Review The Seagull

The Seagull

by Anton Chekhov

The Rivals

https://openairtheatre.com/production/the-seagull

The Seagull! Squawk! In a new version by writer Torben Betts directed by Matthew Dunster! Squawk! At Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre! OK, enough of these seagull noises!

Of course, Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre made its name with the once annual play-within-a-comedy by the English bard, “A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream”. Here we have a Russian classic, Anton Chekhov’s human comedy and viewed as the first of his theatrical masterpieces. 

And it seems like a dream location, outdoors: water (a man-made stage lake), trees, sky.

The Regent's Park stage is reflected by a huge angled mirror suspended from the heavens for a play with a bitter yet loving satiric edge, It’s a clever touch by designer Jon Bausor in this most self-reflexive of plays about life, theatre and art, where all the characters also reflect each other in one way or another. And all just as relevant in our virtual age!  As the characters stroll on stage, the mirror, hanging like Nature's camera, gives a bird’s eye reverse view, yet frames the figures like the French and Russian paintings of the time.

TLT and her horseless scarlet troika have only ever read The Seagull and were keen to experience this early Chekhov classic tableaux 1895 play of unrequited love, disappointment, life, theatre  – oh, yes and comedy :).

 

Writer Torben Betts who adapted this version made quite a splash with crowd-pleasing Invincible. But Chekhov is pretty funny too in his poignant and, in TLT’s view, subtly political sort of way. If fans of Invincible come to this, they may be surprised to learn that most of the best jokes come from Chekhov. 

Irina Arkadina (a finely drawn and gracefully humorous performance by Janie Dee) returns with her lover Boris Trigorin (Alex Robertson), a successful novelist, to the family estate, home of her bachelor brother retired state councillor and lawyer, Peter Sorin (a suitably curmodgeonly Ian Redford). 

Also living on the estate are Irina’s fretful student drop-out and would-be avant-garde playwright son Constantin (Matthew Tennyson) alongside the farm manager Ilia (Fraser James), his wife Paulina (Lisa Palfrey), their disenchanted goth-like daughter Masha (Lisa Diveney). Wandering in are idealistic young Nina (Poldark’s Sabrina Bartlett), living on a neighbouring estate with her landowner father and stepmother, the old lothario of a doctor, Eugene Dorn (a relaxed and engaging performance from Danny Webb) and impecunious schoolmaster Simon Medviedenko (Colin Hoult). 

Like a seagull, the play is a delicate but tough old bird winging its way through stage conventions, symbolism, images, impressions, politics, history, the constant merging yet separation of  life and theatre.  Still, a play is a play and birds don’t normally get reviews ... ;)

While much critical writing dwells on Constantin as artist, his passion for Nina, and the mother-son relationship, perhaps the play is just as much about the rivalry between two actresses.

  

The women are the centre of attention (much to Constantin’s chagrin) but their positions are always fragile.  For example, in spite of her selfishness and self absorbtion, why should we doubt Irina’s assertion that her costumes use up much of her cash?  Nina, infatuated with Boris but also playing her hand against Irina, makes the decision to go to Moscow and take to the stage when she learns the actress and her lover are leaving.

Boris does leave Irina for Nina but finally abandons the young actress and his child to go back to Irina. In the end, Irina is seemingly successful,  Nina  made to drudge from one small town to another with the implication of possible prostitution to make ends meet. Yet both have lost the fathers of their children and, in a final (off stage) coup de théâtre, their children.

In fact, if it one wants to veer towards theatrical artificiality and a detective story, it’s almost as though other characters deliberately lure Nina to her fate of repertory company drudgery:  Irina herself, her brother the lawyer, the doctor all lavish Nina's acting with praise. Boris, indulged by Irina, seduces Nina, then returns to Irina and uses  the young actress’s life, made into tragedy, for his own purposes.    

Part of the unblinking toughness and poignancy of the play is the attraction and resistance to theatrical symbolism, the guying of melodrama, yet the conceding of the truth melodrama reveals. All back-to-back with hard-nosed money matters.

Seeing this production in final preview, TLT and her cabriolet were taken with the ingenious design, especially the play-within-a-play and the soundscape using recorded voice overs giving a satisfyingly visceral resonance. 

But the mash-up and experimenting with styles felt less successful. 

Nina’s pivotal final tussle against identification with the main symbol of the play, to retain her sanity, her dignity, to face reality and continue, did not come through for us. The production therefore lost its rhythm plus some of the play’s clear sightedness about human relations set within the context of a fast diminishing Russian Empire hierarchy. 

In our opinion, it felt sometimes too muddled to turn the audience into fellow travellers, enthused enough to sway at different times in favour of one character or another or to follow the story’s delicately incremental, viciously funny yet tragic development. 

Perhaps the open air location, particularly with some deliberately jarring sound effects, and large stage didn’t lend itself to the style of production. Nor is it surprising to read that director Matthew Dunster comes from the Young Vic and maybe it all would have worked better in that space. Still, an amber light for a stronger first act, ingenious design, some stand out performances and of course a spectacular park setting.

PS  What is it about seagulls? It did occur to TLT that a near contemporary of Chekhov, German nonsense poet Christian Morgenstern wrote a famous cryptic poem about seagulls  Do these writer chaps know something about gulls that we don't?;)

Review Face The Music

Face The Music
Music and Lyrics by Irving Berlin
Book by Moss Hart

http://www.yeolderoseandcrowntheatrepub.co.uk

Police Follies

It's showtime and TLT and her trusty four-wheeled steed took a detour from their usual West End and fringe venues to  venture into the exotic East. That is E17, namely Walthamstow  and Ye Olde Rose and Crown.

This pub theatre has built up a reputation, like the Union Theatre in South London, for resurrecting lesser known musicals. Indeed, this musical was truly “lost”, painstakingly excavated by the US musical archivists’ team from the Rogers and Hammerstein Organization. (There’s a bit of industry inside knowledge for you gleaned from the internet – the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization also represents the Irving Berlin copyrights!).

Certainly quite a few musical theatre afficianados, all of whom are on the venue’s mailing list,  sat alongside TLT at this first preview, eager to see a re-discovered piece directed by Brendan Matthew in its UK première, Face The Music 

.

No, not the other Irving Berlin show with the famous song "Let’s Face The Music And Dance”. Rather, an earlier revue-type musical written four years before  in 1932 with a topical book by Moss Hart  about – er – police graft in the Depression ... 

Yes, you read correctly Irving Berlin wrote a score which underneath all the gags and sunny satire is a pretty angry show about police  and mayoral graft, prostitution, money laundering, fixed court cases  – and, oh yes, putting on a show. 

From the outset, one has to say this was a very unbalanced (especially as regards sound levels) production but there was enough in it to make TLT wonder what it could be. 

At the same time, there was the frustration of a small orchestra often overpowering the voices in the cavernous hall serving as auditorium in this shoestring theatre, plus some strange staging choices affecting sightlines in the first act.

But the costumes (designer Joana Dias) are ingenious and the dance routines (choreographer: Sally Brooks)  satisfyingly witty with plenty of floor space for hoofers to hoof, cutting some particularly cute vaudeville silhouettes. 

The casting and styling too felt ingenious. Alessandro Lubrano as the juvenile lead Pat Mason, hair slicked to one side, actually looks like Irving Berlin in a chirpy performance with a clear singing voice including one of the better known songs “Let’s Have Another Cup of Coffee”. He’s matched by Joanna Hughes as Kit Baker as his love interest, maybe a little hampered by an underwritten role, but with equally sprightly vocals. 

And to continue the likenesses, Ceris Hines as vaudevillian Pickles Crouse, with a passing resemblance to Betty Boop/Julia McKenzie, gives an engagingly kooky and strong rendition of “I Don’t Wanna Be Married”, hoofing pleasingly with partner Lewis Dewar Foley as Mickey Rooney Joey Malarkey. While James Houlbrooke’s besotted police officer even managed to remind us of another James --  Jimmy Stewart. 

Whether or not these resemblances were intentional, it gave a satisfying resonance for this audience member.  

Joanne Clifton, of BBC’s ballroom hit Strictly Come Dancing fame, showed the expected grace in dance routines but also considerable singing chops and sincerity as actress-turned-street-walker in the satiric Torch Song and on the witness stand. 

“The producer came to me/That’s the night I lost my [pause]  modesty ...the business is dropping/The show is not liked by the mob ... And judge, I needed the job!” 

It’s that kinda raw show, it’s that kinda life as the show was first performed during a real investigation into New York City police  and magistrates’ courts corruption with its litany of bribery, perjury, framing of the innocent, fraud and  false imprisonment.  

 

Sure, the impressario Hal Reisman played by Samuel Naughton manages to put on a show, where in a piece of legalistic ventriloquism, the police, lousy with ill-gotten cash, launder their money and then have to raid the show for indecency after expected failure turns to success.   

Then in the second act he puts on a sop of a court case (“on every front page and they don’t even charge for admission”). So naturally there’s a happy ending for the manacled-together criminals, show people, court officials, judge, police chief (David Anthony) and wife (Laurel Dougall) – all rigged by the impressario of course.

Perhaps influenced by 1920s’ Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weil without the overt socialist critique, it’s also as tough in its own way as Mel Brooks’s The Producers thirty years later which it obviously influenced. And maybe it stretches forward even to the 1975 John Kander and Fred Ebb Nowadays premise of Chicago . 

 

Anyway it was a raggedy sort of experience in Walthamstow with TLT and jalopy straining to follow the story and lyrics, but foiled much of the time by the sound levels and sometimes a little too much comedy mugging.   

One hopes now some of the flaws are ironed out as it enters mid-run. The audience, in an L-shape around the performing space, all seemed to relish, like TLT, the quality choreography and sporadic high points. So despite misgivings over sound levels, it’s an amber light for an intriguing piece. 

And  come to think about it, perhaps we’ve been misdirected about Irving Berlin by Fred Astaire’s pristine top hat and tails and Ginger Rogers’ high heels and feathers ...  “Before The Fiddlers Have Fled” could be construed as  pretty damned angry ...  

PS Having gone to see the first preview, TLT and her horsepower scarlet sidekick felt it only fair to forgo posting a next-day review but wait until further into the run.

Review The Beaux' Stratagem

The Beaux' Stratagem

by George Farquhar

The Company They Keep

http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/shows/the-beaux-stratagem

TLT and her horsepowered coach  galloped along after a last-minute online seat booking to the South Bank for The Beaux' Stratagem, a bold comedy of 1707. 

It’s the usual round of Restoration stock characters.  Two wastrels, one Tom the brother of a Viscount Aimwell (Samuel Barnett),  the other, Frank  Archer (Geoffrey Streatfeild), a gentleman masquerading as his man servant, have quickly gone through their fortunes in London. Now they seek to woo and win wealthy wives in the Staffordshire cathedral city and coaching hub of Lichfield to replenish their income and return to their dissolute ways.

Yet these highwaymen of love are matched by the hostelry where they take rooms. The landlord Boniface (Lloyd Hutchinson) and his buxom daughter Cherry (Amy Morgan) act as fences for a gang of real highwaymen headed by Gibbet (a striking performance by Chook Sibtain). 

The landlord of the landlord (are you keeping up?), the local squire Mr Sullen (Richard Henders) is unhappily married to – er – Mrs Sullen  - (Susannah Fielding), targetted by Mr Archer, and has a single half sister Dorinda (a winsome Pippa Bennett-Warner), love interest for Tom Aimwell.

Squire Sullen and Dorinda share the same mother,  herbalist healer widow Lady Bountiful (Jane Booker) with whom son, single daughter and chafing-at-the-bit daughter-in-law all  live. Oh yes, and there’s a French Count (Timothy Watson) and a supposedly Belgian priest with an Irish tang (Jamie Beamish). 

According to advance publicity, director Simon Godwin says Northern Ireland-born George Farquhar, the son of a Protestant clergyman, was a feminist. 

Awww, according to online biographies (and The National Theatre’s programme), Farquhar had a father, but no mother. So we are lucky he felt so deeply about women to include them, even by name, in his plays ...!!! 

But something else struck TLT and her four-wheeled cabriolet watching this version of The Beaux' Stratagem dramaturged by Simon Godwin and playwright Patrick Marber. While marriage conditions and family (rather than purely wifely) settlements were raised  above the parapet in the script, life seemed to be organised into companies, regiments, gangs, as well as families.

So it came as no surprise, looking up afterwards John Vanburgh’s earlier play The Relapse  mentioned in The Beaux' Stratagem, to discover  London theatre had been riven by a chaotic rivalry between two theatre companies.

There was the officially sanctioned patentee, the “United Company” and then a breakaway actors’ company protesting against their “enslavement” by the former, each appealing to the Lord Chamberlain (later also to become the theatre censor) . 

Actors were  even said to be “seduced” (the legal term) from one company to another, with thespians brought in from Ireland to make up the dearth of actors in the United Company. 

Divorce business-wise seemed to be in the air and political marriage also with the Act Of Union between England and Scotland. 

So the final arrangements for the marriage of Tom and Dorinda and  Mrs Sullen’s  separation from her ill-matched spouse, while maybe hearking back to 17^th century pamphleteering about divorce, could equally gesture perhaps towards other issues, theatrical and political, with lawyers' meddling still relevant?

This  production is costumed with Hogarthian relish and carefully designed with a three-floor set (designer Lizzie Clachlan) serving as inn and transforming into Lady Bountiful’s home, with lowered chandeliers, paintings,  mirrors, flowers, red velvet drapes and sliding wallpaper panels.

A band of musicians smooth the transitions, not only with music of the time but glancing at other styles, all of which work well (music: Michael Bruce). The scenes are carefully choreographed with clean and sharp action cut into resonant Hogarthian tableaux. 

Yet the attention to elegant silhouetted detail also can hamper the energy of the piece, making it seem a tad lengthy and sometimes repetitive. Meanwhile a scene with muskets doesn’t have the visceral impact, one might expect. The descent into darker issues with accompanying lighting (lighting designer: Jon Clark) equally so.

It’s the earthier characters who tend to stick in the mind such as Scrub the servant (a lugubrious Pearce Quigley) who terms himself the “butler” and a “perfect slave” as he attempts (in the sense of “lead away”) to seduce Frank Archer in the wine cellar. 

All in all, much for an audience to enjoy but maybe this production doesn’t quite have the muscle and the spontaneous drive to take by surprise. An amber light.

Review The Harvest

The Harvest

by Pavel Pryazhko

Hard Graft

http://sohotheatre.com/whats-on/the-harvest/

Who knew apples were such a hot topic? Researching the Belarus apple industry for this review with that well-known expert, Google ;), Belarus appears a relatively small apple producer but used as a transit country for major political shenanigans in a refrigerated apple cold war ...    . 

Does this have an impact on this Belarusian black comedy transferred from The Theatre Royal Bath? Maybe. But while an interesting hook in reality, an audience for The Harvest doesn't necessarily have to know about this.

An effective white box, designed by Madeleine Girling and Tom Piper,  serves as backdrop for regimented grafted green unblemished apples hanging down from roof railings on strings of various lengths.

Four young people compete to pick Reinette apples from the tree on a clear winter's day (lighting: Charles Balfour).  According to Google, Reinette is an 18^th century French variety first described by Edward Bunyard  in the year of the American Revolution.

And winter? Apparently, according to the script, they ripen off the bough before they are supposed to be brought to market as perfect specimens packed in the wooden crates provided.

Provided by whom? We never get to know. 

There is no gangmaster, no supervisor, no apparent orchard owner as the four descend into at first comic and then increasingly darker desperate strategies. 

A bee sting disrupts the ideal harvest day for the two males and their tantalising female companions, Ira (Beth Park) and Lyuba (Lindsey Campbell) and from then on, it’s all downhill. 

Valerii (Dyfan Dwyfor) in the best-written role, clad in sports gear, is sometimes able to furnish a hammer to knock “new nails in old holes”.  Nevertheless sometimes he’s as incompetent and self-harming as  his chunky bee-stung mate Egor (Dafydd Llyr Thomas) and eventually roams the stage maniacally thinking up new schemes, peering indistinctly from behind the fourth wall. 

The apples themselves turn into vulnerable beings,  bruised, tossed, pulled and  pushed  in and out of collapsing crates. Meanwhile the four human beings spiral into mayhem with the crop ultimately  crushed in the prevailing anarchy. This is a production which must use up a considerable quota of apples every night!

Does the orchard represent a state enterprise? At this very moment state enterprises in Belarus are being privatised  (“it is the work collective that has to decide whether or not privatization will take place”, according to a real-life news story quote of the President).]

Or could it equally, from our world, be a corporate, with the state hidden?  Certainly local and national government and insurance company health and safety inspectorates never appear in the ensuing bloody orchard chaos. 

 

As one character says, “Well, it could happen to absolutely anyone”.  

And the result? The four youngsters,  physically and psychologically maimed ultimately turn from productive apple-picking citizens into aimless patients in a pharmaceutical stupor. The once idyllic landscape goes into freefall, breaking up like the crates and then freezing over.

This 2011 play is given a sprightly poetic translation by Sasha Dugdale, energetically directed by former RSC Artistic Director Michael Boyd and performed with humour and vigour by the actors. 

Jaunty recurring old-fashioned music (sound: Andrea J Cox – no pun intended!) gives a possible clue to a gallop through history. It’s short enough at 70 minutes without an interval to hold the attention. 

Yet the production also feels – a little grafted, put together. Too broad and repetitive for the fragile  seesaw  between artificiality, farce, vulnerability, danger and tragedy, as delicate as the easily-damaged apples hung by slender string. 

Collectively, TLT and her juicy jalopy did wonder whether film, with its naturalistic setting yet descending into surreal moments, might be a fitting medium for this piece? So not quite an apple green light but a golden delicious amber.

Review Hay Fever

Hay Fever

by Noël Coward 

Bohemian Rhapsody

http://www.atgtickets.com/shows/hay-fever/duke-of-yorks/

“Why is Hay Fever called Hay Fever?”, mused TLT and her ruminating roadster about Noël Coward’s play, still in preview, as they gazed at the white stucco facade of the Duke of York’s Theatre in the heart of London’s theatreland. 

Barely two hours later, after the final curtain, this exquisitely structured, melodic (and like Private Lives), “comedy of bad manners”, written by a young Coward in 1924 following a trip to the USA, nevertheless  struck us  as rather sinister (or should that be, in Coward’s case, dexter?).

Are we meant to infer hay fever as feverish disruption and disarray? Or sexual peccadillos as in “a roll in the hay”? Or was it already slang for marijuana or cannabis or for ready cash?  Or should we reach for the anti-histamines? And what about scenes where house guests “play up” to hosts from hell like sane detainees in a mental home feigning madness to advance the career of the chief psychiatrist? 

The seemingly kooky hosts, inappropriately surnamed Bliss, reside in a manor house on The Wind In The Willows banks of the River Thames in the village of Cookham. 

The Bohemian “independent family”:  Veteran actress – and tippler --planning-a-comeback Judith (Felicity Kendal as a delicious domestic tyrant); Pot-boiler novelist David (Simon Shepherd looking just a tad like Coward biographer, the late Sheridan Morley) and late teens’ children Simon (boisterous Edward Franklin) and Sorel (boyishly played by Alice Orr-Ewing) settle down for the weekend, each having, unknown to the others, invited a guest. 

For Judith, Simon and, more ambiguously, Sorel, love trysts with a hearty sportsman, Sandy Tyrrell (a Wodehousian Edward Killingback), a society vamp (authoritative Sara Stewart) and  diplomat Richard Greatham (willing-to-break-protocol-by-the-play's-end Michael Simkins) are respectively on the cards. 

Meanwhile David wants to “observe” a young female flapper, Jackie Coryton (an equally pitch perfect performance by Celeste Dodwell) as a prototype for a character in his novel.  Funny – but rather sinister.

Coward famously said of Hay Fever that “it has little plot and remarkably little action”. 

Well, maybe at its own 1925 opening, there were more than enough plots going in countries mentioned in the play: Spain (military dictatorship and bullfights), Italy (dictatorship and lira crisis), Japan (Imperial Royal Family and US immigration quota) and Russia (Soviet Union? 1920s? Enough said). 

As Coward added, the play depends on “expert technique from each and every member of the cast”. But in TLT and her automotive sidekick’s opinion, every character, including dresser cum housekeeper Clara (Mossie Smith), who by the end has participated by proxy in the world of international finance, is inventing his or her own plots, trying to best the other characters. Plus it’s difficult to say how long any short-lived peace will reign.

Drawing on the music-like play structures of Bernard Shaw (there are more than a few Shavian references in Hay Fever), maybe there’s also  a clue in the hiccups which the sportsman Sandy Tyrell suffers in the final act.  

The play hiccups along like a guffawing playwright-erly musical hocket, an alternation of notes, pitches or chords for several voices.  Hocket from the French word hoquet meaning a sudden interruption -  or hiccup. 

All the characters are sucked into the playacting, the melodramatic tropes, the creation of literary works, the coming together in, then breaking of alliances and the injured parties. While even the apparently bumbling diplomat doesn’t care about throwing around other people’s baggage, as long as his own diplomatic bag is safe. 

Perhaps the family itself is a construct for the press. This is a play which delights in its own technical prowess and nuts and bolts. Maybe the father of the family David Bliss’s definition of his work in this febrile international atmosphere, where novelists, actors, playwrights, artists, diplomats, sportsmen, newspapers, critics (!!) and anyone with a secret play a dangerous tactical game, is sinister:

“The only reason I’ve been so annoying is that I love to see things as they are first, and then pretend they’re what they’re not”

This Theatre Royal Bath revival directed by Lindsay Posner benefits from a terrific Judith Bliss in scion of a theatrical family herself, Felicity Kendal. Backed all the while, with home county midsummer lighting (Paul Pyant) flooding through the French windows, by the finely-detailed wood-panelled galleried set design by Peter McKintosh, becoming a character in itself.

The production has toured extensively nationwide and in Australia before coming into the West End and shows every sign of bedding down nicely. At the same time, it may need a look at the pacing in the first act and some tightening to hone its brittle humour. But TLT and her hatchback are unashamed Coward groupies and present a coveted emerald-green light.

But we still haven’t learnt the definitive explanation as to why Hay Fever is called Hay Fever ;).

Tickets to Hay Fever courtesy of 

Official Theatre www.officialtheatre.com

PS Interestingly, as well as supposedly being inspired by an American couple, actress Laurette Taylor and Anglo-Irish playwright Hartley Manners, there was a Bliss family around at the time of Hay Fever. 

Between 1923 - 1925 the composer Arthur Bliss, whose career had taken off after 1918 and became famous at the same time as Coward, lived, met his wife in 1924 and married a year later in California. His wife's mother, aunt and uncle were all actors with her uncle also being a playwright.  Arthur, whose American father was from Massachussets, of course shares a surname with the family in Hay Fever. 

Does one mention of the name MacKenzie refer to  Compton (known as "Monty") McKenzie, (writer, actor, Scottish nationalist, member of British intelligence and later supporter of the abdicated Edward VIII (along with his drug-taking brother George, Edward also knew Coward)? Compton MacKenzie's sister Fay Compton also appeared in Coward's plays. But TLT and her cabriolet are only willing to share Google search hunches with the reservation that they are definitely only vaguely circumstantial and nothing more ...

Review The Merchant Of Venice

The Merchant Of Venice

by William Shakespeare

In The Ghetto

www.shakespearesglobe.com

On a clear April evening, TLT and her (fully-paid-off) coupé made their way to The Merchant of Venice, the well-known legal loophole play (we want Portia - Rachel Pickup - not Mr Loophole, for any future driving charges!). 

But to the case in hand: Director Jonathan Munby’s well-judged production, with fine ensemble cast playing, pitched at the exactly the right level to hold the attention of an international Globe audience, draws out every ounce of comedy  with double-takes, pauses and clever interaction with the audience.

Designer Mike Britton gives us a luscious oil painting Venice of rich russets, filigreed and solid gold, velvety purples, greens, blacks, startling scarlets, swaying peachy brown gauze surrounding Portia like harem veils. 

Bassanio (Daniel Lapaine) seeks money from Antonio (Dominic Mafham), the eponymous Merchant of Venice, to pursue the hand of  Portia, still controlled as a chattel even from the grave by her father as she is entered into the marriage stakes. 

Instead Antonio agrees  to act as guarantor when Bassanio borrows from Shylock (Jonathan Pryce), confident of being able to repay any loan at the appointed date. However when his ships and cargo are reported shipwrecked, Shylock demands the pound of flesh in the contract ratified when Antonio was sure of his fortune.  

The Merchant of Venice still remains, at heart, difficult - viewed as both a subversive and conservative  play, vulnerable to different interpretations. As vulnerable as a bare-headed Shylock in this version, his scarlet cap, a mark of his place in the Venetian hierarchy,  ripped from his head, leaving him  defenceless, an alien without the rights of a citizen in a slave culture. 

However, as Portia disguised as a lawyer/judge asks tellingly at the play’s climax, raising an instinctive late bitter laugh from the audience, “Which is the merchant here and which is the Jew?”

Who knows if this is the modern gloss or if the ambiguity was there for Shakespeare’s audience? 

Yet, in this production of great clarity, the three businessmen,  Antonio, the merchant guarantor, the previously spendthrift Bassanio  and the moneylender Shylock are as  bound tightly together as three men thrown off the side of a ship in a barrel.  

This is a modern Shylock in a world of medieval savagery,  unable to stop himself sinking to its level. A  man who  seeks to be “loved” in the business den of Venice, alongside other businessmen. Yet as his attempts are frustrated and his anger grows, betrayed by a tremor in his voice, he  becomes a trapped animal. Robbed of his daughter Jessica (Phoebe Pryce) and other chattels, pursuing a civil law case without the insurance of state support, then branded a criminal.

Nevertheless, it seems to us to go strangely against the grain of the play to bring it to a definite close with an evangelically white-robed Shylock brought to the baptism font.  Rather than allowing the actual fate of Shylock (plus his dependent borrowers left without their Jewish moneylender), and even of Venice itself, to hang outside the play unseen, as in the original text. 

Especially when  Bassanio and Gratiano (David Sturzaker), husbands of Portia and her handmaid Nerissa (Dorothea Myer-Bennett), easily sacrifice vows  to their wives and wedding rings in favour of those they suppose to be a Doctor of Law and his clerk who have won the case for Antonio. A whiff of chatteldom and corruption to the still very strong end. 

Still, a minor quibble in an otherwise imaginative production, with magical comic touches, delighting the audience. Jonathan Pryce gives a finely-nuanced  performance as the moneylender, who has come to represent the play, in the midst of a uniformly strong ensemble. A green light.

Review Wish To Die Singing - Voices From The Armenian Genocide

I Wish To Die Singing - Voices From The Armenian Genocide

by Neil McPherson 

Breaking The Eggs

http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/

The slaughter of up to one and a half million Armenians in Easter 1915 within the rapidly-diminishing  Ottoman Empire hit the headlines at the time worldwide. One hundred years later Neil McPherson’s purposeful and necessarily partisan documentary drama piece, I Wish To Die Singing, charts the arrests; torture; mass killings; looting; rapes; slavery; forced conversions; death marches; desert concentration camps and an uncertain world response which remains to this day. 

Narrator (Jilly Bond) introduces an intense 90-minutes without interval, the spine of which are the lives of three different Armenians, survivors, part of an ancient Christian trading merchant minority in a Muslim country.

Music and dance accompany as a girl on the cusp of womanhood  (Tamar Karabetyan) steps forward to speak of relatives in America, along with  the painted Easter egg customs: “Whoever breaks the other person’s eggs wins”.

The joyful little girl (Siu-see Hung) from a wealthy merchant family revels in her dress from Paris and the country boy (Bevan Celestine) expects one day to inherit the family farm. 

Directed by Tommo Fowler, the seven-strong ethnically-mixed, colour blind cast, also including Simon Yadoo and Kate Binchy, give the stories a universal appeal, reinforced by sparsely-scattered references to other historical slaughters. 

The actors play multiple roles feeding in information to the audience from designer Phil Lindley’s  plain rough-hewn gray stage.  Backdrop projections (lighting and video: Rob Mills) include the Anatolian hills, sentences in the Armenian language unravelling as the characters speak, graphics, quotes, the landscapes of tragedy,  as well as  photos of perpetrators and victims. 

Theatrically, the verbatim testimony of the victims are the strongest, most affecting part of the play. 

The old man who swears not to “colour” events  (an affecting performance by Tom Marshall) relates facts which have the power of searing poetry. A sudden wail of the wounded released into the air after their assailants leave at sunset. The rows of heads on one side, bodies on the other with the slits in the thighs into which the hands were neatly inserted “like pockets”. 

Noone denies killings took place, but the Turkish Government have always maintained they were part of a civil war and not a systematic destruction of the Armenian people (with the Assyrian Christians and Greeks also targeted).

As the world map and alliances shift yet again, this play positions itself as part of a centenary push to have the slaughter put into the legal category of genocide, a word created specifically referring to the mass killings of Armenians. Reminding TLT and her companion of a sentence in  Ulysses by James Joyce (a book directly linked with Greece’s independence from the Ottoman Empire): “I fear those big words ... which make us so unhappy”. 

The word genocide was coined at a particular juncture in history during World War II with its alliances and emnities. Many present-day countries did not even exist.  The play’s narrative strand gives a partial rundown of why most scholars accept the events as genocide. However, as a subject of international law,  politically and nationally, it remains a divided issue.

I Wish To Die Singing tackles a 100 year old issue still very much the currency of our global times. A TLT amber light.

Review Clarion

Clarion
by Mark Jagasia

Drop The Dead Newspaper
http://www.arcolatheatre.com/

Over eighty years ago Ben Hecht and Charles McArthur, both seasoned hacks, wrote “The Front Page”  With several classy movie adaptations, and despite the plethora of satiric plays and films since then on the press, they remain a tough act to follow. 

They are of  course American and we in Britain now have had the phone hacking scandal. With the print newspaper industry on the ropes, journalistic practices have themselves  become the news story and subject of plays such as the National Theatre farce Great Britain by Richard Bean.

So does Mark Jagasia, first-time playwright, formerly of the Daily Express and Evening Standard,  bring anything new to the newspaper office genre? 

The play follows one day in the life of The Clarion trumpeting out its Little England headlines. Morris Honeyspoon (Greg Hicks in fine full-throttle, bulldozer mode) is the bigoted, rampantly imperialist editor pandering to the lowest common denominator in an “issue-led” paper.

His sparring partner is Verity Stokes (a magnificently despotic Clare Higgins), veteran foreign correspondent churning out columns in a permanently whiskey-sodden haze at The Clarion offices, allowed (rather out-datedly?)  a long leash for her expenses. 

On a lower rung are "immigration correspondent" Joshua Moon (Ryan Wichert) and news editor Albert Duffy (Jim Bywater) with evangelical executive Clive Pumfrey. (a nicely-judged performance from Peter Bourke) heading the London office. 

At the top of the pyramid is never-seen bottom-line proprietor Benny Panagakos, newspaper, topless hamburger chain and care home mogul.  

Last, but not least, lawyer’s daughter, fresh out of a degree course, Pritti Singh (Laura Smithers), the ambitious work experience trainee determined not to be sidelined.

TLT’s automotive companion surprisingly confessed to always having dreamed of being an intrepid reporter stepping into the shoes of an elegant foreign correspondent like the late James Cameron or, even in this often tawdry new media world,  a strictly ethical investigative journalist as in Lou Grant. 

And not even slight disillusionment when TLT informed the prospective press corps' member that Lou Grant does not exist, and no true hack should mix up fact and fiction, has dimmed the petite limousine’s idealism.

So our theatregoing buggy was especially keen to see what this new piece would bring to the journalism-themed table!

In our opinion, the script, especially in the first act, often had the feel of a well-worn sitcom. At the same time, although the characters are ones we may recognise, the actors up the entertainment value, clearly relishing meaty roles and providing the laughs. 

They launch themselves into a striking, updated Hogarthian or Gillray cartoon, with the visual taking precedence – the image of Morris strutting around in full Roman helmet regalia, the louche Verity, complete with gilt handled walking stick to prop her up, the bluff but craven news editor Albert, the ditzy but pushy would-be young showbiz reporter Pritti, all tight skirt and tottering high heels.

The emphasis on the visual perhaps explains a filmic feel to the script and short scenes, proficiently directed by Mehmet Ergen. Despite later more theatrical darker plot twists, this felt like movie or TV to TLT and sidekick rather than a play.  

The take-over of showbusiness and celebrity (an impressive performance by Laura Smithers which, ultimately,  made us wonder if the play might once have meant to be A Work Experience Girl’s Progress!), the change from trade to graduate career, the selective reporting, political incitement, the deracinated nature of journalism as its former purpose disappears into the internet ether – no one would doubt these are all issues on the boil in the pot of journalism, even if they are well-known.

But TLT and her bonneted companion (who wouldn’t mind an old-style pork pie press hat ;) ) are in two minds about this play  – reflecting its own split personality.  Maybe the writer’s own experience of journalism has given way a little too much to conventional playwriting tropes and self-conscious literary antecedants. Or maybe the lurches from sitcom to drama would work better on screen. 

Yet in our opinion the market for satire on the media and the tour-de-force opportunity for the actors playing the main protagonists will probably be enough to give it a life beyond this run. An amber light for a characterful piece.