Review Absolution and Bill Clinton Hercules (double bill)

Absolution

by Owen O'Neill

Bill Clinton Hercules

by Rachel Mariner

Sorry Is The Hardest Word

https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/

A double bill of monologues, both directed by Guy Masterson, at the Park Theatre which made an impact at the Edinburgh Festival. There is some rhyme and reason for yoking these two together despite the different subject matter.

If Absolution was pitched as a film, despite its hook in real life tragedies and crimes, it would seem like a traditional tale of revenge with plenty of blood and gore. But it's not a film, it's a one man theatre piece written and performed by Owen O'Neill. 

It's a strange, unsettling show, all the more because there is the tiniest, thinnest, delicate skein of dark humour running through it, relying on our knowledge of movie tropes.

The set designed by Sarah June Mills is simple - it could be a prison cell or a room in a high security hospital. A disembodied porcelain sink with a mirror stands on one side, almost like a surrealist painting. 

An iron bed, a side table with a pot of flowers and placed at the front of the stage an old fashioned wooden school desk, the type with an ink well and a lid that flips up to store school text and exercise books.

And our ears are assailed by Johnny Cash's "Further On Up The Road" as O'Neill enters and proceeds to test himself with a series of energetic press ups and a martial arts' move. 

This is not a show for the faint-hearted with the self-appointed avenger of child abuse describing in graphic detail the killing of priests whom, he says, are paedophiles.

Despite its well-worn, although always - to say the least - tragic, subject matter, this is a engrossing monologue. Not least because TLT and her little car were left, in a healthy way, unbalanced by its tone.

It does not diminish the corruption, terror and damage caused by institutional cover ups. The whole  village where everyone is aware of what is going on and many, especially the women, feel guilty but noone does anything. It is like a years-old rite of passage, albeit also a rite of unspeakable torture..

Yet is it also slyly guying the fact that even child abuse can be changed into a commercial commodity for an audience, vigilante avenger meets child abuse? 

When these crimes were open secrets allowed to continue for so long and the human products born of these crimes against boys and girls in plain sight?

Maybe it has taken the age of the internet and communication between victims, impossible before, to expose the lunacy of the situation personified in this gripping monologue. 

A green light for the clear-eyed performance from Owen O'Neill  with hidden depths.

Bill Clinton as a modern day Hercules is an attractive hook, as wife Hilary's bid for the White House gains momentum and he find himself, potentially, a future president's spouse. 

Bill Paisley plays the main man loathe to leave behind his central position in world politics with late poet's Seamus Heany's adaptation from Sophocles, The Cure At Troy as part of his credo.

So far, so good but somewhere between a good idea and the performance of American Rachel Mariner's script for Bill Clinton Hercules, something gets lost. Clinton, we are told in the blurb, is grasping his opportunity to give his own TED talk.

Maybe Mariner, as a former lawyer on the Bill Clinton team in Clinton v Jones,  felt too  constrained in dealing with a still-living non fictional politician, formerly a client. While TLT and her own motorised advisor pride themselves on being attentive listeners, Bill Clinton Hercules felt difficult to follow. 

We caught points where the parallels to the poem were made but this did not make this piece more fluent. Maybe it would have been more meaningful if we had known Sophocles's play Philocletes or Heany's poem. 

There a run down of his childhood and other biography while ex-intern Monica Lewinsky and Alan Greenspan, former president of the Federal Reserve during the disastrous policies on sub prime mortgages both get more than a look in. Nevertheless the monologue itself was rather pedestrian, despite the best efforts of Paisley.

Still, reserving the politician's right to be economical with the truth,  we can now tell people we got to shake hands with Bill Clinton and a glimpse of his study with leather padded chair. An amber light.

Review My Family: Not The Sitcom

Francis Beckett finds poignancy, connection and laughs in this explicit exposure of family secrets, while admiring David Baddiel's ability to draw the line between performance and real life consequences.  

My Family: Not The Sitcom

By David Baddiel

Relative Values

https://www.menierchocolatefactory.com/

At the end of this riotous romp through David Baddiel’s parents’ most intimate secrets, he asked for questions, and a woman in the audience started to tell us how much she empathised: She too had one demented parent and one voraciously priapic parent.  She too found that… but the performer stopped her there. This sometimes happens, he said, it starts to turn into a therapy session - and didn’t the person on the other side of the auditorium have a question?

He was right, of course. However much you might be tempted to treat the evening as a bit of soul-baring, a man grieving for his dead mother and his demented father in the best way he can and making laughter to avoid making tears, it was at its heart a performance - a virtuoso performance, a performance composed of genius and hard work in equal measure. A performance that worked so long as he could keep us laughing and just a bit nervous, but a performance. 

The woman’s story, heartfelt though it might be, was obviously not going to be, well, funny. In this context, secrets and sadness lost their value if they were not funny. 

So I resisted the temptation to put up my hand and talk about my own parents and childhood, even though many would say I have a grimmer and sadder story even than Baddiel’s, and have just finished a book about it, published by Routledge in the summer under the title Fascist In The Family.

The fascist was my father, and Baddiel’s Jewish grandparents, whose sexual shenanigans get a brief look-in during this performance, would have known his name, for he was one of the three best known anti-Semites in Britain in the thirties. Baddiel’s grandparents would never have forgiven him, nor should they.

As Baddiel must have examined his motives, I have examined mine for writing about my parents. Is it therapy?  Is this my journalist’s instinct that I have a good story under my nose, so let’s not waste it?  Why do I choose the most sensational stories to tell?  Am I trying to do justice to my parents or to distinguish myself from them?  Why have I chosen to write this book, when there are many others I could have used the time to write?

I think I loved my parents. I think Baddiel loved his, but I am not quite sure. His mother, as he describes her, was desperately attention-seeking, sexually voracious to the point of being, as Baddiel puts it, “a bit of a slut”, and insensitive to the feelings of others. 

His father Colin seems to have been incapable of giving or receiving affection, and may – or so Baddiel implies – not be the biological father of all his sons. (I wish I had asked the obvious question.) 

Baddiel says: “When family members die, or are lost to dementia, all we tend to say about them is that they were wonderful. But if that is all you can say about them, you may as well say nothing: to truly remember our loved ones, you have to call up their weirdnesses, their madnesses, their flaws.” 

Of course he’s right, but I was not sure that, in the interests of a wonderful show, he might not have overdone it just a little.

Never mind. It is a wonderful show. Great, brave, startling lines – this of his grandfather, Holocaust survivor who later in his life frequented Soho sex shops: “Straight out of Dachau into Berwick Street.” Of his father, who has Pick’s Disease, a form of dementia whose symptoms include breaches of etiquette, vulgar language, and tactlessness: “I wanted to ask the doctor, does he have an illness, or have you just met him?”

My Family: Not The Sitcom is just David Baddiel, on stage, talking, with a screen on which occasional pictures and videos are shown.  It’s a two hour stand-up comedy set. There are very few people in the world who can make that work, but Baddiel is one of them.  For a wonderfully funny, rather disturbing evening, a green light to rush to the Menier Chocolate Factory.

Review King John

King John

by William Shakespeare

Game of Thrones

https://www.rosetheatrekingston.org/

TLT and her loyal motorised lieutenant made all haste to the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames to see King John, a Shakespeare we had never seen before, at the Rose Theatre.

Even before reading the programme after seeing the play, and finding it was the first Shakespeare to be filmed in 1899, both TLT and her faithful equerry agreed King John has all the elements of a stonking melodrama and political mini-series!

The weak and vacillating king (Jamie Ballard) is dependent on advisers, especially his mother, veteran schemer but still careful Elinor of Aquitaine (Maggie Steed). But the King when left to make decisions on his own, in an effort to stand on his own feet, takes a brutal and murderous misstep.

The victim of this, young boy Arthur (played on press night by Sebastian Croft), a prince by demeanour and blood, pleading for his life reduces the would-be assassin (a bluntly honourable Stephen Kennedy) to tears. 

Arthur's tragic mother Constance (Lisa Dillon) is a power player for her son but ultimately driven mad by grief and grievance. Meanwhile swashbuckling bastard son Philip Faulconbridge (Howard Charles) of Richard the Lionheart is a cynical but heartbroken looker on,  participant and commentator.

This is a production of great clarity in what could be otherwise a confusing play. The nearest we have to a hero is Faulconbridge. Yet this doesn't quite fit and perhaps the clue is in the title of a play upon which Shakespeare drew heavily, some would say rewrote in a "twice told tale": The Troublesome Reign of King John.

For this, it struck us, is a situation tragedy - the troublesome situation of "that England hedged in with the main/The water-walled bulwark" plagued by uncertainty over the throne and land rights. 

And it's rather exciting, mined for humour as well in Trevor Nunn's well-paced (even though it should be said approximately three hours long) production.

Don't look for the Magna Carta though in Shakespeare's version, although perhaps a cloth underfoot rolled out like a parchment at the beginning is a twenty first century gesture towards it.

But this is Shakespeare at his most politic, meanng the play does not disturb the Elizabethan world order, the divine right to rule of the Protestant Tudors implicitly compared with the chaos of the Plantagenet Catholics. 

Nevertheless it is this which gives the play its modern feel. The shifting alliances and plotting of the unstable in power have a relevant resonance. Pandulph the Papal legate (Burt Caesar) has all the deviousness and diplomacy of a corrupt FIFA official, whose European power politics on behalf of the Pope sets off family rifts and wars between English and French.

A seemingly straightforward Globe-like stage with scaffolding to insert more levels is given a sense of time travelling and mash up with two video screens, one on each side (set and costumes by Mark Friend with concept design by John Napier). Describing it makes it sound more clunky than it is for the audience, as the actors' phrase goes, caught up "in the moment".

The screens show stills of stone turrets, discarded amour on a desolate battlefield, medieval illuminated manuscript illustrations and paintings, stained glass figures and as the King grows more fragile, delicate blossoming trees.

There is also sparing but effective use of video - a kingly debate flashes on the screens in close up well serving a play full of competing claims. Public events are publicly broadcast and the battles are in stark black and white like some Eisenstein silent film.

An otherwise plot driven artificial incident to modern eyes,  yet, in our modern times, also too horribly true, is shown as a vertigo black silhouetted figure falling from on high.

The rhyming couplets rang out clearly and every character carried their weight in the play with the, again, straightforward but ratcheting-up-the-tension use of sound effects (Fergus O'Hare) - the drum roll, the ticking clock - and music (composer Corin Buckeridge).

Ballard's King John has stepped straight out of medieval painting with his pigeon chested bearing. Gradually as his power waxes and wanes, his nervous gestures augment and his mouth is increasingly down-turned in the manner of the best silent films. This style suits the build up to the supernatural visions of the play  but his end, in a wheelchair, drooling, also had a touching quality.

The Prince Arthur  (he's the son of John's elder brother Geoffrey so has a claim to the throne) of Croft also has the touching embarrassment of the boy whose widowed mother is fighting his corner. 

This play also provides some powerful roles for women, seasoned politician Elinor, determined yet doomed Constance and Princess Blanche of Castille (Elizabeth Hopper) who finds herself torn from her nearest family on her wedding day as events,  triggered by Cardinal Pandulph, twist and turn.

All in all, King John proved a compelling and absorbing evening, with every argument over claims to the throne, the possession of mainland France territories, the plotting and the scheming followed intently by TLT and her trusty mechanized steed. So for an evening of national and international upheaval a jousting green light   

Review Monster Raving Loony

Monster Raving Loony

by James Graham

National Lampoon

http://www.sohotheatre.com/

We at TLT Towers would like thank everyone who has urged us to stand for office in the service of their country. But having seen the trials and tribulations of David Edward Sutch, (1940-1999) better known as Screamng Lord Sutch, and the Monster Raving Loony Party, in Mr James Graham's latest play, not to mention the cost of a deposit, they regretfully have to withdraw their candidature.

Milord's rise to fame and no office began, according to this play, in Harrow Social Club, Harrow being a suburb in North London as lead vocals in band The Savages, a musical ensemble (aka a rock group) in which all the multi-talented actors in this entertainment partake.

Monster Raving Loony is a gallop through the life of  Lord Sutch (plsyed by leopard-skin-jacketed Samuel James). The "Lord", we are told, was adopted by deed poll. Although Lord Sutch tells us he stood "in queue at the town hall" which makes us suspicious that it may just possibly be a irreverent comment on  Her Majesty's honours' system.

We do feel obliged to register our interest, lest we appear compromised, in this show. On our seat we found a gift left by the management consisting of 1) A conical party hat (but which party was never elucidated) 2) A bingo card (as we didn't win we assume it wasn't fixed) 3) A raffle ticket (ditto) 4) A Groucho Marx false nose and glasses.

Yes, there is a certain amount of gentle audience participation including a sing-along and a session of bingo. But being a scrupulously honest, impartial, recycling-minded reviewer, we left our party bag for the next xvoterx punter.

David (somehow his egalitarian stance prohibits the use of more formal monikers) was part of a moderately succssful "zany" (according to Wikipedia) group amd we in the audience were ably tutored by The Musician (Tom Attwood) on how to gain the skills to form our own pop group..

But then a quick rewind to the Brave New World  of post-(Second World) War Britain and the election of Labour Prime Minister Clement Atlee promising to implement policies emerging from the Beveridge Report.

If you are under 35, (please, please, please let us have readers of this blog who are under 35!) you may already be somewhat lost by these references. 

The play's use also of the tropes of comedy acts, radio and TV sitcoms from 1940s onwards may also be of most interest to those who are either of a certain age or the sort who frequent the forums of the British Comedy Guide,  bringing forth a cosy hot water bottle of recognition.

But, as far as we could see, the details of  and conclusions about David Sutch's life (brought up in Harrow,  a spell as a window cleaner, always lived with his mother, had a son who ended up in the US, in the Guinness Book of Records as the candidate losing the most number of elections) are rather sparse. His life is rather overwhelmed in this piece by the  spoofs of -er - spoofs, albeit carefully matched to the era and time in David's life.

So there's  music hall comedian Max Miller (Joe Alessi, one of the supporting cast slickly taking on a plethora of characters) with his, then, risque routine. The Lord Sutch trademark top hat  of a toff  appearing with male impersonator Ella Shields (Vivienne Acheampong), another music hall veteran.

Lord Snooty (Jack Brown) a cartoon character from popular kids' comic The Beano, wearing a top hat, conflated with Harrow public school uniform, carrying a violin and spouting Latin rubbing in the English class system.

However, while we're regaled with a history of British comedy with pleasurably familiar characterisations such as characters of  Peter Cook and Dandy Nichols (Joanna Brookes in fine impersonation fettle), the details of how Lord Sutch managed to keep in the limelight are frustratingly few.

The play downplays a moderately successful music career with recording contracts, a radio station with a manager who came to an untimely end and group members who went on to stellar music careers. 

We were wondering at the cross over between the recording and comedy industry and politics. But this kind of drawing together never came. The play prefers very general (in fact, much more general to the point of dissipation) overview of political trends from left wing-ism with undertones of communism to Thatcherism.

It's all good fun but rather manufactured, as if the effect on the audience were considered before the script. Still, director Simon Stokes keeps the pace brisk and there's much to enjoy. It just all feels rather pulled this way and that without David's ultimately real-life tragic fate touching us. So, while not wanting to be a party pooper, an amber light.  

               

Review The Philanderer

The Philanderer

by Bernard Shaw

Breaking Up Is Hard To Do

www.orangetree.co.uk

Poor Leonard (an elegantly gawky bearded hipster Rupert Young). He's had his wicked way with two women. Cool blonde widow Grace Tranfield (svelte Helen Bradbury), daughter of a drama critic (meticulous old fogey Mark Tandy), and fiery redhead Julia Craven (curvy Dorothea Myer-Bennett) whose Dad is retired Colonel (Michael Lumsden).

And now poor Leonard is forced to plot to break off at least one relationship and his conduct over the second seems more than dubious, leaving a lot to be desired.

Or maybe Leonard's not so poor - we never learn the state of his finances. But in the cold light of day he's a pretty nasty piece of work despite a polished, witty literary exterior.

This isn't the latest Netflix, Sky or Amazon boxed set or even a French farce.

This is one of the Plays Unpleasant of Mr G Bernard Shaw (he never liked the "George"), first performed privately in 1905 to avoid the censor. 

Bring to the fore the "New Woman" at a time when women only could divorce if fault was proven or the man, in the words of the play, was a drunkard, criminal or imbecile. Indeed, the seedy profession of private detectives grew out of the courts and divorce cases.

Directed by Paul Miller, with a pitch perfect cast, this is an updated staging of Shaw's early play on a marble tiled-in-the-round stage, simply but cleverly furnished, with a subtle mash up of delicious costumes (designer Simon Daw, costume supervisor Clio Alphas).

Isabel Waller-Bridge provides a light touch but effective score and this three-act play also manages smooth location changes in the manner of the recently-seen I've Been Here Before with two intervals.

Leonard is a  - wait for it, it's a juicy word! - philanderer. That's not philanthropist  - many would say quite the opposite. Philanderer took on the meaning in the 18th century, the era which witnessed the birth of the often "sentimental" British novel for a female market, of a serial womanizer. 

Until then philanderer had the meaning, from the Greek, of "fond of men", according to my internet resources. Perhaps Enlightenment marketeers  realised such a rolling-off-the tongue word was perfect for the bodice rippers devoured in private by ladies in their boudoirs!

As for Leonard, he is a wisecracking but charming vulture who feeds off the women including Sylvia (Paksie Vernon), Julia's decidedly unsentimental younger sister,  who are all of "advanced views" and members of that "cock and hen" (note the order, not hen and cock) society, The Ibsen Club. 

This is a society where Henrik Ibsen is viewed as Superman (there is a glorious well-oiled design joke which we won't spoil). Where every member is required to be equally nominated and guaranteed by a man and woman in the name of equality and a hollow-eyed runner (Joe Idris-Roberts) brings the latest messages. For centuries before "Nordic Noir" hit our screens, another Norwegian ruled the roost. 

And with Dr Paramore (Christopher Staines) who has condemned Grace's retired colonel, a veteran of Indian and Sudan campaigns, to an early death from his eponymously named disease, Shaw can't resist a potshot at one of his favourite subjects, The latest medical scientific theory in the British Medical Journal, this time that of malign microbes This later surely influencing this Monty Python sketch?!

TLT and her vehicle of choice, with the dangerous liaisons' tinted windows hiding Lord-knows-what ;), did wonder though whether this very cleanly designed and acted version of The Philanderer could be more  - well - low down and dirty. Or in the words of journalist Rachel Cooke's programme introduction in another context, could afford to loosen the stays of both women and the vain men.

After all, the origin of Ibsen's A Doll's House, a clear influence, isn't the nicest of stories. According to the play's Wikipedia entry, Ibsen himself even played a role in the real life downfall of the woman writer who inspired it

And the language of money, share dealing, gambling, the court room, the buying and selling of women and even copyright, rather than the language of love, infects The Phlanderer's script. 

Meanwhile Leonard, a Jack Tanner prototype, increasingly watches like a puppet master the domino chaos he sets off. 

Furthermore, the implication by the end is that women can only get their rights as women and as writers  by marrying a male writer and, like the pension of the time endowed in the husband,  a financial portion by supporting the husband's success rather than given their own royalties!

Shaw's lines when characterful debate and rhythm is drained out of them, can lead to accusations of the prolix. And for an audience more used to short attention span current day scripts, there are always occasions where the concentration may lapse during arguments. 

But this production manages to crack Shaw's characterful conversational, debating style, even if the play itself, sometimes a deliberate trot through different literary styles, is not as polished in verbal sparring as, say, the later St Joan.   

While some of Shaw's work is in the public domain in Canada and the USA, the world rights reside with the Society of Authors until 2020. 

We can therefore expect more of the patter of tiny feet of experimental Shaw productions. And also judging from Lawrence After Arabia, portrayals of Shaw himself, long lived from the Victorian times to the late twentieth century. So the Shaw Society may well find itself in demand! 

In the meantime this is a classy, highly enjoyable, clear production of an early work heedfully modernised, from which the audience emerged with smiles on their faces. A green light.