Review A Midsummer Night's Dream PREVIEW

A Midsummer Night's Dream
by William Shakespeare

Monster Midsummer Mash Up 
http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/ 

A joyful beginning to Emma Rice's tenure at The Globe for a gender-crossing xx best exotic Marigold xx A Midsummer Night's Dream where TLT and her garlanded companion found themselves groundlings in a wonderland just outside of Hoxton.

The tone is set from the start as tambourine-shaking parishioner Rita Quince (bespectacled Lucy Thackeray), in Globe volunteer uniform, clambers on the stage from white-tableclothed restaurant tables, introducing Nick Bottom (Ewan Wardrop) Health & Safety Officer.

Up above is the sitar-playing Sheema Mukherjee perched on a balcony and this parish has obviously now gone global in search of funding as is the wont of parishes nowadays ...   

*Flashback Alert!* 

We must confess to loving AMND (as we will shorten it from now on) since having our first magical experience at Regent's Park Open Air Theatre. Not without it's Indian tinge too, since one of the co-directors was Kashmir-born David Conville (along with Richard Digby-Day, a partnership still it seems going strong, and Christopher Biggins!)  But at the time we were chiefly excited by seeing pre-Big Brother, post Rock Follies Rula Lenska as Titania and Liver Bird Elizabeth Estensen as beanpole Helena. 

Anyway fast forward to the present!  

*End of Flashback Alert!*  

It's a hybrid AMND (hold on to that acronym!), a trifle self-conscious but none the worse for that. A cross between Bollywood, 1960s' Performance (without the gore), Sgt Pepper, Ugly Betty, trademark Kneehigh puppetry and aerial  flourishes (although also playful gestures to Peter Brook's legendary "Empty Space" AMND with Alan Howard and Sara Kestelman) 

Fresh from the "blow up sex doll" Measure for Measure (doncha just love the TLT blog archive, just to be able to say and link to that?! Put that in your pipe and smoke it, broadsheets!;)), Zubin Varla is a middle-aged Indian Mick-Jagger-type (parentheses and acronym alert, wait a moment Mick Jagger is now an OAP!) gangster cum restaurateur cum Duke Theseus.

He has captured the initially Scottish Hippolyta (Meow Meow clad in leopard skin slinky dress and coat) from a rival although she, by the end of the play, having brought her stilletos to the conference table, changes nationality.

A Glasto Indian sixth-former Hermia (AnjanaVasan) and an indy Brit wannabe Kerouac cum Brando cum Calvin Klein pecs' Lysander (Edmund Derrington) plan to elope. While a Brooks Brothers' (we really should get sponsorship for this!) ambitious smoothie Demetrius (Ncuti Gatwa), rather sinister in setting his sights on Hermia, is pursued by his old flame (and first aider - don't ask, go see!) Helenus (no. it's not a spelling error, it's Ankur Bahl!).

Bottom is the male cock of the walk surrounded by lady volunteers (*Minor Quibble Alert* he could insure he has a few all-eventualities' put-downs for good-natured heckles when he poses rhetorial questions to the audience!). 

And they are a comely bunch of variously talented am dram menials from Bottom's vainglorious would-be Olivier, via Snout's (Alex Tregear) ingeniously "wittiest partition" cereal packet wall to the rather proficient Thisbe/Flute (a hard call to make clear an amateur is really rather good but Margaret Ann Bain pulls it off). 

But wait - we can't forget the faerie world and mischieviously Puckish (surely a tautology?!) Puck (Katy Owen) - part Pinocchio, part Tinker Bell - who also transforms herself into stern father in a wheelchair Egeus cum gangsta ?music producer with Sophia Loren sunglasses. 

Voodoo zombie fairies (Nandi Bhebhe, also Metro-reading Starveling) and Cobweb (Tibu Fortes), amongst others, do Oberon and Titania's bidding with Varla and Meow as is usual doubling up the royal roles. 

We're past the time of phrases such as "unashamedly populist" (why should it be anything else?). There have been enough updatings and adaptations of Shakespeare to make even a Globe in-joke about "fidelity to text" a wee bit dépassé when it's now broadcast in your own series or be damned in the groves of academe. But it's all none the worse for that. 

Maybe Bottom's transformation into an ass scene - seen by your Pen and Tell twosome in broad daylight - could have been more magical but, again, that's a minor quibble (we've had enough of alerts - once used they're no longer a novelty!). 

A great bubble of laughter and little toots of pleasure from TLT's sidekick engulfed The Globe (with even a bit of Bowie and was that a touch of cod Sondheim?!) in this first production of a new regime. Tanika Gupta's lyrics  and dramaturgy including a smidgeon of John Donne acknowledging the new Globe's American origins and Stu Barker's music prove charming crowd pleasers. 

So we take away a green light served up by The Globe's "wedding special" menu and wish the happy coupling well!

Review Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

by August Wilson

The Day The Music Died 
www.nationaltheatre.org.uk

Coming home from Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, directed by Dominic Cooke, TLT could have sworn the exhaust of her normally sober little hatchback emitted a series of sobs. But she couldn't ask due to the - ahem - lump in her own throat.

Written in 1982 by Frederick August Kittel Jr, otherwise known as August Wilson, the play follows a band of Chicago session musicians on a day fifty five years earlier when the eponymous Gertrude "Ma" Rainey (Sharon D Clarke), the Queen Bee of the blues, is about to record a new album of songs.

But it's the drones who are at the centre of the action relegated to a basement rehearsal room. Meanwhile, in Ultz's telling set design  the control room is perched on high with white studio boss Mel Sturdyvant (Stuart McQuarrie), allowing only Ma's white management Irvin (Finbar Lynch) to climb the stairs from the studio.

In the words of the play, the musicians are the "nuts in the stew" pulled in to facilitate the session. The bookish Toledo (Lucien Msamati), given to lecturing, neatly playing the piano. Cutler (Clint Dyer) the trombonist and band leader "One, two, you know what to do ..." aware where his bread is buttered.Slow Drag (Giles Terera) on the bass wanting an uncomplicated life. And finally Levee (O-T Fagbenle) the trumpet player, young, vain,  quivering with brashness and undisciplined talent, eager to form his own band.

Seemingly a riff on the music industry and the history of black migration to northern cities from the rural south, the play reaches much further and picks at the scab on the bent knee of collaborative money-driven creativity with intricate precision.

The musicians tell their competing histories, both asserting their right to exist and as a kind of confessional. With the lightest of touches, the playwright evokes the patterns of nepotism and corruption replicated at every level before they blend into anonymity for the recording of the star turn.

This isn't an open ended play of rights and wrongs though, far from it. Ma Rainey sashays in late after a fracas with the police, permitting (yes, that is the correct word in the all-too-human power play of this saga) her manager to bribe the officers.

She battles for control of how she sings her own songs bringing her into conflict with Levee who, having produced modern up-tempo arrangments of Ma Rainey's songs,  believes he has formed an alliance with the white boss.  

How the best-laid plans go wrong is for the audience to discover and the hurt  radiates long after the trap finally snaps shut.This has been a long playing piece since its first performance in 1984 for a reason and TLT gives a green light for this pitch perfect production.

Review Les Blancs

Les Blancs

by Lorraine Hansberry

Circling The Wagons

www.nationaltheatre.org.uk

In an unnamed African colony, sits a skeletal missionary building, the beleaguered inhabitants of which are sitting out the last days of Empire clinging to their faith in medical science, religion and their reason for being there.

With its backdrop of the vast African landscape, Les Blancs, was put together  posthumously by writer Lorraine Hansberry's ex husband Robert Nemiroff  from her notes and drafts after her premature death from cancer in 1965.

Best-known for A Raisin In The Sun - in some ways a response to Clifford Odets' Awake and Sing!, this work with its anthropological sounding title is a riposte to Jean Genet's   Les Nègres, clownerie (The Negros, the clown show) .

The settlers, no longer pioneers but oppressors, and the nomadic Africans are joined by an American journalist (Elliot Cowan) and, separately, Tshembe (Danny Sapani) who, on the death of his father, has returned to his homeland from London where he has studied at university and taken part in an independence movement.

An unfinished play, it's first performance was in 1970, five years' after the writer's death, and, while it has an epic sweep, the patchwork is somewhat roughly stitched and, for us, the joins do show.

It's probably a moot point what were the playwright's original intentions, especially as the paucity of female voices is noticeable. Apart that is from the roles of Madame Neilsen (Siân Phillips), the mission's blind  matriarch, and Marta (Anna Madeley), the practical medic - surely a shoe-in movie role for actress Ingrid Bergman? 

So it's an uneven piece, with a rather conventional first act bringing in a recognizable structure, both covering colonialism and the history of literature. There are touches of Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw and Eugene O'Neill.

Nevertheless, the staging by South African director Yaël Farber with designer Soutra Gilmour, using the full resources of the Olivier stage, brings another dimension. 

Recently there has been a fad for revolving stages in traditional theatres which, to be honest, has irritated the hell out of TLT and her own bush companion. But we've never quite clarified to ourselves exactly why until we saw the apt use on the huge - and we mean huge - Olivier stage. Other theatres are just far too small to do full justice to a revolve and allow the audience clear sightlines.

Here it works to spectacular effect,  giving a full HD treatment to a vast symbolic African horizon with its changing light and seasons. The  onion layered revolve blows up the dust from the arid ground while the tall, stooping, skeletal African figure of "The Woman" (Sheila Atim) lopes across the vista.  

The play itself has a kickback in the second act which takes it away from the neater dichotomies before the interval.  

Throughout there are also glimpses of an intricate, shifting structure, still in progress, encompassing the history of America and its relationship to colonialism as well as a history of Africa and European exploitation.   

Yet the major strand of the mixed race child Eric (Tunji Kasim) feels undeveloped - or maybe, more accurately, truncated - if still vital.

This production blew TLT and her jalopy  away with its unforgettable staging and the soundscape from the Ngqoko singers (music director Joyce Moholoagae) . 

But it also left us with major thorny questions, principally about the author's intent, thrown up by the history of this play and the place of it within the National Theatre's season. At the same time, TLT, as an audience member "in the moment", cannot deny the undoubted power of this production with all its visceral qualities. A green light.

Review Richard II

Richard II

by William Shakespeare

Through The Looking Glass

www.arcolatheatre.com

Order, order! Along to the Arcola Theatre cum House of Commons for this updating of Richard II for the Netflix, boxed set generation directed by Jack Gamble and Quentin Beroud.

It's a pared down version, structured around 24 hour BBC-style breaking news (video design: Sofi Berenger), shoehorned into a US-type political thriller format along the lines of the West Wing or House of Cards (US or UK).

After the death of a political heavyweight, King Richard (Tim Delap) is called on to arbitrate between his two cousins, Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk (David Acton), and Harriet Bolingbroke (Hermione Gulliford) - the latter a blonde female power player, all sharp suits and stilleto heels. Richard fails to grasp the threat posed by this family rift and leaves himself open to rebellion and a coup.

It's a pity the reimagining remains so reliant on pre-existing formats. For  looking more closely at the parliamentary set up, the bars, the debates and question times, the division bell and so on might have reaped benefits for the logic of the tale.

As it is, we have to accept a parallel universe where cousins like Cameron and Johnson (yes, they really are cousins!) do not simply jibe with words and where murder is not out of place.  Where (the closest to a death-in-office we could think of) the death of a party ;leader like John Smith is definitely not from natural causes.

The play starts promisingly with Shakespeare's own lines talking  of receipts echoing the expenses' crisis and disenchantment over a country "leased out", giving reasons why the nation might be ripe for change.

But it's the characters who are more credible than a shaky political drama format and this unbalances the play. Nevertheless, Hermione Gulliford is a striking tactical female Harri Bolingbroke.

Her ascent up the greasy pole gives the play its trajectory and allows also a tantalising glimpse of Richard's wife Isabel (Natasha Bain) as a politician trying to galvanise her born-into-the-role husband.

Yet the change of sex for Bolingbroke also sets up scenarios which feel, to us, like missed opportunities.

When Richard is dislodged by nefarious means, we were waiting for a glimpse of vulnerability from Harri. As a woman in a violent man's world, a politician who fears the situation has run away from her and the possibility striking her she might be being used and could be sacrificed.

But this never materialised and the transfer of power for Harri appears a seamless upward trajectory  regardless of gender.

Ignore the plot holes, concentrate on character,and you can appreciate the disciplined, careful performances, including those  of Tim Delap's Richard II and  Hayden Wood's Bagot, even if they feel sometimes out of context. 

This looking glass world is just a little too cracked and undetailed to hold our attention as a story. Still characters do have resonance, so in the end an amber light.