Review Three

Three 
by Sophie Ellerby

What Will Survive Of Us Is Love
http://www.arcolatheatre.com/

The future seems brighter than ever before for one family.

A call centre promotion is in sight for eldest Rochelle (Alice Vilanculo) who is going steady with policeman Dan (Emanuel Vuso).

Carefree schoolgirl Tia (Ikra Ali) is on the cusp of womanhood and her 16th birthday. Maybe the middle sister Jaz (Courtney Spencer) is drifting and a bit wild, but they're all looking forward to Tia's birthday party and, even better, their Dad, released from prison, is going to be able to join them.

But that same night their lives are torn apart by a terrible event, family relationships shattered and the three young women are tainted by association, although entirely innocent.

Director Anna Niland orchestrates the 19-strong cast in a play which, while covering a range of issues, manages retain the emotional core between the three sisters at its centre.

Three is a full-length play lasting just over two hours  with actors about to graduate from the National Youth Theatre's Playing Up scheme.

There's an impressive debut by Vilanculo as the rock of the family who finds everything she thought of as solid crumbling away. There is also a delicate performance from Ali as the youngest who has to grow up quickly, while Spencer convinces as troubled third sister Jaz

But the other actors in supporting roles are also equal to a thought-provoking, ambitious piece. Jordan Bangura and Dionne Brown as an expectant young couple, Abby Russell as the publicity hungry call centre boss and Aston McAuley as a grieving son impressively mix humour and seriousness.
   
It's a tribute to the writing, directing and acting that it was only late in the play that TLT realised the drama draws loosely on the structure and characters in Chekhov's The Three Sisters. Playwright Ellerby manages to make the story her own, looping in issues but keeping the situations real with all the question marks hanging over them.

Niland carefully paces a play, veering towards screenplay with its quick-cut scene changes, drawing it back into a theatrical experience alongside movement director Kane Husbands.   A police raid and the increasing media spotlight are ingeniously and economically evoked. 

The set designed by Kate Lane makes full use of the Arcola Space. The main stage is flanked by two spaces, stage left and right, in the midst of the audience - a bedroom on one side and a bench on a patch of grass on the other.

On an upper tier composer Roly Botha like a club DJ controls  the inventive and affecting soundscape, put together with John Castle who also does lighting,

We saw it on the first night of a three-night run until July 22 and the flaws were minor - the occasional dropped voice, perhaps understandable as well with the televisual nature of Ellerby's sophisticated script.

This is an intriguing and substantial set of emerging talent, both in the acting and the script in a play which uses rather than is controlled by cliché to become truly poignant and searching. It's a green light.

Review Much Ado About Nothing (Preview)

Much Ado About Nothing
by William Shakespeare

Once Upon A Time In Mexico
http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/

It's Mucho Ado About Nothing with sombreros, ponchos and cigarillos at Shakespeare's Globe set in the midst of the Mexican Revolution in the early years of the 20th century.

The steam clears revealing wooden slatted railway wagons spanning the stage, a  means of moving people and supplies from and to the home encampment.  

The grubby rebels, the leader Don Pedro (Steve John Shepherd),  lanky, moustachioed Benedick (Matthew Needham) and young puppy rebel Claudio (Marcello Cruz) arrive on horses, cleverly evoked by riders on stilts and wire horses' heads.

Here the women stride around with rifles and belts of bullets criss crossing their female apparel. 

In the chauvinist rebel camp environment, there is also Don Pedro's sister, the saturnine Juana (Jo Dockery). It's a gender swap from the original Shakespeare text and the male machismo surrounding her gives some motivation for her bitterness and jealousy.

Directed by Matthew Dunster, it all works surprisingly well. Don Pedro is a slightly insecure Pancho Villa figure at a time when several factions were fighting for dominance in Mexico. The tough Leonato (Martin Marquez in a fine performance), complete with  black eye patch, is still slightly vulnerable when it comes to family honour.

Beatrice (Beatriz Romilly) is his slightly older niece, a slightly more careworn woman than her hardy but still more than slightly fragile cousin Hero (Anya Chalotra).

The music from composer James Maloney and the three-strong band led by Zands Duggan with Matt Bacon on guitar and Miguel Gorodi on trumpet, conjures up a hot, dusty and vibrant Mexico. But it also works dramatically, signalling the mood of the oncoming action and enabling fluid, clear scene changes for the audience.

Anna Fleischle's design keeps it simple: The train wagons from the National Railways of Mexico  provide the backdrop. On one side stands a blue and white tiled pillar with an altar and a Madonna shrine. On the other side, a pillar has a wooden bench curving round as a seat and a perch for the beer bottles.

Away from the main stage is another island platform in the midde of the groundlings, serving as a second stage. 

The tricks played on Beatrice and Benedict make sense in the boredom of the anti-climactic periods between fighting.  The easily-swayed males and their vulnerability, alongside machismo, makes sense of the savage rejection of Hero, not only by Claudio but also Don Pedro and her own father Leonato. 

The place names are changed to suit Mexico. The currency of course is the peso and the masked ball with Fleischle's flamboyant brightly colouried Mexican costumes  becomes a lusty but formalised celebration of the bull and virility. 

In this version, Dogberry becomes Dog Berry (Ewan Wardrop), an American movie director who mangles words in translation. 

His box camera footage helps uncover the villain of the piece and if the storyline feels a little strained, that's more the nature of Shakespearean comedy than this production. 

For a Hollywood newsreel and movie director really did accompany Sancho Panza in real life and there was even a contract, if a little less spectacular and prescriptive than some implied.

It's an earthy, bright and gaudy Much Ado with the music effortlessly flagging up the comic and serious moments.  

Very much an ensemble piece from Beatrice and Benedick, through Don Pedro, Juana, Hero, Claudio and Hero, to the sweetly-singing child soldier (Lucy Brandon), it's a green light for a mucho enjoyable Much Ado About Nothing.  

Review Dessert

Dessert
by Oliver Cotton

The Last Supper
http://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/

There's a real hunger for plays with a new take on financial inequality and the state we're in. But there has to be a fresh insight and Oliver Cotton's new play, Dessert, directed by Sir Trevor Nunn, seems curiously dated and unrigorous in its analysis.

Financier Sir Hugh Fennell (Michael Simkins) and his wife Gill (Alexandra Gilbreath) are domiciled in the UK in a palatial spread surrounded by a collection of paintings.

They are entertaining an equally affluent Connecticut business associate Wesley Barnes (Stuart Milligan) and his blonde, dippy wife Meredith (Teresa Banham).

And they've just reached dessert.

Loyal factotum Roger (Graham Turner) is about to serve the cheese, after they've gorged on something delicious in a tarragon sauce, when their smug bonhomie is suddenly plunged literally into darkness.

Afghanistan veteran Eddie (Stephen Hagan), terribly maimed during active service, invades their dining room with a gun, having disabled  the mansion's electricity and security system.

He's demanding justice for his stroke-ridden newsagent father who had put all his and his wife's life savings into a Fennell company which subsequently collapsed and from which Sir Hugh had walked away.

We were wondering about the dramatist's choice of the newsagent trade for Eddie's Dad - itself under siege from supermarkets for its core products - print newspapers (which have their own problems), cigarettes and lottery tickets.

However this never developed into anything, although there was, late on, peculiarly a variation on the six Ws, taught to all trainee journalists, which also appears in Ink this season.

We guess it was deliberate that at the start a meal was made, in all senses of the word, of a variety of culinary herbs and that Sir Hugh's surname is Fennell, but we don't for the life of us know why. It's that kind of show.

If it had then become a full-blown satire, with or without herbs, it might have gripped us. But even the trigger event for Eddie seems wildly implausible in a jarring way.

Newsagents have a professional association which also gives some financial pointers. Presumably Eddy's parents were not the only alleged victims of Sir Hugh and his (unmentioned) lawyers and accountants.

Surely, in the age of the internet, those who had lost their money would organise themselves into a pressure group and even, heaven forbid, contact the press? 

But it seems that Eddie's Mum and Dad instead flailed from solicitor to (self) regulatory bodies which were mentioned.

This is a bit of a clunky criticism on our part, picking on what some might see as a small part of the play. Nevertheless, we do feel it's indicative of the comedy drama's force-fed scenarios which simply do not hang together.

In the midst of being held hostage, each of the diners, the hostage taker and the Man Friday launch into speeches filled with a set of under developed, under researched passing references to issues.

Not even a moment when a tap on a glass chimes like the New York Stock Exchange bell can save this play. We get the soundbites but no fresh insights.

On the plus side, a fine cast do what they can with the woefully underdeveloped material and thinly-drawn characters they've been handed. There's also a handsome set from Rachel Stone evoking the mansion and its picture gallery.

Yes, there's been Enron, Bernie Madoff, the Sir Philip Green, Dominic Chappell and the Pension Protection Fund affair and now, tragically, the trail of bank-backed companies involved with the Grenfell Tower fire, amongst many others.

However Dessert feels like simplistic political agit-prop rather than an attempt to grapple wittily and dramatically with the landscape of global finance, wars in the name of defence and public goods falling into private pockets. So it's a famine rather than feast red/amber light.

Review Twilight Song

Twilight Song
by Kevin Elyot

Ah! Sweet Mystery Of Life
https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/

Twilight Song, written by the late Kevin Elyot in 2014 just before his death, is an odd little playwriting confection about some odd fellows and a woman. 

Analyse it closely and it turns out to be a tawdry tale of impregnation, loans, property, possible professional fraud, furtive sexual encounters, time slippages and blackmail, all wrapped  in colourful tissue paper and tied with a great big ribbon bow.

We can't begin to add up all the self-consciously theatrical and cinematic styles it seems to go through - there's a touch of Rattigan, definitely some Noel Coward and Alfred Hitchcock, even a snippet of Christopher Isherwood, Charles Dickens and DH Lawrence (or is it EM Foster ...?) and, hey, is that Monty Python parody?

This is the première of Elyot's last play and, despite some sluggish moments, director Anthony Banks gives us a stylish production set on James Cotterill's wooden round stage living room with a settee, curved French windows, mahogany gramophone and a silver drinks' trolley to create a Scotch haze. 

It's a slickly, but rather mechanically, put together play and it rather feels as if the playwright put together the themes going around  rather than a deeply-felt piece. 

Maybe it was intended to go a bit deeper into the gay influence on literature, film and television and what this meant before and after 1967 legislation, yet this never really develops, even in metaphor.  

Still, after a slow and rather stilted beginning, the story does take hold. Barry (Paul Higgins) is a middle-aged gay retired pharmacist who lives with his mother in a North London Victorian villa. While she takes her regular weekly trip to Kent, he invites an estate agent (Adam Garcia) to give a valuation and other services. 

Centred on the house, this modern day encounter slips back to the 1960s and delicate girlish bride Isabella (Bryony Hannah) welcoming two old codgers into her marital home. 

Charles (Hugh Ross), an elderly doctor and seemingly someone's uncle. Harry (Philip Bretherton), a dodgy married solicitor, like Charles, seems well lodged in his current comfortable middle-class existence even if it seems the two men have a past. 

Slipping back and forth in time, by the end we can piece together the story and obtain a sense of an ending but, while it may have been meant as a satire or parody, it comes across as a rather lacklustre playwriting effort.

References to Conservative but pro Welfare State prime minister MacMillan and 1960s emigration to Australia are flagged up as well as a wife's thwarted career.

However, in the end it feels as if we've been lured to spy through the keyhole at a rather insubstantial and too self-satisfied mystery story and it's an amber light. 

Review Bodies

Peter Barker is intrigued by a play tracing a global transaction which a London couple hopes will bring them the child of their dreams.

Bodies
by Vivienne Franzmann

Great Expectations
https://royalcourttheatre.com/

Clem and Josh are desperately trying for a baby. However the well-off middle-class, middle-aged media couple are paying for the creation of a baby who would not otherwise exist.

The egg donor comes from Russia, while across the world an impoverished woman in India is the surrogate mother carrying the egg fertilized by Josh's sperm.

Bodies is a new play from Vivienne Franzmann examining the purchase of parenthood and the bringing to life of another human being with a genetic connection as a paid-for hybrid commodity.

Unable to conceive their own child, Clem and Josh allow their longing for a family dictate their actions without regard for the welfare of and consequences for others around them. 

These others include surrogate mother Lakshmi in India, Salma Hoque skilfully managing wide-ranging shifts of emotions, and Philip Goldacre's touching portrayal of Clem's cantankerous, stroke-stricken, trade unionist father who nevertheless sticks to his socialist values.

Many would regard the situation of the London couple (Justine Mitchell and Jonathan McGuinness) as a first world problem, motivated by dubiously selfish concerns. Unlike the Sex Pistols' song of the same title, the problem and solution is not forced on Clem.

Scientific advance is now a gateway to unprecedented arrangements and Franzmann's play examines where respect for our own and other people's bodies begins and ends.

It also poses the question about what personal fulfilment in our advanced technological age should mean.

The play provides a skilful framework for these questions and issues with a poignant fantasy as a dramatic device. Clem meets and speaks with the unborn child, a young woman of 16 years in a sure-footed, striking performance by Hannah Rae.

This daughter can cross psychic and physical boundaries, moving from Clem's English house to the dormitory of the surrogate Indian mother. The child becomes like an inverse ghost of Hamlet's father, also a victim of other people's actions, but looking to the family's future instead of the past.

Within such an emotionally overwrought situation,  there is nevertheless state intervention,  counterbalancing the illusion that our deepest desires, consumerism and the market are the only factors in a seemingly endless case of supply and demand.

Director Jude Christian, designer Gabriella Slade with Joshua Pharo on lighting  convincingly stage digital connectivity enabling clear changes of scene and context in a fast-moving plot.

Slade's beige softwood set with sliding doors makes for an effective contemporary backdrop with a round window smoothly transforming into a screen with videos created by Meghna Gupta.

However the play at 90 minutes, despite cuts to the published text,  does seem overlong. There is also some clunky dialogue and the final pay off felt confusing, but Franzmann does have the ability to spring surprises and drive the story forward.

The affluence of Clem and Joshua's life, the exploitation of the less advantaged at home and abroad, fertility, loss, and motherhood are all deftly handled. It's an amber/green light for a compelling tale which impressively mines the social and emotional implications of surrogacy.  

Review Queen Anne

Francis Beckett delights in a play on Britain's last Stuart monarch which is both perceptive about its two real-life heroines and a tremendous theatrical success. 

Queen Anne
by Helen Edmundson

A Right Royal Drama
http://www.trh.co.uk/

Queen Anne was in many ways a tragic figure.  She had seventeen pregnancies, but gave birth to only three live children, none of whom lived beyond the age of eleven. Her biographer Anne Somerset writes in the theatre programme that she was “poorly educated, chronically shy and disabled by agonising arthritic attacks.”

She did her best nonetheless to fulfil the duties imposed on her by the iron laws of heredity, and to cope with the vigorous and vitriolic political atmosphere of the time.

Indeed, Helen Edmundson’s play opens with a guilty pleasure, an appallingly hurtful but hilarious satirical song about her inability to have children. This has her trying to deliver a child, but delivering only something unnamed which apparently rhymes with art.

The drama focusses on her relationship with Sarah, wife of John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough, from whom Sir Winston Churchill was descended. Sarah was the opposite of Anne: clever, beautiful, confident, ambitious. The two were the closest of friends, then the bitterest of enemies.

This tense, tightly written and tautly plotted play charts their relationship. Its respect for the known facts would surely win the approval of Hilary Mantel, but it also weaves them into a gripping yet often very funny play.

From the start we are on the side of the needy and manipulative Anne, yet never cease to care about what happens to the brave and manipulative Sarah, whose sophisticated political antennae seem to abandon her after the death of her son.

The script has not a single unnecessary word in it – nothing is spelled out if it can be left to the audience to work it out – and Natalie Abrahami’s direction in this RSC production reflects that economy. Hannah Clark’s set is splendid yet discreet. It knows its place. It is there to supplement the dialogue, not substitute for it.

Yet it is the two central performances on which the evening stands or falls - Emma Cunniffe’s Anne and Romola Garai’s Sarah -  and they are both wonderful.

Cunniffe and Garai capture both the humanity and the political power struggle in a way that easily stands comparison with Mark Rylance’s Cromwell in Mantel's Wolf Hall.

This is one of the best and most gripping evenings in the theatre I can remember for a long time. That's not just because I know a little of the history. For I took with me a South African cousin who knew nothing of Queen Anne, and she was as gripped by the human and political drama as I was. A green light to rush to the Theatre Royal Haymarket.

Review Yank!

Peter Barker finds charm, wistfulness and humour in an American show evoking the golden age of musicals with a World War II story of two men deeply in love. 

Yank!
Music by Joseph Zellnik
Book and Lyrics by David Zellnik

Goodnight Sweetheart
http://www.charingcrosstheatre.co.uk/

Yank! is a lush musical, set mostly in the Pacific during the Second World War, steeped in the tradition of Rogers and Hammerstein who of course also used a similar wartime setting in South Pacific.

It chronicles a pair of lovers in a forbidden relationship, as did Rogers and Hammerstein in 1949, but this time the tender romance is between two gay soldiers.

The score also uses the format and stereotypes of 1940' shows and films. These include patriotic "it takes one of every kind" platoon movies featuring military men of diverse ethnicities in a squad overcoming wartime challenges and coming to appreciate and respect each other.

The creation of two brothers, composer Joseph Zellnik and lyricist and librettist David Zellnik, this musical, originally workshopped in 2005, became an off Broadway hit five years later, before the American army's repeal of the don't ask, don't tell policy.

Now Yank! arrives in London, via a successful run and its European première at Manchester's Hope Mill Theatre. 

At the centre of Yank! is the poignant affair of teenage military recruit Stu (Scott Hunter), who is eventually assigned a role on military magazine Yank!, and charismatic, handsome all-American boy Mitch (Andy Coxon).

Stu, an innocent whose love for Mitch is a sexual awakening, works with gay photographer Artie (Chris Kiely) through whom he discovers more about the secret life of gay men in the military.

The musical uses true life experiences from the book "Coming Out Under Fire" by Allan Bérubé and other stories gathered by the musical's creators from gay World War II military veterans.

The smooth, precise direction by James Baker, James Cleeve's excellent seven-piece band and Chris Cuming's dynamic choreography all add up to a stylish and vibrant production.

The strong story, which also includes plenty of laughs, has beautifully sung performances from Hunter and Coxon leading a polished 12-strong cast. The sole woman on stage is the versatile Sarah-Louise Young showing her mettle playing a variety of female characters.

While there's no tune in the score which made me come out humming, there's still plenty to enjoy. An old fashioned format is given an unusual twist, a likeable hero meets the challenges of life and war and there is an uplifting, though unexpected, ending.

Yank! is a relatively recent musical which pastiches the shows of the past, but still retains a heartfelt and genuine core during its two and half hours and I give it an amber/green light.

Review iAm 4.0

iAm 4.0
Co-Created by Mel Cook and Helena Thompson
with iAm casts

Experimentally Yours
http://www.spidtheatre.com

What seems now centuries ago - in reality back in 2000 - your reviewer wanted to educate herself about technology and websites. So of course she purchased that cutting edge product - a book with real paper pages 😉 with the title "Don't Make Me Think!".

Now, 17 years later, iAm 4.0 aims to reverse the trend of unthinking clicking and their simple but intriguing show could just as well be entitled "Make Me Think!".

It would be churlish to give too much away - after all it will stop the corporation and boffins behind iAm perfecting their valuable product and patent. 😉 ;)

Nevertheless we arrive at the Playground Theatre in Hammersmith's Latimer Road. The head of the research team (Mel Cook who also directs) calls us in, a few at a time.

Then two scientists cum psychologists (Oliver Brassell and Seda Yidliz) with the obligatory official clip boards (ah, with such small matters is authority established!) ask some simple questions.

They may not want us to stop thinking as much as to start thinking according to their parameters.

Our answers to the multiple choice laid before us determine the teams to which we are then allocated. None of us in the focus groups know each othe but we team members bond courtesy of that cutting edge technology -  sticky name labels stuck on our tops.😄

It's then we encounter the real cutting edge technology (set and props design Emily Megson and Olivia Venables) with each team and product pitted against each other.

The experience begins deceptively gently, led by the three boffins who all, rather humorously, have a distinct sense of humour deficit.

They set various tasks for us to interact with our product and across the teams albeit with a spirited sense of competition between the groups and a growing bond within the team.

It's obviously carefully structured both visually and verbally. It's certainly suitable for anyone old enough to handle a mobile phone (which as with any other theatre performance have to be switched off!).

It's also very enjoyable! Let's describe it a bit like that old bonding game Twister but with a modern technology and social twist.

And of course the best product in the room (spot the clue!) is ours ... because she is all ours ...;) !!!

We should add that actors Roseanna Frascona,  Sydnee Howard and Liz Mergerson have a lot to do with adding immeasurable value to our consumer experience.  

There was just one minor flaw at the performance in which TLT participated where her team scored - a moral victory!  (No, that wasn't the flaw!).

The method of operating the iAm 4.0 product meant one team member had his or her back to the rest of the team, so we weren't always able to hear or see what was going on at that moment.

This didn't affect any of the tasks our team was set to execute with our product but proved a few seconds of irritation.

However, isn't that the whole point? We're sure it will be taken on board for those taking part in the iAm 4.5 or iAm 5.0 focus groups.

The theatre company SPID was formed to produce immersive, audience-participation drama with the aim of bringing people together. TLT went to a fundraising Grenfell Tower event, Grenfell Matters, where the whole evening raised more than £1,700.

So we are also happy to give a technologically advanced green light for our time with a delightful team and, yes, thought-provoking immersive drama done with a lightness of touch.

It's an experience  the relevance of which can also linger on afterwards - in our case, switching on the television to hear about workforce exploitation using bogus self-employed status where a lawyer described the situation as an archaic servant and master relationship.

SPID continues its current tour with a ticketed interactive performance on Saturday, July 15 at Kensal House in Ladbroke Grove and future events at venues including Bush Theatre, Southwark Playhouse and the Park Theatre.

Review The Tempest

The Tempest
by William Shakespeare

Fantasy Island
https://www.rsc.org.uk/

A harassed magician and ousted ruler Prospero (Simon Russell Beale), with an impatient Miranda (Jenny Rainsford) straining at the leash, a far more patient but troubled bondservant in the spirit Ariel (Mark Quartley) and a beastly Caliban (Joe Dixon) all uneasily share an island in The Tempest.

And now they're joined by a digital world created by Intel and The Imaginarium Studio and projected on to the large Barbican stage.

Directed by Gregory Doran, towering undulating images dwarf the actors. Otherwise the design by Stephen Brimson Lewis has on each side of the stage half of a ship's two tier skeletal hull, two splays of ribs with an expanse between.

The Tempest would seem like the ideal Shakespeare play for digital special effects. Yet we found several problems with them. They interrupted the rhythm of the play which made some of the real life performances unfairly, we think, seem over-emphatic. Sight gags which would have gone with the flow if there were no gizmos then also feel inserted rather than organic to the play.

It is the quiet moments that work best - especially between Beale's tetchy Prospero and Quartly's thoughtful and elegant Ariel as the latter works towards his freedom while measuring his master's emotions and keeping within his boundaries.

Otherwise Jenny Rainsford makes for a feisty Miranda who has outgrown her father's admonishings and the island. Simon Trinder's white-face, tartan-trousered clown and James Hayes's mutiny-on-the-bounty Stephano's butler make a  comely enough comic duo.

Joseph Mydell's Gonzalo is also distinctive as, having been Prospero and Miranda's saviour, he is also a court politician looking to retain the status quo. We weren't so sure at first about Joe Dixon's Caliban, wrapped in a cockroach-type carapace, but ultimately the severance of his relationship with Prospero has a searing quality.

The special effects?  We didn't see the cinema screenings but it struck us on screen they may have worked better for us. Even though there was a difference made between the scenes of humans and spirits on the island, the masque interludes and the final moments where Prospero abjures his magic, it felt overloaded on stage. It is an experiment worth doing, and doubtless there's a learning curve which will bear fruit, but the play's the thing and we give an amber/green light.

Review Taha

Tim Gopsill applauds a solo show tracing the dislocated life and the tender, humane poetry of a contemporary Palestinian poet.  

Taha
by Amer Hlehel
Translated by Amir Nizar Nuabi  

Lost And Found In Translation
https://www.youngvic.org/ 

Sometimes the shortest work can carry the most meaning. This one-man play Taha tells of a lifetime in just over an hour.

The life is that of Taha Mohammed Ali, the celebrated Palestinian poet who died in 2011.

Playwright and actor Amer Hlehel explores the lives of many Palestinian refugees through the story and character of Taha, using the facts of his biography, his poetry and reconstructing the poet's life with elements of magical realism.

Taha relates how he had forced himself on a world, which did not want him. His mother had given birth to three sons before, all called Taha, for whom thanks had been offered to God, but all had died. No thanks were offered for the fourth, which survived, and “that was me.”

Fittingly, a large part of Taha's story is also conveyed through his verse - the translation projected in surtitles on the the back wall. Sometimes the poetry is recited in English and sometimes in Arabic, all of which adds to the fabric of an affecting play.

A first-generation Palestinian torn from his roots, teenager Taha and his family were driven from the family home in Galilee in 1948.

Unable to bear life in the refugee camp in Lebanon the family smuggle themselves back over the border for a life of internal exile.

We meet Taha's parents, his sister and the cousin he loved through Hlehel's captivating performance and travel with Taha to Lebanon, then back to his changed land of his birth and on to Nazareth where he again built up his life.  

Hlehel's performance as Taha does not have the polemic and anger often associated with the Palestinian experience. While conveying the bitter loss, it is wry, self-deprecating and occasionally funny --- in line with Taha’s verse.

As the owner of a successful souvenir shop in Nazareth, Taha proclaims himself, "a Muslim selling Christian memorabilia to Jews".   

Far from raging over theft, Taha evokes a child puzzling over dispossession and then an adult living with injustice and sorrowing over what the land can come to mean. 

This land doesn't remember love…
This land denies,
cheats, and betrays us;
its dust can't bear us…

Director Amir Nizar Zuabi wisely keeps the simplicity and directness of the poet's voice in his minimal staging - a bench and a box of yellow light lit by Muaz Jubeh with music from Habib Shehadah Hanna.

Taha was launched in Washington DC earlier this year before performances in Luxembourg, Manchester and now The Young Vic until July 15.  It will then travel on to The Edinburgh Fringe Festival

For a deeply affecting performance exploring the Palestinian refugee experience with a universal resonance through one man  striving to live and understand, it's a green light.