Review Rabbits

Rabbits
by Joe Hampson

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

Rabbits puts itself out as a play about what middle-aged people do behind closed doors. Hmm, well, it's  very much a series of sketches with common characters and - eventually - a theme.

However, while an excellent three-strong cast try their best, it's a crab-like would-be comedy of the absurd which doesn't so much develop as try to manoeuvre clumsily sideways.

And there were times when we thought perhaps we were being inducted into the stage equivalent of the cult of mini movies remade with bunnies.

Working in reverse, we learn the rather anticlimactic and curiously old-fashioned whys and wherefores of what turns out to be a sex comedy near the end when it finally pulls the proverbial long-eared mammal out of the hat.

The play revolves around three characters, one apparently a husband and wife, the other a chameleon man who metamorphosizes into three different characters.

When we say metamorphosize, that's a little misleading as it implies fluidity between the three sections of the play.

The dialogue and jerky twists and turns seems to breed more possible plots than a fluffy bunny breeds offspring, going through approximations of numerous TV and movie premises,

So it starts off with a hitman plot where a sitcom-type husband, rather than wanting to get rid of his wife by violent means, is focussing on the disposal of an unwanted gift.

Maybe the baseball cap with a prominent "LA" on the head of the hapless male spouse is a clue. The actors make it characterful but we found the set up and gags distinctly weak and forced.

The experimentation with structure felt less a choice growing organically out of content, but a means of inserting gags and set ups the writer wanted to include. We did also wonder whether this piece may have started off as a radio play.

We noted the repetitions and differences between the first two parts. We can't say there was "Ahhh, brilliant, I never saw that coming" or "Wow, that was wonderfully trailed but it's still a surprise" before the downbeat third act revelation.

Alex Ferns takes on a trio of characters and the first scene is the strongest where visually he cuts a distinctive figure as the hitman in Alex Berry's bedsit set. David Schaal also brings energy to the perculiar ticks and helplessness of the husband.

Karen Ascoe as the spouse who wears the trousers in the household is the stand out in the cast, but this is probably because her transformations as a character are the most extreme.

As far as we could tell, there is also some attempt to make a difference in acting styles between heightened cartoon fantasy with some deliberately coarse acting and more naturalistic scenes.

Staging wise, a raised platform stage or at least more thought given to sightlines for all the rows may have proved beneficial. The space has raked seats on two sides and, about three rows back, we had our view severely impeded when the action descended onto the floor.

Director Sadie Spencer by necessity forces the pace on a script which feels very stitched together and artificial.

Of course at this point it would be easy for the creatives to argue it is meant to be an artificial environment created by the characters themselves and we could dispute about this ad infinitum ... It's that kind of irritating script and situation.

For us this felt like a play that isn't as insightful, experimental or funny as it thinks it is. Still, bunny casting must be hoping it's part of a trend with fluffy mammals appearing in both The Ferryman and now hopping over to the Park Theatre here. A red/amber light.

Review I've Been Here Before

I've Been Here Before
by J B Priestley

For The Children
http://www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk/show/i-have-been-here-before/

A famous searingly prescient newspaper cartoon of 1919 by Will Dyson shows statesmen leaving the Versailles Peace Conference after the First World War turning towards a naked infant weeping behind a pillar, by the child the peace treaty discarded on the floor. Above the innocent toddler reads a sign. "1940 Class".

This came to mind watching J B Priestley's I've Been Here Before. In 1937 when this play was first performed (with performances still needing the permission of the Lord Chamberlain) people had been there before.

And indeed the time travelling play is an impassioned plea, in retrospect in vain, to intervene and take control of destiny before it was too late.

Director Anthony Biggs orchestrates a crisp, carefully-thought-out production at the bijou Jermyn Street Theatre.

The fuel driving this play is the anguish over attempts to mitigate  the era's wars, economic woes and subsequent unspeakable cruelties with academic theory and expediency. Far from adhering slavishly to a theory of predestination, in the play's final act there is a fervent appeal to break away from the predicted unhappy endings. 

Set in hostelry, The Black Bull, on the Yorkshire Moors, a German refugee, a former science professor (Edward Halsted), without the international prestige of an Einstein,  at first finds no room at the inn.

However ambushed by cancellations over the Whitsun weekend, the landlord (Keith Parry) and his widowed daughter (Vicky Binns), already lodging the headmaster (lantern-jawed Daniel Souter) of a recently founded school for bright local boys,  find themselves taking in not only the Professor but  a local businessman (David Schaal), a school benefactor,  and his young wife (Alexandra Dowling).

At the time refugees could even be deported back to continental Europe from Britain. Fascist regimes were taking over Spain and Italy and the National Socialists consolidating in Germany.

This raised trade and stock exchange issues with new partnerships and alliances construed in the play as a love affair and elopement, suicide and intervention also taking on double meanings.

And the landlord's grandson with a scholarship to the boarding school could be said to be of the 1940 class. Mention of experimentation, starvation and drug testing are more explicit.

Firmly anchored in its time, I've Been Here Before is given an admirably straightfoward production with precise, clearly defined performances from the whole cast.

This precision is also reflected in the ingeniously simple but effective design by Cherry Truluck and Alberta Jones.

The pale blue stage is curved like half of a planetary ring, with several audience seats in the middle.The placing of the furniture into different positions after each of the two intervals completes the illusion of a revolving orbit and passing time. With blue, gray and lavender costuming, all in all, it's an elegant production.

Priestley was a playwright and political activist whose skill, using a fashionable theory of time as a vehicle, in bringing forward facts and conclusions otherwise unpalatable to British audiences and those in authority cannot be underestimated.

Despite its mystical overlay, it struck TLT as having someting in common with the events of Noël Coward's Still Life, the basis for the movie Brief Encouner,  or Terence Rattigan's later The Browning Version, couching seismic upheavals in a domestic framework.
 
I've Been Here Before is an intricate literary attempt to avert the fate laid out for the 1940 class. Yet it is still imbued with sadness and awareness of the political reality as a failing British Empire government wavered and blinded itself, falling back on an aristocratic parochial piecemeal parish structure. A green light.
.

Review A Steady Rain

A Steady Rain

By Keith Huff

Silence Of The Cops

http://www.arcolatheatre.com/

As if obeying a celestial director with cloud-seeeding powers, the heavens opened as TLT drove up in oilskins and galoshes to the Arcola Theatre for A Steady Rain. This is the Chicago-based 2007 two-hander that proved the breakthrough work for Wisconsin writer and Windy City resident Keith Huff who went on to pen TV's Mad Men and House of Cards.

The piece charts the lives of two Chicago cops, friends since Catholic school and church, working the same beat as partners in the police force. So far, so stereotypical. But this is no standard police procedural but a sly sleight-of-hand stage play dependent on the testimonies of the protagonists and off stage action.

Gradually, through shifting monologues, interspersed with interaction between the two, we learn Denny, a family man and moral crusader with shades of Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, nevertheless finagles protection money from prostitutes and cheats on his wife. 

Meanwhile Joey lives alone taking solace in the bottle, nurturing a hidden passion for Denny's wife. The two are linked by their chosen career, immersion in the Chicago underworld and their grievances at lack of promotion. Yet they are lives also shaped and buffetted by politics, media headlines, real estate, drugs, murder and mayhem, movies and TV, the two men coming from a generation shaped and united by televison, its ideals and its exposés..

This production premiered at the East Riding Theatre in Yorkshire directed by Anthony Pearson with Vincent Regan reprising here the role of Denny Lombardo and David Schaal as Joey Doyle.  

The stage area is a black box designed by Ed Ullyart encased in the round by banks of audience seats on three sides looking down on a platform, slightly raised from the floor, sloping to street drains. On the back wall projections evoke the wider world but also a more claustrophobic sense of looking through a letterbox. 

A Steady Rain works as a straight forward anti hero plot tracing the disintegration of the partnership, a marriage, a man's sanity, painting a portrait of life on the Chicago streets.  But it's far more intricate than that with its interactions between TV drama, crime that hits the headlines and compromised real lives.

The play grips with its two performances by Regan and Schaal ratcheting up the tension, although it's a tricky balance to maintain with the story filtered through the characters' own words rather than shown. The stuff of TV melodrama and poetically biblical archetypes seep through like water from overflowing drains.

For the most part, director Anthony Pearson manages to keep the equilibrium of the play. 

As the characters move into extremes, a fatal mistake leads to a gruesome cannibalistic murder of a Vietnamese child inspired by the Jeffrey Dahmer murders and eventually breaks brotherly bonds forcing a tragic private and public repositioning.

By the final scenes we are drawn into the psychological world of the relentless beating rain coming into earshot (sound uncredited in the programme).  At times, the play almost becomes a little heavy handed, but the dark subject matter of A Steady Rain has a redeeming wit and a political nous for which we award our coveted green light.