Review Catastrophists

A new comedy catches the zeitgeist but fails to live up to its initial promise, says Francis Beckett.

Castastrophists

by Jack Stanley 

Apocalypse Soon

https://www.whitebeartheatre.co.uk/

I so wanted to like Catastrophists.

The idea is rich with comic possibilities. Husband and wife Harry and Raf, well paid employees and denizens of leafy Barnes, go to their second home in the Cotswolds and invite the neighbours to dinner. 

In this case, it's Peter and Claudia from the field next door, with a carbon-neutral yurt to call home. A couple who live as part of a survivalist commune and also believe the end of the world is nigh

Catastrophists has three good performances and a brilliant one (Elizabeth Donnelly as the monstrous Raf).

Director Cameron Cook with designer Beth Colley have created, in the very small space available to them, a set you can believe is the living room of a second home in the Cotswolds.

The play opens well, with a truly funny and entirely believable argument between Raf and Harry (Alexander Stutt) about whether to serve crisps or flatbread with the guacamole. 

When Claudia (Patsy Blower) arrives, Raf says: “I love your hoodie. It’s so… unapologetic.” In deference to her guests, Raf has dressed in what she calls “hippie chic.”

But after half an hour or so, the script by Jack Stanley loses its way. The more we get to know about the characters, the harder it is to believe in them, until by the end even these four good actors - including Edmund Dehn as Peter - are reduced to bellowing their lines in this tiny venue.  

It is not clear – and there's nothing Ms Donnelly can do to make it clear – why Raf is so desperate for her guests’ approval. Peter and Claudia never quite make sense.  And when Raf has been built up as a rather strong character who knows her own mind, it is not at all clear why the sight of a goat through the window reduces her to a gibbering wreck.

 The White Bear Theatre deserves support. It’s survived the gentrification of its host pub with nothing worse than a move to a tiny but workable theatre upstairs, and it has a coherent new writing policy.

However, this script badly needs someone being cruel to be kind. I have an idea there is rather a good play hidden in there somewhere, but Jack Stanley hasn't written that script, and I can just about muster an amber light for the play that has emerged..

Review Armide

A seventeenth century temptress lures reviewer Peter Barker into a tempestuous evening of operatic delight.

Armide
Music by Jean-Baptiste Lully
Words and Text by Philippe Quinault

The Battlefield Of Love
http://www.arcolatheatre.com/event/armide/

When a Middle-Eastern warrior princess meets a Western soldier, we somehow suspect no good will come of it.

And so it turns out but, perhaps surprisingly, this is the plot of an elegant yet passionate seventeenth century Baroque opera, one of the latest offerings in the Arcola Theatre’s Grimeborn Festival.

Armide, here in an enchanting revival by the enterprising Ensemble OrQuesta and Brazilian director Márcio da Silva, is generally recognized as one of Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Lully's masterpieces composd towards the end of his career in 1686.

With librettist and playwright Philippe Quinault, Lully had already developed a pioneering complexity of character development through declamatory recitative and soliloquies.

Armide is an Islamic warrior princess who, possessing irresistible sexual charms for men while remaining immune to love's dart, defeats and captures knights of The Crusade.

Nevertheless love conquers the temptress for the first time when she encounters the Christian knight Renaud, who alone amongst the crusaders, remains unvanquished by her.

Armide, who is also a sorceress, summons up all her powers of enchantment to bind Renaud to her, but her passion is real while he is bound to her by sorcery alone. 

Through Armide's torment, this opera becomes an exquisite Baroque treatise on the nature of  desire with the conflict between vengeance and love framed within the innovative tragédie lyrique form.  

Performomh in French with English surtitles, Rosemary Carlton-Willis makes a captivating Armide with a fierce yet tender performance demonstrating intelligence and vocal range.

As Renaud, Guy Withers brings charming presence, a bright tenor and precise lyrical characterisation.  

Da Silva, as well as directing, displays a fine baritone in the role of La Haine, the demon of Hate invoked by Armide to overcome her feelings of love with vengeance.

As director he also shows resourcefulness on an obviously limited budget. Candlelight, for example, ingeniously reveals an underworld of monsters during the travails and terrifying journey of two knights, Ubalde of baritone John Holland-Avery and the Danish Knight the tenor Hiroshi Kanazawa. 

The set and props are meagre - two  battered chairs, a tarnished candelabra and a throw cast over several stage plinths convey Armide's fantasy world.

Nevertheless, the minimal staging is more than made up by a memorable musical performance. This includes the small six-piece orchestra of harpsichord, archlute, violin, viola, gamba and cello  conducted by Matthew Morgan.

The Arcola production is a rare outing for a thrilling opera which in the seventeenth century proved a crowd pleaser and broke new ground with its psychological portrayal of Armide's dilemma.

Ensemble OrQuesta's version does justice to this fascinating piece with accomplished instrumentals and vocals. With only one performance left, this comes highly recommended and it's a green light for a night of rapture and tragedy.    

Review A Spoonful Of Sherman

A Spoonful Of Sherman
Music & Lyrics by Richard M Sherman & Robert B Sherman
Al Sherman and Robert J Sherman
Book by Robert J Sherman
Conceived by Robert J Sherman & Colin Billing

Worth A Lot More Than Tuppence
https://www.brasseriezedel.com/live-at-zedel

Awww, back in the day when TLT was an motorless tricycle learner driver, she treasured her mini-cache of  LPs (remember those?) amongst which was The Story And Songs From Mary Poppins with an illustrated booklet.
 
So even though she'd never seen the movie and the album (ah, those old fashioned words!) wasn't even the Disney film soundtrack, TLT and her very own like-minded chitty of an automobile can sing along to all the songs such as supercalifragi - califragi ...  califragi- er -lipstick  ... well, you know the one she means.

Now comes along an 85 minute celebration of the Sherman family tune- and wordsmithery, A Spoonful of Sherman. 

The title puns of course on another of the most famous Mary Poppins's songs, A Spoonful Of Sugar, apparently inspired by the polio vaccine sugar lump but ask TLT's seven year old self who wrote it - she probably would say, "Mary Poppins of course!".

No, dear, it was in reality written by the  New-York Sherman Brothers whose fame unusually lies in songs for movie musicals with the stage shows coming only relatively recently after the celluloid fact.

Yet the brothers were only  the fourth musical generation of an emigrant family from Stepantsy near Kiev in the Ukraine which arrived, via by-royal-appointment freelance musician posts in the Austro-Hungarian Emperor's court, in the musical melting pot of 1906 New York.
.
Musical director Christopher Hamilton at the piano with vocalists (with more than a smidgeon of subtle yet spot-on choreography as well directed by Stewart Nicholls) Helena Blackman and Daniel Boys join a fifth generation musical Sherman, Robert J, at the Brasserie Zedel's Crazy Coqs cabaret room.

Musically the show begins with granddad Al, born  in the old country, who became a successful Tinpan Alley composer, in an age dominated by music publishers and  song sheet music.

Al was a master of in-demand upbeat ditties such as Save Your Sorrow (For Tomorrow) with Buddy De Sylva and anthem to sports and dating (surely an American high school surefire hit!), "You Gotta Be A Football Hero", written with lyricists Al "Blueberry Hill" Lewis and Buddy Fields.

At the same time, with fellow songwriters Nat Burton and Arthur Altman, he could also turn his hand to a wistful wartime song There's A Harbour Of Dreamboats.

This song put TLT in mind of another celebrated 1940s' contemporary song - Walter Kent's and, ahhh, that's why!, Nat Burton's White Cliffs Of Dover.

However it's the brothers who certainly as the show puts it, wrote "The Songbook of  Your [TLT's] Childhood" and since, as far as TLT can remember, the booklet had the words and possibly the music on the long playing record, it's no exaggeration!

Not being musical specialists, TLT and her little jalopy had no idea 60s' bubblegum pop classic You're Sixteen was written by the fraternal duo in 1960  - beating Neil Sedaka's Sweet Sixteen by a year, even if The Sound Of Music's Sixteen Going On Seventeen  was a year before.

Indeed putting in context the songs (including lyricists' rhyming dictionaries!) was all part of the fun of this solidly enjoyable show for your own automotive duo. 

For this reason, it was the inclusion of the brothers' grandpoppy's roots in Austro-Hungary (where the waltz king Johann Strauss and all those operettas come from) and the brothers' pop Al Sherman (who also had a hobby later incorporated in another famous song) with Robert J's more recent works such as Music Of The Spheres which made A Spoonful Of Sherman a full-bodied experience for us. 

Helena Blackman soaring soprano easily encompassed a range of 20th century song styles from perky 1920s to near operetta to the limpid notes and musical hall idiom of Sherman Brothers' songs.

Meanwhile Daniel Boys put his own Eastenders stamp on chimney sweep Bert's songs from Mary Poppins and the doowop jazzy Jungle Book numbers (which TLT originally learned through  Kenny Ball and His Jazzman on the Morecambe and Wise Show).

Nevertheless it's the beautiful, tender harmonies of Blackman and Boys, especially with Feed The Birds (tuppence a bag!) which will stay with us.

However, a further surprise when Robert J took to the piano and sang the River Song from the 1973 musical adaptation of Tom Sawyer - TLT is certain there was reference to the very first word of James Joyce's epic and very musical novel Finnegans Wake (Robert B - Robert J's Dad, keep up at the back! 😉 - was a literature major!).

It's a practically perfect introduction drawing on a family fistful of songwriting characters, sadly missed and still living.

A family spanning  the change from songsheet publishing to movie technology - in a different way from, say, another Imperial Russian emigrant songwriter, Irving Berlin - with an inextricable golden link to movie mogul Walt Disney and the influence on the soundtracks of numerous films which have followed. So we're saving our sorrow for tomorrow 😀 and it's a green light.   

Review boom

boom
by Peter Sinn Nachtrieb

From Here To Eternity
https://theatre503.com/

boom by Peter Sinn Nachtrieb is not to be confused with Boum!, French singer Charles Trenet's pulsating song and ode to life and love where biology has taken over marked by a thumping heartbeat.

But this is the surreal enforced household of Jules - who has reinvented his name as a tribute to French science fiction and surrealist novelist Jules Verne -  and his visitor - female Jo (aha, did you really think it might turn out to be Jim for - er - Jemima - ? - to carry our artificially imposed French theme?).

Jules, a marine biologist, under the pretext of an online lonely hearts ad promising "intensely significant coupling" has lured to his student pad cum lab cum bunker,  Jo. She's a world-weary journalism student from England who is careless about whom she couples with, looking to churn out an article for an assignment.

But Jules has found out that, through his study of fish, that the earth's population is about to go boom! in the negative sense of the word and, driven by a biological and intellectual imperative, is set on saving the human race.

There are a few not insurmountable difficulties.

Jules, who calls a fish in tank Dorothy after the Wizard Of Oz heroine, is gay, even if he recognizes the necessity to create a huge family tree out of a little bush sprig.

While Jo, who also suffers from periodic blackouts, definitely does not want to procreate and a bond between the two seems highly unlikely. .

As the comet approaches the earth, it looks like Jules may be running out of options.

But wait, who is that - that mouthy, percussive museum worker with an array of levers and whose drumbeats intermittently frame the action?  That's Barbara who is your unreliable narrator tour guide to the end of the world and new beginnings.

This three-hander was first performed, and well-received by critics, in New York in 2008 the year the lever was pulled, bursting the credit bubble with the crunch.

The deliberate artificiality, the farcical destruction and creation myth obviously hit a nerve when scientist Jules recounts how his mother "couldn't have picked a worse time to go on a tour of unreinforced masonry in California".

However director Katherine Nesbitt seems unsure of how to hide the flaws of this energetic, raw piece.

Nicole Sawyerr as the journalist in training is clear and focussed but never seems to really get a handle on Jo's determination to turn the random into journalism and her lapses into unconsciousness.

Will Merrick gives good value as theorizing Jules, nicely inept as the graduate whose best laid plans go wrong from a combination of his own incompetence and outside circumstances.

Mandi Symonds's green-suited Barbara, regulating the action, making the Wizard of Oz persona her own, gradually becomes more and more part of the story. Even if her inivtation for the audience to take her into its confidence and purchase the institution's "pamphlets" plant increasing seeds of doubt.

However the play is alternately thought-provoking and tedious with the incomprehension and isolation of Jules and Jo becoming grating.

Meanwhile Barbara's downfall and (dubious) resilience feels a long time coming. There's something there but, although some aspects of this tall tale grew on TLT, it felt spread mighty thinly over an eternity of 90 or so minutes. A lower range amber light.

Review Mrs Orwell

Mrs Orwell
by Tony Cox

Gentlemen's Relish
http://www.oldredliontheatre.co.uk/

Post-Second World War. In the Soviet Union citizens were used to everything being in short supply and whispered about the corruption of those in authority who got more than their fair share plus access to foreign goods.

In Britain, paper rationing had just ended in 1949 but other rationing continued. The writer known as George Orwell had become the author of a bestseller Animal Farm, having eventually hit a post war Cold War zeitgeist, and then 1984, a sensation in the western publishing world.

The bio-drama Mrs Orwell begins with the male writer and essayist rather than the eponymous second wife, Sonia Brownell.

She is a 31 year old, glamorous blonde, as luminous and perky as a sunflower and the efficient literary magazine assistant editor to which Orwell was a contributor

Mrs Orwell, as the title and name implies (although George Orwell was a pseudonym), is for good or ill defined by George Orwell.

Orwell of course was a pseudonym (or  "mask" as one character remarks) for novels and especially essays which caught the imagination of a post-war generation - the persona of a plain speaking Englishman with socialist tendencies espousing values of decency.

This play by Tony Cox rather cleverly but far too subtly, in the opinion of TLT, seems to be a dream of Sonia as conjured up by George Orwell (né Eric Blair) and the male gaze.

Cox is light touch on Sonia who was the writer's second wife, marrying him in his hospital bed three months before his sudden death from a haemorrhage, who hasn't always had a good press.

It is also believed, the author partly based the character of Julia in his most famous novel 1984, although the play decides not to explicitly mention this.

Instead  Cressida Bonas has the difficult task on stage of embodying Sonia Brownell through the filter of Julia - becoming a creature of the famous writer's imagination addled by illness prescription drugs and eventually also a Scotch haze. 

In this Bonas, suitably svelte and cut-glass, does exceptionally well, as far as it goes, in spite of it being a tough ask.

But there is a vacuum at the centre of the play. In this, by coincidence, it rather resembles the fictional matriarch of Apologia where a reputation precedes a woman with hardly any supporting evidence..

Nevertheless in the case of the play Mrs Orwell and real-life perceptions of Sonia as a stereotype grasping and unstable widow in charge of the literary estate after her husband's death, this isn't necessarily wholly a criticism.

The personality of the excitable Orwell (or should we say Blair) is far more filled out  matched by a beguiling performance from Peter Hamilton Dyer who embodies the public schoolboy enthusiasm, including a taste for comfort food such as dumplings and Gentleman's Relish, which turns interestingly into something more hard-edged in the second act.

Rose Ede as the nurse has to cope with a stereotyped role but still manages to give a glimpse of underlying scepticism about the various visitors filing in to see the celebrity writer whose work Hollywood was by this time clamouring to put on screen.

She also shares a moment with the writer's new wife where the audience can glimpse the generous, practical side of Sonia's nature.

Publisher Fred Warburg is portrayed by playwright Cox and played by Robert Stocks as a stolid, methodical businessman balancing the interests of Orwell and keeping some secrets for Sonia yet excluding her from the male club.

This part of the play doesn't always add up  (and is somewhat at variance with the real Westminster School, Oxford-educated, First World War army officer publisher) but may again be explained by the prism of Orwell's imagination. Even so, he is given a clunky expositional speech in the second act which rather breaks up the fluidity of the production.

Edmund Digby Jones gives a charismatic if creepy performance as artist Lucian Freud. Yet he's introduced to us first with Orwell which again rather skews the audience's view of Sonia's close relationship with him. We never get to know that she had known Freud from her days as an artist's model.

So Sonia remains an enigma with her radiant photogenic film star good looks. No mention is made of her shared heritage with Eric Blair, both born in colonial India before returning to England. Or her schooldays with future film star Vivian Leigh, although it may explain an otherwise cryptic desire specifically referenced at the end of the play.

Mrs Orwell is neatly directed by Jimmy Walters keeping up the momentum with Jeremy Walmsley's music bridging the scenes. There's a deceptively simple and effective hospital room design by  Rebecca Brower. Nevertheless the corridor windows also transform themselves almost into cinema screens for some of the action.

However there are a few elements which marr the theatrical experience, chiefly the assumption that an audience new to the story will be able to pick up on the name dropping. By the same token, it may be  a play that has been thinned down and some necessary information left out.

Whatever, lack of background sometimes leaves holes in an otherwise skilful  patchwork and out-of-context jusxtapositions do undermine a more complex dramatic and humanly credible analysis.

It needs a little more like the piquant moment when Sonia is dragged by her husband, his publisher and Lucian Freud, who sees the opportunity for a loan, into a business arrangement and when we realise just how vulnerable and how potentially dangerous the situation is for her. An amber/green light.

Review Apologia

Apologia
by Alexi Kaye Campbell

The Last Supper
http://www.atgtickets.com/shows/apologia/trafalgar-studios/

It's a luxurious country kitchen on the birthday of Kristin, an American-born divorced Marxist academic in her sixties. She's awaiting a fellow veteran of radical 1960s' politics and  her two sons, whom she hardly ever sees, with their partners for a celebration dinner

Peter who is in banking arrives punctually with his physiotherapist girlfriend Trudi while Simon, preceded by his TV actress wife, creeps in more surreptitiously.

Kristin was an activist during the anti-Vietnam war marches in Grosvenor Square and the Paris student demos of 1968. A bundle of hurt and recriminations soon emerges triggered by Kristin's just published memoirs, which she claims were written only to chart her professional life, where her two children fail to get a mention. 

This play was originally staged in 2009 on the intimate stage of the Bush Theatre before it moved to its present venue. It may be something is lost in a larger venue. There's nothing wrong with what is there, but this family drama feels frustratingly under-developed.

Frustrating especially because the juxtaposition of banking, evangelical Christianity, television fame, academia and the legacy of 1968 with the personal cost to a woman and her family is an attractive and thought-provoking premise. 

Nevertheless it remained for TLT  a play of five characters in search of a plot.  Jamie Lloyd directs a solid, straightforward production. There is a marvellously detailed widescreen set from Soutra Gilmour with just a glimpse of a corridor through an open door and a Renaissance portrait with a young woman's telling glance.

However while Stockard Channing is fine as blinkered old leftie and mother Kristin, she is a curiously passive character around whom the others circulate and comment.

Laura Carmichael as Christian evangelist Trudi shines brightest of the satellites with a naturalness in  turning often unforgiving lines into thoughtful responses in  this family drama.

Otherwise Joseph Milson doubles as Kristin's sons, Peter and brother Simon, both isolated in their own way by their parents' actions. Freeman Agyeman is the actress, increasingly estranged from Simon, who reveals her own motivations in life as well as art. Desmond Barrit makes the best of a stereotypical wisecracking gay best friend, a veteran also of the 1960s' protesting frontline.

Our googling reveals the term apologia - from the Greek - to be "A formal written defence of one's opinions or conduct", a rhetorical format not to be confused with apology as an expression of regret.

In some ways, TLT felt, this play tries to combine the two with the unrepentent activist having put forth in print a defence of what she calls her professional life and her sons yearning for something more from her - perhaps something less a defence and more an apologetic understanding of what has happened to all of them.

Yet the nitty gritty exploration is not there - the trial, just or unjust, a show trial or a genuine investigation - never comes. We're never quite sure about the nature of Kristin's past actions or her perceived fault in anything but the most general terms.

The characters are there, but the issues seem thinly drawn with digressions, even if we may suspect the play teeters on the verge of asking whether if she were a man and a father instead of a mother, the same reproaches would be there.

The potentially most interesting relationship is that between Kristin and her prospective American daughter-in-law Trudi, who doesn't pretend to be an intellectual and met Kristin's son Peter at a prayer meeting. However this is a drama which may have looked better on the drawing board than on stage. 

Practically each character has his or her own moment of "apologia" but, for us it felt stretched out and it's an amber light.

Review Evita

Evita
Lyrics by Tim Rice
Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber

It Takes Two To Tango
http://www.atgtickets.com/shows/evita/phoenix-theatre/

We're about to shoot holes through our credibility by admitting that we've never seen Evita - not Elaine Paige, not Madonna, not Elena Roger. Yes, we remember the Julie Covington and David Essex recordings and videos and have caught bits of the movie, but that's about it.

But it was a nice surprise to find Evita, based on the life and death of Eva Perón, is a stonking musical with an ingenious rock and Latin-American flavoured Lloyd Webber score and a very clever, succinct book written by Tim Rice at a time when another Perón was making news,

This touring production from the Bill Kenwright stable, directed by Bob Tomason with Kenwright, feels uneven but still, we think, enjoyable. Part of the unevenness though lies in our own preconceptions, shared we are sure by many of our generation,  of which more later.

The 1978 stage musical follows the career of Eva Perón, a rags-to-riches true life story, illegitimate child to radio actress to wife of the President, only to be cut short  by an operatic-arc tragic death at a relatively young age.  Or as Lloyd-Webber, who was of course Jesus Christ Superstar's composer, pithily put it, before he was persuaded to do the musical, another death at 33.

Emma Hatton is a vivacious Evita of the Elaine-Paige-type but the show is definitely hampered in the first act by some bizarre microphone sound levels. 

Even so Oscar Balmaseda's minor celebrity crooner Magaldi, in this version of Evita's story, Eva's meal ticket to city bright light's rises above this with a pleasing clarity, along with Sarah O'Connor as Perón's former mistress with "Another Suitcase In Another Hall".

Happily the sound levels become practically perfect for the second act when the hard-edged  money making, the turning of Evita into an almost Marilyn Monroe superstar and then her sanctification really kick in.  

Hatton and Kevin Stephen-Jones's brylcreamed Perón in song thrillingly argue out political possiblities while the iconic songs, Che's earlier "Oh, What A Circus" and Eva's "Don't Cry For Me Argentia" have their impact.

Yet we felt somewhat frustrated by what seemed like a vigorous and beautifully put together musical but we couldn't quite fathom the reason why at the time.

During and immediately after the show we were totally unfair about Gian Marco Scharetti's Che. We criticised his faintly ridiculous broad-chested military stance. 

But we did wonder about the way he donned his military beret very like a member of the IRA paramillitary rather than a romantic view of Che Guevara and another moment when, on his knees, eyes raised, he seemed almost Christ-like. 

We should have trusted our instincts and taken this che (che in Spanish is a colloquial term, he's a guy, any guy) more at face value. 

Lloyd-Webber and Rice's original character was not Che Guevara but a far more generic Brechtian terrorist/freedom fighter. This also makes sense of the casting of Irishman Colm Wilkinson as the Che on the concept album. 

It also turns Evita into a musical about how myths are formed compared with the reality of powerbroking and about how social reform can go hand in hand with corruption and murder. It's also a musical, it seems to us, about men and women and who controls the narrative and storytelling.

So any version loyal to the creators' original conception has a major problem. The preconceptions of people like TLT. 

The 1978 director Hal Prince, it seems to us, turned Evita into a more cinematically ready musical of a certain type. It made sense again when we learned that, admittedly much later, Cabaret's Liza Minnelli did a screen test for Evita.

Maybe also there was a difference between the US's view of Che Guevara and Europe's which makes Prince's choice to turn the narrator into the icon legitimate in American terms but also made the character less universal. That said, the Alan Parker movie with Antonio Banderas did revert back to the original concept.  

It may be that the differing South American, the mainstream US, the Broadway and Hollywood and the British and European views on Che Guevara all come into play. And it all may have been complicated by differing colonial and then post Cold War views of Argentina.  

We thought we detected clever moments - the cathedral scenes had a tinge of The Sound Of Music, the slightest echo of West Side Story and Sondheim's Assassins in the Buenos Aires scenes and a nod towards My Fair Lady as the aristocratic women of upper class Argentina berate Evita behind her back before the musical becomes its own creature.

It's all very light touch and does work but it's also rather lush, full of bright colours and military uniforms and of course that iconic Che Guevara image. We had to investigate this and interrogate our own assumptions, but we'd love now to find out if a cut-down overtly Brechtian Evita would work. 

Our storytelling in this review, it seems to us, backs up our own conflicted reaction to this production. We may have made some assumptions, but we didn't know the steps of this Evita tango. We hope it is of service to those about to see the musical for the first time and wish we had known all this before we went. 

It's not only a great musical but, we think, a barometer of conflicting interests and the politics of showbusiness in 1978. For this 2017 Evita, it's an amber light. 

Review The Wasp

The Wasp
by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm

Hornet From Hell
http://www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk/

When the internet first took hold, one of the first successes was Friends Reunited - school reunions writ large online. Many of course were delighted to trace those they had known from their schooldays.

On the other hand, for others it was a nightmare scenario ... 

Two married 30 somethings meet up outside a cafe. Carla's character is immediately established - she's a cash-strapped hard-faced blonde (Lisa Gorgin), chain-smoking - and pregnant.

She's joined by a demure, well-spoken, well-off ex-classmate (Selina Giles), with an air of Charlotte Rampling, who has contacted her through Facebook.

They seem to be polar opposites, in the past one a bully, the other a victim, but now the balance of power has changed, they're all growed up with a grown-up proposition in prospect.

This is a drama-thriller that at first shifts the dynamics rather well. It sets up our expectations, often incorporating issues and news stories which have appeared in the media, only to snatch them away.

It also allows the two actors to run the gamut of  their acting repertoire in a positive way. That's its strength and, a few instants excepted when it lagged a bit, the first act is suitably tense and gripping.

It was in the second act, despite director Anna Simpson's best efforts and a pleasing, efficient set design from Mike Leopold, that the moments of lag started to overwhelm the plot and it falls apart.

There are rather too many on-the-nose explanations, including the origin of the play's title which seem torturous to say the least.

In fact, we began to wonder whether we had wandered into some computer mash up of a David Attenborough nature documentary and John Fowles's The Collector with a touch of Stephen King's Misery. 

Or, despite committed performances, we almost expected it would turn out to be some kind of elaborate game knowingly played between two warring friends, trying to outwit each other and we in the audience were the victims of a theatrical "sting" (it wasn't).

The Wasp goes from plot point to plot point and plot to plot, as if it were tasting a whole range of possible stories, a trend we have noticed in a large number of new plays during the past couple of years.

It becomes a curious amalgam of a thriller - welding together a number of themes - more successfully in its first act than in the denouement. The ending was one we had thought of near the beginning but dismissed as one of the snatched-away scenarios.

However, frankly, with all the jumping around from tall tale to tall tale, we stopped caring.

Nevertheless, it's a slick, well-acted  production and if you're not too pernickety about stereotypes and plausibility even in The Wasp's lunatic, smoke and mirrors world, there are worse ways of spending an evening. It's also probably a movie, rather than a theatre, script.   An amber light.

Review Continuity

Continuity
by Gerry Moynihan

Behind The Walls
http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/

Pádraig is a bit of an artiste - he's called upon to perform - to sing - "Once upon a time there was Irish ways and Irish laws" in the pub in the city he calls Derry on St Patrick's Day.

He's also lived through history both literally as a middle aged mechanic from Cold War to 2017 and also keeping alive the flame harking back to Oliver Cromwell's conquest of Ireland through The Troubles.

For he's still a member of what he views as the IRA - the paramilitary Continuity IRA fighting for  32 counties of a united Ireland.

Yet he's living in modern European times as well, having hitched up with a Spanish lover who works as a university administrator, even if the future is now more uncertain.

But he's never believed in the peace process, although at least one close family member has joined the Police Force Of Northern Ireland.

Meanwhile he finds himself in demand for his technical skills and as part of an alternative "legal" set up by men classified as terrorists maiming for life minor drug dealers.

Writer Gerry Moynihan has framed a neat monologue but the evening belongs to Paul Kennedy as the conflicted Pádraig who gradually realises in this 90 minute monologue that he is a man caught between two generations and cannot reconcile the two..

The core of the monologue lays out powerfully and in increments Pádraig's life. There are a few clunky movie references which sound like additional tweaks.

However the ebb and flow of  Pádraig's emotions and  his increasing understanding of others' inner lives  is effectively conveyed, sometimes touchingly and sometimes with disturbing clarity.

While history and organizations seem to have an onward continuity, the grudges and actions are part of a sordid circular internal turmoil.

This is in essence a melodrama where many of the elements may be familiar. Yet there are also some deft touches which put it in both a more global and intimate domestic context, bringing it up to date.

Director Shane Dempsey, with movement direction by Steffany George, insures the solo piece is well-paced with Anna Clock's atmospheric sound effects.

A magnetic, carefully nuanced performance by Paul Kennedy immerses the audience in a world where everyone has only a partial understanding of what is going on and what they are doing, even with a final seemingly defiant act. An amber/green light.

Review Road

Road
by Jim Cartwright

Northern Soul
https://royalcourttheatre.com/

By 1986 the era of the bomb sites left by the Second World War and subsequent demolition was retreating but not forgotten.

This often revealed on city wastelands a cross section of a home in the rented Victorian terraces which still had tenants in the houses next door. Torn wallpaper and homely cupboards up above still visible to children playing down below in the ruins.

The North/South divide had descended and the old industrial revolution industries were either rapidly contracting or had already died a death. The Big Bang and the bank account culture were yet to take over but there were glimpses of the changes they would wreak.

This, it seems to us, is the atmosphere of Jim Cartwright's Road - dilapidation, unemployment where joining the armed forces and almost a war enconomy seemed the only alternatives, a new generation springing up out of the ruins of the old and, yes, an indominitable stereotypical humour and resilence.

Having only read the play and never seen a production, we were excited when Road came up on the schedule of the Royal Court - its original home - directed by John Tiffany to boot.

Road is a mix of communal poetry, soap opera (Coronation Street, Brookside and even Eastenders had all become popular), rage at social circumstances and an exploration of inner psychic space and society. 

We have to say we were a little surprised by a set from Chloe Lamford with a pair of monolithic streetlights towering on each side of the stage and an extremely clean red brick wall with bricked up huge arched windows as the backdrop.

This all seemed more like something out of expressionist Metropolis than a Lancashire town in the 1980s under a Thatcher government.

And instead of us travelling up and down the road with a  febrile Scullery, it's a production made static by the curious choice of a rising and lowering perspex cube giving a feeling of aliens who had just landed on Planet Lancashire.

Up the wide steps at the front of the stage, our guide, Scullery, is a very laid back Lemn Sissay, poet and actor, who takes his time to lean back and watch the action as it plays out before him.

This is not  a pulsating, changing street or a ghetto where people are trapped. It's a far more sterile environment where everybody takes their turn.

You may guess from this TLT found the Lancashire street via Sloane Square particularly lacking in atmosphere. Sometimes this view of a Northern town even felt theme park-like and kitsch rather than a hand-to-mouth existence of a street full of people  regularly cashing the unemployment benefit Giro at the Post Office.

Still, while they have to sometimes fight against some unwieldy design for the intimate scenes, there are good performances. Mark Hadfield as a Hoover-mending resident, leather-skirted Michelle Fairley propping up a passive binge-drinking soldier she's determined will give her a good time and June Watson's understated but pitch perfect turn as a girlish pensioner.  

Written by Jim Cartwright three years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Road is a map not so much of a sea change but a new era's tidal wave. It still remains an atmospheric piece of writing with beautiful, visceral use of music.

However we don't feel the overall concept of this production goes with the flow of the poetic text. It just doesn't feel raw red and wounded  enough - as if it were all behind an airless perspex box with the politics and soul sucked out. It's an amber light.