Review Hamlet

More about kin than kings, Peter Barker is pleasantly surprised by an odd, but intriguing,  fast-moving Hamlet

Hamlet
by William Shakespeare

Everything And The Kitchen Sink
https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/

Keep It In The Family could be a tongue-in-cheek alternative title for Hamlet, but the Brandreth family take it literally as the cue for their cut-down version of Shakespeare’s most celebrated play.

It's the tale of Hamlet, a self-examining Danish prince increasingly out of sync with his times after his father’s death and the sudden marriage of his mother to his uncle.

Updated to the modern age, directors Simon Evans and David Aula with script editor Imogen Bond have produced a 90-minute one-act play which has the speed of a TV drama  or movie.

We're in an affluent middle-class kitchen, an attractively detailed set from Polly Sullivan,  with oak cupboards, other pine furniture and a handy set of knives, just in case they're needed.

Benet Brandreth tackles the role of Hamlet, while his wife actress Kosha Engler and his Dad, Gyles, former MP and current media personality, split the rest of the roles.

By day (when he's not doing the matinées!) Benet is an intellectual property lawyer and an expert in rhetoric working with, among others, the RSC.

As might be expected, his delivery is very clear, but it's also a very different kind of interpretation - an unsympathetic, bad-tempered, entitled public schoolboy who, deliberately, often shouts his soliloquys at the audience.

Yet, he is relaxed and witty on first meeting an old university friend. Plus his rendition of "to be or not to be",  first read from a philosophy book and then turned into a debate with himself, worked for me. 

Gyles Brandeth captures Claudius's man-in-power hypocrisy and oily charm, as well as the complacent pomposity of Polonius, notably in the funny and realistic exchange with his son Laertes.

But here a minus kicks in. Having actors double up on the spot left me wondering if this was a dialogue between father and son or father and daughter - with both of Polonius's children acted by the otherwise excellent Kosha Engler.

Despite some entertaining programme notes by Gyles, I did wish I'd brought a Hamlet crib for my companion who came knowing nothing about the play.

We both pondered the script and directorial decisions which left Engler, for instance, doing a confusing immediate switch from garlanded Orphelia to her vengeful brother Laertes - also complete with garland. Similarly the switches between Claudius and Polonius were not always clear.

Nevertheless, there's a certain wit to the staging and a daring knife game which gives an adventurous twist to the fight scenes, sustaining the pace and tension.

Preconceptions about Brandeth senior dismissed, this proved to be an entertaining, if sometimes confusing, evening. The relatively short running time and swiftly moving action kept me hooked.

There's a certain panache to the performances of the trio and, dare I say it, Gyles Brandeth proves his acting chops and I wouldn't mind seeing more of him on the stage.  There are flaws but I still enjoyed this Hamlet enough to award an amber/green light.

Review A Fox On The Fairway

A Fox On The Fairway
by Ken Ludwig

Of Clubs And The Man I Sing
http://www.queens-theatre.co.uk/

Think a perfunctorily put-together 1970s' sitcom and you begin to get a flavour of Ken Ludwig's more miss-than-hit golfing farce A Fox On The Fairway receiving its British première.

It's set in the bar of Quail Valley Country Club on the eve of and during the annual tournament against a neighbouring club.

A club with the bizarre name of Crouching Squirrel - TLT did wonder whether it was a case of crouching squirrel, hidden fox,  as the vulpine meaning of this piece's escaped her.

Henry Bingham, the director of Quail Valley overplays his hand, foolishly accepting a wager offered him by the rival club's director, putting all the Bingham assets at risk.

Crouching Squirrel's "capital, capital!" Dickie Bell wears - ho, ho - a variety of outrageous pullovers and - ho, ho - mangles a plethora of well-known expressions.

The characters are well-worn stereotypes - the bungling head of the club, the sex-starved blonde wealthy divorcee, the Essex girl waitress out for evening class literary self-improvement, the dim but well-meaning new executive assistant with hitherto hidden talents and the battle-axe wife.  

A saying attributed to the well-known golfer 😉 Karl Marx states, "History repeats itself first as tragedy and second as farce".

Unfortunately here this laboured farce repeats farce only as a dim echo of more distinguished predecessors with clumsy set ups and very creaky gags.    

Nevertheless, the cast is pretty good despite the intensely irritating characters they have to embody. However, the action, directed by Philip Wilson, simply isn't fast enough to whip the audience up into the frenzy of laughter which is an intrinsic part of the farce experience.

There is a chance that this will bed in during the run, increase its pace and raise a few more laughs. There seem to be a few scattergun  metaphors going on, a lashing together of some  novelistic and filmic tropes and maybe the mention of the master of the silly-ass character PG Wodehouse gives a clue.

However, it's only unpredictable in that many of its self-conscious, supposedly hilarious, cartoonish scenarios come completely out of the blue, even within the skewed logic of farce.

Still, Damien Matthews does a more than decent job as Bingham, the hapless director who is the prey for the predatory Simon Lloyd as property developer Bell out to win by hook or crook.

Natalie Walter does her considerable best with Pamela Peabody (her name seems to combine a novel's virtuous chambermaid and a surname synonymous with philanthropy). Yet she still falls  victim to the clunky scenarios, especially in a golfing version of William Tell's apple, and some hoary  gags. 

Ottilie Mackintosh is forced to be supremely grating as the waitress Louise given to narrating events as a Homeric epic (it sounds better than it is in practice). Yet there is some pay off and, thinking it over, she may be the reason for the fox in the title.

Equally Romayne Andrews' Justin feels wasted (in all senses of the word after a hospital cocktail of drugs for - er - a broken arm) as the easily upset suitor of Louise  and Sarah Quist does what she can with Bingham's "Sherman Tank" wife Muriel who harbours a secret passion.

Besides the louder outfits, there are some surprisingly subtle costumes and styling, especially when it comes to Muriel Bingham.

The set designed by Colin Falconer is an ingenious, impressionist golfing green of paint and carpet superimposed on the club lounge and a final change of scene is a very impressive, if rather lumbering, coup de théâtre.

However TLT and her own little automative caddie were unsure, particularly in the first act, whether the translation of the American country club culture into purely English terms really works.

It's not a hopeless case, as it has a very good cast. Even so, A Fox On The Fairway raised only the occasional unregulated chuckle, rather than giving a novel twist to the farce genre and making TLT laugh her socks off. It's a lower range amber light.

Review Windows

Windows
by John Galsworthy

Through A Glass Darkly
http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/

What a curiously engaging patchwork of a play John Galsworthy's Windows, first performed in 1922, turns out to be!

It starts out as an obviously self-censored Edwardian drawing room London melodrama set in the aftermath of the First World War about a young woman, a figure of pathos, deflowered out of wedlock and the consequences of her pregnancy.

Yet  it finally shifts to a more caustic tone before transforming into  a play as symbolist as Chekhov's The Seagull and focussing on the mistress of the household and an international outlook.

The March family live in Highgate: father Geoffrey (David Shelley) is a newspaper pundit and otherwise a freelance writer and idealist given to muttering about "the government".

Mother Joan (Carolyn Backhouse) takes on the practical duties of running a household with a firm grasp of reality. Son Johnny (Duncan Moore) writes poetry and dreams of chivalry, a disappointed idealist and tormented veteran of three years' in the trenches while his sister Mary (Eleanor Sutton) keeps a level head and confers with her mother. 

The family employs an in-house cook (Janet Amsden), as well as another outside blue collar tradesman. Joe Bly (Vincent Brimble), an ex-seaman turned window cleaner who seems to owe something to G Bernard Shaw's Alfred Doolittle.

He has a philosophical bent and turn of phrase. This includes mulling over imperial concerns about Ireland and India. Yet closer to home, he also has a daughter Faith (Charlotte Brimble), newly released from prison after escaping hanging for smothering her baby.  .

Windows, like Just To Get Married, the Finborough's previous success, deftly weaves together the personal with national and state-of-the-world concerns, but keeps its own distinctive voice.

Geoffrey Beevers directs a measured and sure-footed production with strong performances from the cast of nine.

As Faith Bly, Charlotte Brimble is a tough cookie who eventually shows a glimpse of vulnerability but somehow, intriguingly, knows she must live up or down to a literary and newspaper stereotype.

As the men of the house, David Shelley and Duncan Moore, father and son respectively, are pipe-smoking would-be reformers in their different ways.

Yet there are sly satiric hints about both father and son in Windows, for all their high ideals about social change, just reparations and their wish to give pretty Faith a fresh start in life as a live-in parlourmaid for the March family.

Carolyn Backhouse's Joan March assumes the role of fierce gatekeeper and bears the brunt of responsbility for most matters, principally protecting her husband and son. Yet there are moments when a veil is almost drawn back. Geoffrey, and Johnny are sharply ambivalent figures even if a more tawdry undertow remains a subtle subtext.

This feels like a play sometimes more interested in weaving together issues with some unexpected combinations of the personal and the political than with the characters which are deliberately drawn as literary stereotypes.

Galsworthy in his more famous series of novels The Forsyte Saga, as far as was possible in the era in which he wrote,  often had a subtext touching on contentious subjects in a male dominated society.

Here there is a strange, deliberate scene when after an incident causes disquiet, Mrs March lets the young woman go and appears, highly unusually for a married woman at that time, to swiftly write out a cheque for Faith.

Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House revolves around financial restrictions on wives but Mrs March appears to have her own cheque book and seems to believe the ex-parlour maid can cash the cheque. She also promises the young woman more money if necessary.  

Faith eventually reverts to the role of a stock melodrama bad 'un  who cannot break out of the legal personality and character the law and literature have created for her.

In so doing, she keeps the play within the bounds of the censor - but her comments retain a sharp, barbed, satiric tone which lift the play away from conventional melodrama.

There are other clues planted throughout that all may not be what it seems. When Mr Bly reveals his daughter has never divulged the name of the baby's father, he thinks "the better of her for that".

Mr March replies, "Shake hands, Mr Bly. So do I. Loyalty's loyalty - especially when we men benefit by it."

And as the short three acts continue (unusually for plays now there are two intervals), there's also a further very pleasing modern self-conscious sensibility about theatrical conventions.

The action of the play revolves around family meals and periodic window cleaning or, as Bly says, "Ah! Food and windows! That's life" or Mr March remarks in the final act, "We always seem to be eating!".

Intrigued? We certainly were, and, even if writer John Galworthy was no political radical, our interest was certainly piqued after seeing the play and reading about the circumstances surrounding Galsworthy's own marriage.

Rightly or wrongly, it planted in us a suspicion the Nobel Prize winner's wife, who had a chequered past, may herself have been unfairly characterised by others to fit a feminine and legal stereotype.

Windows sardonically examines a gamut of social and  political issues, not least how women's roles are often defined by literature and the law feeding into each other. It's a green light for a surprisingly worldly and sprightly artistic experiment with form played out over two days in a Highgate drawing room. 

Review Late Company

A compelling dinner party drama laced with dark humour grips Peter Barker with its dissection of parental responsibility and grief. 

Late Company
by Jordan Tannahill

The Blame Game
http://www.atgtickets.com/venues/trafalgar-studios/

Late Company is a searing tale of how adults and their teenage children behave when driven by anger, grief, love, and confusion.

Debora (Lucy Robinson) has arranged a dinner party so that she and her husband Michael (Todd Boyce) will finally meet Bill (Alex Lowe) and Tamara (Lisa Stevenson), as well as their son Curtis (David Leopold), a classmate of the hosts' son  Joel. 

It's a year since, at the age of 16, Joel killed himself leaving heart-broken and uncomprehending parents.

The Canadian playwright Jordan Tannahill sets this  drama in contemporary Toronto where Joel's father Michael is an ambitious Ontario government minister while mother Deborah is an artist, producing challenging  molten metal sculptures.

A work she calls “Thatcher" looks  like a cross between a Francis Bacon painting and a failed chemistry experiment.
 
The son of the guests, Curtis had by his own admission, along with others, bullied Joel, a self-proclaimed gay outsider. 

Debora has taken a leaf out of a psychology self-help book and the dinner is part of the plan inspired by it for all of them to move on. This proves a recipe for disaster.

Yet under the surface charm and social graces,  Robinson in a compelling performance as the grieving Debora is both frightening and fragile. Eventually as the meal progresses, her rage drives the action.

In spite of their barely suppressed sense of superiority beneath a polite exterior, the hosts are wrongfooted when they discover Bill has the same level of university education as Michael. 

Director Michael Yale serves the playwright well, carefully pacing the 75 minutes one act play as Tannahill unravels with skill a complex situation, ranging from the viciously funny to the thoughtful knotting and unknotting of issues and personalities.

Michael is a smooth and initially somewhat unsympathetic politician.

However, Boyce's performance also gradually and effectively conveys his hurt and how deeply he cares matching Debora's vulnerability under her priggishness..

David Leopold as Bill and Tamara's hockey-playing son is a stand out. He captures a teenager's surly intelligence as he is forced to confront the reality of his involvement in a death and watch adults all at sea with the situation. 

His moroseness, insecurity, innocence and finally tenderness become the foil sharpening Debora’s anger and ultimately beginning the process of melting that anger.

As Curtis's father, Lowe gives three-dimensional life to a man dealing straightforwardly with an intractable situation.

Stevenson's Tamara reaches out to Debora. However she finds the total desolation of what has happened too much to handle and here one of the play's most wrenching, visceral truths emerges.    

Late Company is as much, if not more, drama than comedy. However like Mike Leigh's Abigail's Party and Moira Buffini's Dinner, Late Company is driven by a strong woman in a grotesque, self-made situation as the engine for the action. Nevertheless Debora eventually gains the audience's sympathy as a multi-faceted woman. 

Tannahill wrote this play at the age of 23 and it's an impressive, accomplished piece fully deserving its transfer from the Finborough Theatre to Whitehall's Trafalgar Studios.

It's a green light for the twists and turns in this absorbing, stimulating production where the dinner party leads the bereaved couple to discover solace in an unexpected place. 

Review Loot

Loot 
by Joe Orton

It's An Unfair Cop
https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/

When TLT was a little nipper, art lessons at primary school were left to our young imaginations.

Inevitably the drawings and paintings often depicted an open window, a burglar in traditional horizontally striped jumper, mask, flat cap and a sack with LOOT stitched on it in large letters.

What he (and it was always a he) did with the loot and whether he subsequently got away with it, we knew and cared not.

Just the deliciousness of a comic book villain unashamedly carrying a bag proclaiming his misdeeds was enough for TLT and her schoolmates. OK, sometimes it said "SWAG" but mostly it was "LOOT".

There is of course something of the same flavour to Joe Orton's 1960s' farce Loot where two rather older nippers have tunnelled from the local undertakers to the vaults of the neighbouring bank but, here, we are faced with possible CONSEQUENCES.

A staple of amateur and professional theatrical companies up and down the nation, Loot is now given an uneven revival at London's Park Theatre directed by Michael Fentiman on the 50th anniversary of Joe Orton's death.

The two hapless bank robbers (Sam Frenchum as Hal or Harold and Calvin Demba as undertaker's assistant Dennis), unlike TLT's frozen-in-time burglars, have the problem of what to do with the - er - loot.

The play begins in the home of Hal, or rather Hal's father, Mr McLeavy (Ian Redford), a devout Catholic in mourning for Mrs McLeavy, Hal's mother, a stalwart of the WRVS and the Mothers Union. 

A rather over emphatic production starts with the voice of moral crusader Mary Whitehouse. If anything - and we're not sure the play needs such addition -  a news item about The Great Train Robbery would have been more apt.

The boys have stashed the money away in the deceased's coffin - the deceased of course being Hal's mother or "Mum" as a large wreath tells us - while the body ends up in a variety of undignified positions.

Of course there's more to Loot than this. Meanwhile petite feisty blonde Nurse Fay (Sinéad Matthews) is busy seducing the widower, no doubt to add him to her portfolio of ex-husbands - who have also all exited their mortal coils.

Then comes the arrival of Inspector Truscott (Christopher Fulford) of Scotland Yard with the lightest of disguises as an official of the then nationalized Water Board.

This production  proved to be a game of two halves with a much stronger second act.We did feel an abstract towering black, shiny cathedral-like set from Gabriella Slade did the play no favours.

It took a while to orientate ourselves to the fact that we were meant to be in a 1960s' home rather than a funeral parlour or church. However, we were watching from the circle, so it may have seemed more intimate yet surreal from the stalls.

Listening from the circle, there was also some unclear diction in the first act, particularly from Demba and Matthews. Nevertheless this improved 100% in the second act where the cast seemed much more at home with the rhythm of the script and the zingy one-liners finally met their mark.
 
Maybe the household owes something to Galton and Simpson's earlier Steptoe and Son with a son also called Harold and to Billy Liar  and its funeral parlour, as well as Oscar Wilde.

And TLT, having reported on many inquests in her time, knows the treatment of the body (a game Anah Ruddin) is not quite the figment of an outrageous blackly comic imagination as some might think.

What is also interesting about Loot is how, we presume, Orton's criminal conviction as a library book defacer and his experience as a gay man provide a glimpse through the keyhole at the corruption of those in authority in the 1960s before it became headlines many years later: West Midlands and Metropolitan police corruption, council and Catholic Church shenanigans, the Shipman case with the signing of dodgy death certificates.

This provides grist to the mill and heft for sharp black comedy in the fictional situation within the McLeavy household and in the second act a throwaway threat even stretches transatlantically to a political situation across the pond.

Yet  bringing in now more explicit homosexual references takes away some of Loot's artfulness. Secrecy and deceit is intrinsic to the art of a play written because of censorship both in theatre and, to use a BIG word, society.

So there's a rather sluggish first act with a worthier final act. Eventually, this production of Loot just about gets away with it and so we award an amber light. 

Review Against

Against 
by Christopher Shinn

A Silicon Valley Candide
https://almeida.co.uk/

In a world of quicksand, more and more divorced from "real" life by the screen, Luke emerges to tackle Something Big.  

We know tantalizingly little about him. He's a new tech billionaire. He's built his fortune on rockets, solar power, artificial intelligence. He was born abroad and his Dad died when he was young. 

And, he says, God has spoken him directly and told him to go where there is violence. 

Christopher Shinn's new picaresque drama is itself tantalizing and frustrating. It's set in America, a country which has always been an artificial construct of affiliated states. Once, it could be said, the perception of citizens was that the country was bound by the American Dream and family values. 

Now, this play seems to say, it's perceived as bound by motiveless violence and corporatism. As a college student says after a tutorial which has turned from her work to the social network of the tutor, "It feels off".

Shinn has written a play and a series of encounters where everything feels "off", where technology and higher education instead of increasing discovery and a sense of community makes everyone, whether they like it or not, adopt a self-enclosing agenda.

Ben Whishaw plays Luke who grows  literally more and more self-conscious as the story progresses. He's not so much a messiah as an ideal of neutrality and empathy which in the end he cannot possibly sustain.

In a world increasingly dominated by the binary and virtual reality which nevertheless cannot deny the frailty of flesh, Luke emerges unknowable and yet a human being brought up in strange times. 

A world where everyone can tell competing stories but many feel they have no voice. A world of ruthless competition, often under an over-polite exterior.  

Luke's journey starts in his own workplace and ends in the corporate warehouse of a business rival. His encounters begin with the parents of a schoolboy who has gone on the rampage at his school. 

Then a prison where a prisoner has become a victim. Here he also meets the gun-toting father of a child abused by a basketball coach before he moves on to a college campus with a history of mishandlng complaints of rape where a student latches on to him. 

He then listens patiently to the Big Ideas of a client of a drug dealer. His journey ends in an Amazon-like warehouse where the employees, at the mercy of an arbitrary hierachy where many are bosses but nobody is the boss, wear Guantanamo orange polo shirts packing goods and pricing them.

If this all sounds intangible, TLT has done her job in conveying what Against feels like. It has the sterile atmosphere of a human being, the undoubtedly delicately charismatic Whishaw, enmeshed in a computer game going from level to level. 

As is TLT's wont, she wondered whether it would work better on screen. Yet the play, directed by Ian Rickson, does remain, or maybe is pulled back to be, distinctly theatrical in shape even if it starts with a typical police procedural or TV news story crime scene. 

But, despite the fine performances and a structure shaped for the stage, it's also deeply unsatisfying at a rather deep psychological as well as theatrical level.  Maybe it's because it manipulates vocabulary and character in a rather algorithmic way.

Besides Whishaw, there's intricately calibrated work from Naomi Wirthner's anguished mother of a killer,  Kevin Harvey as a rather dangerous professor in charge of student minds, Adelle Leonce as a conflicted warehouse worker, Emma D'Arcy as the student who becomes a boy scoutish acolyte of Luke and Fehinti Balogun, as the fellow student of the school shooter, who admits to trying to manipulate his friend's emotions.   

There's pared back design by ULTZ using the brick walls of the  Almeida - a simple wooden floor, often only chairs and eventually a white bed rising up in the second act keep it simple. 

Yet this is a play and a Candide-like fable in the end held together by characters and their traits while the plot remains not just elusive but irritatingly so. It's an amber light.

Review The Odyssey

An adaptation of The Odyssey with a bijou cast and inventive outdoor staging delights Peter Barker.

The Odyssey
Adapted by Phil Willmott From Samuel Butler's Translation Of The Ancient Greek

More Hit Than Myth
http://bit.ly/TheOdysseyTheScoop

Mythic characters from ancient Greek literature spring to life in this year's free open-air performance at The Scoop amphitheatre on the South Bank by London City Hall

The Odyssey is a Greek epic attributed to Homer. Now writer/director Phil Willmott has adapted Samuel Butler's Victorian translation and presents a fast-moving, enjoyable version of The Odyssey in three parts, each lasting one hour with intervals in between.

Unless London experiences a Greek summer weather-wise, warm clothing and a thermos of something hot or cash for food and drink stall purchases are recommended. Cushions and blankets are available for rental - otherwise again bring your own. 

The first part during the early evening, A Great Big Greek Adventure, is pitched at children.

Odysseus, the poet king of Ithaca, played by a muscular bearded Henry Wyrley-Birch, leads his band of warriors to victory against the Trojans before the homeward-bound journey to the strains of The Lightning Seeds's Three Lions with the words slightly adapted - "The Greeks Are Going Home".

The Power of Love, the second part at sunset leads us into the dangerous enchantments of the bewitching Sirens and seductive goddesses trying to tempt Odysseus and his ship’s crew who struggle to keep on course for Ithaca.

Finally night-time brings The Homecoming. Years have passed and Odysseus returns to Ithaca, only to have to fend off many suitors for Queen Penelope before reunion with his wife and the son who has grown up in his absence

Wilmott directs a pacey production with a versatile cast. Nine players playing multiple characters and breaking the fourth wall when they become a chorus commenting on events.

The three-level plywood set, painted with a map of the Aegean, designed by Philip Edolls has a pop-up feel. The styling with costumes by Penn O'Gara and the choreography of movement director Francesca Bridge-Cicic are also reminiscent of easy-to-understand cartoon versions of the Greek myths created for children,.

Staging, with lighting by Phil Supple and sound by composer Theo Holloway, is done with small resources but much imagination.

Odysseus and his crew's encounter with the many-headed sea monster Scylla - Lawrence Boothman - and the giant Cyclops - Lincoln James - encompasses inventive physical theatre as well as puppetry. Billowing blue sheets conjure up the clash with the sea god Poseidon while the battle where Queen Penelope's numerous suitors are driven off is both ingenious and magical.

Rebecca Laydoo is a dignified and beautiful Penelope while Adrian Decosta proves his versatility as Oydysseus's loyal son Telemachus while also winning the audience's hearts on all fours (mostly) as Odysseus's loyal playful dog Argos.

Molly Crookes makes a blonde and lithe goddess Athena and PK Taylor is both the sea witch Circe and Odysseus grown old. However the cast are an ensemble and plaudits must also go to Toyin Ayedun-Alase and Alec Porter who equally take on several different roles.

The Odyssey at The Scoop is certainly a pleasure to watch with an easy-going drop in and out ethos where anyone can choose to stay, leave and then even return again (like Odysseus!) at will.
.
This is fun evening, that passes far quicker than its three-and-a-half-hour running time. It's highly recommended for families, children and adults. And, just as good, it’s free, so it's definitely a green light!

Review Salad Days

Salad Days
Book & Lyrics By Julian Slade and Dorothy Reynolds
Music By Julian Slade

Dancing In The Park
http://www.uniontheatre.biz/

In 1955, so Wikipedia tells your theatregoing duo,  The Pajama Game won the award for Best Musical. However, tellingly, British musical Salad Days received the award for Most Enjoyable Show.

With an original story by Julian Slade and Dorothy Reynolds, Salad Days evokes nostalgically a fantastical 1920s' world around a well-connected toff and his equally upper class female pal. Although the latter, while a university graduate like her male counterpart, is destined for debutante balls and marriage rather than an influential public role.

Sunny-natured Lowri Hamer and gawky Laurie Denman make a fetching pair of chaste yet fun-loving graduates, Jane and Timothy.

They master the musical's restrained yet joyous style with Hamer's strength being a lucid soprano while Joanne McShane's choreography makes the most of Denman's windmill athleticism.

Jane and Timothy however defect from the destiny mapped out for them and search for a job on their own, well before the age of uni careers advice, online recruitment, zero hours contacts and Uber.

The two emerge from the idyllic years at, presumably, Cambridge University, throwing their lot together on a railway platform after graduation - cue the lovely duet "We Said We Wouldn't Look Back." The two like-minded chums subsequently also secretly contract a romantic, yet still rather convenient, marriage.

Lo and behold, in London they find themselves temporary caretakers on £7 a week for Minnie, an unlicensed magic piano, the plinking plonking notes of which incite a viral outbreak of rebellious dancing in everybody who hears them, "Oh Look At Me, I'm Dancing".

This all signals the start of some amazing earth- and air-bound adventures within a revue sketch structure.

The beauty parlour scene with Jane's mother Lady Raeburn (Sophie Millett) on the (non mobile) phone could have come straight out of a Joyce Grenfell sketch.

Yet the second act segues into Cleopatra nightclub (after all, the musical is named after a line from Shakespeare's Anthony and Cleopatra and Timothy's uncles seem to have "Egyptian" connections).

Meanwhile a scene reminiscent of sci-fi classic The Day The Earth Stood Still transforms Maeve Byrne's vocally statuesque nightclub singer into a space alien.

A mention of 1950s movie bad girl Diana Dors brings in another futuristic note to a musical otherwise populated with good 1920s upper class gals like Jane and Fiona (Francesca Pim). 

Designer Catherine Morgan transforms the Union Theatre space into a cross between an English park and a Coronation street party with colourful bunting, a wooden bench and graceful twirly white seats reminiscent of the original (English!) Mary Shephard illustrations for Mary Poppins on an expanse of manicured green lawn. 

Add to this, Mike Lees' delightful costumes crisscrossing the decades to arrive at the 1950s with a detour again with Emma Lloyd's Rowena first into Mary Poppins' gingham territory and then capitalizing on the script's Wizard of Oz reference to produce a yellow road Dorothy in the second act mash up.    

On first blush, directed by Bryan Hodgson, Salad Days is a quaint, frothy fairytale asserting Englishness in an uncertain era when the United States had come to police the world and dominate the entertainment business.

Maybe the subversive notes also emerge more clearly in the Gilbert and Sullivan-like Hush Hush with Karl Moffatt playing one of a variety of Timothy's string-pulling, influential uncles.

"Don't ever ask where the Empire's gone ... Double cross your double locks ... Never reveal your age or sex .. Don't ever ask what the war was for/It's hush hush."

Equally so with the singing and dancing of the police inspector (Stephen Patrick) and his subordinate PC Boot (Tom Norman) to whom, we're told, the buck is always passed for the nefarious goings on in the park.

Salad Days evokes an innocent Zuleika Dobson world mixed with cheerful, if rather upper class, costermongery influenced by Noel Gay and Vivian Ellis, as well as Noel Coward and Ivor Novello. However there is also a light touch but very definite patina of Cold War, sexual and old-boy-network politics.

It of course also pre-dated the jolly ambience in American movie musical Mary Poppins, similarly endowed with an English park ethos 😉, and held the fort for British musicals until the onset of Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop and then record-breaking Oliver!.

The show reflects its Bristol Old Vic origins, where musical director Julian Slade and actress Dorothy Reynolds built the musical Salad Days around the talents of their company.

The catchy songs here have a charming simplicity and directness played by musical director Elliot Styche's three-piece band with actor musicians Tom Self, Laurie Denman and Lewis McBean variously on piano accompanied by bass and drums.

This is a cheerful piece reflecting a mix of seemingly traditional flapper musical with the concerns of 1950s Britain within a weather vane summer confection.  The digs at the status quo are sly but never undermine the musical's jolly, fresh air ambience as a family show.

Even though Monty Python's Flying Circus famously and bloodily lampooned Salad Days, surely the groundbreaking 1960s and 1970s satiric sketch show owes something to its dancing and hugging police officers?   Ah, that was the musical that was 😉! An upper range tuneful and sunshiny  amber light!

Review The Boot

Peter Barker is amused by a new angle on a love triangle when a husband decides to spice up his wife's sex life.

The Boot
by Peter Briffa

Swingtime
https://www.unrestrictedview.co.uk/the-boot/

A sex comedy with a twist, The Boot is a neat one-act piece which at 50 minutes doesn't outstay its welcome.

White-haired Bill describes he and his younger, curvily attractive wife Julie as "swingers". but at the same time has to admit that their own sex life has fallen into the doldrums.

However when he meets an old flame of Julie, Germanic hunk Ray, in the car park while shopping at a certain Swedish furniture store, he makes an indecent proposal, changing the course of his marriage.    

The Boot is an undemanding, but enjoyable new play performed as part of the Camden Fringe at the Hen and Chickens Theatre.

There are quite a few laughs in The Boot, directed by Paul Blinkhorn, and an intriguing plot, even if I found the ending rather unclear. Yet the theatrical journey to it made my own trip to the theatre worthwhile.

Looking back, some of the plot points seem a little implausible but in performance they do work. Derek Hicks as scouser Bill, Fiona McKinnon as Julie and Michael Wagner as Ray kept my attention giving nearly an hour of amusement.   

It's a conventional, linear, easy to watch piece with a few surprises along the way. I saw the first performance and there were a few hiccups - hesitancy over some lines and the scene changes on the minimal set need to be quicker.

McKinnon makes a slinkily sexy Julie (even when wearing a surgical boot!) while Wagner has a charming presence in his stage debut as Ray but needs at times to project his voice more.

Briffa’s script goes from car park to car boot sale, never taking itself too seriously, delivering some funny moments and allowing the hidden baggage to emerge. 

While there's solid staging by director Blinkhorn, keeping it simple with a back backdrop and few props, it did occur to me that this is a play with radio potential.

It manages to give a conventional dramatic trope an unclichéd makeover, keeping me entertained, so it's an amber light for a play that runs until Sunday, August 20th

Review 13 The Musical

13 The Musical
Music & Lyrics by Jason Robert Brown
Book By Dan Elish & Robert Horn

Your Town Becomes Our Town
http://bit.ly/13themusical

There's a young newcomer in an Indiana town at Dan Quayle Junior High and within this institution's walls are the jocks, the popular girls (aka mean girls), the nerds and the geeks - and now there's Evan.

13 is probably every fish-out-of-water comedy drama/sitcom and middle and high school musical you've ever seen (or not seen) with a touch of South Park to boot.

Yet this is a true children's musical -  all the roles are the age of the title - and the show therefore relies on the charm of its cast.

Luckily the present production has a cast, directed and skilfully choreographed by Ewan Jones, with spadefuls of it, even as the show itself lays on the clichés in digger truck loads.

Evan is just about to turn 13 and apart from a zit or two, life seems unproblematic in metropolitan Manhattan. Then pow! His parents divorce and kapow! His mother whisks him off, for unexplained reasons, to Appleton, Indiana.

At 13 such problems may be magnified into a horror movie in teenage minds (there's Carrie, that other high school musical to verify that). 

So we follow Evan, hailed and then derided as "the Brain" and two other young misfit Indiana natives, Patrice and Archie, in their various The Wonder Years' missteps and victories until everyone gets their priorities sorted and are ready to start on the business of Life with a capital L.

Milo Panni makes an exceptionally cute Evan who finds himself the victim of his own schemes to make himself popular. Madeline Banbury as fellow outcast Patrice proves a polished, confident performer right from her first solo "The Lamest Place In The World".

Ethan Quinn, previously seen in Ragtime, is an engagingly kooky Archie, a cross between Tiny Tim, the lame boy in the Pied Piper of Hamelin and a dark-humoured stand up comedian in "Get Me What I Need".and "Terminal Illness".

There's able support from Lewis Ledlie as the school jock and Chloe Endean as the school's cheerleading object of desire. Isabelle Pappas also delivers the goods as the jealous friend whose power of rumour mongering in "It Can't Be True" would be the envy of many an underhand politician 

There's an entertaining-in-its-own-right backdrop (along the lines of Saul Steinberg's famous New Yorker cover) design from Tom Paris and excellent lighting and sound from Edward Pagett and Andrew Johnson.   

Now the nitpicking.This production embraces the conventional tropes of the high school genre, life-and-soul-of-the-party popularity, "All Hail The Brain!", finding who your true friends are. "

But maybe the clever ceremonial but heartfelt message and juxtaposition in Becoming A Man in the midst of acrimonious divorcing parents "I don't know what a man means/The rule book grows, but noone knows/What all the rules allow" and the final "A Little More Homework to do"  become a bit lost.

There was also a bit of unevenness in diction with a couple of the male leads at the beginning which did wear away as the show progressed. There was certainly a good balance between Chris Ma's four-piece band of keyboards, guitar, bass and drums.

But this is  TLT and her (sole) automotive clique member being picky, This is an intricate show, needing spot-on timing, mastered well by an accomplished young cast.

It's certainly an enjoyable show with enough edge (especially in the light of current events in the USA) to keep a wide age range entertained during the school summer holidays and it's a green light.