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 Twilight Song

Twilight Song
by Kevin Elyot

Ah! Sweet Mystery Of Life
https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/

Twilight Song, written by the late Kevin Elyot in 2014 just before his death, is an odd little playwriting confection about some odd fellows and a woman. 

Analyse it closely and it turns out to be a tawdry tale of impregnation, loans, property, possible professional fraud, furtive sexual encounters, time slippages and blackmail, all wrapped  in colourful tissue paper and tied with a great big ribbon bow.

We can't begin to add up all the self-consciously theatrical and cinematic styles it seems to go through - there's a touch of Rattigan, definitely some Noel Coward and Alfred Hitchcock, even a snippet of Christopher Isherwood, Charles Dickens and DH Lawrence (or is it EM Foster ...?) and, hey, is that Monty Python parody?

This is the première of Elyot's last play and, despite some sluggish moments, director Anthony Banks gives us a stylish production set on James Cotterill's wooden round stage living room with a settee, curved French windows, mahogany gramophone and a silver drinks' trolley to create a Scotch haze. 

It's a slickly, but rather mechanically, put together play and it rather feels as if the playwright put together the themes going around  rather than a deeply-felt piece. 

Maybe it was intended to go a bit deeper into the gay influence on literature, film and television and what this meant before and after 1967 legislation, yet this never really develops, even in metaphor.  

Still, after a slow and rather stilted beginning, the story does take hold. Barry (Paul Higgins) is a middle-aged gay retired pharmacist who lives with his mother in a North London Victorian villa. While she takes her regular weekly trip to Kent, he invites an estate agent (Adam Garcia) to give a valuation and other services. 

Centred on the house, this modern day encounter slips back to the 1960s and delicate girlish bride Isabella (Bryony Hannah) welcoming two old codgers into her marital home. 

Charles (Hugh Ross), an elderly doctor and seemingly someone's uncle. Harry (Philip Bretherton), a dodgy married solicitor, like Charles, seems well lodged in his current comfortable middle-class existence even if it seems the two men have a past. 

Slipping back and forth in time, by the end we can piece together the story and obtain a sense of an ending but, while it may have been meant as a satire or parody, it comes across as a rather lacklustre playwriting effort.

References to Conservative but pro Welfare State prime minister MacMillan and 1960s emigration to Australia are flagged up as well as a wife's thwarted career.

However, in the end it feels as if we've been lured to spy through the keyhole at a rather insubstantial and too self-satisfied mystery story and it's an amber light. 

Review Run The Beast Down

The latest member of the TLT community is Peter Barker, who worked on local newspapers before stints at ITN, UK and China news agency branches and on free commuter paper Metro. He now reviews a compelling new play as a City slicker fallen on tough times goes native in London's feral landscape.  

Run The Beast Down
by Titas Halder

Brush With The Wild Side
http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/

As many a London resident will tell you, foxes are a menace; unwelcome in the city, tearing into rubbish bags, looking for hidden trifles and trotting the sidewalk with a cheek that makes you want to call the hunt -  if only Tony Blair hadn't banned it, damn him!

But it’s the fox within the man that Titas Halder’s new play ‘Run the Beast Down’ pursues at the Finborough Theatre.

Arrive early in the auditorium and the inventive soundscape from on-stage DJ Chris Bartholomew working decks and computers with virtuosity will greet you.

After that, the main man, Charlie, appears in what is otherwise essentially a one-man play  -- played with vulpine good looks and energy by the charismatic Ben Aldridge.

He is truly a creature of these times, probably a sure bet for a successful life with a loving partner, a high-flying job (in the City) and the sought-after London apartment. 

OK, he may also be a TK Maxx kind of guy; clad in cheap black jeans, cheaper black T-shirt and bold-coloured sneakers. But can you tell from the outside what the man is -- what motivates him, what has shaped him, what he is?

And will he beat the pack chasing him, or get cornered?

Our rummaging through Charlie’s rubbish begins with the unexpected woes which descend on him all at once -- he loses his job and has been - sort of -  burgled. At least his girlfriend has left him, taking almost everything, apart from the curtains.

Insomniac Charlie is the filter through which we experience his increasingly bizarre environment and the people around him. Writer Halder demonstrates considerable flair, building the momentum of a fantastical mental and physical journey with a poetic wit. In Aldridge’s Charlie he certainly finds an actor who can rise to the task -- his transformations of mood and movement are seamlessly defined.

The mystery at the heart of the play, the threats, whether real or imagined, and Charlie's metamorphosis are intriguing. Yet, it must be said at the same time, he is just another one of those middle class 20-something London guys you see on the tube whom you'd assume has a good job and comes from a relatively privileged background. So he remains neither quite heroic enough to be admired nor twisted enough to be... well, admired.

But we can pity him and, when he dissolves, there is literally and metaphorically something of everybody about him.

As Charlie unravels, we see him maniacally writing a label for each new scene on the floor of the stage until, finally, there is little space left untouched. The bare plinth set, designed by Anthony Lamble, with a rear wall of thick upright metal tubes and LED lighting,  is ultimately not even covered with words, just a crowded jumble of letters.

Like the set, the lighting from Rob Mill is versatile, unintrusive, without gimmickry. Equally the electronic score orchestrated by Bartholomew and sound by Ben and Max Kingham  complements the pace of the play and makes a significant contribution to the evening.

Director Hannah Price keeps the feral drama tightly focussed, skilfully maintaining the precarious balance of Charlie's flamboyant high-wire act which must reach the end of the line before he really crashes and burns. This 80-minute debut from writer Titas Halder, developed at Canterbury's Marlowe Theatre, emerges polished and sharp in Price's production with Aldridge's gripping  performance all deserving a green light. 

Review The Pitchfork Disney (Preview)

The Pitchfork Disney
by Philip Ridley

The Way We Live Now
http://shoreditchtownhall.com/theatre-performance/whats-on

Start identifying the characters in Philip Ridley's 1991 shocker The Pitchfork Disney, and it shows how life in the 21st century has caught up with the fractured world of  brother and sister Presley and Haley.

It's a pre-internet play written, or maybe a better word is composed, when the video cassette, not yet digital, camcorder, and video game had come to dominate. 

Yet director Jamie Lloyd's intimate, site-specific production still has the ferocity and grim tenderness to take an audience by the scruff of the neck and finger wag us about grotesque spectacle with violent glee. In the age of YouTube and mobile phone footage it  lasts the course with its moving snapshots.

Parentless Presley and Haley Stray (George Blagden and Hayley Squires) live, apparently, cocooned from the world in a East End grubby family home, dark haired and white skinned like human vampires hiding from the outside.

At 28 years old, they wallow in an infantile existence, craving "chocolate" (hmm, this is probably slang) and "medicine",  bickering and trading stories over who should go out to do the shopping.

These enfants terribles compete in creating - or is it pitching? - stories of extremity and sadism of which imagining themselves sole survivors of a nuclear holocaust is a mild example. Scaring herself with her own stories, Haley is finally tucked up by Presley sucking on a dummy soused with a chemical cosh.

Oh, did we mention that this is a very black comedy - once the audience realised that they were allowed to laugh? ;)  

Presley ventures out, bringing in ethereal blond teenager, Tom Rhys Harries as  Cosmo Disney (the names surely have a significance), a macho-camp pub entertainer clad in sparkling red sequinned jacket with a grotesque variety act and a loadsamoney mentality.

He at first expertly manipulates Presley's emotions. Before he finds his own understanding stretched and moved by Presley but instead of tears leading to empathy brings in a disruptive incarnation of Presley's childkiller fantasies - the brutal, grunting "foreigner",  Pitchfork Cavalier (Seun Shote), part wrestler, part comic strip creation, swathed in black plastic from head to foot.      

Soutra Gilmour's set, arfully-lit by Richard Howell in a traverse immersive space, is spread with faded patterned carpet, keeping the audience sparsely scattered on seating at various heights.

In the basement of Shoreditch Town Hall, it's a visceral church nave-shaped design  with an old cooker, a fridge and a misted window located pertinently.

A variety of yellow lanterns with one red one at what could be the altar end light the twilight zone, alongside table electric lamps inhabiting the floors work together to give a chiaruscuro effect.

The furnishings could be left overs  of the Porters' flat in Look Back In Anger. And the church can change to a street. Or a rock concert catwalk or airplane runway or even an elongated wrestling ring or comic strip.

For all the emphasis on Ridley's art school roots, the obvious hooks in film and music and his pioneering break with the past with "In Yer Face" drama ,  this felt to us like a very literary play.

A reptile piece which may be sloughing its skin but still looks back at visual tropes and literature of times past. Even Haley at what could be the altar end, dummy in mouth, is a peverse echo of the baby Jesus without a Madonna.   

The writing betrays its background in art installation monologues. But this is also part of the play's energy when Presley and Haley as opposed to 18 year old Cosmo and Pitchfork clash into each other when 10 years presents a weird generation gap. 

To be honest it did feel a little long at an hour and a half straight through  - but that was because TLT had her own visceral problems. She had opted for a sharp edged block to sit on which unless you are heavily padded she would advise avoiding!

Nevertheless Lloyd paces the production precisely and extracts distinctive performances with staging which manages to keep Squires as Haley in our eyeline even when  almost comatose for long stretches of time on the lengthwise stage.

This play has now become a period piece, just as much as an Joe Orton play or a David Bowie or Mick Jagger movie.

But this element is also its strength for it reflects back on the start of a fast moving yet nostalgic world which has now become strangely familiar  to us. We give an amber/green light and punters may find it worth their while to examine the accompanying Rebels & Rubble exhibition of Ridley's photographs at the East End venue.