Review I.E.D.

A new drama about a female officer bringing the worst possible news to military families benefits from a well-written central character and an excellent performance, says Peter Barker. 

I.E.D.
by Martin McNamara

When Death Comes Knocking 
https://www.theatren16.co.uk/ied

A woman army officer has the duty to inform nearest relatives when a serviceman, their loved one, from her unit has been killed.

I.E.D, Martin McNamara's clever and pithy new drama, is set nine years ago during the height, for the British, of the conflict in Afghanistan and is matched by some excellent performances.

The acronym IED stands for "Improvised Explosive Device",  the bombs which are often the weapon of choice for the Taliban waging jihad in Afghanistan.

Captain Agnes Bennett is stationed in London. She's  tough and a seemingly dispassionate female army officer whose duties include the "death knock", breaking the news to military families.

She has carried out 10 such death knocks, with another now in prospect, as she dresses herself after a night of emotionally distant sex with a man met on a singles' website.

McNamara’s script delivers some wit and tellingly effective lines.

He has also created an intriguing and rounded character in Agnes Bennett, played with convincingly curt military focus by Safron Beck, despite, we learn, the emotional toll beneath.

McNamara’s other lead character is Private Iain Maginnis, allocated to assist Agnes as someone who knew the deceased. Jordan Fyffe lends him charm and emotional intelligence, revealing, eventually, another side to the dead man.

Rebecca Lyon, a recent directing graduate from the Royal Central School of Speech & Drama, shows a little inexperience in allowing the physical focus to drift away from the centre of the stage.

The sparse furnishings and some glaringly inauthentic military garb also betray a production obviously done on a shoestring.

Playwright McNamara does include at least one clumsy stereotype in the shape of Sarah Jane Charlton's prostitute. However Dickon Farmer fares better as a more convincing one-night stand.

Nevertheless, McNamara has created a memorable character in Agnes Bennett, qualities which Lyon maximises in her direction of Safron Beck's remarkable performance.

For this reason the production, which runs until Saturday, November 11, is worth an amber/green light.

Theatre N16, a hub for new writers and performers which adheres to the Equity Fringe Agreement, is currently looking for a new home. Read more about it here 

Review Poison

Tim Gopsill admires a drama where a divorced couple comes together over the grave of a child, but he finally cannot warm to the play.

Poison
by Lot Vekemans
Translated by Rena Vergano

Love And Other Toxins
https://www.orangetreetheatre.co.uk/

A middle-aged couple, a woman and man, meet up after nearly a decade of separation which started shortly after their son died. 

The man is known only as "He", the woman as "She".

“We are a man and a woman who lost a son, and then each other,” he says to her. “Who lost a son and then themselves and then each other,” she corrects.

He assents, which is the only thing they can agree on as they take their faltering steps to rebuild their love.

Poison is an 80-minute two-hander, examing the fall out of a marriage break up, acted with precision by Claire Price, a blonde sarky ex-wife and Zubin Varla as the  husband who previously walked out on her.

The couple find themselves in a reception room of the cemetery where their young son is buried. The discovery of toxic chemicals in the ground are now disturbing his supposedly final resting place.

The young boy's remains, along with those of others, have to be exhumed and reinterred and his parents have arrived to discuss the situation with cemetery officials.

This is, literally, the poison in the title – but the residue of suffering that killed their love is the real poison in the play itself

Written by Dutch writer Lot Vekemans with English translation by Rena Vergano, Poison has been an international success, playing in many languages all over the world, including New York, Berlin and, of course, The Netherlands.

It's concise and focussed, consisting solely of the conversation  between the former spouses,

Simon Daw's set is minimal: two upholstered benches, a coffee machine and a water cooler with mostly full-on lighting from Mark Doubleday.
 
The drama is driven solely by the two former partners' painful conversation, although there is a possible deception involved.

The only movement comes from the couple’s desperate gestures, but Paul Miller’s direction maintains the tension – relieved now and then by the odd nervous laugh.

There's probably a lot of truth in the reactions. The ending, when it comes, has an inevitability, yet beforehand hadn't seemed certain. 

This would make be a wonderful radio play with listeners forming their own picture of the couple in anguish.

However, despite the fine, detailed acting, it is also repetitive, with, deliberately,  the same verbal and physical expressions repeated, and it does become tedious and distancing.

As a chronicle of unrelieved grief,  it could have torn the heart, but in the end it gets an amber light.

Review Mother Courage And Her Children

Mother Courage And Her Children
By Bertolt Brecht
Translated by Tony Kushner
Music By Duke Special

Peace In Our Time?
http://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/

Thirty years is a long time in politics and showbusiness, but it's much, much longer and far more cutthroat and arbitrary for citizens and subjects having to cope with the on-off Thirty Years War (1618-1648).

Hannah Chissick now directs Tony Kushner's translation of Bertolt Brecht's play Mother Courage And Her Children with music by Duke Special, first seen in the National Theatre's production eight years ago.

The play spans the war that ravaged the European continent with Josie Lawrence in the main role in a traverse staging in transformed warehouse, Southwark Playhouse.

The audience enters the battlefield through a trench-like tunnel with grimy, grey-white plastic tarpaulin hanging from metal poles. 

First the good points - Josie Lawrence is magnificent, a force of nature with a tremulous gleam in her eye, determined to survive, run a business and hold together her children, no matter what.

Her singing and acting experience also gives her the voice, along with some of the other theatre veterans in the cast, to negotiate an acoustically difficult space.

In this production, it is a play of two halves with the decision to adopt regional accents in the first act making some of the actors with lighter voices almost unintelligible in a space where there needs to be perfect pitch to be heard.

The uneven nature of the first act  may lose a few camp followers in the audience which would be a shame because post-interval the accents are suddenly discarded and the ensemble comes together in a far more heartfelt and stinging second act. The problematic acoustics do not quite go away but they become far less of a problem.

Besides Lawrence's Mother, the most consistent performances of the night come from Julian Moore-Clark as her terminally honest and loyal son, Swiss  Cheese,  David Shelley as the chaplain and Ben Fox as the Dutch cook.

For those who have not grown up with the German history school syllabus of 1939 and the religious and political battles, Mother Courage And Her Children needs to hit the correct increasingly frantic notes along the route of Anna's picaresque travels with her increasingly disintegrating family.

This only comes about in the second half  when the seemingly heroic but self-destructive act of Phoebe Vigor's Kattrin is truly powerful and the lighting of Robbie Butler comes into its own. The decision to ally the play with imagery and sounds from the First and Second World Wars is also a wise one.

After all, Brecht and other citizens had experienced an on-off battle to survive economically in Germany from the First World War onwards which became something else after 1933 and the seizure of Germany by the National Socialists.

Barney George's design keeps it simple, tarpaulin and metal poles with the cart dragged by Mother Courage able to move across the space.

However the decision to have an upper balcony on one side may have seemed logical, putting the (temporary) victors and actor musicians on high. But it means in addition to acoustic irritations, one half of the audience might feel discriminated against, having to continually turn around to see the action.

So this is a production which eventually finds its balance in an unhinged world. Josie Lawrence and a few others are tremendous but it needed far tighter direction to keep other members of the cast on course in the first act. It's an upper range amber light.   

Review The Red Lion

The Red Lion
by Patrick Marber

When Saturday Comes
 http://www.atgtickets.com/shows/the-red-lion/trafalgar-studios/

TLT's family once dabbled in the beautiful game, before the advent of big money footie, when a teenage schoolboy relative and friends once blithely decided to form a junior league football team.

This momentous moment in soccer's history didn't take place in a pub and, as far as TLT knows, noone involved was a freemason.

However, little did these newcomers know the already fraught atmosphere they were entering: football scouts circling, a notorious opposing team manager taking a swing at the naive father who had taken on the role of manager. After all, who did they think they were? Schoolboy amateurs?!!

This revival of Patrick Marber's 2015 The Red Lion sets the dressing room drama three-hander in the North East where a struggling semi professional team is looking for a saviour.

The manager Kidd (Stephen Tompkinson), harassed by money worries after a failed marriage and without a roof over his head, desperately needs success whether on the field or in financial wheelings and dealings beyond the white lines.

In the dressing room, old guard kit man Yates (John Bowler) is not in such a rush, ironing carefully and methodically shirts for the next game, placing them on hangers lined up on the players' hooks, ready for the next game.

In their own ways, they are both waiting for a player who will save the club and bring at least a sprinkling of past glories - if they ever existed.

The Red Lion tries to encapsulate three generations of footballing and British social change seen through the prism of the dressing room.

It harks back to organized football's amateur origins with its Victorian founding fathers through local councils and small-town business involvement when footballers were paid a meagre wage and had no pension to the current global professional marketplace. 

TLT remembers thinking during the previous incarnation of the play in 2015 that there was very much a conflation of football and the parliamentary expenses scandal in the play.

Certainly this is a drama which quietly positions itself as a state-of-the-nation, as well as a state-of-the-game play.

Yet Marber never quite finds the right balance between the male sentimentality about the game,  delusions of influence with the sport increasingly a by-product of financial transactions and a genuine, potent spiritual love for the game.

This production, originating in at Newcastle Upon Tyne's Live Theatre, doesn't manage quite to overcome what still feels like rather a schematic piece with the themes announced as patently as a linesman's flag going up.

Nevertheless Dean Bone brinngs the right mix of confusion, over optimistic naivety yet guile to the role of rising star Jordan.

Stephen Tompkinson's performance feels slightly over-egged, although TLT can perfectly believe such characters with sneering personality swings do exist.

However in the intimate surroundings of the smaller Trafalgar Studios space, director Max Roberts could have pulled him back a little to allow the later moments of hurt to emerge more fully.

Yates who has gone through the whole gamut as fan, player, manager and what seems at first to be a sinecure as kit man, is probably the best written of the three roles.

John Bowler's grizzled features and deliberate movements, carrying out traditionally female tasks elevated in male eyes by association with the beautiful game, make for a compelling performance.

There's also a nicely-observed grubby white brick set from Patrick Connellan and terrific sound design from Dave Flynn, providing atmosphere and pace between scenes. 

It's a flawed play which has its moments and still, of course, has a relevance and resonance as further British scandals emerge.

TLT does wonder whether an expanded version might work on TV but in the meantime it's an amber/green light.

Review Minefield

Minefield
Campo Minado
by Lola Arias
Translated by Daniel Tunnard

War, Huh, Yeah, What Is It Good For?
https://royalcourttheatre.com/

Before the outbreak of hostilities in 1982 TLT vaguely knew about the fight over Gibraltar between Britain and Spain. But the Falklands Islands and Argentina?

A "war" between a member of the European Economic Community and a South American country seemed scarcely believable to TLT in the late 20th century, knowing nothing of the islands' history.

The flag-waving, bellicose spirit that swept through public events and the media scared her. The deaths of men on both sides and the eventual uneasy conclusion puzzled her rather than made matters clearer. But life goes on.

Mounting a bilingual, verbatim play, with veterans from both sides, about what is known in the UK as The Falklands War, aka The Falklands Conflict, could have been, well, a minefield.

Indeed, Minefield, put together by Argentinian theatre-maker Lola Arias who also directs, allows the men, none of whom speak the language of the erstwhile opposing side, a voice.

They become actors, in all senses of the word, telling stories about their Falklands/Las Islas Malvinas experiences.

The cast is composed of two former Royal Marines,  a Gurkha, part of a regiment traditionally part of the British military, and an Argentinian trio: A factory worker and former conscript who rejoined voluntarily at the beginning of the conflict and two conscripts, a lawyer and a drummer in a Beatles' tribute band.

That is Lou Armour, David Jackson, Sukrim Rai and Marcelo Vallejo, Gabriel Sagastume and Rubén Otero who now look back to their younger selves.

The six relate the history of the war, as they see, saw and experienced it, on Mariana Tirantte's set that includes an enormous white screen for projections of videos, photos and magazine pages from the time and also their visit to the islands many years later.

Long-haired women's blonde and brunette wigs and feather boas hang on the mirror of a dressing table. Various other props, including a drumset, guitars and chairs, are on either side.

Surtitles translate English to Argentinian Spanish and vice versa.

So far, so matter of fact. And, in many ways, it remains so. There is necessarily a choice of what to exclude and include and, as far as is possible, Arias says she allowed the former soldiers editorial control over a now published script.

The words of each side never quite come together, but they have learned to accommodate each other as the discipline of theatre also make the six share a space.

This, of course, includes the Ghurka, part of the British Empire's legacy, whose right to British citizenship has only recently been acknowledged in an increasingly corporate world.  

There is humour, tragedy and an outlet for the grief, memories and anomalies which plague the conflict which, despite plenty of media coverage, still has an uncertain place in both nations' history.

The play also covers a generation where British pop music had been a common language in a United Nations, NATO and Cold War world.

The politicians, Margaret Thatcher and General Galtieri, are portrayed by full carnivalesque head masks with recordings of their voices from media footage.

Arias has a created a very flexible framework - however much or little an audience member may know or not know about the circumstances, he or she listens and notes the more theatrical set pieces and absorbs the words.

The sense comes from the non-sense and the relevance and irrelevance to the men's lives of the islands. An individual's reaction remains individual - both that of the actors, the ex-military, on the stage and the audience member.

For TLT, it still remains a conundrum how a generation linked by post-Second World War social insurance and a common commercial pop music culture could be coerced into killing each other.

There is a comradeship now between the men who have broken down the barriers they themselves put up against what must be called "the enemy". They are trying to come to terms with what has happened together, not isolated in separate TV interviews.

A wall has come down in parallel with the Berlin Wall and European and American occupying forces (which also played a part in the rise of The Beatles and other iconic pop groups).

Minefield also gives us a feel of a pre-Google, pre-digital camera and mobile phone which, nevertheless, is a precursor of the current global landscape. 

If there are gaps, they still satisfy as a human reaction to the violence of the fight and an incomprehensible space which can never be filled. It's a green light.

Review The Diary Of A Nobody

The Diary Of A Nobody
Based On The Novel
By George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith
Adapted For The Stage By Mary Franklin

Keeping Up Appearances
http://www.kingsheadtheatre.com/

There's a queer old cove and his family who've moved into The Laurels in Holloway. We know we're in the second half of the nineteenth century and we daresay he's good-natured enough.

But he's decidedly middle-class, of the lower grade, rather than a blueblood or an easy-going Bohemian.

And to top it all, he's decided to keep a diary, first in Punch magazine and then published as a book, as if he were a toff of a politician or an imperial adventurer or some such thing!

Of course he may be some kind of relation to "J" of Three Men In A Boat fame. His descendants possibly also include Adrian Mole, Bridget Jones, and a late twentieth century factional column about a beleaguered father, Hunter Davies, Father's Day, in Punch again and also turned into a book.

Lor', he may even be a distant cousin of Mrs Hyacinth Bucket from a distinctly low form of entertainment, the situation comedy. And, although noone could ever accuse us of being patronizing, he-may-even-have-voted-for-----Brexit! Thank goodness his wife doesn't have the vote!

Yes, it's The Diary of A Nobody in an all-male production at the King's Head with Jake Curran as the upwardly mobile head clerk Charles Pooter. He who takes the train everyday to the City and then back to the brick suburb specially built to be rented to employees such as him.

He also has Jordan Mallory-Skinner as his charming if somewhat repressed wife Carrie, who laughs (mostly) at his terrible schoolboy Victorian Christmas cracker jokes and whose family is possibly of a tad better stock than the Pooters,

Hence Mr Pooter finds himself a little disconcerted with his exhausting, ne'er-do-well, scapegoat but strangely resilient son. The latter announces that he's been "chucked out" of a banking job and is henceforth adopting his mother's family name of Lupin rather than keeping the name William, the name of a paternal relative.

Lupin, otherwise known as thespian Loz Keystone, also has a propensity to propose marriage to rather unsuitable young(ish) ladies with - speak softly lest the neighbours hear! - theatrical connections.

Indeed, maybe a theatrical parent has been just a little too generous with his or her favours, for, along with live-in maid Sarah and several uppity tradesmen, the ladies all bear a distinct resemblance to actor Geordie Wright.

It's a fun evening, with a surprisingly contemporary resonance in our uncertain times, which maybe goes on slightly too long.

Mind you, that tallies with the original episodic structure of the original text by Gilbert & Sullivan actor George Grossmith with his brother Weedon sticking to atmospheric illustrations.

The Diary first appeared as a serialization in Punch which tickled the late Victorian reader while reflecting comically the anxieties of a newly educated generation with a mixture of almost-cruelty and affection.

Adapted by director Mary Franklin, the show is held together by Curran's Pooter, with blond-red hair and beard,  whom it is easy to take for granted.

He's an almost delicate presence, even during his clumsy faux pas, and the most disciplined actor in the cast. It is he who keeps the show on track as a comical play when it threatens to turn into an alternative comedy sketch show.

Designer Christopher Hone adapts the book's original pen-and-ink illustrations, keeping a balance between the realms of the imagination and comic flesh-and-blood stage reality.   Meanwhile parlour music on piano and guitar completes the ambience.

There's also a goodly amount about entertainment in The Diary Of A Nobody and maybe there is a subtext about the theatrical life in the pretensions of the Pooters and their reliance, while trying to retain their dignity, on tradesmen.

But ultimately this was a mocking column, dashed off each week for a magazine as a light-hearted divertissement.

It happens that a wish-fufilment bricks-and-mortar happy ending is just as pertinent, if not more so, in current times. Anyway, for  a spirited production with just the occasional dip in energy, it's an amber/green light.  

Review The Black Eye Club

A thoughtful drama about domestic abuse engages Peter Barker with its wit in dealing with a serious subject. 

The Black Eye Club
by Phil Charles

I Will Survive
https://www.breadandrosestheatre.co.uk

A man and a woman have a chance encounter in London. Zoe, a diamond South London gal, is a trolley dolly on the railways. Dave, by contrast, is a middle-class accountant who happens to be gay.

The Black Eye Club is nothing to do, as did cross my mind before the show, with the music of the Black Eyed Peas. But the night turned out to be a good night at the theatre, with a play which refers, more seriously, to a club nobody wants to be a part of - the victims of domestic abuse.

Dave and Zoe meet outside a woman-only refuge where Zoe is staying. Dave, with visible injuries, has fled from his abusive male partner, seeking safety. But there is no place here for a male victim until Zoe, wanting to help Dave, offers to smuggle him into her room.

Both of them face challenges, a journey into darkness but illuminated, a couple of shocks notwithstanding, by a Gloria Gaynor karaoke favourite and a witty script.

Cardiff-born writer Phil Charles is the winner of a Bread & Roses Theatre playwriting competition celebrating its third year. He's been both a homeless support worker and a writer across advertising and television, contributing scripts to daytime soap Doctors and comedy drama Shameless.

The skills gained from screenwriting are evident in this drama with its almost continual focus on Dave and Zoe seeming very televisual.. 

The story, which could be relentless and didactic, unravels in an entertainingly earthy and realistic way. The characters are not mere issue-driven cyphers, but  grounded in the real world.

Director Tessa Hart maintains the tension and the comedy, keeping it both tight and light.

Rebecca Pryle convinces as Zoe with her tart tongue and an honest heart. As the more subdued and educated Dave, Christopher Sherwood is given perhaps a more rounded character by the playwright.

Yet he's also the strop against which the playwright sharpens Zoe's genuinely funny lines. This all serves to make the resolution both real and joyful.

Cathryn Sherman is in the supporting role of  the hostel concierge and Sally Hardcastle's set is a believable small and barely furnished hostel bedroom with the lighting and sound provided by Eren Celikdemir.

The efforts of writer, director, cast and crew make this a fun evening on a dark subject and it's an amber/green light. 

Review The Invisible Man

The Invisible Man
by Clem Garritty
adapted from the novella by HG Wells

The Vanishing Point
http://www.queens-theatre.co.uk/

This loose new adaptation of an HG Wells' novella starts off as a promising attempt to fuse themes from a number of different horror tales into an adventurous tale of scientific hubris,  but ultimately falls at the final hurdle.

Jack Griffin (Matthew Spencer), the son of a college Dean, is a young Victorian scientist who believes his experiments will lead to recognition, fame and fortune.

Gradually, though, lack of understanding from family and friends and the axing of his funding, turns his laboratory research into a bitter vendetta and obsession.

He alienates those around him including a suffragette colleague (Eleanor Wyld) on whom he pins his romantic hopes. However he is truly developing a miraculous formula - with the potential for good and evil, as well as unintended consequences.

Directed by Ryan McBryde, there are many enjoyable elements in The Invisible Man, especially in the first act.

The integration of modern themes works pretty well and, despite some clunkily literal lyrics, the inclusion of actor musicians does add  to the atmosphere and also help the scene transitions on the large Queen's Theatre stage.

Purists may object to the inclusion of a female love interest. However it has long been the custom in earlier screen adaptations and  the invention of suffragette Lucy has a resonance with other works by  science fiction pioneer HG Wells.

Wells's own brand of  feminism is found in novels such as Ann Veronica, although it also should be said, it ran side by side with an extremely active adulterous sex life and the fathering of at least one illegitimate child. 

The Invisible Man's first act does have hints of a certain unwieldy wordiness, perhaps trying to keep rather too much of the writer's novelistic scientific explanation 

Even so, despite these few stutters,  the story manages to gallop along along at a lick with a double narrative time scale, nicely combining a televisual feel with a fully fledged stage drama.

It's in the second act that this version of the classic Wells tale comes a cropper, losing its momentum at what should be some of its most exciting moments.

The thought did then occur that adaptor Clem Garritty's - and songwriter Rebecca Applin's - The Invisible Man is really a musical manqué, with uncertainty of tone and lengthy, laboured explanations suddenly filling the vacuum instead of songs.

It's a shame that the narrative energy drifted off after such an engrossing start.

Lily Arnold's set of browns and grays combines pub doors and  research filing cabinets with sliding sets for a tiled laboratory and a rented mahogany village room. Along with Nic Farnham's lighting and Applin's sound design, pace is maintained in a muscular first act.

Maybe it could have done with a bit more spectactular illusion (magic consultant - that's a title not an adjective! - John Bulleid) and been a bit tighter, but this isn't initially a major flaw in a ripping yarn.

Additionally one could feel the collective audience mind ticking as plausible intellectual and mercenary motivations for the actions of the characters were laid before them. 

It's ironically in some of the visually cleverest,  most stylized moments that this production comes apart.

Jack Griffin, increasingly demented both when visible and invisible, a kind of English Rashkolnikov who believes he can get away with murder, develops the visceral look of a silent film villain.

There are glimpses of Jack The Ripper, Sweeney Todd and Frankenstein in the drama's styles, but it all goes increasingly awry. What should be a desperate rooftop encounter drags, as words rain heavily down rather than the action being pushed forward.

The different narrative time scales also start to tell against the play, with the audience left confused for just a tad too long before the pay-off explanation comes.

While, after the first act, TLT and her own mad scientist automotive sidekick thought The Invisible Man might be an exciting family show, by the end it feels far too long and runs out of steam.

Perhaps the bandages were taken off too soon and it's a show put on before it was ready or, as previously indicated, the bare bones of a darkish musical.

However our own visible critical twosome are loathe to entirely write it off - with further development and tightening up, this dramatic experiment might work far better. Mainly for the first act, it's an amber/green light.

Review Quaint Honour

Peter Barker enjoys a fine revival of a little known play pleading for the acceptance of gay relationships a decade before the decriminalization of homosexuality.

Quaint Honour

by Roger Gellert

Against All The Rules

http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk

Quaint Honour, in the first revival more than half a century after its first performance,  is a chance to see a play that championed an argument for gay equality at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain. 

Set in an English boys’ boarding school in the 1950s,  Tully is a house prefect, a liberal-minded atheist who secretly sleeps  with willing fellow pupils, among them the younger Turner. 

Turner challenges Tully to seduce another boy, the studious and naive Hamilton. Yet the relationship,  beginning during an audition for a part in a Shakespeare play where the seduction by the duplicitous Richard III of Lady Anne Neville is the audition piece, turns to genuine love.

At the moment, Quaint Honour, written in 1958, is given, superficially, a topicality by the recent swirl of sexual scandals. 

It  deals with gay relationships in a school where fagging by junior boys, younger schoolboys acting as personal servants for senior pupils, was still part of the school hierarchy. However, this is definitely not a play about the abuse of power. Nor does it advocate lowering the age of consent. 

It is instead a passionate plea for the common sense of equality.

In the wake of the Wolfenden Report recommending the decriminalisation of "homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private", the theatre censor, the Lord Chamberlain had relaxed the rules on stage portrayals of homosexuals in 1958. 

However Quaint Honour, staged the same year,with its overt sympathy for gay men and homosexual sexual relations, was still deemed too explicit, whilst still remaining a play where homosexuality was a problem. 

It could only be  presented at a subscription club theatre, the Arts Theatre Private Club, as a private performance, therefore avoiding the need for a Lord Chamberlain's licence.

The moniker Roger Gellert was itself the pen name of BBC radio announcer John Holstrom, later a script reader for legendary literary agent Peggy Ramsay. He was also a Royal Shakespeare Company dramaturg and translator of Bertolt Brecht and Jean Giradoux, as well as New Statesman theatre critic. 

Quaint Honour was his only original play and groundbreaking in many ways. Notwithstanding, Gellert's characters remain cyphers, even if used to argue passionately for sex and love with a consenting partner to be the prerogative of the individual conscience. 

Nevertheless director Christian Durham has assembled a strong cast.

Harley Viveash gives Tully both charisma and maturity, all of which makes the character’s eloquent argument for the right to a homosexual relationship a passionate and inspiring moment.

Simon Butteriss as the hopelessly out-of-touch housemaster Hallowes is a perfect fit for a tweed suit and master’s gown.

Equally, Oliver Gully's heterosexual head boy of house to Tully's deputy looks like a man who will one day be on  a cigarette card as the England opening bat, his intense gaze conveying both firmness and narrowness of mind.

In the roles of the younger boys, Jack Archer as  Hamilton and Jacques Miche as Turner give able support.

Designer Tim McQuillen-Wright cleverly reuses the set of the play running alongside it this season, an ecclesiastical office setting turned into a public school complete with battered bookcases  and paint-chipped radiator.

Quaint Honour was both hugely daring and attracted establishment critical acclaim from The Observer and The Times drama critics. It is  a period piece, but also attempts to normalise the reciprocal homosexual relationship. It's an amber/green light for a fascinating landmark drama. 

The Exorcist

The Exorcist
A Play By John Pielmeier
Adapted From The Novel By William Peter Blatty

Satanic Schlock
http://www.atgtickets.com/shows/the-exorcist/phoenix-theatre/

Arrrrrrrgh! It may be past the witching hour of Halloween (it's November 1st!) but the demons still are guiding TLT's hand as she pens a review of The Exorcist. Lucky it's all on the internet because - hide your eyes if you don't want to know - the pen, instead of ink, is spurting blood ... 😱😵💀😈😈!!!!

Yes, it's The Exorcist adapted by John Pielmeier from the novel by the late William Peter Batty (no, no, it's ok, it's ok, he died at a ripe old age in a hospital earlier this year!).

The 1973 movie adaptation, with Linda Blair as the devil's victim, remains the best-known spawn of this devilish concoction, a cinematic scarefest that helped launch a thousand other diabolic cinematic franchises ... The Omen, Carrie, The Shining ...

There’s a mildly enjoyable night of schlock horror to be had in this production originating at Birmingham Rep, seemingly trundled out every Halloween.

It won't have you calling the demonic lawyers in for a breach of the Trades Descriptions' Act - as long as you're prepared, tongue-in-cheek-style, to buy into the corny horror tropes.

The special effects are nothing to scream home about and it's the occasional moments of pure physical acting, especially from Claire Louise Connolly as the possessed daughter of Jenny Seagrove's actress divorcée, which elicit the most genuine gasps from the audience and stop the giggles.

Anna Fleischle's set design has the feel of a haunted crooked tower with the action on several levels.

But for TLT, who has seen the movie, and her witch's cat-cum-car sidekick, who hasn’t, the Tutankhamen-curse-like side of the story was very unclear, felt irrelevant and the jumping from scene to scene broke up any previously built-up tension.

This is a play with the parts written so thinly, they seem anorexic. Many in the audience may be left puzzling as to why certain minor characters ever appear and disappear - walking out of the door rather than supernaturally.

The writer John Pielmeier and the director Sean Mathias obviously are relying on  the sensational, communal effect on an audience. But, in the end, the creaky fairground effects are not so-grand-guignol.

There’s a good, solid cast of actors and Peter Bowles has the stature (that's to say height) to bring off an iconic moment when he first appears, ready to perform the exorcism.

But the supporting characters are only there to watch helplessly a sweet little girl’s initiation into the diabolic and the profane, using the recognizable tones of a well known actor as the devil.

The stage version of The Exorcist does also have (sorry, TLT couldn’t avoid mentioning this but she left it until near the end) a disturbing, presumably unintended, resonance with the re-emergence of specific Hollywood child abuse revelations and, perhaps more understandably for the time of the book's first appearance, Catholic church scandals. 

The show correctly has an Adults-Only (or in 1970s’ filmspeak X certificate) label. Finally, though, however much it is a book adaptation divorced from the movie, this feels like a decidedly old-school take on a satanic celluloid classic.

TLT can't help comparing how it is shorn of the cinematic political gestures, psychological and magnified big screen thrills. It should have been hot as hell, but finally attracts a lukewarm amber light. 😈💀