Review: The Kissing-Dance (Jermyn Street Theatre)

The greatest joy of Lotte Wakeham’s production of Howard Goodall’s and Charles Hart’s musical The Kissing-Dance is how beautifully she and Musical Director Tom Attwood make the actor-musician concept works. It gives the show a real sense of music being in every corner.

Based on Oliver Goldsmith’s eighteenth-century sentimental comedy She Stoops To Conquer, Goodall and Hart wrote the piece for the National Youth Music Theatre in in 1999 and this first professional production has leading lady Gina Beck reprising her role as Miss Kate Hardcastle. The operetta-like feel has some echoes of a younger A Little Night Music without the ‘knives in the whipped cream.’ There’s lots of moonlit madness in a country house, some complex harmonies and romantic near misses that come right in the end.

Whilst sharing the wordiness of Gilbert and Sullivan and the innocence of Salad Days (apart from some very jarring profanity), the music doesn’t come close to its influences in terms of developing a distinctive character. There are some delightful moments in the score, particularly Kate’s solo Miss Hardcastle’s Wedding, but a considerable amount of the music is as insipid as Goodall’s (in this reviewer’s opinion) dreadful Love Story and many of Hart’s lyrics are wincingly fussy when they should be fluently witty.

The transition from the eighteenth century to the Edwardian era is a sensible one. As well as being distancing, elaborate eighteenth-century style gowns and wigs aren’t easy to move in and would be a tight squeeze on the Jermyn Street stage. Samal Blak’s magnolia-coloured set is elegantly simple and Karen Frances’s costumes suitably charming. The action takes place on All Fool’s Eve, a night when anything goes, fitting in nicely with this period in which children have very different ideas to their parents as to what the future holds.

The lady of the house, Mrs Dorothy Hardcastle (a role made her own by a young Sheridan Smith, and now in the capable clutches of redoubtable character actress Beverley Klein) wants her spoiled son by her first marriage Tony Lumpkin (Jack Shalloo, who plays his character’s delinquencies purely for laughs) safely married off to his cousin Constance, a young lady in possession of an impressive collection of jewels. Lumpkin, however, prefers the company of blowsy barmaid Bet Bouncer (a rambunctious Lauren Storer in a very ill-fitting dress) and Constance’s heart is given elsewhere. The entire house is in uproar when the jewels go missing, particularly as two young gentlemen from London (who seem to think that the house is an inn) have turned up unexpectedly.

Kate Hardcastle, she who stoops to conquer, is both compliant and subversive, keen to fall in love with the man whom her father has chosen for her whilst taking the risk of transforming herself into a lowly serving maid when discovering that her intended (Ian Virgo, who created the role of Tony Lumpkin) is perfectly at home with wenches, but tongue-tied in front of ladies. Unfortunately, we never really get a sense of why she’s so smitten by this rather smarmy character. Gina Beck has a lovely mixture of archness and wistfulness as well as a gleaming soprano and the sisterly relationship between her and Constance (Gemma Sutton) is touchingly played.

It’s hard to imagine The Kissing-Dance making a stir in the West End. However, in the sympathetic intimacy of Jermyn Street, this is an accomplished boutique production that’s presented and performed with enough warmth and sprightly charm to win over a cynic or two.

Written for Exeunt

Review: Aida (Royal Opera House)

Photo © Bill Cooper

Verdi’s Aida is often thought of as the most bombastic of grand operas, with the huge choruses, the majestic setting of Ancient Egypt and a menagerie of exotic animals. With its traditional reliance on visual spectacle, it is no wonder that it has been a staple of grand opera houses and dramatic open-air settings.

David McVicar’s production (it premiered last year and this is the first revival) rejects any fussy artifice of faux-Egyptiana (there are no elephants, pyramids or sphinxes to be found here) and places the action in an anonymous, primitive society full of gruesome rituals, namely human sacrifice. The King of Egypt is a rather ineffectual figure; the real power lies with the merciless priests. The production is aurally magnificent in terms of individual performances and as a united whole, but the rather static direction and cautious acting (at odds with the production’s visceral visual style) make it less satisfying dramatically.

At its core, Aida is a love triangle in which two women love the same man; one is the future ruler of Egypt and the other is an enslaved Ethiopian princess. The love of a man is forced to compete with the love of a country, personified as ‘Patria.’ Ultimately, it’s human love that triumphs, albeit with dire consequences.

Jean-Marc Pusissant’s un-pretty, harshly lit designs resemble scaffolding, offering the strange juxtaposition of a pre-historic industrial society. This could possibly be to highlight the way in which everything has a price, while the costumes are a mixture of generic Ancient World styles.

McVicar places great emphasis on the link between sexuality and death in this society. Amneris’s court resembles a harem full of insalubrious activities. During Ramades’s inauguration as leader of the army, bare breasted young women give their male sacrificial victims a final moment of pleasure before stabbing them repeatedly. These women appear again during the Triumphal March, which involves a rather gaudy hyper-macho gladiator-style dance to celebrate Egyptian victory in battle and takes place underneath a canopy of human corpses.

In contrast to these displays of raw sexuality, the interaction between the three leads falls disappointingly flat. There is a tendency to sing out to the audience, rather than to develop the relationships on stage. In the title role, Ukrainian soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska in her Royal Opera House debut (she entered the production as a last minute replacement for a pregnant Micaela Carosi, which could help to explain the lack of chemistry between the romantic leads) offers a luminous vocal performance. Monastyrska’s finest dramatic moments are with her father, the deposed King of Ethiopia (a nuanced Carlos Almaguer), the undying love between her and Ramades (Carlo Ventre, in soaring voice) never taking flight. Likewise, Amneris’s rage feels closer to mild annoyance, but Olga Borodina’s rich tones and imperious presence provide a very fitting aura of majesty.

The enormous chorus look and sound formidable, but are under-directed and motionless during the crowd scenes- perhaps to reflect the single-mindedness of this culture, but there’s possibly also a sense of McVicar being unsure as to what to do with them. The concept of a non-glamorised Aida is an interesting one, which isn’t fully realised here with the old-fashioned staging. Nevertheless, the sound produced is remarkable and that kind of thrill is what’s ultimately most memorable.

Written for Exeunt

Review: Anna Karenina (Arcola Theatre)

With interpretations of doomed heroines such as Emma Bovary, Maggie Tulliver and, in this case, Anna Karenina (originally presented in 1992), Shared Experience makes a speciality in creating vivid portrayals of troubled nineteenth-century women.

This production by The Piano Removal Company and Snapdragon Productions has grown out of the young ensemble’s finalist show at Birmingham School of Acting and most of them are making their professional stage debut. It isn’t easy to tell exactly where Shared Experience’s distinctive style ends and director Max Webster’s personal touch begins, but the confident and amazingly agile cast nevertheless offers a striking take on what many consider to be the greatest novel ever written.

Tolstoy tells the stories of his two central characters, the sensual Anna and self-flagellating Levin whose stories run in parallel lines, inviting the reader to draw her own conclusions about why these stories are twinned together. In her adaptation, Helen Edmundson has these two characters punctuate the episodes that make up the narrative with their arguments about passion and freedom versus the quest to find meaning in life, as if embodying two halves of a whole (possibly you need the former to find the latter).

Anna, who married young and longs for freedom and adventure, embarks on an affair with the dashing Vronsky, abandons her son and scandalises society. Her destruction doesn’t come so much from disillusionment in love as it does from the irony that this act of rebellion makes her even more constrained. Levin is a man who makes everything as difficult for himself as he can manage, which is perhaps the biggest obstacle he has to overcome.

The typical tropes of period drama as escapism are stripped away: The setting is hard to define. It isn’t imperial Russia (accentuated by the contemporary music that Anna and Vronsky waltz to), but it isn’t exactly the present day either. The costumes, likewise, don’t belong to any particular time period. Anna could do with a more glamorous dress, while Kitty is dressed in virginal white and the men are in timeless clothing (apart from the red-coated Vronsky). In contrast with David Crisp’s minimalist design is a constant whirl of motion. A sequence of births, marriages and deaths and highs and lows play out, beginning with a haunted pas de deux between Anna and a faceless man and montages that include the erotic charge of horse racing and a romantic cascade of paper snowflakes.

Elizabeth Twells (who produces some impressive jetés) is an elegant and fluid Anna and Tristan Pate makes a sensitive Levin. Andy Rush’s constantly posing Vronsky is a surprisingly comic creation, a parody of an alpha male lover full of ultimately empty promises and Maryann O’Brien’s Kitty is full of girlish energy. The entire cast deliver the many physical demands with great aplomb. This energy is a huge asset, but their inexperience does seep through in the difficulty (particularly for Twells and Pate with the meatiest roles) of really bringing such multi-layered characters to life.

It’s a production full of theatrical tricks, if a little self consciously poetic in execution; ultimately a production easier to admire than be moved by.

Written for Exeunt

Review: Eight Women (Southwark Playhouse)

Eight Women is undemanding, middlebrow entertainment. In its mission statement, Borealis Theatre talks about unearthing forgotten European classics and giving them “a powerful modern voice,” but there isn’t anything profound or urgent about this comic thriller romp. However, Elgiva Field’s production, though a little hesitant at the moment, works well enough on its own terms as Agatha Christie-esque Sunday night entertainment. There are enough laughs and twists along the way to keep the audience in check.

French playwright Robert Thomas first had a hit with Eight Women in 1963, soon after his play Man Trap was acclaimed by Alfred Hitchcock. In 2002, it was adapted into a movie musical by Francois Ozon, with a very starry Gallic cast (I haven’t seen it, so can’t make any comparisons). In this new adaptation, Donald Sturrock relocates the action from rural France to some remote corner of the Home Counties and 1960 becomes 1980, but there isn’t a particularly strong sense of period apart from it all feeling quaintly dated – which is perhaps the whole point of a murder mystery setting. It’s a pity that Anna Bliss Scully’s set design of a narrow elongated stage with long strips of seating isn’t ideal, particularly if you’re sitting at the back and on the side. In the round staging would have been just right.

The plot is classic murder mystery fodder: It’s nearly Christmas and Mark Peterson, the master of the house, is found with a knife in his back (he’s purely a dramatic device as we never see him prior to his demise). The phone line has been cut, the car is disabled and it’s snowing. Cue for much hysteria, as we learn that each of the eight women in the house has a motive for wanting him dead.

Bernice Stegers is appropriately brittle as lady of the manor Goneril and Sasha Waddell’s neurotic hypochondriac Auntie Regan gets much of the best comedy (their names, however, are overly referential). Tamara Hinchco could be a little more imperious as their mother and Clara Andersson sweeps in like an icy breeze as the deceased’s sister Zinka. There are assured performances from Kate Ward as Goneril’s demure and collected elder daughter Susanna and Sophie Kennedy Clark as her precocious little sister Catherine. Completing the octet, Maxine McLoughlin and Alice Anthony are both well cast as the long serving housekeeper Maureen and sly new maid Louise.

What does Eight Women offer that a Miss Marple re-run doesn’t? There is something fun about seeing the clues unfurl right in front of your eyes and witnessing it in a group. As the film is a musical, it would be interesting to find out what the songs add and whether they accentuate the suspenseful or camp aspects of the piece – I would guess the latter.

Review: Teddy and Topsy (Old Red Lion Theatre)

Purple prose doesn’t make for the most exciting theatre. Teddy and Topsy (an Edinburgh Festival success) consists of the love letters written by the ‘creator of modern dance’, Isadora ‘Topsy’ Duncan to her lover, the theatre designer Edward Gordon ‘Teddy’ Craig.  It features an accomplished performance by the actress and dancer Anna-Marie Paraskeva. However, while I don’t doubt the sincerity of the letters, most of them are fairly monotonous and limited in dramatic impact. There’s far more emphasis on Duncan’s clinginess than on any of her achievements.

Robert Shaw, who has compiled the letters and directed the show, assumes too much prior knowledge and doesn’t offer any context for the benefit of audience members who, like me, aren’t experts on Duncan and Craig. We never learn exactly why they can’t be together (presumably he’s already married?) and only get to hear from him towards the end of the show (in a pre-recorded slot by Hugh Bonneville), by which time it’s hard to care.

In her flowing Grecian-style dress, Paraskeva (who also choreographed the show) works very hard for not much reward in her portrayal of a woman who performed with great confidence, but clearly suffered from terrible mood swings and insecurity off stage. The dance routines are passionately performed and full of expressive arm work (as if always reaching out for something), effectively conveying the loneliness of a life spent moving from one anonymous hotel room to another and longing for something more secure.

An hour and a half of flowery declarations of love and devotion (“We were born in the same star!”) quickly becomes wearisome. Surely an exploration of Isadora Duncan as an artist would be more interesting than a recounting of this affair.

Written for A Younger Theatre

Review: Journey's End (Richmond Theatre)

In the programme notes, Robert Gore-Langton describes R.C. Sherriff’s relationship with his unit, C Company, as “The great love affair of his life”. This piece has been labelled by many critics as the ultimate anti-war play, but there’s also an emphasis on how the most profound bonding between human beings can only take place in the most extreme and uncomfortable circumstances. There’s a sense of everything being depressingly true to life, which is brilliantly reflected in David Grindley’s starkly naturalistic production and Jonathan Fensom’s claustrophobic, candlelit design.

The painfully fresh-faced Second Lieutenant Raleigh (Graham Butler) arrives in the trenches expecting “An awful row”, and finds his restless fellow soldiers engaged in shooting rats and racing earwigs. The reception he receives from his commanding officer and former school friend Captain Stanhope (the role created by an unknown Laurence Olivier wonderfully played here by James Norton) is less than cordial.

One of the most arresting details is just how young Stanhope and Raleigh are. Raleigh has joined the army straight from school and Stanhope is only be about 21, yet he holds a position of immense responsibility and has for three years endured an existence that is only tolerable with a large amount of whiskey. In such circumstances, the idea of hero worship is almost as terrifying as the war itself. With all sense of normality lost, the youth whom Raleigh idolised on the ‘rugger’ field has changed beyond recognition and has been forced to age prematurely. You’re allowed to feel frightened and wretched, but showing such emotions is unacceptable.

Sherriff drew these characters from life and the characters develop into something more complex through the truthfulness of the language. Sherriff’s portrayal of the rotund and rather simple SecondLieutenant Trotter (Christian Patterson) and the ever-reliable mess orderly Private Mason (Tony Turner) are perhaps a little patronising, but with enough warmth to prevent them from becoming jarring. There’s a gem of a performance by Dominic Mafham as the former schoolteacher ‘Uncle’ Lieutenant Osborne, the one consistently steady and comforting presence. I have rarely seen such an entirely decent human being so truthfully observed and played. Even if hero worship isn’t appropriate, the young men couldn’t have a finer role model. Raleigh could easily be a frightful caricature with his ‘Boy’s Own’ language and attitude (perhaps that’s the point), and while Graham Butler’s performance is slightly mannered, the tragedy of this lamb to the slaughter is keenly felt.

Such finely wrought theatre ought to be rewarded with rapturous applause, but a release of emotion doesn’t seem right. The actors stand impassively in front of a war memorial with a backdrop of the names of dead soldiers and are received with a mixture of startled silence and nervous applause. This is a world that’s as far removed from logic as Osborne’s beloved Alice In Wonderland is. Sherriff wrote this play in 1928 with less than ten years of hindsight – eighty years on, are we really any more enlightened?


Written for A Younger Theatre