Review boom

boom
by Peter Sinn Nachtrieb

From Here To Eternity
https://theatre503.com/

boom by Peter Sinn Nachtrieb is not to be confused with Boum!, French singer Charles Trenet's pulsating song and ode to life and love where biology has taken over marked by a thumping heartbeat.

But this is the surreal enforced household of Jules - who has reinvented his name as a tribute to French science fiction and surrealist novelist Jules Verne -  and his visitor - female Jo (aha, did you really think it might turn out to be Jim for - er - Jemima - ? - to carry our artificially imposed French theme?).

Jules, a marine biologist, under the pretext of an online lonely hearts ad promising "intensely significant coupling" has lured to his student pad cum lab cum bunker,  Jo. She's a world-weary journalism student from England who is careless about whom she couples with, looking to churn out an article for an assignment.

But Jules has found out that, through his study of fish, that the earth's population is about to go boom! in the negative sense of the word and, driven by a biological and intellectual imperative, is set on saving the human race.

There are a few not insurmountable difficulties.

Jules, who calls a fish in tank Dorothy after the Wizard Of Oz heroine, is gay, even if he recognizes the necessity to create a huge family tree out of a little bush sprig.

While Jo, who also suffers from periodic blackouts, definitely does not want to procreate and a bond between the two seems highly unlikely. .

As the comet approaches the earth, it looks like Jules may be running out of options.

But wait, who is that - that mouthy, percussive museum worker with an array of levers and whose drumbeats intermittently frame the action?  That's Barbara who is your unreliable narrator tour guide to the end of the world and new beginnings.

This three-hander was first performed, and well-received by critics, in New York in 2008 the year the lever was pulled, bursting the credit bubble with the crunch.

The deliberate artificiality, the farcical destruction and creation myth obviously hit a nerve when scientist Jules recounts how his mother "couldn't have picked a worse time to go on a tour of unreinforced masonry in California".

However director Katherine Nesbitt seems unsure of how to hide the flaws of this energetic, raw piece.

Nicole Sawyerr as the journalist in training is clear and focussed but never seems to really get a handle on Jo's determination to turn the random into journalism and her lapses into unconsciousness.

Will Merrick gives good value as theorizing Jules, nicely inept as the graduate whose best laid plans go wrong from a combination of his own incompetence and outside circumstances.

Mandi Symonds's green-suited Barbara, regulating the action, making the Wizard of Oz persona her own, gradually becomes more and more part of the story. Even if her inivtation for the audience to take her into its confidence and purchase the institution's "pamphlets" plant increasing seeds of doubt.

However the play is alternately thought-provoking and tedious with the incomprehension and isolation of Jules and Jo becoming grating.

Meanwhile Barbara's downfall and (dubious) resilience feels a long time coming. There's something there but, although some aspects of this tall tale grew on TLT, it felt spread mighty thinly over an eternity of 90 or so minutes. A lower range amber light.

Review The Libertine

The Libertine
by Steven Jeffreys

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

According to this tale, based on true-life literary, louche aristo John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, it's a bit of a tontine in the playwriting world. If you fall too early, you can well end up the quarry of and as a character in the work of a more acclaimed and financially secure colleague - and rival.

Terry Johnson directs this revival of Steven Jeffreys' restoration romp, pastiche, tragedy (what you will ...) starring Dominic Cooper, which first made its mark in 1994 at the Royal Court as a companion piece to George Etheredge's Man of Mode before a production in the US and a movie 10 years later. Etheredge, my dear sir and madam, appearing as a character in this play - along with a monkey.

The historical Rochester was indeed an outrageous debauchee, hellraiser, whoremonger and cynic who had fought for King Charles II in the wars against the Dutch and whose father had been a loyal supporter of the royals in exile during Cromwell's protectorate.

It was this background that made him a protégé of the King, indulged if banished several times from the court. For Rochester had another weapon as he grew angry and disillusioned, along with many others, with the king's neglect of his country and the corruption of the court - satirical poetry.

In midst of the 1990s, when John Major was prime minister, Jeffreys scored a success with The Libertine following hot on the heels of the successful pairing of The Recruiting Officer with Our Country's Good, directed by Max Stafford-Clark who also directed the first production of this play .

The Libertine is structured around a series of scenes somewhat reminiscent of William Hogarth's A Rake's Progress painted in the century following Rochester's death from syphillis at the age of 33.

This structure is emphasized in this production by the set designed by Tim Shortall. A low, roughly-hewn wood stage stands in front of an oversize gilded picture frame onto which are projected a series of sensual - at first noticeably with women with their heads cut off at the neck - or topographical paintings.

Using also the structure of restoration plays, with a prologue by the libertine himself "You will not like me" and soliloquies by other characters, the characters address the audience between scenes, increasingly in the manner of a court case.

The play itself accepts a disputed premise, that William Etheredge based his man of mode, Dorimant, part of Rochester's circle, on the poet. But otherwise the incidents displayed or alluded to in The Libertine are a recorded part of history.

Not least the portrait of Rochester, a manuscript in hand, about to crown a monkey with a poet's laurel wreath, while the monkey tears pages out of a book and hands a crumpled page to him in his outstretched paw.

It has all the elements of both a lascivious bodice and cod piece ripper (Rochester, so he informs us in his prologue, goes both ways) and a politically and intellectually stimulating play. Yet it doesn't quite deliver on either count.

While Cooper acquits himself tolerably well in the eponymous role, the play feels weighed down by much discussion rather than action.  Maybe it's a bad reflection on 2016, but the supposed outrageousness of Rochester and his acts of destruction and self-destruction seem rather tame now.

Still, Jasper Britton has a flourish and presence as King Charles. Will Merrick as young Cambridge-educated spark (Rochester was an Oxford man), Billy Downs is memorable as the young man lured into life as a mini-Rochester. Yet Ophelia Lovibond as Rochester's actress lover Lizzie Barry and Alice Bailey Johnson as his country-bound wife Elizabeth Malet feel curiously static.

It says much that it's at the sitting for the couple's portrait when the play for a short time catches light. Meanwhile the supposed liveliness of the Signior Dildo song as x-rated satire, where the dildos seemed sometimes more like police truncheons, and the carousing and fighting often falls flat.  

To be perfectly honest, TLT and her own roistering automative servant found this a frustrating experience. Perhaps wrongly, we were continually asking ourselves, "What does it all mean?". "How does it fit into the 1990s?"

"Or is it some metaphor for the rise of the angry young men playwrights like Osborne and Orton against the likes of Rattigan and Coward?" "Is there a special significance when Rochester is called a romantic?" On the other hand, is it just a rather slight play with a role for a charismatic leading man which is more at home in the cinema than on stage?

There was more momentum in the second act but this felt like an uncertain production of a play truncated in its arguments and action. It's perfectly serviceable but there were longeurs and while it sent us to Signior Google to find out more about Rochester, it's an amber light for The Libertine.