Review The Lottery Of Love

The Lottery Of Love
by Pierre Marivaux
Translated by John Fowles

Love In The Dock
https://www.orangetreetheatre.co.uk/

Marivaux is a lesser-known literary figure this side of the Channel. Even if his sentimental novel La Vie De Marianne had an influence on the development of the novel in England and he wrote more than 30 plays, many of which broke the mould in 18th century France.

The Orange Tree is now presenting the world premiere of John Fowles's 1984 translation of the French playwright's best known play, written in 1730,  Le Jeu de l'Amour et du Hasard, renamed in Fowles's version The Lottery Of Love.

Fowles transferred the story of a somewhat reluctant would-be man and wife foiled by their own ruses to Jane Austen's England where indeed a lottery for money, as well as literary trials' and tribulations" for prospective marriage partners, also flourished.  

For Marivaux, life and money had been somewhat of a lottery, his wife's dowry lost in a disastrous investment in the New World, then her early death after childbirth.

The Lottery Of Love deals with life's viccissitudes, cruelty and economics under a sophisticated veneer of  social comedy centring on Sylvia  (Dorothea Myer-Bennett), an independent-minded young woman who fears the marital alliance her father has arranged.

On hearing her prospective husband Richard is coming to visit her for the first time, and with the agreement of her father, she and her maid servant Louisa (Claire Lams) swap roles  to view and put on probation the future spouse's qualities (Ashley Zhangazha).

However it turns out, she herself will be a victim of her suitor's similar ruse. While both of them become the playthings, albeit in benevolent interests, of the inside epistolary dealings of her father (Pip Donaghy) and naval officer brother Martin (Tam Williams), with out-of-sight Richard's father. 

Le Jeu de L'Amour et du Hasard was revolutionary in not setting up two united lovers against the world overcoming obstacles.

It starts from a woman alone reversing social norms, saying no to any marriage unless she feels secure with a husband who will cherish her. In fact, sbe almost adopts the forensic probing of a prosecution lawyer in her reasoning.

In director Paul Miller's delicate confection, the cast conduct an intricate verbal minuet where multiple disguises and a farcical comedy of manners collide. Designer Simon Daw keeps it simple with single upside down roses and gently flashing tea lights suspended from the ceiling above the in-the-round stage.

There's symmetry but also violent disruption in The Lottery Of Love and we couldn't help remembering that by the end of the same century it was written, France itself was riven by a violent revolution. There's plenty to cherish in this handsome version of Marivaux's play but much of the underlying violence and cruelty feels sucked out of it.

Maybe it's because the Orange Tree Theatre space itself doesn't lend itself to French farce's slamming doors as the two lovers disguised as their own servants (there, we've given it away!) enter and exit.

Even so Myer-Bennett does have a touching vulnerability along with a blue-stocking control of her vocabulary. Zhangazha also shines as a deliberately slightly stolid but good-hearted suitor and master who finds his disguise more punishing and painful than he first expected. 

Fowles goes through the literary houses in his translation flirting with Shakespearean comedies, Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The Rivals and even inserting a touch of Dickens in his characterisation of valet John Brass (Keir Charles).

It's a delightful, very pretty production but we felt the darkness lurking beneath was a little too lightly mined. Mind you, this version does have the insurance of Sylvia's brother Martin's brooding, caddish presence, if not absolute actions, of a villain in the shape of slightly dishevelled Tam Williams.

At the same time, its flurry of love, chance, misunderstandings and trickery with a happy ending for master, mistress and servants does work its magic and we give it a mixed posy of amber/green. 
 

Review Posh

While Posh strikes Peter Barker as less than groundbreaking in its themes, he nevertheless enjoys the nuances in a vigorous gender swapping production.

Posh 
by Laura Wade

Pride And Prejudice
https://www.pleasance.co.uk/

The plot is simple; Riot Club members are feasting at a country pub near Oxford, where the young men intend to behave very badly,  picking up where they had left off two terms previously, before a national media exposé

Laura Wade's play was first performed by an all-male cast in 2010, focussing on a self-styled elite Oxbridge dining society.  The unique selling point in the current revival is its all female crew playing a very male cast.

The Riot Club is inspired by the sophomore antics of the Bullingdon Club, whose former members include David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson. Much of the fascination at its première was trying to discern  how much was satirical - and how much documentary.

During the play, the Club prepares to discipline a member who, by breaking its code of silence towards outsiders, has brought unwanted attention to its antics. Another student is newly initiated into the group. To cap it all, there is also a power struggle between the club president and the alpha chimp member of the group.

In some ways, Posh has been overtaken by events. At its première, the dining club boys running our national affairs was just a prospect. Now we can now look back at the reality of their time in government.

While Wade's work is clearly an exaggeration of the club's excesses, the fake news' era has given us the apocryphal story of Cameron and the dead pig's head in which many wanted to believe.

Anyway, throw in a sex worker, a pub landlord trying to earn a living and his attractive waitress daughter with a particular reason why the Riot Club boys can't pull academic rank and you have a lively two and half hour comedy drama.

Director Cressida Carré extracts the maximum shock value and wit from Wade's script. Designer Sara Perks's set cleverly uses a revolve as the diners banter round a circular table.

On reflection, the behaviour in Posh isn't just confined to toffs. I'm not upper class but I did play team sports for many years. I recognise an exaggerated version of our own antics.

But Wade's play  makes the claim, even if unoriginal, that this behaviour is bonding and binding, creating loyalties and obligations lasting a lifetime. When it comes to my sporting teammates and I, it's not significant. But it's a different matter when such  people come to run the country.

While Posh proves the English can laugh (with horror) at themselves and their government, it still plays into a snobbish obsession with aristocracy. Posh feels not so much hard-hitting as nostalgic, harking back to the stage, literary and movie tradition of  The Importance of Being Earnest, Brideshead Revisited, Another Country and If.

So, the play only partially hits the target; it is handicapped by its very English preoccupation with class and lacks an analysis of  money and power in our times which affects all of us far more.

Nevertheless, the all-female ensemble cast riot with wit, boldness and verve. Gabby Wong excels as Riot Club president James Leighton-Masters, whose well-bred manners and fundamental decency are at odds with the ruthlessness needed to preserve his presidency. Serena Jennings gives a visceral sense of the vicious and violent as Alistair Ryle. As appealing novice member Ed Montgormery, Verity Kirk brings humour.

All-female casts should really not be an exception now. Long may this kind of gender swapping continue to shed fresh light on past texts! I have some issues with the play but this production is, above all, great entertainment catching the zeitgeist of the early 21st century and deserves a green light.

Review Honk!

Honk!
Music by George Stiles
Lyrics and Book by Anthony Drewe

 A Quacking Good Show!
 http://www.uniontheatre.biz/

The little headlights of TLT's motorised companion lit up on hearing we were going to see Honk!.

If it proved to be a somewhat different show than our cute little jalopy with its own rootin' tootin' horn expected - it reminded TLT of a friend's more salacious tale of enticing her husband to see "Daisy Pulls It Off" ;) - we pair of theatre animals still settled down to a highly enjoyable farmyard evening at the Union Theatre.

Celebrating the 20th anniversary of Stiles and Drewe's likeable little show, the headlights only grew dim to stifle a little joyous tear as the ugly duckling, instead of becoming a feline villain's main meal and dessert, got his Happy Ending just deserts.

Going back to the original Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale for this adaptation with a few variations, the show's book has echoes of Disney's Pinocchio in Honk's wide-eyed naivety along with the ethos of The Muppet Show's Bein' Green.

It even at one point has a throwaway references to Frank Loesser's musical about difference, The Most Happy Fella and a Salvation Army vibe reminiscent of  Guys and Dolls. with shades of the underwater scene of Bedknobs and Broomsticks.

The songs and the inventive design (set: Emily Bestow, costumes Rosemary Elliott-Dancs and puppets by Phoebe Hill) are the most successful elements of this production directed by Andy Room, along with a committed cast.

The book's use of corny gags is workmanlike rather than inspired, although there are some nice twists and turns to the story itself and it is a delightful children's and family show.

Hatching fully formed Ugly (Liam Vincent-St Bride) is a Mummy's boy - er - duckling wrapped in an outsize grey wool jumper and woolly hat topping the spectacles peeping out beneath.

There's strong work from Ellie Nunn as doughty Mommy duck Ida with a Blitz spirit and a voice with emotional punch in Every Tear A Mother Cries. Sam Sugerman makes for a suitably sleazy ginger tom baddie looking for lunch (and breakfast, tea and supper).

Different, Honk's plea for acceptance, has become almost a standard with its touching message

"No wonder they make fun of me/Life's harder when you're odd./But, different isn't scary/Different is no threat,/And though I'm still their brother,/ They forget/I didn't choose to look this way/I didn't want to be unique/I don't like these grubby feathers/And I hate my stubby beak ..."

Bullfrog (Robert Pearce) selling a version of a militant amphibian newspaper, Ribbit, brings plenty of fun and foot tappping together with a cute baby frog backing choir in Warts And All.

Meanwhile stiff upper lip Greylag (Leon Scott) and air crew chorus have a ball with the stirring Wild Goose Chase affectionately guying a certain type of  British war film.

With resourceful use of actor/musicians alongside the small band led by musical director Oli Rew and make-do-and-mend values in the ingenious costumes and props, this is a canny way to introduce kids to the magic of theatre and music.

How could we resist this sympathetic parody of wartime spirit with, after a series of adventures, the wall dividing Honk from his siblings torn down and the subsequent  re-union of Honk with his Mum and his real roots?

It's an amber/green light for a show which manages to stand on its own two webbed feet with its heartwarming take on The Ugly Duckling.

Review Incident At Vichy

Incident At Vichy
by Arthur Miller

No Exit
http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/

"Hope", wrote American poet Emily Dickinson, "is the thing with feathers-/That perches in the soul-/And sings the tune without the words -/And never stops - at all - ...".

Is this what was in playwright Arthur Miller's mind when the mute Old Jew (Jeremy Gagan), called to the front of the queue and facing extinction in 1942,  stands up and feathers scatter around the room from the homely pillow cover he has been clutching?

For it struck us that Miller's 1964 play Incident At Vichy is about human hope in the face of almost certain disaster. Set in "unoccupied" France, French police have rounded up eight men and a boy and are handing them to the Nazi regime.

Almost all of them turn out to be Jews on false papers. They clutch at whatever slim chances present themselves. They also deceive and lie to themselves and others all for a sliver of hope that they will survive.

The artist Lebeau (Lawrence Boothman), for example, tries to persuade himself and others that he has some agency, that it was not him, but a parent clinging to material goods who stopped him from escaping in 1939 on a US visa.

But even this seemingly simple situation has complex layers. He admits to feeling guilt, but it may be misplaced.

What is unsaid is that the elderly had far less chance of obtaining a visa and being allowed into other countries than the younger generation. Their children often had to make the anguished decision whether to stay behind with them or leave the country. He may be lying to preserve his own sanity in the face of certain death.

For it seems to us Incident At Vichy is very much a psychological play, the very human trait of human beings believing their beliefs and actions mean something and can directly lead to survival - and that their survival is not a random blip but says something about them. Transforming them from human beings buffetted by fortune that they cannot control into symbols.

Miller himself described the origins of the story behind Incident At Vichy in the vaguest of terms but named the person who relayed it to him. It's a story about "a friend of a friend" who is the recipient of an extraordinary selfless act by a fellow human being.

An incident  every Jew, every human being, must hope would happen to them if he or she was in such a position. A story everyone would want to hear even if it were a one-off or an urban legend (Losey's later movie Monsieur Klein is another kind of riff on the theme).

Although it was first staged at the Lincoln Center, this play feels very much as if it were written for  radio or a TV play (Twelve Angry Men may be a different subject with a different outcome but it's also a play similarly centring on persuasion and realisation).

Phil Willmott directs a production of great clarity with outstanding performances from Edward Killingback as dilettante gentile Austrian nobleman Von Berg and PK Taylor as an actor who tries to convince himself that confidence in his own performance both as actor and human being will win through.

We did wonder whether a production with an even more diverse cast would open up the universal themes and knotty problems contained in this play more.

The script at times feels slightly clunky as the issues are laid out - this is very much an issue-led play. Nevertheless the issues lead to no simple conclusions where devastating realities set against the nature of human relationships and politics form a web catching every class and type.

While Leduc, the psychiatrist (Gethin Alderman) seems the clearest sighted, he also has his own blind spots. At one point he blames his wife for his situation and at another time views others, not himself, as being as conditioned as Pavlov's dog.

Incident At Vichy is a play set in the year the USA entered the Second World War but also examines issues of power and responsibility which remain live in our times. Both Von Berg's belief in old pre-war feudal structures where he could proffer personal protection and Leduc's belief in education and self-awareness prove illusory. 

It's an amber/green light for a timely production with a discussion of issues always with us including industrial success achieved by using free labour and slavery rather than on its own business merits.

Review Gabriel

A Second World War drama which tackles the disturbing subject of the Channel Isles under Nazi occupation brings home to Francis Beckett the realities of resistance and collaboration. 

Gabriel
by Moira Buffini

Barbed Wire, Bravery And Betrayal
http://www.theatre6.co.uk/blank

Hitler did manage to occupy one part of the UK. Churchill decided that the Channel Islands were not of sufficient strategic importance to merit vast resources for its defence, and for most of the war, Channel Islanders were faced with the dilemmas and compromises which tormented the French.

White flags had to be displayed outside every home, and the only authority was whatever the Germans provided or permitted.  The island beaches became minefields surrounded by barbed wire.

Moira Buffini’s 1997 play Gabriel is about how one family survived and the dreadful decisions demanded of the matriarch Jeanne Becquet.

Turned out of her big family home which has been requisitioned by the Germans, she lives with her teenage daughter, her daughter-in-law and a housekeeper on a farm. They sell the farm's produce to the occupying troops, and she adds to their comfort by exercising her sophisticated charm on German officers.

Near the start of the play, Buffini produces one of the cleverest devices I have seen for giving the audience the background information it needs without lots of tedious and unconvincing exposition.

She has Mrs Becquet give all the exposition that is required in front of a German officer who she thinks speaks no English, laughing privately at how shocked he would be if he understood her

The most important thing we learn in this scene is that her daughter-in-law, who lives in the farmhouse with her, is a Jew.  Most of the Jews in Guernsey were evacuated before the invasion. However several remained, some of whom died in death camps.

The German officer, Von Pfunz, turns out to speak fluent English and to understand every word Mrs Becquet says.  Indeed, he is not a textbook bullying, brutal Nazi, but something much more interesting, and ultimately much more frightening: a sensitive, clever, erudite, brutal Nazi.

The final element in the play is a young man found washed up on the beach, unconscious and near to death. He cannot remember his name or anything about himself, and the family christen him Gabriel. 

Gabriel – the archangel Gabriel appears in both the Old and New Testaments, and is a figure in both the Jewish and Christian religions – leads the play into a sort of dark mysticism – which I personally found much less gripping than the very real events happening on the island of Guernsey in 1943.

This is a fine, thoughtful play which ducks no awkward questions, and provides no easy answers.

Yes, Mrs Becquet is both a collaborator and languidly, lazily anti-Semitic, but we understand and sympathise with her and her dilemmas and care about what happens to her.  Yes, Von Pfunz is a Nazi who thinks the presence of a Jew in the household is “a cancer”, but this is no pantomime villain; Von Pfunz is a complex and interesting character.

A pretty well perfect cast is led by two wonderful, heart-breaking performances, from Belinda Lang as a torn and compromised Mrs Becquet and Paul McGann, quietly thunderous as Von Pfunz.

Kate McGregor’s direction is sensitive and sure-footed, and the set she and designer Carla Goodman have come up with emphasises the chaos and uncertainty, how everything can fall apart in an instant.

I saw this at the Richmond Theatre before it went on its current tour to Liverpool, Eastbourne, Mold in Wales, Windsor, Guildford,  but it returns to London's Greenwich Theatre in May.  A green light from me: catch it if you can.

Review The Skriker

The Skriker
by Caryl Churchill

The Goblin Free Market
 http://www.styx.space/tickets/the-skriker-at-styx

Ropes of algae hang from the ceiling - like tresses of hair from Grimm fairytale princess Rapunzel but also like  an entrance into the forehead of the young woman, Josie (Briony O'Callaghan), sitting at the bottom of the uneven plaits. 

The warehouse space at The Styx becomes a ragged stage with several banks of chairs for the audience at angles to the shadowy, sunless playing space.

First produced in 1994, Caryl Churchill's modern fairy tale intertwines cascading words, a discernable everyday world and a dark, choreographed ancient underworld. At the same tim traces of folk tales and other literature including Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market inhabit the tale.

Josie, it seems, has been incarcerated in a mental home for infanticide, the killing of her new born baby.

It's worth noting that infanticide is a legal definition formulated in Victorian times directed at women. It has the unusual distinction of being both a crime and a defence, a woman who has committed an evil act, but also a mother possessed by lunacy.

Churchill, we think, pursues this duality, a recognisable world alongside destructive, poisonous spirits. 

Between Josie, her pregnant friend Lily (Jenny Swingler) emerges The Shriker (Phoebe Naughton), a mythical shape-shifting goblinesque wild and amoral spirit and also a portent of death. She's a patient with Josie, a fretful child, a piece of furniture, a potential boyfriend for Lily,

The Shriker is a creature also both caught between and stalking the two women as Josie seeks in her desperation to shift The Shriker away from her at any cost.   

The play works like a dramatic verbal and choreographed symphony (rather like a feminine theatrical equivalent of Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, "haveth childers everywhere") ebbing and flowing,

It swirls together the elements of a world askew, psychologically, politically, economically and environmentally, a Midsummer Night's Dream without a happy ending 

Despite some inventive design and a hard working cast of almost mute sprites and spirits, it did strike us that perhaps this production was over concentrating on the look, to the detriment of the text.  

This production certainly benefits from Phoebe Naughton's dynamically malign Shriker as she slips from shape to shape. Callaghan as Josie also gives a thoughtful, intelligent performance with moments of touching vulnerability.

Meanwhile Swingler as Lily brings clarity with a down-to-earth maternal instinct amid an upside down world, tending her baby in an ominously black cradle swinging from a tree branch. 

But this also feels like a work-in-progress. There's the potential of a powerful dramatic nightmare picture book quality in the design of David Curtis-Ring. However we were often left literally in the dark. 

Indeed, we felt that less might have been more in this kind of space, allowing the audience its own mental space to think about and follow the text and choreographed parade of grotesques. It's a lower range amber light for an overemphatic production which  nevertheless has some striking moments.

Review The Wipers Times

The little-known tale of a humorous battlefield newssheet written by soldiers for soldiers hooks in Francis Beckett, but then undermines its new angle on life in the trenches with material we've seen before.  

The Wipers Times
by Ian Hislop and Nick Newman

Hot Metal And Cold Steel
https://artstheatrewestend.co.uk/

I went to see Ian Hislop and Nick Newman’s The Wipers Times with high expectations and a lot of goodwill. The remarkable story of a newspaper produced in the trenches amid the horror of the First World War, one which really spoke to the men who fought the war and which survived against the odds, would be pretty well forgotten except by a few historians, if Hislop and Newman hadn’t revived it and persuaded us all to listen to it.

It’s a great story, wonderful theatrical material, and I was promised a barrel of laughs; which seemed a reasonable expectation, because Hislop is a very witty man and Newman is a comedy scriptwriter with a fine record.

And it’s a funny enough show too, with some decent jokes and a couple of nice songs, and it chunters along happily enough so you walk out of the theatre cheerful, but at the same time I can’t help feeling it was a wasted opportunity.

Hislop and Newman had a story no one has done properly, and I am not sure why they chose to spend so much of the evening re-treading old ground, with the result that The Wipers Times derives more material than is quite decent from earlier famous shows – or at least it appears to, which is just as bad.

Both acts include a scene when the men go over the top for the Big Push which has echoes of the famous Blackadder scene of nearly 30 years ago. Of course, it’s hard to write that moment without being accused of deriving it from Blackadder, but in that case why write it at all?  It wasn’t needed for the story the show was telling.

The idea of officers lounging around in safety at base while the men at the front took all the risks was done better in Blackadder and before that Oh What a Lovely War in 1963.  And no one has done it as well as Siegfried Sassoon, who was there:

If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath,
I’d live with scarlet Majors at the base,
And speed glum heroes up the line to death.

The best bits are when the authors are telling their own story:  how the military unit find an abandoned printing machine, the sergeant turns out to have been a printer in Civvy Street and knows how to work it, and the two officers then decide to start an irreverent newspaper for the soldiers.

There’s a clever framing device which tells us what the two officers did afterwards.  Neither of them went into journalism, though one of them apparently tried to get a job in Fleet Street and was turned down because of inexperience – the Wipers Times didn’t count.

As the two officers, James Dutton and George Kemp offer fine portrayals of gilded public school youth. But they are outshone by the splendid Dan Tetsell, who combines so well the roles of the sergeant, the general who allowed the paper to continue, and the deputy editor who refused one of the officers a job after the war, that I did not realise they were all played by one actor.

I had the odd quarrel with the generally sure-footed direction from Caroline Leslie.  The trenches seem a lot more comfortable than I think they were, and the two officers never seemed short of whisky, poured from nice decanters.

It was a pleasant evening, but I wanted, and expected, a bit more than just a pleasant evening, so it’s only an amber light.

Review The Life

The Life 
Music by Cy Coleman
Lyrics by Ira Gasman
Book by David Newman, Ira Gasman and Cy Coleman
Book Revisions by Michael Blakemore

The Ho's Opera
http://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/

When TLT first arrived in New York, the clean-up of Times Square was well underway. As a yellow cab drew up, out stepped a guy, grabbed her suitcase - ready to put it in the cab. And then stayed expecting a tip.

TLT being English, buttoned up and then unused to habitually tipping, he didn't get one. A short, heated exchange ended with TLT's polite, "Thank you but I didn't ask. It was your choice to pick it up!!".

The somewhat bemused cab driver, a witness to TLT emerging unstabbed, unshot, with her traveller's money belt intact, shook his head in disbelief and then drove her to the Dickensian-monikered (and, naturally, budget) Pickwick Arms Hotel. He didn't even ask for a tip as she waited for him to count out the change for her note.

What prompts this memory of a pompously naive English girl on her first day in The Big Apple? Mary (Joanna Woodward) from Duluth, Minnesota in the Cy Coleman 1997 musical The Life, Samsonite in hand, fresh off the Greyhound bus sucked into Times Square sleaze when a guy grabs her suitcase.

Oh it could have been so very different for TLT.  Whatever The Life is, it ain't Heidi unless the 42nd Street panhandlers have a pension fund stashed away in a Swiss bank account.

The pocket-sized Southwark Playhouse stage plays host to a parade of pimps, hookers, gamblers, murderers, protection racketeers, mobsters and blue movie exhibitors on the piece of prime real estate off 42nd Street in nineteen seventy something.

In many ways this is a musical melodrama filled with stereotypes (but what musical isn't?) with a few twists lifted by thrilling performances from a cast who look like extras ready to be booked, charged or caged up  in the backgroud of many a 70s' cop show. And yet, and yet ...

It works. The book - decent hearted streetwalker Queenie (T'shan Williams) hooked up with no-good 'Nam vet boyfriend, cokehead pimp Fleetwood (David Albury) at its heart -  reflects and is driven on by the songs and vice (ouch!) versa.

With the swelling tones of an 11-piece band headed by Tamara Saringer, the angular corner-of-Times -Square set design  by Justin Nardella,  projections from Nina Dunn and compact choreography from Tom Jackson Greaves, this production is both successful on its own terms and shows the potential for a larger space.

The echos of other underworld musicals and styles, Sweet Charity (also from the Coleman repertoire), Guys and Dolls, Les Miz, Brechtian noir, West Side Story, even Mack and Mabel and Billy Joel amongst many others, and the corporatism of Chicago and The Godfather, are legion. But, rather than derivative, these are handled with a responsive, dark, smokey wit.

Mary turns out to have a backstory worthy of a David Mamet or Sam Shepherd searing drama and eventually takes to The Life like a Gypsy-Rose-Lee duck to water.

Stab-in-the-back Jojo (John Addison) has the Janus-face of the Times Square porn "talent scout" and Hollywood hustler in "Use What You Got" which could equally be in a musical version of that Hollywood users' manual "What Makes Sammy Run".

Jo Servi's bartender Lacy has the easy ways of old vaudeville Broadway while chief gangster Memphis (Cornell S John) trumps Jojo and Fleetwood in the power stakes, pulling in Queenie in the slow chains of "My Way Or The Highway". But it's Sharon D Clarke's old pro Sonja who carries off the laurels with a thrilling rendition of "The Oldest Profession" vibrating through the Southwark auditorium.

Maybe the ending is still slightly problematic as it almost dips into trench-coat parody but the power of the snarling face-off between Queenie and her haunted former soldier lover Fleetwood in "We Gotta Go" is a breathtaking musical theatre moment with a resonance beyond the hooker and the army vet.

Wait a moment, we take it back about Heidi tho', at least in terms of Hollywood history ...

It may seem churlish to mention one other thing after thrilling live performances fluently directed and staged by the original Broadway director, Brit stage veteran Michael Blakemore. But at a time when the mainstream movie industry is gagging for new musicals to film, The Life, in our opinion, cries out for an atmospheric movie version.

This fearless theatre production definitely gets the TLT green light. Oh, and if Hollywood  (West or East), Bollywood or Nollywood wants to option TLT's own taxi-cab penny-pinching New York tale with a Happy Ending, she's open to offers. ;)   

Review Chinglish

A comedy from an American-Chinese playwright strikes a chord with Peter Barker's own memories of living in China.

Chinglish
by David Henry Hwang

A Matter Of Interpretation
https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/

In search of new business, American Daniel Cavanaugh (Gyury Sarossy) lands up in a regional Chinese city that no Westerner can place on a map, but one that is larger than Birmingham.

Without knowing a word of the language, his aim is to persuade the Chinese municipal authorities to purchase the signs produced by his struggling family firm.

US playwright David Henry Hwang's timely comedy examines the linguistic and cultural chasm between China and the West.

Back in Ohio, Cavanaugh gives a lecture to a local chamber of commerce, framing the action which leads to a series of flashbacks three years before,  giving the lowdown on the true cost and bewilderment of his experience in China. 

Surfing the web, the businessman, tainted by a past association with corrupt corporation Enron, had seen a trading opportunity and a chance for his own redemption in the botched, often automated, translations on bilingual Chinese/English road signs. 

He enlists the help of British ex-pat and sinophile Peter Timms (Duncan Harte) who instructs him in the concept of 关系 (guanxi, loosely translated as connections or social networks) and offers to use his own guanxi to procure a deal for him with an arts complex in the Chinese city.

The minister of culture Cai Gouliang (Lobo Chan) loves his opera, his strong liquor and has a series of convoluted side deals on the go; his deputy Xi Yan (Candy Ma)  appears to be a prim nationalist, but has her own very complicated agenda.

The naive American thinks that get-up-and-go is what you need to succeed in China, and the sinophile Englishman who has fallen in love with calligraphy and porcelain would like to be Chinese in his heart.

Yet even every interpreter has his or her own agenda. One thing Cavanaugh learns as his words are lost in translation, and he can in turn tip off the chamber of commerce to, is, "When doing business in China, always bring your own translator."

The stage business in this 2011 play is conducted both in English and Mandarin - with English surtitles.

While the mistranslations are milked for laughs, Chinglish starts from a real situation. This reviewer spent some years in China and, in one instance, even had to work out that a menu's "sweaty mouth chicken" was in fact meant to be "mouth watering". 

Hwang writes at least as much from the viewpoint of someone of Chinese origin as he does from that of a Westerner. He wrings laughs out of multi-layered circumstances, while not holding up either the Chinese or Westerners for ridicule or damnation, or at least no more than they deserve for their minor frailties or deeper needs.

Ma gives a fine performance as Xi Yan, fiercely ambitious but isolated, while Sarossy is a convincing foil as Cavanaugh, blundering naively through the maze that is both the new consumerist and ancient traditional China. Along with Englishman Peter Timms played by Harte, they are types but avoid parody as the complexities of the situation emerge.

The simple and ingenious set by Tim McQuillen Wright, a backwall of Chinese-style wooden lockers, opens up and folds out to create doors, windows, even a hotel bed. There is also an elegance and
thoughfulness to the direction of Andrew Keates, while keeping the laughs coming.

Hwang uses, yet digs beneath,  the stereotypes with this East-West encounter in a play which juxtaposes Western and Asian characters in an insightful and witty manner.  It's a green light for a humane and funny play where everyone ends wiser, even if some have prospered and some have lost. 

Review Escape The Scaffold

Student friendship and rivalry turn to expediency and ruthlessness after graduation, Peter Barker discovers in a passionate new play. 

Escape The Scaffold
By Titas Halder

Haunted House
https://theatre503.com/

Flitting backwards and forwards through time, this psychological thriller follows the lives of Aaron (Trieve Blackwood-Cambridge), Marcus (Charlie Reston) and Grace (Rosie Sheehy) from three very different but inextricably-linked flat-share students to a future of skewed lives.

Titas Halder’s witty and dark second play Escape The Scaffold consolidates the promise of his debut piece Run The Beast Down. As with the previous drama, the playwright in Escape The Scaffold explores both individual psyches and a breakdown in society.  

The two men are love rivals yet also at times firm friends. Aaron is the idealist, a student activist, while public school-educated ambitious Marcus is fixated on his career and both struggle for the affections of artist Grace.

At first their future seems filled with potential  but student promise and companionship eventually disintegrate into the need for self preservation within a dystopian state.

The double time scale exposes and leads the audience to trace and understand what the two men and one woman once were and the people they become.

Aaron returns to the student digs of his younger days to find Grace and Marcus now a married couple - and homeowners both of the flat and a sinister cellar. Remaining the idealist, Aaron finds himself a wanted man on the run from the forces of a totalitarian state where he is viewed as a dangerous subversive.

Meanwhile Marcus, once the university student union president, has become more than just part of the establishment. He is a spook willing to undertake torture under orders from the authoritarian regime.
  
Halder's absorbing script demonstrates a talent to build suspense  with pungent, even lyrical language while threading together two separate periods of time and introducing a seam of dark humour.

Driven by love, ambition, ego, idealism and treachery, each of his protagonists ultimately prove questionable characters. Sheehy gives Grace, forced to choose between the two men,  an initial appeal until her personality hardens and coarsens over the course of time. Reston's Marcus, honed by an exclusive education, manages to combine the appalling with a compelling vitality.

Hannah Price's assured, pacey direction, never lets the momentum flag as the repercussions of the spy state impact on the trio and audience. Nonetheless, amid all this, Halder's own persuasive humour is allowed to  emerge.

The versatile, dilapidated Victorian house set of Mark Bailey also allows the actors themselves to change the set, while alongside lighting by Katy Morison and sound by Chris Bartholomew,  the homely eventually changes into horrific. 

Escape the Scaffold has flair and wit in character and plotting, braiding past and future together, all laced with a sharp twist of horror and deserving a green light.