Wednesday, 23 November 2016
Review DNA
DNA
by Dennis Kelly
Into The Woods
http://bit.ly/DNANYT
Once upon a time - even before TLT's jalopy rolled off the conveyor belt - TLT studied Bernard Shaw's St Joan and Will Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream for the - ahem - predecessor of GCSEs.
Now we're reliably informed Dennis ("Matilda") Kelly's 2008 Pinteresque one-act play DNA is on the syllabus. It's a dark piece, a cross between Lord Of The Flies and Animal Farm for the television age with a bit of Shakespearean cruelty thrown in for good measure.
A gang of kids, led by Jo Tate (a convincingly menancing yet complacent Natasha Heliotis), escape regularly into the woods away from school while enigmatic Phil (Joe Pierson) stays aloof sedately munching on a series of branded snacks and drinks.
This time, though, it's a different kind of rendezvous and bonding for the teenagers. The group has lured a vulnerable schoolboy regarded as a tag-along weakling into a dangerous dare and, albeit accidentally, a nasty outcome.
An actor-musician strumming the guitar with vocals, Felix Mackenzie-Barrow as Matt, introduces this tale with ensemble cast directed by Sean Hollands. The design by Ivan Alexander Todorov veers towards the minimilist with versatile blocks and neon tubes eveloped by smoke and flashlights slicing through the night (lighting Gareth Weaver).
Originally part of the National Theatre's youth theatre scheme, Connections, in 2007, this was the first time we had seen this subtle and supple play about power politics.
Now a set book, there were still gasps from the mainly young audience seeing the play off the page in performance. The production ratchets up the twists, turns and the logic of the ruthlessness and the cornered.
Nevertheless, it struck us, sitting in the stalls, the script's pace might work better in the round than on The Ambassadors' extremely lofty proscenium arch stage. This consideration certainly influences this review, as it made the play feel a little sluggish at times, even if outweighed by some outstanding individual performances.
Like DNA, the piece's building blocks are split into a double strand - the gang's crime and cover up and, linked across to it, the cool, calculating Phil - Pierson with something of the young Malcolm McDowell about him.
A young man of few words, Phil is the theorist who, at arms length, comes up with the cover-up plan where, nobody else, in theory, should get hurt.
His existence is also defined by the voluble Leah (Catrin Walker-Booth). She's equally infatuated and frustrated by him, like an eager acolyte student trying in vain to impress a seemingly indifferent tutor with her knowledge.
Charlotte Law's conscience-stricken Becky, led into lying, finds a natural way with melodrama, as does Shiv Jalota as the unexpected returnee to the pack. Daisy Fairclough also fulfills the promise shown in earlier NYT productions this season as the out-of-control underling Cathy who throws the best-laid plans disastrously off course.
As a whole, this is a solid production which could do at times with a slightly sharper focus. Even so, it's an amber light for a strong cast in a chilling, powerful play.
Saturday, 19 November 2016
Not A Review - Women Centre Stage Power Play Festival
Leading Ladies
http://www.womencentrestage.co.uk
A host of female talent will be taking over Hampstead Theatre this Sunday (November 20) as part of the second year of the Women Centre Stage Festival organised by Sphinx Theatre Company.
A star-studded array of actors includes Dame Janet Suzman, Josette Simon OBE and Maggie Steed who will be performing plays from Winsome Pinnock, Tanika Gupta and Sabrina Mahfouz and the GRAEAE Theatre Company amongst many others.
"The festival encourages writers to think women into the centre of their stories," says writer April De Angelis also bringing new work to the pioneering Festival.
Eastenders' actor Ann Mitchell, who will be on stage on Sunday, adds, "The Women Centre Stage Festival will present innovative and exciting leading protagonists to a diverse audience that are ready to listen."
Other events include a panel with playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker, Suzanne Bell, Royal Exchange Manchester literary associate and Elizabeth Newman from Bolton's Octagon Theatre to discuss practical measures of how to bring gender equality to a theatre and arts landscape where women remain underrepresented.
The day will end with performances of short pieces inspired by stories ripped from the headlines written by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, Howard Brenton, Alfred Fagon and George Devine award winner Charlene James and BBC writer Vinay Patel, all rehearsed by established and upcoming performers and directors in just 24 hours.
For more information and tickets, go to
http://www.womencentrestage.co.uk/shows
http://www.womencentrestage.co.uk/tickets
Friday, 18 November 2016
Review The Sewing Group
The Sewing Group
By EV Crowe
The Eye Of The Needle
https://royalcourttheatre.com/
Sewing, it occurred to us during this initially intriguing play by EV Crowe, has always been an essential craft for theatre and film from the earliest days. In the end, The Sewing Group is hoisted by its own petard of a premise in being rather stitched together with visible thread but still managed at first to hook us in.
We did wonder whether we had ventured into an American farming Amish or Mennonite community when a group of women soberly dressed in dark 17th century garb sat in a candle lit room lined with planks of Scandinavian-style pale wood floor to ceiling, sewing cross stitch samplers, once beloved by the daughters of gentlefolk to demonstrate their skill at the womanly arts.
But no, the accents were mostly British throughout, although maybe there was one item of purposefully inauthentic apparel worn from the start by the trio and it was all a little too clean. Through a series of short scenes flashing by, with what sounded like a harpsichord in between, we peek into an enclosed world as lace and sampler stitching develops into a very personal form of quilting from, in the words of someone outside the realm of women's needlework, "within".
One woman (most of the characters remain unnamed, described as A,B, C, D, E,F in the script) appears to assume a modicum of control even if she is a newbie. Another, apparently, is her aunt. Amother newcomer turns out to be a widow. The sole man (and a non needle worker) appears to be a village elder and preacher in a Christian parish.
Yet despite an attempt to control communal vocabulary, anachronistic notes intrude and this little Eden of embroidery begins to entertain other plots and styles. An element of whodunnit and commercial exploitation enters the picture, as well as a more Oriental soundtrack.
If this all sounds somewhat ideas-led, that's because it's how it comes across, despite director Stewart Laing's sharp direction injecting some neat variations of pace. Nor is this any reflection on the hard-working cast who are on one level deliberately - without wanting to give too much away - participating in a yoked together clumsy mash up fiction.
Fiona Glascott as the rookie protagonist in blonde braids brings a degree of misguided authoritarianism mixed with sincerity extracting humour from the mismatch. While Jane Hazlegrove, Sarah Niles, Alison O'Donnell, Nancy Crane and John MacKay surround her, conveying plausibly the efficiency of their human quilt.
But once the vocabulary is in place and the premise exposed, there seems little intellectual or dramatic development. There's an indication that 21st century work for an ambitious woman has been so neutered that there's a nostalgia for some aspects of a female division of labour. Yet notwithstanding a more ominous final scene where male concerns take over, the whole seems a self contained verbal bubble and therefore benign, without any jeopardy.
There's certainly a Renaissance sense of anachronism. However it veers finally from cryptic to expository and then again to the cryptic, so that we had to read the script to understand some of the gender exchange going on. And, dare one say it, it seemed rather too engrossed in an incestuously mechanical patchwork of literary, film and TV references.
Of course, the aim may be to show how human imagination, which should be flexible, can be confined to a rigid grid. Nevertheless it then struggles to find a dramatically viable form to make the issues needle the audience sufficiently. It's an amber light for a sampler of work which promises more than it finally delivers.
By EV Crowe
The Eye Of The Needle
https://royalcourttheatre.com/
Sewing, it occurred to us during this initially intriguing play by EV Crowe, has always been an essential craft for theatre and film from the earliest days. In the end, The Sewing Group is hoisted by its own petard of a premise in being rather stitched together with visible thread but still managed at first to hook us in.
We did wonder whether we had ventured into an American farming Amish or Mennonite community when a group of women soberly dressed in dark 17th century garb sat in a candle lit room lined with planks of Scandinavian-style pale wood floor to ceiling, sewing cross stitch samplers, once beloved by the daughters of gentlefolk to demonstrate their skill at the womanly arts.
But no, the accents were mostly British throughout, although maybe there was one item of purposefully inauthentic apparel worn from the start by the trio and it was all a little too clean. Through a series of short scenes flashing by, with what sounded like a harpsichord in between, we peek into an enclosed world as lace and sampler stitching develops into a very personal form of quilting from, in the words of someone outside the realm of women's needlework, "within".
One woman (most of the characters remain unnamed, described as A,B, C, D, E,F in the script) appears to assume a modicum of control even if she is a newbie. Another, apparently, is her aunt. Amother newcomer turns out to be a widow. The sole man (and a non needle worker) appears to be a village elder and preacher in a Christian parish.
Yet despite an attempt to control communal vocabulary, anachronistic notes intrude and this little Eden of embroidery begins to entertain other plots and styles. An element of whodunnit and commercial exploitation enters the picture, as well as a more Oriental soundtrack.
If this all sounds somewhat ideas-led, that's because it's how it comes across, despite director Stewart Laing's sharp direction injecting some neat variations of pace. Nor is this any reflection on the hard-working cast who are on one level deliberately - without wanting to give too much away - participating in a yoked together clumsy mash up fiction.
Fiona Glascott as the rookie protagonist in blonde braids brings a degree of misguided authoritarianism mixed with sincerity extracting humour from the mismatch. While Jane Hazlegrove, Sarah Niles, Alison O'Donnell, Nancy Crane and John MacKay surround her, conveying plausibly the efficiency of their human quilt.
But once the vocabulary is in place and the premise exposed, there seems little intellectual or dramatic development. There's an indication that 21st century work for an ambitious woman has been so neutered that there's a nostalgia for some aspects of a female division of labour. Yet notwithstanding a more ominous final scene where male concerns take over, the whole seems a self contained verbal bubble and therefore benign, without any jeopardy.
There's certainly a Renaissance sense of anachronism. However it veers finally from cryptic to expository and then again to the cryptic, so that we had to read the script to understand some of the gender exchange going on. And, dare one say it, it seemed rather too engrossed in an incestuously mechanical patchwork of literary, film and TV references.
Of course, the aim may be to show how human imagination, which should be flexible, can be confined to a rigid grid. Nevertheless it then struggles to find a dramatically viable form to make the issues needle the audience sufficiently. It's an amber light for a sampler of work which promises more than it finally delivers.
Wednesday, 16 November 2016
Review King Lear
King Lear
by William Shakespeare
The Generation Gap
https://www.rsc.org.uk/barbican
Your Mum's dead. Your difficult, out-of-touch Dad offers to transfer all his property into your name, relieving you and your loved ones of all financial problems - as long as you keep him in the manner to which he has become accustomed.
How many in Shakespeare's world could identify with these material concerns is a moot point, although even the poorest elderly peasant who nevertheless had a roof over his head could fear the younger generation ousting him (or her). But Gregory Doran's handsome production of King Lear launches us into a world where an autocratic leader has also, unbeknown even to himself, suppressed unruly divisions in his kingdom.
Antony Sher as Lear is borne by underlings on stage in a magnificent gold and glass casket - a Titoesque dictator in his combining of three kingdoms, grotesquely assuming he is loved, clad in furs like some pagan Santa Claus.
His demand that his three daughters, including the soon-to-be given-away in marriage and truthful Cordelia (Natalie Simpson), tell him how great he is has the complacency of a Victorian actor-manager hearing the rehearsed plaudits of his favoured actresses.
There's a minimal feel to the staging designed by Niki Turner - tightly packed red brickwork and later an illuminated blank white screen with shadow projections as backdrops, single gilded tree branches, giant bronze discs, great swathes of undulating polythene sheets on the floor and falling from above.
Lear's two eldest daughters, Goneril (Nia Gwynne) and Regan (Kelly Williams) in gorgeous gold brocade on dark luscious velvet robes of another era take part in the ceremony of Lear's vainglorious and unforced, wilful splitting of his kingdom. Indeed when Lear's company of knights later riot and assault serving maids, there seems to be some justification for Goneril's complaints, especially when Lear's bear hug turns into an exercise in power and blight.
There's certainly a clarity and emphasis to the verse speaking and those Shakespearean words come back to bite over the centuries with the twenty first century's own take on value and finance.
Regan's words, "Sir, I am made of that self mettle as my sister,/And prize me at her worth. In my true heart,/I find she names my very deed of love—/Only she comes too short".Then the later lament of the Duke of Gloucester (David Troughton), "the bond crack'd/'twixt son and father.", the forthright speech of the Duke of Kent (Antony Byrne) "I can keep honest counsel ... and the best of me is diligence." The Fool (Graham Turner) "No, faith, lords and great men will not let me; if I had a monopoly out, they would have part on't..."
At the same time, Cordelia is "unfriended" and the vagrants, the crowd of shadowy figures who lurk and criss cross throughout the play, band together to shake literally the ground beneath Lear and those who stay loyal to him. And two football players have a fidelity to the text but almost immediately place Edgar (Oliver Johnstone) as part of the younger, so far carefree, generation.
Indeed the content of this Lear seems to stretch, especially visually, across from the nineteenth century through that of twentieth century Samuel Beckett to our age. Lear himself transforms into male Ophelia in white asylum longjohns and a garland on his head - a delicate echo of the Pre-Raphelites which avoids parody. His slow, measured tones, with curses acompanied by melodramatic drum rolls, which gradually break down, have undoubted power, although their pace could do with a tad more variation.
The painterly visual and the verbally poignant come together most effectively in the quieter scene where blinded Gloucester and denuded Lear at their nadir sit together on the ground and the full import of their fates come home.
Meanwhile there is a lucid charismatic performance from smooth-cheeked Paapa Essiedu as Gloucester's illegitimate son Edmund, innocent looking and wide-eyed enough to be a plausible deceiver and inviting lover for the Lear's truly thankless daughters.
Oliver Johnstone's Edgar convincingly manages the transformation from gullible half-brother through experience to feeling statesman. Graham Turner's Fool is literally a strutting avian white cock beneath his coxcomb, albeit with the ability to play a music hall ukelele.
Overall, the storytelling is also lucid, but it sometimes feels as if the characters, although acting on each other, are themselves separated in glass caskets. The natural ebb, flow and waves of this towering play are sometimes a little frozen. However it is an amber/green light for a tragedy otherwise well-served by every level of the cast with plenty of wry humour emerging alongside the calamity and horror.
by William Shakespeare
The Generation Gap
https://www.rsc.org.uk/barbican
Your Mum's dead. Your difficult, out-of-touch Dad offers to transfer all his property into your name, relieving you and your loved ones of all financial problems - as long as you keep him in the manner to which he has become accustomed.
How many in Shakespeare's world could identify with these material concerns is a moot point, although even the poorest elderly peasant who nevertheless had a roof over his head could fear the younger generation ousting him (or her). But Gregory Doran's handsome production of King Lear launches us into a world where an autocratic leader has also, unbeknown even to himself, suppressed unruly divisions in his kingdom.
Antony Sher as Lear is borne by underlings on stage in a magnificent gold and glass casket - a Titoesque dictator in his combining of three kingdoms, grotesquely assuming he is loved, clad in furs like some pagan Santa Claus.
His demand that his three daughters, including the soon-to-be given-away in marriage and truthful Cordelia (Natalie Simpson), tell him how great he is has the complacency of a Victorian actor-manager hearing the rehearsed plaudits of his favoured actresses.
There's a minimal feel to the staging designed by Niki Turner - tightly packed red brickwork and later an illuminated blank white screen with shadow projections as backdrops, single gilded tree branches, giant bronze discs, great swathes of undulating polythene sheets on the floor and falling from above.
Lear's two eldest daughters, Goneril (Nia Gwynne) and Regan (Kelly Williams) in gorgeous gold brocade on dark luscious velvet robes of another era take part in the ceremony of Lear's vainglorious and unforced, wilful splitting of his kingdom. Indeed when Lear's company of knights later riot and assault serving maids, there seems to be some justification for Goneril's complaints, especially when Lear's bear hug turns into an exercise in power and blight.
There's certainly a clarity and emphasis to the verse speaking and those Shakespearean words come back to bite over the centuries with the twenty first century's own take on value and finance.
Regan's words, "Sir, I am made of that self mettle as my sister,/And prize me at her worth. In my true heart,/I find she names my very deed of love—/Only she comes too short".Then the later lament of the Duke of Gloucester (David Troughton), "the bond crack'd/'twixt son and father.", the forthright speech of the Duke of Kent (Antony Byrne) "I can keep honest counsel ... and the best of me is diligence." The Fool (Graham Turner) "No, faith, lords and great men will not let me; if I had a monopoly out, they would have part on't..."
At the same time, Cordelia is "unfriended" and the vagrants, the crowd of shadowy figures who lurk and criss cross throughout the play, band together to shake literally the ground beneath Lear and those who stay loyal to him. And two football players have a fidelity to the text but almost immediately place Edgar (Oliver Johnstone) as part of the younger, so far carefree, generation.
Indeed the content of this Lear seems to stretch, especially visually, across from the nineteenth century through that of twentieth century Samuel Beckett to our age. Lear himself transforms into male Ophelia in white asylum longjohns and a garland on his head - a delicate echo of the Pre-Raphelites which avoids parody. His slow, measured tones, with curses acompanied by melodramatic drum rolls, which gradually break down, have undoubted power, although their pace could do with a tad more variation.
The painterly visual and the verbally poignant come together most effectively in the quieter scene where blinded Gloucester and denuded Lear at their nadir sit together on the ground and the full import of their fates come home.
Meanwhile there is a lucid charismatic performance from smooth-cheeked Paapa Essiedu as Gloucester's illegitimate son Edmund, innocent looking and wide-eyed enough to be a plausible deceiver and inviting lover for the Lear's truly thankless daughters.
Oliver Johnstone's Edgar convincingly manages the transformation from gullible half-brother through experience to feeling statesman. Graham Turner's Fool is literally a strutting avian white cock beneath his coxcomb, albeit with the ability to play a music hall ukelele.
Overall, the storytelling is also lucid, but it sometimes feels as if the characters, although acting on each other, are themselves separated in glass caskets. The natural ebb, flow and waves of this towering play are sometimes a little frozen. However it is an amber/green light for a tragedy otherwise well-served by every level of the cast with plenty of wry humour emerging alongside the calamity and horror.
Tuesday, 8 November 2016
Review Drones, Baby, Drones
Drones, Baby, Drones
This Tuesday
by Ron Hutchinson and Christina Lamb
The Kid
by David Greig
In The Drones Club
www.arcolatheatre.com/
"If you could register the Predator for president, both parties would be trying to endorse it." So spake US senator Bill Bilbray back in 2011 to the LA Times - Predator being a make of unmanned drone missile.
Well, on the eve of the Tuesday American presidential election, TLT and her automotive weapon of constructive criticism made their way to the Arcola Theatre for a double bill under the collective title of Drones, Baby, Drones.
This Tuesday by Ron Hutchinson and Sunday Times journalist Christina Lamb tackles remote control warfare in a political thriller format running in real time. A female government adviser (Anne Adams) suppresses her maternal instincts when faced with staying by her druggie daughter's hospital bedside or getting the face-to-face go-ahead from the President for a drone strike to take out a terrorist attending a wedding in Pakistan. It's deliberately hard to differentiate whether she's insanely high on the adrenalin of the chase, even at the cost of being with her child, or if she has a unadulterated wish to defend the nation.
Meawhile, married Doug (Tom McKay), about to attend the meeting promoting the strike, extracts himself from his habitual tryst in the Watergate Complex with his student intern lover Meredith (Rose Reynolds) who challenges him over his deception of his wife and the killing of many innocents along with individual guilty terrorists - but without changing anything for her or anyone else.
Across town, two men compete and lay out opposing arguments during an early morning basketball workout for and against using unmanned missiles rather than Special Forces' "boots on the ground" to take out the terrorist.
As they change from sports wear to formal dress, the lover of ancient Greek classics with the strange rhetorical phrasing turns out to be a general (Sam Dale) while the younger man (Raj Ghatak) falls into line as the hispanic adjutant captain handing him the file for the meeting
Despite clear and effective direction from Nicolas Kent to lift a dramatically static script, this portion of the evening feels under-achieved, even if there is an interesting, couched attempt to cover what drones have meant in the past. However there's no doubting the power of the final image when those about to lead the President into a decision to strike line up outside, presumably, the Oval Office.
The more successful and interrogative play is David Grieg's The Kid (a title with both movie and sacrificial connotations), directed by Mehmet Ergen. A pair of military drone operators (Anne Adams and Tom McKay) and their respective partners (Joseph Baldramma and Rose Reynolds) have come together on comfy sofas over popcorn and wine.
Shawna and Pete are relaxing, having just completed a seemingly surgically successful mission and are eagerly grilled by Ramon, thilled to be six degrees of separation away from the "boom".
Pete and Alice have their own happy event to announce. However Alice, who at first seems the voice of common sense Alice-in-Wonderland logic and a moral compass, comes to realise the implications. Her attempt, as those around her sit passively, to reconcile her life with drone warfare spins the compass into unreason.
Using his trademark verbatim theatre, Kent introduces the real-life figure of civil rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith (Sam Dale) at the start and before the second play to bring to our attention the waiving of all regulations over the CIA, as opposed to the Pentagon, drone programme and also the criteria for British involvement, just in case we think that it's all the Americans.
The title Drones, Baby, Drone comes from a 2011 quote at a Washington DC event, with hefty corporate sponsorship, raising money to distribute to families of CIA officers killed in action. Robert Gates, the then Republican Secretary of State for Defense, ended his speech on a high, using hippy language to tell the assembled diners: "“So from now on, the watchword is: drones, baby, drones!
However, The Arcola has previously covered the same subject in Anders Lustgarten's visceral Shrapnel, over at the Gate Theatre, there has been George Brant's Grounded and going further back there's even been Joe Penhall's Landscape With Weapon at the National Theatre.
Nevertheless, the unknown quantity of an impending new White House incumbent may have created now an added urgency. There's a strong cast for Drones, Baby, Drones - over both plays Joseph Balderrama stood out for us as a convincing legal counsel and drone pilot's excitable partner.
The production uses drone-style black and white camerawork videos (lighting and video design by Richard Williamson) to ram home that in the end everyone could be vulnerable, but the first half of the evening especially needed a more original, less schematic premise.
The sometimes subtle, sometimes not so subtle insertion of literary references overall made us wonder at times whether the plays together would push also towards George Steiner's suggestion that, far from acting as a civilising influence, immersion in literature and, by extension, intellectual pursuit in any field can have a dehumanizing effect. Yet this never quite comes to fruition.
At the same time, as the use of remote control drone technology, passing over into the private sector, is ratcheted up in every aspect of our lives and with the ushering in of a new Presidential era, this may still prove a timely piece. It's an amber light from your own peacenik, if unelected, duo.
Saturday, 5 November 2016
Review Deny, Deny, Deny
A new play, which imagines a future where drugs' cheating on the athletics track mutates into genetic manipulation, eventually wins over Francis Beckett.
by Jonathan Maitland
Frankenstein Off The Starting Blocks
http://parktheatre.co.uk
The pressure for an athlete to give his or her body something to enhance its speed or strength is, quite simply, that the others are doing it; and if you don’t do it too, they will beat you.
That’s the clinching argument, put by runner Eve’s coach in this strong new play set in the near future, and Eve reluctantly succumbs to it.
She agrees to treatment which will interfere with her genes – treatment she is assured will not show up in blood tests, for the doping police are condemned always to be playing catch-up.
“What’s the Russian word for sportsmanlike?” a character asks. “I don’t know.” “That’s because there isn’t one.” But of course it’s not just the Russians. It’s everyone.
Eve’s slow and reluctant descent into cheating is well-drawn, especially in one powerful scene between her and her coach, and the tension you feel watching it is no less because you know what the outcome will be.
The effect on her – the ruin of everything good in her life except for her victories – is laid out starkly on the stage.
Eve is played magnificently by Juma Sharkah, who manages by an inflection here, a movement there, to show the two great changes that overtake her.
First, when she moves from being a clean athlete to being a cheat and then after the end of her career. It is a performance of great sensitivity and assurance.
Rona, her coach, is far harder for an actor, and for that I blame the author. He writes in the programme that she was based on three people, Peter Mandelson, Rasputin and his mother, and perhaps that is the problem.
She is required to be clever, manipulative, persuasive and charismatic, and at the same time self-destructive, hysterical and unable to prevent herself from saying the uncontrolled things which will only damage her cause.
Zoe Waites chooses to act the former persona, dealing as best she can with the lines demanding the latter. It’s a fine effort from a very good actor. Nevertheless, no actor can make the character entirely convincing until the author takes another look at the script.
There is not a weak link in the cast with Daniel Fraser as Eve’s journalist boyfriend, Shvorne Marks as a fellow athlete, and Sarah Finigan as everyone else – most notably a sports official – all putting in convincing performances.
The author rightly identifies in the programme the biggest challenge facing any director of this play: “Conveying something of the reality of a major race at a huge global sporting event. Not easy when the play is in the round and there’s a limited budget.”
The solution from director Brendan O’Hea and designer Polly Sullivan is brilliant and devastatingly simple: a stage floor, underlit and divided into squares, capable of being everything, including a track for a running race. It’s quite enough to suspend disbelief for two hours.
However, the character of Rona is not the only problem with the script. The scene in which a sports official investigates Eve is hampered by the fact that the author has not decided whether Eve is to say she did not do it, or that she did it, and so what?
I am also not quite sure I am happy about the fact that both athletes are black, and all the other characters are white (a script issue, not the result of colour-blind casting.)
But overall, this is a very fine new play with a harsh contemporary feel, directed with great flair and acted with conviction. A green light from me.
Review Cymbeline
Cymbeline
by William Shakespeare
Swan's Way
https://www.rsc.org.uk/barbican
Once upon a time TLT remembers watching a BBC children's serial The Changes where suddenly nearly everyone in the British Isles turns violently against technology and goes back to medieval village way of life. Meanwhile mainland Europe remains unchanged.
This emerged from the muddy depths of memory while watching the Royal Shakespeare Company's Cymbeline where the Britons live in a twilight post apocalyptic candle-lit world.
Meanwhile over on the continent ... Yes, the Romans host an electric international court with an multilingual casino lifestyle where the courtiers swan around in luxury designer brands, confident that Latin remains the language of diplomacy.
The programme posits the Britons paying tribute to the Roman Empire as a Brexit fantasy (it was first performed in Stratford-upon-Avon before the referendum), although the parallels feel a little strained in Melly Still's whirlwind gender-swapping production.
Innogen (Bethan Cullinane) is a tough but still emotionally vulnerable young princess, first seen with a ragged skirt of downy swan feathers, picking up on lines in the play, "Hath Britain all the sun that shines?Day? Night?/Are they not but in Britain? In th' world's volume/Our Britain seems as of it, but not in'it:/In a great pool a swan's nest"
She defies her statuesque Boadicea of a mother, Queen Cymbeline (Geraldine Bevan), to marry her childhood sweetheart Posthumus (Hiran Abeysekera) but their newly married life quickly goes awry when Posthumus is banished and then ends up in Rome.
With its unstable mix of genres and self conscious narrating-the-story style, there's no doubt Cymbeline is a challenge and there are plenty of strengths in individual performances in this production.
Cullinane makes a sturdily attractive Innogen, tenacious and resilient but still fragile enough to make us care in female garb and disguised as a boy.
The slighter figure of Abeysekera, her lover, then husband who is easily persuaded in a wager that she is an unfaithful wife is more problematic.
He's a bit of a soft puppy dog at the beginning but his final brief scene with treacherous Iachimo does make for a natural and intuitive sense of an ending to that side of the story.
Changing the sex of Cymbeline and that of her consort who becomes "The Duke" (James Clyde) brings a new dynamic to relationships. Out goes the wicked stepmother trope and The Duke (James Clyde) is a rather too subtle, modern brown-suited villain with leather patches on his elbows.
More successful is Italian nobleman Iachimo (Oliver Johnstone) who as a villainous devil steals all the best tunes bringing lusty swagger and humour before his come-uppance.
A word too for the Posthumus's gender-swapped servant Pisania (Kelly Williams), acting as her master's secret agent at the British court who also brings clarity to the plot.
The trouble is chunks of the story get lost in the low-light opening scenes - it's hard for newcomers to the story to grasp, even with flashed up projections of newspapers, that two of the Queen's children were kidnapped as babies or even that the doltish would-be pop star Cloten (Marcus Griffiths) is The Duke's son from an earlier marriage.
Even so, the soundscape from composer Dave Price does bring visceral ripples as the plot unravels. Over in Wales, a nobleman banished unjustly many years earlier from the Queen's court, Belarius (Graham Turner in a solid performance) is living in the wilds with the Queen's children, in this version a girl and a boy rather than two boys, who know nothing of their Royal birth.
Turned into a pair of Peter Pan-like Lost Children, despite a famously gory outbreak of violence, the two (Natalie Simpson and James Cooney) make an engaging bow-and-arrow pair. Altogether, this is a curate's egg of a production which feels a tad long but it's an amber light for this awfully big adventure.
by William Shakespeare
Swan's Way
https://www.rsc.org.uk/barbican
Once upon a time TLT remembers watching a BBC children's serial The Changes where suddenly nearly everyone in the British Isles turns violently against technology and goes back to medieval village way of life. Meanwhile mainland Europe remains unchanged.
This emerged from the muddy depths of memory while watching the Royal Shakespeare Company's Cymbeline where the Britons live in a twilight post apocalyptic candle-lit world.
Meanwhile over on the continent ... Yes, the Romans host an electric international court with an multilingual casino lifestyle where the courtiers swan around in luxury designer brands, confident that Latin remains the language of diplomacy.
The programme posits the Britons paying tribute to the Roman Empire as a Brexit fantasy (it was first performed in Stratford-upon-Avon before the referendum), although the parallels feel a little strained in Melly Still's whirlwind gender-swapping production.
Innogen (Bethan Cullinane) is a tough but still emotionally vulnerable young princess, first seen with a ragged skirt of downy swan feathers, picking up on lines in the play, "Hath Britain all the sun that shines?Day? Night?/Are they not but in Britain? In th' world's volume/Our Britain seems as of it, but not in'it:/In a great pool a swan's nest"
She defies her statuesque Boadicea of a mother, Queen Cymbeline (Geraldine Bevan), to marry her childhood sweetheart Posthumus (Hiran Abeysekera) but their newly married life quickly goes awry when Posthumus is banished and then ends up in Rome.
With its unstable mix of genres and self conscious narrating-the-story style, there's no doubt Cymbeline is a challenge and there are plenty of strengths in individual performances in this production.
Cullinane makes a sturdily attractive Innogen, tenacious and resilient but still fragile enough to make us care in female garb and disguised as a boy.
The slighter figure of Abeysekera, her lover, then husband who is easily persuaded in a wager that she is an unfaithful wife is more problematic.
He's a bit of a soft puppy dog at the beginning but his final brief scene with treacherous Iachimo does make for a natural and intuitive sense of an ending to that side of the story.
Changing the sex of Cymbeline and that of her consort who becomes "The Duke" (James Clyde) brings a new dynamic to relationships. Out goes the wicked stepmother trope and The Duke (James Clyde) is a rather too subtle, modern brown-suited villain with leather patches on his elbows.
More successful is Italian nobleman Iachimo (Oliver Johnstone) who as a villainous devil steals all the best tunes bringing lusty swagger and humour before his come-uppance.
A word too for the Posthumus's gender-swapped servant Pisania (Kelly Williams), acting as her master's secret agent at the British court who also brings clarity to the plot.
The trouble is chunks of the story get lost in the low-light opening scenes - it's hard for newcomers to the story to grasp, even with flashed up projections of newspapers, that two of the Queen's children were kidnapped as babies or even that the doltish would-be pop star Cloten (Marcus Griffiths) is The Duke's son from an earlier marriage.
Even so, the soundscape from composer Dave Price does bring visceral ripples as the plot unravels. Over in Wales, a nobleman banished unjustly many years earlier from the Queen's court, Belarius (Graham Turner in a solid performance) is living in the wilds with the Queen's children, in this version a girl and a boy rather than two boys, who know nothing of their Royal birth.
Turned into a pair of Peter Pan-like Lost Children, despite a famously gory outbreak of violence, the two (Natalie Simpson and James Cooney) make an engaging bow-and-arrow pair. Altogether, this is a curate's egg of a production which feels a tad long but it's an amber light for this awfully big adventure.
Wednesday, 2 November 2016
Review The Last Five Years
The Last Five Years
by Jason Robert Brown
A Final Chapter
https://www.stjamestheatre.co.uk
The Last Five Years is a gauzy ribboned confection with a bitter pill underneath the wrapping. This two-hander charting the coupledom of novelist Jamie (Jonathan Bailey) and actress Cathy (Samantha Barks), an almost totally sung-through American musical, first performed in 2001, after an intial stumble has become a worldwide success.
It's a piece for a post-war generation - that is post Vietnam War and the many conflicts since then, all boiled down to the short-lived marriage of writer and aspiring actress in New York whose lives and careers are structurally opposed within the piece.
In some ways, this is a modern version of Romeo and Juliet, with the death of love rather than the lovers and an unintended career war between an agented published writer and a performer still on the audition roundabout. A portion of each of the couple's souls are sliced, diced and wither by the undoubted success of Jewish author Jamie and the relative career failure of Irish Catholic Cathy.
Directed by the composer Jason Robert-Brown, the scenery is minimal. With musicians led by musical director Torquil Munroe on scaffolding above, loft apartment brickwork slide open to bring forward a desk, a door, at one instance a boat and nicely understated use of video footage (Jeff Sugg).
Samantha Barks brings heartrending and humorous soaring vocals to the role of Cathy. She's well-matched by Jonathan Bailey's Jamie whose initial infectious charm and over-confidence hardens into darker ambition and infidelity.
Like Harold Pinter's Betrayal and Stephen Sondheim and George Furth's Merrily We Roll Along (the song Moving Too Fast perhaps has an oblique reference to the latter), we're given a rewind, as well as a play forward, of the romance and rupture.
Cathy is the musical's catalyst. The first song is her realisation Jamie her husband has left her, Still Hurting, "Jamie decides it’s his right to decide/Jamie’s got secrets he doesn’t confide/ And I’m still hurting.” Her story runs backwards to the dawn of love when life seemed far more straightforward.
From the first, despite the beauty of the songs in a range of styles, there's sour with the sweet. Principally it's Jamie, whose story runs in chronological order, who is allowed to inscribe his version to the outside world. Even if it is Cathy who catches the complexity of tone at the beginning, realising how lies and authorship interact and now characterise her life.
For throughout the relationship, it is male writer Jamie telling female actress Cathy who she is. From the simple crassness where, nevertheless, his energy provides wit, of Shiksa Goddess "I'd say, 'Hey! Hey! Shiksa goddess!/I've been waiting for someone like.../You, breaking the circle/You, taking the light/You, you are the story/I should write/I have to write!'.
Jamie even assumes the garb of secular rabbidom (there are sly glimpses of Fiddler On The Roof in the musical arrangements and staging) combined with a fairy storyteller in Tbe Schmeul Song.
There he spins a Danny Kaye/Sylvia Fine-type yarn (although the song sweetly stands on its two feet without knowing that) by the light of a fully decked-out Christmas tree, apparently instructing Cathy what she should do to succeed.
The couple only come together musically on stage in a marriage duet "The Next 10 minutes" on a Central Park boating lake where the moment after there's a touch of The Lady Of Shalott drifting off to Camelot as Cathy is sent off in the boat alone.
At the same time Jamie's "If I Didn't Believe" just misses crossing with Cathy's disappointment with her audition in "Climbing Uphill" and marks the point when his glib career-politicking and domestic life merge, as he distances himself from her and what he sees as failure.
The tale of the one left behind is not of course original: A Star Is Born being a prime example. But this piece juxtaposes and sets at odds two separate but not unrelated professions, author and performer.
Maybe the individual stories are not always a tight metaphorical fit but there is more than enough wit and romance in the one-act 90-minute score and book for performers to scoop up and make them their own without the audience having to worry about that. It's a green light for a tender, bittersweet intimate tale of love and betrayal with a steely core at its centre.
Review Fool For Love
Fool For Love
by Sam Shepherd
Looking For Mr Right
http://found111.co.uk/
It's a final trip up the stairs to see a play at found 111i n the former Central St Martin's School School of Art. The theatre company is now bidding farewell to its grunge venue and seeking another site-specific space after its successful sojourn on Charing Cross Road.
In the meantime, it's back to familiar Sam Shepard territory, a motel room in California's Mojave Desert where May (Lydia Wilson) and Eddie (Adam Rothenberg) brawl and tear themselves apart.
Eddie has tracked down May, driving over a thousand miles, he says, to pluck her up and take her to a piece of land he has bought in Wyoming where he plans to raise horses, chickens and make a place for May.
But he finds May, who maintains she has now reinvented herself as a good citizen, gained a job and a beau, more than reluctant to drop everything and drive back with him in his horse truck.
All the while, a lanky, grizzled Marlboro Man spectre (Joe McGann) watches over the pair while into the secrets, lies and battles comes the unsuspecting gentle Martin (Luke Neal) who is wooing May.
A two-level thrust stage designed by Ben Stones works on two levels, on low stilts at the back is the run-down motel room with its door smeared with grime.
Then in front a gravelly front yard reaches out to the audience in this initimate venue. Angular neon lights and fairy lights also flash and flicker within the physical and psychic space.
It's a curious self-conscious piece which mixes the hardscrabble life of near-trailer trash folks with the language of the movie business. As May, Wilson brings a taut, stubborn fragility, struggling to free herself from the emotional lassoo pulling her towards tequila-drinking Eddie, away from Martin.
These are characters, apart from Martin, who are all physically and mentally in their own self-contained space yet affecting each other's lives. This double perspective doesn't always catch fire in Simon Evans' production, even if the individual performances remain strong with a strain of dark humour.
A quick passing one-act drama, the laconic play shoots its arrow and lands in just over an hour. The clanging, slamming door soundscape (sound design by Edward Lewis) takes us inside the characters as much as their words and actions.
A final stunning image with lighting by Elliot Griggs merges the movies and the itinerant world of these abandoned souls. With its lingering thin, whip sharp quality, this Fool For Love ultimately finds an elemental power. It's an amber/green light from your own bareback theatre reviewing TLT and her trusty steed.
Monday, 31 October 2016
Review Harrogate
Harrogate
by Al Smith
Father Takes Stock
https://www.hightide.org.uk/productions/harrogate#dates-and-locations
Harrogate the play started its life as part of the High Tide Festival and, after a short run at the Royal Court Theatre, is now embarking on a national tour between 1 and 16 November: the Farnham Maltings in Surrey, the artsdepot in North Finchley, Harlow Playhouse, The North Wall, Oxford, Canterbury's Marlowe Studio, The Garage in Norwich, The Cornerstone in Didcot, The Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds and the Cambridge Junction
An 80-minute two hander, it stars Nigel Lindsay, last seen by us in Speed-The-Plow, as the apparent father of a 15 year schoolgirl played by Sarah Ridgeway who also doubles as wife and mother. It's received mostly rave reviews, although it strikes us as a marmite type of play.
It's set in what seems to be the family flat, designed by Tom Piper on a clinical white traverse stage (we caught it on the last day of its run at the Royal Court) with a kitchen island at one end, two equally gleaming white chairs, and a wall on which, eventually, a photo of the parents hangs on the other.
While mining with precision the relationship between a Dad and his teenage daughter, the play nevertheless leaves a question mark continually hanging over their identities,what is true and what is not. The script ambiguously, especially in view of Sarah Ridgeway's transformation into the medic wife in the final scene, only names the characters as "Him" and "Her".
Past and present also coalesce within a sort of audit, with secrets and reveals, of the parents' marriage and their daughter's life as words and incidents repeat themselves in different patterns.
It has something in common with Blue Heart, which we enjoyed recently, with its repetitions and the acting is impeccable. In fact, it is altogether cool, glossy, clinical and slick, even at the moments when it would appear to be at its most heartfelt - and most cruel.
There's certainly tricksy quality, but maybe the clues are there. In the father's profession of reinsurance (there's quite a bit of financial vocabulary and acronyms), the language of computer games, in the unseen mother of the daughter's best friend who has forged her career in performance psychology and the rhythm of a binary computer program at work.
This felt to us a somewhat one-dimensional play and as if it could be part of larger piece; Unlike Blue Heart the repetitions do not feel true alternatives but part of a closed circuit learning process where the memory of past conversations is solely there so that the incidents and vocabulary can be rearranged.
The father's relationship with his daughter may be unhealthy or maybe it is just he cannot let go, trying to train her to be a smart machine with a degree of independence, which includes a mysterious stay at Harrogate, but always thinking she will come back to him.
There's an undercurrent of corruption in the dialogue, although it's kept deliberately ambiguous as to whether it is commercial or sexual or both TLT and her mechanical sidekick found it a little precious, as if we were going to be tested afterward on whether we'd noticed the links between the scenes - and so then writing a review of this could be a self-fulfilling prophecy!
Still the staccato rhythms are sharply delineated by director Richard Twyman and fluently performed even if its narrating style and stylized format left us rather uninvolved. It's an amber light for a clean-cut but ultimately just a little bit too regimented a piece for us.
by Al Smith
Father Takes Stock
https://www.hightide.org.uk/productions/harrogate#dates-and-locations
Harrogate the play started its life as part of the High Tide Festival and, after a short run at the Royal Court Theatre, is now embarking on a national tour between 1 and 16 November: the Farnham Maltings in Surrey, the artsdepot in North Finchley, Harlow Playhouse, The North Wall, Oxford, Canterbury's Marlowe Studio, The Garage in Norwich, The Cornerstone in Didcot, The Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds and the Cambridge Junction
An 80-minute two hander, it stars Nigel Lindsay, last seen by us in Speed-The-Plow, as the apparent father of a 15 year schoolgirl played by Sarah Ridgeway who also doubles as wife and mother. It's received mostly rave reviews, although it strikes us as a marmite type of play.
It's set in what seems to be the family flat, designed by Tom Piper on a clinical white traverse stage (we caught it on the last day of its run at the Royal Court) with a kitchen island at one end, two equally gleaming white chairs, and a wall on which, eventually, a photo of the parents hangs on the other.
While mining with precision the relationship between a Dad and his teenage daughter, the play nevertheless leaves a question mark continually hanging over their identities,what is true and what is not. The script ambiguously, especially in view of Sarah Ridgeway's transformation into the medic wife in the final scene, only names the characters as "Him" and "Her".
Past and present also coalesce within a sort of audit, with secrets and reveals, of the parents' marriage and their daughter's life as words and incidents repeat themselves in different patterns.
It has something in common with Blue Heart, which we enjoyed recently, with its repetitions and the acting is impeccable. In fact, it is altogether cool, glossy, clinical and slick, even at the moments when it would appear to be at its most heartfelt - and most cruel.
There's certainly tricksy quality, but maybe the clues are there. In the father's profession of reinsurance (there's quite a bit of financial vocabulary and acronyms), the language of computer games, in the unseen mother of the daughter's best friend who has forged her career in performance psychology and the rhythm of a binary computer program at work.
This felt to us a somewhat one-dimensional play and as if it could be part of larger piece; Unlike Blue Heart the repetitions do not feel true alternatives but part of a closed circuit learning process where the memory of past conversations is solely there so that the incidents and vocabulary can be rearranged.
The father's relationship with his daughter may be unhealthy or maybe it is just he cannot let go, trying to train her to be a smart machine with a degree of independence, which includes a mysterious stay at Harrogate, but always thinking she will come back to him.
There's an undercurrent of corruption in the dialogue, although it's kept deliberately ambiguous as to whether it is commercial or sexual or both TLT and her mechanical sidekick found it a little precious, as if we were going to be tested afterward on whether we'd noticed the links between the scenes - and so then writing a review of this could be a self-fulfilling prophecy!
Still the staccato rhythms are sharply delineated by director Richard Twyman and fluently performed even if its narrating style and stylized format left us rather uninvolved. It's an amber light for a clean-cut but ultimately just a little bit too regimented a piece for us.
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