Review Venus In Fur

Game Of Thrones' star Natalie Dormer impresses Francis Beckett, catches the zeitgeist, but turns out to be less than the sum of its parts.

Venus in Fur
By David Ives 

Of Human Bondage 
 http://www.trh.co.uk

Sometimes timing dictates what your play is about.

Harvey Weinstein was just another Hollywood film mogul when several years ago David Ives sat down to write Venus in Fur. In his play a theatre director,  who rather despises the actresses he hires or declines to hire, gets his comeuppance.

That, at least, because no play is an island, is what Venus in Fur is about right now and what the zeitgeist demands in late October 2017.

However I suspect that was not the original subject of the play Mr Ives wrote.  I think it had much more to do with sexual fetishes, sado-masochism, and the strange things they do to the brain.

Never mind. It’s the Weinstein affair, and the consequent pleasure of seeing an actress turn the tables on a male director, which will have theatregoers flocking to the Haymarket.

In addition, perhaps attraction will be the not totally unpleasant sight of Game Of Throne's Natalie Dormer’s shapely legs protruding from S&M outfits.

In Ives's two-hander comedy drrama, New York writer and theatre director Thomas (David Oakes) has had a long day failing to cast the main female part for his adaptation of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s 19th century novella.

The word masochism is coined from the author's name. The book is about a woman who makes a man her slave urged on by the man who wants to be enslaved.

Thomas is just packing up to go home when Vanda (Natalie Dormer) walks in, persuades him to hear her read for the part and turns out to know most of the lines.

He is in charge at the start, for he has a wonderful part to bestow on some lucky actress.  But slowly Vanda persuades Thomas to act out in real life the relationship she has read about in his play, to become her slave. What starts as a reading merges into role-play.

It’s a clever, witty play with a lot of blunt but resonant one-liners, like “Working in the theatre is the world’s greatest way to get laid”.

Patrick Marber, for my money Britain’s best contemporary playwright, directs with a sure touch and there is a splendidly detailed realistic set from Rob Howell.

As the director Thomas, David Oakes is extremely competent, but most of the time he’s simply a foil for a stunning virtuoso performance from Natalie Dormer as Vanda, at once a monster and an avenging angel.

So, a thoroughly engaging 90 minutes in the theatre (straight through, no interval). However, in the end, I wanted a bit more.

I didn’t care quite enough what happened to either character. Truth to tell, not quite enough did happen and Thomas’s swift capitulation strained the suspension of disbelief. So it's almost full marks; but in the end only an amber/green light.

Review The Ferryman

The Ferryman
by Jez Butterworth

Cooking The Family Goose
https://royalcourttheatre.com

Quinn Carney (Paddy Considine), a former IRA man, has turned his sword into a plowshare and now, in 1981, is cultivating cereal crops on the family farm.
 
Jez Butterworth's dramatic tapestry weaves in the past - back to the prehistoric bog men whose fate disturbingly echoes more recent events through the Easter Uprising of 1916 and the men and women who disappeared during The Troubles - up to the play's present day with the hunger strikers in Long Kesh's Maze Prison 

Artfully staged and acted, the large cast of this sprawling family melodrama is skilfully deployed by director Sam Mendes over nearly three and a half hours.  

The play is structured like a movie  or a boxed set  setting up a question mark and the imminence of threat and violence in the first scene and switching to the Armagh countryside with several stories intertwined.

A distinctive literary sensibility runs through the drama - the plays of Brian Friel, Sean O'Casey and Eugene O'Neill came to mind while there's more of a whiff of James Joyce with its tales of lost loves and dashed hopes with political activity.  It's often humorous, troubling, delightful and menacing in turns.  

There's meticulous attention to detail by designer Rob Howell down to the kitchen of the Catholic farmer's family with the smell of cooking meat wafting from the substantial range. 

As the family descends for the start of the harvest, there's also something of a feel of Northern Irish harder-edged, more sweary version of  The Waltons  where we meet parents, children, elderly uncles and aunts and eventually cousins. 

But the play starts very differently in a city the very name of which is a matter of contention with a horrifying exhumation of the recent past, showing this can be no rural idyll.  

The family arrangements of Quinn, his widowed sister-in-law luminous dark haired Caitlin (Laura Donnelly), joined eventually by his fragile, exhausted fair-haired wife Mary (Genevieve O'Reilly) and the pall of  possible illicit relationships and abuses, past and present, also hang over the generations. 

Yet in some ways this felt like a mystery story which never quite materialized, almost as if we were being deliberately diverted (in every sense of the word), with the possible chief character of that tale, Father Horrigan (Gerard Horan) hardly appearing. 

And that's what we found mildly frustrating Stories are evoked and then curtailed - so we never quite know what happens in the end even if it does feel jam-packed. The strands of the stories come thick and fast with the hovering of stereotypes. 

Yet it enchants enough that we bob along on the sea of words and comings and goings including a remarkably docile baby and various live animals, courtesy of gentle giant Englishman Tom Kettle (John Hodgkinson), with a Shakespearean sounding moniker which happens to be the name of a Home Rule politician and friend of James Joyce. 

Considine as Quinn makes a fine professional stage debut, a tall, slightly stooping but sturdy figure who like, Donelly's Caitlin, is caught between ancient and the modern, 

But this is very much an ensemble piece from youngest child Honor (Grace Doherty alternating with Sophia Ally) to aged wheelchair-bound Aunt Maggie Far Away (Brid Brennan). Like a victim of sleeping sickness awoken by drugs, she has moments of lucidity turning her into an aged Scherherazade.   

Des McAleer as Uncle Pat straddles the century through his education in the classics, as well of his memories of a harsh but pastoral farming past. An education which smacked to us as possibly British based. Equally, Dearhbla Molloy crosses the years both visually and verbally as the staunchly republican Aunt Patricia.
  
The play's visceral strength lies in its archeological layers of Irish history where everything. good and bad,  feels "pickled", perpetually in readiness for Virgil's boatman of death, The Ferryman of the title. 

Amidst the lyrical flow there are also sly hints of something more - a glimpse of another son of Armagh, the Reverend Ian Paisley and also international economic reality underpinning the farm.  

Through myth, literature and filmmaking, the image of Northern Ireland and Ireland has itself been "pickled", even if the hornblowing for the harvest crosses more than one culture. 

Now on the verge of Brexit, we look back from yet another archeological layer as the borderlands enter into a new phase and it's a green light for a play which feels obliquely apt for our times.

Review Groundhog Day The Musical

Groundhog Day The Musical
Music & Lyrics by Tim Minchin
Book by Danny Rubin

Ready For My Retake, Punxsutawney Phil!
http://www.oldvictheatre.com

A new musical by an already successful songwriter reuniting with the director of his most celebrated work, along with a book by a screenwriter of an acknowledged comedy classic was always going to be an event.

An event which is at least as big as the  folksy Groundhog Day in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania.

The ingeniously simple but ever giving premise of the 1993 movie Groundhog Day, the ill-tempered TV weather forecaster Phil Connors (Andy Karl) doomed to repeat for ever one day while those around him are unaware of the time loop, is never going to fail.

And for 21st century audiences which have lived through the development of computer games, the repetition and psychological modifications have a modern, familiar feel.

The repeated day is Groundhog Day in a rural borough of Pennsylvania where Puxsutawney Phil is brought out each February 2nd to predict how long winter will last. Perhaps the nearest we have in Europe is British-born Paul the Octopus.

But that's being silly ;). Back to the serious stuff. Matthew Warchus takes the helm as director with an ingenious toy town set design by Rob Howell and energetic choreography by Peter Darling. And of course the music and lyrics by Tim Minchin.

There's a smart-aleck sketch like feel to the show giving this musical more of an updated One Man, Two Guvnors vibe. Complete with snow, it's a kind of seasonal show for every season, Phil in TV Land mixed with Dickens' Scrooge mixed with Moliere's Le Misanthrope (hey, read that last again, once you've learnt to speak French to ingratiate yourself with us just like Phil Connors with producer Rita!).

It has to be said a few dirtier jokes also make it much more 18 than a PG certificate.

Karl as human Phil is far more of a handsome City slicker than the movie version as the town metaphorically and literally revolves around him. The film plot is all there but this Phil Connors is less of a crumpled cynic who has never moved out of local news than a high flying graduate who feels he has come down in the world.

The love interest, TV producer Rita (Carlyss Peer) and cameraman Larry (Eugene McCoy) like the townsfolk dress casually compared with the suited Connors who looks like a Wall Street executive parachuted into a Peanuts-style comic strip or other more kiddie like literature.

The score and plot whip through the story at breakneck speed. At the moment it does feel as if some of the timing for the repetition needs to bed in to extract the maximum comedy and pathos from the  psychodelic time warp (Mary Poppins or a Roald Dahl adaptation, it ain't!) as the marching band and groundhog festivities come round faster and faster.

Song-wise the score  is stronger in the second act than the first but there are quaint rhymes, puns and gags to hold the attention and sell the show.  Georgina Hagen as Nancy, a one-night stand during Phil's don't-care period on the time loop, also brings distinctive vocals to her song Playing Nancy in the second act.

This reflects too the filmic conceit at the heart of the movie and the musical. We're in a fast changing world of  movie  frames continually shot and re-shot. All in all, it's colourful and contemporary, so it's a crowd pleasing amber/green light.