in total darkness; the sounds are harrowing enough. Ria Zmitrowicz convinces as Yulia in her combination of vulnerability and knowingness, weakness and strength; as does Tadgh Murphy as Stas, the soldier, with his internal conflicts and erratic behaviour.

The settings are all dark in any case. Camilla Clarke’s set consists entirely of stripped bare tree trunks, through which the actors rush or creep in dim light like fighters in a forest, and has just a couple of upended chairs, an iron bath and a chest freezer cabinet, whose grisly contents most of the time have to be imagined.

Director Vicky Featherstone handles this touchy, knife-edge material carefully with varied pacing.  The first and longest scene, for instance, has a woman journalist (Kate Dickie) recounting a week-long visit to the front line, which establishes at the start the ambiguities of the male and female liaisons within the play.

Interestingly all the seven-strong cast, who double up for the 14 roles, have strong regional British Isles accents, which emphasise the varied cultures within a state at civil war. They are different peoples but what they have in common, in place of a national identity, is their suffering.

Bad Roads is brilliantly written and bravely acted. It has to be said that it is challenging, not to say painful, to watch and listen to at times and thoroughly deserves an amber/green light.

Review Victory Condition

Victory Condition
by Chris Thorpe

Different Planes
https://royalcourttheatre.co,uk

This is the kind of play you'll be either for or against. A sweeping statement, TLT and her four wheeled companion know, but this is a binary play you'll (ok, probably) either love or hate.

But to proceed. A man and woman (we never get to know names) unlock the door of their modern, pretty plush flat (design by Chloe Lamford) and wheel in their brightly coloured, plastic mould suitcases.

They go about unpacking both their luggage and their minds in an apparent stream-of-consciousness.

He (Jonjo O'Neill), it appears, is either an assassin or, influenced by a computer game he starts to play later on, imagines he is one. She (Sharon Duncan-Brewster), more plausibly for the world TLT inhabits, seems to work for an advertising agency.

Their minds range over multiple images and subjects which obviously colonize their minds - his more intent on warfare and spaceships. Her thoughts concentrates more on her personal frailty and the possibility of collapse in a public place and the abuse of a trafficked child.

O'Neill's Northern Irish  accent and Duncan-Brewster's London accent gives some variation - even though there are glimpses of the Ukraine in O'Neill's monologue, the talk of barricades also has resonance for Northern Ireland.

Duncan-Brewster's image of collapsing, on her back and helpless on an underground station platform with a brain haemorrhage, is a potent image. However, the audience is never given the chance to connect with much in the intercut monologues.

The couple (the audience is given enough to work out they are a couple) move around the well-organized flat doing whatever they feel needs doing and consuming whatever takeaway food and images that they want to consume. 
 
Our expectation was that something would happen to bring a recognizable narrative rather than an attempt  solely to bring thoughts on to the stage - albeit in fully formed words and sentences.

The overall impression was of a dream where you see yourself rather than view the world from inside your own head and you know that it's all wrong. 

There also seem to be enormous assumptions. Our first thought was that they worked as airplane stewards. Looking at the play text, it appears they've come back from a holiday in Greece. And that's part of the problem.

Why put something like Greece, which does have a resonance, in play text stage directions  when it has has no bearing on what the audience members see and hear in the performance?

TLT wouldn't always make this point about the differencce between the printed and performed script but here at least one person involved in the production is assuming that everyone thinks in the same way she or he does.

The same goes for the title of the two internal monologues - Victory Condition. There was no clue in the piece TLT watched as to what this term means - an assumption that everyone in the audience must know gaming terms. However TLT can't pretend that knowing this term now makes the play itself any more comprehensible.

The blurb says Victory Condition is  "An attempt to get to grips with the fact that everything happens at once. And to see if there’s anything we can do about it." Maybe. There's a lot of maybes with this play.

Maybe it's an attempt to make some kind of correlation between infinite psychic space and the non finite nature of computer games. Maybe it's a tease but if so, it's a rather mind-numbing, frustrating and ultimately boring one.

Maybe writer Chris Thorpe will collect all the Victory Ambition reviews and turn them into some sort of play. TLT and her engineered companion or a TLT reviewing colleague would still turn up 😉, but in the meantime it's a red/amber light.

Review Cyprus Avenue

Cyprus Avenue

By David Ireland

The Orange And The Green

www.royalcourttheatre.com

There is a Buzzfeed meme making the rounds of the internet at the moment asking "What percentage Jeremy Corbyn are you?" Well, Eric Miller (Stephen Rea), the Protestant Loyalist protagonist of Cyprus Avenue would surely point indignantly at his grandchild as one hundred percent Gerry Adams.

Notwithstanding that she's a peach of a girl and barely five weeks' old and brought to the Miller's Cyprus Avenue household by daughter Julie (Amy Molloy).  

This tragicomedy, written by East Belfast playwright David Ireland and directed by Vicky Featherstone, tackles with black humour the entanglements of an older Belfast Protestant generation. 

Despite a dangerous, searing subject and the Gerry Adamification of the granddaughter, it almost falls into the category of a conventional psychiatric-consulting room based play, if it were not for two things. David Ireland's understanding of his home city and Stephen Rea's performance as he turns and considers the issues simmering in his mind before they boil over into violence.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves, for before that there are the  flashbacks  and  the psychiatrist Bridget (Wunmi Mosaku) to talk to. See what we mean about a conventional play?  

The title mirrors that of a Van Morrison song,  but Cyprus Avenue, where Eric lives with wife Bernie (Julie Dearden), is apparently also a leafy upmarket road, almost a Bishop's Avenue of Belfast (see Page 27 of link).

This seems at odds with the confused but strangely logical deductions  of Eric, which rightly or wrongly one associates with the working class,  as he repeats to himself why he is British. Yet it's not at odds with the strangeness of this play.  

It also occurred to us the playwright, without knowing if he is Catholic or Protestant, thankful his surname is a geographical fact rather than a partisan nationality, may have rehearsed the British/Irish arguments in his own mind for many years before writing this play!

It's a dangerous, edgy piece which plays around with conventions of playwriting as well as sectarianism. 

For all that, weaker points sometimes peep through.  A pivotal encounter with a Loyalist gunman Slim (Chris Corrigan) exposes the political language hiding harsh reality seeping more and more into the play as it progresses but uses mundane stand-up jokes less successfully.

And the slightest of niggles is that this would perhaps work even better as a movie where the psychiatrist's explanations of identity in a world context at the beginning of the play would feel less expositional. 

But the effective theatre-in-the-round plain white carpeted design  by Lizzie Clachan  with its few pieces of furniture almost works as a green special effects (no pun intended!) screen. The Protestant/Catholic divide is definitely Belfast but the trip to London brings in foreign exchange and hints of other eras.

The ending is not for the fainthearted but it's a play that knows it can't put a step wrong even if the characters are in the wrong. A green light for a disturbingly funny but tragic play.

Review X

X

by Alistair McDowall

Space Oddity

www.royalcourt.co.uk

Gosh, if life in Pluto were a tax dodge, more off planet than off-shore, as Alistair McDowall imagines in his dystopian fantasy X directed by Vicky Featherstone, one has to wonder who's the accountant?!

In fact there are no accountants or lawyers or Panama hats in  this play seemingly set in space. But it did raise a sardonic collective laugh early on as one of the crew of workers stranded on Pluto, way past their contracted six months with tax-free earnings commented, "There are easier  ways to avoid tax".

And what a nightmare of unpaid uncontracted overtime it is, where zero hours takes on a whole new meaning as time itself slips and disintegrates with flashbacks and doubling back like a disturbing form of neurofeedback.

At the centre of this inside-out universe designed as a gray-green vaulting cube by Merle Hensel  is Gilda (Jessica Raine), a geologist and second in command to veteran astronaut Ray (Darrell D'Silva).

The latter has a dangerous nostalgia for pre-internet twentieth century life when a tweet meant birdsong. Belligerent technician Clark (James Harkness), maths' nerd Cole (Rudi Dharmalingham)  and  Mattie (Ria Zmitrowicz) who maintains "the ladies", the oxygen and water systems, complete the team.   And could it be that the spaceship is haunted by a prepubescent spectre  (Grace Doherty)?

Ostensibly this is a sci fi thriller with supernatural and ecological tentacles, just shy of two and half hours in length. Yes, it's overlong and feels stretched, especially in the second act when it starts to explain itself and irritatingly exposes a medical equivalent of "it was all a dream".structure by the end.

And yet it also has moments of resonance, when the concept is more open-ended,  spanning a life crossing from the twentieth into the twenty first century, possibly the life of a woman whose name is only mentioned  once.

The film and TV references are legion and most obvious - the deserted spaceship, the labyrinthine upper space out of sight in this play up a ladder with a woman taking command  recalls Alien. The uniforms  modelled after those on Space Trek, although more monochrome. The female protagonist bearing the name of a 1940s' movie. But also glimpses of childhood reading -  Treasure Island, Wuthering Heights - and workers' values of another time.

If this had been cut to one act with the opportunity to ratchet up the suspense in a tighter structure, the plot might have felt more fulsome and absorbing. As it is, it feels as put together as the panels in the walls in order to fill the allotted time rather than organically grown. But X just about flickers into an amber light, even if doesn't quite manage to mark the spot.