Review I Loved Lucy

A play about a television icon makes Francis Beckett ponder on the cult of celebrity nostalgia infecting current playwriting.  

I Loved Lucy
By Lee Tannen

After The Ball Is Over
https://artstheatrewestend.co.uk/

Younger theatregoers start here. I Love Lucy was a 1950s' American sitcom which was also shown here starring Lucille Ball and her first husband Desi Arnaz.

The series was fast and funny and established Ball as one of the earliest great female comics.  Children used to badger their parents to be allowed to stay up and watch it.  (I speak on this with authority.)

In the late seventies, when Lucille was in her late sixties, she met a young man in his twenties called Lee Tannen, distantly related to her second husband, who had grown up hero-worshipping her.

He was her friend for most of the last ten years of her life, and he has now written this two-hander play about that friendship.

The best thing about the evening is a wonderful performance by Sandra Dickinson who spits out her lines in just the way I imagine Lucille in old age would have done.

Lee is played with great assurance by Matthew Scott, but he is hampered by having very little to work with.

We learn early on that he is a gay, neurotic Jewish New Yorker and an unsuccessful writer. For the rest, his devotion to Lucille has to substitute for character and, directed by Anthony Biggs, Mr Scott does well to make that even remotely convincing, obliged as he is to tell us frequently, in slightly different ways, how wonderful she is.

The story goes like this. Lee meets Lucy, is overawed, but manages to forge a strong friendship with her. She takes him to parties and first nights, but mostly they play backgammon, and talk, and occasionally what they say is quite funny.

At the end of Act One they fall out, and at the start of Act Two they make it up again. And at the end of Act Two (normally reviewers do not reveal the denouement, but in this case I don’t think I will spoil anyone’s enjoyment) she dies.

That’s it, really, except that after she dies the author seems to remember a few things he wanted to say about what a great genius she was that he hasn’t squeezed in earlier, and detains us for another ten minutes or so while he says them.

There seems to be a growing view in London theatre that if your central character is a famous actor, you need only recount what happened and you can call it theatre.

I’ve seen a couple of shows recently that appear to have been written on that premise, and I don’t buy it.

I need a plot to hold my attention or, at least, an overarching theme or some clever and unexpected insights; and if none are present, then I need a lot of very funny lines.

Mr Tannen doesn't offer any of these things. There are a few good lines, but not enough of them, and  they are not good enough.

“What did the doctor say to the midget? I’m afraid you’re going to have to be a little patient” is about as good as it gets, unless you prefer “Lucy loved Oprah when Oprah still had a last name.”

I’ll stretch to an amber light on the basis that it’s always a pleasure to watch top class actors at work.

Review Judy!

A trio of singing marvels thrills Tim Gopsill in a musical bio-play about one of the twentieth century's most enduring Hollywood icons.

Judy!

by Ray Rackham 

Triple Threat

https://artstheatrewestend.co.uk/ 

There’s a glaring problem that plagues the producers of all shows telling the life story of a great theatrical artiste: who is up to playing the lead role? All those good enough would have to be stars themselves.

When the star is a singer with a mighty voice that stunned generations, it is even harder; but when you have found your singer, she or he has got to act the part as well; and when the star carries a perplexing reputation combining big-hearted generosity, overbearing autocracy and tragic vulnerability, it becomes harder still.

On top of all these, you want to portray the artist’s whole life, and the great Judy Garland already took to the stage as a 12 year old girl. 

At least there's a clear solution to the final problem: you use different performers to play different periods of the star’s life.

In the case of Judy!, writer/director Ray Rackham’s amazing musical bio-play that has just transferred to the Arts Theatre, this solves the other problems too.

Three actors play the part; all can sing – and dance – and have been with the show since it opened at the London Theatre Workshop in Fulham. This was two years ago before a run at Southwark Playhouse.

It's currently at the Arts Theatre, a stone's throw from the former Talk Of The Town -  now the Hippodrome -  where Garland sang her penultimate concert. 

There is the cocky but tender young girl, born Frances Gumm played by Lucy Penrose, who dreams up her glorious stage name for herself; the neurotic singer - Belinda Wollaston - in her late twenties at the top of her game, launching her unsurpassed 19-week solo run at New York’s Palace Theatre.

Then middle aged Judy played by Helen Sheals, doped up with booze and pharmaceuticals, going down with the ship of her failing weekly TV talk show; always still a grand dame – “I’m a fucking legend,” she yells at CBS executive Hunt Stromberg – she's much too grand to bend to the intimate demands of the small screen.

There is a notable precedent for this way of dramatizing a stage life in Ray Cooney’s triumphant musical Elvis, which had a West End run 40 years ago before a national tour and then being revived in the 1990s. But that had rock 'n roll stars in the two senior of the three roles, Shakin’ Stevens and PJ Proby.

Elvis’s life – somewhat tame to my mind compared with Garland’s -- was told chronologically. However  Rackham’s structural trick, lifting Judy! above the level of a tribute show or run-of-the-mill jukebox musical to that of a serious play in its own right, is to blend the three different eras of life together. The narratives are introduced in reverse order but play continuously, mingling with each other. 

At times the Judys sing together – as when Wollaston's Palace Judy joins in with Penrose's youthful performer singing her first audition number, Jimmy F Hanley's Zing! Went the Strings of my Heart.

With the Arts Theatre being a relatively small house, there are no microphones; the natural singing therefore has an affecting nature rarely achieved with banks of speakers in big-theatre musicals. 

But Wollaston could probably sing unmiked in Drury Lane: she belts out Rock-a-Bye Your Baby With A Dixie Melody (music by Jean Schartz, lyrics by Sam M Lewis and Joe Young)  with some of the ferocity of Garland herself. 

All the music is acoustic. The ensemble has seven of the cast playing instruments on stage: three of them, Joe Shefer as Judy’s father Frank, Christopher Dickens as Stromberg and Tom Elliot Reade as fellow producer Roger Edens, are pianists.

Reade also plays violin. He and Chris McGuigan, playing Norman Jewison, a later triple Oscar nnominee, who survived one week as director of the Judy Garland Show, play reeds.

Don Cotter plays the legendary tycoon Louis B Mayer and the onstage drums and Carmella Brown doubles as both Judy’s devoted dresser Judith Kramer, and flautist in the band.

It may be true that the wonderful music does have the predictable downside that dialogue seems flat and dull beside it. The succession of hapless and handsome producers and directors becomes tedious, with the comings and goings charting her life at three different times, sometimes makes it hard to remember which is which.

Nevertheless,  there is the memorable clash between CBS Judy and TV executives is over her refusal to sing Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg's Over the Rainbow, the song from the 1939 movie Wizard of Oz that made her a teenage star; she’s sick of it.

But the intertwined storyline and combination of singers does make for a magical finale. The show ends with Penrose, Wollaston and Sheals singing, quietly and unaccompanied, Over The Rainbow together. The audience goes crazy. 

Judy! could get a green light for that moment alone. It runs at the Arts Theatre until June 17. Beats me why not for a longer run. This is one of those musicals that could become the talk of the town and, like the performances of Judy herself, go on for ever.

Review The Wipers Times

The little-known tale of a humorous battlefield newssheet written by soldiers for soldiers hooks in Francis Beckett, but then undermines its new angle on life in the trenches with material we've seen before.  

The Wipers Times
by Ian Hislop and Nick Newman

Hot Metal And Cold Steel
https://artstheatrewestend.co.uk/

I went to see Ian Hislop and Nick Newman’s The Wipers Times with high expectations and a lot of goodwill. The remarkable story of a newspaper produced in the trenches amid the horror of the First World War, one which really spoke to the men who fought the war and which survived against the odds, would be pretty well forgotten except by a few historians, if Hislop and Newman hadn’t revived it and persuaded us all to listen to it.

It’s a great story, wonderful theatrical material, and I was promised a barrel of laughs; which seemed a reasonable expectation, because Hislop is a very witty man and Newman is a comedy scriptwriter with a fine record.

And it’s a funny enough show too, with some decent jokes and a couple of nice songs, and it chunters along happily enough so you walk out of the theatre cheerful, but at the same time I can’t help feeling it was a wasted opportunity.

Hislop and Newman had a story no one has done properly, and I am not sure why they chose to spend so much of the evening re-treading old ground, with the result that The Wipers Times derives more material than is quite decent from earlier famous shows – or at least it appears to, which is just as bad.

Both acts include a scene when the men go over the top for the Big Push which has echoes of the famous Blackadder scene of nearly 30 years ago. Of course, it’s hard to write that moment without being accused of deriving it from Blackadder, but in that case why write it at all?  It wasn’t needed for the story the show was telling.

The idea of officers lounging around in safety at base while the men at the front took all the risks was done better in Blackadder and before that Oh What a Lovely War in 1963.  And no one has done it as well as Siegfried Sassoon, who was there:

If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath,
I’d live with scarlet Majors at the base,
And speed glum heroes up the line to death.

The best bits are when the authors are telling their own story:  how the military unit find an abandoned printing machine, the sergeant turns out to have been a printer in Civvy Street and knows how to work it, and the two officers then decide to start an irreverent newspaper for the soldiers.

There’s a clever framing device which tells us what the two officers did afterwards.  Neither of them went into journalism, though one of them apparently tried to get a job in Fleet Street and was turned down because of inexperience – the Wipers Times didn’t count.

As the two officers, James Dutton and George Kemp offer fine portrayals of gilded public school youth. But they are outshone by the splendid Dan Tetsell, who combines so well the roles of the sergeant, the general who allowed the paper to continue, and the deputy editor who refused one of the officers a job after the war, that I did not realise they were all played by one actor.

I had the odd quarrel with the generally sure-footed direction from Caroline Leslie.  The trenches seem a lot more comfortable than I think they were, and the two officers never seemed short of whisky, poured from nice decanters.

It was a pleasant evening, but I wanted, and expected, a bit more than just a pleasant evening, so it’s only an amber light.

Review A View From Islington North

A View From Islington North
Five Political Satires
The Mother by Mark Ravenhill
Tickets Are Now On Sale by Caryl  Churchill
The Accidental Leader by Alistair Beaton
Ayn Rand Takes A Stand by David Hare
How To Get Ahead In Politics by Stella Feehilly

The State We're In 
 https://artstheatrewestend.co.uk/

A View From Islington North seemed a promising title. Maybe, we thought, containing some of the irony we detected in John Osborne's lawyer narrator in the other political play seen the same day.  But what emerged was a curiously neutered set of playlets with Caryl Churchill's Tickets Are Now On Sale a slick but dispiriting reflection for us of the show itself.

For those who go often to the theatre, all these writers' names are "brands" and certainly their styles in these playlets fo the most part are instantly recognizable. Something Churchill's brief play oddly, if maybe unintentionally, reflects on.

In front of a window, with a countryside scene straight out of a healthy yoghurt or cholesterol lowering margarine commercial, sits a tall, dark and handsome man (Steve John Shepherd). A frisky blonde (Sarah Alexander), modern (she wears shapely, tight fitting trousers!) comes into his space periodically to discuss their relationship in glossier and glossier business and advertising-speak, divided by airy chimes as if sections of their love talk were an advertising break.

It's simple, quick and effective, but in the words of German poet Hans Magnus Enzenberger, We know we know ...  And all that talk of brands, well it crossed our mind, that was exactly what was happening here. Rather than a dissection of attitudes across the smallest but arguably one of the most influential constituencies in the country, the evening felt sold on names and left behind by regular topical sketch shows such as long-running Newsrevue

Like Caryl Churchill's play, Mark Ravenhill's play The Mother had its premiere at The Royal Court theatre some years ago.

Two soldiers, one an older woman (Jane Wymark), the other a young man (Joseph Prowen), have arrived at the home of a soldier to break the worst possible news to his mother (Sarah Alexander).

Well, the mother turns out to be a dressing-gowned dysfunctional, a diagnosed depressive who uses a series of expletives and reverses her status from victim to aggressor before expressing, alone, her pain. It's a good idea but the stereotype "woman on a sink estate" makes for a less than convincing satire.

In fact, the far more intriguing female character is the 50 something childless female informant, a career soldier whose few words made us wonder about her life.  And what about the toll on the informants and the relationship between them as they go from door to door, if the same folks are used all the time? 

One of three new plays The Accidental Leader by Alistair Beaton  felt like well-worn territory, ground already covered by Yes Minister and The Thick Of It when parliament as sitcom still felt newish.  Albeit even with the latter we'd already had The New Statesman and (the British) quasi satirical House of Cards An MP (Bruce Alexander) is coordinating the troops to oust the Labour leader when the best-laid plans fall apart with the biggest blow when even youngster Ollie (Joseph Prowen) understands whose goose is well and truly cooked.

Ann Mitchell's big and blowsy Russian-accented Ayn Rand considerably livens up proceedings in David Hare's riff on the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Steve John Shepherd with perhaps deliberately some of the same mannerisms as Mr Perfect in Carly Churchill's earlier piece) and Theresa May (Jane Wymark) given lessons in novelistic free market politics and economics. But once we catch on to the premise, any wit seeps away to leave only the performance (albeit a memorable one).

The reverses of fortune in Stella Feehily's How To Get Ahead In  Politics  also have a familiar feel with Bruce Alexander as an MP again but this time a successful Chief Whip protecting at any cost the party's reputation,  covering up for habitual sexual harassment offences and chronic alcoholism.

We struggled to find any conclusions or questions posed about the view from Islington North. The plays ranged from the predictable to the slick and,, directed by Max Stafford-Clark, the staging was skilfully unobtrusive. Yet it felt more like a scattergun display of wares, ending with a chorus of Billy Bragg's No Buddy, No, than pieces, either individually or overall, with real bite.  If you go, determined to be entertained by star name writers, it may well work for you. But otherwise it only just about slips into an amber light.

Review All That Fall

All That Fall

By Samuel Beckett

The Path Of Life

https://artstheatrewestend.co.uk/

Sitting in a blindfold  - both artistically correct and in accordance with the wishes of Samuel Beckett's estate -  during this production of All That Fall, an unoriginal  thought struck TLT and her conveyance of choice.

"That Sam Beckett can't half write!"

We don't mean the character of Quantum Leap fame, but the real Samuel Beckett, playwright, novelist and not a bad cricketer either (well, it gave him and Harold Pinter something to talk about - in between pauses;)).

All That Fall, an hour-long 1956 radio play set in rural Ireland, is such a beautifully structured, rhythmic piece of pure audio, technically brilliantly paced. 

And what is more, what  comes through joyously in this production transferred to the Arts Theatre from the more cavernous Wilton's Music Hall, is the total delight in it for director (Max Stafford-Clark), actors, the sound person (Dyfan Jones)  - and of course the listeners .

Not discounting naturally the silences,  for as the central character Mrs Maddy Rooney (Brid Brennan) says  at one point with simple eloquence: "Do not imagine, because I am silent, that I am not present and alive to all that is going on'

And there is such a lot going on. From the start we are immersed in the heightened noise of farmyard animals and footsteps. Driven by sound as much, if not more than, words, the play charts the Saturday journey to the railway station, there and back, on foot  of elderly arthritic Mrs  Rooney. 

She is out to surprise her blind husband Dan (Adrian Dunbar, currently Superintendent Ted Hastings in TV series Line Of Duty)  on his birthday, returning  from work.

And the "never tranquil" Mrs Rooney and her acquaintances move around us as we sit in darkness,  bringing with them their soundscape, the climbs and descents, the slowing downs and the quickenings, the advances and the retreats.

Along the way German lieder music on a gramophone drifts out of a house across the lane and Mrs Rooney meets familiar folk. The dung carrier (Frank Laverty), an elderly cyclist (Dunbar again, although you wouldn't know it!), an admirer from times gone by, the race course clerk (Ciaran McIntyre) with his own little cramped jalopy,  Mr Barrell, the stationmaster (Frank Laverty doubling up, but you wouldn't know it ..) and the pious Miss Fitt (Tara Flynn).

Meanwhile Mrs Rooney's mind drifts back to past family tragedy.  She finds Dan and they walk home, managing to laugh despite finding no place to rest, "There is no bench ... There is no bank". As Mrs and Mr Rooney make their way home  they also encounter two children Jerry (Tara Flynn) and Tommy (Killian Burke) as the June weather changes for the worse, But not before we are all drawn into a mysterious railway death of a child.

This seated auditory blind man's buff reaches its peak when we are surrounded by the crescendo huff, puff and hiss of steam as the train draws into the station. For all the world,  as if the flickering Lumière Brothers' famous film of a locomotive drawing into a station had come to life around us

It's a delicate piece teetering into tragedy by way of laughter and lunacy  with, like James Joyce's Ulysses,  a steely backbone of trade and business. The title is obviously a  quote from the psalms. Yet surely Joyce's final work Finnegans Wake also starts with The fall bababadalgharaghtakmminarronn...)? (third paragraph) 

But enough of literary criticism, real or imagined!  It's enough that this piece dramatically managed to evoke a characterful literary history while making us laugh, sometimes ruefully, and provided a completely different, but very three-dimensional theatrical radiophonic experience.A green light.