Review Travesties

Travesties
by Tom Stoppard

The Biggest Bet
https://www.menierchocolatefactory.com/

Life is drawing to an end for Henry Carr. He's not so much forgetful or senile as bloody annoyed. He obviously wants to join the ranks of the respected, those who knew and encouraged the genius which manifested itself in Zurich during World War One.

The only trouble is that the genius, acclaimed by a deluge of accolades by all and sundry (ok, by those in publishing and academia - we're safe as the genius himself made fun of them), is a certain Mr James Joyce (1882 -1941).  We're at the start of Travesties, a 1974 play written by Tom Stoppard.

Now Henry (Tom Hollander) is forcing himself to join the Joyce (played here by Peter McDonald) bandwagon, minueting around possible biographies. He rehearses different plausible versions of the past as if preparing evidence for a court case  - or at least in case he is quizzed by a publisher, literary editor or reader. Wavering between eulogy and fury.

"Memories of James Joyce. James Joyce As I Knew Him. The James Joyce I Knew. Through The Courts With James Joyce .. To those of us who knew him, Joyce's genius was never in doubt ... an amazing intellect ..." until we get to "... in short, a liar and a hypocrite, a tight-fisted, sponging fornicating drunk not worth the paper ..."

Then on to future Soviet leader Lenin (Forbes Mason) out to commandeer artistic pursuits for the revolutionary ideals on whom, Carr having outlived them all, can only rue the day that he never laid a bet when they all lived in Zurich. Along with Romanian Tristan Tzara (Freddie Fox), founder of "anti-art" - er - art movement Da da.

As you may have gathered, this is a genre of memory play. Stoppard has taken a footnote in the magisterial Richard Ellman 1959 biography of James Joyce in which Henry Carr appears and spun it into Travesties. Carr, who like Joyce had worked in a bank, was an ex-soldier, invalided out of combat, working in a minor British consular role.

Joyce recruited Carr to play Algernon ("the other one" in  Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest) on an amateur basis in an acting troupe of which  Joyce was business manager. However, the whole affair ended in acrimony for Carr and Joyce - and in the Zurich district courts with each in the hands of lawyers.

Directed by Patrick Marber, this is essentially a high-brow farce set in Carr's lodgings and Zurich public library which like the earlier Rosencrantz and Guildernstern Are Dead becomes a play within a classic play. This time it's The Importance Of Being Earnest intricately intertwined in the action.

As in literary memoirs where fact and fiction interweave, Wilde's Gwendolen (Amy Morgan) is Carr's sister who ends up as amenuensis to the great man in this tale. That is, Joyce relies on her as he dictates Ulysses (in which Joyce exacted revenge on Carr for claiming he was owed money for his costume and allegedly libelling the author - that damn fact and fiction again!).

Meanwhile Wilde's Cecily (Clare Foster) is turned into a Zurich librarian (although in this travesty changes later on into a more male donnish lecturer on the Russian Revolution). Tristan Tzara falls for her but has to invent in Wildean manner a less radical brother due to her conservative inclinations.

"Confused?",  you probably will be. Unlike Rosencrantz and Guildernstern Are Dead, the possible tragic and human consequences of war and putting theory into practice feel mightily submerged in the wordplay and literary allusions.

Nevertheless the consequences are there. For in one sense or another, Zurich is conveyed as a city of refugees and political manipulation where art, politics and historical events of the past  all too easily solidify in a record which puts a selective import on disparate strands.

For while we may laugh at Carr's inadequate ramblings when putting together his own book, they are also recognizable as precisely the sort of literary memoirs which are the currency of literary and academic lionization.

And Switzerland's position in wartime seemingly divorced from the conflict is always there. As is Carr's butler Bennett (Tim Wallers) with his succinct diplomatic bag newspaper summaries of the situation. In reality, Bennett was in charge of Carr and the consulate in Zurich, so here as butler he is  is literally a "public servant". Even if his transformation into a PG Wodehouse type character also has resonance.

It feels both a problem and a strength that our sympathies tend to turn towards Carr as an uncanonized character in this gallery of secular saints. Nevertheless, the play relies on an inordinate amount of background knowledge which, speaking frankly, hardly seems part of the mainstream in our twentieth first century internet world.

The detailed care lavished on the set and costumes, the timing and entrances and exits, the merging of Finnegans Wake language into Carr's muddled or maybe experimental recollections make this almost a biblical theatrical text in itself. Yet it's the visuals which stick in the mind, despite quickfire, fine performances by the cast.

Carr's torment and disgust at Joyce's undisputed genius held us - the other characters filtered through Carr's mind perhaps seem less original in our own quickfire, algorithmic world. This feels now very much a play put together rather than organically grown. Lenin and his wife Nadya (Sarah Quist) may be deliberately distanced with dialogue taken from books Carr has read to make up for being in their proximity without meeting them but this adds to the collage effect.

We have to say the current public exposure of the coopting of artists into political partisanship makes the juxtapositions a little old hat now. But, it is true, a hat which like wars and revolutions and Henry Carr's boater in The Importance Of Being Earnest, always needs to be paid for. So it's a quickfire kerching! amber light from TLT and her very own car (without the double r) critic!

Review The Libertine

The Libertine
by Steven Jeffreys

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

According to this tale, based on true-life literary, louche aristo John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, it's a bit of a tontine in the playwriting world. If you fall too early, you can well end up the quarry of and as a character in the work of a more acclaimed and financially secure colleague - and rival.

Terry Johnson directs this revival of Steven Jeffreys' restoration romp, pastiche, tragedy (what you will ...) starring Dominic Cooper, which first made its mark in 1994 at the Royal Court as a companion piece to George Etheredge's Man of Mode before a production in the US and a movie 10 years later. Etheredge, my dear sir and madam, appearing as a character in this play - along with a monkey.

The historical Rochester was indeed an outrageous debauchee, hellraiser, whoremonger and cynic who had fought for King Charles II in the wars against the Dutch and whose father had been a loyal supporter of the royals in exile during Cromwell's protectorate.

It was this background that made him a protégé of the King, indulged if banished several times from the court. For Rochester had another weapon as he grew angry and disillusioned, along with many others, with the king's neglect of his country and the corruption of the court - satirical poetry.

In midst of the 1990s, when John Major was prime minister, Jeffreys scored a success with The Libertine following hot on the heels of the successful pairing of The Recruiting Officer with Our Country's Good, directed by Max Stafford-Clark who also directed the first production of this play .

The Libertine is structured around a series of scenes somewhat reminiscent of William Hogarth's A Rake's Progress painted in the century following Rochester's death from syphillis at the age of 33.

This structure is emphasized in this production by the set designed by Tim Shortall. A low, roughly-hewn wood stage stands in front of an oversize gilded picture frame onto which are projected a series of sensual - at first noticeably with women with their heads cut off at the neck - or topographical paintings.

Using also the structure of restoration plays, with a prologue by the libertine himself "You will not like me" and soliloquies by other characters, the characters address the audience between scenes, increasingly in the manner of a court case.

The play itself accepts a disputed premise, that William Etheredge based his man of mode, Dorimant, part of Rochester's circle, on the poet. But otherwise the incidents displayed or alluded to in The Libertine are a recorded part of history.

Not least the portrait of Rochester, a manuscript in hand, about to crown a monkey with a poet's laurel wreath, while the monkey tears pages out of a book and hands a crumpled page to him in his outstretched paw.

It has all the elements of both a lascivious bodice and cod piece ripper (Rochester, so he informs us in his prologue, goes both ways) and a politically and intellectually stimulating play. Yet it doesn't quite deliver on either count.

While Cooper acquits himself tolerably well in the eponymous role, the play feels weighed down by much discussion rather than action.  Maybe it's a bad reflection on 2016, but the supposed outrageousness of Rochester and his acts of destruction and self-destruction seem rather tame now.

Still, Jasper Britton has a flourish and presence as King Charles. Will Merrick as young Cambridge-educated spark (Rochester was an Oxford man), Billy Downs is memorable as the young man lured into life as a mini-Rochester. Yet Ophelia Lovibond as Rochester's actress lover Lizzie Barry and Alice Bailey Johnson as his country-bound wife Elizabeth Malet feel curiously static.

It says much that it's at the sitting for the couple's portrait when the play for a short time catches light. Meanwhile the supposed liveliness of the Signior Dildo song as x-rated satire, where the dildos seemed sometimes more like police truncheons, and the carousing and fighting often falls flat.  

To be perfectly honest, TLT and her own roistering automative servant found this a frustrating experience. Perhaps wrongly, we were continually asking ourselves, "What does it all mean?". "How does it fit into the 1990s?"

"Or is it some metaphor for the rise of the angry young men playwrights like Osborne and Orton against the likes of Rattigan and Coward?" "Is there a special significance when Rochester is called a romantic?" On the other hand, is it just a rather slight play with a role for a charismatic leading man which is more at home in the cinema than on stage?

There was more momentum in the second act but this felt like an uncertain production of a play truncated in its arguments and action. It's perfectly serviceable but there were longeurs and while it sent us to Signior Google to find out more about Rochester, it's an amber light for The Libertine.

Review Pigeon English

Pigeon English
By Stephen Kelman
Adapted by Gbolahan Obisesan

Wild About Harri
http://www.nyt.org.uk/whats-on/pigeon-english

The past is always with us, even when current events sweep us along. And while Pigeon English is startlingly contemporary, there's also a backward echo to the tragedy of little Damilola Taylor. But as this adaptation of the novel by Stephen Kelman makes clear, there's always a doppelgänger somewhere in the world in the present, future and past.

This picaresque play follows the life of Ghanaian immigrant, Harri (Seraphina Beh in cross gender casting), an 11 year old schoolboy who with his best mate Dean sets out CSI-style to solve the murder by stabbing of a young basketball ace near Luxembourg House on a London estate.

Framed Shakespearean-style with a poetic prologue (Charlotte Law) who also pushes the narrative along with diary entry type interjections, not of time but of locations.

Directed by Anna Niland with electronic and natural vocal beatboxing sound effects mixed with African inflections, we are given a map of and hear the pulse of Harri's world - estate, the ninth floor flat of Harri's family in Luxembourg House, the school, the Jubilee Centre community hall with a place for an immigrant chapel, the bus stop, the pub, the laundrette, the bins, the Catholic Church, all touched by the tribal gangs where it's either for or against,  and  overhead the sounds of the cooing, fluttering pigeons.

For Harri's migrant family, his shift-working midwife mother (Chineyne Ezeudu) and his sister Lydia (Daisy Fairclough), has also flown in to this country, leaving behind the father and baby sister Agnes with only the occasional tenuous telephone connection.

In the tribal world on the London estate everyone is making sacrifices, tributes and offerings from the schoolyard to the gangs to the Opoku family having to pay Caribbean Julius (Joshua Lyster-Downer) to whom the mother's sister, Sonia (Shalisha James-Davis) has attached herself. But Sonia has made her own sacrifice to escape the authorities, burning off the skin on her finger tips so she has no finger prints.

The two-hour piece has a televisual feel, even, or perhaps more so,  with the abused Never Normal Girl of the prologue and Harri speaking directly to the audience. The plot strands could make up a several episodes, sometimes veering off in colourful, characterful, observational directions, although a little jam packed for a stage production.

It's loud, brash and energetic with Harri, even if he is led astray or a bystander to misdemeanours, an unfailing optimist and sweet child in this new country. In short, a child with every hope for the years ahead.

Cecelia Carey's set of slender scaffolding conjures up the nooks and crannies of the estate, the schoolyard and schoolroom, inside and outside space. It raises the action on different levels, filled with geometric shapes, providing the kids of the estate with their own pigeon lofts. All fronted by a clverly constructed tunnel entrance, half representing the whole, through which we watch the action.

Beh is a determined Harri, intent on his trainers with a crush on fellow classmate Poppy whom we see only though his eyes. Felix MacKenzie Barrow as best friend Dean contrasts well, a mixture of the gormless and the streetwise.

Fairclough's Lydia tries to make her way in grown up matters beyond her years  with equally adrift but threatening mates Maquita (Arianna Beadie) and Chantelle (Natasha Heliotis). There's good work too from Nathaniel Wade as the worldly preacher, Joe Pierson as the yo-yoing Jordan, who may be more dangerous than he seems, and Kwami Odoom as gang leader X-fire with Shiv Jalota as gang member Dizzy.

Some of the best scenes are the intimate, domestic ones  with  Chineyne Ezeudu as Momma, alongside Shalisha James-Davis as her glamorous sister, Sonia, and Joshua Lyster-Downer as moneylender Julius with the two children, Harri and Lydia.  

Pigeon English is never glib but it does feel sometimes as if it is doing too much, despite the themes threaded through to integrate the plot and hints of  wider political contexts. It's a zestful episodic tale of linking stories swirling around Harri vividly and excitingly, where life for everyone, young and old, becomes riskier and riskier. Like the life it portrays it's flawed but an intense and passionate piece and it's another amber/green light for a multifaceted both spiritual and disturbingly earthbound play

Review Romeo And Juliet

Romeo and Juliet
Written by William Shakespeare
Adapted by Owen Horsley

Love And Death In The Officers' Mess
http://www.nyt.org.uk/whats-on/romeo-and-juliet

It's the perfect fit, of course, for the National Youth Theatre (NYT), as director Kate Hewitt notes in the NYT 60th anniversary brochure. The young star-crossed lovers Romeo (James Mace) and Juliet (Shalisha James-Davis) held back by their elders and a hidebound adversarial family-based society.

Owen Horsely's adaptation is a neatly pared down Romeo and Juliet, while keeping the lyricism and major speeches,  with scenes intercut, well-paced by adaptor and director. It's a world of shadows, spotlights and echoes set in 1956 with the military still at the centre of life, conscription only ending four years later, but Britain, as in The Entertainer, increasingly unsure of its status in the world.

Indeed this seems linked to Juliet's father Capulet (Felix Mackenzie-Barrow), arranging her marriage to American Paris (Nathaniel Wade), who is enjoying dressing like the Brits and partaking in British artistocratic pastimes in an enjoyable scene, part of the sharp and vigorous version of this tragedy

But there is also the feel of the Notting Hill Riots and the moneyed nightclub world of Ruth Ellis, guns replacing traditional swords, with the Capulet parents singing in sultry tones their lines at the masqued ball where the young lovers meet - Capulet in dress uniform, Lady Capulet (Natasha Heliotis) in a decadent old-gold strapless number.

This admirably clear abridgement focuses more on the out-of-date class system than on the feuding Capulets and Montagues and Hewitt directs with a sure hand. Juliet's father is an officer and, especially with a glass of scotch in his hand, a bully both to his wife and his daughter.

The mothers of both Romeo (Catrin Walker-Booth) and Juliet mother dress in the latest Paris couture sucking on cigarette holders, while Romeo has joined the ranks of the Teds, although he and his friends and cousins can don bow ties and dickeys when the occasion demands.

Juliet is a charmingly vulnerable schoolgirlish sparrow-like figure in gingham and bobby socks and in bedroom white slip  while Romeo is a fresh faced army cadet in waiting.

A group dance element (movement Polly Bennett), pushing the plot forward, along with judicious use of blackouts, is established from the prologue along with an original, dissonant, throbbing soundtrack (music and sound Dom James and Tommy Antonio).

There's a fluidity to the simple set (design by Cecilia Carey), a black box,  depending on painterly shapes, with a versatile moveable  rectangular dais.

White strips hang down and white and sooty black upright boards work simply but effectively, especially in the balcony scene. There are always others in the shadows ready to slip into their scenes  and there's a bold use of colour filters (lighting by Elliot Griggs).

Juliet comes into her own in the second act, slipping into her own version of Parisian couture in pastel shades and visibly maturing. It's certainly a production where clothes (costume Helena Bonner) maketh the man and woman.

The supporting cast, apart from the Friar in glowing light turquoise robe, have a mash up of costumes ranging from teddy boy to some 21st century bare midriff wear at the dance (where there's a Charleston rather than Rock 'n Roll) to Peaky Blinders style caps and suits.

Mace and James-Davis give solid performances. Joshua Lyster-Downer as Friar Laurence, Arianna Beadie as the matronly Scottish nurse, part nanny, part beauty salon operative, part SRN, Michael Kinsey as the Prince give distinctive interpretations.

There's also a well-judged brief performance by Daisy Fairclough as Balthasar, Romeo's close confidente. 

Juliet's relationship with her father and mother and with her business-like nurse and Romeo's with the Friar bring the story into a strong and modern focus. The latter finds his best laid plans scuppered by one message which fails to reach its target like a vital email sitting in the outbox.

This is a fast-moving, well-drilled production - we even wondered what a one act 90 minute' version, rather than two hours and two acts,  could do taking the lovers from childhood to falling in love to death without a break and increasing the emotional stakes between the actors and with the audience. Even so, an amber/green light for a precisely directed spare, and well thought-through updating of Romeo and Juliet.

Review Out There

Out There
Music, Book & Lyrics by
Elliot Davis & James Bourne

Logan's Run
http://www.uniontheatre.biz/

Back in the day, TLT is of the television generation who watched the black and white images of an astronaut taking man's (yes  it had to be a man ...) first step on the moon. And then gazed at the moon in the sky and thought, "There's someone up there!".

So TLT and her own little space shuttle had high hopes of Out There, a musical about this great achievement filtered through three generations of one family.

It's 1969 and NASA has named Newman Carter  (Shane Gibb), to the pride and delight of his wife Hope (Thea Jo Wolfe) and young son David, as lead astronaut for the first expedition to the moon. He's the man in the news until earthly tragedy strikes the Newman family and Newman disappears, leaving his son to be brought up by his aunt Celia (Jodee Conrad).

Roll on 40 years and we discover David (Neil Moors) is now the hotshot American head of Carter Galactica, a company he runs with the help of lawyer Linda Wares (Melissa Bayern). The plan is to launch a commercial spaceline and allow tourist travel to the moon

However Linda's duties also include fielding off police and mitigating punishments meted out to David's talented but tearaway son Logan (Luke Street) who has chosen the life of a petty criminal over studying engineering at college.

When Linda can no longer keep Logan out of jail, he takes off, one step ahead of the law, with the help of his Aunt Celia who gives him a letter to deliver to an old friend, Ned Thomas (Dave Willets), in the stagnating Texan town of Hope.

The corrupt local sherriff Pack (Melissa Veszi), aided by henchmen Billy (Adam Pettit) and Stan (Rhys Owen) is out to sell all the land in Hope off to a chemical waste firm, but is blocked by Ned who refuses join in the party.

When Logan arrives in town with the letter he puzzingly finds himself rejected by elderly Ned. However after a rocky start he develops a relationship with him, finds love interest  in the local (female) mechanic Jaimie (Imelda Warren-Green) before discovering Ned's true identity and a further secret on Ned's farm.

The best-known name in the show is Dave Willets as Ned whose experience and control are self-evident.  The score, by James Bourne (of McBusted fame) is tuneful enough with a tinge of country and western  and keyboard and guitar accompaniement (musical director Joe Louis Robinson).

Director Michael Burgen takes us through the twentieth century story with gusto on a stage surrounded by the audience on two sides. The narrative flows, almost entirely sung through.

But it's when the story jumps ahead in time that it starts to fall apart and the shoestring production loses its bearings. A staging choice to use a corner entrance rather than the main stage area also doesn't do the production any favours.

In the end, no score, however good, can survive an uncertain book, even though there were indications of more characters and a more ample story, of which more later. As it stands, the makeshift style of the cardboard scenery (Nik Corrall's set), which could have been charmingly whimsical, becomes indicative of a makeshift plot clumsily combining fantastical elements with a supposedly more gritty, political tale mixed with slapstick.  

TLT can see this working if it were made clear everything we see and hear is percolated through the world evoked by TV series and films from the mid twentieth century onwards. In fact, the first scenes with young David Carter watching TV, playing with a space rocket and a cartoon rocket on the  back wall may suggest this.

The posible framework of a clever childlike, but not childish, patchwork of  popular TV and movie tropes never comes into fruition. Instead, we're presented with a clunky series of face-value clichés and indications that parts of the plot may have been cut.

The mid twentieth century Disney optimism about space travel and its benefits, the 1970s urban movie grit of Logan and his car thieving pals,  the successful father and his rebel-without-a-cause son, the comic "Dukes of Hazard" law enforcement, the town council's fight to save their town from a destructive corporation (the stuff of many a movie) all could have provided a witty structure with room for new twists.

The mention of environmental protestors and the putting into the mouth of the female sheriff of what are obviously the lines of a journalist made TLT and her automotive redneck wonder what had been cut.

A quick web search revealed a 2011 two-day production by the Youth Music Theatre with a fuller score. The journalist in this version appears on first blush to have been a villain in cahoots with the elected law enforcer. This may explain a verse about "smelling a story" sung, rather glaringly inappropriately, by the police chief. It seems to us quite appropriate to take away one villain in that case but leaving those lines in the mouth of the another just didn't fit.

The subjects of journalism and environmental damage are also strong subjects which  can last through the years. They seem to be present a tad more forcefully in the 2011 version and, with research and thought, could still have added depth without unbalancing the space story.

For it could have resonated now in 2016 with real-life current news about an environmental journalist, oil pipelines and and native American land which has caused international  disquiet concerning policing, local politicians, corporations and the impact on journalism.  Melissa Veszi playing the sheriff in Out There does have a native American look/Mexican look and the repetition of needing access to fuel in the musical also chimes with this news story.

A townsfolk comment about putting on a show, which seemed strangely out of place at the performance we saw, also fell into place when we realised that a song Step by Step had been cut. This bound the themes of space, the construction of a space rocket, the saving of a township, two young people falling in love, the putting together of a news story, the creation of a musical and the gradual coming together of grandfather, son and grandson.  

There were other incongruities. Logan, who is white, bridles at being called "boy"  by his father and grandfather, something out of sync with their other speech patterns,  in a strange Coriolanus-type theme which goes nowhere.

It is possible that the whole is a prescription-drug-fuelled fantasy of a dying old man with the town and corporate plot still outside the fantasy. But this kind of ambiguity is never allowed air to breathe and the different stories never fully integrated.

The cast of eleven all acquit themselves in the singing stakes, while there are a few very wobbly American accents. This, looking back at the 2011 production, seems be a musical pulled and pushed out of existence since then instead of developed. An amber light for the performances and such a shame that, with so much being lost in the process, something valuable may have been submerged out there.
    

Review Imogen (William Shakespeare's Cymbeline Renamed And Reclaimed)

Imogen
William Shakespeare's Cymbeline Renamed and Reclaimed

Romans (Rap) In Britain
http://imogen.shakespearesglobe.com/

As far as TLT could recall from her dim and distant past of Shakespeare studies, Cymbeline is a bit of a ragbag of Shakespeare's Greatest Hits. Echoes of King Lear, Othello, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night abound.

It's also part of that loose association of plays in lit crit which are known as "problem" plays (but also a romance or tragicomedy) with its improbable plot and eponymous character who is out of the picture for much of the play's running time.

Director Matthew Dunster's adaptation focuses instead squarely on the character of Imogen, daughter of  kingpin drug dealer Cymbeline, who in any case always has the most lines in the play, far more than the King of the Britons, her father.

In fact, TLT's little but learned hatchback reminded her there are only four Shakespeare plays with women in the titles. Like joint bank accounts, the male name automatically comes first in Antony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet and Troilus and Cressida and it's only in The Merry Wives of Windsor where women stand merrily alone.

Cymbeline (Jonathan McGuinness) is Britain's most powerful drug dealer running a gang producing a factory conveyor belt's worth of Class A substances. Meanwhile far off Rome is home to a rival white tracksuited bling drugs' gang.

One of Cymbeline's lieutenants Belarius (Martin Marquez) is falsely accused of treachery and in revenge for unjustified exile steals Cymbeline's two sons Aviragus (William Grint) and Guiderius (Scott Karim)  bringing them up as his own. Only Imogen (Maddy Hill) remains within the drugs' gang compound.

Previously, Cymbeline had brought Posthumus (Ira Mandela Siobhan), the son of another of his lieutenants, who had been murdered into his inner sanctum. With gangland members as nannies Imogen and Posthumumus are brought up together eventually getting it together and secretly making  it legal as wife and husband.

But Cymbeline has married again and the new Queen Bee in the drugs' gang (Claire-Louise Cordwell) has a definite sting. She and Cymbeline want Imogen to marry her cocky son Cloten (Joshua Lacey) from a previous marriage. So when Cymbeline discovers the marriage of Imogen and Posthumus, he banishes the latter to keep them apart.

Before he goes into exile to Rome, Imogen and Posthumus exchange love tokens: He gives her a bracelet and she gives him a diamond ring.

The rest of the play pivots round a bet with devious Giacomo (Matthew Needham), placed against Imogen retaining her virtue which Posthumus is lured into and tricked by whilst in exile,  Imogen escaping Cloten's clutches in disguise as a boy, the Romans and Brits in gang warfare and how Cymbeline's family is reunited,  the fortunes of Belarius and finally Posthumus restored and the latter coming to see how wrong he has been about Imogen's supposed adultery.

With its rather awkward mix of pantomine, fairytale, Britain's mythic history and revenge tragedy-like gruesomeness, it's already a romcom which  fits with a certain modern cinematic sensibility.The updating of Cymbeline to embrace gangland culture isn't entirely new.  There's a 2014 US movie set in biker culture directed by Michael Almereyda ending with Imogen and Posthumus riding off into the sunset on a motorbike and freedom.

But this is set in current day London, including a historical nod to West Side Story and The Long Good Friday, with its transparent butcher's shop curtains, rap, hip hop and electronic music  - Skepta's Man, Daft Punk's Get Lucky amongst others - and gangland honour culture. Branded tracksuits are the gang uniform in an interpretation, cutting out much of the supernatural gumph, giving the story in some respects recognition and clarity for modern audiences.

It's also literally an electric show - the Globe stage is flooded with artificial light and miked and electricity is bound up with the drugs' gang concept of the show (design by Jon Bausor and lighting by Lee Curran). That's to say the hydroponic drug "farms" with their steep electricity bills.

At the same time, there's a certain cost to the balance of the play. Rather than Imogen as a Renaissance babe (ok, maid) emerging with untutored virtue out of barbarous Britain, Imogen, although clean of drugs, ends up as a potential narcotics' gang matriarch.

That's not to say this version of the play does not work on its own terms It does. It's loud and it's brash. There's some clever, punchy updating of the text through pauses and modern speech patterns giving new meaning to old words.

There's a little too much hand gesturing and self-conscious feel to Maddy Hill's Imogen, more comfortable on the Globe stage when she dons her male disguise and becomes an active figure rather than the previously more passive recipient of bad news.

There's also a notable playful and tender performance from Grint's Averagus with deaf signing feeling a natural part of the play. Nevertheless the updating doesn't have the rigour and attention as this season's other problematic play "The Taming Of The Shrew".

It flattens Cymbeline into a gangland tale and the comedy and violence no longer form part of a delicate Shakespearean meditation on inherent nobility threading together the pastoral, the court and the supernatural in its concerns, language and dramatic contrasts.

Without these skeins giving the possibility of a more idealistic existence, it also feels rather lengthy. But - and in these days, it's a big (positive) but - the dancing (choreography Christopher Akrill), blunt black comedy, music, aerial acrobatics and choice use of pauses to twist lines into current speak may still find an appreciative audience, especially those who come to Cymbeline for the first time in this version focussed on Imogen. An amber light for an electric performance which, despite its flaws, still leaves many in the audience on a high.

Review Father Comes Back From The Wars

We at TLT Towers welcome Carolin Kopplin who brings continental spice to the TLT mix! Munich-born Carolin trained as a lawyer and dramaturge before living and working in the USA. She is now a writer and translator based in London and, of course, the newest recruit to the TLT team. 

Father Comes Back From The Wars (Parts 1,2 &3)

by Suzan-Lori Parks

Of Human Bondage

http://www.royalcourttheatre.com

A slave on a West Texas plantation called Hero and his personal odyssey through the American Civil War and its aftermath is the focus of Father Comes Back From The Wars. Pulitzer Prize winner Suzan-Lori Parks combines elements of Greek drama with Homer's Odyssey and a philosophical debate on the concept of freedom in a powerful trilogy of plays. 

In the first part, "A Measure Of A Man", set in 1862. Hero (Steve Toussaint) is faced with a dilemma. His master has promised to free him if Hero joins the Confederate army. But should he fight against the army that wants to abolish slavery in the South? Or should he maim himself to evade the military? And, even more importantly, will his master keep his promise? 

Hero's wife, Penny, (Nadine Marshall) urges him to stay home. His father (Leo Wringer) and many of his fellow slaves, who also make him the subject of a wager, want him to go, not just because they will face severe punishment by the "boss-master" if Hero refuses..

The second part, "A Battle In The Wilderness", takes us on to the battlefield. The Colonel (John Stahl), Hero's master, has captured a Union soldier Smith (Tom Bateman) and keeps him locked up in a tiny wooden cage.

To pass the time, the Colonel plays his banjo and forces his prisoner to sing rebel songs. But Smith changes the lyrics, the Colonel loses interest and instead challenges him on his beliefs about freedom and slavery.

Parks also uses Hero and Smith to explore the materialist culture, ruled by the rich, where the slaves will never be free: "This mark of the market will always be on us." Smith urges Hero to desert and join the Union Army to fight for his freedom. To whom should Hero give his loyalty?

The final section, "The Union Of My Confederate Parts" sees Hero returning from the war and the parallels to The Odyssey become particularly striking. Hero has changed his name to Ulysses, after Commander-in-Chief Ulysses S Grant, and his wife Penny (Penelope from the Greek epic) has been fending off wooers in his absence. 

The slaves have been sold off or died with only Penny or Homer (Jimmy Akingbola) remaining. Hero's talking cross-eyed dog Odd-See (Dex Lee) miraculously returns to fulfil the function of Messenger, reporting on Hero's journey and lightening the more sombre mood of this act.

Originally staged at the Public Theater in New York, director Jo Bonney's production now has an excellent British cast. Toussaint's Hero is an imposing presence, the archetype of a hero, yet seriously flawed. Marshall portrays Penny with strength and vulnerability. Akingbola impresses as the rebellious Homer, whose foot was cut off after he tried to run away. Bateman gives a forceful performance as Smith.  

Although over three hours' long, this skilfully directed, intriguing work never has a dull moment. Neil Patel's atmospheric set and Steven Bargonetti's bluesy music transport us straight to the American south.    

Writer Parks sets the bar high in the first three of nine planned plays, employing ancient forms to tell a still very relevant story. It's a green light for a trilogy uncovering how the precarious position for African-Americans during the long-past Civil War still resonates today.

Review Good Canary

Good Canary
by Zach Helm

Imitation Of Life
https://www.rosetheatrekingston.org/

Hollywood comes to Kingston Upon Thames with publicity justifiably headlining "John Malkovich Directs" in UPPER CASE above the title of the play, Good Canary. Although we should add the two leads, Skins' Freya Mavor and Harry Lloyd each get a photo and equal size lettering.

But then again, this play by Zach Helm (he gets equal size lettering below the title) has been pet project of the Hollywood star for some time. It was first performed in a French translation at the Théâtre Comedia in Paris and then, in Spanish, as El Buen Canaria at Mexico City's Teatro de los Insurgentes.

Now the Rose Theatre hosts the English language world première. Writer Jack (Lloyd) suddenly achieves the overnight fame dreamt of by many an aspiring novelist. After a glowing review by critic Mulholland (an acerbic Simon Wilson), Jack's gritty (and read for that, pretty filthy) novel shoots to top of the bestseller list.

But, in the opinion of the New York literati, his new best friends, Jack comes with baggage. Annie (Mavor), Jack's wife, is the centre of his life but she is also a bulimic junkie, hooked on amphetamines with a tendency to slice through the chauvinist small talk at deal-making dinner parties with a mixture of insight and violent insults - or rather, violent insults and insight in that order.

This is indeed a slickly directed play with Mavor giving a tour-de-force performance in a role not unlike that of Denise Gough in People, Places & Things. Lloyd as Jack manages the tricky balance as the supportive husband and ambitious career-climber. It is he who gives her the caged yellow canary (a live one on stage!) of the play's title.

The canary, we are told through words projected on the backdrop at the beginning, was used by miners to warn if the air was filling with toxic gases. However, by the end of the play, when the canary appears to have fluttered away, we weren't quite sure what exactly this signified, although we had a rough idea that Annie was equated to the caged bird.

The set by Pierre-François Limbosch is inventive and sets up its own visual discussion on the clichéd relationship of art and a tormented life. There is a clever use of projections and the backdrop is brushed with painterly daubs. Equally, there is an evocation of at least one famously anguished painting.

A café with adjacent road in New York, seen in different scenes from outside and inside, has a resemblance to Montmartre's paintings for tourists. Characters exit scenes stepping out of frames or slip out as if between the canvases of two paintings. At one point, a publisher's office and the couple's sparsely furnished apartment even slide together to resemble the archetypal poverty-stricken artist's garret.

Yet this, with the music by Nicolas Errèra and sound design by Jon Nicholls, somehow still serves to emphasize the cinematic nature of the script. We couldn't help thinking this was a movie that was never made. There's an attempt to make a virtue out of this - the use of surtitles instead of speech signifies the start of a slide into predominantly visual melodrama reminiscent of silent movies.

Sylvia (Sally Rogers), the wife of the wealthy publisher out to lure Jack into his publishing house, feels like a character which would benefit from being in a movie rather than a stage version, especially with scenes split between two rooms and groups of characters.

There is also a subtle time mash up feel. Publisher Charlie (a strikingly charismatic performance by Shepherd) could have stepped out of the 1960s. Drug dealer Jeff (Ilan Goodman combining shambling geniality and a belief he's in business rather than a criminal enterprise) could be from a 1980s' police procedural.

The dialogue of the wealthier publisher Stuart (marvellously glib Michael Simkins) apparently with the money for a lucrative advance and critic Mulholland has the feel of pre-internet unguarded comment.

We did sense, however, particularly when Stuart, having admitted that he'd not read Jack's novel, later proudly announces he has read Chapter 7 (ambiguous in the USA with its meaning of insolvency) that there might be another hidden plot to the Good Canary.

So all in all, it's well directed and acted, even if the script leaves a few too many question marks. We're still not sure what happened to that cute little bird, but TLT and her sidekick in their own cheep and cheerful way award a canary-coloured amber light for an evening with plenty of highlights.

Review No Man's Land

No Man's Land
by Harold Pinter

The Batting Order
http://www.nomanslandtheplay.com/

After the first performance of Harold Pinter's absurdist No Man's Land back in the Cold War days of 1975, the Times critic Irving Wardle said it was "... palpably the work of our best living poet in its command of language and its power to errect a coherent structure in a twilight zone of confusion and dismay."

We did not personally mine this quote from the esteemed Mr Wardle but owe its excavation to the programme introduction of director Sean Mathias's current production, which also doffs its cap to a quote from the equally esteemed Mr Billington from that time, 'a mixture of "admiration, respect and bewilderment". Ah, those heady days, when print was king and the word blog would have been viewed as some kind of unforgiveable newspaper misprint!

All of which is to say that No Man's Land, we would be presumptuous enough to believe, is very much a product of its time, a class system, a literary and Oxbridge hierachy. It's still got heft and bite. However it's a slow burner for current audiences, now when surreal humour and intricate power play has entered mainstream television and internet.

Step into the breach, Sir Patrick Stewart as eminent man of letters, Hirst, and Sir Ian McKellen as Spooner, a dishevelled lesser poet. Spooner enters the twilight zone, after a chance encounter on Hampstead Heath - ho, hum - and an invitation back for one - or several - drinks.

The twilight zone turns out to be a huge circular domed drinking room with panelled walls, designed by Stephen Brimson Lewis, within Hirst's North London abode. Up above we see the the night outline of tree tops against the transparent roof. Strangely it reminded us of a space ship come to earth in what seems to be Hampstead. Perhaps not unusual though for some individually commissioned Hampstead architecture of the time. The room almost empty in its luxury,  aside from a padded leather chair and some other sparse furnishings.

The two trade stories and memories. Yet we are never sure about them. Are they true recollections coloured by one-upmanship? Spooner, apparently reduced to collecting glasses in a pub for a pittance, could be desperate to keep his own end up with a university contemporary. Or he could be exercising literary skills, with a liberal amount of dirty mindedness, in a competitive manner, somewhat reminiscent, it seemed to us, of Jean Genet's "The Maids".

There's a rhythmic, musical feel as the lines jump back and forth between the pair of elderly gents as part of their mind games and twilight zone competition. But it's not just a two hander.

Spooner, after leaving behind rivalry with Hirst for the possibility of a position in his household, suddenly finds different competition. It appears in the shape of Hirst's male secretary or "amanuensis", John "Jack" Foster (Damien Molony) and manservant cum bodyguard Briggs (Owen Teale) and a whole new generation of posturing.

Pinter used the names of cricketers for his characters, carefully picked. Hirst a Yorkshire cricketer, a "player" rather than a "gentleman" who first worked as a weaver and in a dyeing firm before becoming known for cricket and his swing bowling. Spooner, a public school-educated Lancashire man and celebrated for his batting prowess. Foster, another public schoolboy, England captain and middle order batsman. Finally Briggs, a professional cricketer and noted spin bowler, who crossed over from Yorkshire to Lancashire.

So we may gasp and be left bewildered at the foresight of Harold Pinter using the word "Google" in his script. However, a passing knowledge of cricket's googly will make this an accidental glimpse of future technology. Continuing this glossary, we should add that, less cryptically, Jack Straw's Castle was then a listed pub (now luxury apartments since 2002 closure), not some citadel of a future and somewhat controversial Home, Foreign and Justice Secretary.

Just to let you gen up before you go - for you surely will go, like us, to see two legends of British acting at full throttle in a classic play, matched with Game Of Throne's Teale as Briggs and Molony as Foster. The latter is all set to step into the literary shoes of Hirst - if Spooner does not hinder his plans. 
      
The lines are thrown like skilfully bowled cricket balls and equally skilfully batted away. We still feel The Caretaker, Betrayal, The Dumb Waiter (the three Pinter plays we have previously seen) are more accessible. Yet there's an undoubted power to the twilight zone of No Man's Land.

Written at a moment when the reach of literary magazines, funded by who knows what or who, the left or right wing Oxbridge set was on the cusp of the wane. And a Hackney lad, the son of a Jewish ladies' tailor and a housewife, a cricket fanatic, could eventually be thought of as a modern Shakespeare.

It's an upper range amber light from TLT and her own motorised amanuensis for an occasion they wouldn't have missed, even for the complete editions of Wisden.     

Review Torn

Torn
by Nathaniel Martello-White

The Broken Branch
http://www.royalcourttheatre.com/

Another play about a family tree cracking and snapping but this time the roots of the familial problems go deeper than First World Problems in Nathaniel Martello-White's Torn directed by Richard Twyman in the Jerwood Theatre upstairs at the Royal Court.

We enter what appears to be an institutional room with wooden floor, moulded plastic grey plastic chairs for the audience in a round - a few raised up at the back like bar chairs, the only concession, along with lighting and sound, to the theatrical space designed by Ultz. 

Already in the room is Angel (Adelle Leonce) who converses with the audience, helps herself to a drink from the tea urn on a table in one corner. So Angel is aware that people are watching as she draws out chairs for the family members, we are about to learn, she has drawn together. But for what?

Maybe at first it seems like a showdown - we know from Angel's first anouncement to us, something bad happened - but after a while, it seems that even Angel does not even know why she has brought the eight family members together and what she expects. Except she knows, we have seen this at the beginning of course, she is showing us.

Although the family at first trickle in with few words, just uncertainty as to why they have been called together, the trickle of words soon turns into a deluge. The audience has to adjust to the criss-crossing conversations and rising cadences as emotions boil up and over.

At one point an analogy to a flock of  birds of prey becomes explicit and it seems this is how the play is structured. The lone one at first and gradually more and more flock in and greet and peck at each other.

And they are dangerous issues to peck at: the consequences of mixed race, yes, harking back to past slavery but also feeding into current issues. Slave owning and present day debt collection merge together with child abuse emerging from both.

At just over ninety minutes, the story shifts and turns around fractured family and time lines. It's a hard ask for an audience to concentrate intently all the time and there are moments when the action seems to sag into too much intricacy, shouting matches and huge-eyed Angel can only be static, standing apart as a bystander.

Yet a story with many layers over time and space does emerge of a child torn from the mainstream of her family by past and present economics, a family pitted against itself and manipulated in spite of itself by a criminal stepfather. It's not perfect as we've indicated but stand out performances do emerge from Leonce as Angel, her mother known only as Twin 1, Indra Ové, Roger Griffiths as Angel's father Brian, Kirsty Bushell as both fairer Aunty J and white Irish Nanny and James Hillier as stepfather Steve.

Director Twyman with lighting by Charles Balfour and sound by Gareth Fry keep up the pace  and it's an amber/green TLT light for this difficult but rewarding play.