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. 😈💀

Review Much Ado About Nothing (Preview)

Much Ado About Nothing
by William Shakespeare

Once Upon A Time In Mexico
http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/

It's Mucho Ado About Nothing with sombreros, ponchos and cigarillos at Shakespeare's Globe set in the midst of the Mexican Revolution in the early years of the 20th century.

The steam clears revealing wooden slatted railway wagons spanning the stage, a  means of moving people and supplies from and to the home encampment.  

The grubby rebels, the leader Don Pedro (Steve John Shepherd),  lanky, moustachioed Benedick (Matthew Needham) and young puppy rebel Claudio (Marcello Cruz) arrive on horses, cleverly evoked by riders on stilts and wire horses' heads.

Here the women stride around with rifles and belts of bullets criss crossing their female apparel. 

In the chauvinist rebel camp environment, there is also Don Pedro's sister, the saturnine Juana (Jo Dockery). It's a gender swap from the original Shakespeare text and the male machismo surrounding her gives some motivation for her bitterness and jealousy.

Directed by Matthew Dunster, it all works surprisingly well. Don Pedro is a slightly insecure Pancho Villa figure at a time when several factions were fighting for dominance in Mexico. The tough Leonato (Martin Marquez in a fine performance), complete with  black eye patch, is still slightly vulnerable when it comes to family honour.

Beatrice (Beatriz Romilly) is his slightly older niece, a slightly more careworn woman than her hardy but still more than slightly fragile cousin Hero (Anya Chalotra).

The music from composer James Maloney and the three-strong band led by Zands Duggan with Matt Bacon on guitar and Miguel Gorodi on trumpet, conjures up a hot, dusty and vibrant Mexico. But it also works dramatically, signalling the mood of the oncoming action and enabling fluid, clear scene changes for the audience.

Anna Fleischle's design keeps it simple: The train wagons from the National Railways of Mexico  provide the backdrop. On one side stands a blue and white tiled pillar with an altar and a Madonna shrine. On the other side, a pillar has a wooden bench curving round as a seat and a perch for the beer bottles.

Away from the main stage is another island platform in the midde of the groundlings, serving as a second stage. 

The tricks played on Beatrice and Benedict make sense in the boredom of the anti-climactic periods between fighting.  The easily-swayed males and their vulnerability, alongside machismo, makes sense of the savage rejection of Hero, not only by Claudio but also Don Pedro and her own father Leonato. 

The place names are changed to suit Mexico. The currency of course is the peso and the masked ball with Fleischle's flamboyant brightly colouried Mexican costumes  becomes a lusty but formalised celebration of the bull and virility. 

In this version, Dogberry becomes Dog Berry (Ewan Wardrop), an American movie director who mangles words in translation. 

His box camera footage helps uncover the villain of the piece and if the storyline feels a little strained, that's more the nature of Shakespearean comedy than this production. 

For a Hollywood newsreel and movie director really did accompany Sancho Panza in real life and there was even a contract, if a little less spectacular and prescriptive than some implied.

It's an earthy, bright and gaudy Much Ado with the music effortlessly flagging up the comic and serious moments.  

Very much an ensemble piece from Beatrice and Benedick, through Don Pedro, Juana, Hero, Claudio and Hero, to the sweetly-singing child soldier (Lucy Brandon), it's a green light for a mucho enjoyable Much Ado About Nothing.  

Review Terror

Terror
by Ferdinand Von Schirach

A Question of Intent
https://lyric.co.uk/

In Peter Weiss's searing stage docu-drama The Investigation using extracts from the real-life Frankfurt Trials after World War II, there is a small but telling moment when we hear that there was a form of justice within Nazi concentration camps.

Military guards were disciplined for stealing from the piles of belongings gathered from those incarcerated and murdered in the camp. This was seen as a major infraction, whereas what was happening in the camp was seen as routine and legal.

And it doesn't seem as if any of the guards in their defence protested "You're killing and robbing  thousands, millions and you're accusing me of stealing?"

This could be seen as satire - if it hadn't really happened. 

We didn't know the background of Ferdinand von Schirach, the writer of Terror,  the "You decide" courtroom drama directed by Sean Holmes and translated by David Tushingham, before we read about him after the event.

Terror strikes us as a couched - rather too couched - satiric analysis of legal misdirection and diversion where the supposed moral conundrum can easily be dismantled in one sentence and the binary vote at the end is a palpable nonsense.

A rapid response military fighter pilot Lars Koch (Ashley Zanghaza) deployed when a civilian airplane is highjacked by a terrorist makes the decision to shoot the plane down against orders and against German constitutional law.

The motivation?  The plane carrying just over 160 passengers was heading for the Allianz stadium in Munich where there were 70,000 people. Is he guilty of murder?

All the audience aka voters are promoted flatteringly by judge (Tanya Moodie) to the status of "lay judges" and the very narrow remit laid before them.

If you decide to go to Terror, by the end you might be ruminating on a seemingly knotty moral conundrum.

Alternatively you might agree even a seemingly democratic electronic voting process can become the gateway to a coup if the judge, pilot, lawyers and even the court usher, who also stands by, are so inclined.

You might, on the other hand, accept the authority of the court and view the statements made by the judge, the lawyers and the questioning of two witnesses as transparent.

Or you might question why there are only two witnesses, the military air traffic controller  Lieutenant Colonel Christian Lauterbach (John Lightbody) and a passenger's wife named as "joint plaintiff" Franziska Meiser (Shanaya Rafaat) with everything else second hand through the judges and lawyers.

We'll make no bones about it. Having heard the evidence from two witnesses, the questioning and speeches of the prosecution (Forbes Masson) and defence (Emma Fielding) lawyers and something from the pilot, TLT refused to vote.

She might not be the only one because the number of abstainers was not counted - in fact we don't even know whether the final result was truly the way the audience voted.

TLT will also nip in here and say that a fact laid out by the prosecution and confirmed by the military witness demolished all subsequent arguments, although it was not included in the topsy turvy process when the judge summed up after the verdict.

We don't want to give too much more away but we'd put it like this. If TLT were a journalist covering this trial - which many will find rather dry and abstract - there is a startling news angle and headline  buried in a witness's testimony and then never referred to again. A spoiler hint about the course of action which could have been taken is on this link, if you want to click on it.

Now we'll reveal what we didn't realise until after the show. Ferdinand Von Schirach, the playwright, is the grandson of the head of the National Socialist Youth movement, Baldur von Schirach,  who also took part in the transportation Jewish citizens to concentration camps.

So the playwright, who is also a lawyer, has had plenty of years to consider how a murderous regime and a head of state can be voted in democratically under a seemingly "legal" veneer.

He seems also to have considered how people aren't that precise about analysing the facts against superficially logical arguments, even when it involves sacrifing hundreds of fellow citizens  - if these citizens are not their nearest and dearest or vital to their well-being.

Giving this away may seem like a partial spoiler, only ... there was nothing to flag this play up as a satire and not a courtroom drama and, if they could still be bothered, many left still trying to weigh up ponderously-put moral arguments.

In other words, this was for us about words and so-called moral arguments beguiling an audience away from an indisputable fact, judging (no pun intended) by the cross section around us.

We're willing to be corrected if it's not satire and it's just that nobody's noticed previously there is a prolonged section which contradicts the whole premise.

But, although we're vain, we're really not that vain, and a postscript to the published text, with the playwright expressing his admiration for Jewish German satirist Kurt Tucholsky, does seem to give a clue.

It's perfectly good acting and direction with a suitably awe-inspiring court designed by Anna Fleischle, even if the script becomes somewhat ponderous. In other circumstances, we might give it an amber light.

However  with the play marked not as a satire but as an interactive drama, "a worldwide phenomenon that's stirred debate across the globe", it feels fundamentally dishonest. For that alone we feel it should be a red light review.

It's a highly unusual situation for a TLT review - but we've laid out our prosecution and the defence. You decide. 

Review Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead [Preview]

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
by Tom Stoppard

The Lost Boys
http://www.oldvictheatre.com/

Hot on the heels of the video editor's Hamlet, comes a revival of Tom Stoppard's first playwriting success, the 50-year-old tragicomedy Rosencrantz and Guildernstern Are Dead.

In 1967  two bit characters in Shakespeare's tragedy were plucked from obscurity, first by a young writer, then by an Observer critic and finally by the literary manager of the National Theatre. 

"We're just over the moon, it's better than winning the pools, we've been in work for 50 years," says Guildenstern - or is it Rosencrantz ...?*

For those a tad too young to know, the football pools were one of the two ways of winning big money  in 1967, the other being Post Office Premium Bonds.

OK, ok, we're being tongue-in-cheek and metatheatrical as the Old Vic - the original home of the National Theatre between 1963 and 1976 - celebrates half a century of the Danish twosome in Stoppard's play.

This time it's the turn of Joshua McGuire and Daniel Radcliffe to take on the double act with David Haig taking up the mantle as the Player King. (who, by the way, speaks fluent Danish for, some might say, rather Stoppardian absurdist reasons).

Directed by David Leveaux,  Radcliffe is the more passive Rosencrantz, gaining in confidence during the play as the wide-eyed little lost boy who wants to "go home" and showing a knack for comedy timing. Meanwhile McGuire grasps the mettle as the fruity-voiced leader of the pair, Guildenstern, and both are clothed in traditional brown and green jerkins with satchels from their shoulders

But Rosencrantz and Guildernstern are also children let loose from the nursery, set against an unrolled cloudy blue sky, half Simpsons cartoon-like, half Michaelangelo Sistine Chapel sky (set design Anna Fleischle, lighting Howard Harrison). After all, unlike Hamlet we do not see or know their parentage. Yet, the child-like aspect is emphasised by a picture book quality to the costumes, as if the Danish royal Court has steeped itself in the pastels of Le Petit Prince.

King Claudius (Wil Johnson) has a paper crown, Queen Gertrude (Marianne Oldham) has an outsize Elizabethan ruff topping a scarlet dress with hooped skirt halting above the ankles. Polonius (William Chubb has a gold braid and Danish  pastel blue jacket with a fairy-tale blonde Orphelia (Helena Wilson), similarly in pastel blue (costumes Anna Fleischle and Lori Epstein).

Hamlet (Luke Mullins) is a confident, languid first rank public schoolboy, all in black, smoothly outwitting the two attendants mired in trying to work out their place in things as tantalizing snippets of the Shakespeare play emerge and disappear around them.

For Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not acting extras but characters who know only their own lines - when they remember them - and are blocked from knowing the whole story. Haig's Player King enters Brechtian style with a cart but accompanied by a pierrot/commedia del arte band with a klezmer feel (composer Colin Buckeridge).

Indeed Haig's scene-stealing Player King, in an unbuttoned red toy soldier scarlet jacket, has a touch of Fagin about him as well as a slightly Pinteresque menace as he draws the curtain across the stage with what looks like Brueghel's painting of Icarus's fall when the sun melts his wings, suffering while life goes on around him.
 
Any production of Shakespeare's Hamlet has to overcome its status as a play filled with quotes, bringing freshness to the text. So Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern has to compete now against a plethora of parodies where the premise of two characters hanging around, waiting for their cue is hardly novel.

Yet as we have pointed out in our review of the 2011 Trevor Nunn production, for all the theorizing about probability and literary in-jokes, there is heart and drama at the centre of Stoppard's play. The deracinated pair at times almost seem like refugees in their un-knowledge of what is going on around them and their fates dictated by others, both in person and in paperwork.

This is a solid production with a winsome quality of the nursery mixed with the sting of ill chance and looming death. On its 50th anniversary, it seems the dictum of that well-known stand up Karl Marx still stands up: "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce." It's an amber/green light for a play which has now has entered theatrical history but still keeps its edge, both as farce and tragedy.

*We should say that's an off the record quote from Rosencrantz - or - um - Guildenstern, in case you go to the show and wonder why that line isn't in it. OK, we admit it, it's fake news  - we made that one up ... 😉

Review Henry V

Henry V

by William Shakespeare 

Wild About Harry

http://openairtheatre.com/

This Henry V begins with a Mary-Beard-like veteran academic, an orange-scarfed Chorus (Charlotte Cornwell) urging us to exercise our minds on the history of Henry V and the war against France. 

After patiently explaining the male succession to the crown, it is this gray haired tutor who has the prerogative to annoint a King Henry from among the modern young people milling around on stage. She chooses, naturally, a woman (Michelle Terry), in a nifty Prince of Wales check three-piece short-trousered suit with red rosebud lipsticked mouth and something of Le Petit Prince about her.

During our lifetimes, TLT and her own peacenik horsepower sidekick never had occasion, until now, to view  Henry V as problematic. It had the infinite capacity to chime with both patriotism and pacificism and Britain was safely esconced in Europe geographically and politically in a way Shakespeare never envisaged.

But now it has to accommodate uncharted territory. The bureaucratic seismic shift of Brexit and a war, or rather in our times technically a conflict, with real flesh and blood maimed and lives lost, transformed into a report. These are uncertain times and this uncertainty, for better and for worse, pulses through director Robert Hastie's production of Shakespeare's history play.

The single-minded pursuing of conquest despite the uncertainty, on a metal grid stage designed by Anna Fleischle amidst the greenery of Regent's Park, proved more visceral for us than the gender bending casting. The delicate mash up costuming matches the mood -  crumpled red velvet surrounded by a gold crown sitting on the head of a diminutive but authoritative King Harry and a taller, darker decadent Dauphin (Alex Bhat) with an Amadeus laugh. 

For it's not the older heads, not even the scheming Church of England leader (David Sibley), who lights the touch paper, but the rivalry between the graduate of the French royal court, the louche French prince taunting his generational counterpart across the Channel. 

It's a strange but lucid rendering of Henry V. We cross the century from Edwardian check to modern army fatigues, blue for the French, khaki for the British but this fight ain't no fashion parade. 

Harry on the spot orders summary executions: a conspirator, Lord Scroop (Phil Cheadle), planning to dislodge him; a former drinking partner, Bardolph (Bobby Delaney), for looting a French church and he gives the nod to the cutting of French prisoners of war throats. 

The famous St Crispin's Day speech uttered on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt turns from the rousing of the crowd to the singling out of one recalcitrant to be persuaded to turn back to fight. Yes, it's a plea, yes it has a sense of urgency. 

But it also curiously chimes with the age of the blog and the astute piece of internet propaganda which feels as if it's tailored to the individual. King Henry V has for many always been a play with a double voice, patriotic and heroic yet cynical and angry about the expediency, brutality and waste of life by war. Now Hastie's production has added the finely honed psychology of the web age. 

Lanky Princess Katherine (Ben Wiggins) is more noticeably at first in drag but her learning of English has real comic verve, with surely a leaf taken, in reverse, from Betty Comden and Adolph Green's French Lesson . And her final appearance is suitably regal, spikey crown on her head as she towers over the rest of the cast with an echo of an American icon.

This is a production with a mix of strong performances from Terry, Cornwell, Bhat, Catrin Aaron as Captain Fluellen and Philip Arditti as Pistol,  full of striking images and precision within self-contained scenes. But it sometimes does feel rather like a curate's egg, more resonant in its parts than as a whole. 

Maybe poet Rupert Brooke, often dismissed as a misguided jingoist, was craftier than is sometimes acknowledged when he chose the cadences of Henry V in his idealized view of England and soldiery in his war poetry. The point between what the soldier king would be and what he is isn't always found in this production but it's an amber/green light for cold metal amidst the lush park greenery.  

Review The End Of Loving

The End Of Longing

By Matthew Perry

That's What Friends Are For

http://endoflonging.co.uk/

Long before the sitcom Friends hit our screens in our homes, the place of friendship and love in modern life provided the script of many a Hollywood movie and also proved an ironic backdrop in at least one darkly humorous song sung by two celebrities in a hidden real-life illicit relationship   

Now Matthew Perry - of Friends' fame  - who tells us he contributed to the sitcom'sscripts  has put together his first play, also with dark undertones, The End of Longing. The story of four 40-something singletons drawn together in the bar and the bedroom. 

Smoothly directed by Lindsey Posner with slick design by Anna Fleischle, Perry takes the lead role as heavy drinking photographer Jack downing enough vodka "to finance Russia".

TLT and her four wheeled conveyance did wonder exactly what the title meant and if it were a quote from a poem or similar. A quick Google turned up a political science paper "The End of Longing ? Notes towards a history of post war German Longing" - surely not? - and the equally unlikely source of a historical novel by Australian writer Ian Reid.

Well, maybe we are given notes ... The quickly passing staccato scenes are like the pages of a notebook quickly turning and have the feel of a a sitcom or soap, even to the point of one character joking whether they have half an hour's worth of material. 

The over size  angular scenery sliding in and out could be in a studio lot and, after tragedy looms in the second act, the power of positive thinking and a happy ending wins out.

  

The types are familiar TV characters: A high-class $2,500 an hour hooker Stephanie (statuesque Jennifer Mudge). An female pharma executive desperate to have a baby Stevie (Christina Cole a bundle of nervous energy). The two women bonded reaching for the same latte in some coffee shop or other ;). And, the most intriguing character,  the seemingly dim but good natured Joseph (a finely judged performance from Lloyd Owen) who met Jtack on the sports' field.  

Maybe behind this brittle play, there's a  real story which the production reflects. Certainly Perry's battle with drink and drugs hit the headlines. But is it too fanciful to think that the genuine nature of  friendship after fame strikes must also be a obsession?

There are hints of a self reflexive play here reflecting on the skewing of life by TV tropes with its references to the TV process with its switching of old wine in new bottles, to pitch, sell, stay in the limelight and update to today's broadcasting currency.

We're in a bar, we're in a bedroom, we're in a late night pharmacy, we're in a hospital, in a church asking for a miracle and maybe finally on the cusp of a script pitch and commission. Then there are the off stage plots - pretending to be a couple to meet the parents, the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and so on.  

In the end, it's Matthew Perry who is the draw and Friends' fans may well be satisfied. It's an odd fish of a play but we prefer to believe it's a more sophisticated vehicle than a  shuffling of pre-programmed plot cards and characters, leaving us to discern what is actually happening and what is TV fantasy.  An amber light for an uneven play given a polished production.

Review Around The World In 80 Days

Around The World In 80 Days

By Laura Eason 

Odds On London Fogg  
https://www.stjamestheatre.co.uk/

Before the internet put a girdle round the world in nano-seconds, TLT and her own Passepartout automobile recalls David Niven and Shirley MacLaine  on the telly floating in the basket of a hot air balloon in the 1956 movie.

It seems curious and remains unanswered in any way by this play, why a Frenchman Jules Verne would write a book about English gent Phileas Fogg with a British Empire Bank of England featuring majorly in the background.  However now American playwright Laura Eason  has adapted Verne's 1873 episodic adventure story Around The World In 80 Days into a tongue-in-cheek play directed by Lucy Bailey.

Phileas Fogg (a suitably phlegmatic Robert Portal), a London gentleman of mysterious independent means who lives a life of  mathematical precision attended by recently recruited French valet Jean Passepartout (an engaging Simon Gregor), accepts a £20,000 bet from his Reform Club whist pals.

Namely that he can travel the world in 80 days by rail and steamer clutching his copy of Bradshaw's Guide  - the world tending to mean the dominions of the then British Empire apart from the breakaway USA

But with any good book, it turns out what sounds most topical is in the original Jules Verne's novel : the Bank of England robbery, the gas left burning, the incompetence of Inspector Fix (Tony Gardner playing it with a touch of One Man Two Governors)  chasing the wrong man with his warrant.

While adventures rather than deep characterisation dominate the book, it remains a stonking story harnessing 19th century fascination with travel, Empire and exploration with a touch of the later Sherlock Holmes and an attempted nemesis in Fix who believes Fogg to be a gentleman thief.

This cheery pantomine-like version held the attention of the youngsters in the audience. A detailed set by Anna Fleischle adapts well enough to above ship and round-the-world locations while below deck the show starts with live piano playing.  The rest of the eight strong cast including Liz Sutherland and Eben Figueiredo inhabit a range of roles with a breezy comic competence.

Enjoyable but not perfect. The saloon style piano player features in the first few minutes but never appears again. and with the feel of a children's show, it did make TLT and her companion wonder whether the play could work just as well with an unadorned stage while keeping the ingenious props.

The grumpy old men in the Reform Club, an elephant ride led by Lena Kaur as the pachyderm's keeper, a  Hong Kong opium den and a turn by Tim Steed as an American colonel stick in the mind. But, the first act particularly sometimes felt less than varied in staging and pace once the initial character traits of the lead characters were established.

Still the testosterone-fuelled events are suitably softened with the rescue of widow Mrs Aouda (a graceful Shanyana  Rafaat) from the funeral pyre and Gregor's Passepartout enlivens proceedings in the second act when the actors break out of the fourth wall.

So it's another 80 days to add to the canon: A 1946 Orson Welles/Cole Porter flop (:o!!!) musical; a foxy 1972 Australian animation series; a 1984 mini series with Piers Brosnan and then Jackie Chan and Steve Coogan in a very loose adaptation.  All preceded by a 1919 silent German film Die Reise um die Erde in 80 Tagen.  

This skittish adaptation has plenty of playfulness, even explaining with the lightest of touches the lack of a hot air balloon. Yet it felt as if it could have explored more the impetus behind the book, threading in its literary allusions and social background. All this may have lent more variety to its staging to match the energy of the acting ensemble. An amber light.