Review The Hairy Ape

The Hairy Ape

By Eugene O'Neill

A Stoker's Progress
http://www.oldvictheatre.com/whats-on/2015/the-hairy-ape/ 

Off to the palladial Old Vic to catch up on somewhat of a curiosity - Eugene O'Neill's 1922 satiric Expressionist play The Hairy Ape - a gorilla (as opposed to a guerrilla ;) ) play, eleven years before King Kong graced our screens.

Descending into a ship's sulphur yellow engine room, meet "Yank" (Bertie Carvel), the lead stoker or fireman, characterised by his brawn rather than brains as he mechanically shovels coal.   Part Popeye, part Marlon Brando, both later incarnations. 

But what surprised TLT and her free-thinking hatchback  is the resemblance to a reversed Rev Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies with Yank  like "the little black gorilla" chimney sweep literally below the surface. It's almost as if Irish American O'Neill engaged in a debate with Protestant English Victorian clergyman Kingsley, at the same time artistically embracing but also fearful of succumbing to social Darwinism.

However, unlike the begrimed chimney sweep of the fairy tale, Yank is a Frankenstein water baby who never finds redemption in this one-act 90 minute play.  

In eight scenes rhythmically directed by Richard Jones, Yank is propelled towards his fate via encounters with marionette-like church and party-going New York bourgeoisie and a book-driven workers' movement. 

Finally killed by political sentiment, deluded into a sense of brotherhood and commonality with an ape (Phil Hill deserves more than a mention for a memorable performance!), his bones are snapped like a puppet or clockwork doll by the animal whom he believes he can embrace and free.

In between he is a workhorse spurred into a kind of awakening. First by a lyrical whisky-drinking Irishman Paddy (Steffan Rhodri)  recalling the days of sailing clippers dependent on weather not machines.   

Then his own reverse Water Babies' Ellie, chaperoned steel heiress Mildred Douglas (Rosie Sheehy) who, wishing to play out academic social work theories learned at college, descends to the stokehold, only to seal Yank's fate, branding the fireman "a filthy beast" before melodramatically fainting.

Indeed it almost felt like The Truman Show before its time - with so much foreshadowing and characters testing out Yank's reactions before the inevitable end. 

Led by Long (Callum Dixon), the galley's Marxist agitator, into Manhattan's consumer society, Yank finally loses his passivity and registers with a political party after reading a newspaper in prison. But then turned on by his comrades, he's branded a possible spy and ends up in the zoo in front of the ape's cage.   

One can't help thinking such filmic and art school disenchantment may also have helped pave the way for mid twentieth century dictatorships and propaganda.  

It's a hair shirt of a play, five years after theory had also driven the bloodshed and famines of the Soviet Revolution.  Striking design by Stewart Laing (plus a stonking gorilla outfit, Stewart!), lighting by Mimi Jordan Sherin, choreography by Aletta Collins and sound by Sarah Angliss all drive Yank's progress. 

Even if the inaudibility of some of the Brooklynese (deliberately so, we think) adds to that hair shirt feeling, Bertie Carvel gives a virtuoso performance as Yank. Yet the combined design, lighting, choreography and sound in some scenes felt a tad too self-conscious for TLT's taste. 

 Was the play ever conceived to be a silent film (The Cabinet of Dr Caligari was released in 1920), we wonder? Anyway, a few stills from the original stage production with Louis Wolheim are here   and here.  And an amber/green light for this simian fantasy and four days still until November 21 to see it.

Review Mr Foote's Other Leg

Mr Foote's Other Leg

By Ian Kelly

Perruques And Prosthetics

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

You couldn't make it up - an actor-manager and satirical playwright Samuel Foote should surely have been a character in one of his own plays. Running with a fast and ruthless upper class crowd, including the future George III and his brother the Duke of York, Foote loses his leg taking on a bet. Yet he made a comeback as a one-legged thespian with the apt singular surname  worthy of the celebrated Peter Cook and Dudley Moore sketch which his story may have inspired.

And there's an amputation scene, strenuous but not unduly bloody, yet TLT did wonder whether Mr Clint Eastwood or Mr James Caan might want to take on the role for an American production ...

Ian Kelly adapted his own biography of Foote into the play "Mr Foote's Other Leg", now transferred from a sell-out run at the  Hampstead Theatre to its natural home at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. For Samuel Foote, played in this production by Simon Russell Beale with Kelly striking as his patron Prince George,  operated from the Little Theatre In The Hay with a Royal Patent in the 18th century, a forerunner of the current venue. 

In addition, he managed to evade the licensing and script censorship of the Lord Chamberlain  by claiming amateur status for his company, charging for tea or chocolate at his "tea parties" rather than audience tickets and performing improvisations including his own drag acts. 

TLT and her horse powered carriage was particularly intrigued by the theatrical premise of the play, having discovered the torrid rivalries of official and unofficial theatre companies doing research for her review of The Beaux Stratagem. 

And sure enough the play does encompass rivalries between Foote the comedian and David Garrick the tragedian (a finely judged performance by Joseph Millson), the competition from opera and  Hanoverian import G F Handel and the rise of the pleasure garden entertainment.  

Alongside themes emerging from Foote's possibly ambiguous sexuality, his relationship with his leading actress Peg Woffington (Dervla Kirwan), his surgeon John Hunter (Forbes Masson), his Jamaican dresser Frank Barber (Micah Balfour)  and scientist and American statesman Benjamin Franklin (Colin Stinton). Not forgetting Foote's big theatrical break after the manslaughter of actor Mr Hallam (Joshua Elliott).

Past and modern literary, light entertainment, historical and current affairs parallels punch well beyond the 18th century into our present day.  But it's the gamut of themes, allusions and characters, each worthy of their own play, which proved problematic for us. 

The play is directed at a filmic lively pace by Richard Eyre with sumptuous design and costumes by Tim Hatley.  Russell Beale holds the play together as best as he can, but  it did feel like a skate through heterogenous elements of several plays and then some alternative comedy yoked self-consciously together rather than an organic whole.  

Perhaps there's a clue in the mention of Laurence Sterne's shaggy dog story Tristam Shandy but the play lost its focus for TLT and her sidekick.   The night time search after Foote's death for his amputated leg among the pickled relicts of medical student curiosities never fulfilled its initial promise of concentrating on Foote, the man exchanging the law for the stage yet embroiled in a complex web of interests including his own.  

Nevertheless TLT did catch some more thought provoking strands such as Miss Chudleigh, a pleasingly cast Sophie Bleasdale stepped fresh out of a Gainsborough portrait.  First an ingenue actress and then a cackling villainess - at least as filtered through Foote's viewpoint as we never hear her side of the story. But such possible complexities never reach an apex and are easily missed. 

So an intriguing story and although there are glimpses of something darker drawing modern parallels, the play pulls in too many directions despite the best efforts of actors, including a distinctive performance by the playwright himself, director and crew. An amber light.

Review Close To You. Bacharach Reimagined

Close To You. Bacharach Reimagined

Music Burt Bacharach and Lyrics Hal David

Co-conceived by Kyle Riabko and David Lane Seltzer 

The Old Music Master Remastered

http://www.criterion-theatre.co.uk/site/crit/templates/general.aspx?pageid=128&cc=gb

The age of downloads has led to an inter-generational appreciation and study of great song writing as never before.   It's also probably led to the popularity of a show like "Close To You", with  twentieth first century arrangements of mid twentieth century classics by octogenarian Burt Bacharach and the late Hal David.

  

Starting with a spotlight solo "Anyone Who Had A Heart" with Canadian Kyle Riabko  on guitar followed by "This Guy" and the first of a recurring refrain of "What's It All about" (from Alfie), the show follows musical themes and patterns rather than an instantly recognisable musical theatre narrative. Whole songs are embedded with slivers of others,  giving a seamless sonata quality to the musical medley expertly choreographed by director Steven Hoggett.

And, with Burt Bacharach present on press night, maybe one can say there is an outside narrative - real life merging with theatre. Emerging from a demo session when he played new material by the  composer, the show is the brainchild of twenty something Riabko alongside David Lane Seltzer with the old masters, Bacharach and David (before his death), giving their blessing.  Once such protegé back stories were away from public gaze, now it's part of the marketing of the show. 

The talented seven-strong cast play instruments varying from guitar to percussion (ah, rhythm is all!) to piano to ukele to double bass (and maybe shades of an electric organ?). 

While artistes as diverse as Johnny Mathis, Dionne Warwick, Cilla Black, the Carpenters, Whitney Houston, Tom Jones, Sammy Davis Jr have interpreted the songs of Bacharach, David and  collaborators, the septet work to bring fresh rock, funk, soul, rhythm and blues, reggae sounds to the thirty three songs in the show.   

Hits such as What The World Needs Now Is Love, Walk On By, This Guy's In Love With You and many more. 

In some ways a musical equivalent of sitcom Friends with Riabko at its centre, the show plunges the cast into an impromptu jam session in a kooky boho apartment. Walls are clad with a higgledy piggledy of  musical instruments, a turntable, even sofas,  suspended above a patchwork of carpet, rugs, chairs, speakers and lamps.  And joining in the cosy façade created by designers Christine Jones and Brett Banakis with lighting by Tim Lutkin, some audience members sit on squashy sofas on either side of the stage. 

Inevitably for anyone of a certain age, affecting, nuanced recordings have already colonised the mind. Yet the show's aim is Bacharach reimagined in a style for a twenty first century global audience - the generation of mass musical education, easily accessible downloads of song archives, of Glee,  X-Factor and The Voice. In that it has proved already in New York and an earlier run in at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London under the moniker "What's It All About?" very successful. 

And is there more of an affective patchworked narrative within the musical clichés? Or at least a colouring of  music history as the business changes tack from  solo artiste interpreting the songwriter to the rise of singer songwriter, personified in Riabko's vocals with acoustic guitar, then of the group, natural or manufactured. 

Maybe tinges of a "Merrily We Roll Along" story and even the show's publicity image with an almost ironic twist,  reflecting the psyche of music besotted generations:  the image of the magnificently talented ethereal James-Dean like solo singer, eyes on musical heaven, but still a babe magnet. 

The singers - at first free-moving atoms across the stage - become like rotating figures contractually glued (letters received and torn up) on a turntable, singing however joyously and  beautifully.  

The slivers of story give way to more of a concert second act, a slick and mature rendering of hits echoing the first act but also reflecting organically the amalgam of current musical influences.

The versatile technically brilliant cast all shine, though the featured vocalists naturally (like the music business itself) are the pin ups one takes home. Riabko's folksy solos and rock leads,  Anastacia McCleskey's "Don't Make Me Over",  James Williams' percussion moving rightfully at times centre stage, Stephanie McKeon, Daniel Bailen, Greg Coulson along with Renato Paris's vaulting vocals.

Yet this is way too analytical! Give yourself up to the music and your own non-copyrightable musical nervous system, shaped by a century or so of American recorded music,  and life will shape its own narrative. A superior hall of musical mirrors, the change from "What's It All About?" to "Close To You",  gets a green light from TLT. 

PS Video of Burt and the cast outside the Criterion in Piccadilly Circus - for once it wasn't raining in London for Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head! Ah memories of those heady pre-video and internet days when TLT queued (yes, queued!) to see Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid at her local fleapit, even if she later abandoned her bike for the engine beneath her theatregoing wings ... :)

Review French Without Tears

French Without Tears

By Terence Rattigan

Entente Non Cordiale

https://www.orangetreetheatre.co.uk/whats-on/french-without-tears

A group of young gentlemen gather in Villa Miramar in France to learn French for the diplomatic corps entry exams. Coming from a line of toffs himself with a diplomat father and once earmarked for the same career, playwright Terence Rattigan was obviously writing, to cite an old adage "what he knew" in 1936.

And that year was a rum old twelve months for diplomacy.  George V died to be succeeded by Edward VIII who within a few months had abdicated in favour of his brother. Stalinist purges swept the Soviet Union.  France elected a left-wing government.  The Spanish army of Africa rose up against the left wing Spanish Republican government,  Syria gained partial independence from France,  the Italian army marched into Ethiopa,  Japan and Germany signed an anti-communist pact  and  National Socialist Germany reoccupied the Rhineland. 

Still Billy Butlin started his first holiday camp.

And aged 25, Rattigan scored his first theatre success, inspired by his own experiences at a German crammer, after honing an economic  writing technique penning dialogue for quota quickies at Teddington Studios. Luckily for us, this  Hi-De-Hi boarding house school for toffs, distracted by the fairer sex, channels the more frivolous side of this era in a delicious production directed by Paul Miller at the Orange Tree Theatre.

And my God, doe-eyed Diana (Genevieve Gaunt) , an English rose cum Hollywood femme fatale, does cause havoc at the crammer college of M. Maingot (David Whitworth).  As she exercises her own seductive divide-and-rule ruses,  the men tumble for her like diplomats unable to resist the most powerful she-nation.  

Ambassador's son Hon Alan Howard (Alex Bhat), already fluent in French, destined by family for the diplomatic service but a novelist and pacifist by inclination, becomes increasingly embittered. Stoked by Diana, his relations with the more sentimental Kit Neilan (Joe Eyre) and bluff Royal Navy man Commander Bill Rogers (William Belchambers) also become more than strained, eventually coming to blows.

Meanwhile the demure tutor, Jacqueline (Sarah Winter), daughter of the proprietor,  and Kenneth (Patrick MacNamee), Diana's cadet brother, are also victims of unrequited affections. Indeed, apart from M. Maingot and the maid Marianne (perfectly French Laila Alj), only hearty Englishman Brian Curtis (Tom Hanson), with sterling qualities and sex not love on the brain, keeps his head when all about him are losing theirs.  

Like all the best farces, this has more serious undercurrents. Claws lurk beneath the cut glass accents, cod French (anyone else remember Punch's Let's Parler Franglais?), irregular verbs and present definitely tense as Bastille Day arrives with carnival celebrations at the local casino.

Genevieve Gaunt's timing (and claws) as predatory Diana are spot on, raising the temperature and laughs backed by - what else but - French windows.  The sparsely-furnished yet expressive set, from Simon Daw, suits the performance space topped by blackboards fronting the balcony chalked with French exercises.  

The costumes  are satisfyingly recognizable types while the transitions are pleasingly lit by Mark Doubleday to pass time on the in-the-round stage with music by David Shrubsole.   

The male characters all make their mark and throw out their own point of view: Alex Bhat as Alan, seemingly in control but with demagogic tendancies and increasingly frantic behind his copy of Le Monde while Joe Eyre's Kit has an underlying vulnerability; Tom Hanson makes barrel-chested Brian,  for whom it is almost always business as usual, stride through the wreckage; William Belchambers convincingly turns from love struck suitor to bodyguard, while Patrick McNamee embodies nervy Kenneth.

David Whitworth cuts an appropriately professorial figure, donning his Carnival fancy dress with aplomb. Delicate Sarah Winter is  sweetly besotted as daughter "Jack" (from Jacqueline rather than Frère Jacques) who by the end shows her own claws in a Oscar-Wilde-like scene with Diana. Even with sometimes slightly dodgy French accents, there is a charm as the farce unravels.  

Ah yes, and TLT had no idea until her trip to the West Coast of France via the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond that Mr Rattigan had already bagged the red, amber and green light idea as his own in French Without Tears. Listen out for it in the second act! :)

While this may seem like a frothy piece of almost-juvenilia, Rattigan himself was at pains to point out it dealt with matters close to the heart of the young idealistic 1930s' playwright. This production has a pleasing clarity working on many levels with at least two young children in the audience enjoying the farce element of the show as much as the adults. A green light from TLT and her bagnole, but not quite as Rattigan meant it in his play!

Review Measure For Measure

Measure For Measure
by William Shakespeare

They Tried To Make Me Go To Rehab
http://www.youngvic.org/whats-on/measure-for-measure

First of all, TLT and her motorised equerry should make it - beep, beep! - clear, this was a preview.

Duke Vincentio (Zubin Varla) surfaces from a warehouse sea of blow up sex dolls on to the triptych-framed stage  (design Miriam Buether) to announce austerity has come to Vienna's brothels.

Why, we never quite get to know. Maybe the lender country has called in its loans after the (ahem!) bottom dropped out of the consumer market for their goods, hence the surfeit of scarecrow-like sex dolls?!

This is a heavily edited (dramaturge Zoë Svendson), no-interval Measure For Measure directed by Joe Hill-Gibbins with Varla as its magnificent lynchpin.  Part art installation/performance arts, part US police procedural or thriller, part (or maybe full) crack den as well as movie studio complete with omnipresent over-the-shoulder cameras.  

A surfeit also of video shot - maybe for future transmission,  maybe for archiving, maybe for the cutting room floor. Pulsating sound (Paul Arditti) out of TV drama backs the action.

Duke Vincentio, though  middle-aged, seems only to  just have emerged from a years' long house rave/orgy. There is no Mistress Overdone (cutting room floor obviously!)  but the Duke is literally undone at the beginning.  And, having buttoned himself up, he appoints the next generation to do the dirty work of cleaning up the city.

Angelo (Paul Ready),  media-ready, dresses (credibly) more like a head croupier or an estate agent than a puritan to head the crackdown on lechery but slyly smarmy, sharing secrets, from the first: " Always obedient to your grace's will, I come to know your pleasure ..."

Meanwhile Escalus (Sarah Malin), all efficient suit and high heels, hovers like an advisor from The West Wing or executive seconded from a corporation in a state where execution can take place by "private message" and prisons are hidden behind sliding doors at the back of government offices.

This is a hit-and-miss surveillance state. After the Duke dons his Friar disguise, the confession box becomes a video box with faces looming large on projections (video: Chris Kondek). 

And is that a state cop or from a private security firm (Hammed Animashaun)? Or even an out-of-work actor who fits the role and has the uniform with large letters PROVOST on the back and an American accent out of police procedurals?

Isabella (Romola Garai), dressed in a blue shift and white triangular scarf covering her head, has almost stepped out of a Vermeer painting into the stage frame, although her previous ostentatious bird-like swoop into prayer may also indicate an awareness of the cameras. 

With a "That's well-said",  it's as if Angelo finds her fresh PR techniques of persuasion,  rather than just her body and his power,  the turning point sexy turn-on.

More problematic, as  TLT noticed also in The Globe version of the same play, is to sustain any erotic tension and follow the arguments once the characters of Angelo and Isabella are established and the novice nun argues her case.  

While this scene is nicely bookended with naturalistic touches, we noticed a dip in attention in the audience. This may have been a production waiting to bed down in preview and find a rhythm  but two productions with the same flaw doesn't feel like a coincidence - something lacking in the productions rather than text. 

After all, the deputy ruler of Vienna is blackmailing Isabella for sex and even when he's over her like a dog on heat on all fours, it feels just - well - choreographed.

The close up projections also have the effect of flattening the emotion at crucial points.

Nevertheless, there's some beautiful verse speaking and the video projections emphasize the rhetorical nature of Shakespeare's Vienna. 

Only in Angelo's soliloquies and Julietta (Natalie Simpson), made pregnant out of wedlock by Isabella's brother Claudio and shying away from cameras, is the public declamation more suppressed in a culture swinging like a pendulum between private pleasures and public naming and shaming.

And the chiaroscuro lighting (lighting James Farncombe) on Isabella during the "fear of death" speech of her brother Claudio (Ivanno Jeremiah) as they sit on the prison ground, with Claudio intently watching her reactions, does summon something new from the text.

Part of the understated key to this production is surely the casting of a woman as Escalus, carrying out the orders of the Duke manoeuvring through the play. One wonders, since there is an ambitious woman who does the business and is prepared to let citizens die, whether in different circumstances  Isabella would have done the same?

Soft-spoken Scottish Lucio (John MacKay), the pimp turned hangman, seems equally at home directing, tutoring and prompting Isabella, at times a crouching animal at the side watching forensically the action. Pompey  (Tom Edden) channels 70s' Huggy Bear  and Woody Allen, as both he and the Provost seem imports from American TV into Vienna.

It ends with an uneasy family portrait with two of the protagonists chased out of the picture to jail. One is left to wonder whether the elaborate charade was only to get rid of those characters without the possiblity of blackmail and to contain Angelo's power. 

And is there some other kind of relationship between Angelo and the Duke to make Isabella and Mariana (Cath Whitefield) decide it is in their interests to prevent his execution?

It's a flashy, thought-through, fast-moving production for the Netflix generation with Zubin Varla  managing affairs like some Ducal Andy Warhol. There is something lost in the execution but also something found. We've had the pilot. Maybe we'll have the series - the Duke and his young bride as squabbling crime investigators, complete with sidekicks, in Vienna?! An amber light.

CORRECTION The Duke, was played by Zubin Varla not as previously published ...