Branching Out 3

With 20-odd new shows in three weeks, it's a bit like pot luck and I tried to attend as many as I could. I'm so lucky to only be about five minutes away from the Rosemary Branch, which I believe (wholly without bias) to be the best fringe theatre in London. It's a shame one can't be a professional audience sweller- I think I'd be quite good at it. It's a win-win situation as they get one more person in the audience and it keeps me off the streets.

I'm not really in the target audience for Rosie Wilby's Edinburgh Fringe hit The Science of Sex (I don't feel entirely comfortable with the tell-all style that Sex and the City and the likes has made the norm), but I quite enjoyed it nevertheless as Wilby has an engaging, amiable style. I saw a show with a very similar concept in Cambridge a few months ago and that was absolutely awful, so it was in some ways a breath of fresh air. There were some very funny lines ("I love the term LGBT- it sounds like a sandwich!") and I enjoyed the story of how she came out to her parents on April Fools Day, thinking they'd be horrified, but were very excited and handed out leaflets to the neighbours with the good news.

The Forecast, performed by Marvin and the Theatre Cats seemed to be the hot ticket- I didn't need to be there to swell the audience as it was absolutely swollen. The premise is that a luxury cruise liner sinks, and three rich twits are stranded on a raft together and inevitably get on each others' nerves. This might have potential with a lot more work (the dancing is quite amusing), but it currently feels very incomplete and about as aimless as the raft itself.

The undoubted highlight of the festival is Rosemary Branch co-Artistic Director Cleo Sylvestre's one-woman show The Marvellous Adventures of Mary Seacole, which is everything a one-person show should be- beautifully written and performed, informative, warm, funny and poignant. It really is like having an audience with the real Mary Seacole. Cleo takes us on a journey from Mary's upbringing in Jamaica, where she learned about herbal remedies from her Creole mother and practiced nursing her dolls and pets, her first visit to England at the age of sixteen, her many personal tragedies and struggles with poverty,  and finally the Crimea where she was turned down by Florence Nightingale, but started her own unique hospital. It's told with so much gentle humour (I loved the descriptions of all of Mary's colourful outfits- she clearly had quite an eye for detail) and there's not a trace of self-pity. I now really want to read her autobiography. Miss Nightingale might have been interested in formal qualifications, discipline and references, but Mary Seacole did more by doing what came naturally and clearly had a much more effective bedside manner. A pearl.

The trouble with Ah, Bet You Didn't Know, performed by Allistar Bain is that you need to have some kind of prior knowledge of Caribbean folklore for it to make sense as it isn't easy to follow. It's a bit like an in-joke and I think that sort of defeats the purpose of storytelling...

Soviet Zion by Katy Lipson and Giles Howe met with a mixed reception from my friends, but I'm leaning towards the more positive end of the spectrum. Jewish flavoured musicals seem to be tricky things (in spite of the fact that nearly all of the great musical theatre writers are of Jewish extraction) and last year's Holocaust musical Imagine This (my scathing review can be found here) was the most embarassing, misguided thing I've seen in my entire life ("Let's put on a show in the ghetto!"). This is certainly an ambitious project- an epic musical spanning thirty years in Soviet Zion, an area of Siberia given to the Jews by Stalin in the 1920s (I'm ashamed to say this is something I'm completely ignorant about, and I'm half-Jewish). I worry that it's too ambitious and that the time span won't allow sufficient character development and there isn't much in the way of traditional Jewish rhythms or humour (though I realise how tricky it is to get the balance right...).  It would also be nice if it ended on a note of hope. Of course, it's never going to be a commercial success. However, I enjoyed what I heard, I didn't find it emotionally manipulative, the lyrics (so often the biggest problem with new musicals) didn't make me want to bang my head against a wall and I would be interested in seeing a fully staged production. There were great performances from Arabella Rodrigo, Julia Buckley and Nancy Hill, as well as Katy and Giles themselves. I'm cautiously optimistic about this one, I think it has the potential to be very good.

I found Terje Tveit's staged reading of Peer Gynt to be a very curious piece of work that I don't think I'm clever enough to appreciate. It's not that I don't enjoy a crazy, sprawling epic from time to time, but I definitely prefer Ibsen's tightly plotted "domestic tragedies." I read a synopsis beforehand, but still got completely lost early on (my cleverer friends fared much better than I did). This production is set in a 1920s jazz underworld full of music and dance, including a rendition of Broadway Baby. As Follies (a favourite of mine) is the most meta-theatrical musical I know, my head started spinning at that point with all the meta-ness. The aesthetic, in which the only colours on stage were red and black, reminded me a lot of Chicago and the jazzy feel and the anti-hero working his way through the underworld and seducing numerous women with an overhanging threat of murder and self-destruction felt pretty close to The Threepenny Opera and Pal Joey. The stage directions were read out by the director, and that actually worked really well with the whole stylised feel of the production. Sort of like Ibsen done as Brecht. All the acting was very good, especially Peer Gynt himself, his mother, "Green Eyes" and the maid who gets murdered (no cast list, I'm afraid). I can't honestly say I enjoyed this, but that's probably most likely to due to the fact that Peer Gynt is almost definitely an acquired taste. The rhyming couplets started to grate on my nerves almost immediately. I found myself having flashbacks of Michael Frayn's Afterlife, agh.

The Clock Master by Sparkle and Dark's Travelling Players was real treat. I couldn't quite work out if it was aimed at children or adults, but that's not really the point. This is very much from the Angela Carter school of fairy tales as they aren't afraid to step into sinister, macabre territory, all of the stories have a sting in the tail and are full of cryptic messages. There was such a creative use of puppetry and props (the origami birds were particularly delightful) and the music was lovely. I really hope to see more from this multi-talented troop of actors, story-tellers, puppeteers and musicians. Enchanting.

My least favourite piece was Graham Farrow's Stay With Me Til Dawn, which I found really horrible. At least it was only a reading as the violence is hideously gratuitous, bordering on voyeuristic. The unpleasantness is laid on so thick (ever heard of the expression less is more??) and needless to say, I won't be going to see the staged version, if it happens. I expect the Hackney Gazette, which runs a pedophile story practically every week, would love it...

Dead-Kat Productions' (can't say I'm too keen on their name) 'multi-media' adaptations of Macbeth and A Midsummer Night's Dream condensed into under an hour each reminded me a bit of the BBC's animated Tales From Shakespeare (very useful for when revising for Finals...). Of the two, I preferred Macbeth, with was very effective in capturing eerie atmosphere, with the projected blood and witches. There was some confusion over who the child puppet was supposed to represent- apparently it was drippy Malcolm. My problem with Dream was that most of it wasn't terribly funny. I did like the way they did Pyramus and Thisbe as a puppet show though- I was a bit concerned as to how they'd pull that off with only two mechanicals. The Shakespearean performances weren't quite world class (though I thought the actress playing Lady Macbeth and Titania did have real presence), but were mostly pretty good. As it was the first time they'd performed Dream to an audience, I'm sure the comedy will start to flow more naturally. This would be a perfect show to take round to schools.

My favourite parts of Mew and Me by distinguished actress Petra Markham (sister-in-law of Corin Redgrave, who was in attendance) were the scenes between her character (an actress) and Charlotte Mew herself. I've never read any of Mew's work before (even though obscure Victorian/early C20 women poets are right up my street), but she seems like quite an enigmatic character full of contradictions, which naturally works really effectively in drama. However, I think this piece might work better as an Afternoon Play on Radio 4 than as a staged drama...

Saving the most eccentric to last, Fiona Watson's show An Evening With Bunty Carnavon was a most quirky take on spiritualism for a commercial era (actually, you could say that spiritualism has always been commercial). Blinky and Minky were hands down the finest guinea pig puppets I've ever seen.

As expected, a real mix of things. I have to single out Mary Seacole and The Clock Master as my favourites. There was an all-time low in September with a one-woman vanity show by a not particularly talented 'singer/songwriter,' which was half a cabaret (including songs from a musical she's written about Adam, Eve and Milton in therapy- as you do) and the other half was a solo musical in which she played a gay man dying of AIDS, performed to tracks used for ring tones (the same eight beats on a loop over and over again). It really was dire ("Who does she think she is- Kathryn Hunter?!"). It's very hard indeed to imagine anything else being as soul-destroyingly awful as that (though Stay With Me Til Dawn was on a par). Here's to a fantastic November and December. I have a very good feeling about all the forthcoming shows and there really never is a dull moment around here.