Review Miss Julie

A perfectly pitched production of a 19th century playwright's pioneering drama thrills Peter Barker.

Miss Julie
by August Strindberg
Adapted by Howard Brenton
From a literal translation by Agnes Broomé

Danse Macabre
http://www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk/

The daughter of a Swedish aristocratic gatescrashes the servants' midsummer eve's party on her father's country estate.

So begins a passionate and emotionally intense version of August Strindberg's one-act naturalist tragedy from 1888 in an adaptation by Howard Brenton.

The production starts with minute attention to detail. Valet Jean played by James Sheldon and Izabella Urbanowicz's cook, also his lover, carrying out their menial duties in a working kitchen.

Director Tom Littler carefully paces the show from this slow start to establish an atmosphere of tension and suppressed sexuality.

After the appearance of the young mistress, there is a skilful change of tone and quickening of pace as the deadly emotional dance between servant Jean and Miss Julie gathers momentum.

This is played out in the intimate surroundings of the Jermyn Street Theatre as the audience follows every move in Howard Brenton's three-hander adaptation of Strindberg's play.

Brenton keeps his adaptation in the 1880s, powerfully reflecting Strindberg's teasing out of class and gender within a tempestuous, short-lived relationship across the class divide with all its power shifts.

Charlotte Hamblin is the capricious coquette, almost a young predator until in a convincing switch we glimpse the vulnerability beneath.

As the employee, James Sheldon is a charismatic, handsome presence,  the couple swinging between antagonism and love. 

As the mistress of the kitchen and Jean's betrothed, Izabella Urbanowicz completes a trio of fine performances.

All of which is complemented, in a 90 minute drama in one location, by Louie Whitemore’s exquisite costumes and detailed set, suitably domestic and workaday in constrast to the emotionally violent scenes. Sound from Max Pappenheim adds to the powerful crescendo.

Miss Julie is an oft-performed play but the playwright, with director Littler and a cast extracting every nuance, refresh this Strindberg classic into a thrilling experience and it's a well-deserved green light.

Review Anything That Flies

Anything That Flies
by Judith Burnley

The Past Is Another Country
http://www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk/

Anything That Flies is an ambitious little play on the refugee experience, setting its sights on huge topics within a domestic milieu which slips and slides into the fantastical.

German-born Otto Huberman is a curmudgeonly, whiskey-supping Jewish widower, living alone in a North West London flat, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall and his grown up child's emigration to Israel.

His life is disrupted by the arrival of a new carer -  unexpectedly a matronly but also softly attractive blonde German hausfrau apparently sent by his daughter to look after him following a stroke.

The play, directed by Alice Hamilton, charts the ups and downs of an enforced relationship between the two and an attempt to come to terms with a past they are unable to reconcile either as separate individuals or in relation to each other.

Oscar both faces and evades his past, the unjust fate meted out to his kin who nevertheless always protected him and helped him board a Noah's Ark to safety.

Behind his bristling belligerance and, in many ways, justified snobbery about his achievements as a cultured inventor and innovator, he is wracked by his own failings as a human being which, in other more normal life circumstances, he might have allowed himself to push entirely aside. 

Lottie, a minor German aristocrat from an estate in the former Eastern Germany, throws herself into making his life more comfortable, while sometimes overlooking more basic, practical needs, also idolizing her childhood English governess who in reality deserted her ward in disturbing circumstances.

In our Brexit age some descendants of Jewish German speaking refugees are considering taking up citizenship of their ancestors' homeland for a variety of motives, but this play in its present form, tackling previous displacement, belonging and attempts at reparation,  feels like a missed opportunity.

TLT thought she could detect some slight hints of complexity and irony in the text. However this production has a tendency to flatten these and the result is the implication of probably unintended conclusions.

At the same time the script does it no favours failing to flag up more patently a cleverer, and very much more human, mix of successful entrepreneur, male chauvinist and guilty survivor.

Otto's repeating, for instance, of an old canard levelled against those who  stayed in Germany comes over as a fact rather than what could be an aggressive survival mechanism on his part in his new homeland.

He outwardly dismisses his family's powerlessness to leave, even before the Second World War's outbreak, not only within the National Socialist regime but in the context of an outside world, including Britain, which often closed its doors to Jewish refugees.

Emily Adamson and Neil Irish's set is a nicely understated but detailed Belsize Park flat.  Clive Merrison as the wily, lascivious, mercurial Otto and Issy Van Randwyck as the carer, Lottie, equally needy for completely different reasons, with her own infatuations and obsessions, both give vivid and vivacious performances.

However they are hampered by an unbalanced dramatic framework, reducing distressing complexity to simplistic stereotype and playing to conventional assumptions about heroes and villains in the Second World War.

There's potential in Judith Burnley's one act drama and the possibility of a distinctive voice emerging. She certainly has a take on refugee technical innovation and its relationship to continental Europe and the former Soviet Union which distinguishes her work from, for example, Stephen Poliakoff.

However, at the moment, her grasp of the entanglements and ramifications is not matched by a playwright's technical, structural skill and it's an amber light.  

Review The Blinding Light

The Blinding Light
by Howard Brenton

Down But Not Out In Paris 
http://www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk/

Fin de siècle Paris and a famous writer is holed up in a seedy hotel doing decidedly weird stuff in the bathroom.

Howard Brenton's new play tangles itself with a few months in the life of Swedish writer, poet and painter August Strindberg, the "other" Scandinavian playwright.

For those not up on world playwriting, Norwegian Henrik Ibsen is probably slightly higher on the league table of Scandinavian playwrights in terms of fame, something which comes up in Brenton's sometimes witty but rather static and opaque take on this episode in Strindberg's life.

It should be enough for anyone coming new to Strindberg and this play to know only this. Certainly there's a pretty strong cast with Jasper Britton as the fiery, choleric Strindberg. He has shut himself away to pursue his weird science - the ancient dream of alchemy to transform base metals to gold.

So much for his theories - the play starts with a face off between the dishevelled and disturbed Strindberg, clad in his underwear and an artisan's apron, his hands stained with the chemicals needed for his experiments and forthright, dark-haired hotel cleaner, Lola (Laura Morgan) trying to do her job.

After that comes a succession of his former wives in what is,possibly a hallucinatory Faustian pageant. First of all, bossy aristocrat Siri von Essen (imperious Susannah Harker), an actress and mother of his two children. Then Frida Uhl (Gala Gordon who could have stepped out of a Gustav Klimt portrait), an Austrian writer, barely out of her teens when she first met and married Strindberg bearing him another daughter.

It's a neat irony that the elder of his wives' real first name reflects an authoritarian piece of Apple software (isn't all "helpful" computer software by its nature authoritarian?). Is Brenton playing on this? Who knows but he and maybe his director Tom Littler in a detailed and measured production?.

Yet in the midst of Strindberg's rantings and paranoia (he liberally takes swigs of what may be absinthe), the occasional futuristic reference crops up. Strindberg, we hear from one wife, "made his excuses and left" like some old-style tabloid hack.

The name of the celebrated movie from Ingmar Bergman (another Scandinavian!) Wild Strawberries also comes into his conversation. Such references and his assailing by inner and outer voices almost turn The Blinding Light into a Stephen King-style science fiction time travelling story.

Indeed, despite a polished staging, Max Pappenheim's soundscape made TLT and her own definitely non-imaginary sidekick (a talking, theatre reviewing car, what are you accusing TLT of? 😉) wonder whether this was originally intended for radio and maybe a prospect for a feature film.

This might explain, despite a grippingly intense, feverishly wild Britton and nicely stylized performances from Morgan, Harker and Gale, who cross over "real" life, painting and literature in one fell swoop, why The Blinding Light partly didn't quite work for TLT & Co.

The other part was like the recent Mrs Orwell: the name dropping and theorizing  might have the cogniscenti chuckling knowingly. However,  unless you know your Wedekind from your Swedenborg, audience members might drift off, drawn in again by only the occasional glimpse of a story.

There is a threat from Siri which finally materializes, only to dissolve through the help of the canny chambermaid. But in the end it feels as if The Blinding Light might work better as an opera with all its internal conflict and duologues with women in Strindberg's life.

Just in case, this sounds altogether too gloomy, it's worth adding there is a sense of irony and some comical juxtapositions transformed into a kind of writer's (and literary agent's) crafty happy ending when Strindberg, transformed, breaks through his own brick wall.

It's 90 minutes with good performances, if sometimes the writing itself seems rather studied and self conscious. There's an ingenious design by Cherry Truluck for Lucky Bert with gravy-brown late 19th century furniture in front of abstract painted screens, spot-on costumes from Emily Stuart and impressive lighting from William Reynolds,

The Blinding Light starts off well and ends well,  but the script  sinks into rather undramatic verbosity part of the way through, despite some redeeming humour and the best efforts of the director and cast. All in all, the voices assailing the collective mind of TLT and her jalopy whisper amber light.       

Review The Wasp

The Wasp
by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm

Hornet From Hell
http://www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk/

When the internet first took hold, one of the first successes was Friends Reunited - school reunions writ large online. Many of course were delighted to trace those they had known from their schooldays.

On the other hand, for others it was a nightmare scenario ... 

Two married 30 somethings meet up outside a cafe. Carla's character is immediately established - she's a cash-strapped hard-faced blonde (Lisa Gorgin), chain-smoking - and pregnant.

She's joined by a demure, well-spoken, well-off ex-classmate (Selina Giles), with an air of Charlotte Rampling, who has contacted her through Facebook.

They seem to be polar opposites, in the past one a bully, the other a victim, but now the balance of power has changed, they're all growed up with a grown-up proposition in prospect.

This is a drama-thriller that at first shifts the dynamics rather well. It sets up our expectations, often incorporating issues and news stories which have appeared in the media, only to snatch them away.

It also allows the two actors to run the gamut of  their acting repertoire in a positive way. That's its strength and, a few instants excepted when it lagged a bit, the first act is suitably tense and gripping.

It was in the second act, despite director Anna Simpson's best efforts and a pleasing, efficient set design from Mike Leopold, that the moments of lag started to overwhelm the plot and it falls apart.

There are rather too many on-the-nose explanations, including the origin of the play's title which seem torturous to say the least.

In fact, we began to wonder whether we had wandered into some computer mash up of a David Attenborough nature documentary and John Fowles's The Collector with a touch of Stephen King's Misery. 

Or, despite committed performances, we almost expected it would turn out to be some kind of elaborate game knowingly played between two warring friends, trying to outwit each other and we in the audience were the victims of a theatrical "sting" (it wasn't).

The Wasp goes from plot point to plot point and plot to plot, as if it were tasting a whole range of possible stories, a trend we have noticed in a large number of new plays during the past couple of years.

It becomes a curious amalgam of a thriller - welding together a number of themes - more successfully in its first act than in the denouement. The ending was one we had thought of near the beginning but dismissed as one of the snatched-away scenarios.

However, frankly, with all the jumping around from tall tale to tall tale, we stopped caring.

Nevertheless, it's a slick, well-acted  production and if you're not too pernickety about stereotypes and plausibility even in The Wasp's lunatic, smoke and mirrors world, there are worse ways of spending an evening. It's also probably a movie, rather than a theatre, script.   An amber light.

Review Instructions For American Servicemen in Britain

A World War II guide for newly-stationed US soldiers becomes a robust twenty first century parody diverting Peter Barker.

Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain
Created by Dan March, Jim Millard, Matt Sheahan
and John Walton

Know Your Ally
http://www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk/

In 1942 the US War Department distributed a 5,000 word booklet as a guide for American servicemen about to arrive in Britain.

Taking the pamphlet's observations, astutely aimed at the US soldier, sailor and airman, as inspiration, comedy trio The Real MacGuffins, director John Walton and Fol Espoir have created this delightful and very funny production.

The Atlantic divide between the US and Britain has always been fertile territory -- think of The Beatles, regulatory arbitrage, Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death through the writings of Bill Bryson to Richard Curtis's Notting Hill and even  TV hit Downtown Abbey.  

Bill Bryson's books mine a sentimental and whimsical outsider's view of Britain from the point of view of an Anglophile, marking a nation's foibles without insulting the nation or its consumers whom he hopes will buy his books.

Meanwhile Instructions For American Servicemen in Britain, written by a writer who has remained anonymous, was given away free. It was more aimed at keeping the US forces and the British population as allies on the ground, but  it also remains an educated American's snapshot of the UK.

However the show of Instructions For American Serviceman in Britain, keeping the framework of the pamphlet, tends towards the genial and agreeable path of Bryson.

It's a laugh from the beginning to the end with the pamphlet transformed into the arrival of an American airbase filled with US airmen in the village of Nether Middleton and subsequent attempts, with audience participation, to educate them in the ways and etiquette of British life.

Among other laconic observations we hear “the British can’t make decent coffee, but then you can’t make decent tea”. "The British are tough, the English language didn’t spread across the oceans and over the mountains and jungles and swamps of the world because these people were panty-waists.”

Inversion is of course a great staple of comedy. Here it is the inversion of an American guide to the British way of life played back to a London audience in, 75 years later, a self-deprecating historical take on our still special relationship.

The Real MacGuffin’s trio of players Dan March, James Millard, and Matt Sheahan, play all the characters -- from US Army Air Force officers to old English ladies and English officers.

They take the audience through set pieces including an explanation of the monetary system, afternoon tea and a hybrid baseball/cricket match. The material feels as though it has been built up through improvisation and is continually open to even more.

A highlight for me was the use of puppets at the start of Act two tackling the British class system described in the pamphlet, in a hilarious MacGufffin framework.

One warning though; if you don’t like Morris Dancing, you will really hate the show’s climax ... 😉

I found the whole experience, skilfully relayed by the MacGuffins, relaxing and very, very funny. It may not be what the well-informed anonymous writer intended when he - we presume it was a he - wrote this snapshot of 1942 Britain as a benevolent piece of propaganda.

Yet his tolerant mapping out of the British Way Of Life, in this adaptation, proves a green light tonic for this reviewer.

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 All Our Children

All Our Children
by Stephen Unwin

 Lives in Their Hands
 http://www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk/

In 1942, four months after the USA entered the Second World War,  President Franklin D Roosevelt spoke to the nation in a radio address:

"Yet ... we can make, if we choose, a planet unvexed by war, untroubled by hunger or fear, undivided by senseless distinctions of race, color, or theory. Grant us that courage and foreseeing to begin this task today that our children and our children's children may be proud ..." 

One of the then senseless distinctions of theory was the German National Socialist regime's espousal of eugenics beginnning with a "euthanasia" programme in 1939. It targetted the mentally and physically disabled, children and eventually adults,  and anyone deemed to have a "life unworthy of life".  

Stephen Unwin's moving play focusses on the doctor, Victor Franz (Colin Tierney) in charge in an imaginary Rhineland paediatric clinic, one of many in Germany to which parents were encouraged to send their handicapped children.

Yet time is running out for Franz as his own health deteriorates, alongside the children, placed in his clinic by often loving but impoverished parents without the means or the time to look after their needs.  Children who, at first unknown to them,  suffer a terrible fate in what has been termed a rehearsal for later mass murder  

There is a lot packed in to the one-act play. This sometimes feels as if it could be a fragment of a larger, longer piece where the juxtapositions could be more pointed for the audience to work out more fully the vested interests, power struggles, compromises and cowardice.  

However the generation gap and an understandable, if detestable, callousness of inexperienced youth is plausibly delineated with the callow 23 year old ambitious Lutheran assistant to atheist Franz, Eric Schmidt (Edward Franklin).  

Germany in fact had an advanced social and welfare system, having been the first country to introduce social insurance to take care of all citizens, even though it lost its Empire and much of the means to fund the scheme after the First World War. 

The perpetrators therefore at first tried to keep the killings a secret, issuing death certificates with fake causes of death.  While there have been some documentaries, this is all a lesser known part of the National Socialist killing machine. 

The revelation of the brazen extortion involved in the subsequent bureaucracy covering up the deaths, exposed by an angry and helpless working class mother Elizabetta Pabst (Lucy Speed), elicited horrified gasps from the audience.  

A glimmer of  hope still flickers in this bleak picture when the scarlet robed aristocratic Bishop von Galen (David Yelland) comes on behalf of some of his constituents who, like Elizabetta, have come to understand what is happening. 

This is in some ways the most intellectually searching part of the play in a Shavian-like private encounter between the Catholic primate and the medic who may be compromised by his own political past. It puts the audience through almost the same process as a parent who retains hope that there can be some trust in an authority somewhere.

The Catholic bishop is a skilled theologian who holds out a sprig of hope and constructs elegant arguments condemning events he knows to be inhuman, but keeps it all carefully away from the public domain, dashing our own hopes of any moral touchstone or heroic behaviour.

Trapped between the tricked parent, the duplicitous but tormented doctor, the lofty churchman and the blinkered assistant administrator is the maid, Martha (Rebecca Johnson). She also wants to trust and find reassurance in her Catholic faith and authority figures. 

However she is still forced into harbouring justified doubts about some aspects of the regime and its perversion of communal values.

Stephen Unwin himself directs bringing clarity and precision to the proceedings. A  handsome set from Simon Higlett has shelves of grey lever arch files containing the fatal paperwork breaking up the warm wood panelling of the clinic's office. 

This is a harrowing tale of how narrow the medical profession's line can be, slipping too easily from sustaining to destroying life. While it sometimes feels a little truncated, it's a green light for a play which also challenges the ease with which we separate past actions from current-day concerns.

Review The Autumn Garden

The Autumn Garden
by Lillian Hellman

Sweethearts and Scoundrels
http://www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk/

On a trip to Alabama, TLT recalls a memorable tour of antebellum mansions on the Gulf Coast where a genteel Daughter of The American Revolution evoked times past. Including the institutionalised prostitution (which crossed the racial divide) of which the sons of the leading families partook, practically as an obligation, from an early age.

The Autumn Garden, first produced in 1951, deftly combines the secrets and scandals of life in the American Southern states, national and international politics and Hollywood in a deceptively languid piece by Alabama-born Lillian Hellman, also a former Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) script reader and a Hollywood screenwriter.

In fact, despite the recorded Chekovian inspiration and obvious similarity with fellow southerner Tennessee Williams, it struck us an American Terence Rattigan might be an apt comparison in Anthony Biggs' s production which, by the end, packs a definite punch.

Set in 1949, the owner of one of those Gulf Coast antebellum mansions which has seen better days, Constance (Hilary MacLean), has sold her family's New Orleans' town house on the death of her parents and attempts to resolve a debt-ridden estate.

She has been reduced to running the family's holiday home as a summer boarding house. with the help of black factotum Leon (Salim Sai), dependent on the family's circle of friends for guests.

Now she nervously awaits the return of an old beau, glib artist Nick Denery (Mark Healy)  with his wife Nina (Madalena Alberto), from Paris with their German maid (Leonie Schliesing) where he apparently spent the Second World War fairly comfortably under Nazi occupation.

Meanwhile, also staying as guests are a distinguished Boston-born member of the military, General Benjamin Briggs (Tom Mannion), who seems ready to embrace a new progressive order and is estranged from his ditzy movie-going southern belle wife Rose (Lucy Akhurst) and their two grown up sons.

Constance, at a time the European continent had become dependent on American Marshall Aid, has taken in her seemingly demure French niece Sophie (Madeleine Millar), daughter of her dead brother Sam and a French seamstress.

Sophie has come to a business like arrangement to marry young bachelor Frederic Ellis (Sam Coulson) who has literary aspirations and a substantial allowance from his grandmother (Susan Porrett), via his mother Carrie (Gretchen Egolf). Also on the guest register is hard-drinking banker Ned Crossman (Mark Aiken) whom Denery confuses with his brother Willy and whose love for Constance has now become a jaded memory.
       
The Autumn Garden is surpassed in fame by Hellman's two other plays Little Foxes in which former MGM star Elizabeth Taylor made her stage debut in 1981, and The Children's Hour.

Despite an effective set of faded glory designed by Gregor Donnelly, it struck us that maybe it was written as a movie, or even a soap for radio or that brash relative newcomer on the media scene, television. Still there is plenty of stagecraft, and the ensemble all give fluent and precise performances.

Once the second act gets underway, the previous hints about Hollywood politics and cover-ups become more explicit yet the Chekovian story of unrequited love and lives in the American South remains undimmed and stands on its own account.

Hellman herself was, to say the least, a divisive character. Once she, Showboat star Paul Robeson and Death of A Salesman playwright Arthur Miller were grouped together as radicals. She and lover Dashiell Hammett refused to name names to the House of UnAmerican Activities (unlike, for example, MGM actor Robert Taylor),  but she later irretrievably tainted her copybook.

In the public perception she remained a seemingly unreconstructed defender of Stalin, spouting falsehoods in a novel and movie she insisted was a partial factual memoir (even if Tom Stoppard, amongst others, has questioned the nature of literary memoirs in his recently revived Travesties), exposing herself in an undignified spat when she accused a fellow novelist of slandering her as "a liar" on a TV chat show and fell into the hands of lawyers just before her death.

Yet, as Biggs implies in the programme notes, whatever her mendacious literary and monetary manoeuvring, her reputation could well have suffered, with her skill as a writer downplayed, because she was a woman who played a man's game but was not tolerated as a man would be.

Just as Hellman's own reputation can be simple or complex, subject to the motivations of those portraying her, so The Autumn Garden is skilfully constructed, a simple tale of the South or a multifaceted piece. An amber/green light for a worthwhile  and careful revival.

Review Marilyn & Sinatra

A new play about the real-life love affair of two American icons fails to get under their skin and, Francis Beckett finds, relies on celebrity status rather than dramatic insight.   

Marilyn & Sinatra
by Sandro Monetti

They Did It Their Way  
http://www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk/

The tiny Jermyn Street Theatre tucked away in the heart of London's West End seems to make a speciality of interesting showbiz retrospectives.

Some years ago that I saw NF Simpson’s last play there, written in the great absurdist’s nineties, shortly before his death, his first play for decades.   

A while before that, I had an entertaining and interesting evening there hearing Stefan Bednarczyk revive Flanders and Swann.  And their next production is to be a revival of a really interesting period piece, The Dover Road, by AA Milne, the creator of Christopher Robin.

So why does Marilyn & Sinatra directed by writer Sandro Monetti – on the face of it, just Jermyn Street’s sort of show – offer neither entertainment nor insight?

Partly, I think, it’s the subject matter. This is the second show about the life of Marilyn Monroe I’ve seen this year, and the other one - Norma Jeane: The Musical at the Lost Theatre – didn’t work either. 

On the face of it, Marilyn is a gift: the sex symbol, the pills and drink, the suicide, the famous husbands and lovers – Jack and Bobby Kennedy, Arthur Miller, Joe DiMaggio, Frank Sinatra.  But it’s too much of a gift.  Writers and directors seem to feel that all they have to do it to put the life, or part of it, on the stage, and they have a hit show on their hands.

If there is an insight in this one, it’s that Marilyn played Sinatra records the night she died, which indicates she was probably in love with him. That’s enough to sustain a paragraph in a biography, but not a whole stage show – even just an hour long one, like this.

 

The show tells the story of Monroe and Sinatra’s romance, such as it is, and strings it together with some instantly recognisable songs, some of which we associate with Sinatra.  (And some we don't. I wondered what Rodgers & Hammerstein's Some Enchanted Evening was doing there. Mr Google tells me that Sinatra did sing it once. Not a lot of people know that.)

The two actors, Erin Gavin (Footballers' Wives) as Monroe and Jeff Bratz  (an America's Got Talent alumnus) as Sinatra, do the best they can to lift it, but in such a small, intimate venue like the Jermyn Street Theatre you can’t disguise the fact that they both look wrong.

Bratz has a nice singing voice, and it’s a pleasure to hear him sing songs we know well, but he doesn’t look a bit like Sinatra, and he sounds much too simple and straightforward. 

Gavin is nice looking in a completely different way from Monroe, and it’s painful to watch her caricature of the Monroe sex appeal and the famous Monroe wiggle. And any performance would be fatally wounded by her blonde wig, which looks like tangled white wire superglued to her head.

I can’t recommend this, I fear: it’s a red light. But I’ll trot along to their next show.  I have high hopes of The Dover Road.

Review The 2 Sides of Eddie Ramone

The 2 Sides of Eddie Ramone

by Chris Sullivan

A Comedian's Wake

http://www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk/

Poor old Eddie - you have to feel for him. Like some latter day Charon, he's left standing on a boat, in his words, going "into auto pilot". A stand-up comedian on a North Sea cruise ship ploughing its way through choppy seas from and to Hull - just one vowel away from the other place.  

In this way Eddie (Emmerdale and Bergerac veteran Chris Sullivan) starts his act in The 2 Sides of Eddie Ramone. Dressed in the colours of a prelate, red jacket and black silk shirt, he takes the usual place under the spotlight in front of the microphone with a routine minted before television voraciously devoured years of jokes honed on the musical hall and club cricuit and spat them out all in one night.

Both written and directed by Dublin-born Sullivan, Eddie,  an Irishman with (his stage surname Ramone presumably taken from  the famously divided punk pioneers) used to be something big on the telly, a quiz show host. Part of a perfect family with a wife and talented daughter, convent educated Katie (Shian Denovan) who, with help from her Dad, went straight into a sitcom after drama school.

***Diversion alert!

In her earlier incarnation as a local newspaper journalist, your venerable motorised reviewer used to speed through  the listings for forthcoming events and write a par (that's journalese for paragraph, doncha know?! ;)) on each show. Until it came to  stand up comedy, when she would have to do a phone interview with a comedian.

Because comedy, we can assure you, is no laughing business. The comedians were invariably deadly serious, often talking about their craft and their influences ... etc etc. And TLT knows all about going into auto pilot.

Nevertheless, the best one was the comedian who'd been filmed often as an audience member clapping and whooping enthusiastically. TLT ended up subbing her own copy after swapping to the subs' (that's journalese for sub editor, doncha know?!) desk and coming up with the immortal headline "Britain's Best Known Unknown".

We've often wondered since then whether Donald Rumsfeld's scriptwriter, while looking through British local newspapers for ideas, as they all obviously do ;),  coopted it for his boss's most famous (and in the opinion of some, most shifty) line. Not that scriptwriters are ever known for doing such things ;). Whaddya mean, get back to the point?! ;)

***

Anyway  back to Eddie. The play sprang into life as a one-man show in Santa Monica and then had a moderately successful run at the Edinburgh Festival.

Now developed as a two-hander, it does indeed capture something of the seriousness, not just in the plotting, but the single-mindedness coupled with vulnerability needed for the successful comedian. 

The tragic tale of Eddie and his daughter can be taken at face value as a family melodrama. But it also explores the  intersection between celebrity, family, sex, the paparazzi and reality TV. Plus the new digital television environment (the sub editor in me did wonder whether this was why the title had "2" in figures instead of the word "Two"), drugs, booze, prostitution and, with an extremely light touch, politics and agents.

The performances are skilful and the drama draws together throughtfully the threads of our modern age. Sullivan shows his chops as a seasoned actor, although occasionally at the beginning, there was a tendency to drop his voice a little too confidentially and inaudibly in filmic style. Denovan is impressive as his daughter Katie, in the garb of a medieval nun, in whom past, present and future meet. 

At the same time, the balance between stereotypical dramatic tropes and the all-too common causes of true-life celebrity downfall  is a delicate one to maintain. The pacing sometimes sags and we did wonder what the eye of a separate director would bring out in the subtle interlacing of themes where literature becomes intertwined with life. 

Still it's a detailed performance from Sullivan with Denovan successfully portraying the younger generation and the uncredited lighting following a trajectory of its own with a hint at one point of early filmmaking. 

The play runs until Saturday, July 30 and with a rousing yet elegaic Joycean ending going back to Eddie's music hall roots coming over crystal clear, this was a thought-proving 70 minutes with a pleasing delivery. So it's an amber light from your very own TLT reviewing double-act.  

Review I'm Getting My Act Together And Taking It On The Road

I'm Getting My Act Togehter And Taking It On The Road

Music by Nancy Ford

Book and Lyrics by Gretchen Cryer

When Joe Met Heather

 http://www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk/

This is an interesting one. A confessional musical created in 1978 by two women from small town America, both divorced from ex-Christian ministers who also turned to showbiz, which overcome tepid reviews to become an Off Broadway smash. Have we got your attention? Oh yes, and the two women had also gone on the road as singer/songwriters.

Often billed as the "first feminist musical", the creators prefer to class it as an exploration of  relationships between women and men. And it's wisely left as a period piece in Matthew Gould's comradely production in the intimate surroundings of Piccadilly's Jermyn Street Theatre.

Heather Jones (Landi Oshinowo), sometime bubble gum pop star and soap actress, having reached the big 4-0, determines to break away from her typecasting and  consumer-driven notions of love and family. Literally leaving her old act and getting a new act together, she's also got together a band and backing singers for a rawer and, yes, more political set of songs and is preparing to strike out on a tour without the corporate hype.

But before she goes, she still seeks the approval, or maybe rather a first audience, in the shape of manager Joe (Nicolas Colicos) who, with domestic troubles of his own,  veers between dominance, likeability and vulnerability, fearing she'll destroy what they have built up together.

This, as we've indicated, is very much of its time. But it remains a cleverly constructed ongoing discussion of irresolvable matters punctuated by an affecting series of songs building up to a more complex picture than a narrative description  might indicate.

The show is as much about women in the music industry and the contractual slavery, at the time, for both sexes in the recording industry and TV. When the feminine icon of America was as much the Barbie Doll and carefully choreographed girl groups as the Statue of Liberty.

With a mix of songs and styles and slipped-in references from West Side Story's I Feel So Pretty to soul amd rock,  it's also a sly history of  women in music. with some of the songs almost ending in question marks.

There's a literary side to it too with a reference to Virginia Woolf and social history with the "New Woman". Then there's the global subtext to this musical  when it was recently not just about women in the home and men going to work, but men and some women going outside America to war.  For in the words of  Miss America "Beauty was your currency/Talent was your style/Lovers falling at your feet/Power in your smile"

There''s strength too in a polished cast with understated, but intelligently evocative, choreography. Dark-haired Alice (Rosanna Hyland) and blonde Cheryl (Kristen Gaetz) provide the backing singers and transform themselves, along with Heather, into the traditional girl group. 

While Heather also finds herself wooed plaintively by the young guitarist Jake (David Gibbons) who looks like Bruce Springsteen but sings more like David Cassidy. The casting of a black woman in the role of Heather also adds a layer of musical history harking back to the black girl groups manufactured by white male managers and emerging solo black vocalists.

Looking up the history, it was the cathartic discussion element, when producer Joe Papp cannily noted the cold war audience lingered to talk and argue with each other after the show, which also proved part of its success. Papp pioneered post-performance Q and As and, along with a strong score, turned the show into a hit.

Ford and Cryer have now put together a sequel, "Still Getting My Act Together" and melded ir into a two act play with songs. If it's as strong as the original, it struck us it may well have legs as a movie as well as a stage play. Anyway this felt like a matinee well-spent and it's an amber/green from the TLT band.

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 I Loved Lucy

I Loved Lucy

by Lee Tannen

Queen of Comedy

http://www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk/

Back in the day TLT faintly recalls as a tot enjoying the slapstick in reruns of sitcom I Love Lucy. It was part of the strange glamour mingled with down-to-earth accessibility of Americana seeping on to British commercial TV. 

And for TLT it had a kindred spirit in the copies of "Jack and Jill" TLT'S great aunt (her grandmother's sister-in-law) sent over from New York with one particularly memorable story of the little boy who despaired of needing nerdy glasses until he saw a native American Red Indian chieftain in full headdress wearing - yes! - a pair of spectacles. 

But enough of TLT!

For this is a review of I Loved Lucy, an American play, written by and based on Lee Tannen's memoir of his father's cousin's wife's brother's wife, Lucille Ball.

Tannen presents himself as tongue-tied fan, an escort of, a backgammon player with, bathed in the aura of, estranged from and finally reconciled with the redheaded icon and TV pioneer in this canter through the years between 1960 and her death in 1989.

After the opening strains of Frank Sinatra singing "How Little We Know" drift away, theatre ad copywriter Tannen creates a world where sitcom and life merge together in a portrait of the actress filtered through the character of - er -   Lee Tannen. 

The stage Lee is played by an expressive Matthew Bunn in a clever hall of mirrors' script reflecting on a celebrity in the family, the nature of fandom and the need to earn a living. The stage Tannen may have aspired to the character played in the 1950s by William Holden in Sunset Boulevard  but he slips by tiny increments towards King of Comedy's 1980s' Rupert Pupkin.    

Meanwhile Sandra Dickinson's more deliberately naturalistic performance as the star of sitcom and sponsorship herself in her last years is a true revelation. She inhabits the tracksuits and personality of the model turned Hollywood B-actress turned everybody's favourite sitcom wife and mom as if a tailor-made role for her.  

We can take what Lucille's sidekick says about her at face value or we can read between the lines. Or we can value what Lucille says about herself. Especially when for a moment she grasps the narration from Lee and guides the play in a new direction near its denouement.

All of which is staged with skilful understatement by director Anthony Biggs. Matched too by the equally skilful set design of Gregor Donnelly backing the two players with large three dimensional letters - L-U-C-Y - filled with black and white press cuttings. A heart, which also graced I Love Lucy's opening credits, doubles up as a suspended screen for evocative images of Lucille and her entourage. 

Yep, we loved this Lucy - a carefully crafted play written with heart and something to impart, meticulously acted and directed. 

And TLT has even managed to find a connection between Jack and Jill and I Love Lucy. 

An early contributor to the kids' magazine was Pearl S Buck who also wrote The Good Earth, turned into a movie filmed by cameraman Karl Freund whom Lucille's then husband Desi Arnaz brought in to film the innovative recordings of I Love Lucy for their Desilu production company. 

Even if  apparently as Lucy Ricardo in I Love Lucy she didn't always deliver the pizza at the right moment for the bosses, a green light for a play which delivers the goods