Review The Last Ones

Set in Tsarist Russia, a frenzied tragifarce by a celebrated playwright disappoints Peter Barker in its British première.  

The Last Ones
by Maxim Gorky
Translated by Cathy Porter

Children Of The Revolution
http://www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk/

Written while Russian playwright Maxim Gorky was in exile in 1908, The Last Ones now receives a very uneven first UK production at the Jermyn Street Theatre.

Gorky himself characterised the events in the play, banned in Russia for its portrayal of the tsarist police,  as a "tragic sideshow"

In the Jermyn Street version, Gorky's grotesque melodrama unfortunately slides into an unconvincing family drama filled with a series of overwrought scenes. Seeming to walk in the shoes of Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg in its painful dissection of family life, its near hysteria and bloated tally of characters work greatly against it.

This mixture of tragedy and farce is set in the turmoil following the 1905 Russian Revolution when corrupt police chief Ivan Kolomiitsev is sacked, then reinstated, in the wake of the revolution, the chaotic aftermath of which includes an attempt to assasinate him.

There is some good news about this production. As the dislodged police chief and overbearing and charmless father Kolomitsev, Daragh O’Malley is deliciously villainous and thuggish.

Sonya, his wife, played by Louise Gold, also holds it together, while all around her the disarray of what appears to be a clumsy script overwhelms the action.

Nevertheless, the supporting cast includes very able actors.

Tim Woodward is  nicely restrained as Komitsev's brother whose wealth payrolls everyone. Maroussia Frank gives a well-pitched performance as the calm family nurse, Fedosia. David Burt is the urbane Dr Lesch, channelling the suavity of a Claude Rains in Casablanca.

The play is definitely grounded in the events post the first Russian Revolution. Yet the radio snippets broadcast to the audience before the play starts and after the interval confusingly seem to mash up The Hungarian Uprising of 1956.

There is also a lumpen attempt to add contemporary relevance by dropping Donald Trump on top of the play with an extract from one of his speeches.

Kolomitsev’s tiresome five children -- all at various stages of young adulthood -- are played by actors who are bright as a button and word-perfect. However what maybe should be searing melodrama (Tennessee Williams comes to mind) and hyper-theatricality only comes across as over acting.

Again, there is a confusing mash up as they speak with English home counties' plum-in-the-mouth accents while the parents have completely different accents. There are also lavish helpings of ham as the family falls apart faster than the Conservative Party majority. It seems amazing that the Kolomiitsev family with all its fractures and flaws didn't fall apart years before.

Director Anthony Biggs, who has done some very fine work during his Jermyn Street tenure, in this case marshalls his troupe like a First World War general  - over the top. The overall impression left is of a tiny stage filled to the brim with a wailing, weeping, distraught cast of a dozen actors.

Maybe this play could work in another production but this appeared to be a solid cast of actors struggling with intractable material and it's a regretful red light.

Review The Busker's Opera

Francis Beckett enjoys the songs and laughs in this update of John Gay's eighteenth century classic but finds it lacking in new insight and political teeth.

The Busker’s Opera

By Dougal Irvine

The Gang's All Here

https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/

The delightful Park Theatre, a mere three years' old and just a stone’s throw from Finsbury Park station, boasts a decent bar selling good, simple food at reasonable prices and an eclectic artistic policy. 

It's now offering a lively, brave, enjoyable, radical show that bounces round the theatre with energy and aplomb - and doesn’t quite work.

It doesn’t quite work – let’s get the negative stuff over and done with – for several reasons:

First, it wants to tell a very political tale of modern London, but nails itself to the story and characters of The Beggar’s Opera in a way which is not a good fit.

Second, the characters are not strong enough for us to care what happens to them. It should be a shock when a character dies, but it isn’t.

And third, its radicalism is of the declamatory kind. It tells us for example that newspaper proprietors like Rupert Murdoch lie to the people, that government cuts are cruel and greedy and will kill poor people. And the trouble is that either, like me, you agree already, in which case there is no added value; or you don’t agree, and not a lot is done to persuade you.

Along the way it offers some sharp political one-liners like “Speech is free but only the rich get a listen” and a lovely couplet: “We pay no attention to corporate crimes/ So long as they make their delivery times.” But they tell; they don’t show.

And yet I had a nice evening. The direction of Lotte Wakeham, after a slightly slow and portentous start, bounces along, the show always giving us something interesting and lively to look at and listen to.

The songs are great fun in a Gilbert and Sullivan manner. The whole thing is written in rhyming couplets, a very hard trick to bring off, but that works.

There are some wonderful comic moments like the radical seminar where someone says that a handshake is a racist slur because it represents imperialist manners. Plus there are some laugh out loud lines, many of them terribly politically incorrect, like this couplet: 

“When I am blue, when I am sad, I photograph my tits/ They’ve been on line for quite some time, with only twenty hits.”

And the acting and singing are glorious. There isn’t a weak link in the large cast. The best of them, for me, was the marvellous Natasha Cottriall, a young actor of whom I hope we will hear much more. Her Lucy Lockitt was a hard-hearted charmer, making a surprising song near the finale, I’m Going to Have a Baby, both comic and heartrending at the same time.

Next in line is John McCrea’s Filtch, especially when pretending to be Macheath. He made a spectacularly good job of a very hard trick to pull off: An actor playing someone acting a part who has to be convincing, but not too convincing.

There were other fine performances: celebrated veteran David Burt oiled about enjoyably as a sort of Rupert Murdoch figure; meanwhile Lauren Samuels made an engaging ingénue of Polly Peachum; and George Maguire entertained as a hairy, hyperactive Macheath. 

Simon Kane, fun to watch, played Mayor Lockitt as Boris Johnson, but a radical show ought to know better than to let Boris Johnson get away as just an engaging twit. How much harm must a mayor do before we find him out?

Altogether a gently entertaining evening, but one that failed to convince or persuade, which is why it only gets an amber light.