Imagine This

Maryam Philpott, a historian, regular blogger  and theatre reviewer. She now joins the TLT team and finds a musical charting one of the Second World War's darkest hours is hampered by a clumsy handling of its themes.

Imagine This
Book by Glenn Berenbeim
Music by Shuki Levy
Lyrics by David Goldsmith

Love Among The Ruins
http://www.uniontheatre.biz/

One of the most terrible and doomed of wartime circumstances, The Warsaw Ghetto, provides the backdrop for the musical Imagine This.

War and theatre have of course a long history together through Julius Caesar to Journey's End and beyond.  Yet theatre has always also provided an outlet for raising the morale of those experiencing the conflict at first hand.

During the First World War, for instance, servicemen started concert parties, putting on a range of entertainments  including all-male revues and the Royal Navy even had dedicated theatre ships pulling alongside warships, allowing men to board and watch a show.

Book writer Glenn Berenbeim with composer Shuki Levy and lyricist David Goldsmith have taken the idea of theatre instilling hope for the civilians caught up in Nazi atrocities.

Daniel Warshowsky, the head of a family and a theatre company, is imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto alongside hundreds and thousands of other Jews driven inside its barbed wire by the Nazis.

In 1942 Daniel is spurred on by justified fears the Nazis have plans to crush them further. He encourages family and friends to put on a clearly allegorical play about the Jews persecuted by the mighty Roman Empire in the desert settlement of Masada.

Initially roused by the idea, the players start to hope for a better future. However their company is disrupted by the sudden arrival of resistance fighter on-the-run Adam.

They give him a starring role to shelter him, but he also forces them to confront stark realities and decide whether to continue with the play and its message of hope or to take another course of action.

Imagine This is a strange compression of two semi-independent stories as the audience watches the cast preparing for the show in the bleak surrounds of the ghetto and then putting on the Roman story as a musical within a musical.

Director Harry Blumenau manages the transitions fairly seamlessly, clearly emphasising the areas where art and life begin to overlap which adds moments of poignancy and purpose to the odd construction.

Yet the ancient story of the Jewish rebels somehow feels more believable and encourages greater audience investment.

Some of the songs here are well-staged including Masada in which the local community vows to defend themselves against the advancing professional army.

Kevan Allen’s choreography uses the rhythmic beating of sticks to suggest a powerful stomping force approaching, while the arrangement of the cast in the Union Theatre's small space gives the impression of greater crowds on both sides.

The rebel story also has a credible love story at its heart. Lauren James Ray is the young Jewish woman who, despite herself, falls in love with Shaun McCourt’s Roman General Silva, the two then togther attempting to prevent further bloodshed.

Their duets Far From Here, Far From Now and I Surrender have a sweet charm, lending genuine feeling to their romance. However, they are also the only characters the audience gets to know well, although Rob Hadden’s Rufus as the Roman Emperor's tribune does make an intriguing villain.

By contrast, the ghetto scenes have much less impact than the Masada musical-within-a-musical and feel much stagier.

As actor-manager Daniel, Nicky Wyschna has considerable presence and sings well. Nevertheless the non-musical acting between the songs is awkward, the scenes lack tension and any real sense of the danger they all face.

Jonny Muir’s Captain Blick skilfully manages to avoid Nazi stereotypes, suggesting a man who enjoys culture and has some feeling for Rebecca, but a collection of supporting characters barely make their mark.

While this is primarily a problem with the show itself (this is a revival following a shortlived première in 2008), it seems a shame the elements of a true story, filled with potential darkness and hopelessness, aren't used more meaningfully.

There are also times when the voices do get lost beneath the volume of the band under the direction of Alex Williams. Nevertheless there are some genuinely engaging moments, particularly when the company performs in unison with striking effect. 

The same harmony, though, eludes the structure and themes of the musical. Imagine This fails to exploit the constant battle between optimism and realism, embodied in the contrasting figures of the actor and the resistance fighter.

War and theatre may be closely linked, but Imagine This never manages to  reconcile its two plots satisfactorily, undermining the signficance of the musical's conclusion, and it's an amber light.

Review Young Marx

Young Marx
by Richard Bean and Clive Coleman

Kapital, My Dear Karl, Kapital!
https://bridgetheatre.co.uk/

Hey, it's Young Marx at the new Bridge Theatre, hot on the heels of Young Frankenstein over at The Garrick! The first season at London's latest theatre, a commercial venture but springboarded, some might say, from advantages gained at the publicly funded National Theatre.

This new play by former stand up and writer of One Man, Two Guvnors, Richard Bean and BBC legal correspondent cum playwright Clive Coleman takes seriously Marx's dictum, "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce". Even if the shift in tone to tragedy is in reverse order and comes quite late in Young Marx.

Before that huge beard, Prussian-born "the Jew" Karl Heinrich Marx (Rory Kinnear) is living in London in 1850 with his aristocratic wife Jenny Von Westphalen (Nancy Carroll) and their two young children, frail Guido, known as Fawksy, (played on alternate nights by Logan Clark, Rupert Turnbull or Joseph Walker) and feisty piano-playing little Jenny (Dixie Egerickx, Matilda Shapland or Harriet Turnbull). Also with last, but certainly not least, a loyal maidservant (Laura Elphinstone).

Constantly on the breadline, Marx is also constantly one step ahead  - often by hiding in cupboards! - of a Prussian spy (Fode Simbo), London bobbies (Joseph Wilkins as Sergeant Savage), the family's landlord and the bailiffs, pawning his wife's family's silver.

Meawhile he and his friend,wealthy industrialist patron and fellow political philosopher Friedrich Engels (Oliver Chris) form a political and (almost) a musical hall double act.

Hm, TLT prides herself as a reviewer with both a bourgeois and proletarian sense of humour (Yes! All at the same time!). My, how she and her exploited but cooperative automotive sidekick laughed many years ago when they read a cartoon version of Marxist philosophy.

Young Marx tries awfully hard to be funny and there are also plenty of facts and pseudo-facts (as far as  nittypicky TLT is aware, the allegation of an illegitimate child's paternity is unproven and, while Marx is commonly regarded as Jewish, he was a baptized Lutheran).

Obviously the story does insert details which are specific to the Marx household and its economy but over two hours and 20 minutes, we did wonder if other famous people could be inserted and loose and fast "facts" changed with little difficulty.

Young Dickens, for example, dashing like Bill Sykes over the roofs of Mark Thompson's rather fetching three-dimensional revolving set, complete with swirls of smoke from the chimneys. A Tiny Tim in Karl and Jenny's little boy Fawksy and Dickens's lover Nelly Ternan as the bit on the side? Yes, it's a different story (Marx stayed with his wife) combining fact and fiction, but somehow, there is something template-ish about this piece.

Indeed Young Marx struck us as more of a series of sketches, a League of Marxist Gentlemen, very well-acted, given pace by Nicholas Hytner's direction and the music of Grant Olding. But nothing particularly hilarious and side-splitting or insightful.

There was only one point where we really thought there going to be a humorous lift off with satiric bite - the arrival of a whelk stall owner gving a telling dissection of how she is bound in a torturous (read: privatised) economic supply chain. However, like Oliver Twist, we waited for more which never came.         

Still, it's a spacious, airy, pleasant new building on the South Bank and there's an extensive future programme of new writing including the talented Barney Norris's Nightfall and, next, its first foray into the classics with a promenade version of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. So plenty to look forward to but needs dictate we give our verdict on Young Marx and it's an amber light. 

Review Demons

Demons
From The Book By Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dramatised by Peter Stürm

The Revolution Will Be Dramatised
http://www.splitmoontheatre.org/repertory/demons/
 
Tackling Fyodor Dostoevsky's Demons for a stage production is always going to be a mighty task. Inspired by an 1860s' real-life murder case of student murdered by his fellow nihilist revolutionaries, the novel prophetically warns of the dangers of fanatical ideologies.

Peter Stürm, artistic director of  SplitMoon theatre company, is the latest artiste to grapple with this sprawling satiric work in a patchy production at St Leonard's Church in Shoreditch, London.

On the plus side, there's no lack of ambition in this modern dress production with its parade of carnivalesque grotesques.  There are strong actors in the cast, Jeffrey Kissoon, Samuel Collings, Timothy Allsopp and Valerie Grogan, and some beautiful work on lighting, although the lighting designer is unnamed in the programme

St Leonard's Church is magnificent, a venue fittingly reflecting Doestoevsky's religious preoccupations. It could have been a glorious setting and audience experience for a carefully thought-out production.

Unfortunately, the pluses are outweighed by the minuses in what turns out  to be a gruelling and jumbled three hours for the audience, shepherded from nave of the church to various other rooms, up and down staircases.

The problems start with the church's acoustics - audibility is a major issue, even sitting up close. The sound is better when the action moves to the smaller rooms.

The play's framework, as far as TLT could grasp,  is that of a court case, the story of a botched uprising then told in flashback. What happens between the beginning and the end? It was often hard to grasp and there's something amiss when one needs to consult the programme's description of characters in order to try and work out what is going on.

There is a possiblity of some spectacular staging - the image of a duel on one balcony watched by the audience on the opposite balcony sticks in the mind. However it was impossible to follow a narrative line.

Collings as the manipulative, amoral Stavrogin is undoubtedly charismatic and Kissoon makes an impact as both a bishop and also Stravrogin's intellectual mentor. However, this feels like a tangled production, with only occasional moments of clarity where basic technical problems could have been solved beforehand,

While Dostoevsky is famously wordy, the script could do with some filleting to allow more of both the subtlety and the bold satiric humour to emerge.  This seems like a script  shoehorned into the space rather than tailor-made.

It made TLT wonder whether in another space, more convenient for the audience and actors, this particular production would have worked better. However, as it is, this is a frustrating experience for the audience, sealing a red light. 

Review Witness For The Prosecution

Francis Beckett relishes the legal shenanigans of a classic courtroom drama in a venue haunted by the ghosts of London's political past. 

Witness for the Prosecution
By Agatha Christie

A Hanging Offence
https://www.witnesscountyhall..com/

One of crime writer Agatha Christie's most famous plays is being performed in the splendid debating chamber where, from 1922 to 1986, the London County Council and then the Greater London Council met and took decisions for the capital.

It’s an atmospheric venue of the right period for both the 1925 short story and the 1953 popular stage version Witness For The Prosecution.

A young man is charged with the murder of a wealthy spinster and subsequent events display all the Christie bag of tricks: suspense, betrayal, a plot with as many twists and turns as a fairground ride.

The stakes are high, for in 1953 we still hanged people for murder. Agatha Christie, as playwright, does a thoroughly professional job and, without doing anything at all profound, Witness For The Prosecution certainly holds the attention.

The present production has assured and imaginative direction from Lucy Bailey and set designer William Dudley makes sensitive use of what the venue gives him.

A first class cast is headed by David Yelland as Sir Wilfred Robarts QC, counsel for the defence. 

Yelland has this old-style QC just right: vain, stately and instinctively, but not unkindly, snobbish. He calls the accused man by his unadorned surname, expecting the working class man to call him Sir Wilfred. But he's also a lawyer who cares about people and about justice.

Patrick Godfrey makes a wonderful, crackling, elderly judge and Philip Franks a sinister, sneering prosecution barrister. Jack McMullen manages brilliantly to make the twists and turns of the accused man almost believable and Catherine Steadman is superb as his wife.

The cross-examinations may sometimes seem rather ham-fisted with Sir Wilfred a bit slow to see what is before his eyes. But, without them, the author couldn’t have given us the next twist in the plot. The end justifies the means.

Walking into the chamber, you pass walls which have, engraved in them, fading lists of great politicians who once ruled London: famous names of the recent past  - Herbert Morrison, Christopher Chataway, Ashley Bramall, Ken Livingstone. They are a reminder of a time when the building belonged to Londoners.

Once inside, you also get to watch that fine character actor Richard Attlee, who doubles as clerk to Sir Wilfred and a police surgeon and is probably best known as Kenton Archer in The Archers.

By an excruciating irony, he is also the grandson of Clement Attlee, Britain’s post Second World War Labour Prime Minister. Attlee had a healthy respect for local democracy and the denizens of the building that glowers across the Thames at the House of Commons.

He would have been horrified to see the fate that has befallen the building. For in 1986, Margaret Thatcher evicted London's elected representatives and sold the splendid building to a private company. It now houses restaurants, fast food outlets, hotels, that sort of thing.

When Londoners got their government back, it was exiled to a small novelty building, sloping like a plastic replica of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. So, one really good reason for going to see Witness for the Prosecution is that it’s one of the few chances you’ll get to see how much more dignified London government once was.

You also get to follow Agatha Christie's well-constructed play, still an audience pleaser, with the capacity to spring surprises.

If you’ve seen an earlier stage or screen version, you'll  know what’s coming, but go anyway – this production is as good as it gets.  A green light for a walk through history and a good evening in the theatre.

Review Insignificance

Insignificance
by Terry Johnson

Starry, Starry Night
https://www.arcolatheatre.com/

Who is imagining whom in Terry Johnson's flirtatiously symbolic 1982 piece Insignificance where Hollywood, politics, science and professional sport all collide?

On an evening in 1954 in a New York hotel room, the heavy-drinking Senator (Tom Mannion) is confronting the German-born Professor (Simon Rouse), denigrating him as a "Yid".

However, the politician is shrewd enough in his small-minded way to understand the capital to be had from the celebrity scientist's attendance to promote the profile of the House Of UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings.

And after the senator temporarily leaves, whoosh! In blows the platinum blonde actress (Alice Bailey Johnson). She, in turn, is eventually pursued by her heavy-hitter, in all senses of the word, sportsman husband (Oliver Hemborough).

It is of course rather disingenuous of your starstruck reviewer, who is not even  a front for anybody's organisation or cartel 😉, to leave the characters unnamed.

Except she is following the example of the playwright. For Johnson carefully keeps his toolbox of characters representative, cherry picking and jumbling details of many lives hooked in to the recognizable celebrity images who inhabit the space-time continuum in the play's Manhattan hotel room.

In this 1950s' parallel universe we cannot know if we are confronted by the spitting images of or the "real" Nobel prize winning scientist Albert Einstein,  Hollywood sex bomb Marilyn Monroe and legendary sportsman Joe DiMaggio.

Meanwhile the 1950s' villain-in-chief Senator Joe McCarthy sometimes also has difficulty separating the Hollywood double from the real thing.

Are we to believe it is a biographical episode? Is it a honeytrap using a Hollywood sex symbol to force a chain reaction for the naming of names during the Red Scare?

What is significant and what is insignificant?

Originally premièred at the Royal Court directed by Lee Waters with Judy Davis, Ian McDiarmid, Larry Lamb and William Hootkins, some aspects of Insignificance now feel dated.

The concept of starry icons brought down to earth is no longer a novel one. Bio-plays and films are now all the rage. In our internet age, imagining encounters between famous people in out-of-character circumstances does not feel outrageous.

Still, Johnson's kaleidoscope still does have something to say in our times where the precarious nature of America's celebrity shop window royalty is even more apparent.

However David Mercatali's production seems uncertain and is uneven in quality.   

The first act has some wavering accents and an opaque scientific (literally) Mickey Mouse demonstration which doesn't completely convince. To be fair, though, we are generations on from audiences knowing Walt Disney truly once was the conveyor of popular science to the masses, so maybe some of the double-edgedness is lost.

The cast feels much more at home with the emotional truths of the second act than the caricatural media images of the first.

However one act needs to bat against the other, politically, historically and dramatically, for the play to succeed. In short, the chain reaction doesn't consistently spark here and it's an amber light.

Review Anything That Flies

Anything That Flies
by Judith Burnley

The Past Is Another Country
http://www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk/

Anything That Flies is an ambitious little play on the refugee experience, setting its sights on huge topics within a domestic milieu which slips and slides into the fantastical.

German-born Otto Huberman is a curmudgeonly, whiskey-supping Jewish widower, living alone in a North West London flat, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall and his grown up child's emigration to Israel.

His life is disrupted by the arrival of a new carer -  unexpectedly a matronly but also softly attractive blonde German hausfrau apparently sent by his daughter to look after him following a stroke.

The play, directed by Alice Hamilton, charts the ups and downs of an enforced relationship between the two and an attempt to come to terms with a past they are unable to reconcile either as separate individuals or in relation to each other.

Oscar both faces and evades his past, the unjust fate meted out to his kin who nevertheless always protected him and helped him board a Noah's Ark to safety.

Behind his bristling belligerance and, in many ways, justified snobbery about his achievements as a cultured inventor and innovator, he is wracked by his own failings as a human being which, in other more normal life circumstances, he might have allowed himself to push entirely aside. 

Lottie, a minor German aristocrat from an estate in the former Eastern Germany, throws herself into making his life more comfortable, while sometimes overlooking more basic, practical needs, also idolizing her childhood English governess who in reality deserted her ward in disturbing circumstances.

In our Brexit age some descendants of Jewish German speaking refugees are considering taking up citizenship of their ancestors' homeland for a variety of motives, but this play in its present form, tackling previous displacement, belonging and attempts at reparation,  feels like a missed opportunity.

TLT thought she could detect some slight hints of complexity and irony in the text. However this production has a tendency to flatten these and the result is the implication of probably unintended conclusions.

At the same time the script does it no favours failing to flag up more patently a cleverer, and very much more human, mix of successful entrepreneur, male chauvinist and guilty survivor.

Otto's repeating, for instance, of an old canard levelled against those who  stayed in Germany comes over as a fact rather than what could be an aggressive survival mechanism on his part in his new homeland.

He outwardly dismisses his family's powerlessness to leave, even before the Second World War's outbreak, not only within the National Socialist regime but in the context of an outside world, including Britain, which often closed its doors to Jewish refugees.

Emily Adamson and Neil Irish's set is a nicely understated but detailed Belsize Park flat.  Clive Merrison as the wily, lascivious, mercurial Otto and Issy Van Randwyck as the carer, Lottie, equally needy for completely different reasons, with her own infatuations and obsessions, both give vivid and vivacious performances.

However they are hampered by an unbalanced dramatic framework, reducing distressing complexity to simplistic stereotype and playing to conventional assumptions about heroes and villains in the Second World War.

There's potential in Judith Burnley's one act drama and the possibility of a distinctive voice emerging. She certainly has a take on refugee technical innovation and its relationship to continental Europe and the former Soviet Union which distinguishes her work from, for example, Stephen Poliakoff.

However, at the moment, her grasp of the entanglements and ramifications is not matched by a playwright's technical, structural skill and it's an amber light.  

Review Fishskin Trousers

A beguiling tale, drawing on folk myth and 20th century history, alternately intrigues and frustrates reviewer Peter Barker.  

Fishskin Trousers
by Elizabeth Kuti

Catching The Waves
https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/

Fishskin Trousers weaves together a trio of monologues from three characters spanning hundreds of years .

Mab (Jessica Carroll) is a medieval serving woman in a castle on the East Anglian coast who develops a fascination for a wild supernatural creature which the local fishermen trap in their nets.

Ben (Brett Brown) is a 1970s' Australian scientist, haunted by his past, working to combat the Soviet threat during  the Cold War. Yet he begins to wonder whether there is a supernatural reason for the strange noises interfering with a radar system.

Hauling the play into the net of our times,  Mog (Eva Traynor) is a teacher from the current century who finds herself having to make a tough decision after a love affair ends unhappily. Yet her tale also unwittingly echoes and is inextricably linked with the past.   

Their voices all emerge from the same location - the real-life Sussex fishing village of Orford and mysterious island of Orford Ness. 

Each character from a different era era shares his or her experience with the audience, psychologically and physically separate from each other, yet intertwined.

Fishskin Trousers weaves together myth, psychology and history to give a sense of the uncanny combined with earthy personal dilemmas. However the dependence on storytelling alone proves a double edged sword.    

This production, a revival of the play's première four years ago when it achieved considerable success with the same director and cast, has an ingenious idea at its heart and poignant moments.

The play seeks to map out the psychic geography of three emotionally lost people's lives, as well as evoking the physical atmosphere swirling around them.

Nevertheless it does feel very static, which also emphasizes the unevenness within the drama, breaking the mystery and the poetic language's spell.

The archaic language with  thick local accent of the servant Mab does rather distract, bordering on parody, although Jessica Carroll's performance is undoubtedly characterful.

There are also strong performances from Brett Brown as researcher Ben and Eva Traynor as tormented schoolteacher Mog. 

The staging is minimal, a boulder enclosed by a circle of shingle with the lone additon of a visual soundwave on the backdrop. The unravelling of the stories do draw the audience in but for me, it felt like a play more suited to radio.

The resolution is neat, ingenious and satisfying with the qualities of a good ghost story. But the monologues sometimes seem unbalanced with, for example, the opening monologue from Mab being very long.

Overall, this felt like a very promising rather than a fully achieved set of monologues and play. It  might also have been interesting to bring in more choreography.

There was much to admire but my interest in the characters waxed and waned like the sound and sea waves and it's an amber light.   

Review Albion

Albion
by Mike Bartlett

Stab In The Book
 https://almeida.co.uk/

Successful entrepreneur Audrey Walters gives up a life in metropolitan London, buying back a family home amid the birdsong of  the English countryside, bringing cynical but supportive husband Paul and Cambridge graduate daughter Zara in tow.

She becomes evangelical in her rather desperate mission to revive a once-celebrated garden created in the twilight decades of the British Empire and remembered from her youth in the 1970s.

Albion is a strange, bitter mishmash which strives to be a weighty history and state-of-the nation drama. In fact, for TLT and her own 21st state-of-the-art motorised sidekick, it felt rather dated despite the insertion of a few Brexit references.

Audrey (Victoria Hamilton), having founded an apparently flourishing furnishings business, appears to have had her head turned in a Bovaryesque way by literary romance and a very British deluded concept of family heritage.

She rushes in where many a lesser soul would fear to tread and becomes an unwitting agent of change in the village.

From the title, Albion, an ancient name for Britain also adopted by Romantic poet William Blake, you might expect an exploration of Britishness. However Mike Bartlett's drama deals more in on-the-nose (or should that be nosegay?!) metaphors and token gestures towards its many themes. 

There are plenty of literary references but nothing to copyright home about. It could have been an agile, sly but touching satire. However it becomes a scattergun, lumbering play with contrived conflicts and simplistic viewpoints.

Directed by Rupert Goold most of the characters - and they are explicitly identified with past literature and a rather troubling ultimate identification of the feminine with novelistic insanity without any proper context  - give expositional speeches.

That's all, except for Audrey's bestselling novelist friend Katherine (Helen Schlesinger) whose words, in contrast  need to be treated with caution. As with Audrey's business, the nature of Katherine's talent and her financial set up appear somewhat hazy. However she appears to churn out novels with romantic aplomb without an editor or any such mundane publishing accoutrements.

Zara (the name of a shop! the name of a royal!) has aspirations to be - what else? - a writer. Despite her mother's achievements, Zara (Charlotte Hope) embodies the work and housing problems of graduates eternally on placements, never getting a job, and sleeping on a friend's couch. Ha, another theme ticked off!

Meanwhile the garden with its tall and sturdy English oak, is haunted by the ghosts of two male wartime casualties (shades of another property-based play, Clybourne Park with its Korean veteran ghost), separated by a century.

Nevertheless, for TLT, Albion remained inorganic despite the best efforts of designer Miriam Bluether,  with a turfed traverse stage alongside lighting designer Neil Austin and sound from Gregory Clarke, to give it a cycle-of-the-seasons feel.

In its machine-like churning out of themes - and its length! - it did bear some resemblance to A Day By The Sea, currently on a run in South London - but far more smug.

While something again of a stereotype, the most interesting character and the story with the most promise is that of Krystyna (Edyta Budnik), the go-getting Polish cleaner who has set up her own efficient company.

She obviously has clients outside the boundaries of the rather tiresome house and grounds and there is the question mark over what will happen to her beliefs and business after 2019. 

Albion seems like a play that has been stretched out in all directions to be a big, meandering state-of-the-nation play, rather than growing some potentially interesting relationships into satisfying integrated drama.

The literary metaphors feel very self-consciously, rather than wittily, tacked on, so it becomes a case of spot-the-literary-reference.

The actors do their best with this big, baggy monster of a play but nothing can disguise its overblown nature for TLT and it's a lower-range amber light.    

Review Venus In Fur

Game Of Thrones' star Natalie Dormer impresses Francis Beckett, catches the zeitgeist, but turns out to be less than the sum of its parts.

Venus in Fur
By David Ives 

Of Human Bondage 
 http://www.trh.co.uk

Sometimes timing dictates what your play is about.

Harvey Weinstein was just another Hollywood film mogul when several years ago David Ives sat down to write Venus in Fur. In his play a theatre director,  who rather despises the actresses he hires or declines to hire, gets his comeuppance.

That, at least, because no play is an island, is what Venus in Fur is about right now and what the zeitgeist demands in late October 2017.

However I suspect that was not the original subject of the play Mr Ives wrote.  I think it had much more to do with sexual fetishes, sado-masochism, and the strange things they do to the brain.

Never mind. It’s the Weinstein affair, and the consequent pleasure of seeing an actress turn the tables on a male director, which will have theatregoers flocking to the Haymarket.

In addition, perhaps attraction will be the not totally unpleasant sight of Game Of Throne's Natalie Dormer’s shapely legs protruding from S&M outfits.

In Ives's two-hander comedy drrama, New York writer and theatre director Thomas (David Oakes) has had a long day failing to cast the main female part for his adaptation of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s 19th century novella.

The word masochism is coined from the author's name. The book is about a woman who makes a man her slave urged on by the man who wants to be enslaved.

Thomas is just packing up to go home when Vanda (Natalie Dormer) walks in, persuades him to hear her read for the part and turns out to know most of the lines.

He is in charge at the start, for he has a wonderful part to bestow on some lucky actress.  But slowly Vanda persuades Thomas to act out in real life the relationship she has read about in his play, to become her slave. What starts as a reading merges into role-play.

It’s a clever, witty play with a lot of blunt but resonant one-liners, like “Working in the theatre is the world’s greatest way to get laid”.

Patrick Marber, for my money Britain’s best contemporary playwright, directs with a sure touch and there is a splendidly detailed realistic set from Rob Howell.

As the director Thomas, David Oakes is extremely competent, but most of the time he’s simply a foil for a stunning virtuoso performance from Natalie Dormer as Vanda, at once a monster and an avenging angel.

So, a thoroughly engaging 90 minutes in the theatre (straight through, no interval). However, in the end, I wanted a bit more.

I didn’t care quite enough what happened to either character. Truth to tell, not quite enough did happen and Thomas’s swift capitulation strained the suspension of disbelief. So it's almost full marks; but in the end only an amber/green light.

Review Young Frankenstein

Young Frankenstein
Book by Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan
Music and Lyrics by Mel Brooks
Based On The Story And Screenplay by Gene Wilder and Mel Brooks

Mel's Show Of Shows (Again 😉)
https://www.nimaxtheatres.com/shows/young-frankenstein/

Young Frankenstein is an odd re-animated creature. Mel Brooks, of course, comes with a guaranteed store of goodwill from his  fans.  So  a lot of the audience will come to Young Frankenstein determined to enjoy it.

Professor Frederick Frankenstein - Les Miserables' veteran Hadley Fraser - is quizzed on his grandfather's experiments by his keen research students.

After singing a eulogy to the organ in the body that he loves best - Yes, "You can bet your ass on the brain!", - and a fond farewell to his fiancée (a splendid Dianne Pilkington), he arrives at his family's Transylvanian family seat.

There he's greeted by Igor - comedian Ross Noble in a career-making performance. He's a family retainer who sounds like a non-bitter remnant of the ups and downs of would-be moguls of old Hollywood, "My grandfather worked for your grandfather!".

And of course there's leggy and busty blonde Inga (yes, Summer Strallen, a Brooksian Swedish blonde who's a Transylvanian lab assistant!). She introduces the American professor to a cleverly animated roll in the hay and the animation of high kicks.

Add to this musical theatre test tube concoction the stern housekeeper (Lesley Joseph) who announces with Beethoven 5th-Symphony-like- bravado "He Vas My Boyfriend!". Oh and of course Grandpa Victor's "How To" book on brain transfer and raising the dead for Frederick to follow and you have a rollicking tale.

It all proceeds wih the precise timing of an 1970s' adult nostalgia-fest pantomine, ideal for the forthcoming Happy Holiday season.  All over the world, judging from this Spanish language Mel Brooks' episode of The Simpsons!

Offensive? More out of context  - compared with the already retro black and white movie, that is.

In 1974, there were still folks alive who knew people who made the original movie and the movie manages to be both a parody and an appreciation of its creators' filmmaking skill.

If  you're under 40 and not an aspiring comedy writer or film student who has swotted up on Mel Brooks, here's the trailer of the movie.

As it is, it's an enjoyable, well-choreographed stage show with the broadbrush highlights of the movie kept, but it does become rather a different creature.

Once one could have chuckled and said how non-PC it all was, even though that already felt retro some years ago.  Now with the son of Woody Allen and Mia Farrow breaking the latest (very serious and, for want of a better word, incestuous) movieland scandal,  it feels like a tough time for bawdy humour and satire. 
 
Young Frankenstein the musical is slick and laugh-inducing with the involuntary reflex reactions to tried and trusted vaudeville and sketch humour honed on Sid Caesar's TV shows.

TLT still kicks herself for guffawing, for there's something mildly re-heated about it all. But the timing, verbal and physical, is impeccable, as befits the work of a seasoned writer, as well as pianist and drummer - Brooks was taught by Buddy Rich before he turned stand up comedian, gag and sketch writer.

It all slots satisfyingly into place There's the direction and dance routines of Susan Stroman. There's the cartoony design from Beowulf Borritt (he of Microsoft advertisement fame in case you don't believe anyone with a name like that can exist!). Excellent sound design from Gareth Owen and musical director Andrew Hilton leading the nine-piece band make the kitsch songs easy-listening.

There's even a shameless emotional manipulation of our emotions making us feel sorry for Shuler Hensler's monster never quite getting to grips with his Stein - oh, sorry, beer tankard - and  remaining thirsty while others drink. But finally the monster is transformed into a Broadway star ...     

In some ways it's as if Mel Brooks, aged 91, is being buried alive very, very comfortably,  with his stone (that's Stein in German) tombstone reading, "He was (is) a genius!" 

The thing is, he is. A genius, that is. In that he represents the spirit of a time - the Catskills comedians thrust into the brave new (or at times cowardly and cowering) world of  television in the 1950s and 1960s with something of the involuntarily television salaciousness whirling around us now and it's an amber/green light.