Review: Heisenberg: The Uncertainty Principle

Freelance writer, editor and journalist Elizabeth Ingrams, now joins the TLT team and is taken with a fragile new love story where opposites attract.  

Heisenberg: The Uncertainty Principle
by Simon Stephens

Physical Attraction
https://www.delfontmackintosh.co.uk/tickets/heisenberg/

Two strangers, an American woman and an Englishman, meet accidentally on a London train station platform  and embark on an unlikely and unexpected unrelationship. 

There are waves of false starts, lies, confusions and sheer luck for Alex, a tango-teaching South London butcher in his 70s and Georgie, a much younger middle-aged primary school teacher.

Georgie's opening parry so confounds Alex's expectations, after his half a century of celibacy, he agrees to date her.  By the second half of this two-hander, 90 minute play, it is Georgie who has her expectations confounded by Alex.

And so begins a slight but attractive love story, a Brief Encounter for the 21st century filled with expectation on every level,

The drama directed by Marianne Elliott unravels on the no-man’s land white space of designer Bunny Christie’s minimalist set, saturated with the ingenious, pulsing coloured lighting of Paule Constable.

How does Heisenberg come into it? Any expectation this play is about physics and a Nobel Prize winner, deviser of the eponymous theory of uncertainty, should certainly be parked outside the theatre.

And don't sigh and think this has as much to do with the play’s title as the title of the film Beethoven has to do with the German composer (in case you don't know the movie's about a St Bernard dog).

Or that that this might closely mirror one of those discussions on Brexit, in the words of The Clash song, "Should I stay or should I go"? There is something subtle that’s worth waiting for here.

Uncertainties do abound: Georgie’s self-invented identity; the whereabouts of her missing son and her former partner; Alex’s uncertainty over the sale of his failing butcher’s business, and, more crucially, what to make of Georgie.

Thus it is that Heisenberg’s Principle, which can be crudely paraphrased as,  ‘the more we look into something, the less we can predict how it will turn out, or when,’ is woven into the play's fabric.

Stephens has always been a master of dialogue, allowing him to build his plays on the slightest of premises. Here, though, he allows meaning to emerge from between, rather than in, the lines.

The unexpected happens in plenty of inventive, witty and touching ways - Alex's post-coital classical music treat, Georgie's propensity, perfectly timed by Anne-Marie Duff, for screeching unexpectedly which brings the house down.

Is Georgie truly smitten or a calculating, mercenary opportunist preying on an old man? Is Alex a dotard or a wily fox picking up a younger woman for his own future benefit?

The play delicately leaves questions hanging in the air. The feature film-length, one-act play's slender structure immeasurably benefits from the cast, Anne-Marie Duff’s performance as Georgie - a brash, sometimes raucous New Jerseyite - and Kenneth Cranham’s shy-but-cuddly butcher.

Cranham’s strangled-cat vowels only finally emerge into full voice in the second half of the play when Duff's Georgie shows us her tango and the final dance of these two lonely hearts binds several negatives into a positive and a TLT amber/green light.

Review Lady Day At Emerson's Bar & Grill (Preview)

Lady Day At Emerson's Bar & Grill
A Musical Play
by Lanie Robertson

Keeping On Track
https://www.delfontmackintosh.co.uk/tickets/lady-day/

It was another day - or rather midnight - at the office for the guest spot jazz singer in a small nightclub in South Philadelphia. Except the singer was Philly-born jazz legend Billie Holiday and, in March 1959, she only had a few months to live.

Introduced by her business manager and pianist Jimmy Powers, Audra McDonald as Billie takes to the small stage surrounded by drinking customers sitting at the small round tables scattered around the room.

And then below the glitterball shade dangling from the ceiling, the Lady starts to talk - and sing.

This is a portrayal of Billie at the end of her life, indominatable but failing, fighting against vicious discrimination but beaten down by outside and personal demons.

The songs break through the sometimes lucid, sometimes incoherent and rambling in-between patter from which emerges the story of a life. 

Classically trained McDonald suppresses the naturally luscious richness of her voice and with technical precision nails Holiday's heartbreaking distinctive phrasing. 

At this point Holiday was a released jailbird, taking the fall for a feckless husband whom she nevertheless loves and pities. However, as an ex-con, she was now without the prized cabaret card that would allow her to sing in Harlem nightclubs.

On stage with her, Shelton Becton as Powers interjects when absolutely necessary, cajoling to make sure she gets to the end of her set, singing the songs the punters expect from her. 

But it also brings a realisation that breaking into the well-honed rountine of songs also keeps Holiday on track when the often justifiable fury and despair over a ruined life spills over.

For the glamorous off-the-shoulder gleaming white cabaret gown and long white gloves, we later learn, also hide the tell-tale tracks of heroin addiction needle injections. 

Lanie Robertson's play has been around since 1986 dong the rounds of American regional theatre and it may seem ironic that six-time Tony award winner McDonald now sprinkles Broadway stardust on the tawdry last few months of Holiday's life.

But the beauty and precision of the impersonation also wins us over. In addition to this uncanny performance, the life and sorry death of, among others, Amy Winehouse in the media spotlight serve to remind us these ravages aren't mere history and past cliché. 

Robertson's script is well-structured, allowing for Holiday's anger and resignation to emerge, although, perhaps by necessity in the 90 minute show,  it feels at times a tad expositional. 

But it's the evocation of Holiday's voice we come  to hear and which gives the breath-catching moments. There's unbearable poignancy too in a bruised life conveyed though bitter and wicked humour.

Holiday's evident decline as she stumbles over spoken words transmutes into heartrending, stirringly defiant renditions accompanied by Frankie Tontoh on drums and Neville Malcolm on bass, as well as Becton on piano.

There's God Bless The Child addressed to her mother, "The Duchess",  T'Aint Nobody's Business If I Do addressed to us all, Don't Explain addressed to an errant husband and Strange Fruit againt lynching in the American south.  

While not mentioned in the show, it's instructive that Emerson's Bar appeared in The Negro Motorist Green Book. This guide, published for 30 years from 1936 during the Jim Crow era in the southern states of America and de facto segregation in the north, listed services and establishments relatively friendly to African Americans.  When Holiday toasts the bar owner in the show, it has an added meaning.

This is a solid play directed by Lonny Price lifted by an exceptionally moving and technically breathtaking performance by McDonald and it's a green light.   

Review People, Places & Things

People, Places & Things

by Duncan MacMillan

An Actor's Life For Me?

http://www.peopleplacesthingsonstage.com/

Watching Duncan MacMillan's graphic novel of a play, People, Places & Things, a poem read long ago rose up from the deeper recesses of TLT's mind. Where the poet performed a feat of naming a long list of poets with perfect rhyme and scansion, ending with something to the effect: "One thing I know, we are too many..."

A hit of last year directed by Headlong's Jeremy Herrin, now transferred to the West End from the National Theatre, People, Places & Things ostensibly follows one of the too many - via the world view of a young drink and drug-fuelled actress - while riffing on art, literature, education, religion, acting, competition and substance abuse in the age of mass production.

After an on-stage debacle in an Anton Chekhov play, our actress enters rehab expediently to gain a prized certificate, presumably for insurance purposes, showing she is clean and allowing her to work again.

The evangelical twelve steps towards sobriety, which we see through her eyes, reflects her own life trajectory in the cracked mirrors of her mind.  Even to the point of starting out as the reluctant new girl in  reception, group therapy doubling as rehearsal room and culminating in a rehab graduation ceremony paralleling a world where acting is now a university degree.

On stage for the full two hours and 20 minutes, the lead role is an undoubted despair-to-euphoria tour-de-force for Denise Gough in designer Bunny Christie's white-tiled set. Additionally Andrezej Goulding's melting projections, sound by Tom Gibbons and Polly Bennett's choreography take us inside a drug-addled soul.

There's plenty to mull over, some pithy humour, polished performances from the rest of the cast including Barbara Marten in triple role as doctor/therapist/Mum and, although somewhat mitigated by repetition, many visceral effects.

Such repetition gave TLT the feeling the play could have been shorter, giving her time to wonder during its course why money never seemed to be a problem.  Maybe it all might have worked better for her in another medium, on film or even as a TV boxed set with the actress falling into aggressive reverie and progressing in the midst of a recognisable outside world.

A plethora of literary references scatter the piece, ranging from Mary McCarthy's The Group  to Zamyatin's We  (a known source for 1984 which writer MacMillan has successfully co-adapted for the stage)  with the work of sculptor and painter Jim Dine  and his exhibition called People, Places, Things seemingly another influence.

Once you catch on to the concept, it strikes us that the story peters out and the play becomes the victim of the very ideas it examines dramatically, emotionally and intellectually. Again a section with police officers and blood stained outcome becomes rather lost and might have had more impact, giving more of a narrative thread, on film. As would the studied monologues of the parents (played by Kevin McMonagle and Barbara Marten) in a home with literally strings attached.  

The opening, complete with playwright's typewriter, has our troubled thespian playing Nina in Chekhov's The Seagull (she later adopts the name of Emma - had the play's writer read the post script to our review of the same play?!). 

But it only underlined for us how Chekhov wrote the role of beleaguered actress as someone who lives in the real world. As well as serving as writer's creation, symbol, riff on theatre, victim and avenging angel for the audience.

As we approach the final lines of this little riff of a critique, yours truly and her fully insured sidekick have been racking their own collective brains, desperately googling to find the title and poet of the work mentioned in the first paragraph. But we've run out of time, so if you know the poem I mean, you know where to find the comments' column below ... :) Meanwhile, for People Places Things an amber light for a thought-provoking if overlong theatrical experience.