Review Jamaica Inn

Peter Barker is spirited away to 19th century Cornwall  in an enjoyable if flawed adaptation of a classic romantic thriller.

Jamaica Inn
by Daphne du Maurier
Adapted for the stage by Lisa Evans

The Beasts Of Bodmin
http://tabardtheatre.co.uk/whats-on/jamaica-inn/

A young woman comes to live at an isolated inn in the midst of the Cornish moors with her uncle and aunt, her only surviving family.

But mystery swirls around Jamaica Inn like the howling winds on the moor -  just how does the hostelry, which seems to do little business, make money?

This drama is adapted from Daphne du Maurier's edgy gothic thriller, written in the 1930s but set in the first half of the 19th century.

Jamaica Inn was famously made into an Alfred Hitchcock movie. This adaptation by playwright Lisa Evans comes across as a rollicking tale, a kind of Poldark without the pectorals, played very broadly by a cast of eight directed by Anastasia Revi.

It soon becomes clear the inn is the haunt of murderous smugglers and shipwreckers who lure vessels to their doom onto the rocky shoreline.

At the beginning of the production, the dialogue teeters perilously on the edge of parody. However it settles down into an enjoyable 90 minutes, even if some of the action and script occasionally is not as clear as it could be.

Kimberley Jarvis is a spirited, red haired Mary facing villainy on all sides. As her bruiser of an uncle, Toby Wynn Davies makes a suitably menacing adversary, brandishing pistols and ale with equal relish.

No bodice ripper would of course be complete without some devil-may-care love interest. Here it takes the shape of Jem, her uncle's younger brother nicely played by Samuel Lawrence, who may or may not be on the dark side with his brother.

The design by Maira Vazeou, with Ben Jacobs's lighting, is extremely effective. Using dry ice, horse tackle, ropes and sacks hanging from the ceiling,  they conjure up  the inn and stables, the Cornish shoreline and the moor and the characters sashay around in some splendid costumes.

Several songs are scattered throughout the play and  drive forward the plot. However this can also be at times a weakness as the actors are clearly not trained singers.

There are also moments when both the script and accents of the actors err on the side of caricature. But it's played with such pace that you can just about ignore that and the creaking plot clichés.

For an entertaining hour and a half performed by the cast at a steady gallop under Revi’s direction. it's a solid amber light.

Review Salomé

Salomé
by Oscar Wilde

Fatal Attraction
https://www.hoxtonhall.co.uk/

Blood-red cloths, glossy waxed fruit, perfumed air and white skin characterize Theatre Lab's production of Oscar Wilde's 1893 oriental symbolist riff on the biblical story of Salomé with international cast.

The atmospheric surroundings of bijou restored music hall Hoxton Hall provide the perfect dark wood venue for the moonlit decadent birthday banquet in Herod's palace.  The audience is seated on chairs on two sides facing the long banquet table stretching to the high stage.

The young women are either slumped at the table like mechanical dolls waiting to be wound up or as still as statues on a swing seat in an ivy bower dressed like ballerinas out of a Edgar Degas painting. 

Crystal decanters filled with wine, sparkling glasses, peacock feathers and real fruit mixed with wax versions spill over q table draped with a red tablecloth hung with gold braid (set dresser Maira Vazeou)..A silver flute lies waiting to be played.

Transferred from fin de siècle to the 1930s, this production has a Herod (Greek actor Konstantinos Kavakiotis) in white face with black eyeliner, a silent film plutocrat in full jazz age nightclub black dinner dress.

His wife Herodias (Helen Bang from Denmark), a handsome woman in black lace past her youth but relishing the excess, is the palace's very own Gloria Swanson.

The Moon (Annabelle Brown) and Herod's  unattainable step-daughter Salomé (Spanish American actress Denise Moreno), bathed in its light. has already entranced the young Syrian captain (French-accented Benoit Gouttenoire) with tragic consquences.

Virginal Salomé meanwhile has come to lust after the charismatic prophet Iokannan (Matthew Wade) who has earned the wrath of Herod for condemning the court and particuliarly Queen Herodias.

But the combination of wine, power, music and the moonlight moves Herod to alight his gaze on his step-daughter with disruptive results. He begs her to dance for him at any price and she agrees - extracting from him a terrible transgressive price.

Combining dance, flute, glockenspiel, accordion, trumpet and voice, this is a sensual, stylized vibrant production directed with care and fluidity by Anastasia Revi, with music direction by Annabelle Brown who also performs.

Costume designer Valentina Sanna styles the piece with, amongst other garb, calico ballet tutus for the young women and art deco geometric shaped tunics for the Syrian and the Man Of The Palace (Tobias Deacon in an engaging performance). 

Orientalism was probably as close to legitimate pornography as the Victorian sensibility allowed.

However even Salomé did not escape the censure of the Lord Chamberlain, ostensibly for breaching the ban on depicting biblical characters on stage. And its erotic reputation allied with the playwright's sexual notoriety doubtless led to the gullibility of Wilde's biographers in wrongly stating, in all seriousness, the photograph of a female opera singer in Richard Strauss's opera adaptation was "Oscar Wilde in drag".

In our times, Salome has gained an appreciative audience for its hypnotic rhythms and distinctive rhetoric as well as its power and gender  relationships which have resonance in our global, celebrity-obsessed consumer age.

Wisely, Revi breaks the declamatory nature of the piece intermittently with humour as the words are turned to mine their 21st century comic potential. The Man of the Palace resorts to lists in his desperation to avert tragedy and Herod breaks the fourth wall seeking the audience's approbation as he unleashes a drama in which he is an unwilling actor.

With its clever conception and both international and French sensibility (Wilde originally wrote the play in French), this is an intriguing, sensual piece which robustly maintains a delicate balance deserving in our view a green light.