Review Taha

Tim Gopsill applauds a solo show tracing the dislocated life and the tender, humane poetry of a contemporary Palestinian poet.  

Taha
by Amer Hlehel
Translated by Amir Nizar Nuabi  

Lost And Found In Translation
https://www.youngvic.org/ 

Sometimes the shortest work can carry the most meaning. This one-man play Taha tells of a lifetime in just over an hour.

The life is that of Taha Mohammed Ali, the celebrated Palestinian poet who died in 2011.

Playwright and actor Amer Hlehel explores the lives of many Palestinian refugees through the story and character of Taha, using the facts of his biography, his poetry and reconstructing the poet's life with elements of magical realism.

Taha relates how he had forced himself on a world, which did not want him. His mother had given birth to three sons before, all called Taha, for whom thanks had been offered to God, but all had died. No thanks were offered for the fourth, which survived, and “that was me.”

Fittingly, a large part of Taha's story is also conveyed through his verse - the translation projected in surtitles on the the back wall. Sometimes the poetry is recited in English and sometimes in Arabic, all of which adds to the fabric of an affecting play.

A first-generation Palestinian torn from his roots, teenager Taha and his family were driven from the family home in Galilee in 1948.

Unable to bear life in the refugee camp in Lebanon the family smuggle themselves back over the border for a life of internal exile.

We meet Taha's parents, his sister and the cousin he loved through Hlehel's captivating performance and travel with Taha to Lebanon, then back to his changed land of his birth and on to Nazareth where he again built up his life.  

Hlehel's performance as Taha does not have the polemic and anger often associated with the Palestinian experience. While conveying the bitter loss, it is wry, self-deprecating and occasionally funny --- in line with Taha’s verse.

As the owner of a successful souvenir shop in Nazareth, Taha proclaims himself, "a Muslim selling Christian memorabilia to Jews".   

Far from raging over theft, Taha evokes a child puzzling over dispossession and then an adult living with injustice and sorrowing over what the land can come to mean. 

This land doesn't remember love…
This land denies,
cheats, and betrays us;
its dust can't bear us…

Director Amir Nizar Zuabi wisely keeps the simplicity and directness of the poet's voice in his minimal staging - a bench and a box of yellow light lit by Muaz Jubeh with music from Habib Shehadah Hanna.

Taha was launched in Washington DC earlier this year before performances in Luxembourg, Manchester and now The Young Vic until July 15.  It will then travel on to The Edinburgh Fringe Festival

For a deeply affecting performance exploring the Palestinian refugee experience with a universal resonance through one man  striving to live and understand, it's a green light. 

Review Life Of Galileo

A magnificent performance at the centre of a Brechtian universe brings a German classic into focus for Francis Beckett. 

Life of Galileo 
by Bertolt Brecht

On Different Planets
https://www.youngvic.org/

The Young Vic under artistic director David Lan encourages its directors to use its space in unexpected ways.

With Galileo, director Joe Wright and designer Lizzie Clachan have filled the centre circle, where you expect to see only actors, with some of the audience, seated on cushions. No doubt this has the incidental advantage of maximising the potential box office.

Galileo, a 17th century academic and scientist, passes off the telescope as his own invention in the Venetian Republic.  Yet with the telescope he then makes a true discovery which counters popular belief and sets him up in opposition to the powerful Roman Catholic Church.

Much of the action of the play takes place on a narrow raised platform around the centre circle, and sometimes the actors thread their way through the members of the audience on the cushions.

They use this part of the audience as props, handing out pieces of paper which they retrieve a few minutes later. When an audience member sneezed, the actor speaking at the time added “Bless you.” to his lines  During the interval the 11-strong cast engage the people seated on cushions in conversation.

Some of the cast are also seated on the cushions. This is a modern dress production, so you don’t know who are audience members and who are actors until the actors stand up and speak. The entrances and exits are used for the occasional spectacular set piece.

Before the play begins, Brendan Cowell’s Galileo has to run and dance around the raised platform for quite a long time.  I am not sure it was wise of the director to make his leading actor do this: the night I saw it, Mr Cowell sounded a tiny bit breathless in his first few scenes.

Sometimes, even with the impressive planetarium-style design, projections by 59 Productions  and pulsing music by the Chemical Brothers' Tom Rowlands,  I felt the director was getting carried away by clever gimmickry, but if you can’t experiment with that great theatrical innovator Bertolt Brecht, who can you experiment with?

And it does emphasise the relevance and immediacy of this most political of plays, translated by John Willet.

For Life of Galileo isn’t about Catholicism, though the Catholic Church comes out of it pretty badly. It isn’t, as some academics have suggested, a play about Marxism. It’s exactly what Joe Wright says it is: “At the heart of the play is a questioning of authority… It’s about power. It questions the way power maintains itself through prescribing an ideology and dogmatising an ideology.”

The great strength of Joe Wright's production is that everything he does emphasises that central idea, underlining that it’s as relevant now as it was at the time of the Inquisition or when it was written in 1938 and then revised in 1947. During those years  the Nazis were in power in Germany, Stalin’s terror in full swing in the USSR and then the nuclear bomb unleashed on Hiroshima.

Brendan Cowell is a magnificent Galileo. He offers us the selfish, self-assured, almost childish impatience of genius for much of the play, but at the moment the Inquisition comes for him, all the cockiness drops away. 

He is instantly diminished. It prepares us for the moment when he confesses that they did not torture him.  They only showed him the instruments of torture. That was enough for Galileo. It would certainly be enough for me.

A fine production of one of the greatest plays of the twentieth century is certainly worth a green light.

Review The Emperor

The Emperor 
Adapted by Colin Teevan
From The Book By Ryszard Kapuściński

Pictures At An Exhibition
http://www.youngvic.org/

At the start of The Emperor, s delicate verse adaptation by Colin Teevan of Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński's 1975 literary reportage, we hear a rippling melody picked out on the strings of the Krar, the Ethiopian lyre.

The writing is literally on the wall when projected letters unravel, picked out to the beat of typewriter keys. "Kapuściński's intention was 'to recover pictures doomed to destruction, to make an exhibition of the old art of govverning'.

This two hander with Kathryn Hunter and Temesgen Zeleke (who plays the lyre and percussion, as well as army and student rebels), and presumably Kapuściński's book The Emperor, has an almost fable like quality in its ironies and humour. 

The archaic rhythms of the hierachical  Ethiopian court and attempt to rule with Aristolian purity are contrasted with the post Second World War world of international politics, implied social insurance, corruption in the form of a modern financial paper trail and a new educated generation influenced by Communism.

Hunter plays twelve characters interviewed by Kapuściński, maintaining a ricketty structure, underpinned by Japanese investment and foreign capital in the form of development aid,  holding up the Lion of Judah. The last of the imperial dynasty Haile Selassi was supposedly descended from the biblical King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba and ruled  Ethiopia until his "dethronement" in the latter half of the twentieth centry.

Yet every one of the court associates and flunkies in their outsize military uniforms and epaulets can be seen as one aspect of the elusive, unseen character of the frail, tiny ruler Haile Selassie. Simultaneously every one may be some aspect of the writer Kapuściński, another unseen character.

At the same time the testimonies of the court functionaries also reveal with fine brushstrokes how western politics and finance was reflected back and entangled in Ethiopia's uneasy mix. That is to say the "development without reform", the God-like, out of touch status of the Emperor, the army as royal bodyguards but then rebels, the poverty and famine  afflicting the Horn of Africa country.

Echoing the final days of the court of Louis XVI, the last Tsar of Russia and the Chinese Emperors, the piece in its measured poetic form has the feel of a deceptively gentle Candide or, perhaps more aptly, Rasselas satire. Most of all, Kapuściński himself was a journalist reporting back to and having to negotiate the potentially fatal (for him) internal and external intricacies of the Polish Soviet satellite state. 

Walter Meierjohann directs in a black box stage designed by Ti Green with the simplest of props: A couple of chairs,a walking stick, a wooden throne. red and gold cushions, a silk handkerchief. Hunter buttons and unbuttons an army jacket with removeable epaulets and dons a chauffeur's large peaked cap, scholarly glasses, a pair of shades as she metamorphoses from one character to another. 

The soundscape by Paul Arditta includes a jaunty brass band, the racket of building as the international development money flows in, the murmuring of discontents and the drumming of the rain.  

Running until September 24 at the Young Vic before transferring to Manchester's Home and then on to Luxembourg, the play does not stint on the ambiguities of the power play of the Western powers. It also simply and effectively emphasizes the mixed motives of the journalism which proved one of the major catalysts for the overthrow of the Imperial leader as the hacks cry at a press conference, "We don't want development, we want famine!". 

There is just a hint that this play wishes to spread its tendrils further than the years of The Emperor's reign and fall. For as the Minister of Information says to his dissident university student son, "For you, Hailu, there exists only the twentieth century,/Or this twenty first century/In which you say blessed justice will reign!"

This was a nation caught between an ancient feudal set up and both a willingness to play a role on  while being dragged onto the world stage. If a direct quote from Kapuściński (we haven't read his book), the immuring of Haile Selassie from the poverty of his subjects takes on a deepened meaning in our financial times:

"But in a poor country?/Money is a thing of wonder/ Money is a thick hedge, always in bloom/It separates you from everything else,/Through that hedge you can't see poverty,/Nor smell the human misery,/Nor hear the cries of the hopeless masses.

The art of governing, mentioned from the first, and the fate of empires, according to Aristotle, depends on the education of youth. Yet the elite of Ethiopia found their own children in the university refusing to be distracted by the city girls in hotel bars dressed in mini skirts "like Jane Fonda" or the music of the Rolling Stones. In the end, the elders have to be protected from stones launched by their own children.

This is a play exquisitely done. And yet, as the introduction to the printed text by Richard Reid of the School of African and Oriental Studies points out, the Kapuściński source material is not "unproblematical" (we assume in its double edged agenda coming from a Polish journalist at a certain point in history). 

While Teevan mentions the 21st century, the exploration of journalism and  Kapuściński's role seems just a little too lightly drawn for this version of The Emperor to make it distinct enough from that of Jonathan Miller and Michael Hastings at The Royal Court before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Still, it's an engrossing 100 minutes with a book and play which attempts to crystallize the nature of ancient hierarchies in a modern world and it's an amber/green light from TLT and her own little valet de théâtre.

Review Blue/Orange

Blue/Orange
by Joe Penhall

Typecasting
http://www.youngvic.org/

Imagine a world where the police detain a citizen without trial and any crime committed and then wash their hands of him or her. Where the detainee is transformed into a patient and  handed over to doctors and a hospital ward which, in the words of Joe Penhall's Blue/Orange, is effectively "a prison".

Where self-regulation rules, opinions rather than proof are regarded as evidence, where medicine is turned into a tribal greasy pole and patients are blank canvases used to support the ambitions and aims of consultants. And it seems from Penhall's piece the doctors to preserve the illusion hide from the detainee that their ability to keep the citizen can be overruled by tribunal after 28 days.

Welcome to the world of the section.

Except watching senior consultant Robert (David Haig), his junior Bruce (Luke Norris) manoeuvre and debate over black detainee Christopher (Daniel Kaluuya) as to shall-he-stay? or shall-he-go?, TLT and her own compos mentis companion were not so sure.

For Christopher, who seems to incorporate at various times all the different opinions, more than tinged with racial bias, of the medics as regards types of patients, comes from the "White City" estate, was picked up for "acting funny" - those seeking to break into TV comedy, watch out - in Shepherd's Bush market.

Ok, he also believes he is the natural son of "Butcher of the Bush" Idi Amin but if it's a  delusion (who knows when nobody seems to need any proof except opinion), it's a harmless one. Only once is mention of suicide brought up and we're never quite sure if it's convenient for the records or if he really has suicidal thoughts. 

As the consultants talk and behaviour grows more and more outrageous and crude, something began to dawn on your intrepid twosome. For surely the consulting room in the square designed by Jeremy Herbert, surrounded by the audience who entered through a basement National Health Service waiting room which could still be seen, at times, through gaps in the stage.beneath, could stand for any national institution?

Mentions of the property boom, institutionalised racism, sporting fixtures with the vagueness surrounding the section all segued nicely into our own theory about this play. Hey, we may not have a book deal like manipulative consultant Robert, with David Haig channelling by increments his own inner God/Jesus/Archbishop complex,  but we definitely can publish!

For it doesn't seem as if you need the inmates taking over the asylum when you have these docs who all seem to have their own lawyers as well for extra insurance.

But hang on a moment, Shepherd's Bush, White City, the market, could playwright J Penhall Esq in his 2000 play possibly be talking about another institution, now again on the brink of yet another major upheaval? :o No, surely not?!

Anyway director Matthew Xia keeps the more subtle and the nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw balls expertly in the air at the same time and the three-strong cast show, in the words of Marx (Groucho and Chico, that is) 'Sanity Clause, Sanity Clause, there ain't no Sanity Clause'! So we promote Blue/Orange to a big bucks TLT apple green light

Review A View From The Bridge

A View From The Bridge

By Arthur Miller

Young Vic SE1 

Family Guy

Yes, we’re back. Do we have to make excuses for our absence? We think not  – after all, you’re reading this blog and hopefully hooked like a fish on bait or a side of meat hung in an abattoir. ;) Nor, unlike some others, will our narration misdirect you. This is a wonderful production of Arthur Miller’s 1950s’ fable, A View From The Bridge, with not a dud coin amongst the performances. 

At the same time, TLT and her well-oiled and speedy-wheeled chariot have to admit, although they would always race to a Miller play, they have always found his writing a little  – well - schematic. Yet in their humble opinion, the rendering of director Ivo van Hove, along with Jan Versweyveld's design and lighting, of A View From The Bridge turns this into a strength.

At the height of an economic crisis, the arrival of a wife's cousins as illegal immigrants from the old country disturbs the tenuous status quo of the Italian-Brooklyn Carbone family: Eddie (Mark Strong), good natured patriarch eventually descending into despairing self-defeating revenge, Beatrice (Nicola Walker), torn between her family and her isolated husband, and Eddie’s young niece Catherine (Phoebe Fox), chafing at the bit to experience life. 

A simple stretched length-wise stage  –  without props, bare-bones black and white with long box benches rising on every side can change within a few words into a dockyard pier, a Brooklyn home, an attorney’s office, a boxing ring or maybe even a court house foyer, a political cell,  an international conference room - or a man trap.

Cousin Marco (Emun Elliott) sets out methodically to earn precious dollars to send back to his own wife and children in Italy but, to the horror of her Uncle Eddie, Catherine is charmed by ambitious Rodolpho (Luke Norris) with his matinee-idol looks. 

Yet there is an explicit indication this play means more than the one man’s tragic (alleged) incestuous, jealous obsession. The two Italians speak perfect American from the start, although TLT and her motorised compatriot willingly took part in the audience's suspension of disbelief, while glimpsing the possibility of parallel stories.

Alongside a masterly use of sound (Tom Gibbons), lighting and choreography, the staging reminded TLT of a previous Young Vic production – the circular heartbeat simplicity of  The Brothers Size. And like Richard Eyre’s recent absorbing Ghosts, this production gathers momentum by eschewing an interval (back to its one-act verse roots) and the two hours fly past. 

The twists and turns of this piece’s tragic trajectory and insistent lawyer-narrator demand attention and open up the possibility of an audience analysing the action and words for itself rather than accepting the say-so about any character from others.

Naturally the pacing is superb with seemingly sympathetic but seedy lawyer Alfieri (Michael Gould) and the increasingly tortured and trapped longshoreman Eddie Carbone juggling the action until all hell breaks out and events spiral out of their control.

A minor quibble alone -  for us, using coloured lighting in the denouement might have made a more visceral impact than a final prolonged clinch in an actual liquid tide, although (we think) we can understand the reasoning for this. 

Anyway this may seem rather churlish as, for us too, the tragic human consequences acted on an anosmic (look it up! :) ) set of otherwise almost digital cleanliness gives the play recognizable currency in our globalized electronic age of video games and drones. A great ensemble effort to which TLT and her rootin’, tootin’ buggy give an unadulterated green light!