Review a profoundly affectionate, passionate devotion to someone (noun)

a profoundly affectionate, passionate devotion to someone (noun)
By debbie tucker green

Back To Basics
https://royalcourttheatre.com/

Three couples inhabit the universe of this 80-minute play, but five people - or is it five proper nouns? For the title of this cryptic play comes from a dictionary definition, apparently, of that otherwise undefinable thing called Love.

We have to admit when we first saw the title we thought of that other treatise on Love - yes, the one where the granddaughter of a Nobel prizewinning physicist wanders around in a nightdress hopelessly devoted to a summer lover.

It turned out we were not so very wrong as all the couples in debbie tucker green's ping pong match of a play wander around in their jim jams and dressing gowns and express the kind of brooding thoughts which may occur in the wee small hours.

The stage and set designed by Merle Hensel in the upstairs theatre of the Royal Court are a turquoise green ledge, wall and floor raised around three sides.

The audience perches on black swivel bar stools divided into regimented lengthways rows inside, allowing a swivelling round as the voices, action (movement director Vicki Manderson), lighting (Lee Curran) and sound (Christopher Shutt) demand.

This has the effect of training the audience to physically follow the action and each other like a shoal of fish. We'd already been instructed to leave our bags in the cloakroom and enter with the bare minimum.

Directed by the playwright, the men and women also have the bare minimum in terms of their monikers: A (Lashana Lynch), B .(Gershyn Eustache Jnr), Man (Gary Beadle). Woman (Meera Syal) and Young Woman (Shvorne Marks).

Drama, the text books often say, is conflict. We're certainly pitched in to a clash between A and B where the words do the grating, while the drawing of chalk lines from what seems to be two overlapping venn diagram circles is silent.

The play itself is a series of stripped-down gendered duologues with only the briefest moments of pleasure for the couples stemming from a baby, a mutuality and a kiss. We don't know anything about their lives except for these private twilight interchanges about their relationships. 

Except watch out, the male and female attributes swap with the second couple and there's a definite feel as the play progresses that we may be within a computer program or chat bot or a space where biology and software crosses over.

There's a lyrical, rhythmic, soundtrack quality to the dialogue, sometimes with a razor's jagged edge and an underlying sense of menace about the changes afoot. There are enough hints to suggest a subtext of an automated future patterned, for good or ill, on male programming - the subject of one of the best but also ominously unfair jibes against the sour, sarcastic drained Woman.

Does the definition of love in the play's title actually exist, we wondered? Is love always about "someone"? We weren't sure. It's the individual voices that came through strongest with the Young Woman moulded by the older lives but with a resigned but quietly angry sense of a poisoned legacy which she cannot yet fully analyse.

We're speaking in general terms because, despite the precision of the acting and sharp corners of the platform ledges and the words, it is a play that rarely names specifics. The playwright does specify in the published script that the characters are black or Asian. Yet the  visuals otherwise indeed sometimes distracted from our concentration on the elastic snap of the dialogue and occasionally we turned our head and eyes, just to listen.

So when the few human spikes of recognition came, they dug deep but we also felt manipulated. It's a play that invites some satisfying taut resistance as the words bounce hard against the walls of the room. It's also secretive and frustrating.

We don't doubt there is the sharp jab of visceral prodding and the configuration of language feels both literary and computerised. But we also felt conditioned into responding and it's an amber light for a disembodied, fascinating and flawed play dictating and yet wistfully cajoling us into obeying its terms and conditions.

Review Deny, Deny, Deny

A new play, which imagines a future where drugs' cheating on the athletics track mutates into genetic manipulation, eventually wins over Francis Beckett. 

Deny Deny Deny 
by Jonathan Maitland 

Frankenstein Off The Starting Blocks 
http://parktheatre.co.uk 

The pressure for an athlete to give his or her body something to enhance its speed or strength is, quite simply, that the others are doing it; and if you don’t do it too, they will beat you.

That’s the clinching argument, put by runner Eve’s coach in this strong new play set in the near future, and Eve reluctantly succumbs to it.

She agrees to treatment which will interfere with her genes – treatment she is assured will not show up in blood tests, for the doping police are condemned always to be playing catch-up.

“What’s the Russian word for sportsmanlike?” a character asks.  “I don’t know.”  “That’s because there isn’t one.” But of course it’s not just the Russians. It’s everyone.

Eve’s slow and reluctant descent into cheating is well-drawn, especially in one powerful scene between her and her coach, and the tension you feel watching it is no less because you know what the outcome will be.

The effect on her – the ruin of everything good in her life except for her victories – is laid out starkly on the stage.

Eve is played magnificently by Juma Sharkah, who manages by an inflection here, a movement there, to show the two great changes that overtake her.

First, when she moves from being a clean athlete to being a cheat and then after the end of her career.  It is a performance of great sensitivity and assurance.

Rona, her coach, is far harder for an actor, and for that I blame the author.  He writes in the programme that she was based on three people, Peter Mandelson, Rasputin and his mother, and perhaps that is the problem.

She is required to be clever, manipulative, persuasive and charismatic, and at the same time  self-destructive, hysterical and unable to prevent herself from saying the uncontrolled things which will only damage her cause.

Zoe Waites chooses to act the former persona, dealing as best she can with the lines demanding the latter.  It’s a fine effort from a very good actor. Nevertheless, no actor can make the character entirely convincing until the author takes another look at the script.

There is not a weak link in the cast with Daniel Fraser as Eve’s journalist boyfriend, Shvorne Marks as a fellow athlete, and Sarah Finigan as everyone else – most notably a sports official – all putting in convincing performances.

The author rightly identifies in the programme the biggest challenge facing any director of this play: “Conveying something of the reality of a major race at a huge global sporting event. Not easy when the play is in the round and there’s a limited budget.”

The solution from director Brendan O’Hea and designer Polly Sullivan is brilliant and devastatingly simple: a stage floor, underlit and divided into squares, capable of being everything, including a track for a running race.  It’s quite enough to suspend disbelief for two hours.

However, the character of Rona is not the only problem with the script. The scene in which a sports official investigates Eve is hampered by the fact that the author has not decided whether Eve is to say she did not do it, or that she did it, and so what?

I am also not quite sure I am happy about the fact that both athletes are black, and all the other characters are white (a script issue, not the result of colour-blind casting.)

But overall, this is a very fine new play with a harsh contemporary feel, directed with great flair and acted with conviction. A green light from me.

Review The Brink

The Brink

by Brad Birch

The History Boy

https://www.orangetreetheatre.co.uk/

It's  a tough life as a teacher - one moment you're Superman for all the kids, but then starts the dark descent into the shallow grave of marking, academy politics and dreaming the top secret Second World War bomb under the playing fields explodes.

History teacher Nick (Ciarán Owens) can't sleep, having woken from his recurrent school nightmare but finds a handy cube to sit on.to eat his breakfast.

The glowing cube is one of four on an interesting set designed by Hyemi Shin introducing us to Planet Nick with s floor full of dark gray shards - almost as if a bomb had - well, never mind ...

The Brink by Brad Birch is a vigorous 80 minutes without a break, fleetly directed by Mel Hillyard, as Nick's life is put on reverse through the school system. 

Time slips away and we're not sure if we're being treated to an inside out skewed view of the world through Nick's mind, or if he, to use The Archers mot de jour, is being gaslighted.

Or if there really is a bomb under the playing fields.

And as her little motorised 'A' grade student companion remarked to TLT, aren't school playing fields being sold off to developers? But perhaps that's the point of why we've come to The Brink.

Yet the play struck us as a rather cold exercise with studied jokes, a bare bones' gallop through an educational breakdown with movie references. But again, perhaps that's part of the point. The exercise of theory in education?

TLT doesn't know whether she's been infected by the Francophone feel enveloping many of this season's plays but she did wonder whether  a French context might be more resonant with its  history of left wing (nay, communist) history teachers, militant university student surveillants, and pride in secularism.

At the same time, there are clever ideas, even if The Brink doesn't quite know whether it wants to invite sympathy or be a harshly modern Hogarthian storyboard satire. As it is, it's ticking off of the issues, plot points and jokes may be satisfying for some.

 Owens embodies an engaging mix of intellectual analysis, puppyish vulnerability and bouncing-off-the-wall paranoia. There's able support from Shvorne Marks doubling as Nick's partner Chloe and school pupil Jessica, Alice Haig as fellow teacher Jo and Vince Leigh as Chloe's hotshot boss Martin and shifty headmaster Mr Boyd. 

So it's not quite an A grade from TLT but it's definitely a not-fail amber light.