Review The Pulverised

The Pulverised
by Alexandra Badea
Translated by Lucy Phelps

The Opposite Of Babel
 http://http://www.arcolatheatre.com/

In the Bible, Babel is the site where all speak a common global language but the universal language is destroyed by the builders of the Tower Of Babel. Now it seems that it's financial jargon and the global corporate chase for the bottom line to maintain solvency at any cost which has become the global language.

The memory of the Icelandic financial crisis when the country's major banks collapsed came to mind when Reykjavik was mentioned late in the one act economic drama The Pulverised, translated from the French.  For the set is dominated by what could be the ashes of a fire or maybe s solidified volcanic lava flow. 

Writer Alexandra Badea is Romanian-born but lives in Paris. The Pulverised therefore looks at a world of outsourcing from a Franco-Romanian perspective.

A call centre worker (Solomon Israel) is in the former French colony of Senegal where employees work, like call centres all over the world, to standard scripts. A young country girl ((Rebecca Boey) is an electronics' assembly worker in the Chinese city of Shanghai, a part of which France once controlled.

Globe-trotting quality assurance  executive (Richard Corgan) is based in Lyon with his family, capital of the recently-formed French administrative region of Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes. However he is more often found in a hotel room and branch offices around the world as he carries out his job.

Meanwhile in Bucharest, another centre for French outsourcing,  a new mum (Kate Miles), a research and development engineer, perfects her language skills for the unnamed French multinational and a chance of the one new job while the company cuts the old ones.
  
The drama emphasizes the repetitive, dislocated, unnatural rhythm of work from the factory floor to the executive level with the underlying crudeness, savagery and humiliation which a screen-based relationship with the world brings.

Paid-for live porn on screen is customized and broadcast in time-efficient slots. The lower rungs of the manufacturing hierarchy allow  for abuse. Even religion has learnt to package itself for the MP3 age with advertisments on African buses. The African call centre clerks must adopt typically French names to answer customer calls.  

The Pulverised is divided into a series of monologues. The production, directed by Andy Sava and designed by Nicolai Hart-Hansen, flashes projections in between (audio visual and sound designer Ashley Ogden), has the four-strong cast doing automaton or zombie like moves (movement director Lanre Malaolu), as well having an electronic music soundscape.

Unfortunately, despite good performances, The Pulverised suffers from a lack of context.

This is not to downplay the issues involved and the strongest and most disturbing moment for us was a viaual one (beautifully played by Solomon Israel) when it dawns on a a call centre worker that promotion is coming to him as a result of an avoidable tragedy involving, at best, covered-up criminal negligence by his company.

However The Pulverized also seems to be either strangely worded or in  a strange translation. We're told that the Shanghai worker is manufacturing "boxes". Yet at another point in the play electronic circuits are mentioned.

In fact we think this play may need amplifying in English for a UK audience. Otherwise it feels like we've seen it all before - whether in the Hollywood version like Up In The Air,  the plays, for example, of Anders Lustgarten or the "selling" of a pen in the Wolf Of Wall Street.

Ironically in a  week when the French and English languages have become a hot issue, our hunch is The Pulverized may have lost something in translation elminating a dramatic discussion of what the French language means in the modern world and becoming a more standard script. 

While Shanghai has an obvious meaning for us all, we felt the names of Dakar and Bucharest simply do not have the same resonance and history for an UK as for a Francophone audience.

So the moment when suddenly we're dragged from the countries which remain in France's orbit to Reykjavik where there can be a glimmer of recognition simply does not have the impact it should have had  and we award an amber light.  

Review Madame Rubinstein

Madame Rubinstein
by John Misto

Making Up Is Hard To Do
https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/

The name of Helena Rubinstein lives on as a brand, although now owned by L'Oréal. Her story, and that of cosmetics' rival Elizabeth Arden, has recently been part of a flurry of activity with a 2007 documentary, a couple of biographies and a Broadway musical.

Now Miriam Margolyes takes up the cudgels as the heavily accented, flamboyant, battling Madame Rubinstein near the end of her life in a play by Australian writer John Misto.

Her dark hair scraped back, Rubinstein, who was born in Austro-Hungarian Krakow, cultivated an "exotic" look with bright clothes and sparkling jewels while her salon brand had glamour but also retained a severe scientific aura of the medical laboratories where she may have studied in her youth.

The story of the cosmetics' tycoon (and also Australia's first entrepreneur of global fame) making her way in an industry, which like the movie business allowed in enterprising souls excluded from other trades, should make for a rich and fascinating tale..

However the play feels thin and conflicted - pulled between her relationship with her secretary, Irish journalist Patrick O'Higgins (Jonathan Forbes) and  Rubinstein's rivalry with Frances Barber's Elizabeth Arden (currently also charted in musical War Paint on Broadway) without any real dramatic storytelling.

Instead it settles into a clichéd two hours filled mostly with apocryphal incidents and the habits of "Madame". Margoyles tries to inject a sense of wit and, towards the end, pathos to the portrait of the make-up pioneer. However the script militates against this, failing to capitalize on hints of something more complex and falling back on stereotypes and gags.

It's a shame because a bit of shrewd digging might have brought about a more orignal concoction - for example, her considerable drive leading to Australian connections and success is reduced to mental scars and memories of alleged sexual abuse by a relative.

The way her make up and salon brand developed, taking cosmetics out of the theatre and whore house and making it a part of a respectable woman's routine, is equally downplayed.

An intriguing reference to later women's lib protests against her personally and the cosmetics' industry is mentioned but despite her own protests that she made women "free", there's no social context. Instead we're treated to exaggerated Yiddishkeit and wilful, some would say psychotic, characteristics rather than a sense of someone who had built up a business from nothing. 

An advertising image dominates Alistair Turner's design in director Jez Bond's production which has a cartoonish sketch-like feel with some clumsy scene changes.

There's definitely a bioplay in Helena Rubinstein's life but this piece variously shoehorns her life into every other template, apart from truly investigating dramatically her story.  So, despite strong casting, we fear it's a lipstick and casing red/amber light.

Review The Three Comrades

A love story set during the upheaval in Germany between the two world wars leaves Peter Barker unimpressed.  

The Three Comrades
Adapted by Galina Volchek and Alexander Getman
From the novel by Erich Maria Remarque

Love and Angst in the Weimar Republic 
http://www.atgtickets.com/shows/three-comrades/piccadilly-theatre/

Based on Erich Maria Remarque's 1936 novel,  The Three Comrades kicks off the Moscow Sovremennik Theatre's short repertory season at London's Piccadilly Theatre.

Three men are all veterans of the First World War trenches, earn a precarious living as car mechanics in late 1920s' Berlin during the Great Depression and the rise of National Socialism.

Chief among the trio is Bobby Lohkamp (Alexander Khovansky), whose friends Otto (Sergey Yushkevich) and Gottfried (Sergei Girin) are the only people he can rely on in the tough circumstances of the doomed Weimar Republic.

The three men live in a world of hard physical work in the garage by day and hard drinking in the shadow world of Berlin’s insalubrious nightlife of cheap bars and sex workers by night.

The disillusioned and cynical Bobby meets a pretty young thing, Pat (Russian TV star Chulpan Khamatova) and the pair fall in love. But tragedy awaits them.

This adaptation, in Russian with English surtitles, is by playwright Alexander Getman and the play's Sovremennik's current artistic chief, 83 year old Galina Volchek as director.

The plot is the only serious problem in this production, but it did hang over the evening for me. Pat’s character feels shallowly written, and she is barely more than a foil for the hero Bobby to take a journey from cynicism to love, only to suffer as a consequence.

In this adaptation the idea a beautiful woman can redeem a good man from his existential misery seems like an outdated cliché. With the plot points clearly signalled, I grasped exactly what would happen shortly before the interval when I was already bored with the predictable love affair and the winsome perfection of Pat.

The second half, when the plot plods interminably towards its consumptive ending, smothers the joy from what should be a showpiece touring production.

The very large cast, with at least 23 named characters, as well as many extras, are well drilled for their roles in a drama which changes scenes at great speed. We sometimes have barely a minute of dialogue in a bar before it moves to the other side of the stage for a tableau in a bedroom, before shifting again to a street or a park scene.

Khovansky as the disillusioned Bobby hardly ever leaves the stage for the two-and-a-half hour production. He gives a very physical performance, at one point effortlessly turning cartwheels as part of his lovestruck euphoria.

Even if one of the main leads is effectively relegated to a piece of scenery, the technical achievements of the production stand out.

The action takes place on the front half of a huge conventional proscenium arch stage, with no backdrop and only some flats to suggest ruined Gothic architecture. Yet the scenes change quickly, with a series of well-built tableaux, including a 1920s car, rolling in and out.

Director Volchek and designer Pavel Parkhomenko also have an eye for bringing the memorable drawings of German artist George Grosz to life in front of our eyes. Busty sex workers and dishevelled survivors of the war drink away their misery.

The story did suffer for me, perhaps unfairly, in comparison with the musical Cabaret adapted from Christopher Isherwood's 1939 short story inspired by the latter's time in the city.

Remarque had made his name when he struck a zeitgeist with his 1928 wartime masterpiece All Quiet On The Western Front.

Eight years, later having fled Nazi Germany and in exile in Switzerland, Remarque wrote  Three Comrades (Drei Kamaraden) about the decade following World War 1. In 1938 it was turned into a Hollywood movie co-written by Scott Fitzgerald starring Robert Taylor.

There were a few glitches with the surtitles on press night but, no doubt, these will be quickly sorted out.

The play suggests that misfortune in life can be transcended through love and friendship. However, it's a red/amber light for, despite good performances and great technical accomplishment, the superficiality of a plodding plot and a heroine reduced to a cipher frankly stopped me from giving a damn.

Review The Resistible Rise Of Arturo Ui

A World War II play written when Bertolt Brecht fled to the US is still a potent analysis of dictatorship, but Peter Barker wonders if a new adaptation's jokey approach and Trump analogy lessens its impact. 

The Resistible Rise Of Arturo Ui
by Bertolt Brecht  

Market Forces
https://www.donmarwarehouse.com/ 

Bertolt Brecht wrote The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui in 1941 during wartime exile from Germany in the United Sates. Last year, we had the National Theatre's take on Brecht and Kurt Weil's 1920s' musical critique of capitalism, The Threepenny Opera. 

Now, after a new wave of crowd-pleasing demagogues and fake news has crashed on the shores of Western democracies, director Simon Evans and adaptor Bruce Norris have turned again to Brecht in an attempt to drew their own analogy with our times.

The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui presents fascism as gangster-like capitalism, with Lenny Henry in the title role. The play’s premise is easy to understand: it’s an allegory of the rise of the 20th century’s not-so-great dictator.

Market trader Ui is Hitler who, using and destroying the corrupt Cauliflower Trust, takes control. Among his henchmen and victims are Ernesto Roma (Giles Terera)  representing Hitler's ally and then rival Ernst Röhm. Givola (Guy Rhys) is Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. Betty Dullfeet (Justine Mitchell) is Engelbert Dollfuß, assassinated Austrian Chancellor,  and  deceitful, profiteering Trust chief Dogsborough (Michael Pennington) is the Prussian junker president, Paul von Hindenburg.

The play catalogues the rise of  Ui and asks the question -- what should we do to stop history repeating itself, once more, as tragedy?

In fact, this staging poses that question to the audience very directly. There is a great deal of audience participation, with members co-opted to play arsonists, those assassinated, a rigged jury, a dead body, a framed innocent and other victims.

There are genuinely horrible, as well as horribly funny, moments; as Henry’s Ui is coached on diction and stance by an actor (Tom Edden), it is chilling to see how Ui picks up the gestures and stance of the Berchtesgarden bully. It is not at all subtle. It is a screaming political allegory repeated again and again and again.

And that is how it should be, in my opinion. Not comfortable, but something resembling a physical assault by a bully armed with a cosh and a knuckleduster.

This production achieves that punch, to its credit. My only reservation is that this version of the play is a bit too much fun; it is almost too good-natured in places. Perhaps even, dare I say it, too English, needing more sourness and anger. The National’s Threepenny Opera last year had the same feeling about it -- it was too nice at times.

Henry as Ui leads the rest of the ensemble cast. He convinces at beginning as the slouching rough beast, who slyly takes a mile when barely an inch is offered and gives in return lies and violence. He also has bags of charisma.

The Donmar is transformed by Peter McKintosh’s intricate, detailed set into a Chicago speakeasy where the audience is seated on saloon chairs on all sides. It’s theatre in the round and a few chairs, benches and tables are used at various times for the different scenes.

Yet the production makes one serious mistake. It directly links Donald Trump and Hitler.

Many may see Trump as a liar, a bully, an incompetent, a misogynist, a racist, a narcissist, a demagogue, a chauvinist, a failed businessman, an evil spirit conjured up through media manipulation, a urophile  -- but he is not Hitler, and I don’t believe it aids public understanding of Trump to liken him to the Nazi dictator.

Perhaps there is a danger now that Trump has become too easy, and too often an inaccurate,  shorthand which in this case diverts attention from Brecht's bruising analysis of the circumstances which brought Hitler to power.

While not an unflawed production, this version of the Brechtian classic has an undoubtedly visceral Arturo Ui in Lenny Henry and merits a green light.

Review All Our Children

All Our Children
by Stephen Unwin

 Lives in Their Hands
 http://www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk/

In 1942, four months after the USA entered the Second World War,  President Franklin D Roosevelt spoke to the nation in a radio address:

"Yet ... we can make, if we choose, a planet unvexed by war, untroubled by hunger or fear, undivided by senseless distinctions of race, color, or theory. Grant us that courage and foreseeing to begin this task today that our children and our children's children may be proud ..." 

One of the then senseless distinctions of theory was the German National Socialist regime's espousal of eugenics beginnning with a "euthanasia" programme in 1939. It targetted the mentally and physically disabled, children and eventually adults,  and anyone deemed to have a "life unworthy of life".  

Stephen Unwin's moving play focusses on the doctor, Victor Franz (Colin Tierney) in charge in an imaginary Rhineland paediatric clinic, one of many in Germany to which parents were encouraged to send their handicapped children.

Yet time is running out for Franz as his own health deteriorates, alongside the children, placed in his clinic by often loving but impoverished parents without the means or the time to look after their needs.  Children who, at first unknown to them,  suffer a terrible fate in what has been termed a rehearsal for later mass murder  

There is a lot packed in to the one-act play. This sometimes feels as if it could be a fragment of a larger, longer piece where the juxtapositions could be more pointed for the audience to work out more fully the vested interests, power struggles, compromises and cowardice.  

However the generation gap and an understandable, if detestable, callousness of inexperienced youth is plausibly delineated with the callow 23 year old ambitious Lutheran assistant to atheist Franz, Eric Schmidt (Edward Franklin).  

Germany in fact had an advanced social and welfare system, having been the first country to introduce social insurance to take care of all citizens, even though it lost its Empire and much of the means to fund the scheme after the First World War. 

The perpetrators therefore at first tried to keep the killings a secret, issuing death certificates with fake causes of death.  While there have been some documentaries, this is all a lesser known part of the National Socialist killing machine. 

The revelation of the brazen extortion involved in the subsequent bureaucracy covering up the deaths, exposed by an angry and helpless working class mother Elizabetta Pabst (Lucy Speed), elicited horrified gasps from the audience.  

A glimmer of  hope still flickers in this bleak picture when the scarlet robed aristocratic Bishop von Galen (David Yelland) comes on behalf of some of his constituents who, like Elizabetta, have come to understand what is happening. 

This is in some ways the most intellectually searching part of the play in a Shavian-like private encounter between the Catholic primate and the medic who may be compromised by his own political past. It puts the audience through almost the same process as a parent who retains hope that there can be some trust in an authority somewhere.

The Catholic bishop is a skilled theologian who holds out a sprig of hope and constructs elegant arguments condemning events he knows to be inhuman, but keeps it all carefully away from the public domain, dashing our own hopes of any moral touchstone or heroic behaviour.

Trapped between the tricked parent, the duplicitous but tormented doctor, the lofty churchman and the blinkered assistant administrator is the maid, Martha (Rebecca Johnson). She also wants to trust and find reassurance in her Catholic faith and authority figures. 

However she is still forced into harbouring justified doubts about some aspects of the regime and its perversion of communal values.

Stephen Unwin himself directs bringing clarity and precision to the proceedings. A  handsome set from Simon Higlett has shelves of grey lever arch files containing the fatal paperwork breaking up the warm wood panelling of the clinic's office. 

This is a harrowing tale of how narrow the medical profession's line can be, slipping too easily from sustaining to destroying life. While it sometimes feels a little truncated, it's a green light for a play which also challenges the ease with which we separate past actions from current-day concerns.

Review Everything Between Us

Everything Between Us
by David Ireland

What's So Funny 'Bout Peace Love And Understanding?
http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/

Actually there's quite a lot that can be darkly and ironically funny about professed peace, love and understanding after years of violence (don't ask us to explain a situation which has mutated over hundreds of years from Plantation colonization to now Brexit adding a new complication to a twisty history).

Northern Ireland. Yes, we're talking about Northern Ireland. As we've seen previously, playwright David Ireland (yes, it really is his name ...) charges in like the proverbial bull in the china shop, but something real and universal emerges when he refuses to glue together the pieces as if they were never broken or even to pretend that he can't see the cracks.

But enough of cryptic metaphors. Everything Between Us is a two hander. Sandra (Lynsey-Anne Moffat) has become part of the Stormont establishment, a seemingly outward looking politician who is helping facilitate a peace and reconciliation commission under the glare of the world's press.

Yet the proposed peaceful opening of the conference is disrupted, in almost reverse Dr Strangelove-style, by a wildcard in the shape of Sandra's long-lost violent sister,  blonde rock chick Teeni. She fans the flames of old hostilities, intransigently inventing new battles, albeit with occasional lapses into moments of reflection.

Everything Between Us has the trajectory of a cathartic play. However,  it never supplies any closure of or easy answers to a stand off which has different incarnations in many countries riven by civil war atrocities for whatever reason, bringing destruction, maiming and death to often innocent citizens.

While some of the references may be immediately recognizable to many as indicating which side of the Northern Ireland divide the sisters are on, the Protestant unionist side, it's left until nearly at the end for us to fully understand the siblings' affiliation.

Indeed, despite the clues laid down, the glamour of Teeni beside her more frumpy sister almost also seemed to reflect the romanticized image of the IRA successfully promoted throughout the world during The Troubles.

Is it a successful play? Well, this is an unusual review in that we don't know whether it needs to be. Dramatically it feels flawed.

Teeni pours out both venom and occasionally more perceptive, if clouded by a gleeful rage, insights for most of the play before Sandra belies her more conservative demeanour with her own hocus pocus.

The jokes are hit and miss - not so much because they're not funny but some do feel thrown in rather than emerging from character. But there's a lot that is thrown and sticks.

This applies especially to how legal structures such as tribunals and commissions after the formal end of hostilities refuse to countenance the contradictions involved in themselves.

Acoholics Anonymous becomes a metaphor for the addiction to both violence and then confessions with sponsors just as compromised as those whom they sponsor. All reflecting a world situation when a commission narrows its focus down to itself and one country rather than the global affiliations which often helped the violence continue.

It's a play that maybe doesn't fit all the jigsaw pieces together - angry, cynical, raw, jagged where political and  media-friendly vested interest smooth over the wrongs to construct an artificial right.

Neil Bull directs with a sure hand, maintaining the momentum over seventy minutes against a dishevelled backdrop of  a basement filled with now disused metal filing cabinets, trailing cables and flickering lights designed by Laura Cordery.

But it's also very clearly a play that's also a fantasy. It's difficult to imagine such a confrontation between the sisters in these circumstances. Indeed even their attitudes feel awkward for women.

And maybe there's the nub of it - Ireland the playwright has chosen two women to channel and front the very male-dominated worlds in which each of them live. And it's a strength that this seems an awkward fit because it forces us to think about what these conflict resolution processes really are.

It's a green light for a deliberately uneasy and stimulating one act play which keeps us in the room with problems we may not want to, but need to, consider.

Review The Treatment

The Treatment
by Martin Crimp

City Lights - Camera, Action!
https://almeida.co.uk/

"Where do you get your ideas?" So the continual question goes for the successful writer by those admiring, envying, incredulous who somehow can't believe the simplest answer, "I made it up". A writers' strike, now warded off, has just threatened to shut down Hollywood storytelling but the hunger for new stories continues.

We move to New York for playwright Martin Crimp's 1993 satire The Treatment. A treatment can of course mean a brief written blueprint for a screenplay, the way we all treat each other - or it can have a medical connotation.

Anne (Aisling Loftus) has answered the ad of two producers or "facilitators" as they like to call themselves, Jennifer (Indira Varma) and Andrew (Julian Ovenden) looking for distinctive true life stories.

They buy up Anne whose story they want to pimp up to fit into, what they believe, is a fit story for the camera and the expectations of the target audience.

In the meantime, they meet elderly down-on-his-luck Clifford (Ian Gelder), who apparently had a couple of Broadway comedy hits back in the day and has a script in his bottom drawer that he is eager to sell.

It's the package they have been looking for - they splice together the two stories, introducing him to the big name star John (Gary Beadle), although Clifford in his excitement unwisely forgets to ask for the precise arrangement in writing,

The Treatment is a distinctly odd but searing snipped up tale of dysfunctional metropolitan people trying to put themselves in functional holes.

We're never quite sure whether Anne and her electrical technician husband Simon (Matthew Needham) are genuine or may be would-be screenwriters trying to find the elusive "idea" and believe it can only be found by living it out.

Are the rooms simply rooms or are they elaborate movie backdrops (design by Giles Cadle)? Are the people going by really just office workers, passers by, or are they actors and extras hired for the day? Or, more disturbingly, has the city become an unstable mixture of both with violence seeping from one to the other?

There's a lot of piquant, uneasy humour in director Lyndsey Turner's smooth widescreen staging with a pinpoint sharp performance by Varma as the producer cannibalizing Anne's life and Clifford's work. Ovenden is equally convincing as her husband and business partner who begins to doubt the separation between storytelling and life.

Loftus's Anne is the Alice-in-Wonderland character who tries to apply common sense and Beadle's movie actor sprinkles his superficial stardust and draws the wrong conclusions while generating success.

Considering the play first reached the light of day at the Royal Court 24 years ago, it has lasted remarkably well to feel just as relevant in a world where boxed set dramas are the new movie blockbusters.

And Martin Crimp even anticipated your own traffic road furniture reviewers within the play 😉 with a taxi driver who needs exact verbal descriptions of everything for a very particular reason.  Oh, so you better tell the cab driver, it's a green traffic light from TLT and her co-producing automotive sidekick!

Review The Cardinal

The Cardinal
by James Shirley

Les Liaisons Dangereuses
http://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/

We have to admit our knowledge of theatre history has hitherto jumped from the Revenge Tragedies to the Restoration plays, and left out the drama of the Caroline era. That is, the era when Charles I ruled before Oliver Cromwell engineered Chaxit and closed down the theatres.

So we are indebted to director Justin Audibert and his cast of James Shirley's 1641 tragicomedy for a sure-footed introduction to this witty chessboard of a play, The Cardinal.

Set in a Spanish court, yes, there's a more than an echo of John Webster's The Duchess Of Malfi with a touch of Measure For Measure.

But playwright Shirley turns out to be a real discovery for us. His own chequered background as a Catholic convert and the uncertain times in which he lived produces a shrewd assmilation of past masterpieces, but also a grasp of contemporary politics, a refreshing attitude to women and lucid, pointed verses.

The widowed Duchess Rosaura (Natalie Simpson), beautiful and smart niece of the King of Navarre (Ashley Cook) has been promised that she can marry the man of her choice. Nevertheless she finds herself coerced into a marriage with rough-hewn Columbo (Jay Saighal), the nephew of the scheming Cardinal (Stephen Boxer).

By hook or by crook she determines to marry the handsome Count D'Alvaraz (Marcus Griffiths) and, by legitimate if tricksy means, achieves her goal except that on her wedding day ...

Ah, dear blog reader, you'll have to skidaddle to Elephant and Castle's Newington Causeway and Southwark Playhouse to find out the often murderous twists and turns which have all the cliffhangers of a boxed set thriller.

Simpson (last seen as Cordelia in the RSC's King Lear) is a slender but tough Duchess, as sharp as the silver edge of a rapier matching the cynical wit of Boxer's scarlet-robed Cardinal with a wily but sceptical turn of phrase.

Timothy Speyer also gives good value as the Secretary evaluating a quick-changing situation. Ashley Cook's King has the stillness and dignity of a portrait amidst a fast moving plot when the country was still weighing up the worth of their own monarch. 

Shirley himself gained the favour of, without being fully a part of the court of, Charles I and his French wife Henrietta Maria.

There is a particular astuteness and scepticism which marks Shirley, also a grammarian and schoolmaster as well as a playwright, apart from those other playwrights he draws upon, making him appeal to a modern sensibility.

Anna Reid's light gray marble set gives a sense of the echoing halls of the Caroline era where swords clash in Bret Yount's excitingly choreographed fights   And surely those were not the chimes of Big Ben we heard in the midst of the chorals in Max Pappenheim's subtle echoing soundscape?

For a new perspective on an era and a remarkably clear-sighted play given a production of elegance and wry humour, we eschew the scarlet for a green light.    

Review Late Company

Late Company
by Jordan Tannahill

Prodigal Sons
http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/

Michael (Todd Boyce) is a laid-back Canadian Tory politician, bustling, blonde Debora (Lucy Robinson) is an artist and the Shaun-Hastings' couple live in an isolated spot in suburban Toronto. Bill (Alex Lowe) and Tamara (Lisa Stevenson), the Dermots, are near-ish neighbours.

An event over which, it seems, they all have no control has drawn them together and it's now the first anniversary in the depths of winter.

Debora and Tamara have arranged for the two couples to meet over dinner, following the guidelines in a bestselling book by a self-help guru to "attract positivity".

Included in the party is Bill and Tamara's teenage schoolboy son, monosyllabic, hockey jock Curtis Dermot (David Leopold) who was a classmate of Debora and Michael's son, Joel Shaun-Hastings.

Tensions and irreconcileable differences rise to the surface in a slick production directed by Michael Yale with a polished, dark wood dining room set designed by Zahra Mansouri.

Ostensibly a play about the impact across the generations of school bullying and a child dealing with his sexuality, there are still hints of another story - a financial and political one - which also has reverberations on  the lives of the two boys and their parents.

The first clue, like Canada itself, has a Brit connection. It  is the steel, modernist artwork called "Thatcher" on the wall created by Debora which belies her conservatism in dress, apparent attitudes and striving to be civilised in a difficult situation.

As the play and evening progresses, the Thatchernomics' dictum, "... there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families ..." came to mind.

Whatever the loaned resources, including the media and the support of his political colleagues, at the disposal of politician Michael and artist Debora, these are two families who have been thrown back on themselves.  The school principal, it turns out, knew of a situation before events turned tragic, but had done nothing.

It's a play with a more than promising beginning, hooking the audience in from the start with strong performances from the whole cast and the build up to the main meat of the situation raises expectations.

Yet once the subject turns to the nitty gritty, a rather schematic feel comes in. As if the planned politeness and the keeping of boundaries has invaded the script of the play.

In spite of an ambiguity surrounding the boy who is classed as the victim, the attacks and defences in the cold war between the families, the separate stories and their merging have a mechanical rather than an organic feel.

The play then goes from plot point to plot point. It simply does not feel as if there is a rich enough texture for stage and the ending is anti-climactic.

Still, the characters remain well-defined and the performances carry the drama. Boyce's Michael and Robinson's Lucy, the older couple convey the pent up emotions of a calculating couple who bear the scars beneath their cool exterior.

Despite the political couple's tendency to view the Dermots as hicks, Lowe's pained and morose Bill, led into the meeting by his wife, turns out to be as equally academically qualified as Michael and Stevenson's Tamara has her own core of steely determination beneath a sunny, if strained, exterior.

At the centre, although less verbose, Leopold is totally convincing as the teenager who can only live for the present within the ring of families and school incidents in which he may, or may not, have played a leading role.    

We came away with the overwhelming impression of a worthwhile piece about university-educated baby boomers and their dislocated children where the definition of a "village" no longer means a homely community but the survival of the fittest. But it would be better served as a TV piece or movie.

The natural landscapes of Ontario, the dislocation of new technology, adult political and financial concerns and the invasion of media attention on the barely-formed personalities of teenagers who have been convicted of no crime - these would all be far better juxtaposed jostling on screen than an over-compartmentalized stage play .

Nevertheless, Yale's production, we think, is as good a stage production as it could possibly get for a gritty but unfocussed play and we give it an amber/green light.

Review Romeo and Juliet

Romeo And Juliet
by William Shakespeare

Verona In Voodooland
http://www.shakespearesglobe.com

They've gone down the rabbit hole in Verona and emerged in a dystopia where, it seems, friends are the new family. And the families are feuding.  For it's as if the flatmates have become family and Verona has become the new dressing-up and party capital.

The inhabitants of Verona are like bored Big Brother contestants who strive to have fun in their family units. The Prince (Paul Rider) is the disembodied TV voice dispensing justice. So Juliet (Kirsty Bushell) is a world-weary modern spinster, way past her teenage years but not ready to play the maiden aunt.

Romeo (Edward Hogg) is maybe younger, Bip The Clown with words, even to the point of presenting a single flower at one point but also part of the grunge generation.

Soutra Gilmour's set design is minimal, black netting above, a patch of bright green grass at the front of the stage. The props, clown make up, furniture and music further maketh the concept. Verona has become a kidult's playground - the prologue comes through a loudspeaker with a chorus of kids' voices echoing the adult.

This is also a production that has everything thrown at it and some of it sticks. But some of it just wanted to make TLT and her automotive sidekick roll their eyes and headlights in that middle class way of theirs and toot out, "Oh, reeeeally?!!!!"

Now we're all for having our bourgeois expectations shaken up. However when a newcomer to Romeo and Juliet might well believe, having seen this show, that the lovers don't die and that the tragedy is an out-of-this-world episode of Dr Who - well, to mix our metaphors in the same way, Houston, we have a problem.

On the other hand, there's some value of the concept of an older Juliet and Romeo eternally stuck in pretend student mode before meeting each other and experiencing something real amidst the chaos.

Blythe Duff makes a distinctive Scottish nurse in white face war paint - part Elizabethan Queen and part 18th century duchess gone to seed.

The relationship between Romeo and the female Mercutio (Golda Rosheuvel) and Mercutio with a credulous Benvolio (Jonathan Livingstone) in a Goth daisy chain of family connections gives a certain backbone to the household. Romeo's verse speaking still had a clear lyrical quality which broke through the kerfuffle around him.

But this was a hard-working production trying to do what? The story (has director Daniel Kramer never read Robert McKee. dahlink? ;)) is lost in the gimmickry.

A chorus of Village People's YMCA while dressed in a dinosaur costume? Tick! A piebald faced. chained actor (Ricky Champ) bounding on as the dog of Capulet (Gareth Snook)? Tick! Lady Capulet (Martina Laird) like a tottering black-robed Alice In Wonderland character with a glass of whisky in hand? Tick!  Lots of screeching and screaming and kicking of Doc Martens? Tick!

It's certainly once more unto the the breach - if it weren't marketed as Romeo and Juliet but a play about a process with its cutting and splicing and editing, we might have felt more sympathetic.

But, while we think we understand some of the reasoning behind this rendition of the play, (this is the serious bit) it also seems to take away the very reason for watching a play by William Shakespeare. The love, violence and death is not felt but laughed at. That is the breach with the play and its language.

And, most egregious of all, it felt too long. The schoolkids around us gasped at times and giggled, but  were also bemused - maybe as to whether this was story they had studied. It seemed to make them unsure and uneasy, but not, we think, in a good way.

Anyway, enough of our possible projections on to the younger generation. We like good actors even in an ill-thought-through production but we give a red/amber light.