Review Kiss Me

Kiss Me
by Richard Bean

Brief Encounters
http://www.atgtickets.com/shows/kiss-me/trafalgar-studios/
 
In this enigmatic and delicate one-act play Richard Bean reverses the film censorship in the years following the First World War.

While both the silent movies and the talkies eschewed the physical realities of intercourse in favour of the iconic cinematic kiss, the couple in Kiss Me find themselves subject to a different kind of censorship by the woman doctor who has brought them together. 

The stiff upper lip son of a manufacturer with interests in the West Indies  and a woman munitions' driver with a Louise Brooks' bob meet for the first time in her bedsit.

We spy on the couple, learning the surprising reason for the meeting. The play then runs perhaps a little predictably as writer Richard Bean divvys up the pair's background, but it would be churlish to give away the initial surprise.

Suffice to say the scenario involves a process, found in the bible and the subject of speculation and royal intrigues, recorded as practised at least since the 19th century, even though it may have been often carried out in an unethical rather than cooperative manner. 

The direction by Anna Ledwich and the performances of Claire Lams, demure in box pleat skirt, blouse and cardigan,  and Ben Lloyd-Hughes in city gent three-piece-suit, bowler hat and umbrella are seductive with the whoosh of almost a ghost story.

This seductiveness draws us away at times from some surely deliberate discrepancies.  Set, according to the programme, in the year of the Wall Street Crash, 1929, there is a time travelling feel to the script and social stigma seems more of hinderance than money.

There are also echoes of literary and screen references from Lady Chatterley's Lover to the apparently very-much-in the-future Brief Encounter. The man glancing at a fob watch and the simple but effective set design by Georgia Lowe with three large mirrors tarnished at the edges, behind a double bed, also seem to point towards the two Lewis Carroll "Alice" books.

There is, maybe, a very light touch subtext of travelling through political history as well. However the central preoccupation is also very 21st century.

Perhaps it's a piece which doesn't bear too much cold-light-of-day analysis as to how it all hangs together. Nevertheless, it did charm during our brief 75 minute acquaintance with it and it's a green light. 

Review Working

Working
From the book by Studs Terkel
Adapted by Stephen Schwartz and Nina Faso
With additional contributions by Gordon Greenberg
Songs by Craig Carnelia, Micki Grant, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Mary Rodgers and Susan Birkenhead, Stephen Schwartz and James Taylor

Boom And Bust
http://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/

There's an iconic photo of American blue-collar workers taken during the 20th century - aka The American Century.  Iron workers are balancing precariously on a girder on one of the top floors of a skyscraper they are constructing high above New York City,

Surely skyscrapers are the pyramids of our times - except of course they weren't built by Jewish slaves but usually a diverse workforce as the vital cogs in the wheel of construction.

The fame of these American construction workers spread far and wide even infiltrating James Joyce's famously often inpenetrable masterpiece Finnegans Wake "Bygmester Finnegan ... freeman's maurer .... this man of hod, cement and edifices ... piled bildung supra bildung pon the banks ... rise in undress maisonry upstanded (joygrantit!) a waalworth of a skyerscape ..."

So it fits the bill when Peter Polycarpou's Mike Dillard with an apron filled with his iron worker's tools takes to the stage to echo 19th century poet Walt Whitman's iconic (yes, there's a lot of iconic here) poem, I Hear America Singing/All The Live Long Day (music and lyrics Stephen Schwartz)

But Mike also comes from a bygone age of trades passed on from father to son, as if standing on the shoulders of giants, a dynasty of manual workers who, by virtue of their fearlessness about heights, did a job that others couldn't do.

Working is based on a series of real-life interviews conducted by veteran Chicago journalist and social historian Studs Terkel, which he then carefully crafted by ordering them into a best-selling non-fiction 1974 book.

Stephen (Wicked, Godspell) Schwartz, inspired by the success of similar oral testimony-based The Me Nobody Knows and the semi-fictional A Chorus Line, decided to make a musical out it. He brought in his own collective of music and lyric writers including James (You've Got A Friend) Taylor and Mary (Once Upon A Mattress) Rodgers and selected a cross-section of workers' testimonies.

Working in some ways reflects the strengths and weaknesses of the published book and musical form. The narrative line is less a story than the turning of a page to pick up a fresh interview.

There are subtext twists and turns - the iron worker, the mason, the press agent and the fireman all serve as markers in ground, we felt -  but TLT and her automotive product of British industry companion could feel the possibility of a different running order in a musical that never quite slots together.

Nevertheless the nuts and bolts are the performers and this is a fine production directed by Luke Sheppard with inventive and never over-fussy choreography in a compact space by Fabian Aloise.

Gillian Bevan in "Nobody Tells Me How" (lyrics Susan Birkenhead, music Mary Rodgers) is the elderly second generation American from an immigrant family teaching Elementary School and the waitress infected by showbusiness in "It's An Art".

Dean Chisnall is the stone mason in "The Mason" (lyrics and music Craig Carnelia) who notices any stone that's put in crooked, even if he can't change it, and the former bank worker who has willingly  forsaken dealing with unreal digits for saving human lives as a fireman   

There are obvious points made but also some deeper implicit realism and understanding about change. The two striking turns by Liam Tamne point this up - one more subtly than the other. The successful (presumably unpaid) community activist, in Tamne's and this production's interpretation, feels like a former trade unionist who has turned to communal matters and has the air of a business motivational speaker fitting in with our times.

Much more disturbingly there are the violent flip flops in manner of an ex-newspaper copyboy (given a pseudonym in Terkel's book) who - even if he never seems to have implemented his wildest threats - almost could have stepped out of Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman's Assassins and also feels all too real in today's world.

At the same time, Working feels like an elegaic look at an industrial past and its decline which isn't quite flagged up enough as a period piece because it sets out to be a documentary musical. Even since 2012, when director Gordon Greenberg gave some  updates along with songwriter Lin-Manuel Miranda, the world of work, including work for women, and leisure has changed drastically.

Nevertheless the creatives obviously know this, introducing a polished chorus of current drama school graduates who also act as a wide-eyed, if somewhat unironic, audience for the Terkel interviews transformed into song.

It may be unfair but of course more current issues like zero-hours fake self-employment forced upon folks but presented as a choice are non-existent. Neither is there unpaid or under-paid work posing as "internships".  Despite the 2012 updates, this is a piece more from the time long ago when interns only meant paid young doctors gaining hospital experience. 

Another problem inherent in Working is that it is too easy to forget in this musical rendition that these are real interviews. The cast just sing and dance too well and there's a tendency towards the sentimental.    

Of course there are many employment issues which were not foreseeable when the musical was first conceived. Things have moved and move so fast now - not least  the shark-like possibility new media companies might become huge with the aim of having hardly any employees at all, however inept or dangerous it may be.

While it definitely does retain a resonance, events seem to have outpaced the framework of Working, making it both a glorious but grating musical for us, so it's an amber/green light.  

Review Punts

Punts
by Sarah Page

Virgin Care
https://theatre503.com/

Any right-thinking parent worries about the future for his or her kid, especially in these competitive times when even human beings seem to be turned into assets and liabities in the accounts' ledger of life.

Punts is a comedy drama dealing with physical and financial health, parenthood, kids, marriage - and sex. Lots of sex but not perhaps as you would expect.

Antonia and Alastair, a housewife and her barrister husband, live a seemingly well-to-do existence  in England's capital with their one remaining child, 20-something Jack, while the other two sons have fled the nest.

Jack is sporty and affectionate - but he also has learning difficulties, seemingly from medical negligence at birth, which puts him behind his peers. His working life comprises of a couple of days a week in his father's legal chambers doing menial work shredding paperwork.   

So what does a housewife and her barrister husband do to insure the future of their son? Maybe help him invent an app so that he becomes a new tech millionaire? Set up some savvy investments with presumably the compensation award obtained from a hospital trust?

In this case, determined to give their son every chance in life and fit in with his friends and brothers, his mother rather eccentrically but in a way understandably, decides to give Jack an enjoyable, but paid for, first sexual experience in his own bedroom.

Punts is filled with good ideas with a terrific cast, even if it veers somewhat uneasily between real life issues and a satire on both middle class private life and global commerce.

Christopher Adams gives a beautifully nuanced and wholly convincing performance as the hesitant but also confidently literal lad trying to become his own person.

The behaviour of aggressively loving mother, Antonia - Clare Lawrence-Moody - and his apparently more diffident bespectacled father Alastair - Graham O'Mara - stretches the bounds of plausibility, with the uneasiness of the mixed genres  becoming more blatant. However the characters themselves have a succinct, if unsympathetic, credibility.

Florence Roberts is the cut-glass blonde and beautiful invited intruder into the household, eventually bruised by her encounter with the family, who has something in common with barrister Alastair - charging hefty fees.

Jessica Edwards' direction is also clear and succinct over the eight scenes of this one-act play. Set in the affluent West London home, Amelia Jane Hankin's spare set ingeniously combines the feel of a luxury home transforming it with a single piece of moveable wooden furniture into a kitchen and a more clinical sauna-like atmosphere.

The script and some of the design also seem to be self-consciously playing with book, stage, transatlantic film and TV references. We can see this making a very distinctive and quirky movie with plenty of touching humour.

However we're in two minds about the play - it has a lot going for it, especially with the resolute and sympathetic Jack. Yet the insertion of real life problems, obviously derived from research, feels rather awkward while the out-and-out satire works much better and provides the most lively moments.

At the same time, Punts is clever and sassy with an underlying seriousness, deserving of an amber/green light.

Review The Braille Legacy

David Wilkins is a blind and partially deaf print and broadcast journalist who has worked in South Africa and for the BBC in Guernsey and Lincoln.  https://davidwilkinswords.blogspot.co.uk/

The Braille Legacy
Original idea, French book and lyrics by Sébastien Lancrenon
Music by Jean-Baptiste Saudray
Translation by Ranjit Bolt 

A Touch Of Genius
http://charingcrosstheatre.co.uk/theatre/the-braille-legacy 

Louis Braille pioneered a touch system of raised dots which revolutionised the education of the blind, enabling them to read and write as well as their sighted peers.

As Louis was also a gifted vocalist and musician who invented the Braille music code, a musical would seem to be an extremely appropriate way to celebrate Louis' legacy.

The unique story of Louis' remarkable achievement by the age of 15 allows composer Jean-Baptiste Saudray and book and lyric writer Sébastien Lancrenon to use an approach and style in The Braille Legacy beloved by fans of Lionel Bart's Oliver and Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg's Les Miserables.

Losing his sight in an accident when very young, Louis becomes a pupil at a workhouse-like cash strapped Parisian boarding school for blind children in the early 19th century.

He is eager to read but the few books available at the school are in embossed print, making it enormously difficult for the blind children to read at all. However merely airing these frustrations in public results in a ban from France's National Library in Paris.

Yet he overcomes his despair and adversity hardens his resolve to find a way to learn and fight the injustice he encounters. Braille has to battle against the bigotry of both individuals and the state, as well as the difficulties of persuading his school to accept the Braille system as an alternative to print.

Inspired by a retired army officer's system of reading messages in the dark devised for soldiers,  Louis is determined to pioneer his own system - still in use by blind people worldwide after 200 years.

The Braille Legacy is based very loosely based on the inventor of Braille's true-life story. Jack Wolfe is a sympathetic proactive Louis telling his own story through song.

Directed by Thom Southerland, The Braille Legacy's narrative is simple, direct and affecting and includes the obligatory tragic hero and villain. Louis' chief ally is Jérôme Pradon's Dr Pignier and his chief adversary Ashley Stillburn's Monsieur Dufau.

Dialogue acts in a supporting role and the music conveys the characters' deepest feelings. The musical as a whole is heartbreaking but leavened throughout by a sense of comedy. And in the end the audience is left with the impression that the good guy won.

But - and it's a big but - The Braille Legacy as a musical presentation of the Louis Braille story is also deeply flawed. The most blatant flaw is that the entire cast are sighted, but telling a story about blind people.

Obviously it is too much logistically to expect a production to hire an entire cast of blind performers. Nevertheless I would contend that, despite appreciating Jack Wolfe's superb performance, a blind performer with equal singing and acting talent would have been more convincing simply because he would understand what it is to be blind and, just as importantly, how blind people are treated by others, adding a more truthful dimension to the performance.

For somebody who has never been blind, it's impossible to truly understand how it feels to be treated as a blind person.

The sighted actors wear blindfolds to convey they cannot see, removing them when they bond with each other and upon the invention of Braille. This is a clever device making a tangible difference for the performers and showing there should be no exclusion for blind people.

However it also puts the sighted audience at a distance from the action, giving it an abstract quality, rather than including them in the world of the blind.

The Braille Legacy also sometimes veers too much away from the life of Louis to make general points regarding disability instead of letting issues emerge organically from the particulars of story.

Again, while appreciating musicals need to have some dramatic licence and simplification, this musical tells a tale that was too black and white. This significantly weakened the plot and at times made the story difficult to believe.

Monsieur Dufau’s view that blindness is a disease to be cured, principally by surgical intervention,  doesn't reflect the true story and is unconvincing.  I was also frustrated that after Louis invents Braille, he effectively melts into the background, becoming a minor character.

The musical then foregrounds a story of blind children vanishing for fiendish experiments and inserts what appears to be an argument about whether blindness should be understood as an illness or a simple variation of the human condition.

This unbalances a musical that begins well with an exploration of Louis Braille's unique story but has a weak and unconvincing finale.

Those who have seen The Braille Legacy may be pleased to know there were never any experiments to find "a cure for blindness" at the National Institute for Blind Youth.  Monsieur Dufau did exist but no children vanished from the school when it was under his care.

Of course The Braille Legacy is a fictional dramatisation, never intended as an accurate portrayal of The National Institute for Blind Youth in 19th century France.  I still enjoyed the performances and the rousing and touching songs.

I cannot ignore the lack of visually impaired and blind actors and believe the musical's book to be sometimes misguided. Yet this musical also powerfully conveys the legacy of Louis Braille and the debt the blind population owes to him. I give an amber light for a flawed but invigorating production.

Review The Island

The Island
by Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona

Sentences For Life
http://www.southwarkplayhouse.co.uk

The Island is a 1973 play of the Cold War South African Apartheid era. Two men are imprisoned on an unnamed island lashed under the regime of a brutal guard. Brutalised by pointless hard labour during the day, they return to each other's company in a cell with only rolled up mats for bedding and a pail in the corner

The gruelling and cruel routine is about to be disrupted - the prisoners have obtained permission for a concert and John (Mark Springer) persuades his cellmate Winston (Edward Dede) to join him in a two-hander production of Greek tragedy Antigone. But the biggest disruption comes from news John receives which threatens the solidarity of the pair. 

The drama charted the experiences of imprisoned actors Norman Ntshinga and Welcome Duru which included a production of Antigone with Nelson Mandela playing King Creon.  Robben Island is always unnamed in The Island, not for any abstract artistic reason, but because any indication of a connection with contemporary places and events in the 1970s would have landed everyone with a sentence - on Robben Island.

The current production, directed by John Terry, proves that The Island has lost none of its power, even if there is now another 21st century context for the audience.

Designer Sammy Dowson's spartan in-the-round raised plinth set triples up, aided by the effective lighting of Alexandra Stafford. First there is the punishing hard labour on the beach where the men, forced to be mute, are set to digging and building up mounds of sand; then the prison cell;  finally the performance space for the play-within-the-play.

The play was a collaboration between writer Athol Fugard with improvisations by actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona. They used material given to them by actor Ntshinga, who was arrested for his political activities on the eve of a production of Antigone in 1965 and was replaced by Kani, and Duru.  

At the time Fugard was working with the group of black actors, the Serpent Players, based in New Brighton, a township just outside of Port Elizabeth, putting on European classics including Sophocles's Greek tragedy and Jean Genet's Deathwatch.

The Island has a tough-minded tenderness. It deliberately grows in complexity both artistically and in ideas as it progresses, while conveying a real situation. In this it shares, somewhat ironically bearing in mind the Cold War situation, the inguenuity of plays produced under Soviet oppression.

Terry wisely takes The Island at face value in a straightforward production which leads the audience from  the grunts of tormented physical effort on the seashore, through the incoherence as they first collapse in the cell.

We partake in the gradual regaining of their humanity and humour, going from monosyllabism to their recollections of life off the island, both accurate and imaginative, debate  and eventually to the resonant script learnt by the characters for the  performance.

The personalities of the two prisoners gradually emerge with engrossing performances by Mark Springer as the single-minded play impressario John and Edward Dede as the increasingly eloquent, put-upon Winston.

Circumstances have obviously changed since this courageous play was first put on but the honesty of the piece still cuts through the years.

The play works on several different levels. The figure of Antigone embodies both weakness and strength. There's also the bravery of the original collaborators (in the best sense of the word) in acknowledging the play's own distance from prison life - neither Kani nor Ntshona ever served prison sentences, as far as we can tell - and the ruthlessness men needed to survive.

For The Island tackles apartheid oppression, injustice and the law, questions of responsibility. However it also exposes the unfair hierarchies within the ranks of the oppressed. For a play that poses uncomfortable but necessary questions, showing why drama at its most truthful is both uncomfortable and necessary, it's a green light.

Review Twitstorm

Twitstorm
by Chris England

Watch The Birdie
https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/

There are plays with plenty of talent on board which give tantalising glimpses of taking an original route. Except there's a chickening out or a failure to recognize the potential of the material and the plays  fall back on reheated plot points and gags.

Such a play, in our opinion, is Twitstorm. In fact Twitstorm is two plays wound awkwardly together.

One is an obvious TV-show-host-gets-embroiled-in-a-mistweeting-scandal. The other is what happens when the sponsor-an-African-child monthly direct debit is transformed into a living, breathing strapping lad who turns up unexpectedly on the doorstep. If you were switching channels to see what was on, which one would you choose?

Guy Manton (Jason Merrells) is the host of a TV panel show with a large following and the almost sure possibility of the format being exported to the US. His agent Rupert (Chris England, also Twitstorm's playwright) is handling the business side and it looks like the Stateside show will keep Guy as  host but jettison other long-term colleagues.

Guy's success is bolstered by wife Bex (Claire Goose) who is  a mildly successful chicklit authoress and in demand as the subject of women's interest magazine features. Even so, they suffer from the same first world problems as many couples, trying desperately to get off stage son Olly into the school of their choice.

Like many celebrities, Guy has someone else to manage his twitter account, long-term friend and show scriptwriter Neil (Justin Edwards) who does it all from his laptop which he carries around. It therefore ends up in Guy and Bex's home  - where Ike (Tom Moutchi) has previously arrived unexpectedly from the African state of Benin  - on the day of an end-of-series barbecue thrown for the show's staff.

We did laugh intermittently but there was little to surprise us in what was, in the end, an overwrought script. Frankly the celebrity who finds himself in the midst of the eponymous Twitstorm, partly because he doesn't seem to want to understand the new-fangled social media, would be, at the very least, very last century if Twitter had been invented then.

But shaming can come equally as an audio or video recording. Twitter is magnified publication. Yes, the Twitter beast has to be fed, just as once did the mass readership tabloid beast - but the material has to be there in the first place.

The most precarious and excruciating Twitter shaming has often been corporate man or woman with a personal account and unintentional 140 character or less ambiguity. Twitter also often gets exercised by events that start on that cutting edge part of modern broadcast technology, the radio. 

The African child story did pique our interest. However, in trying to have a twist that the African is not as unknowing as he seems, Twitstorm unfortunately turns an out-of-date, if it were ever in-date, idiot savant story into what many would consider an equally, if not more, offensive belligerent stereotype.  

There is a fine cast, given pacey direction by Jonathan Lewis, for the laboured plot, in spite of an attempt to bring in couched political and historical points of reference.

But why have such references if, for example, most of the audience is unlikely to have an in-depth knowledge of the history of Benin and you need to drill a bit further on Google to discover any Ike Eisenhower connection to Ike? (Ike Eisenhower was the first American president to recognise the independence of Benin). 

We were prepared to give Twitstorm leeway at the interval wondering if there would be an inspired  second act but it seemed to rely on the old implicit "it was all a dream" or "he's been driven mad by the whole affair" to explain some unlikely plot twists and rants. 

This felt like a play that may have started with the title. Then there seems to have been a lack of recognition of a possibly much stronger story in which Twitter either was unnecessary or  a minor part and an attempt to combine the two ended up with some unintended consequences. Oh dear, a bit like an unintended mistweet and so it's a red/amber light.

Review Killology

Killology
by Gary Owen

Loose Ends
https://royalcourttheatre.com/

Killology intertwines three male lives and three monologues: a troubled youngster, a middle-aged man seemingly his father and an ultra successful new media entrepreneur.

On designer Gary McCann's black box set of tangled overhead wires, humps of black coils on the ground, as well as oily slicks, the spotlight at first falls in turn on each of the trio, although eventually the lives appear to tangle with each other.

This is a play with its intense focus on each of the three men which stands and falls by the performances and the three performances are gripping. Seán Gleeson's Alan, deceptively open-faced and pleasant, speaks the first words of the drama.

Siôn Daniel Young's Davey, is a boy whose  relationships with his mother and a woman teacher and a dependent female pet are skewed by the real life violence where he lives. Richard Mylan is the glib businessman who has been given every opportunity in life made callous by the 1990s' games of his schooldays  but seeing the potential in a video game concentrating on the process rather than the result.   

The individual narrations of the characters do not slot neatly into place with each other. There are many moments which seem to stretch plausibility (although TLT may be hyper-nitpicking having covered numerous employment tribunals and inquests as a news reporter) and have no continuity.

There may be an explanation for this - the humps of black coils and broken off wires could even indicate a damaged brain or may, at a stretch, be a critique of movie and TV drama relying on editing and sensation rather than the piece being properly plotted. However this is not clear and may be an assumption on our part.

So we have a problem with the play's structure. The repetitive and open ended  nature of computer games, the papering over of the film editing process, bringing in mental health problems as a framework, in our opinion, need to have, in our opinion, an acompanying dramatic argument.

Killology is directed fluently by Rachel O'Riordan and equally fluently written by Gary Owen, but if any or all of the motives for holes in the plot, almost as numerous as stars in the sky, are what we've said, it feels a bit of a cop out because the theatrical argument doesn't go anywhere. It feels too much like fragments or the template for a movie or a TV series.

To be fair, the video games' entrepreneur does give an obviously specious reason for the morality of a game involving prolonged torture and the father's discovery of a community online suddenly reverses the power dynamics. There is a potentially intriguing confusing of the legal set up in Britain and the US in the 1970s. But these elements are introduced rather than explored. 

Killology is a term coined in 1996 by a former American soldier, David Grossman, who is now an author and trainer. Killology is defined on one website as focussing "on the reactions of healthy people in killing circumstances (such as police and military in combat) and the factors that enable and restrain killing in these situations."

Grossman, who is in the playtext acknowledgments, seems to have had considerable success  in his post-military career, lecturing to American police officers, although his theories and methodology have also attracted criticism.

Killology has the benefit of excellent performances from the cast, but maybe the mention of three scenic artists (Charlotte Neville, Phoebe Tomkin and Maren von Wachenfeldt) in the list of creatives indicate a cinematic rather than stage-geared piece. If you like this sort of thing, you're gonna love this. We found it rather stretched out to a two-act play and it's an upper range amber light.

PS TLT managed to put the wrong actor's name for video games entrepreneur Paul at first - it is very definitely Richard Mylan.

Review Combustion

A new play set in Bradford entertains Peter Barker while tackling difficult issues with comic flair. 

Combustion 
by Asif Khan

Life In The Fast Lane
http://www.arcolatheatre.com/

The dilemmas and quickfire situations in Asif Khan's fast paced and good-hearted drama Combustion follows an honourable tradition, even if a higher profile for British Asian playwrights is only just emerging.

Showing working class regional life and masculinity, Khan is occupying a similar space to Scottish playwrights John Byrne (Slab Boys) and Peter McDougall (Just Another Saturday, and Just a Boys’ Game) from a previous generation.

Khan wittily examines the lives of contemporary working class British Asians in Bradford and their reaction to religion and the racism swirling around them. The religous tensions and violence are key parts of  both Khan’s world as it is, for example, in McDougall’s Glaswegian Orange Day march world in Just Another Saturday.

Combustion has a five-strong cast, starting out in a Bradford auto-repair garage during the Ramadan month of fasting..

The play is set against the background of  an English Defence League march leveraging the maximum amount of hate from a scandal involving the grooming of under age girls and the convictions of several Asian men.

Shaz (Beruce Khan) wants to make a success of his late father’s car repair business with his friends Ali (Rez Kempton) and Faisal (Mitesh Soni) as mechanics. Shaz’s sister Samina (Shireen Farkhoy), a student campaigner against racism, is determined to demonstrate against the EDL march and give a speech.

Mechanic British-born Faisal is considering a move to Pakistan, the birthplace of his father, away from the racism he has suffered in Britain. Ali, belligerently opposed to the rise of the fascists, is thinking of marrying Samina.

A tense atmosphere in the city turns to violence when ranting racist EDL supporter Andy (Nigel Hastings) turns up out of the blue and is assaulted. Approached by Samina, he nevertheless unexpectedly agrees to talk - or argue - with her.

The fast pace of action sees all the characters going through radical changes. Beruce Khan is charismatic as Shaz, with both Soni and Kempton also showing confident comic timing. Farkhoy gives good value as the gobby, Northern girl grappling with politics.

However as a northerner who lived in Yorkshire for several years, I missed the lyrical quality of northern spoken language, while Khan did capture much of the wit. Also, if all these people are from Bradford, why are their accents different?

Still, director Nona Shepphard keeps the pacing fast and tight, even if some of the shifts in plot seem rather implausible. Designer Mila Sanders ingeniously uses the Arcola studio's brick walled space as the basic set of  an auto workshop where tables and chairs  double up as other props such as cars and fridges. Khan’s writing is funny and often sharp in a play which faces the issues head-on, deserving an amber/green light.

Review Sand In The Sandwiches

Francis Beckett admires both the subject of the one-man play and the actor playing him but feels the two are not a perfect match.

Sand in the Sandwiches
by Hugh Whitemore  

Betjemanland
http://www.trh.co.uk/

I so wanted to love Sand in the Sandwiches.

John Betjeman’s a guilty pleasure for me. A left wing chap of a certain age doesn’t like to admit that he’d rather have Betjeman than fellow poets Auden or Spender any day, but I would.

I admire Edward Fox, whose long acting career has provided us with many memorable performances, and who is now admirably sustaining a one-man performance as Betjeman in the vast Theatre Royal Haymarket at the age of 80.

The mix in this play about Betjeman’s life and work as he approached his fiftieth birthday,  was about right, with some qualifications.  It is a judicious mixture of old favourites – the show starts, as is only right and proper, with one of his best known poems Miss Joan Hunter-Dunn – and some less well-known works, together with lengthy extracts from Betjeman’s verse autobiography Summoned by Bells, plus some extra biographical information.

Into the mix, writer Hugh Whitemore has chucked a few funny stories with a pretty flimsy connection to Betjeman, such as what Winston Churchill said when he saw a picture of the woman Labour politician Tom Driberg was to marry: “Well, buggers can’t be choosers.”

So what’s the problem?  The problem is that Edward Fox doesn’t convince as Betjeman. It’s not just that he’s quite unlike Betjeman physically – though he is.  It’s that he is like Edward Fox - tall, elegant, handsome, slightly raddled Edward Fox, with a lovely voice and distinguished longeurs.

When he ends a love poem on a note of despair – “Little, alas, to you I mean/ For I am old and bald and green” it makes complete sense coming from the portly, untidy Betjeman, but none at all coming from neatly elegant Fox. 

When he describes his schooldays, you can see that the boy in the poem – unsporty and aesthetic – grew up to be John Betjeman.  The boy who might have grown up to be Edward Fox is Betjeman’s nemesis, not mentioned in this show:

“Percival Mandeville, the perfect boy
“Was all a schoolmaster could wish to see –
“Upright and honourable, good at games,
“Well build, blue eyed; a sense of leadership
“Lifted him head and shoulders from the crowd.”

So it is, to some extent, with the selection of Betjeman’s poetry offered here. We learn from the play that Betjeman had a patrician distaste for post Second World War state planning – as he did.  We do not learn that Betjeman disliked Thatcherite capitalism even more:

“You ask me what it is I do. Well, actually, you know,
“I’m partly a liaison man and partly PRO.
“Essentially I integrate the current export drive
“And basically I’m viable from ten o’clock till five.”

A lifetime ago, when I was a sixth former, I found in the local library a recording of Betjeman reading Summoned by Bells.

Some poets do their own work no favours when they read them – think of that ancient scratchy recording of Hilaire Belloc massacring Tarantella – but Betjeman read his poetry wonderfully, and made Summoned by Bells an extension of his rather quirky, if sometimes disingenous, personality.

Hearing Edward Fox recite it beautifully, I yearned to hear Betjeman recite it less beautifully. Still, Fox does recite beautifully.

Director Gareth Armstrong moves him about the stage enough to make it interesting, and not so much as to make it distracting, and Fotini Dimou’s simple set is just what it should be – a moody backdrop which knows its place and doesn’t try to take over.

It’s not as good as the real thing, but it’s an enjoyable evening in the theatre, well worth an amber/green light.

Review On The Town

On The Town
Music by Leonard Bernstein
Book and Lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green

Revolving Doors
https://openairtheatre.com/

There's something thrilling about a chorus of enchanting voices floating up into the sultry air when twilight draws in at leafy Regent's Park Open Air Theatre. And with songs like Lonely Town, I'm So Lucky To Be Me and Some Other Time with its collective sigh, "Oh well", how can one resist this tale of the fleet and fleeting love?

It was adapted from wartime hit Fancy Free, a short ballet conceived and choreographed by Jerome Robbins with score by Leonard Bernstein - both 25 at the time - about three US Navy sailors on  shore leave who end up fighting amongst themselves for a date with a pair of young women.

A few months later and at the age of 26, Robbins and Bernstein had added a musical to their increasing list of successes with Betty Comden, just a year older, and Bernstein's flatmate Adolph Green, barely 30 years old, writing the book and lyrics.

Its origins in dance and wartime uncertainty give the show a particular ensemble and snatched pleasures' flavour with an open ending. The framework of  sailors whose first trip to New York will always be a transient one.

The departure as another ship with another crew draws into the harbour puts the three young men, Gabey (Danny Mac), Chip (Jacob Maynard, a last minute replacement for the injured Fred Haig) and Ozzie (Samuel Edwards) in the spotlight before they melt back into ranks of the Navy.
 
This is followed through as they descend into the subway to start sightseeing in the hell-uv-a town and encounter Miss Turnstiles - on a poster.  However, unknown to sailor Gabey who is smitten by the image, the publicity turnstiles turn every month to create another short- term subway seductress advertising the city's transport system.

Directed by choreographer Drew McOnie with Tom Deeering's musical direction,  there's plenty of storytelling through dance on Peter McKintosh's dockyard packing crate set (complete with traffic lights!) and with Vogue-style costumes of sparkling colours.

The sailors in the spirit of naval fraternity search for Gabey's Miss Turnstiles aka Ivy Smith (Siena Kelly), the Bronx ingénue in debt to her blowsy singing and dancing teacher Madame Dilly (Maggie Steed), Ozzie and Chip respectively encounter and pair off with a statuesque rapacious, nymphomaniac blue stocking (Miriam-Teak Lee) Claire De Loon and brassy blonde yellow cab driver Hildy Esterhazy (Lizzy Connolly).

With Comden and Green coming from the left-leaning revue nightclub scene, there is a revue structure to the show with plenty of in-jokes  about then current fads for anthropology and psychology and pastiches of opera and the experimental off Broadway theatre scene. 

So it's easy enough to classify it as a period piece with the bonus of luscious tunes and witty lyrics ("The Bronx is up and the Battery's down") and for modern tastes there may be longeurs. Yet this is a solid production and we would feel churlish in withholding a top rating because some of its cultural references feel dated.

The wit still shines and  audience are still whirled through the turnstiles into -  in the words of So Lucky To Be Me - what a day. It's a green light for landlocked romance in a love letter to New York  amid the greenery and birdsong of Regent's Park. .