Review The Scar Test

The Scar Test
by Hannah Khalil

The Need To Know
http://www.sohotheatre.com/

Go on to the official Yarl's Wood website and you'll find many glossy photos of smiling women. The name Yarl's Wood and a logo of "Respect, Support, Commitment. That's our promise" are in large letters. While the words Immigration Removal Centre are in much smaller black letters.

Yarl's Wood in Bedfordshire is one of 11 removal centres in the UK, outsourced by the Home Office to private security firms.  Here asylum seekers, migrants and the stateless are detained before release or deportation when their status is clarified..

The Scar Test, a new play by Hannah Khalil, is a reflection of life in a detention centre which has been touring since its premiere in Bedford earlier this year and now arrives at the Soho Theatre.

Based on verbatim interviews and research at Yarl's Wood by the playwright, The Scar Test seeks to initiate the audience into the often disturbing world of deportation centres, a nexus of conflicting interests in which the inmates find themselves caught up.

At the same time, The Scar Test also aims to bring home the normalness of the unnamed women who find themselves, through no fault of their own, under lock and key and constant surveillance.

This is one time when the ticking off  of issues within a drama seems thoroughly justified. Indeed a question mark hangs over the true circumstances when the battle over how to portray the situation of those within the centres is fought in newspapers such as the Daily Mail and The Guardian.

This is a stripped back touring production with minimal staging and the versatile cast of five female actors play many more characters, both male and female.

We progress through the female detainees and the male and female guards to the volunteer visitors who befriend the inmates, the distant doctor whose appointments are strictly rationed and the duty solicitor grappling with the restrictions of the unwieldy appeal process and language barriers.

There are strong performances by Janet Etuk, Nadia Nadif, Rebecca Omogbehin, Shazia Nichols and Lucy Sheen.

The best moments occur when we can follow backwards from the Centre the individual stories of the women. Zoe Spurr's lighting and Jo Walker's sound, with a mute anguished Omogbehin, for example, powerfully convey the details and trauma of an agonizing memory without words.    

But in many cases characters flash by and some of the contrasts seemed awkward rather than raw. It is also a production where the writer and director need to find and pin down the pivotal points between the abstract, and the naturalistic.

Sometimes the piece seemed compromised by the playful breaking into song and choreographed movement even if the aim was to emphasize the women's normalness and closeness to us.

It did occur to us, although the play tries to convey the disorientation of those in the detention centre twilight zone by avoiding specificities,  that projections of the buildings and rooms might bring something to the audience's experience. 

Nevertheless, even if it is dramatically erratic, The Scar Test does hand to those watching a lucid package of information within its 75 minutes and plants seeds for those who want to find out more.

We give an amber light for a drama throwing its own spotlight on human beings who have committed no crime, yet are, in some cases, indefinitely detained. 

Review Ink

Ink
by James Graham

It's The Sun Wot Won It
https://almeida.co.uk/

At this very moment one of the UK's main news agencies is developing robot reporters for local news coverage.

James Graham's Ink looks back to another age when reporters on local newspapers were hungry to reach Fleet Street, every newspaper had its own watering hole and the print unions in control of the hot metal ruled the roost. More ink and less inc.

And The Sun newspaper ousted The Mirror, grabbing its traditional working class reader base as Britain's bestselling newspaper after new proprietor, Aussie outsider Rupert Murdoch, took over in 1969.

Ink charts the transformation of The Sun from an ailing left wing broadsheet to a cheeky chappie, aspirational tabloid with its infamous topless Page 3 model, focussing on Murdoch (Bertie Carvel) and, above all, its first editor, the son of a Yorkshire colliery blacksmith, Larry Lamb (Richard Coyle).

We're in at the start of a legend, that of The Sun, and also just before Margaret Thatcher's ascension to Prime Minister and the move to Wapping where the play ends.

Ink mixes variety japes - it even begins with the old Max Bygraves' catchphrase "I wanna tell you a story" - with the towering personalities of owner and editor as The Sun became "The Soaraway Sun".

Yet Graham's and director Rupert Goold's approach feels scattergun. There's an introduction to reporting through the five W's of journalism - What, Who, Where, When and Why - for the unintiated.

Giant Ws then remain on Bunny Christie's deliberately and evocative ramshackle two storey offices. Murdoch and Lamb dine out on lobster (although documented as true, it's ironic as lobster has its own place in newspaper slang) in a Covent Garden restaurant where they map out the future of The Sun.

Murdoch of course gives Lamb, at last in a prized editor's chair, an impossible deadline which he fulfils in equally ramshackle fashion. Lamb gathers together a group of journalistic ne'er-do-wells and sidelined hacks, apparently after Fleet Street veterans with bulging contacts' books had rejected his offers.

There's certainly a feel of the mix of older oddballs and new generation hacks and photographers with the heady rush of ideas, plucked out of the air or the result of expediency,  at the first editorial and executive meetings. The musical hall/variety thread continues with pop ditties of the time and the cast, caught up in the euphoria of the moment, breaking out into song and dance.

But, despite darker true episodes with the abduction of the wife of a Sun executive, Ink never really digs deep and is more of a scrapbook than an integrated play.

As is sometimes perhaps inevitable with real people in the frame, the performances of Carvel and Coyle as Murdoch and Lamb at first do feel studied. However they do eventually come into their own as personalities on stage in their own right.

As we've indicated there's the trademark Rupert Goold song and dance with choreography by Lynn Paage, but this sometimes feels like wallpaper for a lack of strong story narrative. Many of the jokes are heavy-handed. It's broadbrush and often fun but never seems truly to bring together a substantial story.

It's the clever characterisations from the strong cast that hold it all together - besides Coyle and Carvel, there's David Schofield's Mirror old guard Hugh Cudlipp, Tim Steed's fastidious deputy editor Bernard Shrimsley while Sophie Stanton is a firmly feminist women's page editor in a man's world, Joyce Hopkirk and Pearl Chanda is the first Page 3 girl, Stephanie Rhan.

Ink is mostly bright and breezy and also gives due regard to a tragic episode, but it never really amplifies its tale, preferring often to make passing references than to be truly thought-provoking. So it may not make the colour scheme with any tabloid revamp but it's an amber/green light.  

Review Instructions For American Servicemen in Britain

A World War II guide for newly-stationed US soldiers becomes a robust twenty first century parody diverting Peter Barker.

Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain
Created by Dan March, Jim Millard, Matt Sheahan
and John Walton

Know Your Ally
http://www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk/

In 1942 the US War Department distributed a 5,000 word booklet as a guide for American servicemen about to arrive in Britain.

Taking the pamphlet's observations, astutely aimed at the US soldier, sailor and airman, as inspiration, comedy trio The Real MacGuffins, director John Walton and Fol Espoir have created this delightful and very funny production.

The Atlantic divide between the US and Britain has always been fertile territory -- think of The Beatles, regulatory arbitrage, Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death through the writings of Bill Bryson to Richard Curtis's Notting Hill and even  TV hit Downtown Abbey.  

Bill Bryson's books mine a sentimental and whimsical outsider's view of Britain from the point of view of an Anglophile, marking a nation's foibles without insulting the nation or its consumers whom he hopes will buy his books.

Meanwhile Instructions For American Servicemen in Britain, written by a writer who has remained anonymous, was given away free. It was more aimed at keeping the US forces and the British population as allies on the ground, but  it also remains an educated American's snapshot of the UK.

However the show of Instructions For American Serviceman in Britain, keeping the framework of the pamphlet, tends towards the genial and agreeable path of Bryson.

It's a laugh from the beginning to the end with the pamphlet transformed into the arrival of an American airbase filled with US airmen in the village of Nether Middleton and subsequent attempts, with audience participation, to educate them in the ways and etiquette of British life.

Among other laconic observations we hear “the British can’t make decent coffee, but then you can’t make decent tea”. "The British are tough, the English language didn’t spread across the oceans and over the mountains and jungles and swamps of the world because these people were panty-waists.”

Inversion is of course a great staple of comedy. Here it is the inversion of an American guide to the British way of life played back to a London audience in, 75 years later, a self-deprecating historical take on our still special relationship.

The Real MacGuffin’s trio of players Dan March, James Millard, and Matt Sheahan, play all the characters -- from US Army Air Force officers to old English ladies and English officers.

They take the audience through set pieces including an explanation of the monetary system, afternoon tea and a hybrid baseball/cricket match. The material feels as though it has been built up through improvisation and is continually open to even more.

A highlight for me was the use of puppets at the start of Act two tackling the British class system described in the pamphlet, in a hilarious MacGufffin framework.

One warning though; if you don’t like Morris Dancing, you will really hate the show’s climax ... 😉

I found the whole experience, skilfully relayed by the MacGuffins, relaxing and very, very funny. It may not be what the well-informed anonymous writer intended when he - we presume it was a he - wrote this snapshot of 1942 Britain as a benevolent piece of propaganda.

Yet his tolerant mapping out of the British Way Of Life, in this adaptation, proves a green light tonic for this reviewer.

Review Mr Potsunen's Peculiar Slice Of Life 2017

Mr Potsunen's Peculiar Slice Of Life 2017
by Kentaro Kobayashi

Playing Solitaire
http://www.the-print-room.org/

Mr Postunen's Peculiar Slice Of Life is a neat little tale constructed as a series of theatrical sketches about the eponymous eccentric gentleman.

By sketches we mean literally sketches - the creator of Mr Potsunen, Kentaro Kobayashi, started off as an illustrator and moves fluidly and with immaculate timing between projections and live performance.

It's a clever and polished act performed by Kobayashi, who is also an actor and comedian and, without any words, straddles the boundary between adult and children's entertainment.
 
Far from being inscrutable, Mr Potsunen wears his heart on his dapper gray sleeve as he lives a solitary one and three-dimensional life where his daily rituals are interrupted by unexpected events.

From our European point of view, Kobayashi's character seems to hearken towards  the mime of Marcel Marceau and Jacques Tati.

But the landscape he inhabits is a surreal one reminiscent of The Beatles' Yellow Submarine animated by Robert Balser and Jack Stokes and Terry Gilliam's Monty Python. Alice In Wonderland vertigo is also present, as is the uncanny symbolism of freemasonry.

The sketches, which also of course draw on the Japanese Manga tradition, form together an elusive but gradually beguiling story of objects metamorphosizing into living creatures mixed with touches of modern life like parcel delivery.

They lead and accompany Mr Potsunen as he slips in and out of animations on to The Print Room's performance space, as fellow performer Daisuke Minami camouflaged in black, traces delicate patterns with rod puppetry.

It's altogether charming, interacting with Heath Robinson-style animated creations mixed with delicate, fluttering creatures.

Mr Potsunen takes the audience on a psychological journey with leaps of imagination reflecting the psychology of  the unconscious and dreaming and a child's simplicity.

The musical notes of flute and brass drift across the scenes, You could do worse than pass a whimsical hour or so in the company of Mr Potsunen And His Peculiar Slice Of Life in a show which runs until July 8. It's an amber/green light.

Review King Kong (A Comedy)

King Kong (A Comedy)
by Daniel Clarkson

The Ape Of Wrath
https://www.thevaults.london/

It's one of the iconic images of Hollywood horror, the giant ape clambering up New York's Empire State Building, tenderly clutching a damsel in much distress, creating a mild sexual frisson.

In a concept invented by former pilot Merian C Cooper,  King Kong combines a Jules Verne-like adventure tale with an age-old tale of man's overweening arrogance and nature striking back with  of course state-of-the art special effects for its time

Now a cast of five take on the tale in  a comic recreation blending the different incarnations of Kong since his first appearance in 1933.

Daniel Clarkson's previous success was the parody of the Harry Potter books, Potted Potter. This time he turns his pen to the much older franchise of King Kong. We say "franchise" but reading up on the history, it turns out that King Kong has a mass of copyright tangles as tightly knitted as the dense vegetation of a jungle. 

Anyway back to the version in The Vaults. The jokes come thick and fast, Airplane style and, thankfully, more hit than miss in an enjoyable, if unoriginal, parody. There's a touch of Treasure Island and many groan-out-loud jokes.

In addition, there's a bit of aping of Marx Brothers' style humour,  running jokes about the movie business and an extended bit of cannibalism - both literally and feeding off Hollywood cliché.

OK, it has its weaknesses - some of the gags go on too long and one particular running joke about a put-upon but indestructible character needs a final different twist. But it's all good, clean fun with a set design by Simon Scullion descending like an art deco toast rack giving a Punch and Judy feel to the show as the characters and props pop up and down and effective lighting by Tim Mascall .

There are times it's like a computer game - the jokes just go on and on and get repeated,. But hey, there is some pathos in the final scenes as the creature's fate is sealed.

Admiration of the cast's unflagging energy - Benjamin Chamberlain, Rob Crouch, Sam Donnelly, Alix Dunmore and Brendan Murphy - is built into the experience. We give an unpeeled banana amber light for frothy and fruity family entertainment. 

Review Superhero

Superhero
Book by Michael Conley
Music by Joseph Finlay
Lyrics by Richy Hughes

Mad About The Girl
http://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/show/superhero/

Colin Bradley (Michael Rouse) has arrived for a hearing at the Royal Courts Of Justice. He's in one of the modern pine courtrooms (a simple but very effective set design by Georgia De Grey), nervously reading from the index cards he has already prepared.

Colin's also trying to obey the instructions of his solicitor, Rupert, even though he's the one supposedly instructing the solicitor. It's a tug-of-love case as Colin is trying to win custody of his young teenage daughter Emily whose career-minded Mum Christine wants to emigrate with her to the USA.

The show, directed by Adam Lenson, traces Colin's own journey starting with him being part of a happy family, leaving a job in his parents' construction industry business to becoming a stay-at-home Dad.  Then he has his head turned by apparently unexpectedly landing a leading role in an amateur theatre production and his life as a divorced Dad follows.

There is a committed performance from Michael Rouse as Colin and an excellent three-piece band led by musical director Joe Bunker on piano. Molly Lopresti on percussion contributes much to the play's atmosphere and Stephen Street is on bass.

Thinking about it, TLT has probably only seen one other one-man musical when Benjamin Scheuer came to London with The Lion, a very personal musical memoir of his own relationship with his father.

Superhero is a fictional story told in flashback but it draws mightily on stereotyping the Fathers For Justice campaign and Colin, although the double-edged nature of support from a more militant Dad might have been intriguing if more explored.

Otherwise Superhero follows a fairly predictable path with some clever elements allying Colin's own story with the am dram musical which triggers his adultery and the break up of his marriage. It also puts together a number of recognizable musical theatre styles - Boubil and Schönberg among them - with a few stand out songs, including Other People's Parents and All American Dad. We just wished we could have liked it better as a whole.

It seemed to miss putting some interesting junctures into song in favour of more obvious moments, so for us there was a feel of plodding cliché. We thought also perhaps some of the songs may have come  first and the plot followed after.

The atmosphere of the am dram company is amusingly enough conjured up with the traditional fey director but the Victorian atmosphere of the Royal Courts of Justice and the lone man in the echoing Gothic building foyer is nowhere to be found. The court room could be anywhere in the world and we weren't convinced by the evocation of some London landmarks.

Colin is full of hope for the hearing but then the court's decision seems to fall into a pre-decided template and creates a worse situation for him. We're sure these peaks and troughs are indeed the genuine experience of many such fathers.
 
So it's a pity the see-saw of hope, the beginning of suspicion, the attempt to will away the suspicion, the realisation that nobody is listening and the reality dawning isn't embodied more viscerally in a song. 

This appears to be very much a narrative musical blending a fairly traditional estranged parents and beloved daughter scenario, a transatlantic and European subtext and a breakdown with a wish-fulfilment ending.

However the way the content of the show is arranged made us feel we were always on the outside looking in and much of the narration contained within the songs felt strangely flat.

Still the performance, direction, design, lighting by Sam Waddington and sound by Andy Hinton are all fine. But it felt like a pitch for a show rather than the show itself. It's an amber light.

Review The Mentor

The Mentor (Der Mentor)
by Daniel Kehlmann
Translated by Christopher Hampton

The Blagger's Guide To Playwriting
https://www.nimaxtheatres.com/vaudeville-theatre/the_mentor

A celebrated veteran playwright (F Murray Abraham) at the moment finds himself mostly in movie development hell. His most famous work is the stuff of college syllabuses rather than current productions, but he has now received an invitation.

He arrives at a picturesque villa in the German countryside, complete with its own Greek chorus of chirruping birds and ribbiting frogs, as the paid for guest of literary benefactors to mentor a young dramatist (Daniel Weyman).

The younger man's career, maybe on the strength of one adulatory - or perhaps puff-atory depending on your degree of cynicism - review, has gained momentum and seems a suitable case for philanthropy. 

Like some well-worn latter-day Oscar Wilde the older vainglorious Benjamin Rubin, with unnaturally dark hair matched with a grey goatee, at first throws out aphorisms he has concocted, probably as old as his most well-known work.

However Rubin quickly clashes with his not-so-willing pupil Martin Wegner, also a paid for guest, who is accompanied by his cool blonde museum chief and art historian wife Gina (Naomi Frederick).

Tempers fly and there's no way to measure who, out of Rubin and Wegner, is the greater talent or whether they have just negotiated their way through the politics of the playwriting hierarchy.  

The playwright, Daniel Kehlmann, is a hugely popular German-born novelist and playwright and this is a sharp  comedy of manners, positioned as a memory play, written in 2012. 

It's an elegant, lucid performance both visually and aurally from Murray who turns into a kind of comico-tragic Hamlet as directed by Laurence Boswell. Yet we weren't at all sure about the play as a whole, even though the smaller role of frustrated abstract painter-turned-arts administrator Erwin Rudicek (Jonathan Cullen) also made an impression and is a deftly drawn character. 

The set also partially reflects a certain abstraction. We couldn't place the location although we read afterwards it was meant to be Germany.

To our eyes the design (by Polly Sullivan) with its layered perspectives and pink villa reminded us more of a Danish or maybe a Tuscany villa than German Jugendstil also known as the-turn-of-the 20th century nouveau art.

The set is  elegant and ingenious with indications of an unpainted rough draft outline alongside a naturalistic cherry blossom tree. However its indeterminate location may take away from the  meaning of the play.

Indeed we have some sympathy with Rubin's frustration with the Scottish whiskey served by the foundation's administrator - The Mentor is like a blend in landscape and ideas rather than pure spirit.
 
Benjamin Rubin is presumably Jewish (at least on his paternal side) and it appears speaks fluent German which begs a question.

A foundation set up by a German industrialist and his family owns the villa, which itself may beg questions about the Second World War past, and runs the mentoring scheme.  Against this context the profession of Wegener's attractive wife as a history of art expert and museum curator is also a loaded matter.

There are some other clues (the links contain spoilers if you're going to see the show), some rather cryptic and obscure - an allusion to a classic Austrian short story, a reference to an award named for a German Jewish critic famous for his feuds and possibly another to a celebrated German author who admitted late in life SS membership.

This may make this play, with clarinet riffs between scenes by composer Dave Price, more than a slight story of literary egos over a couple of days. But blink, and you'll miss these hints.

It's 80 or so minutes long and before the final moments we were re-imagining it as a movie, mildly in the style of A Bigger Splash, where a director could relish the landscape and plant visual clues.

As it is, in a play, the allusions to German language literature in the early twentieth century and a rather savage subtext feel way too subtle and the comedy drama too abstract.

It would make sense if it were envisaged as going on to be a movie.  Yet, as indicated, albeit couched in the flashback to a comic battle between the older and younger generation, The Mentor does evoke unexpectedly the feel of past ghosts and unresolved matters.

We think we are justified at teasing this meaning out, bearing in mind the playwright Kehlmann's own background with a father who survived  partly as a beneficiary of a confused paper trail laid out by the writer's grandparents.

The geographical vagueness does the play no favours, but we did laugh at the playwriterly neuroses and pondered the change from pen and ink to scripts on computer and possible connections to Greek comedy. It's smart, sophisticated and a well-performed entertainment, but also unsatisfying, so it's an amber light.

Review The View From Nowhere

A playwright flags up his message too blatantly, says Francis Beckett, instead of allowing the implications of corporate cover-up to emerge from compelling drama.

The View From Nowhere
by Chuck Anderson

Test Tube Integrity
https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/

New playwriting needs the Park Theatre near Finsbury Park tube to continue airing theatrical experiences which might otherwise have stayed on their author’s computer hard drive.

Recalling my previous reviews on this blog, there's Jonathan Maitland’s Deny, Deny, Deny, about doping in sport, of which I wrote: “A very fine new play with a harsh contemporary feel.” 

I also predicted – and I stick to it – that the Park has made an important discovery in playwright and National Theatre book shop sales assistant, Michael Ross, after I saw his play Happy to Help.

But for a bold, radical theatre like the Park to succeed, it has to have the courage to fail sometimes. And this time, I’m afraid, it has.

Which is a shame, because The View from Nowhere comes from the same creative team that gave us the excellent Warehouse of Dreams, at The Lion And Unicorn, about refugee camps.

Th play starts out with the best of intentions.  It’s about a scientist who discovers the undesirable side effects of a chemical in which a big company has invested heavily and describes the ruthless methods by which it tries to discredit him and his work.

Good food for drama, this, and the author has done his research.  The trouble is that the play plods through the issues with all the dexterity of someone wading through treacle.

The scientist is black and has dreadlocks and he has a young, female assistant. I had a sinking feeling from the start when man from the chemical company – grey-suited, middle-aged, conventional – asks for Dr Washington.

He assumes the distinguished scientist could not possible be either of them – the one too young and too female, the other too black and too dreadlocked. And of course he cringes with embarrassment when he finds out that the black man is indeed Dr Washington.

Maybe twenty years ago that scene would have been worth doing. Now it’s too right-on, too virtuous for words and quite unbelievable. A chemical company executive would know something about a distinguished scientist he was about to visit.

I saw this scene coming and waited impatiently for playwright Chuck Anderson to get over proving his liberal credentials, so we could get on with the play.

Things do look up a bit after that.  There’s a decent plot (though not much of an ending) and the characters come over as real people.

There’s a good professional cast. In particular, Mensah Bediako makes an attractive and entertaining Dr Washington and Nina Toussaint-White a ruthless director of corporate affairs, Rona Worthing, with a touch of human decency.

The writer has taken the trouble to find out how the system works and how a big company can kill off uncomfortable truths.

These days, newspapers, as the director of corporate affairs says, will be delighted to accept a competently written article they do not have to pay for, especially if the same company is advertising, preferably in a sister paper. 

It’s also true, as one character tells us, that cash-strapped governments have outsourced environmental protection to the chemical industry.

The trouble is that nothing is left for us to work out; the lessons the writer wishes us to take away are carefully spelled out, to the point where I wondered if we were to be tested on them in the interval.

“Investigate his students” commands Ms Toussaint-White.  “Any hanky-panky going on there?”  Hanky panky, forsooth.

We’re told all these things, not shown them. And that makes The View From Nowhere, directed by Dan Phillips, a pamphlet on stage.  Quite a good pamphlet, but an amber light is the best I can do for it until it’s turned into a play

Review Mumburger

Mumburger
by Sarah Kosar

A Mother's Modest Proposal
http://www.oldredliontheatre.co.uk/theatre.html

In Sarah Kosar's surreal satire Mumburger, Tiffany (Rosie Wyatt) has just learnt she is, in her words, "a half orphan".

She and her Dad, Hugh (Andrew Frame), are left grieving for their militantly vegan Mum, after her electric car collided with a frozen food lorry, when a surprise delivery from the afterlife drops down from on high into father and daughter's bereavement limbo.

Tiffany, who is waiting to move on with her partner, had been busying herself with the bureaucracy of death and fielding calls from relatives in between watching a video news clip of a Chinese amusement park tragedy gone viral.

Hugh, stunned by his own personal tragedy, has gone into zombie-mode. He clicks "like" on all the messages of sympathy on Facebook and immerses himself in cheesy Hollywood family movies which threaten to cloud any sense of reality.

Currently there appears to be a penchant in new writing for metaphors about the new economic and TV and movie world order, frequently with the play itself verbally announcing its metaphorical status.

This works in plays like Rotterdam where the audience doesn't necessarily have to realize there is a metaphor with fully rounded characters and their reactions, even within the play's bizarre world, seem natural to the audience.

Kosar's play introduces, often in clunky metaphors, any number of issues and current social (and playwriting) trends: the new economic and business world order, a lesbian relationship, the change of culture from family viewing to internet voyeurism, the search for new ideas,  the new media employee mentality, environmental crises, a predatory world  - and, oh yes, bereavement. 

However the characters are simply the tools of elements often introduced like a to-do list to be ticked off. Possible legal action? Tick. Driver's or firm's responsibility? Tick. It's as if somebody has told the writer about how large companies employ drivers and she's just popped it on her list.

One online form, we hear, asks about "unexpected death", although the coroner is never mentioned. OK, it's supposed to be a surreal play but in the end "surreal" can become an excuse for self-indulgence and a feeling of cut and paste rather than a rigorous exploration of the surreal to its logical ends.

Charlotte Henery's set evokes a chic functional modern well-to-do home with gray carpet and blinds, with a hint of glittering silver beyond, and a gray bench.  We were also at first intrigued by the preliminary mix of artwork and video designed by Fed.

The hard-working actors do their best with material which starts off with a focussed idea but then loses shape entirely while trying to keep up the illusion of shooting off sharp one-liners.  

Having said all this, this really feels like a possible quirky piece for the screen, especially as director Tommo Fowler does not solve major problems of pace and scene resolution which would be better served by film edits.

Also while it's set in the East End of London, the script, on the basis of what we saw, feels as if its rhythms would flow more happily with American accents.

Mumburger starts off inventively with a good idea - satirist Jonathan Swift had a similar notion back in 1729, so not bad company to keep.

Nevertheless in the end we weren't at all convinced by a play that tries to force feed the audience rather than take it on an organic psychological and culinary journey. It's a red/amber light.

Review James Bonney MP

A play seemingly in the right place at the right time to unpick left wing politics and give some sorely-needed laughs disappoints reviewer Peter Barker

James Bonney MP
by Ian Buckley

Events, Dear Boy, Events
http://whitebeartheatre.co.uk/ 

A week is a long time in politics and the current unexpectedly strengthened position of  Labour's leader with squirming volte faces of previously naysaying Labour politicans has been a wonder to behold.

So James Bonney MP seemed full of potential for a playwright willing to grasp the mettle, do the research and mine his material. However Ian Buckley's new play seems stuck in the last century in terms of scenarios with no attempt to really grapple with current or perennial political issues.

James Bonney (Andrew Loudon) is a careerist Labour MP, a Blairite of the sort we now all know is an anathema to most old Labourites and new Corbynistas.

He has a wife Christine (Karen McCaffrey) and daughter Kate (Elian West), a curvy blonde secretary Jennifer (Louise Tyler), and a suited and booted fixer as his agent George (Malcolm Jeffries), for whom the phrase éminence grise seems apt.

Bonney's daughter also just happens to be in love with a constituency activist Malcolm (Ciaran Lonsdale) who is opposed to everything Bonney stands for.

Predictably the male MP is bonking his female blonde secretary, his previously trusting wife finds out, the éminence grise plays his cards close to his chest, the activist gets his girl but not before finding political temptation hard to resist.

Philandering Bonney gets his comeuppance. And the blonde personal assistant? Oh, yes she only - I roll my eyes at this point - gets pregnant.

That leaves the wife.

She gets angry.

It's a pale shadow of a Ray Cooney sex farce (think of Two Into One which was revived at the Menier in early 2014).

The design by Oscar Selfridge is made up principally of different doors, moved around the set to create new spaces, as well as entrances and exits. However these are not used for comic effect - there's a distinct lack of laughs and wit throughout, as well as satiric edge.

While playwright Ian Buckley describes the Labour Party as a "strange beast" and self-identifies as a  left-winger, whatever that means now, his political analysis is undercooked and his digs at the political set up lily-livered.

Indeed,  this play's personality reminded me of the SDP in the 1980s, the ill-fated Labour breakaway  -- it has a weak left jab, even weaker narrative and appears to have no real purpose other than to damage the Labour Party.

Bonney is never more than a one-dimensional New Labour MP, a type which naïve idealists might believe in - if they ignored the reality of making politics.

We've seen all the other characters before and better done. The loyal daughter torn between her father and her lover; the upright activist; the House of Cards Machiavelli; the wronged wife; the busty secretary.

There's nothing dividing it from any other limp traditional farce because it inflexibly fails to grasp its chance to examine the institutional Labour Party and the contortions and compromises of recent times.

The play references the failed coup against Jeremy Corbyn but not the general election, so it's painfully behind the times. Like it or not, any playwright worth his or her salt would have had to update the script, even if it meant a late rewrite.

This is especially true when the theme takes a well-worn path. There have been plenty of stage and screen incarnations of MPs stretching back to the last century.

The Nearly Man was created and written in the 1970s by Arthur  Hopcraft who also successfully adapted John Le Carre's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy for television. It chronicles the political and domestic life of a talented middle-class Labour MP,  the dilemmas and intricacies of the political scene and is well worth hunting down.

Director of James Bonney MP Georgia Leanne Harris makes the most of lacklustre material and has some nice tricks. The play even informally starts before the lights go down, with Bonney greeting audience members for instance.

However nothing can disguise the thin material which seems to have no inkling of truly pitting ideology against realpolitik.
 
Truth to tell, the left has often dominated playwriting and much popular comedy since the second half of the last century. When political comedy and satire wallpaper the media, with comedians like Mark Thomas and Mark Steele producing angry satire and drawing blood, a political farce really needs to know its stuff.

James Bonney MP is neither a classic farce nor a political satire and a gap in the market still exists for a really coruscating play about the state we're in. In the meantime, it's a red light.