Review The March On Russia

Tim Gopsill is drawn into a delicate yet hard-hitting 1980s' drama where family bickering reveals a deeper malaise. 

The March On Russia 
by David Storey

A House Divided
https://www.orangetreetheatre.co.uk/

Marital strife is a staple element of drama, both in life and on the stage. In either milieux it can be light-hearted or deadly serious, poignant or embarrassing; it can make us laugh or cry.

In the late David Storey’s 1989 drama The March on Russia, he managed to cover pretty much the gamut in a play that is both surprising and heart-wrenching.

At first the Pasmore couple's bitter discourse makes you laugh with their obviously well-used little digs. Then the laughter becomes more nervous with embarrassment; you start to cringe and by the end you are aching with compassion for this decent, loving couple, wracked in a torture chamber of old age, isolation, claustrophobia and regret.

Ian Gelder's retired coal miner Mr Pasmore aggravates with his mock bowing and scraping at his wife’s supposed bossiness. Sue Wallace's Mrs Pasmore whines at his persistent failure to respect her house proud values.

This grim routine is disrupted by surprise guests on their 60th wedding anniversary. Their three middle-aged children, without telling each other, have all decided independently to visit  their Mum and Dad at the same time.

The occasion for this seemingly contrived, but ultimately satisfying, scenario is the old couple’s diamond wedding anniversary. 

David Storey was a master at drawing intense drama from everyday life. His reputation, revived at his death only six months ago, was made with a  gritty tough-guy drama, This Sporting Life, whereas the March on Russia is as gentle and subtle as you can get.

Yet contained within the countless opportunities for nostalgia, resentment and recriminations, the dialogue  becomes truly painful.

The Orange Tree's in-the-round stage space perfectly suits James Perkins' atmospheric set evoking the couple's Yorkshire bungalow. It maps out their home -  the sitting room with its fireplace, sofa, table and chair, the utilitarian rear kitchen with work top, fridge and sink. The invisible walls between rooms and people become solid and real for us. 

The longer the play goes on, the more frenetically the spaces are used. Yet in Alice Hamilton's sensitively directed production, after all the anguish, you feel the real affection beneath the surface tension.

It's a slow burner and all the more effective for it. The arrival of the siblings is restrained, not to say repressed, before it boils over in a pointless row over an anniversary gift, unleashing hitherto hidden depths of resentment.

Sarah Belcher is the discontented local politican daughter, Wendy, her tongue loosened by drink, speaking her mind. Connie Walker's more conciliatory housewife and mother, Eileen, and Colin Tierney's morose, workaholic academic son, living a life a world away from his working class roots, complete the homecoming.

The March On Russia, we learn, really happened. It's the stuff of a First World War anecdote often recounted by the elderly Pasmore, an eye-opening episode in the otherwise routine life of a working man. It's the only outside subject the couple have to talk about but also a resonant reflection of failed ventures and thwarted lives. 

 David Storey's portrayal of the wounded heart of a family speaks eloquently nearly 30 years after its first production at the National Theatre and more than matches playwrights like Harold Pinter and John Osborne whose works are more frequently revived.

This is a welcome revival and director Hamilton and the fine cast gives it the nuanced green light production it deserves..

Review The Treatment

The Treatment
by Martin Crimp

City Lights - Camera, Action!
https://almeida.co.uk/

"Where do you get your ideas?" So the continual question goes for the successful writer by those admiring, envying, incredulous who somehow can't believe the simplest answer, "I made it up". A writers' strike, now warded off, has just threatened to shut down Hollywood storytelling but the hunger for new stories continues.

We move to New York for playwright Martin Crimp's 1993 satire The Treatment. A treatment can of course mean a brief written blueprint for a screenplay, the way we all treat each other - or it can have a medical connotation.

Anne (Aisling Loftus) has answered the ad of two producers or "facilitators" as they like to call themselves, Jennifer (Indira Varma) and Andrew (Julian Ovenden) looking for distinctive true life stories.

They buy up Anne whose story they want to pimp up to fit into, what they believe, is a fit story for the camera and the expectations of the target audience.

In the meantime, they meet elderly down-on-his-luck Clifford (Ian Gelder), who apparently had a couple of Broadway comedy hits back in the day and has a script in his bottom drawer that he is eager to sell.

It's the package they have been looking for - they splice together the two stories, introducing him to the big name star John (Gary Beadle), although Clifford in his excitement unwisely forgets to ask for the precise arrangement in writing,

The Treatment is a distinctly odd but searing snipped up tale of dysfunctional metropolitan people trying to put themselves in functional holes.

We're never quite sure whether Anne and her electrical technician husband Simon (Matthew Needham) are genuine or may be would-be screenwriters trying to find the elusive "idea" and believe it can only be found by living it out.

Are the rooms simply rooms or are they elaborate movie backdrops (design by Giles Cadle)? Are the people going by really just office workers, passers by, or are they actors and extras hired for the day? Or, more disturbingly, has the city become an unstable mixture of both with violence seeping from one to the other?

There's a lot of piquant, uneasy humour in director Lyndsey Turner's smooth widescreen staging with a pinpoint sharp performance by Varma as the producer cannibalizing Anne's life and Clifford's work. Ovenden is equally convincing as her husband and business partner who begins to doubt the separation between storytelling and life.

Loftus's Anne is the Alice-in-Wonderland character who tries to apply common sense and Beadle's movie actor sprinkles his superficial stardust and draws the wrong conclusions while generating success.

Considering the play first reached the light of day at the Royal Court 24 years ago, it has lasted remarkably well to feel just as relevant in a world where boxed set dramas are the new movie blockbusters.

And Martin Crimp even anticipated your own traffic road furniture reviewers within the play 😉 with a taxi driver who needs exact verbal descriptions of everything for a very particular reason.  Oh, so you better tell the cab driver, it's a green traffic light from TLT and her co-producing automotive sidekick!

Review Gods and Monsters Review

Gods And Monsters 

By Russell Labey

Based on the novel Father Of Frankenstein by Christopher Bram

http://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/the-large/gods-and-monsters/

The Artful Dodger 

Two months have gone by since you last heard from TLT, your glamorous theatre spy,  and her ruby red limousine. Now she has to confess, after previously infiltrating the theatrical world anonymously, she has broken cover and accepted a Press Night ticket for this newly-adapted play Gods and Monsters.

The novel Father of Frankenstein, already made into a successful film, and the current Gods and Monsters’ play, directed by adapter Russell Labey, charts the final days in the life of openly gay Frankenstein movie director James Whale (an affecting and effective performance by Ian Gelder).

Born British and working-class, after attending art school he reinvented himself  first as World War I army officer, then as theatre director and eventually double-edged success at Universal Pictures in the 1930s as a movie director, whose toolbox included German Expressionism.

Following his Hollywood hits and technical innovations including a cutting-edge 360° panning camera shot in musical Showboat starring Paul Robeson, he nevertheless found himself caught up in studio and world politics and sidelined, retiring in 1941.

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By 1957, the turmoil resulting from several strokes, dependence on prescription drugs for sleeping and waking and even, gallingly, being pigeonholed as solely a horror movie director, had taken its toll on Whale. The play presents an increasingly fragmented world through his eyes and physical symptoms, alongside the mixed solace of his later years, his painting.   

Finally, he apparently took his own life, knocking himself out in the swimming pool of his Hollywood home and drowning, little knowing his movies would soon have a new lease of life on the new mass medium of television 

Often with the feel of a monologue interrupted and resuming, the character of Whale has its main foils in a Hispanic housekeeper (Lachele Carl making the most of her intermittent appearances), an ambitious fey young horror movie buff chasing his hero for an interview (Joey Phillips) and, as if stepping out of the pages of an Americanized E M Forster or D H Lawrence novel,  the heterosexual gardener Clayton Boone (Will Austin), reluctantly baring his nude torso to pose for Whale’s art – and finding himself the object of the older man’s desires. The play also includes Grecian-statue-style male nudity and strobe lighting.

A lengthy first act of an hour and ten minutes has a tendency to bare its own musculature and insert exposition a little self-consciously, also shoehorning in a somewhat formulaic Cold War subtext.

Yet, despite a few longeurs in this diffuse play, the much shorter second act with dynamic visuals - projections by Louise Rhoades-Brown - and sound design/score by John Chambers, bringing visceral depth, constructs something more original out of the celluloid context, using Whale’s true-life history, art and sketching and a repertoire of movie clichés to interrogate itself. An amber light for new light on a tale of classic old Hollywood.