Review Sideways

Sideways

by Rex Pickett

Through The Grapevine

https://www.stjamestheatre.co.uk/

It's tough for Miles. He's a would-be novelist with a sheaf of rejection letters and more in the post. That's a failed novelist with rejection letters and a failed marriage behind him. 

Oh yes, a failed novelist with a failed marriage, popping prescription drugs. With (failed) actor Jack as a mate. That's Jack who has made a foray into voiceovers and TV directing but now has settled for a forthcoming marriage to a fiancee with a trust fund.

Oh but we mustn't forget Miles's passion for the wines of California and his stock of bottles filled with the most exquisite vintages he can afford.

In 2004 the Sideways movie, adapted from Rex Pickett's semi-autobiographical novel and directed by Alexander Payne, was a hit movie with numerous awards, even affecting wine sales according to Miles's likes and dislikes. 

Now Pickett has adapted his novel into a stage play directed by David Grindley which, of course, we should take on its own play-tasting terms but somehow can't forget savouring the fragile 2004 movie vintage.

The movie, full of lush Californian landscapes and a gently humorous entrée into esoteric world of wine tasting, followed the two pals on their road trip through Califonian wine country, Miles seeking more wines to savour and Jack seeking - Jack seeking, well, to get laid before his wedding.

 
The play is well enough acted by Daniel Weyman as yearning and eager-to-impress Miles, while Simon Harrison takes on the role of Jack. 

But it loses the visual contrast of the film's characters. the feeling of a novelist and actor "in plain clothes" and frenzied recompense sought in wine tasting and womanizing..

Despite the clunky scene changes, (and with our special interest TLT and her own London cadillac are always ready to go on the road with a play! ;)), we were slightly more drawn in when we realised designer Laura Hopkins's scenery flats were, in fact, book covers.

However this delicate and very clever touch was a little obscured in the blunt instrument of the play. The bare bones script, although laced with some wit, becomes ponderous stripped of the chance to delve into the Californian landscapes, sunsets and manicured vineyards.

Emotional turning points never develop into exquisitely fruity consequences until perhaps the last quarter of the play when a harder-edged humour, tearing us away from the movie, makes its mark, relating fluently with the book cover scenery and novelist success fantasy of a middle-aged man.

But youngsters may wonder why Miles doesn't self-publish and how come hot waitress Maya (Ellie Piercy) and tasting room manager Terra (Beth Cordingly), who must come across any number of pretentious fakes, would not be more suspicious of Jack and Miles.

A two-act play, this felt a tad bloated and might well have worked better as a quicker paced  shorter piece where cash transactions, the tricksy relationship between writer and actor - and literature and viticulture  - might have made for something more full-bodied. 

Anyway, using up our quota of wine puns,  it's a mellow amber light for a volatile piece with some crisper moments.

Review Eventide

Eventide
by Barney Norris

Tied Landlord

https://www.arcolatheatre.com/production/arcola/eventide

"It's like everyone's trying to keep a secret. Trouble is the secret's out."

Barney Norris's secretive lyrical three-hander, directed by Alice Hamilton at the Arcola Theatre in Dalston, covers a year bookended by a funeral and a marriage, revolving around a Hampshire village pub. 

Enter John the heavy-drinking freeholder pub landlord (an ebullient James Doherty) into the pub garden on his last day before selling up to a chain. 

The time of a village centred on the local Downton-Abbey big house, the Anglican church and local pub is now long past,  although, we learn by the play's end, charity at the point of delivery appears to have made a comeback.

Eventide means end of the day, but is also name of the tune and mentioned in the lyrics of hymn "Abide With Me". 

Delightfully, at least one more senior member of the audience sang along when it came up, testifying to the abiding influence of church services or, just as, if not more, likely, school assemblies.  The origin of the play's title appears to be one of the secrets of the play, part of a web of somewhat cryptic allusions.  

Yet Norris seemed to TLT to have caught the zeitgeist on the day employees at the Bank of England issued warnings full of foreboding about buy-to-let for a different kind of landlord.

Forced to liquidate to pay an ex-wife her half share of the assets, presumably after tax, as the couple's tax bill is also involved (we never see or hear of the accountant or bookkeeper who allowed this to happen!), Bible-quoting publican John entertains two final-day customers. 

Local lad Mark (Hasan Dixon) can hardly afford to pay the rent to live in his own village. He takes jobs where he can including, while mourning the death of his best friend, one to patch up the village war memorial with which her car collided.  While Liz (an excellent Ellie Piercy) drives a couple of hours a day to play the ramshackle church organ, taking a loss on her expenses.

Lucky mine host of this blog had a copy of the script/programme for this review. For TLT mistakenly thought she heard "always civil service when you come to The White Horse" as a clever pun on the old role of pubs in civil and criminal law, as even the Inns of Court and Inns of Chancery were part of a network of taverns where business was conducted and not part of (landlord) universities.

 

In fact, the line was  "always silver [my italics] service at the White Horse". Oh, the perils of doing reviews :o ;)!!!  

Yet set against a simple, but evocative of centuries of pub life, set design by James Perkins, the playwright  does investigate, dramatically, pub and English history in other ways.

The framework of monologues linked by sequences with two or three of the characters, is more apparent in the  somewhat self-consciously symbolic and poetic first half. Here ideas and arguments, although insightful, sometimes feel schematic and take over from characterisation, despite sterling work by the actors. 

And maybe some of the over-explanatory nooks and crannies over all the script could have been directed and played with a sharper, self-knowing irony rather than at face value. However, once the foundations have been laid, the play comes more into its own as it moves into the second act.

A year later, Mark, suited and booted, is an employee assistant manager of the pub, part of a chain, with a staff drawn from around the globe, preparing for his wedding. 

Liz is ready to play her last organist gig as Mark takes his bride up the aisle. 

John, previously sent off after describing the tribute to him from a communally-minded now deceased village elder, unexpectedly arrives and the threads of the play are drawn together.  

This  bookish, thought-provoking and sometimes charmingly mysterious piece has a definite appeal with a tour lined up after its Arcola run. Another amber/green light.

Review The Heresy of Love

The Heresy of Love

By Helen Edmundson

Sister Act

http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/theatre/whats-on/globe-theatre/the-heresy-of-love

What an intriguing premise – a portrait of a seventeenth century nun and not just any nun. Juana Ines de la Cruz (Naomi Frederick). A Super-nun! 

Renowned female scholar, poet and playwright in Mexico, then a colony of the Spanish Empire. Born into racial and hierarchical complexity, she was one of six illegitimate children from a Criolla (of mixed race ancestry) mother and two different Spanish soldier fathers.

Helen Edmundson’s 2012 play, The Heresy Of Love, inspired by a staging of Sister Juana’s Baroque comedy House of Desires eight years earlier,  first surfaced to great acclaim at the RSC’s smaller space, The Swan,  in a season alongside Shakespeare’s Measure For Measure and David Edgar’s St James’s Bible anniversary play Written on the Heart.

Now directed by John Dove, it is part of Shakespeare’s Globe Justice and Mercy season.

So TLT, not having seen the earlier incarnation, emerged from her cloister with her scarlet carriage looking forward to a major historical drama centred on a phenomenally-gifted woman writer constrained by contradictory and shifting circumstances of Church, Court and Empire.

Despite only few undisputed facts of Sister Juana’s life, there is certainly enough there to provide a meaty dramatic discussion in the context of our twenty first, as well as seventeenth century, preoccupations. Except that for TLT and companion, that discussion never came.

Maybe it was swamped by the much larger proportions of The Globe's thrust stage with grilles at the back, extended into the audience, we fancy, in the shape of a cross (design: Michael Taylor). However the piece’s linear telling of Juana’s story, use of Baroque  play structure with some cod-Shakespearean devices, stayed firmly within the stereotype for us.

There were tantalizing lines and possible story lines. 

The need to earn a living from commissions. The relationship with other nuns equally imprisoned by their sex and class, manoeuvring their lives, wealth and intellects within the confines of “New Spain” politics and the dreaded Inquisition. 

The wife of a powerful patron still subjugated by the need to produce son and heir. The illegitimate babies. The scholar nun, still very much maintaining the caste system by owning a mulatto female slave, but licensed briefly to hold her salons of secular as well as religious learning within the convent. 

The secret courts and selective record keeping.

But all this seemed thrown away and much of the history recounted outside character. Sister Juana herself seemed curiously marginalised and muted with the weak and trapped Father Antonio (Patrick Driver)  and the true-history plotting of Bishop Santa Cruz (Anthony Howell) leaving the more conflicted imprint on the play. 

Juana’s battle for her career and finally her life against the Archbishop Aguiar y Sejas (Phil Whitchurch as sour as the lemon he held in his hand) is allowed to fizzle out. It seems heresy to say it but the male scheming from the very beginning of The Heresy Of Love pulls the play itself away from its female subject and gives it whatever dynamism and rhythm comes through.

This is a shame as the Golden Age Of Spanish drama during Sister Juana’s lifetime not only allowed her plays to be published and staged to great acclaim in Spain and its empire, but also permitted female actors to play female characters when boys still monopolised such roles in England. 

There are some more lively, if rather obvious, moments with Vicereine patroness (an elegant Ellie Piercy), slave confidante Juanita (rumbustious Sophia Nomvete) and Juana’s niece Angelica (a fetching Gwyneth Keyworth) plus a final visual design transformation of Juana in her downfall gives a hint of more depth and subtlety.

Maybe in a smaller space, or even on screen, the granting of leeway for women in theatre and cloister, the dramatic possibilities of interplay between the excesses of the Baroque form and censorship, the illegitimate babies and the fatal real-life theatricality of male dominated church and state could bring a much more intricately human and open ended reading of the same piece.

This play certainly opens up a subject which we knew nothing about but at the same time only just about scrapes through into an amber light. 

Still, writer Helen Edmundson appears to be on a roll with an upcoming play on Queen Anne at the RSC and an adaptation of Zola’s Therese Raquin for Keira Knightley on Broadway. 

In the meantime, for those interested, Sister Juana is championed by poet Octavio Paz in his 1982 biography, the subject of a couple of early twenty-first century plays by American-Mexican playwrights Estela Portillo and Karen Zacarias  and a 1990 biopic from filmmaker Maria Luisa Bemberg.