Review: Alice In Wonderland (Little Angel Theatre)

 
Lewis Carroll’s much loved 1865 tale of trying to find logic in nonsense Alice In Wonderland provides the inspiration for one of the Little Angel Theatre’s most ambitious and perhaps most technically complex show to date.

Any adaptation of Alice In Wonderland has plenty of visual material to draw upon, from the splashy 1951 Disney cartoon to the overblown Tim Burton extravaganza earlier this year.

However, the prevailing imagery has to be the original Sir John Tenniel illustrations. Director and designer Peter O’Rourke (who has also designed the Little Angel productions of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox and The Giraffe, The Pelly and Me) achieves a sense of the surreal and epic nature of the story that is just right on a puppet-sized scale. He remains faithful to the essence of the original images while giving the production his own quirky visual flair.

The set is dominated by an array of sepia photographs, which prove to be very versatile indeed in manoeuvring set changes. They become the doors that Alice longs to go through, the playing cards in the Queen of Heart’s court and members of the jury when Alice is on trial. All the technical aspects are outstanding, demonstrated by David Duffy’s remarkable lighting and the flawless scene changes.

Carroll’s sprawling cast of Wonderland inhabitants is pared down to Alice, the White Rabbit, the Caterpillar, a Cheshire accented Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter and March Hare (accompanied by the Dormouse) and the Queen of Hearts (and her husband, who doesn’t usually get a look-in), all of whom are wonderfully well-defined. I particularly liked the great big yellow and orange striped monster of a Cheshire Cat and the White Rabbit full of manic pomposity. Alice herself is alternately impetuous and prim and beautifully expressive. A particularly lovely moment is when she is transformed into a shadow (represented by a shadow puppet)- meta theatre for children?

The team of four puppeteers/actors (Jonathan Storey, Mandy Travis, Michael Fowkes and Seonaid Goody) are all extraordinarily multi-talented and hardworking as they have to manipulate the puppets, act, sing and adapt the scenery and props. The way that they act through the puppets is like a special double act, in which puppet and performer are reliant on one other.

One of the many joys of Little Angel productions is the use of original music (provided by Ben Glasstone, who also collaborated with Peter O’Rourke on the Roald Dahl adaptations). The songs include a puzzlement for Alice, a laid back bluesy number for the Caterpillar, and a show stopping music hall routine for the Cheshire Cat, all of which are wittily written and infectiously catchy.

While this may not be a definitive Alice adaptation from a literary perspective (I felt that a few more lines from the book could have been incorporated into Tim Kane’s script), the wonderful puppets and the ingenuity of the stagecraft, is, in classic Little Angel style, a thing of wonder. A highly inventive and enjoyable take on a story that’s every bit as delightful and bemusing for adults as it is for children.

Written for musicOMH

Review: The Cradle Will Rock (Arcola Theatre)

For the Arcola Theatre’s final production at Arcola Street, Artistic Director and founder Mehmet Ergen takes the directorial reigns for a rare revival of the 1936 musical The Cradle Will Rock, which was originally directed by Orson Welles and dedicated to Brecht.

Composer, lyricist and librettist Marc Blitzstein (who was murdered in Martinique in 1963) is best known today for his 1954 adaptation of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, particularly the much misunderstood ‘Mack The Knife’, a song about a serial killer that has somehow turned into an easy listening standard.


While Blitzstein’s contribution to musical theatre was deemed ‘irreplaceable’ by his friend Leonard Bernstein, experiencing a full production of this piece makes it glaringly obvious as to why it has languished in obscurity. The idea of the original production, which was banned from being staged by The House Committee of Un-American Activities, and was performed from various points around the theatre (just not the stage) is a more striking image than anything in the show itself, in spite of the dedicated efforts of the cast (most of whom play multiple roles) and creative team.

New girl in town Moll (instantly identifiable as a lady of the night by her scarlet shawl that leaves one shoulder exposed) who is finding business a little slow is arrested for soliciting and finds herself in jail alongside the highly respectable members of the ‘Liberty Committee’ (who are in fact advocating the very opposite), carrying out the orders of the mysterious Mr Mister. A series of extended sketches that are clearly meant to be bitingly satirical (though I couldn’t explain most of them) follow, with varying success.


Much of the music is conversational, juxtaposed with acapella motifs and vaudevillian style sketches. An argument between and artist and a painter starts off quite amusingly, but goes on for far too long. Many of the political and social arguments embedded in each vignette are not at all clearly expressed, which makes for frustrating viewing. While comparisons generally aren’t helpful, there’s an overwhelming sense of how Brecht and Weill did it all so much better.

The atmosphere is somewhat lightened in the first act with a delightful performance by Adey Grummet as Mrs Mister, the essence of hypocritical matronly respectability, excited by the idea of war so that she can knit socks for the brave soldiers. Josie Benson is an impressive presence as a woman whose brother’s death was the responsibility of the Liberty Committee, but by the time she appears, it’s too late to turn things around. Alicia Davies’s tart is endearingly played, but apart from her solo at the beginning of Act II, she more or less disappears after the opening scenes, denying the piece a real emotional centre. If only The Threepenny Opera had been Arcola Street’s swansong instead.

Written for musicOMH

Review: Passion (Donmar Warehouse)

Apparently the reason why so many nineteenth-century heroines die of consumption is because having a fever supposedly heightens one’s sex drive. From that perspective, Violetta and Mimi are at the heights of their ‘powers’ when they’re at their most vulnerable. However, as we all know, sexually aggressive women, particularly ones who read, are dangerous (which coincidentally makes Passion an excellent companion piece to Breakfast With Emma). The sickly Fosca, suffering from some kind of consumptive hysteria, is another woman who feels too deeply and she uses books as a way to live through others without getting emotionally involved herself. She comments, “If you have no expectations/You can never have a disappointment”- there are few sentiments bleaker than that.

Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s 1994 musical Passion (inspired by a little known 1981 Italian film Passione d’Amore, which was in turn based on an equally obscure 1869 semi-autobiographical novel Fosca by Igino Ugo Tarchetti, written when the author himself was dying of typhus) is like being trapped a fevered dream cum nightmare. Jamie Lloyd’s chamber production (the intimacy of the Donmar needs no further comment) is very wisely played without an interval, in which the fever is broken with applause for the curtain call. It’s true that this is Sondheim’s most repetitive score (frequently labelled as ‘difficult’) and it doesn’t have the witty wordplay and humour of the other works. I firmly believe that ‘catchy’ and ‘memorable’ are two separate things. I find that the scores that take a little longer to get to know are often the ones that are the most rewarding.

In the crudest terms, Passion could be described as a sort of Beauty and the Beast story with the genders reversed, but the message (if there is one) is far more opaque than the idea of how “true beauty comes from within.” Sex, death, love, obsession and sickness are all so closely interlinked that they practically become interchangeable.

David Thaxton (who caused a fangirl explosion with his Enjolras in Les Mis that was practically unheralded for a show that’s been running for decades) excels in the extremely tricky role of sensitive literary soldier Giorgio, enjoying his matinees with his lovely married mistress Clara when he is transferred to a dreary provincial garrison where his superior officer’s scary cousin Fosca starts stalking him. His transformation from an ardent lover and military hero to an ‘alone and palely loitering’ wreck like the knight in Keats’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci, who has succumbed to Fosca’s almost vampiric ‘love without reason’ is charted with supreme sensitivity and his gorgeous baritone voice is a joy.

Elena Roger’s Fosca isn’t made to look repulsive; physically, she’s more of a ‘Poor, plain and obscure’ Jane Eyre type in a suitably governess-y dress (she also resembles the famously reclusive poet Emily Dickinson). Roger’s diminutive stature works brilliantly, suggesting that the idea of her being sexualised is grotesque because of the unsettling juxtaposition of her haggard face and childlike body. Her voice may not be pretty, but it’s remarkably expressive (and contrary to other comments, her diction was absolutely fine). However, it’s her extraordinary eyes that truly make the performance- they devour her prey with her bitterness and grimly sardonic acceptance of her fate.

The third member of the triangle is less well served by the direction. Scarlett Strallen is beautiful floating around the stage in her corsets and crinolines and has a soprano like a dream, but her Clara is a rather remote figure. I don’t think that the Giorgio/Clara relationship needs to be downplayed in order to make Giorgio/Fosca as sympathetic as possible. Their relationship turning into ‘Just another love story’ seems an inevitability as soon as Fosca appears, which I think somewhat undermines the bewildering nature of this piece in which nothing is that predictable.

Amongst the ensemble of boorish soldiers, Simon Bailey stands out as the soldier constantly shooting jealous looks at Giorgio, as well as the abusive fortune hunter. It’s hardly surprising that Fosca is drawn to Giorgio for his gentlemanly manner and the simple kindness of lending her his books- a soldier with a bit of culture is a rare thing indeed in this society.

Having listened to the cast recording dozens of times, I had hoped that seeing the piece in its entirety would answer that elusive question- why exactly does Giorgio fall in love with Fosca? I still can’t quite articulate it. Perhaps it’s more important to question how it happens. Fosca muses about Rousseau’s heroine, “The character of Julie is a great mystery.” One could say the same thing about Giorgio. And indeed all the characters in this piece.

Review: Breakfast With Emma (Rosemary Branch)

One of the most telling lines in Fay Weldon’s adaptation of Gustave Flaubert’s 1857 novel Madame Bovary is when Emma Bovary’s lover Rodolphe remarks about their liaison, “If only Emma hadn’t taken it all so seriously.” This idea of scale and perspective is crucial to the story of the original desperate housewife’s triumphs and disappointments in a provincial French town in the mid nineteenth century. A black box above a pub is transformed into the Bovarys’ breakfast room (that transforms itself into various other locations) where scenes from Emma’s past are re-enacted on a scale that’s both intimate and operatic. Emma Bovary is a woman who is indifferent to her own daughter, and yet is doomed because she feels too deeply and invests too much in things that others regard as frivolous and inconsequential.

Breakfast With Emma was a flop for Shared Experience in 2003 but was given a second chance at the Rosemary Branch last year and was so well received (hailed as a revelation by the author herself) that it has returned briefly to the Rosie before a regional tour. This particular breakfast on the last day of Emma’s life when she decides to confess all is not in the novel, offering something a bit more spontaneous and unpredictable than a chronological scene by scene journey through the book.

Helen Tennison’s (a director with extensive physical theatre experience) highly creative and almost balletic direction is a masterclass in stagecraft that’s beautifully complemented by James Perkins’s set. An ordinary breakfast in which Emma tries to hide her unpaid bills from her oblivious husband Charles turns into something far more surreal as her past comes to life, turning the furniture upside down. Charles’s disapproving mother drops through the chimney to warn her little boy not to marry a convent girl with silly romantic ideas, Emma and Rodolphe’s riding lessons take place in the bookshelf and the slippery shopkeeper Lheureux manages to weasel his way in from all corners (and even the trunk). There are several exquisite set pieces, especially the high society ball that marks the pinnacle of Emma’s ‘career’, in which reality and fantasy collide in the breakfast room.

The cast of five deliver a host of passionate and sensitive performances. Helen Millar’s Emma could do with playing up the coquettishness and artifice a little more when trying to convince Charles that she’s the perfect wife, but she comes into her own when fantasising about dying a beautiful death as a martyr. James Burton brings out Charles’s oafishness as a man who sticks his spoon back in the jam after licking it and who kibitzes at the opera, as well as his vulnerability in his delusions that he is well respected in the local community. Jason Eddy is a virile and distinctive presence as the three gentleman friends who all embody aspects of Emma’s dream man- the dashing viscount who dazzles Emma at the ball, the idealistic young student Léon and the libertine Rodolphe. The minor roles are well filled by Georgina Panton as the maid Félicité who gets to answer back to her imperious mistress and James Hayward is a scene-stealer in his assorted cameos (I particularly enjoyed the verger in Notre Dame).

Fay Weldon’s Emma Bovary isn’t ruined by the insurmountable debt she’s built up; that’s almost an afterthought. She’s destroyed by the fact that she feels she’s unable to love anymore. This Emma takes the idea of being an incurable romantic to a new level, commenting “Disappointment is the difference between life and death.” And yet she has a point about needing to have a souvenir of something out of the ordinary to cling onto to make everyday life endurable- a worn pair of dancing slippers can be invaluable if they hold the memory of waltzing with a viscount.

Everything about this production is of the highest calibre and I feel it very much deserves a transfer to a small West End theatre. Flaubert might not have approved of all the liberties Weldon takes (the pharmacist Homais is only a very minor presence), but I don’t think even the most rigid purist could fail to be moved by Helen Tennison’s stagecraft. A beautiful achievement that’s simultaneously delightful and devastating. Rather like Emma Bovary herself.

Written for A Younger Theatre