Review Late Company

A compelling dinner party drama laced with dark humour grips Peter Barker with its dissection of parental responsibility and grief. 

Late Company
by Jordan Tannahill

The Blame Game
http://www.atgtickets.com/venues/trafalgar-studios/

Late Company is a searing tale of how adults and their teenage children behave when driven by anger, grief, love, and confusion.

Debora (Lucy Robinson) has arranged a dinner party so that she and her husband Michael (Todd Boyce) will finally meet Bill (Alex Lowe) and Tamara (Lisa Stevenson), as well as their son Curtis (David Leopold), a classmate of the hosts' son  Joel. 

It's a year since, at the age of 16, Joel killed himself leaving heart-broken and uncomprehending parents.

The Canadian playwright Jordan Tannahill sets this  drama in contemporary Toronto where Joel's father Michael is an ambitious Ontario government minister while mother Deborah is an artist, producing challenging  molten metal sculptures.

A work she calls “Thatcher" looks  like a cross between a Francis Bacon painting and a failed chemistry experiment.
 
The son of the guests, Curtis had by his own admission, along with others, bullied Joel, a self-proclaimed gay outsider. 

Debora has taken a leaf out of a psychology self-help book and the dinner is part of the plan inspired by it for all of them to move on. This proves a recipe for disaster.

Yet under the surface charm and social graces,  Robinson in a compelling performance as the grieving Debora is both frightening and fragile. Eventually as the meal progresses, her rage drives the action.

In spite of their barely suppressed sense of superiority beneath a polite exterior, the hosts are wrongfooted when they discover Bill has the same level of university education as Michael. 

Director Michael Yale serves the playwright well, carefully pacing the 75 minutes one act play as Tannahill unravels with skill a complex situation, ranging from the viciously funny to the thoughtful knotting and unknotting of issues and personalities.

Michael is a smooth and initially somewhat unsympathetic politician.

However, Boyce's performance also gradually and effectively conveys his hurt and how deeply he cares matching Debora's vulnerability under her priggishness..

David Leopold as Bill and Tamara's hockey-playing son is a stand out. He captures a teenager's surly intelligence as he is forced to confront the reality of his involvement in a death and watch adults all at sea with the situation. 

His moroseness, insecurity, innocence and finally tenderness become the foil sharpening Debora’s anger and ultimately beginning the process of melting that anger.

As Curtis's father, Lowe gives three-dimensional life to a man dealing straightforwardly with an intractable situation.

Stevenson's Tamara reaches out to Debora. However she finds the total desolation of what has happened too much to handle and here one of the play's most wrenching, visceral truths emerges.    

Late Company is as much, if not more, drama than comedy. However like Mike Leigh's Abigail's Party and Moira Buffini's Dinner, Late Company is driven by a strong woman in a grotesque, self-made situation as the engine for the action. Nevertheless Debora eventually gains the audience's sympathy as a multi-faceted woman. 

Tannahill wrote this play at the age of 23 and it's an impressive, accomplished piece fully deserving its transfer from the Finborough Theatre to Whitehall's Trafalgar Studios.

It's a green light for the twists and turns in this absorbing, stimulating production where the dinner party leads the bereaved couple to discover solace in an unexpected place. 

Review Late Company

Late Company
by Jordan Tannahill

Prodigal Sons
http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/

Michael (Todd Boyce) is a laid-back Canadian Tory politician, bustling, blonde Debora (Lucy Robinson) is an artist and the Shaun-Hastings' couple live in an isolated spot in suburban Toronto. Bill (Alex Lowe) and Tamara (Lisa Stevenson), the Dermots, are near-ish neighbours.

An event over which, it seems, they all have no control has drawn them together and it's now the first anniversary in the depths of winter.

Debora and Tamara have arranged for the two couples to meet over dinner, following the guidelines in a bestselling book by a self-help guru to "attract positivity".

Included in the party is Bill and Tamara's teenage schoolboy son, monosyllabic, hockey jock Curtis Dermot (David Leopold) who was a classmate of Debora and Michael's son, Joel Shaun-Hastings.

Tensions and irreconcileable differences rise to the surface in a slick production directed by Michael Yale with a polished, dark wood dining room set designed by Zahra Mansouri.

Ostensibly a play about the impact across the generations of school bullying and a child dealing with his sexuality, there are still hints of another story - a financial and political one - which also has reverberations on  the lives of the two boys and their parents.

The first clue, like Canada itself, has a Brit connection. It  is the steel, modernist artwork called "Thatcher" on the wall created by Debora which belies her conservatism in dress, apparent attitudes and striving to be civilised in a difficult situation.

As the play and evening progresses, the Thatchernomics' dictum, "... there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families ..." came to mind.

Whatever the loaned resources, including the media and the support of his political colleagues, at the disposal of politician Michael and artist Debora, these are two families who have been thrown back on themselves.  The school principal, it turns out, knew of a situation before events turned tragic, but had done nothing.

It's a play with a more than promising beginning, hooking the audience in from the start with strong performances from the whole cast and the build up to the main meat of the situation raises expectations.

Yet once the subject turns to the nitty gritty, a rather schematic feel comes in. As if the planned politeness and the keeping of boundaries has invaded the script of the play.

In spite of an ambiguity surrounding the boy who is classed as the victim, the attacks and defences in the cold war between the families, the separate stories and their merging have a mechanical rather than an organic feel.

The play then goes from plot point to plot point. It simply does not feel as if there is a rich enough texture for stage and the ending is anti-climactic.

Still, the characters remain well-defined and the performances carry the drama. Boyce's Michael and Robinson's Lucy, the older couple convey the pent up emotions of a calculating couple who bear the scars beneath their cool exterior.

Despite the political couple's tendency to view the Dermots as hicks, Lowe's pained and morose Bill, led into the meeting by his wife, turns out to be as equally academically qualified as Michael and Stevenson's Tamara has her own core of steely determination beneath a sunny, if strained, exterior.

At the centre, although less verbose, Leopold is totally convincing as the teenager who can only live for the present within the ring of families and school incidents in which he may, or may not, have played a leading role.    

We came away with the overwhelming impression of a worthwhile piece about university-educated baby boomers and their dislocated children where the definition of a "village" no longer means a homely community but the survival of the fittest. But it would be better served as a TV piece or movie.

The natural landscapes of Ontario, the dislocation of new technology, adult political and financial concerns and the invasion of media attention on the barely-formed personalities of teenagers who have been convicted of no crime - these would all be far better juxtaposed jostling on screen than an over-compartmentalized stage play .

Nevertheless, Yale's production, we think, is as good a stage production as it could possibly get for a gritty but unfocussed play and we give it an amber/green light.

Review The Burnt Part Boys

The Burnt Part Boys
Book by Mariana Elder
Music by Chris Miller
Lyrics by Nathan Tysen

 To The Mountaintop
http://parktheatre.co.uk  

It's 1962 in a mining town of West Virginia where, until a fatal underground disaster 12 years previously, the whole of the community depended on the company owning the mine.

The Burnt Part Boys is a coming-of-age musical centring on fatherless 14 year old Pete (a tender performance by Joseph Peacock), obsessed with John Wayne movie The Alamo, who views the closed mine as a shrine and grave to his Dad and the others who died in the accident.  

Hearing on the transistor radio of his older brother Jake (Chris Jenkins) that the company will be re-opening the mine, Pete, inspired by a mixture of grief and his favourite movie, determines to take action. 

He persuades his friend Dusty (Ryan Heenan, sweetly combining bumptiousness and vulnerability), who also lost his father, to accompany him up the mountain to Burnt Part, the mine scorched by a fire following the fatal accident. However Pete doesn't tell his companion the second part of his plan to keep the mine closed for ever. 

This should have the makings of a stonking, much-at-stake story, with a book by Marianna Elder and music by Chris Miller and lyrics by Nathan Tysen. But this tale doesn't deliver the courage of its beginnings.  

The historical, political, native American and cinema references promise greatly at the start with a tinge of sophisticated Sondheim amid the hillbilly country and bluegrass style. Yet the possibilities are not followed through by the creators of this musical who seem content to rest on the laurels of a good idea.

Even so, there's good work here in this theatre-in-the-round production fluidly directed by Matthew Iliffe with Charlie Morgan Jones's lighting design in the Park90 studio space. It also benefits from  a minimal set of ropes, drapes and lamps hanging from the ceiling designed by Rachel Wingate, just enough to let the audience's imagination do the rest.

The band led by Nick Barstow on keyboard with violin, guitar, bass and percussion give lively and nuanced accompaniment.

The characters are all well-defined although there was some struggling with accents causing lines and lyrics to be lost. Nevertheless this musical gives an opportunity for some splendid choral harmonies as well as individual turns and duets by Pete, brother Jake, the latter's friend Chet (Chris Jenkins and David Leopold grasping the mettle and giving depth to teens given responsibilities too soon). 

David Haydn brings singing ability and humour as Pete's movie and American folklore fantasy figures fusing eventually into his lost father. Jonathan Bourne as Dusty's ghostly father also gives a glimpse of a fine voice in an eleventh-hour solo moment. 

Meanwhile Grace Osborn as wildcat Frances also sings characterfully in a pleasingly Katherine Hepburn-tinged performance.

At the same time, it's a curious mixture of  a musical with heart with touching moments and a musical by numbers letting the grit of mining life slip away.  

The story notably drops at what should have been the most dramatic moment just before the delivrance of the boys and Frances from underground. Titles such as "I Made It" and some of the references in the lyrics nevertheless give a clue to what could have been a more complex musical paralleling mining, family trees, filmmaking and the creation of a musical.

So. the potential of the story is never mined (pardon the pun!) by the writers. And yet ... the choral singing gives an indication that a bigger cast might add an epic dimension. 

And while it might be heresy with such spirited performances, we did wonder whether the story would have had more trajectory if it had been the "Burnt Part Girls" and brought in other implications. Ouch, there, we've said it! In the meantime, it's a canary-coloured amber light from TLT and her little wagon at the coalface.