Review Boudica (PREVIEW)

Boudica
by Tristran Bernays

No Man's Land
http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/

Many of us (ok, TLT and her own metallic chariot) had previously only the vaguest impression of a Celtic  warrior queen Boudica with flowing locks taking on allcomers and emerging victorious.

The life of Boudica, whose image has varied according to the world picture of those who wrote about her, had a more tragic trajectory than we realised and is now the subject of a vigorous new verse play by Tristan Bernays filling the Shakespeare's Globe stage.

It's certainly an apt and clever choice, for it feels like a Shakespearean story, a proud Queen uniting the British tribes against the might of the Roman Empire.

However, it also feels appropriate to wonder if Shakespeare's pen would have chided her for hubris and unfeminine behaviour in more certain terms than the imperial Victorian image of the queen of Iceni tribe handed down more recently.

The Queen is a historical figure wrapped in a myth and probably an appropriate heroine for our double edged Brexit age. In the present version, it's woman power but also with a certain amount of questioning and a non pejorative modern slant.

But of course before Brexit there was Game Of Thrones and various swashbuckling mythological and historical TV serials in a Hollywood genre which has enjoyed a revival of popularity in recent times.

Directed by Eleanor Rhode, Boudica's life  makes for an epic re-telling, often in verse, with plenty of energy. If it is a tad unsubtle in its television-like structure and modern mash up, it still demands to be taken on its own terms as a tale of adventure and betrayal.

The writer himself says in the programme he wants to make a blockbuster action film onstage with battling women at its centre. And just as much as colonialization, it is a dramatic discussion of war including a hint of Cold War as defeat closes in.

Again it may not always be subtle, baldly questioning when defence becomes attack in a debate over the nature of conflict in post Second World War terms. But reiteration in the baldest terms suits the energetic style and there's a pleasing working of the audience as the British tribes rally.

Preceded by a drumming soundscape and  narrator (Anna-Maria Nabirye) dressed in the uniform of African rebels and child soldiers, the martial widowed Boudica (Gina McKee) and her two daughters, clad in robes with weapons at their side, make their regal entrances.

They have arrived to claim their share of the kingdom of the Iceni. Their husband and father had enjoyed favours including loans,  as a client king, from the Roman conquerors.

However expediently for the colonizers including the fey procurator Caius Deciamus (Samuel Collings) in a knatty brocade coat, suited and booted in cuban heels, Roman law only recognizes primogeniture and there's not a male heir in sight. 

Far from recognizing the danger and a hierarchy where woman are not even recognized as minor players, the Queen protests and is bound and lashed with a whip by soldiers while her daughters Blodwyn (Natalie Simpson) and Alonna (Joan Iyola) are given as trophies of empire to the troops and raped starting a cycle of rebellion and revenge.

The action takes place on a plain but versatile wooden stage, designed by Tom Piper, with ladders against the Globe's pillars backed by a stockade with simple but effective extras coming in as they are needed.

There may not be an especially complex subtext and we wondered whether rape was defined then in the same terms as now. The modern colonial elements are signposted a mile (or is that 1,609 metres?!) off,  but historical and mythical movies and TV series have conditioned us to such mash ups and artistic licence.   .

There's some zombie choreography (choreographer Tom Jackson Greaves)  lots of clashing swords, a spectacular aerial attack, a seering curse and bloody revenge.

The chief of the Belgics (Abraham Popoola),is a charasmatic huge punk tree trunk of a man, "There's madness and there's Badvoc!". The uneasy unification of the tribes under Boudica is sealed by Cunobeline (Forbes Masson), another chieftain who overomes his doubts,  with  a rock concert rendition of The Clash's London Calling.

The jokes are sometimes of the Monty Python/Blackadder genre but with more swearing: "Honey of course he's got news, he's the f******g messenger!". Boudicca  may not be the most complicated of characters, written as veering between the military and motherhood, but gives a stirring mix of Elizabeth I and Henry V rhetoric standing in front of the microphone to urge her troops.

There may be a risk of the lines descending into the parodic when we hear, "What has Rome done to you? and there are shades of the musical Salad Days in a scifi deus ex machina as Boudicca falters. However another piece of action makes sure the audience just takes in the visuals and doesn't stop to think too much.

Another softer dynamic is introduced through the younger daughter Alonna. A meeting with the enemy general (Clifford Samuel) ends in a glimmer of more civilised behaviour when he promises honourably he will insure she leaves free of harm.

It's clunky, perhaps trying to pile in too many issues,  but also funky and the cleverest thing about it is a reversal of the TV genre, which draws on classic literature, back into Shakespearean stage terms. It certainly could also work in even bigger venues and it's not often TLT would say that,, so it's an amber/green light!

Review Harrogate

Harrogate
by Al Smith

Father Takes Stock
https://www.hightide.org.uk/productions/harrogate#dates-and-locations

Harrogate the play started its life as part of the High Tide Festival and, after a short run at the Royal Court Theatre,  is now embarking on a national tour between 1 and 16 November: the Farnham Maltings in Surrey, the artsdepot in North Finchley, Harlow Playhouse, The North Wall, Oxford,  Canterbury's Marlowe Studio, The Garage in Norwich,  The Cornerstone in Didcot, The Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds and the Cambridge Junction

An 80-minute two hander, it stars Nigel Lindsay, last seen by us in Speed-The-Plow, as the apparent father of a 15 year schoolgirl played by Sarah Ridgeway who also doubles as wife and mother. It's received mostly rave reviews, although it strikes us as a marmite type of play.

It's set in what seems to be the family flat, designed by Tom Piper on a clinical white traverse stage (we caught it on the last day of its run at the Royal Court) with a kitchen island at one end, two equally gleaming white chairs, and a wall on which, eventually, a photo of the parents hangs on the other.

While mining with precision the relationship between a Dad and his teenage daughter,  the play nevertheless leaves a question mark continually hanging over their identities,what is true and what is not. The script ambiguously, especially in view of Sarah Ridgeway's transformation into the medic wife in the final scene, only names the characters as "Him" and "Her".

Past and present also coalesce within a sort of audit, with secrets and reveals, of the parents' marriage and their daughter's life as words and incidents repeat themselves in different patterns.

It has something in common with Blue Heart, which we enjoyed recently, with its repetitions and the acting is impeccable. In fact, it is altogether cool, glossy, clinical and slick, even at the moments when it would appear to be at its most heartfelt - and most cruel.

There's certainly tricksy quality, but maybe the clues are there. In the father's profession of reinsurance (there's quite a bit of financial vocabulary and acronyms), the language of computer games, in the unseen mother of the daughter's best friend who has forged her career in performance psychology and the rhythm of a binary computer program at work.

This felt to us a somewhat one-dimensional play and as if it could be part of larger piece; Unlike Blue Heart the repetitions do not feel true alternatives but part of a closed circuit learning process where the memory of past conversations is solely there so that the incidents and vocabulary can be rearranged.

The father's relationship with his daughter may be unhealthy or maybe it is just he cannot let go, trying to train her to be a smart machine with a degree of independence, which includes a mysterious stay at Harrogate, but always thinking she will come back to him.

There's an undercurrent of corruption in the dialogue, although it's kept deliberately ambiguous as to whether it is commercial or sexual or both TLT and her mechanical sidekick found it a little precious, as if we were going to be tested afterward on whether we'd noticed the links between the scenes - and so then writing a review of this could be a self-fulfilling prophecy!

Still the staccato rhythms are sharply delineated by director Richard Twyman and fluently performed even if its narrating style and stylized format left us rather uninvolved. It's an amber light for a clean-cut but ultimately just a little bit too regimented a piece for us.

Review The Harvest

The Harvest

by Pavel Pryazhko

Hard Graft

http://sohotheatre.com/whats-on/the-harvest/

Who knew apples were such a hot topic? Researching the Belarus apple industry for this review with that well-known expert, Google ;), Belarus appears a relatively small apple producer but used as a transit country for major political shenanigans in a refrigerated apple cold war ...    . 

Does this have an impact on this Belarusian black comedy transferred from The Theatre Royal Bath? Maybe. But while an interesting hook in reality, an audience for The Harvest doesn't necessarily have to know about this.

An effective white box, designed by Madeleine Girling and Tom Piper,  serves as backdrop for regimented grafted green unblemished apples hanging down from roof railings on strings of various lengths.

Four young people compete to pick Reinette apples from the tree on a clear winter's day (lighting: Charles Balfour).  According to Google, Reinette is an 18^th century French variety first described by Edward Bunyard  in the year of the American Revolution.

And winter? Apparently, according to the script, they ripen off the bough before they are supposed to be brought to market as perfect specimens packed in the wooden crates provided.

Provided by whom? We never get to know. 

There is no gangmaster, no supervisor, no apparent orchard owner as the four descend into at first comic and then increasingly darker desperate strategies. 

A bee sting disrupts the ideal harvest day for the two males and their tantalising female companions, Ira (Beth Park) and Lyuba (Lindsey Campbell) and from then on, it’s all downhill. 

Valerii (Dyfan Dwyfor) in the best-written role, clad in sports gear, is sometimes able to furnish a hammer to knock “new nails in old holes”.  Nevertheless sometimes he’s as incompetent and self-harming as  his chunky bee-stung mate Egor (Dafydd Llyr Thomas) and eventually roams the stage maniacally thinking up new schemes, peering indistinctly from behind the fourth wall. 

The apples themselves turn into vulnerable beings,  bruised, tossed, pulled and  pushed  in and out of collapsing crates. Meanwhile the four human beings spiral into mayhem with the crop ultimately  crushed in the prevailing anarchy. This is a production which must use up a considerable quota of apples every night!

Does the orchard represent a state enterprise? At this very moment state enterprises in Belarus are being privatised  (“it is the work collective that has to decide whether or not privatization will take place”, according to a real-life news story quote of the President).]

Or could it equally, from our world, be a corporate, with the state hidden?  Certainly local and national government and insurance company health and safety inspectorates never appear in the ensuing bloody orchard chaos. 

 

As one character says, “Well, it could happen to absolutely anyone”.  

And the result? The four youngsters,  physically and psychologically maimed ultimately turn from productive apple-picking citizens into aimless patients in a pharmaceutical stupor. The once idyllic landscape goes into freefall, breaking up like the crates and then freezing over.

This 2011 play is given a sprightly poetic translation by Sasha Dugdale, energetically directed by former RSC Artistic Director Michael Boyd and performed with humour and vigour by the actors. 

Jaunty recurring old-fashioned music (sound: Andrea J Cox – no pun intended!) gives a possible clue to a gallop through history. It’s short enough at 70 minutes without an interval to hold the attention. 

Yet the production also feels – a little grafted, put together. Too broad and repetitive for the fragile  seesaw  between artificiality, farce, vulnerability, danger and tragedy, as delicate as the easily-damaged apples hung by slender string. 

Collectively, TLT and her juicy jalopy did wonder whether film, with its naturalistic setting yet descending into surreal moments, might be a fitting medium for this piece? So not quite an apple green light but a golden delicious amber.