Review Sunset At The Villa Thalia

Sunset At The Villa Thalia

by Alexei Kaye Campbell

Greek Encounter

http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk

It's the 1960s and would--be playwright Theo (Sam Crane) and his wife actress Charlotte (Pippa Nixon) are holidaying on a Greek island in an angular grey house perched on an outcrop of rocks. They meet, seemingly by chance, an older American couple. Watchful Harvey (Ben Miles) "works for the government" and June (Downton Abbey's Elizabeth McGovern)  is a former model with a fondness for alcohol.

In Sunset At The Villa Thalia directed by Simon Godwin, bumptious Harvey turns out to be something more than a public servant - more like a spook stepped out of the pages of Ian Fleming,  Graham Greene or John Le le Carré. He persuades Theo and Charlotte to take advantage of favourable exchange rates and make an offer for the house  belonging to the cash-straitened Greek owners who are emigrating to Sydney.

The first act ends with  the completion of the sale and the villa re-christened Thalia after the Greek Muse of comedy and poetry.  but also the couples hearing of the toppling of the civilian government by a military coup in the Greek capital.

By the time of the second act, nearly a decade later, Theo and Charlotte now have two young children. The era of dictatorship by the colonels has ended. Theo's career as a playwright has, it seems, progressed in Britain and Harvey and June come to stay,, the former beingremarkably well-informed about the English couple's lives but also troubled by his involvement with events in Chile.

TLT can still remember vaguely the old secondary school history  syllabus covering 1815-1914 she studied, before she was even a ingenue learner driver, in which the fight for Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire was prominent, famously championed by Lord Byron with James Joyce in 1921, long after Greek independence,  requesting the colours of the Greek flag for the cover of  his novel Ulysses. 

Writer  Alexei Kaye Campbell was barely a year old, growing up in Athens, when his own family, Greek on his paternal side, was caught up in the 1967 Greek coup and he lived through the era of the colonels, its demise and the age of profligacy and debt which followed. So he should be in an ideal position to give the inside story.  

Yet the story that emerges in his play seems to combine stereotype characters with an archetypal tale of American interference in the internal affairs of European and South American countries during, we presume, the Cold War fight against the Soviets. 

Maybe the point is that Greece was already deracinated by 1967 but the play feels oddly derivative and patcched together with a Clybourne Park-type ghost ending. Still it offers Ben Miles an outsize role as the definitely unquiet American creating his own version of Plato's ideal chair as he pontificates on the ideal democracy while Elizabeth McGovern plays an elegant lush  with conviction.

Otherwise the piece seems somewhat Brit centric in a slightly smug way - the Brits stay sober and don't appear to meddle in other nations' affairs - although there is the slightest hint near the end that Theo may himself be a junior partner in other matters. Pippa Nixon does indignation well as Charlotte and maybe we should take with a pinch of salt Harvey's description of the Greek family's fate in Australia. Yet there seems to  very little subtext. 

Nevertheless the set designed by Hildegard Bechtler is evocative, even if the situation feels rather too lightly drawn. It seems we still have to rely on our own general knowledge and that old school syllabus and good old Google to flesh out the play.So it's an amber light for this foray into Mediterranean life.  

Review The Fix

The Fix

Book and Lyrics by John Dempsey

Music by Dana P Rowe

American Pie

 http://www.uniontheatre.biz/

The Fix started life as a musical about presidential shenanigans produced by Cameron Macintosh and directed by Sam Mendes at the Donmar Warehouse in 1997. Currently it's opening the season at the Union Theatre,  which has now moved across the road from its former more ramshackle space under the railway arches in Southwark.

On the verge of the presidency, Reed Chandler, a family man with ambitious wife Violet and handsome, if ne'er do well, son Cal, suffers a setback. In the over-excitement  of a private Miss Whiplash encounter he literally has a heart stopping moment and dies.

His brother Grahame, a crippled Harvard-educated Machiavellian lawyer agrees with his sister in law Violet, a cross between Jackie O and Cruella De Vil, that the show must go on, with the star now Cal, plucked from playing air guitar in his bedroom, groomed for the Oval Office.

The story was apparently originally based on Robert Graves's novel "I, Claudius", itself already given various movie, theatre and TV adaptations, charting corruption and conspiracy in imperial Rome

It's  a lively if flawed piece matched by a production with the same qualities and faults directed by Michael Strassen. There are echoes of Pygmalion, Dorian Gray and  even a mention for Aristophanes' The Birds as well as a hefty Shakespearean dollop alongside the Roman decadence,

Fra Fee as the tousled haired Cal who goes from Marlon Brando white T shirt andjeans to suited and unexpectedly charismatic, if drug-addled, politician looks the part, even if his singing when tackling rock numbers such as One, Two, Three is slightly underpowered in the first act. However he proved sweet voiced and clear in the quieter numbers.

As the mafia honeytrap lover and small fry drug pusher, Tina McCoy, Madalena Alberto again looks the part and also, despite lacking diction in the first act while having the vocal strength, eventually comes into her own with both strong vocals and diction in the second act.

Peter Saul Blewden impresses as Reed Chandler, in a Hamlet's father-like ghostly return with the song Control to advise his son, by then a soldier,  amidst Middle East minefields.  He takes on with equal aplomb another part, the role of mafia don Anthony Gilardi.

Nonetheless the show belongs to Grahame, whose dark second act song First Came Mercy with its mix of religion and politics is a tour-de-force, and Violet with Ken Christiansen and Lucy Williamson respectively. 

Grahame on crutches, a Claudius stutterer, whom Christiansen invests with  an interesting mix of villainy and vulnerability, forms a partnership with Violet, the single-minded Jezebel, whose whole raison d' être centres on  making the men in her life the country's power players.

There is also a strong professional debut from Sam Barrett in the smaller role of the Presidetial bodyguard Peter.  

Despite being revised since its first production, it still feels very much a 1990s' piece. The to and fro between Grahame and Violet on the one hand and Cal on the other also throws into relief the problems of an unbalanced book

The introduction of I Claudius into a Kennedyesque late twentieth century political dynasty feels inconsistent and scattergun. The analogy between Cal and a manufactured rock star is truncated as, in the end, is Grahame's story. In fact it's Violet who has the best, most consistent dramatic arc with a satisfying finale to her story.

Sitting in the third row there was a sightline problem as the characters fell to their knees for some of the action. Some of the lyrics also became hard to hear as the characters retreated towards the back wall.

Nevertheless there is fine choral singing with an excellent bandn- keyboards, guitar, bass and drums - led by Josh Sood   

It's a solid start to  the Union Theatre's new venue with plenty to enjoy in an energetic show with a strong narrative drive even if the book feels somewhat forced. So we elect an amber light for this presidential piece.

Review The Trial Of Jane Fonda

The Trial of Jane Fonda

by Terry Jastrow

Miss Fonda Regrets

http://www.parktheatre.co.uk/

There are moments in history when we folks outside America maybe underestimate the will of the American people, whatever their hue and politics to bind together when their country is attacked. Yet the popular view is the conflict in Vietnam was lost on the home front when press and public turned against the US military campaign.

This stylish but somewhat stactic production directed by Joe Harmston and designed by Sean Cavanagh, deals with a true story, one legacy of Vietnam which may seem almost trivial to us compared to the many issues thrown up by American military intervention, sending in ordinary Joes and Janes as the "world's policemen" (and policewomen).

Yet it reflects a febrile  atmosphere, a cross over of media and military, sincerity and playacting, politics and frankness,  all uneasily contained and threatening to explode and splinter, focussed on one woman. 

The Trial of Jane Fonda, written by Terry Jastrow, takes place in 1988. 

It imagines what occurred during a real-life private meeting organised by an Episcopalian minister between middle-aged movie star, Jane Fonda, a political peace activist in her younger days who now expresses regret for some of her actions,  and male Vietnam military veterans in Waterbury, Connecticut.

The men were trying to have the town boycott the filming of her latest movie (one minute 15 seconds in) which co-starred Robert De Niro, viewing her as "Hanoi Jane", a traitor to the soldiers who fought on the orders of their country in the former French colony of Vietnam.

Fourteen years earlier, during her Paris marriage to film director Roger Vadim, invited to visit Hanoi by the North Vietnamese, she had been filmed and photographed astride an anti-aircraft gun used against American planes and had made a controversial broadcast.

This is a strange play. The vets are boiled down to five types: The public servant lawyer Larry Bonk (Alex Gaumond), the Ohio bond trader Buzzy Banks (Christien Anholt), Tommy Lee Cook (Mark Rose), the guy "between jobs" with a gift for crude caricature, injured by a grenade Reggie Wells (Ako Mitchell) and the Italian-American father of a dead soldier, Tony Celano II (Paul Herzberg).

All the elements are there for a stonking drama, even if dealing with living people, a certain amount of discipline obviously has to be exercised. But this sort of parameter can lead to an even more dramatically interesting examination. The intelligence is there but it is weirdly flat-lined in the script of this one act play with the flare ups between the men, the easier to grasp action, oddly isolated and ritualized.

For it eould be a fascinating and all-too-human situation, if it were amplified. Indeed, despite the black and white videos and the still projections of Jane Fonda who, in her words in the play "wanted to be taken seriously" plus audio recordings, this feels like a play without a context. 

As far as we can garner from the internet, the working class municipality of Waterbury, the main business of which was making bullet casings,  had welcomed the job creation and other economic potential of filmmakers coming to town. Yet noone with any ounce of the civility and respect due to those who had made a career, as well as those who were conscripted, in the military could disregard a letter to a local newspaper from an army veteran.

While the analogy with Twelve Angry Men, the iconic movie starring Fonda's part Italian Episcopalian turned agnostic father, seeems clunky, it is somehow psychological appropriate to the situation. When past hostilities reignite and the demure, almost matronly, Fonda (played by Fatal Attraction's Anne Archer)  is accused of using quotes rather speaking her mind, her rebuke does somehow work, "I'm an actress, that's what I do".    

The images are potent, from luscious Barbarella to helmeted peace activist and then the prim Jane of the meeting, having reinvented herself as fitness guru and with a more conservative look in keeping with the general swing of the US towards a more conservative stance

But she is always a woman encircled  by men. Whether in Vietnam or in the church hall meeting arranged by the minister John (Martin Fisher) who nervously takes nips of Scotch and at one point removes his dog collar, as if it were a prop, and thrown it challengingly into the centre of the room

The word "Trial" itself in the title may give a clue. The obvious parallel is the celebrated courtroom drama Yet trial can also mean an audition, a test for selection into the team, however unstable the selection process.

OK, we're going round the houses on this, mainly because this feels like an extract of something else. In between the distribution of points of view and violent prejudices, thrre are revelations but more documentary information than drama. 

And having done a little research on Google, we also wonder whether this is a show which would mean more to Americans who understand that with every Middle East conflict with American troops involved, Fonda, as a woman still in the public eye, becomes once again a target. Some would say for displaced anger and frustration tinged by misogyny.  

It's a play that's made us think hard and, in a world where inaccurate content on social media can destroy a person without reaching the light of day in the mainstream press, we have striven to be accurate. 

Nevertheless it needs more context as a play for British audiences even if there are intriguing glimpses of a difficult story which is well-worth dramatizing. An amber light from a sober TLT and her equally thoughtful vehicle.   

Review The Kreutzer Sonata

The Kreutzer Sonata
by Leo Tolstoy
Adapted by Nancy Harris

Legal Fictions
http://www.arcolatheatre.com/

Sometimes it helps, when writing our little critiques, to sum up a play in an imaginary news headline. In this case, "Councillor stabbed wife after finding her with piano tutor" Or maybe not ... For like most news stories confined to a headline and a few paragraphs there's something more to this case.

That passenger, opposite you in the train, turns out to be the released local government official. Why has he been released so early? And his defence, the provocation of his wife seems a little rich. .

Pozdnyshev (Greg Hicks), part of the landed gentry and trained in law,  buttonholes you in the carriage chugging across the Russian countryside.  At first he's intent on emptying his pockets - the Swiss fob watch, the silk handkerchief, the expired first class train ticket.

It's a virtuoso piece for an actor - a monologue play driven by music and with much in common, we thought, with Robert Browning's My Last Duchess where the power of art spills  into real life - but through an unexpected byway - with tragic results for the woman.

When the novella, which writer Nancy Harris adapted in 2009 for this monologue,  was first published in 1889, Tolstoy, the father of 13 children borne by his long suffering wife Sofiya, found himself at the centre of a storm. Indeed there seemed to be almost a tug of war between admirers such as the Tzar himself and the condemnation of  Russian and American censors.

And just as the Russian ruler and societies based on an institution of marriage, which Tolstoy viewed as destructive, were at odds over a piece of art, Pozdnyshev is split. Over his not unusual first sexual encounters in whore houses before meeting an innocent wife in an arranged marriage whom he first views as a timid gazelle trained to entrap and then, as the years progress, as a coarser creature.

We have to admit it took a while for us to feel caught up in this monologue - it had the feel at times of a radio piece. It took the combination of Beethoven's radical sonata with its violent duelling and sexual undertow and a surge of words turned into actions to turn it all around into a thrilling crescendo.

Backed by pianist Alice Pinto and violinist Phillip Granell, the mania of  Pozdnyshev, clearly driven insane by jealousy yet ironically in his acquittal protected by the law, does indeed  tear down  marriage as a financial and dynastic institution, even if it takes the ripping of a frail female body to do it.

The woman who has done her duty and given numerous heirs finally, it seems for a brief moment, could settle down to enjoy music for its own sake tutored by Pozdnyshev's childhood friend. A woman who seems wilfully determined not to live out the stereotypes of literary adulteresses but ends up a corpse with her posthumous public image shaped by her lawyer and local politician husband.

For all that, it seems an odd choice for adaptation even if it makes a change to be faced with a mad husband rather than a mad wife - in terms, that is, of playwriting tropes.

It did feel to us somewhat overlong, even though every word had its place in the build up to as guesome and visceral layer by layer description of a murder as ever we've heard in any play. But it also meant we pondered inordinately as well on matters such as, did they really have boiled broccoli in nineteenth century Russia? It's not meant to be facetious, just our honest experience of the piece.

Nevertheless in the end the clenched jaw and hurt, savage eyes of a character who could be termed a legal murderer under the direction of John Terry just about swung it dramatically for us and it's an amber light for the train - eventually - reaching the platform.

Review The Deep Blue Sea

The Deep Blue Sea

By Terence Rattigan

Aftermath

http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/

When we say "post war" now, it really feels as if we have to define which war we're talking about. For Terence Rattigan, son of a diplomat,  an Oxford-educated history graduate and ex-RAF, there was no such ambiguity in 1952. Everybody in the western world, and some beyond, knew what it was like to be "post war".

So The Deep Blue Sea is very definitely a post Second World War play - post Battle of Britain, post the revealing to the British public of concentration camp horrors, post the judgements of the Nuremberg Trials, and, even if in the very near past, post British Empire in an austere and much depleted United Kingdom.  

Helen McCrory is Hester Collyer, who has run away from her High Court judge husband, Sir William (Peter Sullivan).  Having fled from Eaton Square, she now lives an exile from society  yet a near neighbour, apparently unknown to him, of her estranged husband, as "Mrs Page", in a Ladbroke Grove bedsit with her ex RAF lover. Freddie (Tom Burke) has struggled to make a living as a post-war test pilot, both in Canada and the UK, although he still manages somehow to pay for his rounds of drink and golf weekends at Sunningdale.

The play starts with Hester's botched attempt at suicide from an overdose and gas asphyxiation - botched because the shilling in the gas meter runs out.  She's found the following morning by fellow tenants,  Home Office employees Philip Welch (Hubert Burton) and his pregnant wife Ann (Yolanda Kettle)  -  obviously no surname pun intended  -  and her solicitous gossip of a landlady Mrs Eldon (Marion Bailey),  They call in bookie's clerk and German ex Prisoner of War Kurt Miller (Nick Fletcher) who appears to have more than a smattering of medical knowledge. 

This is an engrossing, detailed production directed by Carrie Cracknell, if somewhat held up at times by lengthy sound effects splaying like confused radio frequencies (sound: Peter Rice). At the centre is a desperate yet clear-sighted Hester, known as Hes to her husband of which more later, at the centre of the action and all the other characters swirling around her, in their various ways keeping her at arm's length. 

The bedsit, in a multi-storied set designed by Tom Scutt, filled with the shadows of adjacent tenants' rooms,  feels surreally stretched out, bathed in grayish green light. (lighting: Guy Hoare). McCrory's cut glass Hester is transfixing, with a film star glow amidst her dull surroundings. She's a conquest creating a problem which  Freddie (a dissolute with a survival instinct in Burke's equally fine performance) and his friend Jackie (Adetomiwa Edun)  realize he cannot possibly handle..  

There's little doubt that, in part, The Deep Blue Sea was inspired by the suicide of Rattigan's male lover, actor Kenny Morgan and TLT with her sporty little hatchback went in with this commonly held knowledge. But as they watched the play another uncomfortable, more than spikey parallel emerged. 

Phoned up by the Home Office couple, the judge calls Hester by the shortened nicknamed "Hes". Hes becomes more and more isolated while even her own estranged husband comforts her but seems to have no inclination to bring her back to legitimate society where he can count the Solicitor General as an old friend and entertains American judges. 

The Home Office couple are, like the landlady, solicitous but also rather thrilled by the knowledge they now have about a High Court Judge. Albeit the implications of the publiic coroner's court enquiry,  if Hester had succeeded in her attempt,  are not lost on them. 

It is Miller, as much an outcast as a struck off Nazi scientist and German  mprisoned by the Allies as an outcast as a homosexual, the latter a common interpretation of his role,  who can talk Hester out of her aggrieved attempts at suicide. The question of judgements and justice raised by the post-war Nuremberg Trials and a lifetime's limbo of life imprisonment, as in the case of Rudolf Hess, caught between those who were hanged and those imprisoned and released spoke out loud and clear to us from this production. 

This was the first production of The Deep Blue Sea we have seen with fine performances and a stunning Hester at its centre, a heroine who knows her life is descending into cheap melodrama while others can turn the page and move on. Written after the turmoil in Europe and Asia of World War II, it also, it seems to us, is a seamlessly integrated nuanced dramatic debate without attempting a glib resolution. 

But many others can judge for themselves when it is broadcast in British cinemas on September 1 and internationally on October 6. In the meantime, it's a green light from TLT and her little jalopy.

Review I'm Getting My Act Together And Taking It On The Road

I'm Getting My Act Togehter And Taking It On The Road

Music by Nancy Ford

Book and Lyrics by Gretchen Cryer

When Joe Met Heather

 http://www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk/

This is an interesting one. A confessional musical created in 1978 by two women from small town America, both divorced from ex-Christian ministers who also turned to showbiz, which overcome tepid reviews to become an Off Broadway smash. Have we got your attention? Oh yes, and the two women had also gone on the road as singer/songwriters.

Often billed as the "first feminist musical", the creators prefer to class it as an exploration of  relationships between women and men. And it's wisely left as a period piece in Matthew Gould's comradely production in the intimate surroundings of Piccadilly's Jermyn Street Theatre.

Heather Jones (Landi Oshinowo), sometime bubble gum pop star and soap actress, having reached the big 4-0, determines to break away from her typecasting and  consumer-driven notions of love and family. Literally leaving her old act and getting a new act together, she's also got together a band and backing singers for a rawer and, yes, more political set of songs and is preparing to strike out on a tour without the corporate hype.

But before she goes, she still seeks the approval, or maybe rather a first audience, in the shape of manager Joe (Nicolas Colicos) who, with domestic troubles of his own,  veers between dominance, likeability and vulnerability, fearing she'll destroy what they have built up together.

This, as we've indicated, is very much of its time. But it remains a cleverly constructed ongoing discussion of irresolvable matters punctuated by an affecting series of songs building up to a more complex picture than a narrative description  might indicate.

The show is as much about women in the music industry and the contractual slavery, at the time, for both sexes in the recording industry and TV. When the feminine icon of America was as much the Barbie Doll and carefully choreographed girl groups as the Statue of Liberty.

With a mix of songs and styles and slipped-in references from West Side Story's I Feel So Pretty to soul amd rock,  it's also a sly history of  women in music. with some of the songs almost ending in question marks.

There's a literary side to it too with a reference to Virginia Woolf and social history with the "New Woman". Then there's the global subtext to this musical  when it was recently not just about women in the home and men going to work, but men and some women going outside America to war.  For in the words of  Miss America "Beauty was your currency/Talent was your style/Lovers falling at your feet/Power in your smile"

There''s strength too in a polished cast with understated, but intelligently evocative, choreography. Dark-haired Alice (Rosanna Hyland) and blonde Cheryl (Kristen Gaetz) provide the backing singers and transform themselves, along with Heather, into the traditional girl group. 

While Heather also finds herself wooed plaintively by the young guitarist Jake (David Gibbons) who looks like Bruce Springsteen but sings more like David Cassidy. The casting of a black woman in the role of Heather also adds a layer of musical history harking back to the black girl groups manufactured by white male managers and emerging solo black vocalists.

Looking up the history, it was the cathartic discussion element, when producer Joe Papp cannily noted the cold war audience lingered to talk and argue with each other after the show, which also proved part of its success. Papp pioneered post-performance Q and As and, along with a strong score, turned the show into a hit.

Ford and Cryer have now put together a sequel, "Still Getting My Act Together" and melded ir into a two act play with songs. If it's as strong as the original, it struck us it may well have legs as a movie as well as a stage play. Anyway this felt like a matinee well-spent and it's an amber/green from the TLT band.