Review Uncle Vanya

Uncle Vanya

by Anton Chekhov

A New Adaptation by Robert Icke

Here's Johnny

www.almeida.co.uk

Uncle Vanya gets a meandering updated filmic treatment in Robert Icke's new adaptation which he has both adapted and directed. While this is a British accented production, this struck TLT and her little gas guzzler as having an American setting.

Icke translates Uncle Vanya into Uncle Johnny, as apparently Vanya is a diminutive of Ivan, the Russian enquivalent of Russian equivalent of John. 

Paul Rhys's Johnny almost appears to have stepped out of a celibate Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf. The same simmering frustrations of academic and sexual jealousy directed against the returning widower  Alexander (Hilton McRae) of Johnny's late sister, a professor of the Arts, now remarried to the much younger beautiful disenchanted Elena (Vanessa Kirby), reminiscent of a Hollywood starlet in sunshine yellow later turned to bohemian black.

This could almost be an artists' or academic or, dare one say it, actors' commune in its final days with Johnny and his niece Sonya (Jessica Brown Findlay), the daughter of the first marriage managing the day-to-day running and financial affairs against the overwrought backdrop.  

Set on a stage revolving (creakily like cracking branches) by increments, the wooden pillars at each corner enclose the space designed by Hildegard Bechtler with multiple resonances of time and place.   

Michael (Tobias Menzies), a doctor, tends but despairs of his patients, his heart in conserving the forest and future vistas ending the play with a Chaplinesque touch, balancing a globe. Impoverished Telegin is transformed into Cartwright (Richard Lumsden), the Bob Dylan emulating neighbouring landowner.  

These are baby boomer characters all left cut adrift, as the elderly professor proposes to sell the estate, not in his gift to sell, along with the old Nanny (Annie Queensberry) with her knitting and offers of tea, bringing the farmyard into the house in the shape of a (well-trained!) red rooster.

It is an adaptation with a neat turn in humorous bathos as the awkward group bring their fragile egos to the farmhouse surrounded by animals and woods. Chekhov's play itself was adapted by the original playwright from an earlier version, "The Wood Demon" and Johnny's increasing dishevelment and the characters' Caliban-like animal positioning pinpoint the forest magic.

Almost all the roles carry equal weight until the final scenes with characters jumping down from the revolve to reveal their inner thoughts in monologues under spotlight. It is an adaptation and sometimes it feels that Chekhov's irony is lost and the hurt distanced in favour of a new story.

But the growing anguish of Rhys in the title role from measured administrator to maddened holy idiot as if wrongly accused of failing in life is finely judged.  And his mother Maria (Susan Woodridge), acolyte of the professor, with her androgynous short combed back white hair and glasses could equally be a party apparatchik of the 1970s as well as the protector of an academic or even acting theory.

It comes in at nearly three and a half hours so plan your journey home carefully. Still, it's divided into acts broken up by 10 minute intervals, although  it felt as if the farmyard herd was being orchestrated outside the play within the crowded confines of the Almeida as we all rushed out for drinks and a comfort break and then back!

Intriguing and reflective, this production held us just on the right side of languor as it weaved its spell. It doesn't replace other versions but it's a green light for an ensemble rumination on the strangeness of modern life.

Review The End Of Loving

The End Of Longing

By Matthew Perry

That's What Friends Are For

http://endoflonging.co.uk/

Long before the sitcom Friends hit our screens in our homes, the place of friendship and love in modern life provided the script of many a Hollywood movie and also proved an ironic backdrop in at least one darkly humorous song sung by two celebrities in a hidden real-life illicit relationship   

Now Matthew Perry - of Friends' fame  - who tells us he contributed to the sitcom'sscripts  has put together his first play, also with dark undertones, The End of Longing. The story of four 40-something singletons drawn together in the bar and the bedroom. 

Smoothly directed by Lindsey Posner with slick design by Anna Fleischle, Perry takes the lead role as heavy drinking photographer Jack downing enough vodka "to finance Russia".

TLT and her four wheeled conveyance did wonder exactly what the title meant and if it were a quote from a poem or similar. A quick Google turned up a political science paper "The End of Longing ? Notes towards a history of post war German Longing" - surely not? - and the equally unlikely source of a historical novel by Australian writer Ian Reid.

Well, maybe we are given notes ... The quickly passing staccato scenes are like the pages of a notebook quickly turning and have the feel of a a sitcom or soap, even to the point of one character joking whether they have half an hour's worth of material. 

The over size  angular scenery sliding in and out could be in a studio lot and, after tragedy looms in the second act, the power of positive thinking and a happy ending wins out.

  

The types are familiar TV characters: A high-class $2,500 an hour hooker Stephanie (statuesque Jennifer Mudge). An female pharma executive desperate to have a baby Stevie (Christina Cole a bundle of nervous energy). The two women bonded reaching for the same latte in some coffee shop or other ;). And, the most intriguing character,  the seemingly dim but good natured Joseph (a finely judged performance from Lloyd Owen) who met Jtack on the sports' field.  

Maybe behind this brittle play, there's a  real story which the production reflects. Certainly Perry's battle with drink and drugs hit the headlines. But is it too fanciful to think that the genuine nature of  friendship after fame strikes must also be a obsession?

There are hints of a self reflexive play here reflecting on the skewing of life by TV tropes with its references to the TV process with its switching of old wine in new bottles, to pitch, sell, stay in the limelight and update to today's broadcasting currency.

We're in a bar, we're in a bedroom, we're in a late night pharmacy, we're in a hospital, in a church asking for a miracle and maybe finally on the cusp of a script pitch and commission. Then there are the off stage plots - pretending to be a couple to meet the parents, the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and so on.  

In the end, it's Matthew Perry who is the draw and Friends' fans may well be satisfied. It's an odd fish of a play but we prefer to believe it's a more sophisticated vehicle than a  shuffling of pre-programmed plot cards and characters, leaving us to discern what is actually happening and what is TV fantasy.  An amber light for an uneven play given a polished production.

Review I Loved Lucy

I Loved Lucy

by Lee Tannen

Queen of Comedy

http://www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk/

Back in the day TLT faintly recalls as a tot enjoying the slapstick in reruns of sitcom I Love Lucy. It was part of the strange glamour mingled with down-to-earth accessibility of Americana seeping on to British commercial TV. 

And for TLT it had a kindred spirit in the copies of "Jack and Jill" TLT'S great aunt (her grandmother's sister-in-law) sent over from New York with one particularly memorable story of the little boy who despaired of needing nerdy glasses until he saw a native American Red Indian chieftain in full headdress wearing - yes! - a pair of spectacles. 

But enough of TLT!

For this is a review of I Loved Lucy, an American play, written by and based on Lee Tannen's memoir of his father's cousin's wife's brother's wife, Lucille Ball.

Tannen presents himself as tongue-tied fan, an escort of, a backgammon player with, bathed in the aura of, estranged from and finally reconciled with the redheaded icon and TV pioneer in this canter through the years between 1960 and her death in 1989.

After the opening strains of Frank Sinatra singing "How Little We Know" drift away, theatre ad copywriter Tannen creates a world where sitcom and life merge together in a portrait of the actress filtered through the character of - er -   Lee Tannen. 

The stage Lee is played by an expressive Matthew Bunn in a clever hall of mirrors' script reflecting on a celebrity in the family, the nature of fandom and the need to earn a living. The stage Tannen may have aspired to the character played in the 1950s by William Holden in Sunset Boulevard  but he slips by tiny increments towards King of Comedy's 1980s' Rupert Pupkin.    

Meanwhile Sandra Dickinson's more deliberately naturalistic performance as the star of sitcom and sponsorship herself in her last years is a true revelation. She inhabits the tracksuits and personality of the model turned Hollywood B-actress turned everybody's favourite sitcom wife and mom as if a tailor-made role for her.  

We can take what Lucille's sidekick says about her at face value or we can read between the lines. Or we can value what Lucille says about herself. Especially when for a moment she grasps the narration from Lee and guides the play in a new direction near its denouement.

All of which is staged with skilful understatement by director Anthony Biggs. Matched too by the equally skilful set design of Gregor Donnelly backing the two players with large three dimensional letters - L-U-C-Y - filled with black and white press cuttings. A heart, which also graced I Love Lucy's opening credits, doubles up as a suspended screen for evocative images of Lucille and her entourage. 

Yep, we loved this Lucy - a carefully crafted play written with heart and something to impart, meticulously acted and directed. 

And TLT has even managed to find a connection between Jack and Jill and I Love Lucy. 

An early contributor to the kids' magazine was Pearl S Buck who also wrote The Good Earth, turned into a movie filmed by cameraman Karl Freund whom Lucille's then husband Desi Arnaz brought in to film the innovative recordings of I Love Lucy for their Desilu production company. 

Even if  apparently as Lucy Ricardo in I Love Lucy she didn't always deliver the pizza at the right moment for the bosses, a green light for a play which delivers the goods 

Review Jeepers Creepers

Jeepers Creepers

By Robert Ross

The Eyes Have It

Leicester Square Theatre

Ah, the 1970s, what a source it's been for BBC 4 biopics. 

Go back to when "I phone" meant you picked up the receiver and used your finger to dial. Take a bunch of ordinary guys and fewer gals. Use cod psychoanalysis and camera angles to magnify and simplify any ordinary faults and frailities already magnified by fame and tabloid scrutiny. And you have a perfectly enjoyable pacey rollercoaster story.  At least you should have.

Marty Feldman has lived on for new generations in repeats of Gene Wilder and Mel Brooks's Young Frankenstein and comedy fans can also peruse Robert Ross's detailed 2011 biography 

With the Carry On Team, also covered by Ross, already nabbed by Terry Johnson in his excellent stage play performed at the National Theatre back in 1998, Ross has the monopoly on  the one BBC 4 missed with the two-hander Jeepers Creepers. Maybe because as Feldman's sole biographer, he has guarded the material waiting for the right moment?

Well, Monty Python veteran Terry Jones, who knew and worked with Marty agreed to attach his name as director of the project.  With Jones on board and  Jeepers Creepers presumably named in honour of Feldman's most distinctive feature ('Jeepers Creepers, where'd ya get those peepers? Jeepers Creepers, where'd ya get those eyes?') and for Feldman's love of jazz, it all seems very promising.

On the positive side for Ross, the thinly sketched script of Jeepers Creepers has just enough in it to whet the appetite  for the book sold in the foyer. But if in the Feldman sketch everyone spoke in the voice of Sydney Lotterby, Ross's narrator's voice for the most part stifles any of this piece's dramatic potential. Save for a few moments in the second act when Rebecca Vaughan's betrayed wife Lauretta  springs to life and leads one to wonder what a stage play about betrayed first wives might be like.

As the couple and Marty solo lurch from 1974 US hotel room to hotel room, there's a bed in every scene.  Possibly an attempt to evoke a history of broadcast comedy - the Laurel and Hardy stalwart  brought to British television by Morecambe and Wise's scriptwriter Eddie Braben and, perhaps one of the much later victims of the '70s generation gone sour, Paula Yates  

There's a memento mori of a skull in the background to reflect Feldman's skeletal TV and movie persona beside the fleshy David Boyle as Feldman looking more of a Gene Wilder. Nothing wrong with that but Boyle struggles with the lack of pace in script and direction and his truthful imitation of Marty's subdued thoughtful tone, unlike the aggressive sharp-beaked TV persona, only serves to emphasize an under powered production determined to index rather than grow organically with subtext the facts of Feldman's life.  

Perhaps Ross, with his knowledge across the period, would have spread his playwriting wings more if he had chosen to write about a fictional career spanning jazz, music hall, radio, television, movies, drugs and drink in the context of the times. A generic 1970s' manslaughter of a celebrity. But what we have is an amber/red light for this plodding amble through a life and talent which merits a more insightful exploration.   

Review Around The World In 80 Days

Around The World In 80 Days

By Laura Eason 

Odds On London Fogg  
https://www.stjamestheatre.co.uk/

Before the internet put a girdle round the world in nano-seconds, TLT and her own Passepartout automobile recalls David Niven and Shirley MacLaine  on the telly floating in the basket of a hot air balloon in the 1956 movie.

It seems curious and remains unanswered in any way by this play, why a Frenchman Jules Verne would write a book about English gent Phileas Fogg with a British Empire Bank of England featuring majorly in the background.  However now American playwright Laura Eason  has adapted Verne's 1873 episodic adventure story Around The World In 80 Days into a tongue-in-cheek play directed by Lucy Bailey.

Phileas Fogg (a suitably phlegmatic Robert Portal), a London gentleman of mysterious independent means who lives a life of  mathematical precision attended by recently recruited French valet Jean Passepartout (an engaging Simon Gregor), accepts a £20,000 bet from his Reform Club whist pals.

Namely that he can travel the world in 80 days by rail and steamer clutching his copy of Bradshaw's Guide  - the world tending to mean the dominions of the then British Empire apart from the breakaway USA

But with any good book, it turns out what sounds most topical is in the original Jules Verne's novel : the Bank of England robbery, the gas left burning, the incompetence of Inspector Fix (Tony Gardner playing it with a touch of One Man Two Governors)  chasing the wrong man with his warrant.

While adventures rather than deep characterisation dominate the book, it remains a stonking story harnessing 19th century fascination with travel, Empire and exploration with a touch of the later Sherlock Holmes and an attempted nemesis in Fix who believes Fogg to be a gentleman thief.

This cheery pantomine-like version held the attention of the youngsters in the audience. A detailed set by Anna Fleischle adapts well enough to above ship and round-the-world locations while below deck the show starts with live piano playing.  The rest of the eight strong cast including Liz Sutherland and Eben Figueiredo inhabit a range of roles with a breezy comic competence.

Enjoyable but not perfect. The saloon style piano player features in the first few minutes but never appears again. and with the feel of a children's show, it did make TLT and her companion wonder whether the play could work just as well with an unadorned stage while keeping the ingenious props.

The grumpy old men in the Reform Club, an elephant ride led by Lena Kaur as the pachyderm's keeper, a  Hong Kong opium den and a turn by Tim Steed as an American colonel stick in the mind. But, the first act particularly sometimes felt less than varied in staging and pace once the initial character traits of the lead characters were established.

Still the testosterone-fuelled events are suitably softened with the rescue of widow Mrs Aouda (a graceful Shanyana  Rafaat) from the funeral pyre and Gregor's Passepartout enlivens proceedings in the second act when the actors break out of the fourth wall.

So it's another 80 days to add to the canon: A 1946 Orson Welles/Cole Porter flop (:o!!!) musical; a foxy 1972 Australian animation series; a 1984 mini series with Piers Brosnan and then Jackie Chan and Steve Coogan in a very loose adaptation.  All preceded by a 1919 silent German film Die Reise um die Erde in 80 Tagen.  

This skittish adaptation has plenty of playfulness, even explaining with the lightest of touches the lack of a hot air balloon. Yet it felt as if it could have explored more the impetus behind the book, threading in its literary allusions and social background. All this may have lent more variety to its staging to match the energy of the acting ensemble. An amber light. 

Review Evening At The Talk House

Evening At The Talk House

 By Wallace Shawn  

Farewell To The Theatre

http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk

TLT and her jalopy have never entered The Gay Hussar restaurant but somehow images of mahogany panels with its Cold War intrigues came to mind looking at the set of the Talk House dining club of Wallace Shawn's new play about the thespian world. 

But in the alternative science fiction universe of The Talk House, the theatre of war takes on a sinister turn enveloping the whole of showbiz.

A decade on from the premiere  of theatre flop Midnight in a Clearing with Moon and Stars, composer turned jingle writer Ted (Stuart Milligan) has arranged a reunion at a once favoured post theatre venue, The Talking House, run by blowsy bohemian Nelly (Anna Calder-Marshall), helped by waitresss/resting actress (Sinéad Matthews),  Caught in time, somewhere in the no man's land between New Haven, the Royal Court and The Princess Bride.

In an opening monologue author Robert (Josh Hamilton), now a successful TV screenwriter, describes the fantastical medievalesque premise of his play. But this is already unsettling - more reminiscent of a now mundane open-ended computer game than a play by a promising writer.

Alongside Nellie, seemingly vulnerable waitress/resting actress Jane welcomes star actor Tom, a suavely convincing Simon Shepherd, with Joseph Mydell's producer and talent agent Bill playing every twist and turn to the hilt. 

Also accompanying Ted, wardrobe supervisor Annette (Naomi Wirthner), whose  fashion sense, although not her murderous activities when entertainment sector employment is hard to find, is reminiscent of a recent newsworthy figure.

And then from under the rug on the couch emerges cartoon-like Dick, embodied by Wallace Shawn as some bruised down-and-out Simpsonesque Mr Burns. Once a star of sitcom and advertising, now an apparent loser until he grasps the opportunity to read a speech from the play with all the aplomb of a writer as well as an actor or perhaps an actor making the most of what he is given.  

Alliances and careers have prospered, foundered and may still reverse. No talk here of marriages, divorces and children or even  about the artistic content of current media successes. 

This is an entertainment Parliament or Senate discussing the market and stock value of individuals and companies, where products feel more like snacks rather than the main meal and everyone may devour the other at any moment.   

And are we really to take at face-value Robert's speech to the house, his dismissal of the "theatre going impulse" (What?! This is Trafficlighttheatregoer!) and jarring interpretation of the theatre audience experience as a group of passive staring cows chewing cud?

Smartly directed by Ian Rickson with evocative set design by Stephen and Timothy Quay, it's an odd hotch potch of a piece with an actorly improvisational feel which, like many pieces on stage now, may well work better in the close up, edited medium of film, even the first episode of a scifi soap.   

Nevertheless, TLT and her horsepower chariot rather liked it, even if they did not love it. It's curmodgeonly, it's spikey with themes and an atmosphere that stays with you. And as we are all in a way actors now in front of surveillance cameras and repositories of valuable data for advertisers, there is the sensation of, if not the definition why, the play is relevant.

Not easy-listening at the Talk House but worth catching the last couple of performances before Christmas and then it runs until March 2016. An amber light.