Lady In The Dark

Review: The Go-Between (Royal & Derngate Northampton)

2011-11-12T20:22:00.002Z

Re-visiting a diary kept during one’s adolescence is inevitably a squirmy experience. In this musical adaptation of L.P. Hartley’s 1953 novel (originally workshopped by Perfect Pitch) with music by Richard Taylor and a book by David Wood (both share credit for the lyrics), Leo Colston, a tweedy, repressed bachelor in his sixties declares angrily to the crowd of Victorian ghosts who stifled his emotional development fifty years earlier in 1900, “The past is a foreign country – you do things differently there.” In response, they beg Leo to let them go from the shackles of his memory. There is a sub-aqueous quality to Michael Pavelka’s set comprising of tarnished mirrors at skewed angles and a sepia colour palette (Leo’s ‘Lincoln green’ suit is the most conspicuous flash of colour), reminiscent of a once-grand stately pile that has been neglected for years.

Warned by his widowed mother that the upper classes live very differently, twelve-year-old Leo arrives to spend the summer at the Norfolk estate of his school chum Marcus’s untitled but certainly entitled family. As one of the only children in a house full of grown ups, he is intoxicated by and becomes the protégé of Marcus’s beautiful elder sister Marian and the ‘postman’ who delivers messages between her and the ‘ladykiller’ tenant farmer Ted Burgess. If Hartley’s writing can be compared to Henry James (in style and themes, charting a child’s loss of innocence and the taboo of sexual relationships across the class divide), it seems apt that Taylor’s beautifully integrated and shimmeringly lovely score with snatches of Gothic menace has echoes of Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw (as well as Sondheim’s Passion), lavishly scored for a grand piano played onstage by Jonathan Gill. Everything is seen through Leo’s eyes in Wood’s very faithful adaptation, and so there isn’t a love duet as Leo never sees the lovers together.

Roger Haines employs gracefully choreographed movement to create images that, as befits Taylor’s musical style, aren’t quite set pieces but have the same kind of impact. Stuart Ward’s ‘wild’, sinewy Ted, upon whom Leo depends for his sentimental education, bursts in on civilised bathing party; Leo celebrates his heroism as twelfth man in the crucial cricket match between the Hall and the village (to my mind, Hartley was unique in being able to make cricket exciting) and there is an animalistic denouement enacted by phallic umbrellas. Tim Lutkin’s lighting is a key player in the storytelling, evoking the glorious sunshine and the coming storm as well as the shifts in time.

Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ is a recurring motif, tying in neatly with the deadly nightshade (belladonna). The idea of a vampiric woman who seduces men and leaves them helpless is all too clear to the audience, while Marian’s upstanding intended Hugh Trimingham (Stephen Carlile), an aristocrat disfigured in the Boer War, clings to a soon-to-be outdated chivalric code in which “Nothing is ever a lady’s fault.” Sophie Bould offers a precise soprano as Marian and the children are just precocious enough with splendid singing and acting abilities: Adam Bradbury makes a sweetly snooty Marcus and William Miles’s wide-eyed and inquisitive Leo ably anchors the show alongside the outstanding James Staddon as his damaged adult counterpart.

The Go-Between entwines adult secrets and lies with the careless cruelty and destruction wreaked by the upper classes’ inborn sense of the world revolving around them (Marcus informs Leo, “Don’t thank the servants – that’s why they’re there”); the rich symbolism of Hartley’s writing is acutely dramatised in an intelligent, heartfelt and delicately realised gem of new British musical theatre writing that very much deserves a further life beyond this world premiere tour.

Written for Exeunt

Review: The House of Bernarda Alba (New Diorama Theatre)

2011-11-06T15:59:00.000Z

The flagship show of Suspense 2011 with its theme of puppetry and politics, Yas-e-Tamam’s production of Federico Garcia Lorca’s play The House of Bernarda Alba about a manipulative widow and her five daughters living isolation against an impending backdrop of fascism is the company’s British debut, having performed in Spain, France, Lebanon and their native Iran. Iran isn’t known for its theatrical or puppetry tradition (at least not in Britain); the choice of source material with the implicit parallels between 1930s Spain and the contemporary Middle East (Almeida Theatre will also be presenting a Middle Eastern-set production of this play in 2012) combined with an arresting visual style fused together to create a nightmarish world of oppression and brainwashed conformity.

Condensed into an hour and performed to a pre-recorded soundtrack in Farsi without surtitles, the puppeteers (revealed at the end to be two women and a man) are life-sized versions of the puppets, dressed in black robes that resemble both nuns’ habits and burkas. The puppeteers’ faces are covered with white masking material and like the puppets have crudely stitched identical, featureless faces with stitches covering their faces and hands like scars. Reza Mehidizade’s effectively simple set comprises of wooden boxes and suitcases of various sizes and the puppets emerge from a long, narrow box like a coffin during Bernarda Alba’s husband’s funeral, with echoes of the undead as these forbidding rag dolls crowd together accompanied by mournful music.

On the predominately black stage, flashes of colour appear in the form of a red horse and the threads on an embroidery frame from which the ill-fated youngest daughter Adela hangs herself. Sewing, a traditionally female activity, is a recurring motif, a symbol of creativity and a weapon, as Alba threatens one of her daughters by mining sewing up her mouth and therefore taking away her ability to speak.

The storytelling in Zahra Sabri’s production doesn’t transcend language as much as would be ideal and it would benefit from surtitles to make the nuances in the story more comprehensible and to get a clearer sense of individual voices and characters. As it stands, it is daringly radical in itself by charging these blank-faced puppets with political fervour in a world where individual self expression is not something to be encouraged.

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Review: Speechless (Arcola Theatre)

2011-10-31T20:20:00.001Z

Taking its cue from Marjorie Wallace’s 1986 book The Silent Twins charting the story of the ‘elective mute’ twins June and Jennifer Gibbons, Polly Teale (who also directs) and Linda Brogan’s play Speechless (which premiered at Edinburgh last year) is the ‘other’ play currently in London that opens with a rendition of William Blake’s hymn ‘Jerusalem.’ June and Jennifer were Welsh-born of West Indian parents who, like many others, believed Great Britain to be the promised land. Like Shared Experience’s recent production Brontë, the Gibbons are another troubled set of sisters with literary ambitions (we see them staying up all night ferociously typing their novels) who operate in a fantasy world; they refuse to speak or make eye contact with others, but, when alone, show themselves to be highly perceptive and articulate observers of the world around them.

The love-hate relationship between the sisters is exemplified in the visceral opening montage as they strangle and embrace each other in confinement at Broadmoor. The story is narrated in a flashback: having been asked to leave their secondary modern where they are the only black pupils and the victims of racist bullying at the age of fourteen, they are referred to a specialised support unit where the teachers are addressed by their first names and no uniform is worn (their mother does not approve). Mrs Gibbons (Anita Reynolds) is bemused as to how her ‘twinnies’ who have had a good Christian upbringing could find themselves in such a situation, yet the problem began when they were only four.

There are fearless performances by Natasha Gordon and Demi Oyediran as Jennifer and June, who make remarkably believable teenagers. Their mirrored movements and silent communication out of the furthest corners of their eyes is truly unnerving, but alone in their bedroom, they share the same anxieties as any ‘normal’ teenage girls who are curious about romantic love, dislike their appearance and feel embarrassed of their mother, excluded from the other RAF wives’ coffee mornings and Tupperware parties, making fun of her strong West Indian accent and attempts to be British. The idolisation of royalty, with the peeling images of Lady Diana on the wall and a delightful re-enactment the Queen’s 1977 Silver Jubilee with their (white, blonde) Barbie dolls shows the power of pageantry on their imaginations, though some of the references to 1980s popular culture are rather heavy-handed.

The only male presence in the cast of five, Kennedy (Alex Robertson), is clumsily shoehorned into the narrative. Robertson is far too mature to convince as the troubled American youth to whom the twins lose their virginities in a most unromantic fashion while Mrs Gibbons swoons as Charles and Diana’s fairytale romance culminates on the balcony of Buckingham Palace. The disturbing parallel of these sacrificial lambs takes place against a backdrop of rioting that is brought to life by a storm of clutter.

Focusing on the twins’ adolescence and ending with the arson attack on their school that had them committed to Broadmoor, the most bizarre twist in the story – Jennifer died on the day that she and June were discharged – isn’t dramatised. If it was fiction, it would seem too symbolic to be convincing. The separation is hinted at by portraying Jennifer as the more domineering twin with her declarations of “You are Jennifer. You are me “ Unlike many other fact-based plays, there isn’t a projected postscript explaining what happened next, leaving the audience to draw their own conclusions from this somewhat disjointed dramatisation of a story that exemplifies the idea of truth being stranger than fiction.

Written for Exeunt

Review: The Last of the Duchess (Hampstead Theatre)

2011-10-29T17:49:00.000+01:00

Nicholas Wright’s new play directed by Richard Eyre based on Booker Prize shortlisted author Lady Caroline Blackwood’s book of the same name dealing with her attempt to interview a widowed Duchess of Windsor in 1980 has a poetical allusion in its title, accentuated by the Duchess being something of a fantasy figure around whom the ideas of memory and artistic representation revolve.

The impediment to Lady Caroline’s interview is the octogenarian Maitre Suzanne Blum, the Duchess’s lawyer, also a companion cum gaoler. Under Blum’s orders, no one is allowed to see the Duchess; she might be completely senile, she might even be dead. Her jewels are being sold anonymously at auction and the housekeeper is wearing her furs. Denied access to the Duchess, Blackwood re-casts the profile with Blum (only two years younger than the ailing Duchess) as the focus, leading to a battle of wills and egos between two stubborn women, which ultimately comes down to each vowing to outlive the other.

Mrs Simpson herself only appears in a fantasy sequence at the beginning of the play in a youthful guise, the decadent jewellery collecting, ‘vawdka’-addicted socialite of lore. Caroline’s re-imaging of Wallis’s story as a twisted Gothic fairytale is reflected by the way in which it is as if time has stood still in the Windsors’ Bois de Boulogne home, occupied by people who by 1980 are relics and anachronisms. This eighteenth-century salon (designed by Anthony Ward) filled with Ancien Regime objets d’arts is untouched by modernity. The youngest character, Blum’s assistant and an ingratiating collector of influential people Michael Bloch (the excellent John Heffernan), gives the impression of being born in the wrong era, in a striped jacket that makes him look “like something out of The Boy Friend.”

Sheila Hancock employs a superb French accent and regal mannerisms as the indomitable Suzanne Blum, who, the Simpson connection aside, had a remarkable career, being the daughter of a Jewish butcher (the Windsors’ cosying-up to Hitler isn’t mentioned) who qualified as a lawyer in the 1920s. A model of professional discretion only offering sycophantic anecdotes (the Duke and Duchess were apparently renowned for their charity – the Duke would open doors for unimportant people) and adamantly against using her client’s celebrity for self-promotion, she is won over by the glittering prospect of being photographed by Lord Snowdon. Her sparring with Anna Chancellor’s dishevelled, vodka-fuelled journalist (immortalised by her husbands Lucian Freud and Robert Lowell in art and poetry) is splendidly done; it seems quite plausible that she has the willpower to live forever.

I couldn’t help but be rather unsettled by Diana Mosley (a relation of Lady Caroline by marriage and the author of a cut-and-paste biography of the Duchess) and her repellent political views being treated as a comedy turn like a favourite eccentric aunt, receiving gales of delighted laughter (somehow the dialogue automatically becomes funnier when delivered by a Mitford sister). Angela Thorne’s portrayal of Lady Mosley’s breezy anti-Semitism is all too convincing with impressively arched vowels, but the idea of a Nazi that the nation took to its bosom is a deeply troubling one, which strikes me as the real demon in the story, though probably not Wright’s intention.

Wright touches upon the plight of being widowed at any age, the fear of being kept alive like a “breathing cabbage” and journalistic ethics with delicacy but doesn’t explore them to fruition. It’s a play that has the rather smug surface gloss of a beautifully photographed high society magazine, one that is lovely to look at, finely acted and pithily written, but has more to do with namedropping in gilded exile than offering a huge amount of insight.

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Review: Britannicus (Wilton's Music Hall)

2011-10-24T15:01:00.000+01:00

The enchanting Wilton’s Music Hall resembles many things, including a bath house or forum with its high ceiling and immersive acoustics, making it an ideal setting for the grandeur and ruthlessness of the Roman Empire with its obscenely complicated genealogy. Irina Brown’s stylish modern-dress production of Jean Racine’s 1669 tragedy Britannicus (in a new translation by Timberlake Wertenbaker, co-Artistic Director of Natural Perspective Theatre Company with Brown) offers the opportunity to see the space back to front: the audience sits on the stage and the performance takes place on a tiled floor with the balcony as a backdrop. Only a few upturned transparent plastic chairs adorn the floor and a plastic shower curtain is pulled back to reveal a junk-filled storeroom stuffed with trunks, books and decapitated marble busts (designed by Chloe Lamford), possibly a nod to all the crumbling ambitions mouldering away.

Many a tyrant’s reign begins with optimism: as the play opens, the late Emperor Claudius has been succeeded by Nero, the son of his last wife Agrippina (also his niece, for whom he overturned the laws regarding incest), rather than his own son Britannicus. Britannicus (a fairly minor character in his own tragedy) is in love with Junia (Hara Yannas), the only surviving member of her aristocratic family, who becomes Nero’s own lust object. Nero’s notorious reputation precedes him, yet the underlying implication here is that his fate wasn’t pre-ordained having been given too much power at too young an age (Matthew Needham plays him as a louche and petulant teenager), pushing his authority to the limits, commenting, “I’m tired of being loved – I want to be feared.” If Racine is speculating about what kind of Emperor Britannicus might have been, Alexander Vlahos portrays an idealistic and hot-headed young man, well-meaning and ardent in his love for Junia, but no match for the courtly machinations that conspire to destroy him.

There’s no mother quite like a Roman mother (perhaps the play ought to be called Agrippina) and Sian Thomas’s frostily sensual and conniving matron of impeccable lineage very much dominates the proceedings. It's a gripping portrayal of a relationship between a mother and son in extraordinary circumstances. Agrippina is scornful of the powerful men from whom she is descended, unable to claim power herself as a woman, and schemes to realise her ambitions through her son. When she cannot bear the thought of losing Nero to another woman or to the Empire itself, her jealousy manifests into something almost vampiric.

There is something (to my mind) inherently static about Racine’s style, in which the most exciting moments take place off-stage and are reported second-hand (as in Greek tragedies), though Wertenbaker’s robust use of language lends the story a contemporary resonance. The ending is a beginning in itself that demands a sequel as the real horrors of Nero’s reign have only just begun – if ever there was an argument against inherited power (take for instance the Middle Eastern dynasties very much in the news at present), this is it.

Written for A Younger Theatre

Review: The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (Union Theatre)

2011-10-21T16:44:00.001+01:00

It’s extraordinary that it took two people (Larry L. King and Peter Masterson) to write the book for Carol Hall’s true-events-based 1978 musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas as it’s as much of a dramaturgical disaster as the Union’s recent offering The Baker’s Wife. These two flawed 1970s musicals have very different performance histories: The Baker’s Wife understandably flopped, yet The Best Little Whorehouse ran for 1,584 performances on Broadway, where it returned after a national tour with the original leads and was later filmed starring Dolly Parton. It might be a show that doesn’t try to be anything other than light entertainment, but that doesn’t mean that the queasy sexual politics should be accepted with an indulgent shrug as a harmless ‘bit of fun.’

An inaudible introduction charting the history of The Chicken Ranch and how it passed into the hands of Miss Mona narrated by Doatsey-Mae (Lindsay Scigliano), a waitress in the greasy spoon next door and a failed prostitute, is an unpromising start from which Paul Taylor-Mills’s production never really recovers. Miss Mona runs what she believes to be a respectable sort of house where “a certain kind of French” is spoken (‘guests’ rather than ‘customers’ and ‘sample salesmen’, not ‘pimps’), a high level of pastoral care is provided and the local Sheriff (an uncomfortable James Parkes) is an old friend. She and her girls live together like one big happy family; the conflict comes in the form of a campaign led by squealing television anchor and evangelist Melvin P. Thorpe (an immensely grating turn by Leon Craig in a Boris Johnson-style wig) to get the establishment closed down. The second act merely ties up a few loose ends.

There are no romances between whores and clients (it’s unusual to find a musical without a love story), none of the girls try to rebel and the old spark between Miss Mona and the Sheriff isn’t re-lit. A football team promised a field trip to the whorehouse as a special treat get the most memorable choreography with interesting display of male bonding featuring some athletic dancing with towels. Designer Kingsley Hall exploits the versatility of old fold-up beds, which act as shower cubicles and screens behind which the girls provide their services.

As Miss Mona, Sarah Lark is a fine singer and has a nicely approachable manner, but is decades too young and lacks blowsy authority. The youthfulness of the whole cast is something of a problem, particularly the whores who are far too fresh-faced to be convincingly world-weary, though Stephanie Tavernier offers powerful vocals and substantial presence as brothel housekeeper Jewel and it would make more sense if she had the narrator role.

The prostitute has a rich history in musical theatre, often idealised, but rarely sentimentalised in such a sickly manner (though it is the first musical I've ever seen that alludes to menstruation). When the gauche new girl Shy (Nancy Sullivan) takes to her new profession like a duck to water, the others congratulate her ‘Girl, You’re a Woman’ without irony as if it’s a wonderful act of empowerment. Along with an abrupt ending in which the leading lady accepts defeat (a strange way to end a romp), all of this is as hard to swallow as a Hard Candy Christmas.

Written for Exeunt

Review: The Queen of Spades (Arcola Theatre)

2011-10-19T16:38:00.000+01:00

Alexander Pushkin’s 1833 hallucinatory prose novella is immensely theatrical and it comes as a surprise that Max Hoehn’s staging is the first time it has been imagined on an intimate scale. This tale of German military engineer Hermann, who becomes obsessed with extracting the secret of the key to unlimited wealth held by a decrepit 87-year-old Countess, combines social satire, Gothic set pieces and a warning about the dangers of attempting to create one’s own destiny. A woman wearing a scarlet coat and a hat with a veil covering her face circles the stage like a circus ringmaster and twirls a cane; a younger woman emerges from the swathes of white fabric that act as a backdrop, and a young man, clad in only his long-johns, is clearly disturbed by the spectacle.

Fusebox Productions’ strikingly theatrical and stylised approach focuses on the three characters (like the three cards) who lead the story. Some of Raymond Blankenhorn’s rhyming couplets lapse into doggerel, but the form lends the wit and irony that drives the story a rhythmically agitated feel. Having asked Hoehn about the production’s operatic qualities, it seems more appropriate to describe it as balletic. Daniel Saleeb’s music and sound design is a key player alongside Hoehn’s emphasis on mime, integrating Russian folk tunes, the tinkling of a child’s music box and the roar of the traffic that Hermann rushes through with the Countess’s secret ringing in his ears.

After a somewhat lengthy prologue narrated by Hermann in his troubled state, we enter the story in style as a masked youthful Countess visits the ‘Wandering Jew’ Saint Germain, a strange kind of confidante with the power to make wishes come true. Hermann’s scheme to gain access to the Countess by sending love letters to her companion Liza, is played out like a silent film with jaunty piano music and exaggerated romantic gestures, the charming innocence undercut by Pushkin’s irony. The ultimate game of cards is dealt on a rocking table in what appears to be a seedy modern casino rather than a high society gathering; shifts in mood and time conveyed by Saleeb’s sound and Edmund Sutton’s lighting rather than any elaborate props.

Hoehn evokes an ambiguous sense of period with the timeless costumes, some modern turns of phrase and Liza incurs the Countess’s disdain for miserable Russian novels by reading from Anna Karenina (written 40 years after The Queen of Spades). The diminutive Norma Cohen is more eccentric than tyrannical as the Countess. There’s an unexpected moment of warmth between the Countess and Liza when the Countess brushes Liza’s hair and tells her about how women were less naïve about marriage in her day, the kind of advice a mother would give a daughter and would never appear in Pushkin.

Benjamin Way doesn’t capture the Napoleonic allure that mesmerises Liza and scares the Countess to death, but he offers a convincing portrayal of an outsider excluded by the privileged elite who have money to burn. He seems repelled by the idea of physical intimacy when the long-suffering but eager Liza, played with appealing openness by Jen Holt, throws herself at him.

Hoehn’s vision of The Queen of Spades is a bold one that’s filled with ambition (my companion commented that an adaptation she saw in Russia was much more traditional). If the production’s trump card is somewhat elusive with individual ideas more effective than the piece as a united whole, it’s an interesting and aesthetically and aurally invigorating take on one of the greatest short stories ever written.

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Review: Mixed Marriage (Finborough Theatre)

2011-10-18T10:19:00.000+01:00

Sam Yates’s very fine revival of Irish Protestant playwright St John Ervine’s 1911 ‘Belfast tragedy’ Mixed Marriage (the first London revival in 90 years), set in pre-partisan Ireland, arrives at the same time as the BBC’s Mixed Britannia series of documentaries dealing with a very similar matter. Marriages between different religions can be fraught with difficulties, signifying a breaking away from tradition and potential children caught in the middle of two cultures. Polemic-heavy plays can be something of a chore, but this piece, despite not being particularly subtle and undeniably mouthpiece-heavy, combines an agonising domestic tragedy and a contemporary resonance that’s tragically all too recognisable in an urgent 80 minutes.

The drama takes place in the kitchen of the working-class Protestant Rainey family led by bullish patriarch John Rainey (a defiant Daragh O’Malley) and his kindly wife, where a portrait of the Protestant hero William of Orange takes pride of place. Their Catholic neighbours Michael O’Hara and Nora Murray are regular guests for tea. Being friendly with Catholics and uniting in a workers’ strike against the corrupt bosses (based on a real-life strike led by dockyard workers in 1907) is one thing for Mr Rainey, but the idea of elder son Hugh (Christopher Brandon) marrying the steadfast Nora (Nora-Jane Noone) is something else entirely, leading to familial warfare and a tirade of anti-Catholic sentiment.

Ervine’s writing has some lovely domestic details and he’s particularly good at highlighting the conflict between the microcosm and macrocosm, and the personal and the political. To Mrs Rainey, Hugh and Nora’s love is the ultimate symbol of a united Ireland, but to her husband, it’s a selfish act between two incompatible factions putting their personal desires before their faith. The idealistic but equally headstrong younger generation is represented by Michael (Damien Hannaway), who is supportive of Hugh and Nora’s romance, but is always in pursuit of the bigger picture, admitting that he would sacrifice his own family for Ireland.

The cast of six are all impressive, particularly Fiona Victory, who gives a performance to treasure as Mrs Rainey (Ervine’s own mouthpiece, perhaps?), a warm-hearted and outwardly conventional matriarch with a sharp mind of her own. This devoted wife and mother is unafraid to stand up to her husband and articulate her acute sense of what really matters, the running joke about the different roles of men and women in regard to the strike turning into something more profound.

Yates makes excellent use of the Finborough’s compact space, evoking a close sense of claustrophobia and shabbiness assisted by Richard Kent’s sepia-tinted design and David Plater’s lighting. Alex Baranowski’s immersive sound design echoes from all corners, heightening the sense of entrapment and the outside world beyond the Raineys’ kitchen, with Mr Rainey’s pre-recorded speeches effectively covering the transitions between scenes.

Inevitably, things don’t end well for the lovers caught up in forces beyond their control. Nora, having been cast as a temptress by her prospective father-in-law, takes the blame by casting herself as the sacrificial lamb. It’s hard to tell whether this act is supposed to be seen as noble or misguided. Ervine’s play remains a plaintive cry for understanding and compassion. It is a bleak picture of the premature judgement day that explodes into the kitchen when bitter, irrational grievances prevent two people in love from choosing their own lives.

Written for A Younger Theatre

Review: The Zoo/Trial By Jury (Rosemary Branch Theatre)

2011-10-17T17:41:00.000+01:00

Playing alongside The Mikado as part of a three-week Gilbert and Sullivan festival at the Rosemary Branch, Charles Court Opera present two one-act entertainments: the rarely-performed collaboration between Sullivan and D.C. Stephenson The Zoo (Charles Court is the only professional company in the country to have the piece in its repertoire) and Gilbert and Sullivan’s first work together Trial By Jury, often presented as an appertif to their full-length works. These are miniature gems that take zaniness to a new level under John Savournin’s direction.

The Zoo is a perfectly bonkers tale of botched suicide attempts, too much cake and love across the class divide taking place amongst the wild animals of London Zoo. When a courtship conducted via prescriptions goes wrong, humble apothecary Æsculapius Carboy (David Menezes), clad in an anorak and socks with sandals, plans to commit suicide in the bear pit having been denied permission to marry the wheezing, runny-nosed wealthy grocer’s daughter Laetitia (Catrine Kirkman).

Alongside this awkward, inexperienced couple is the disguised do-gooding Duke of Islington (aptly played by Savournin) and his love Eliza (Rosie Strobel), a refreshment seller with a busy social calendar who is rewarded for ensuring that everyone is well fed by becoming Duchess of Islington. It seems something of a pity that the riotously earthy Strobel wasn’t born in the Victorian era as she could have been a music hall sensation.

The second piece moves from Regent’s Park to the bear baiting of reality TV, ‘Charles Court on Camera’, the realm of the likes of Jerry Springer and Jeremy Kyle where it shouldn’t come as a surprise if the participants behave like animals if they’re treated as such. The audience is introduced by Martin Lamb’s floor manager to a familiar parade of grotesques in Kirkman’s blinged-up, knocked-up ‘Am I bovvered?’ bride Angelina, a struggle for her lawyer to present her as a delicate flower, Menezes as the groom, Edwin, who’s taken up with another woman and Strobel as her pink shell-suited mate, nudging her to “Show him what he’s missing, Ange.” A most unreal surprise is the leggy Savournin as Judge Judy in a power suit and Jenni Murray-style spectacles, more interested in powdering her nose than the nuances of the case.

This is English eccentricity with a surreal twist that would surely be unanimously declared by this jury as a triumph – all the original material in tact performed by wonderful singers with a few hip-hop moves added for good measure.

Review: The Mikado (Rosemary Branch Theatre)

2011-10-09T17:17:00.000+01:00

A Charles Court Opera production at the Rosemary Branch is always a treat; this chamber opera company specialising in the works of Gilbert and Sullivan has premiered almost all of their 20-plus productions at the Rosie since their inception six years ago, returning with a mini-festival of works to commemorate the centenary of Gilbert’s death. This production of The Mikado featuring a cast of nine is minimalist in terms of set, but is quite the contrary in relation to the exuberance on display, the very high musical standards and the detailed characterisation.

The idea of exotic Japanoiserie (fans, kimonos, etc.) that so captivated nineteenth-century Europeans is stripped away, with a stylised red and black colour scheme in a possible nod to the comic bloodthirstiness that leads the plot. The costumes are 1920s-style with a twist; the very proper ‘gentlemen of Japan’ (more like ex-pats than locals) have their cravats and pocket handkerchiefs, while the travelling trombonist hero Nanki-poo is a floppy-haired beatnik in jeans and the ‘three little maids from school’ are dressed in gymslips that are actually cropped dungarees and matching black bobs.

Finding a volunteer willing to lose his head is rarely a simple matter. When ‘cheap tailor’ promoted to Lord High Executioner of Titipu Ko-Ko discovers that the position isn’t merely ceremonial, he comes across the conveniently suicidal Nanki-poo who agrees to take the chop in return for a month-long marriage to his lady love Yum-Yum, Ko-Ko’s own fiancée (as well as his ward). This arrangement isn’t quite as straightforward as it might seem, such as the law dictating that his widow be buried alive, but in true British stiff-upper-lip-style, they resolve to make the best of things. After a number of mishaps and double bluffs, bloodshed is averted – this is comic opera after all.

His Majesty The Mikado makes a relatively late entrance into the proceedings, portrayed by a munificent Simon Masterton-Smith who lends the character a hint of sadistic curiosity. Philip Lee is thoroughly entertaining as the flustered Ko-Ko, reminiscent of Uncle Albert in Mary Poppins with a tape measure draped around his neck. There’s a really rather sultry Katisha, the hag to whom Nanki-poo accidentally got engaged, in the vigorously energetic Rosie Strobel. She makes her entrance like Carabosse in The Sleeping Beauty in a puff of scarlet chiffon, with Pitti-sing and Peep-bo gathering around like the good fairies as she curses Yum-Yum. A very appealing pair of young lovers can be seen in Kevin Kyle’s easy-going Nanki-poo and Catrine Kirkman’s lovely Yum-Yum, an ingénue who doesn’t believe in false modesty.

The multi-talented John Savournin (the show’s director and choreographer) is also remarkably deft comic actor as the over-employed “born sneering” Lord High of Everything Else Pooh-bah of “pre-Adamite ancestral descent”, who gets many of the wittiest lines exposing the contorted logic of this topsy-turvy world where “every judge is own executioner.” Animated support also comes from Ian Bealdle’s arch Pish-tush, along with Caroline Kennedy’s spirited Peep-bo and the wonderful Susan Moore as a hilariously hearty Pitti-sing.

The cast are supported by David Eaton’s fizzing piano accompaniment. No punishments need be doled out on this delightful production delivered by a troupe of splendid singers whose high spirits have a contagious effect on the audience.

Written for Exeunt

Review: Noel and Gertie (Cockpit Theatre)

2011-10-04T11:16:00.000+01:00

When I told a friend that I was going to see Noel and Gertie, he seemed surprised that it was being revived as it was very much aimed at audience members of a certain age when he saw it in the 1980s. There can’t be many people today who remember Gertrude Lawrence’s stage appearances first-hand; she never became a film star and died in 1953, shortly after creating the role of Anna in The King and I. Noel Coward outlived her by 20 years and his most popular plays are still frequently revived, but he’s possibly best known for achieving mythical status alongside Lawrence as symbols of a bygone age of gilded glamour. The first musical staged at central London fringe venue the Cockpit in many years, it’s a gently affecting testament to friendship respectfully directed by the ubiquitous Thom Southerland.

With a script by the late Sheridan Morley (biographer of Coward and Lawrence) comprising Coward’s songs, excerpts from his plays, and personal letters and telegrams in the style of the revues that he was renowned for, the show takes place through a wistful haze of memory and sheet music after Lawrence’s death, framed by their greatest success together, Private Lives. While Elyot and Amanda’s love brings out the worst in each other, the disciplined Coward’s influence on the capricious Lawrence was one of the most constant aspects in their lives. Morley is rather coy about Coward’s sexuality; he admits not to liking women in ‘that’ way, but regarded them as the most exciting part of theatre. Despite their real-life relationship being entirely platonic, it seems that conveying a sexual chemistry was crucial to their onstage allure.

The leads don’t quite sizzle together: Ben Stock plays the piano well, but is too boyish to convince as a jaded, middle-aged Coward. Helena Blackman (the most talented How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? contestant), a much better singer than the real Lawrence, is every inch the 1920s starlet with her elegant composure, a touch of haughtiness and humble origins that weren’t quite as humble as she liked to make out. Their “tremendous transatlantic bickering” via telegrams could do with more zing, and the scene from Still Life (filmed as Brief Encounter) doesn’t wholly convince, but their moments together at the piano are lovely, with Blackman’s renditions of ‘Sail Away’ and ‘Why Must the Show Go On?’ showing remarkable control and empathy.

Biographical plays ought to give an insight into the real people behind the myth. Morley’s script offers human, if idealised, portraits of two people who lived for the theatre – when it came to balancing nine plays in Tonight at 8:30, “the strain didn’t bear thinking about; so we didn’t”.

Written for A Younger Theatre

Review: My City (Almeida Theatre)

2011-09-29T14:22:00.001+01:00

The idea of school assemblies being many children’s first experience of theatre is crucial to writer and director Stephen Poliakoff’s first stage play in 12 years.

A haunting, distinctive and mordantly witty piece of writing, My City explores the many hidden depths beneath the surface of London and the equally mysterious lives of teachers outside the classroom.

The past and present come together when city yuppie Richard (Tom Riley) discovers his primary school headmistress Miss Lambert, whose patience and flair for storytelling helped him to overcome his learning difficulties, sprawled on a bench outside St Paul’s Cathedral. This elegant woman is no vagrant, but a compulsive night-time wanderer of London’s streets.

This chance meeting leads to Richard and Julie (an endearingly blunt Siân Brooke), his former partner in special needs, being inducted into a bizarre coven led by retired teachers in a subterranean wine bar.
In these surroundings, Miss Lambert’s stories take a macabre turn, with historical flights of fancy replaced by urban legends of ghosts and teenage killers.

The eerie nocturnal world is wonderfully realised: Lez Brotherston’s designs evoke grandeur and dinginess, accompanied by creative sound design and splendidly murky lighting. It takes a few minutes to re-acclimatise to the house lights afterwards.

Tracey Ullman is fascinatingly serene with a touch of witchiness as the mystifying Miss Lambert. As her fellow teachers Sorcha Cusack shows touching devotion and David Troughton as suitcase-clutching Mr Minken delivers an extraordinary piece of storytelling at its most powerful and heartbreaking in recounting his Jewish father’s escape from Nazi-occupied Austria.

Written for Islington Gazette

Review: The Baker's Wife (Union Theatre)

2011-09-25T12:11:00.000+01:00

What makes a cult musical? For fans, is it the longing to restore a misunderstood work by a favourite composer to its rightful place in their canon? For a director, is it the desire to achieve a ‘By George, she’s got it’ moment where others have failed? At the very least, one would expect it to have something really startling about it. While Michael Strassen’s staging is perfectly charming, I’m bemused as to why The Baker’s Wife inspires such devotion with its lack of anything special. It’s obvious why Stephen Schwartz’s 1976 musical based on Marcel Pagnol’s film never made it to Broadway and flopped in the West End – above all, it has a hopeless book by Joseph Stein (most renowned for his work on Fiddler on the Roof) that’s devoid of character development, making every role a thankless one.

We know that we’re in France because we’re told so by the narrator, café proprietress and abused wife Denise (Ricky Butt), but the time period is uncertain: the costumes are vaguely 1930s-style, but it could just as easily be set in medieval Martin Guerre territory as a brief reference to a bus is the only concession to the twentieth century. The wall is covered with a striking chalk mural (by Robyn Wilson-Owen) featuring haunted Munch-esque female figures, indicating a dark sense of sexual mania that never transpires on stage. There’s nothing authentically Gallic about Schwartz’s music, but it’s lively enough and he deserves credit for rhyming ‘listless’ with ‘kissed less.’

The chattering, bread-deprived inhabitants of an isolated rural village are excited about the arrival of a new baker, Aimable, who turns up newly married to a beautiful young wife, Genevieve, who agreed to marry him when an affair with a married man ended. Aimable’s baking is a huge hit (with hints of suggestive baguette action), as is the virtuous Genevieve with the male residents. Initially resisting the local Marquis’s hunky manservant Dominique’s attentions, she submits and the pair plan to elope to Paris. In the meantime, her teetotal husband gets drunk and the villagers gossip some more. After a night of passion in a barn with her lover, she discovers that lust and a well-toned torso is no substitute for the warmth of her Baker’s oven, returns home and all is well. Madame Bovary, this is not.

Lisa Stokke is very sweet in the title role (something that’s impossible to imagine Patti LuPone, the original Genevieve, being) but remains on the same dramatic level throughout. Her rendition of the show’s stand-alone song ‘Meadowlark’ doesn’t convey the nervous euphoria of a woman about to embark on an affair with a “beautiful young man.” If the tactless villagers weren’t so obsessed with the age difference, she and the hardly decrepit Michael Matus wouldn’t seem mismatched at all. Matus brings an appealing vulnerability and palpable sense of adoration towards his wife. As the fancy man, Matthew Goodgame, who was a dead ringer for Clark Gable in Chichester Festival Theatre’s enchanting production of She Loves Me, here resembles a young Hugh Jackman, his warm voice and persuasive masculinity setting several audience members’ hearts aflutter.

While The Baker’s Wife itself is fated to be half-baked, Strasssen’s production (he also recently revived Schwartz’s Godspell at the Union) is engagingly staged, enjoyable to watch and captures the Union’s characteristic warmth – the cupcakes and petits fours on press night were a lovely touch.

Written for Exeunt

Review: Street Scene (Young Vic Theatre)

2011-09-23T10:12:00.001+01:00

This revival of The Opera Group’s production of Kurt Weill, Langston Hughes and Elmer Rice’s 1947 ‘Broadway opera’ Street Scene, returning to the Young Vic before a tour, shows John Fulljames’s staging to have been richly deserving of its Evening Standard Award for Best Musical in 2008. Street Scene is a piece that straddles boundaries of musical theatre and opera; Weill’s pulsating and agitated score employs operatic arias, Broadway show tunes, jazz and blues, interspersed with spoken dialogue, building up to one of the most visceral and heart-rendering denouements in either genre.

Taking place over a 24-hour period in sweltering heat on the dilapidated, overcrowded tenement block 346, the home of Jewish, German, Swedish, Italian and Irish immigrants, this adaptation of Rice’s own 1929 play is a tragedy of ordinary folk, in contrast to the satirical grotesques found in Weill’s collaborations with Brecht. While children play hopscotch and draw chalk pictures, the matrons assemble in their faded floral dresses to catch a little fresh air and share gossip and grievances: Mrs Hildebrand’s daughter graduates from high school on the same day that the family faces eviction, the birth of the Buchanans’ first baby is nigh and tempers are running high. A radical elderly Jew speaks fervently about a new conception of society, while the brutish Mr Maurrant (a menacing turn by Geof Dolton) wants everything back to “the way it used to be.”

With Hughes’s lyrics rather swamped by the orchestra (the BBC Concert Orchestra until press night and Southbank Sinfonia Touring thereafter), I was nervous during the opening numbers as to how this would impede the drama (surtitles might have been beneficial). While the acoustics aren’t ideal, it's fortunate that the emotion conveyed transcends words. It comes together when the lynchpin of the piece Anna Maurrant (played with heartbreaking straightforwardness by Elena Ferrari) pours her heart out about her high hopes for a happy marriage destroyed by her violent alcoholic husband and the sense of abandonment experienced when her much-loved children no longer need her in the aria ‘Somehow I Never Could Believe.’ As soon as Mrs Maurrant’s back is turned, she is torn to pieces by her neighbours, particularly the sanctimonious Mrs Jones (Charlotte Page), her affair with the milkman Mr Sankey being common knowledge and a ticking time bomb until her husband finds out.

Also navigating matters of love are an outstanding pair of juvenile leads: Susanna Hurrell gives a delicately wistful and beautifully sung performance as the belle of the tenement Rose Maurrant, negotiating the advances of her sleazy married boss (James McCoran-Campbell) with his flashy promises of putting her on Broadway and the earnest attentions of Sam Kaplan, the studious nice Jewish boy next door (perfectly portrayed by Paul Curievici), who intends to escape from poverty by becoming a lawyer. Their plan to flee from the prejudices and unfriendliness of New York (strongly echoing and pre-dating West Side Story’s ‘Somewhere’) is expressed with poignant sincerity, made as transient as the chalk pictures that illustrate it by reality. Curievici’s rendition of ‘Lonely House’ is also a vocal and dramatic high point, an all-too-true contemplation of how isolation can be even more potent when surrounded by other people.

Arthur Pita’s choreography shines in a jive number performed with consummate precision by Kate Nelson and John Moabi, bringing a seedy glamour to block 346 (represented by Dick Bird’s iron-laddered set, which accommodates the orchestra) and an ode to the refreshing qualities of ice cream led by flamboyant Italian Mr Fiorentino (Joseph Shovelton). While Street Scene is a piece that is infrequently performed due to its episodic structure and uncertain genre classification, Fulljames’s full-bodied production demonstrates the timeless potency of this tragedy of everyday life and that to quibble about its categorisation is beyond the point.

Written for Exeunt

Review: Perchance to Dream (Finborough Theatre)

2011-09-13T16:54:00.002+01:00

Perchance to Dream, like most of Ivor Novello’s musicals, was something of an anachronism in its own time, celebrating a fairytale kind of Englishness (even though Novello himself was Welsh). Being immensely popular with audiences in the aftermath of World War II in 1945, it ran for 1,022 performances starring the non-singing Novello himself as the lead, but despite the evergreen appeal of its most famous song ‘We’ll Gather Lilacs’, Novello has been less than fashionable for years.

Spanning three generations in Huntersmoon, a crumbling ancestral manse filled with “Old Masters and young mistresses”, the tale begins during the Regency era in 1818, moving 25 years ahead into the Victorian period, andfinally jumps a century forward to 1943, when air raid sirens are wailing but the ghosts that haunt the house are laid to rest. Rather than adhering to happy-ever-after conventions usually found in novelette-ish plots, Novello offers something more bittersweet, the lashings of romanticism tinged with the shadow of death – one can detect shades of a less coarse The Beggar’s Opera, with echoes of the unquiet sleepers found in Wuthering Heights.

Director Max Pappenheim (who also played the piano at the performance I attended) resists the temptation to put an ironic spin on the proceedings, allowing Novello’s enchanting music and witty libretto to work its own magic, delivered by a very winning ensemble. Novello’s integration of the music and book is a delight, with songs arising from choir practice, an impromptu concert around the fire, and the joy of a wedding day. The only exception is a rather gratuitous ballet celebrating the seasons.

It’s amusing to see James Russell and Claire Redcliffe from the Finborough’s Christmas production of J.M. Barrie’s Quality Street reunited as another pair of Regency lovers: Russell (playing another Valentine in the Victorian act) lacks finesse as an actor, but he cuts a dashing figure as Regency buck and closet highwayman Sir Graham Rodney. Redcliffe’s delicate physique suits wide-eyed ingénue Melinda perfectly, turning her daintiness to a very different advantage as ‘glo-glo’ dancing home-wrecker Melanie. It’s hard to tell whether we’re supposed to be on her side just because fate has ordained that she and Valentine are meant to be together as my sympathies remained firmly with his wife. As the obligatory battleaxe, Annabel Leventon’s caustic Aunt Chatty, whom we see mellow over the years, relishes most of the best lines and could hold her own against many a grande dame with her flawless delivery.

Along with a leading man who doesn’t sing, the piece is also unusual in having two heroines. The more interesting of the two is Lydia Lyddington, a seasoned lady of the theatre who finds giving up her lover more difficult than anticipated and whose daughter, Veronica, makes the seemingly perfect wife for composer Valentine (both played by Kelly Price). Price’s renditions of ‘Love Is My Reason, ‘A Woman’s Heart’ and particularly ‘We’ll Gather Lilacs’ (with Natalie Langston) are things of beauty. While she might lose the hero, getting to break the audience’s hearts and having the best songs seems ample compensation.

Despite appearing in the Finborough’s Sunday and Monday window for a modest eight performances, Pappenheim’s production would be deserving of the main slot. If one can leave all cynicism in the bar, this is a delicious wallow in nostalgia, love and loss, the kind that so captivated post-war audiences.

Written for Exeunt

Review: The Belle's Stratagem (Southwark Playhouse)

2011-09-11T20:32:00.000+01:00

The Belle’s Stratagem is a play that even the most notoriously cross-referential critic would have trouble comparing to another version, as ‘lady playwright’ Hannah Cowley’s 1780 play hasn’t graced the stage since a regional production in 1888.

While Hannah Cowley was unusually well-educated for a woman of her time and The Belle’s Stratagem was a big hit in its day, it disappeared rapidly when Richard Brinsley Sheridan became manager of Drury Lane and removed this exhibition of cunning, outspoken females from the repertoire. If kind readers will forgive me for cross-referencing, I found the modern elements of Jessica Swale’s concept reminiscent of Deborah Warner’s recent production of Sheridan’s The School for Scandal at the Barbican, but the execution couldn’t be more different. In contrast to Warner’s aggressive method, Swale’s fluid and warm-hearted production establishes a convivial relationship between the cast and audience, releasing the mischievousness of the eighteenth century that is often suppressed under staid artificiality, accentuated by Simon Kenny’s vibrant design and a parade of brightly coloured gowns.

The Westminster Chimes and Lily Allen’s ‘Why Would I Wanna Be Anywhere Else’ sung in counterpoint sets the scene for Swale’s playful approach with unexpected touches that are charming rather than jarring (including a lace capped rendition of the Spice Girls’ ‘Wannabe’). The frothy plot belies Cowley’s forward-thinking ideas: Miss Letitia Hardy and Mr Doricourt have been betrothed from birth but haven’t seen each other since childhood. Letitia, disappointed by her intended’s lack of enthusiasm about marrying her, is determined not to marry without mutual love (even – heaven forbid – preferring to remain single) and hatches a surprising plan to tease him, to appal him and to eventually win his passion at a masquerade ball. Meanwhile, Lady Frances Touchwood, a young wife kept in solitary confinement by her jealous husband, is taken under the wing of Mrs Racket and Miss Ogle who contrive to turn her into a ‘fine lady’, “A creature for whom nature has done much, but education more,” the very kind that her husband finds so threatening.

Amongst the capable ensemble, Gina Beck (who leads the songs with her lovely voice) is enchanting as ingénue Letitia, a true lady of spirit who exposes the double standards of women who enter marriage straight from finishing school, while men are free to roam. Michael Lindall’s lithe Doricourt provides an impressive display of feigned madness, improvising at one point with my wine glass. As the secondary couple, Hannah Spearritt’s sheltered Lady Frances makes a stand by refusing to let her husband continue treating her like a child, with Joseph MacNab blustering effusively as the insecure Sir George, a husband with an interest in choosing his wife’s gowns. The more mature ladies are represented by Jackie Clune as the acerbic spinster Miss Ogle and the wonderful Maggie Steed as Mrs Racket, a widow dressed in scarlet who refuses to conform to conventional norms, a subversive influence on the young ladies under her guidance. Christopher Logan’s bitchy rumourmonger Flutter manages to stay on the right side of grotesque and Robin Soans is a highly entertaining presence as Letitia’s cross-dressing father.

While it’s perplexing that The Belle’s Stratagem has remained in mothballs for so long, its obscure status heightens the sense of what a treat this production is. Swale and her cast have created a triumphant spectacle of Georgian girl power that’s accompanied by the most delightful programme I’ve ever received – an exquisite piece of craftsmanship in itself.

Written for A Younger Theatre

Review: Ragtime (Landor Theatre)

2011-09-09T12:30:00.000+01:00

Stephen Flaherty, Lynn Ahrens and Terrence McNally’s musical Ragtime (which premiered on Broadway in 1998 and in the West End in 2003) is about the energy and modernity embodied in the ‘real’ music of African American culture that was beginning to cross boundaries at the turn of the twentieth century. Robert McWhir’s astonishing production exploits every nook and cranny of the Landor Theatre, evoking the teeming American melting pot in 1906 through illusions and imagination. This fast-moving, pared-down staging, which can’t rely on the spectacle of fireworks and a real motorcar that the original production enjoyed, restores the piece’s somewhat Brechtian roots, making a truly immersive experience in which one is placed right in the midst of the turbulence.

Taking place in the bustling metropolis of New York City and the leafy, all-white suburb of New Rochelle, by way of Atlantic City, the three strands of the story (mixing fact and fiction) are held together by Mother (a sensitively modulated performance by Louisa Lydell), a privileged housewife who has thus far lived the “too safe” life expected of a woman of her social standing, given an opportunity to do something different when her firework manufacturer husband leaves to go exploring for a year. Upon discovering an abandoned black baby, she takes the child and his washerwoman mother, Sarah, into her comfortable home. Also crisscrossing in the microcosm is Tateh, a Latvian Jew with a young daughter, disillusioned by the way in which the Land of Opportunity offers the same deprivations and prejudices as the Old World and strikes up an unlikely rapport with Mother.

As the tragic Sarah, Rosalind James, with her gorgeous voice and clear-eyed innocence, makes a deeply heartfelt sacrificial lamb. Her baby’s estranged father, ragtime pianist Coalhouse Walker, renounces his womanising past and tracks them down in order to win her back. In the process, he befriends Sarah’s benefactress and her Little Boy and Younger Brother (David McMullan), motivating the latter’s development from a dandy to a political activist. Kurt Kansley has charisma to burn, compellingly charting Coalhouse’s journey from a carefree musician to a vengeful arsonist, driven by injustice. There is a performance of outstanding empathy by John Barr as Tateh (reprising the role he understudied in the original London production), struggling to make enough money to feed himself and his daughter by selling silhouettes on the streets, imbued with the canny business sense to his little “movie books” into something profitable, and has a warm bond with Lydell’s Mother.

Amongst the supporting cast, Judith Paris exudes zealous energy as anarchist Emma Goldman; Alexander Evans’s Father embodies the narrow-minded attitudes and casual racism of his time and Hollie O’Donoghue sparkles as scandalous entertainer Evelyn Nesbit. One of the greatest joys of the production is the way in which every member of the cast of 21 is sharply defined an individual (something that you wouldn’t get in a cast of 60), and collectively make up a force to be reckoned with.

Choreographer Philip Conley adeptly manoeuvres these groups of people who don’t know how to interact with each other, jostling for space in an overcrowded city, as well as the intricate theatricality of a very Chicago-esque courtroom number, a rowdy baseball game and a silent film shoot. In a nod to Tateh’s silhouettes, the cityscape and waves of the ocean are evoked by projected shadows (designed by Martin Thomas), with transitions between settings aided by Howard Hudson’s creative lighting.

The five-piece band led by George Dyer play Flaherty’s complex score with ferocious commitment. This important musical feels uncannily timely in light of recent events in London – angry, ardent and limitless in compassion, this is a tremendous achievement that brims with infectious fervour.

Written for Exeunt

Review: Le nozze di Figaro (British Youth Opera at Peacock Theatre)

2011-09-06T16:25:00.000+01:00

William Kerley’s staging of Mozart’s 1786 opera Le nozze di Figaro is the fifth time that British Youth Opera have produced this much-loved piece since their second summer season in 1988. One can see why it’s such an appealing choice for a youthful cast, with its dazzling music, balance of wit and pathos and, as Peter Robinson explains in the programme notes, Mozart, who died at the early age of 35, often wrote music with his favourite young singers in mind. Many of the ridiculously talented and accomplished cast members have at least one degree under their belts, offering a very high level of professionalism combined with youthful ebullience. Despite usually being an avid note taker, this was one occasion in which I had to put my notebook and pen away and immerse myself in the music.

Based on the second play in Beaumarchais’s Figaro trilogy, the Count and Countess Almaviva’s honeymoon is long over and the skirt-chasing Count, overcome with lust for his valet Figaro’s fiancée Susanna, wants to reinstate the barbaric feudal practice of a master having the right to ravish his female servants before their wedding. Meanwhile, the domineering Marcellina regards Figaro has her own property, and, aided by her henchman Dr Bartolo, plans to force him into marrying her by using incomprehensible legal jargon. Matters become fearfully complicated until, after much confusion, hiding behind furniture and a number of white lies, everyone is united with the right partner.

Taking place against a traditional pre-revolutionary, eighteenth century setting, the production is lovely to look at and the costumes are the stuff of costume drama dreams. The set (by Matthew Wright) comprising a series of linked window frames is cleverly assembled, with David Howe’s lighting creating a beautifully sun-dappled effect – which could be a metaphor for the entire production.

Matthew Stiff is a rich-voiced and likable Figaro, paired with Ellie Laugharne, who sparkles as the clever and mischievous Susanna. Eleanor Dennis gives a touching and sumptuously sung portrayal of the Countess, worn down by the thankless task of being a devoted and faithful wife, and strengthened by her capacity to love. There’s a natural and easy rapport between the two sopranos, creating a warm mistress-servant relationship and their voices blend together beautifully. Rather than being overtly lecherous, John Savournin effectively communicates the Count’s oily sense of entitlement, with a persuasive and somewhat menacing baritone. Katie Bray charmingly conveys household pet Cherubino’s adolescent love-struck confusion, dressed up as a solider with a bucket for a helmet and broom for a sword. There’s also strong support from Sioned Gwen Davies’s ample Marcellina, a villainess who becomes a benefactress, and Thomas Faulkner as her loyal sidekick.

It isn’t a short evening at three and a half hours (including interval), but it fizzes along under Alexander Ingram’s conducting and Southbank Sinfonia’s playing. Kerley’s direction is perhaps a little coy in regard to the opera’s subversive aspects, eschewing revolutionary zeal in favour of sunshine, but complements the buoyant and playful approach. As the Almaviva household enjoy the spectacle of a firework display, ending this day of madness on an entirely joyous note seems completely apt, as all the young people involved in the production deserve to have many more ahead of them.

Written for A Younger Theatre

Review: Pandora's Boxes (Rosemary Branch Theatre)

2011-09-01T13:24:00.002+01:00

The neighbour who encourages the eponymous Pandora’s husband to open the mysterious box remarks, “Without curiosity, where would we be?” As an inquisitive person, a life without curiosity would be unbearable. Taking its cue from the Greek myth, Pandora’s Boxes, which Denise O’Leary originally wrote as a radio play, is given a stylish theatrical transposition by Dimitry Devdariani, offering a quirky and engaging fable exploring what it means to ‘have it all’.

Pandora, her Husband and Baby Son live modestly and contentedly in a rural Eastern European state, uninterested in any kind of change until a “real life box” (a television set) opens up a world of obsessive consumerism. It’s somewhat reminiscent of a comic strip in regard to the broadly drawn characters (only Pandora has a name) and the predictable yet surreal path that they take. O’Leary has an acute ear for the absurd, her gently satirical tone exemplified in the advertisements promoting luxury food, cigarettes and cosmetics that Pandora suddenly can’t live without. Some of the scenes do feel rather choppy, though I wouldn’t want it to be much longer as the 50-minute running time prevents the joke from becoming stale.

The most startling revelation for Pandora (a poignant performance by Margarita Nazarenko) is the idea that a woman can be something other than a housewife and mother. Seduced by the idea of being ‘modern’ like her sister, she sells her long hair in favour of a low-maintenance bob and takes a job selling ‘boxes’ of all different kinds under the guidance of a slippery boss (Richard Holt) who wants something other than hard work in return. The patient Husband (Charles Church) is ultimately more unworldly than chauvinistic, having never had any reason to think outside accepted norms. Victoria Johnston plays the antithetical roles of Pandora’s sister, the perfect model of a ‘modern’ woman whose idea of living life to the full is to make as much money as possible and spend it on designer goods, and a childminder scathing about mothers who don’t bother to look after their own children and treat them as fashion accessories. The cast also deserve credit for Slavic accents that don’t lapse into caricature. The sentimental ending befits a morality tale, but feels simplistic following the questions that precede it.

This would be a good show for a first date – short, light and easy to watch, but also provides plenty to talk about over a delicious home-cooked Rosemary Branch meal afterwards.

Written for A Younger Theatre

Review: The Wolf (Network Theatre)

2011-08-13T18:54:00.001+01:00

The big bad wolf is perhaps the most Freudian of fairytale characters, a figure of corruption and carnal sexuality. The Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnár’s (probably best known to English speaking audiences for Liliom, which inspired Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel) 1912 bourgeois marital comedy The Wolf is a fairly unknown beast, receiving its first British airing since 1973 in a production by Sturdy Beggars (a young ensemble of Poor School graduates) at the elusive Network Theatre, a perfectly proportioned black box tucked away under the arches of Waterloo station. Molnár’s interest in Freud is evident in his portrayal of repressed desires that surface in dreams, which become different with time and reality (and makes the act two twist more interesting than an old cliché). It’s a farce with a bleak edge; rather than domestic harmony being restored at the end when the wolf turns out to be a gauche middle manager, the husband and wife both break down in tears.

Eugene and Vilma Kelemen are having an early dinner out before returning home to prepare for a high society soirée hosted by a countess, at which Eugene intends to seal an important business deal that should earn a million kronen for Vilma’s future happiness. Kelemen, who is not handsome, witty, nor dashing, is madly jealous with an inferiority complex, unable to come to terms with his luck in marrying her. He feels as if he needs to pay her off in order to prove his love. As they bicker, a mysterious stranger, recognised by the prattling cavalry officers at the neighbouring table, enters the restaurant. Kelemen recognises him from an old photograph as Vilma’s former suitor George Szabo, who seven years previously vowed to win her back, leading to a series of interrogations and fantasies that become increasingly nightmarish.

Brendan Jones’s neurotic Kelemen isn’t exactly endearing, but he makes his character’s obsessive paranoia plausible. Katherine French, while a tad shrill, is a good foil for Jones with her portrayal of “an honest, upstanding woman without an ounce of romanticism”, a model of self-denial dressed in virginal white who also harbours fantasies for something more exciting. Alexander Andreou makes light work of portraying five different versions of the same character: a world-weary military hero (who enslaved a small Balkan nation for his beloved), a dashing attaché, a broadly comic baritone (in Rigoletto costume), a humble servant and finally the anticlimactic reality. Andrew Mudie and Dan Addis make a very amusing double act and Josie Martin milks some of the broadest comedy as the fainting countess.

Jamie Harper’s light-handed staging benefits from pleasing production values (a nicely homey design by Charlotte Randell, with cleverly dismantling furniture to create different settings), atmospheric lighting (by Dan Addis) and neatly choreographed transitions between scenes (though the prancing with the furniture is a little excessive). While it does take rather a long time to wrap everything up, it’s an accomplished and spirited production of an intriguing play, offering a welcome glimpse into the richness of turn-of-the-century European theatre.

Written for Exeunt

Review: Crazy for You (Open Air Theatre)

2011-08-11T12:37:00.001+01:00

The Open Air Theatre never cancels a performance due to bad weather before the starting time and, true to form, the show certainly went on in the face of civil unrest on a deceptively beautifully clear evening. Regent’s Park provides a cocoon of tranquillity for this George and Ira Gershwin musical comedy that was devised in 1993 as a ‘trunk’ musical using Girl Crazy (1930) with its East Coast–Wild West clash as a starting point. It’s filled with songs from the Gershwin catalogue and features an original book by Ken Ludwig (who wrote Lend Me A Tenor) in the spirit of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland “Let’s put on a show!” extravaganzas, which relies rather too heavily on post-modern nudge-nudge-wink-wink jibes. It’s a perfectly preposterous bit of hokum with wonderful music and Timothy Sheader directs with great flair, but it does feel somewhat less satisfying than recent Regent’s Park offerings Into The Woods and Hello, Dolly! due to the lack of a really well-written book.

The hero, Bobby, is a young man who works in a bank but longs to be a dancer in the Zangler Follies. Dominated by his bossy mother and a disapproving fiancée, he’s sent to Deadrock, Nevada, a depressed mining town in the “armpit of the American West” to repossess a disused theatre and (literally) falls head over heels for the feisty Polly, the daughter of the theatre’s owner. When Polly doesn’t want anything to do with him after discovering that he’s from the bank, Bobby decides to impersonate the impresario Bela Zangler in order to put on a benefit show to save the theatre. His gaggle of lady friends from the follies (all wonderful dancers) turn the ranchers into dancers, but an audience fails to materialise. As soon as morale is re-established, the real Zangler turns up and confusion ensues.

In true Regent’s Park style, the staging is delightful: Peter McKintosh’s wooden set nimbly revolves between the flashing lights of Broadway and the barrenness of Nevada. Stephen Mear’s choreography is vibrant as always, with lots of elegant Fred-and-Ginger style soft-shoe and it particularly shines in the quirkier moments that integrate homespun props with the Broadway glitz. There’s excellent work from musical director Gareth Valentine. providing an exuberant sound throughout . Credit is also due to the pigeon cleverly circling above during ‘Someone to Watch Over Me.’

American performer Sean Palmer is a true triple threat, brimming with natural charm and elegance, as well as being an excellent mimic. His leading lady Clare Foster is full of pep and also has an affecting wistfulness underneath her fierce façade. Kim Medcalf gets to explore her vampy side when her prim and proper New Yorker, antagonised by Michael McKell’s bit of rough, discovers her inner ‘Naughty Baby’ and David Burt has fun as the volatile Hungarian impresario. Harriet Thorpe and Samuel Holmes are also highly entertaining as a pair of jolly hockey-sticks British explorers clad in safari khakis. Their solution of a ‘Stiff Upper Lip’ and a nice cup of tea in the threat of adversity seemed remarkably prescient.

It’s very lively and glittery, a world away from any real-life troubles. The anti-materialist sentiment of ‘I Got Rhythm’ is a heartening one – an inspirational message to bear in mind

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Review: Dames at Sea (Union Theatre)

2011-08-01T14:37:00.002+01:00

Dames at Sea is an affectionate homage to frothy ‘a star is born’ 1930s musicals, a cross between 42^nd Street, Anything Goes and On The Town. It premiered off-Broadway in 1966 starring a very young Bernadette Peters (who was herself a last-minute replacement). Jim Wise’s score is sprightly and tuneful, while George Haimsohn and Robin Miller’s lyrics and book are playfully knowing and referential, without being in the least bit cynical. The story of an unknown dancer, who goes out on the poop deck a chorus girl and comes back a star and the new sweetheart to the US Navy, is presented with exquisite style and humour in Kirk Jameson’s production at the Union Theatre, with a sweetness rarely equalled by West End extravaganzas.

Our plucky heroine Ruby (named after 42^nd Street’s star Ruby Keeler) arrives in New York from Utah with only a worn pair of tap shoes to her name; she lands a chorus line spot replacing a girl who has eloped with a rich patron, and promptly faints in the arms of song writing sailor Dick, who happens to be from the same tiny town in Utah. To Ruby’s jealousy, Dick finds himself preyed upon by the star of the show Mona Kent, the legendary “Lady Macbeth of 42^nd Street”. When the theatre is bulldozed to make way for a roller skating rink during the dress rehearsal, the show is relocated to the battleship where Dick is stationed, and it transpires that Mona isn’t a good sailor. No setback is too intimidating for this team – when the chorus boys sink, the sailors line up to audition.

The entire cast is a joy: Gemma Sutton is kittenish and apple-cheeked as Ruby, with a delightful voice, touching vulnerability and the wholesome sensuality of a Betty Grable or Alice Faye. She’s well paired with the sweet Daniel Bartlett (in his professional debut) as her love interest. Catriana Sandison displays great verve and powerful pipes as Ruby’s more worldly friend Joan, and has an engaging rapport with Alan Hunter as her on-off sailor boyfriend, Lucky. The Phantom of the Opera’s original Carlotta Rosemary Ashe is a hybrid of Ethel Merman and Bette Davis, making an indomitable diva who stops at nothing to stay the top. There’s fun character work from Anthony Wise as the show’s harassed director and Ian Mowat as Mona’s old flame Captain ‘Kewpie Doll’ Courageous, and the ensemble are charming.

Drew McOnie’s choreography is a witty delight, including a wistful dream sequence for Ruby, a dramatic Latin-flavoured number as Mona and the Captain renew their acquaintance and even a bit of synchronised swimming in the Union’s confines. The chaotic backstage area is characterised by an array of trunks and crates and a curtain of $100 bills (by Kingsley Hall, who also provides the vibrant costumes – his first design credit). Steve Miller’s lighting is amongst the most creative I’ve ever seen in a fringe show and the twin pianos (MD Richard Bates) are jauntily played.

This is perfect summer feel-good theatre that made me smile and laugh throughout (though the ‘Oriental’ ‘Singapore Sue’ number could be eliminated…). Pastiche can often pale in comparison to the real thing, but this production is an irresistible slice of fun that showcases everything that is good about fringe musicals.

Written for A Younger Theatre

Review: Pericles (Open Air Theatre)

2011-07-21T20:50:00.000+01:00

Review: Anne Boleyn (Shakespeare's Globe)

2011-07-18T19:30:00.000+01:00

Howard Brenton’s salty, irreverent and post-modern take on the life and influence of Henry VIII’s second wife (returning for a second run after garnering great acclaim last season) very much belongs to the Globe. The sociable, inclusive atmosphere where characters take the audience into their confidence and the certain excesses in performances and direction wouldn’t be the same in any other venue.

In linking Anne Boleyn’s story with that of her daughter Elizabeth’s successor, James I of England/VI of Scotland, it’s the ghost of the ‘Boleyn whore,’ an advocate of the ‘heretic’ William Tyndale, whose 1520s translation of the Bible would lay the foundation for James’s own project, the King James Bible, several years later.

The newly crowned James I (James Garnon) is ill at ease in England and full of (rather overstated) nervous tics and twitches. This is an eccentric figure with ideas about extending tolerance to Catholics and who dons Anne’s coronation gown to perform a dance full of ambitious lifts with his handsome favourite George Villiers (Ben Deery), an outsider who probably would have been more comfortable as a scholar than a king. Anne, however, has been dead long enough to relish her notoriety, and walks on stage clad in a white nightgown and carrying a blood- stained bag. She teases the audience about its contents before proudly displaying her severed head. Miranda Raison makes a radiant and delightfully mischievous and personable Anne, who can wrap her spectators around her little finger. After a harrowing recollection of her execution, she proclaims, “And now I’m with Jesus!” with childlike glee.

As with most historical fiction, Brenton takes certain liberties with the facts – there’s no historical evidence that Anne Boleyn and William Tyndale (a charismatically rustic Peter Hamilton Dyer, living a furtive existence with his band of outcasts in the forest) ever met. Rather than being a victim of an aspirational family (who are absent from the play, as is Catherine of Aragon) or a heartless schemer, Brenton presents Anne as a deeply religious figure being motivated by the idea of becoming the first Protestant queen and introducing religious reform to England than by self interest (though a cynic could argue that both are interlinked).

Contrary to the popular image of an obese monster, Anthony Howell portrays a slim, refined and loving Henry (Anne maintains that he was “a good husband” – apparentlyit’s different amongst royals). He and Raison evoke a palpable sense of a man and a woman passionately in love. The idea that a king, used to having his way in all matters, would sustain a five-year chaste relationship, as forcing himself upon his beloved would lead to his own emasculation, is the stuff of courtly romances. The audience is dismissed with an interval when Anne, certain of marriage, finally agrees to sleep with him.

Julius D’Silva is superb as a thoroughly chilling Thomas Cromwell, a workaholic whose influence extends everywhere. The fact that he and Anne are allies on matters of religion doesn’t lend her any protection. No nonsense to the end, following Anne’s arrest, he barks at his minions to get on with the paperwork. There is also fine support from Sophie Duval as Anne’s nervy sister-in-law Lady Rochford, not willingly treacherous but a victim of Cromwell’s bullying, and Colin Hurley as a gluttonous Cardinal Wolsey.

Anne’s downfall is underplayed, perhaps because the accusations of incest and witchcraft are too ridiculous to rebuff. In a parallel scene to the community and hymn singing of the first act, we see Tyndale and his followers receive her less than cordially, but we don’t get to see Henry turn against her, denying us the full arc of a love that became as poisonous as it once was ardent. While not a perfectly constructed play with a rather weak conclusion, much of that can be forgiven.

John Dove’s exuberant direction with its rich detail (he previously directed Brenton’s In Extremis at the Globe) makes full use of the Globe’s innate sense of pageantry, filling the stage with luxurious velvets and satins. The fact that Brenton seems rather smitten with Anne Boleyn is hardly surprising – this was a formidably well-educated, intelligent and principled woman living in extraordinary times, who made the most of every opportunity that came her way.

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Review: Carousel (Landor Theatre)

2011-07-15T14:11:00.000+01:00

Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel (which is set in 1878, but in this production is updated to 1945) premiered on Broadway in 1945, the year World War II ended and two years before Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire appeared. The Bigelow and Kowlasky marriages are both based on an sexual attraction that is somewhat animalistic; one of the differences being that Carousel’s Julie, unlike Streetcar’s Stella, isn’t aroused by violence and sees in Billy a childlike vulnerability that Stanley hasn’t really got. There is something of the Angry Young Man of the 1950s in Billy Bigelow (based on the eponymous anti-hero of Ferenc Molnar’s 1909 play Liliom) in this musical that combines domesticity with fantasy and an emotionalism that’s made all the more powerful by so much that goes unsaid.

Jeremy Lloyd Thomas’s production for Almost-Normal, featuring a young cast of predominantly Mountview graduates, is very rough around the edges. It rolls along at a brisk pace, but several crucial moments are brushed over, denying the piece its full emotional impact. The direction is fairly pedestrian with awkward transitions between scenes, the American accents are seriously dubious, and several soloists struggle to fill the small space. The reduction of the orchestral score played by a piano duo is hit and miss. There are passages of the truncated Carousel Waltz (much

of which the cast vocalise acapella-style) and Louise’s Ballet that sound unrecognisable or out of tune.

There is a dreamlike atmosphere to the opening sequence as Louise (a feisty Georgia Bevis), the fifteen-year old daughter of the brief union between Julie Jordan and Billy Bigelow, wanders amidst the ensemble as the seedy seaside carnival springs into action. The rough-and-ready choreography by Lainie Baird and Jodie-Lee Wilde serves its purpose and is energetically performed. Rachel Stone’s functional set comprises of a doorway framed with jagged wooden strips with the titular carousel represented by a single carousel horse and piled-up wooden crates, which the lovers scramble around on, and also acts a viewing platform from the heavenly waiting room.

Sean-Paul Jenkinson is miscast as Billy Bigelow; he conveys the thuggish side of the character well, but rushes through his lines and is strained vocally, without the bad boy allure and suppressed tenderness that makes Billy something other than just a yob. At the end of ‘If I Loved You’, he and Julie kiss because they’re supposed to, rather than it being a glorious culmination of two people overwhelmed by an erotic charge that neither can quite explain. Ebony Buckle is more impressive as Julie, with her elegant bearing and flashing eyes. Her performance of the death scene is outstanding, as she cradles the dead Billy in her arms, kisses him for the final time and wavers between anger and tenderness before breaking down in despair.

In a production that relies too heavily on mugging, Iddon Jones’s Mr Snow (the fisherman intended of Julie’s best friend Carrie) is a delight when he appears in his flannel shorts and knee socks, interrupting Carrie’s (Chelsea Corfield) wedding fantasy enacted with a dust-sheet veil and dustpan-and-brush bouquet (one of the most creative touches in the show). There’s a self-deprecating charm to this mismatched pair, with Jones showcasing the finest voice in the cast.

Richard Rodgers deemed Carousel his crowning achievement, but this isn’t the most satisfying production. The 1945 setting, which surely would have hit too close to home at the time of writing, doesn’t jar with the material, but under the conservative direction ultimately feels rather superficial, as if there is a finer point to be made.

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Review: Eden End (Richmond Theatre)

2011-07-12T16:34:00.001+01:00

Life upon the wicked stage ain’t ever what a girl supposes. There was certainly very little glamour to be found amongst the minor ranks of the Edwardian repertory system. The protagonist of this slow-burning family drama dealing with change, belonging and the importance of maintaining illusions is Stella Kirby (an effervescent Charlotte Emmerson), an actress who returns to the titular family nest after several years of silence, seeking respite from dingy dressing rooms, dreary provincial towns and far-reaching but aimless travel, breathlessly expressing her delight at coming home. During her absence, her mother, who never approved of having a daughter on the stage, has died; her doctor father is worn out; and her two younger siblings have grown up and are trying to make sense of their own positions in the world.

This comparatively neglected play by JB Priestley, written in the midst of a new wave of political turmoil in 1934 and set in 1912, lays the dramatic irony of the ordeal ahead thick and fast, with remarks such as, “1916 should be a marvellous year” and the interspersion of a music hall routine entitled ‘I Want to Be a Military Man’. Priestley and the audience are all too aware that this solid middle class existence is about to change forever, while the frail Dr Kirby (an odd performance by William Chubb, who seems quite uncomfortable) anticipates a tranquil era ahead, while wondering if he made the right decision by choosing stability over taking a chance in London.

This co-production between English Touring Theatre and Royal & Derngate Northampton is very patchy technically (at least on the night I saw it): I’m not sure if it was faulty sound design or poor vocal projection, but I strained to hear much of it. The lighting is amongst the least effective I’ve ever seen; the action takes place on an elliptical platform filled with furniture and knick-knacks (designed by Sara Perks), evoking a stage within the stage that’s surrounded with floodlights and hanging light bulbs at the back. It’s a clever concept, but the execution is terribly clumsy, particularly the central hanging lamp that keeps flickering.

Several critics have commented on the Chekhovian influence, highlighted by the weariness of characters in stifled existences wishing for a brighter and more stimulating future. Having seen Uncle Vanya recently, there seemed to be echoes of Sonya and Yelena in the spinsterish sister, Lilian, who does all the work but gets none of the credit, while her more glamorous sister only has to breeze in and dominate all the male attention – namely the local squire Geoffrey Farrant (Jonathan Firth), whom Lilian herself is in love with. The mark of a wedding ring on Stella’s ring finger enables Lilian to cut Stella’s visit short by inviting her estranged husband Charlie Appleby (a miscast Daniel Betts) to disrupt the idyll.

There’s a tedious drunk scene (a theatrical device that bores me senseless) between Appleby and the theatre-mad younger brother Wilfred (Nick Hendrix in a confident professional debut, though I found him a little too much like a modern hyperactive teenager). Wilfred is also in transition, on leave from his job with the East African Development Company in Nigeria, where he is a figure of authority, but at home is still a little boy to the faithful old housekeeper Sarah (played with warmth and exasperation by Carol MacReady), with whom he becomes increasingly snappy. Daisy Douglas gives an effectively waspish performance as Lilian, the daughter who has kept the home in order, fearful that Stella’s re-appearance will destroy the stability she has worked towards.

This isn’t a play that lends itself naturally to experimentalism, though director Laurie Sansom dabbles with some expressionist touches, complementing the way in which Stella plays out her delights and anguishes like a drama (which Lilian snidely suggests that she enjoys), culminating when she and Appleby get their own show on the road and Eden End returns to the way it was. I’m a magpie for plays of this period, and while I’m not convinced that Eden End (a favourite of Priestley himself) is a neglected gem, nor that this is a great production, it has its moments of genuine pathos amidst the chattering. The wistfulness of the road not taken is something that will always be resonant – there is a very different path ahead, but not one that the Kirbys expect.

Written for A Younger Theatre

Review: The Turn of the Screw (King's Head Theatre)

2011-07-11T10:45:00.000+01:00

One of the questions that strikes any reader of Henry James’s 1898 novella is whether the unnamed Governess (undoubtedly one of the most unreliable narrators in literature) really is seeing ghosts, or if she was being driven towards madness by a repressed imagination. When re-reading it in preparation for Edward Dick’s production of Benjamin Britten’s 1954 opera, it seemed extraordinary just how quickly she jumps to her conclusions – not only are these figures the walking dead, but their intention is to ‘contaminate’ the angelic children in her care (surmised before she learns that Peter Quint, the remote Master’s late valet, was ‘too free’ with young Miles). She seems all too keen to assume the worst, so that she can ‘save’ them and earn the attention of her charges’ unobtainable uncle.

Dick’s minimalist production for Opera UpClose seems to promote the idea of the Governess’s insanity, choosing to frame the action by portraying her as a patient in a psychiatric hospital, not that that really ‘proves’ anything either way. Surely anyone who claimed to have witnessed what she has seen would be labelled ‘mad.’ The isolated country house is represented by Signe Beckmann’s monochromatic grey set with three doors. The only props on stage are two wooden chairs (which the Governess clings to constantly) and there’s blank screen onto which scenes from the idyllic summer are projected. The lighting, however, isn’t quite atmospheric enough and the elongated stage at the King’s Head isn’t particularly effective when it comes to creating a sense of intimacy and claustrophobia. The production eschews restrictive corsets and rustling taffeta for trainers and T-shirts emblazoned with cartoon characters (Miles’s Superman T-shirt provides a wry dig at the Governess’s own hero complex), while the Governess, tellingly, is clad all in white.

The Turn of the Screw is deeply rooted in nineteenth-century sensitivities about class (particularly the idea of a lady having a sexual relationship with a man who is not a gentleman), requiring a certain amount of creativity to make it resonate with a contemporary setting. Laura Casey’s marshmallow-munching Mrs Grose becomes a slovenly babysitter and overgrown child, dressed in a pink velour tracksuit. While the grotesquery is overstated, she all the same retains the cryptic knowingness of James's Mrs Grose.

There’s something very solid about James’s ghosts, who aren’t fleeting spectres at all; the Governess’s description of Quint’s appearance, right down to the length of his whiskers and the colour of his eyebrows, could hold up in court. The intensity of the eye contact between the ghosts and Governess is underplayed, the scenes between the ghosts alone being the most successfully gothic. David Menezes’sQuint and Catrine Kirkman’s Miss Jessel are distinctive from the living characters by louche sophistication as they hatch their malevolent plans like something out of a film noir; Quint clad in leather and Jessel in a slinky cocktail dress. Menezes masterfully communicates the confidence and dangerous allure of this arch-manipulator, his tenor voice equally lulling and commanding, with Kirkman seductively conveying his ally’s disturbed compliance.

Katie Bird is vocally stunning as the Governess and delivers a very credible portrayal of an idealistic young woman’s descent into a state that defies comprehension, while never ceasing to justify her actions to herself. The children are remarkably assured: Eleanor Burke sings Flora beautifully, while Samuel Woof ably captures Miles’s eerie, otherworldly creepiness. Musical director David Eaton is not so much an accompanist as he is a one-man orchestra, playing with exceptional flair and passion.

The Turn of the Screw is so open to interpretation that it’s probably impossible to stage it in a way that’s going to please everyone (I personally don’t sympathise with Dick’s interpretation of Miles’s demise). While Dick’s production is thin on full-blooded horror, it’s nevertheless a sleek and impressively sung rendition of a challenging opera.

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Review: Then The Snow Came and Winter (Orange Tree Theatre)

2011-07-04T12:40:00.000+01:00

The Orange Tree Theatre’s spring season traditionally ends with a showcase by their trainee directors: this year, a double-bill directed by Jimmy Grimes and Teunkie van der Sluijs that features several of the actors from the theatre’s recent Three Farces.

Grimes’s devised piece Then The Snow Came, interweaving Oscar Wilde’s fairytale The Happy Prince with a look into the less leafy side of Richmond, and van der Sluijs’s production of Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse’s oblique two-hander Winter both deal with isolation and desperation (as well as being profanity-heavy) – the former drawing on real life characters and situations, while the latter is absolutely impersonal and clinical.

Grimes conceived Then The Snow Came after talking to a rough sleeper when stranded on the streets in Richmond on a cold night. The piece was crafted alongside the Richmond homelessness charity SPEAR and the richness of his research is evident with a real sense of collaboration; some of the dialogue is verbatim and the integration of The Happy Prince, a tale about compassion, devotion and sacrifice, is very much in sympathy with the story of these two men and adds another layer lyricism to the narrative without feeling contrived.

There are two outstanding central performances: the brash Mickey (Kieron Jecchinis), and his more poetically-minded, softly-spoken Liverpudlian friend, Stu (Daniel Cheyne). Ed Bennett also provides agile support in all his cameos, particularly the policeman who bookends the piece. These men carry all their worldly possessions in bedraggled rucksacks from spot one to another, when Mickey’s ex-partner is rushed to hospital and he has to raise the train fare to Middlesbrough. Jecchinis’s highly physical performance makes Mickey engaging and charismatic; we want him to succeed, but he’s held back by his circumstances and by himself. Wilde’s tale concludes with the Happy Prince and his devoted swallow being whisked off to heaven by an angel, while Grimes ends on a bleak note with the destruction of a friendship and the inability to move on. A thoughtful, haunting piece that’s accentuated with puppetry – something that could be developed even further.

On the other hand, Jon Fosse’s 2000 play Winter is a frosty affair that’s completely devoid of warmth or humanity. The recent production of his play I Am The Wind at the Young Vic seemed to suggest that Fosse is an acquired taste who creates works that are mesmerising to some and insufferably tedious and pretentious to others. On his way to a meeting, a mild mannered businessman (Stuart Fox) encounters an unhinged young woman (Jennifer Higham) in a city park. She’s completely spaced-out (surely a drug addict or a prostitute – maybe both), they go back to his hotel room together and he decides to leave his family and job for her. When we see her again, she’s all glammed-up and less childlike – was it all an act? And why should we care?

Fosse’s interminably repetitive writing is as drab and colourless as the concrete slabs on stage. It’s hard not to feel sorry for the waif-like Higham, who is forced to declare, “I am your lady” over and over again like a broken record. Fox and Higham’s commitment can’t be faulted and van der Sluijs’s direction is effectively spare, but to this Fosse sceptic, it’s more of a slog than a challenge that very much outstays any initial spark of interest.

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Review: Faith, Hope and Charity (Southwark Playhouse)

2011-07-02T12:49:00.000+01:00

Leonie Kubigsteltig’s revival of Odön von Horváth’s 1932 play Faith, Hope and Charity (translated by Christopher Hampton) is wonderfully timely. The Austro-Hungarian born Horváth observed the poverty of the 1920s and 30s and the horrors of the newly implemented Nazi regime first hand, creating a mix of social commentary and surrealism with a deeply subversive streak. This vicious circle of deprivation and unemployment set in an unnamed state was banned upon its intended premiere in Germany and is still all too recognisable today.

The aesthetic is strikingly modern, even slightly futuristic and it’s something of a jolt when the protagonist, Elisabeth, appears in her 1930s dress. Designer Signe Beckmann creates a forbidding screen of clouded windows (expertly lit by Richard Howell) that slide open to provide the settings for each of the five scenes: the exterior of a mortuary, an office, the street, a love nest and a police station. Modern music plays before the lights abruptly go down and in the vignettes between scenes (particularly aggressively during the love scene), evoking a nightmarish world of manipulated chaos.

In an act of desperation, Elisabeth, a corset saleswoman, offers to sell her body to the Anatomical Institute to raise the 150 marks she needs to get a sales license in order to trade legally. She could go home to her father (and others wonder why she doesn’t), but is determined to earn an independent living. A kindly Dissector (Julien Ball) with a love of animals lends her the sum, only to discover that he has been double-crossed. Following a brief jail sentence, she takes up with a solider (Jude Monk McGowan), which falls apart when her past is revealed.

Rebecca Oldfield is endearingly perky as Elisabeth, steadfast in her optimism that humanity will prevail. Most of the cast play multiple roles, not all of which work, but Penelope McGhie is particularly good as the Magistrate’s Wife, pretending to only sell corsets and garters as a hobby and Paul Bhattacharjee is menacingly leering at the interrogative Police Inspector.

Perhaps what’s most chilling about this play is the matter-of-fact attitude towards death – Elisabeth’s demise is met with mild disappointment; her rescuer wonders why he bothered to try to be heroic and her lover mutters half-heartedly about his bad luck. Horváth works with archetypes and it’s hard to say that any of the characters really transcend their types. Faith hope and charity ought to be linked together, but when lives are dictated by the state, leaving little room for people to find their own way, these virtues become entirely abstract, replaced by blind obedience to a dictatorship. Bureaucratic jargon never changes.

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Review: Meow Meow (Apollo Theatre)

2011-06-27T14:40:00.000+01:00

I wonder how Meow Meow (alter ego of Australian singer/actress/performance artist Melissa Madden Gray) rehearses her exhilarating, chaotic and somewhat terrifying ‘kamikaze cabaret’ as so much of it depends on audience participation. Meow Meow isn’t a cabaret performer who gushes about how much she loves her audience – she pops up in the dress circle in a terrible state: the chorus boys have been held up in customs, she hasn’t warmed up and she has a broken heart. She’s really too distraught to perform, but has been forced on stage by the management.

Like many felines, Meow Meow is something of a tyrant; she’s desperate for attention and is constantly frisking around the auditorium. She resembles Liza Minnelli, but also has something of the zany, plummy schoolgirl quality of the stage Sally Bowles. She barks at the audience to throw flowers at her, get her dressed and undressed, and lift her around the auditorium (something everyone gets a go at) and yet she’s lovable enough for her audience and her three-piece band (led by composer Lance Horne) to be happy to indulge these demands. One can only marvel at her nerve. I found myself as part of a chorus line of high-kicking Barbie dolls (thankfully in a large group in front of the stage, rather than on it). It’s fortunate that her two main gentlemen ‘volunteers’ were accompanied as any photos taken could appear very compromising indeed.

Her comic prowess and extraordinary legs are matched by her remarkable voice that’s like rich dark chocolate (probably with a touch of something stronger) with a repertoire that includes Kurt Weill, Jacques Brel and modern pop numbers. Hardly any are sung all the way through, being interspersed with comic asides and banter, particularly from the homespun spectacle that includes a manual revolve and a handheld spotlight – showgirl on a shoestring.

Rapturous applause and a standing ovation ought to overturn any assumptions about British reserve. It seems woefully inadequate to label Meow Meow merely as a ‘femme fatale’ or ‘cabaret diva’; she’s a stunningly versatile theatrical creature who defies any kind of pigeonholing. As lovely as it would be to hear her sing uninterrupted (a concert dedicated to works from the Weimar Republic would be particularly blissful), this is a whirlwind of activity and explosion of talent that is an experience in every sense of the word.

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Review: The Roar of the Greasepaint – The Smell of the Crowd (Finborough Theatre)

2011-06-13T15:55:00.000+01:00

As its rather long title suggests, The Roar of the Greasepaint – The Smell of the Crowd is a piece about inversion, exposing the dark side of theatrical archetypes and stock figures of the British class system.

This exceeding peculiar 1964 musical by co-composers, lyricists and librettists Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse (who also collaborated on the 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory), is reminiscent of a cross between Waiting For Godot, Dennis Potter’s Pennies From Heaven and Charles Dickens at his most grotesque. With its Victorian setting, it draws heavily on the British Music Hall tradition, combined with a sense of Continental absurdism, and also features a cameo from a professional body-builder (Tahir Ozkan) in his stage debut.

Greasepaint has never had a West End run – it transferred directly from its UK tour to Broadway, where it played 231 performances and starred Newley himself as the protagonist, Cocky. The idea of Broadway snapping it up seems remarkable, as it’s the opposite of a lovable crowd-pleaser, being a satirical allegory of the British class scale with a distinctly unsettling feel. Several of the songs, including ‘Feelin’ Good’ (immortalised by Nina Simone) and ‘Who Can I Turn To?’, have become standards that have surpassed the show’s own fame – perhaps unsurprisingly, as many of them feel like stand-alone numbers due to the rather loose integration between the book and music.

The somewhat repetitive plot (if it can be said to have one) involves the perpetually subservient everyman, Cocky (an appealingly shabby Matthew Ashforde) and his master, Sir (Oliver Beamish), who are engaged in ‘The Game’, a subverted version of hopscotch. Sir, a jovial tyrant who consciously models himself on Henry Higgins and manipulates the rules to serve his own interests, naturally gets many of the most stinging lines. Cocky’s own brief flirtation with power, becoming a king with a chamber pot crown, is an aptly grotesque spectacle, as if tyranny and power are always synonymous. More jarring is ‘The Negro’ (a gorgeous-voiced Terry Doe), uninhibited by Sir’s rules and skips right to the middle of the board, who is written as a caricature that surely would have been patronising before Gone with the Wind.

The tiny Finborough possibly boasts the most creative designs on the London Fringe, and Tim Goodchild’s effectively childlike aesthetic is no exception. The circus-like atmosphere is enhanced by a roulette board painted on the floor, surrounded by ladders and lit with fairy lights. The all-female ensemble, dressed as Pierrots with white faces, exaggerated black eyebrows and button noses, further heighten the sense of otherworldliness, providing wry commentary on the bizarre proceedings.

Almost 50 years after it was written, the Finborough’s Celebrating British Music Theatre series seems a far more fitting setting for Greasepaint than the West End or Broadway. Under Ian Judge’s nimble direction (his next engagement is Romeo et Juliette conducted by Plácido Domingo at Los Angeles Opera) this is an eccentric and disturbing curiosity that makes a refreshing antidote to West End glitz and gaudiness.

Written for Exeunt

Review: She Loves Me (Chichester Festival Theatre)

2011-06-10T16:19:00.000+01:00

I always mean to see more theatre outside London, but find myself deterred by astronomical train fares, so I was delighted to be notified of Southern Rail’s 90% off sale. How fortunate, as Stephen Mear’s production of Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick’s romantic musical She Loves Me is as perfect a piece of theatre as I have ever seen, delivering two and a half hours of the kind of theatrical bliss that’s absolutely priceless.

It seems unfair that She Loves Me (which premiered on Broadway in 1963) was somewhat eclipsed by Harnick and Bock’s smash hit Fiddler On The Roof a year later, being a masterclass of romantic comedy with intelligence. Its basic story – an epistolary romance between shop assistants who bicker by day and unknowingly exchange heartfelt letters by night– originating from Hungarian playwright Miklós László’s 1937 play Parfumerie, has been used many times over. As if it the fuzziness stakes couldn’t be raised any higher, it ends on Christmas Eve.

It’s as if She Loves Me was written to be a chamber piece, sitting perfectly in Chichester’s more intimate, horseshoe-shaped Minerva Theatre. Anthony Ward’s glass-fronted revolving design takes us right inside a bespoke parfumerie in a 1930s Central European fantasyland, full of jewel-coloured fripperies. Chic and beautifully cut costumes complete the picture of tasteful glamour.

Mear, perhaps the best theatre choreographer working today, shows himself to be equally assured as a director. As befits a choreographer, the timing is spot-on and the pace zips along. The two set pieces, ‘A Romantic Atmosphere,’ and ‘Twelve Days To Christmas’ are masterpieces of small-scale spectacle. The former takes place in a decadent café with tango dancers and the latter the frantic countdown to Christmas, both of which are executed with an extraordinary amount of control.

Dianne Pilkington is simply adorable as the klutzy, yet quick-thinking Amalia, displaying a shimmering soprano. Her poignancy is matched by her comic timing, particularly when hopping around on one shoe before accepting Georg’s peace offering of vanilla ice cream. Her leading man, Joe McFadden, is appealingly shy and eager and full of charm.

They’re supported by one of the most charming ensemble casts I’ve ever encountered. Annette McLoughlin is a total delight as the unlucky-in-love Ilona, entangled with the über-debonair Steven Kodaly (caddish charm personified by Clark Gable lookalike Matthew Goodgame). Steve Elias’s Sipos is full of bumbling charm and Jack Chisseck’s shop owner Mr Maraczek nimbly whisks us back to his waltzing days by the Danube. Credit also goes to Gavin McCluskey’s aspirational delivery boy and Lee Ormsby’s impeccable Head Waiter, providing a sardonically sympathetic shoulder to cry on in Amalia’s hour of need.

A divine treat that’s tied up with a satin ribbon. I wafted back to London on a cloud of vanilla ice cream with a memory that I’ll treasure for a very long time.

Written for A Younger Theatre

Review: Into Thy Hands (Wilton's Music Hall)

2011-06-06T17:02:00.001+01:00

Into Thy Hands begins with a speech about theatre and decay – very apt, considering that the future of the enchantingly distressed Wilton’s Music Hall is on shaky grounds after a major National Lottery grant recently was rejected.

This new play by Jericho House’s artistic director Jonathan Holmes (who also directs) illuminates the changing world of the early seventeenth century, full of a religious and scientific upheaval, through the eyes of John Donne, a maverick figure in Renaissance literature and religion. Whilst the play is packed with complex theological ideas that could seem rather remote, it’s personable, touching, and served with a generous amount of eroticism.

John and Ann Donne’s marriage ought to be counted amongst history’s great love stories; indeed, it is Ann who speaks out against the clergy on her husband’s behalf. In 1611, the Donnes and their growing brood of children are exiled in two rooms in a “Croydon craphole” as a result of their mixed marriage (his Catholicism and her Protestant background), scraping a meagre living by performing various favours for members of the court. The only escape route is an ecclesiastical position (which would presumably mean converting to Anglicanism), a transition that is fraught with self-doubt.

Donne’s belief in a more fluid and sensual approach towards scripture, in contrast to the austere Calvinism of court (yet this is also a place where noblewomen perform in masques with their breasts exposed), seems remarkably modern. Holmes takes a certain amount of creative license with history, presenting an overtly camp King James I (a scene-stealing cameo from Bob Cryer) and a Sapphic Lady Russell, but despite the play’s pro-Donne stance, Nicholas Rowe’s Lancelot Andrewes (the foremost cleric of the day) is presented with due gravitas and dignity.

Zubin Varla’s performance as Donne, though a touch overwrought, effectively conveys the torment of a man without a steady outlet for his extraordinary gifts. Jess Murphy’s Ann (remarkably nubile considering her constant state of pregnancy) reveals herself to be a worthy match to her husband’s intellect with her insight. Helen Masters is warm and spiky as Lady Magdalene Herbert, the Donnes’ loyal friend and Stephanie Russell as Donne’s patroness Lucy Russell, an aging beauty at twenty-nine, offers an intriguing glimpse of sexual frustration and self-denial.

Holmes fully embraces the way in which Wilton’s, with its arched roof, balconies and panelling, is somewhat reminiscent of a bohemian church, and Filippo de Capitani’s wondrous lighting creates the most lovely chiaroscuro effects, as if the auditorium really is filled with candlelight. Lucy Wilkinson’s design, with painted screens and a painted silk backdrop (stripped away to mark Donne’s conversion to the visually plainer Anglicanism) and a cosmos of planets overhead, characterises the world of the play and an unknown existence beyond.

As Donne learns, much of earthly survival depends having enough money to live on. I hope that Wilton’s will be saved with all the good faith in the world, but its endurance ultimately depends on hard cash from rich donors. If decay and ruin really do unite us all, it would be an absolute tragedy if this exquisite building that inspires so much wonder and delight was to vanish.

Written for A Younger Theatre

Review: I Am A Camera (Rosemary Branch Theatre)

2011-05-25T15:01:00.000+01:00

New company Cornelius Cooke Productions make a vivacious debut with a rare revival of John Van Druten’s 1951 play I Am A Camera.

It is based on Christopher Isherwood’s autobiographical novels set in Berlin during the rise of Nazism – which in turn inspired the musical Cabaret.

The play is set in the bedsit occupied by aspiring writer Christopher and nightclub singer Sally Bowles, and Van Druten excels at making these hedonistic characters likable. Director Owen Calvert-Lyons maintains a fast, farcical pace, rather like a sitcom punctuated with moments of bleakness, while Amy Yardley’s set beautifully evokes seedy bohemianism. These friends, preoccupied with partying and cultivating Americans with unlimited wealth, fail to realise that they are living in extraordinary times, the hideousness of the growing gangs of Nazis in the streets only hitting home when witnessed first-hand.

The heart of the piece is the somewhat one-sided friendship between Chris (Mark Jackson) and Sally (an entrancing Vicki Campbell), who talks faster than she can think and leaves others to tidy up the debris she leaves behind. Jackson is equally impressive as her less flamboyant counterpart, particularly when hinting at Chris’s ambiguous love life.

Caroline Wildi is deliciously clipped as Sally’s mother and arch-nemesis. Erika Poole also impresses as Fraulein Schneider, the ever-helpful landlady with a heart of gold who fortunately knows the local abortionist’s telephone number – alongside the fact that she also represents the brainwashed majority that helped Hitler rise to power.

This is a sparkling tribute to mark the 25th anniversary of Isherwood’s death, a captivating snapshot into another world that’s delivered by a remarkable team who have set themselves a very high standard.

Written for Islington Gazette. Disclaimer: the print version was really kind of savaged.

Review: Autumn and Winter (Orange Tree Theatre)

2011-05-09T16:48:00.002+01:00

All things Scandinavian seem to be quite ‘in’ at the moment: Swedish crime drama is all the rage and there was a Woman’s Hour feature last week about how Nordic cuisine is currently the most fashionable in the world. In the Orange Tree Theatre’s latest production, Swedish playwright Lars Norén is given a rare English-language outing with this angsty and shrill family drama directed by Derek Goldby and translated by Gunilla Anderman.

Norén’s writing and emphasis on domesticity are somewhat reminiscent of the nervous hysteria found in Alan Ayckbourn (of whom I’m not a fan) and Mike Leigh’s mixture of character driven humour and gloom. This slice of middle class misery takes place after the two adult daughters drop in on their parents for a family dinner and all kinds of resentments are brought to the fore. The premise is perfect for the Orange Tree, where the audience is gathered around the perimeters of the living room (designed by Sam Dowson – the uncomfortable-looking sofa is a fitting touch), but it is let down by the clunky writing, with a sense of the characters competing as to who can be the most miserable and ‘issues’ being ticked off as if on a shopping list; abortion, divorce, eating disorders, etc.

The main perpetrator of the misery is the dungaree-clad Ann, a down-on-her-luck single parent obsessed with her supposedly horrible childhood, who blames all her misfortunes on her mother. In contrast, her elder sister, Ewa, is a linen-suited, French-pleated and frightfully smug corporate high flier, who chimes in with the cracks in her seemingly ideal life, and Mum follows suit by blaming her husband for everything. Everybody is keen to have their say but no one is willing to listen, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that the same points go around in circles and no one reaches any kind of understanding by the end.

Lisa Stevenson, in the showiest role, is at times ferociously volatile as the ever hard-done-by Ann and Kristin Hutchinson is perfectly pinched as overachiever Ewa. Diane Fletcher’s Mum is harder to pin down, presenting an icily detached façade, but gradually reveals herself to be just as much of a drama queen as Ann. If Osmund Bullock (splendid in The Thunderbolt) as Dad spends much of the show blending in with the furniture, it isn’t really his fault as his ineffectual character has so little to do.

With six bottles of wine imbibed by the end of the evening, plus various nightcaps of port, whisky and brandy, it’s remarkable that anyone can string a sentence together – and no one bats an eyelid at Ewa driving Ann home. Ultimately, a fairly aimless wallow in Nordic angst.

Written for A Younger Theatre

Review: Uncle Vanya (Arcola Theatre)

2011-05-02T14:09:00.000+01:00

Following on from their production of Anna Karenina (by Birmingham’s Piano Removal Company), the Arcola remains in Russia with Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya (a co-production with Coventry’s Belgrade Theatre), a play, which like Tolstoy’s novel, also features a young wife in an unfulfilling marriage with a much older husband.

This new version by Polish-born director Helena Kaut-Howson and Jon Strickland, who plays the title role, aims to move away from the “fossilising reverence” often found in English translations of Chekhov, extracting the full potential of the farcical elements that run concurrently with the disillusionment of so many wasted lives. Kaut-Howson’s fluid approach, strong performances from the entire cast and the detailed period design offer a glimpse into a long vanished world of country estates and lace parasols, but much of it is universal, particularly the frustration felt by the characters whose purpose in life is to do supposedly cleverer people’s work for them.

Sophie Jump’s three quarters in the round design helps to break down some of the potential distance between the characters and the audience, perfectly evoking the clutter of a picturesque but slightly distressed country estate. Alex Wardle’s atmospheric lighting hints at the heady indolence of a balmy summer afternoon full of familial and erotic tensions that can only be hidden under a mask of ennui for so long. The use of incidental music (by Boleslaw Rawski) gives the busier scenes an effectively cinematic quality, but is a little overly emphatic in some of the more reflective moments.

The return of Professor Alexander Serebreyakov (a suitably curmudgeonly performance by Geoffrey Whitehead) and his beautiful wife Yelena to his country estate interrupts the order maintained by the estate managers, his daughter, Sonya and brother-in-law, Vanya. Vanya’s misplaced hero worship is perhaps what’s most hurtful of all, being deceived that dedicating his life to the service of a genius was a noble thing to do, and the devastation of discovering that his brother-in-law’s ‘talent’ was based on delusion. Likewise, the environmentalism of Sonya’s unrequited love Dr Astrov (a charismatic Simon Gregor) is equally in vain, in which pioneers of change, rather than making improvements, simply repeat the same mistakes of the past.

Jon Strickland’s nervy Vanya is not a repressed genius, but a man who, like anyone given the right opportunities, could have achieved more. Marianne Oldham is luminously languid as the “regrettably faithful” second wife with “mermaid blood.” She has the power to set all the male hearts aflame, initially appearing to be something of an unknowable ice queen, but provides one of the most emotional moments with the burst of joy when she and her stepdaughter fling their arms around each other and finally come to an understanding.

Most poignant of all is Hara Yannas’s Sonya, who seems unbearably young to have her dreams crushed so completely. She’s imbued with a grim determination to get on with the dull work she’s been sentenced to, which prevents her from appearing like a victim. On the contrary, there is something heroic about her refusal to give in to self pity, particularly when she is surrounded by pervading melancholy that seems almost contagious.

Written for Exeunt

Review: The Tempest (Little Angel Theatre)

2011-04-28T17:04:00.000+01:00

Four Things meme

2011-04-27T19:03:00.000+01:00

A bit of frivolity circulating around the internet; a little break from theatre reviews.

Four books I recommend

No Fond Return of Love by Barbara Pym
An Education by Lynn Barber
Magic Flutes by Eva Ibbotson
My Turn To Make The Tea by Monica Dickens

Four jobs I've had

Theatre reviewer (I've yet to make any money out of it, but one day...)
Assistant Administrator/general dogsbody
Trademark monitor
Assistant stage manager (only once, but so much fun)

Last four films seen

The Tempest (new version with Helen Mirren)
Morning Glory
Black Swan
Tangled (by far my favourite of the four

Four favourite TV shows

Lost
Being Human
The Office (US version)
Outnumbered

Four places I have visited

St Petersburg, Russia
Dubrovnik, Croatia
Dalyan, Turkey
Paris, France

Four favourite foods

Olives
Cottage pie
Smoked salmon and cream cheese bagels
Peanut butter on toast

Four celebrity crushes

Aidan Turner
Naveen Andrews
John Krasinski
Julian Ovenden

Four things I'm looking forward to

My holiday in Chicago next month
Seeing my review in print tomorrow.
Visiting Wilton's Music Hall for the first time on Saturday- I keep hearing about how extraordinary the building is.
Meeting a rather interesting long lost relative next week.

Review: Lines (Rosemary Branch Theatre)

2011-04-20T16:44:00.001+01:00

One of the many provocative points raised by James Fritz’s faux-verbatim drama Lines (which premiered at the Rosemary Branch’s new writing festival last autumn) is what it means to ‘enjoy’ a show. It’s possible to find something interesting and moving whilst wondering if it’s in poor taste to take pleasure from the experience, particularly when the subject is a recent tragedy that’s still in the headlines.

Fritz’s conceit is that a certain Kilburn theatre renowned for cutting edge political drama produces a verbatim play called Ian and Bill, about the death of Ian Tomlinson at the G20 protests. During the run, one of the cast members, Michael, is murdered by Terry Stein, the police officer he portrayed in the show. As we enter the auditorium, the actors are engaged in their warm-up exercises, and then form a line to express their feelings about this tragedy.

The writer, Robin (Ian Mairs) and director (Tom Berish) are young, confident types who are more than a little pleased with themselves. Robin expresses his sympathy, but is too wrapped up in his ‘art’ to accept the fact that he might be partially responsible. The parental loss is acutely captured in David Vale and Jeryl Burgess’s exquisite portrayals of quiet devastation. There’s also a thought-provoking turn from John Canmore’s Sergeant, a man with no artistic pretensions and who volunteered to be interviewed for the project simply as a chance to defend the Met’s reputation regarding their involvement in the Tomlinson case.

Flamboyant characters often register most strongly on stage, the creatives seizing on Stein’s enthusiasm at having at audience to perform to. Michael’s portrayal of Stein, with an emphasis on a childlike hero complex and the embellishment of a slight speech impediment, becomes the light relief amidst the bleakness. While we never see Stein and only hear his voice at the end (having the last word lends a certain gravitas), it’s remarkable how vivid and human he becomes.

Does a verbatim play have a writer? The words might come directly from the speakers’ mouths, but they become part of an arc of stories that can easily be twisted. It’s all carefully contrived as to what’s included and what’s left out, who speaks when and who gets the final say. It seems more like an editor’s role than a writer’s.

What could have been quite a specialised, theoretical exercise is turned into a beautifully observed human drama. Fritz’s writing is perfectly served by the sensitive cast and Thomas Martin’s understated direction. The premise might be extreme, but it becomes frighteningly plausible. Mimicry can be incredibly hurtful.

Written for A Younger Theatre

Review: Bed and Sofa (Finborough Theatre)

2011-04-03T07:38:00.001+01:00

A silent film from the Soviet Union is unusual source material for a musical. Although I haven’t seen Abram Room’s 1927 film Bed and Sofa, it’s easy to see why the subject matter caused controversy, with a portrayal of a ménage a trois, abortion (which is still something of a taboo subject in films today) and, according to librettist Laurence Klavan, the question of what a ‘free’ society is. The last point is perhaps less obvious in this re-telling.

This musical adaptation by composer Polly Pen and librettist Laurence Klavan has arrived in London fifteen years after its premiere Off-Broadway, where it received seven Drama Desk nominations. While the cosy Finborough Theatre is an ideal venue for a chamber musical with a domestic setting (a typically lovely Finborough design by David Woodhead, with the musicians on the roof), it’s difficult for director Luke Sheppard to overcome the fact that the show is sustained on one recurring joke (who gets the bed, and who gets the sofa). Although there are a number of interesting themes to explore, they’re suppressed underneath the veneer of whimsy.

The setting is Moscow in 1926, in the midst of a housing shortage. Volodya, a young man with “blonde hair and a sensitive face” arrives in the city to take a job as a newspaper printer (there are some hints of radicalism that are never explored), and finds himself homeless. His old friend Kolya comes to the rescue, offering him the sofa in the cramped apartment he shares with his wife Ludmilla. When Kolya is transferred to Rostov for a few weeks, Volodya and Ludmilla fall in love over a trip to the cinema. Kolya soon learns that his place is now on the sofa, but can’t leave due to the housing shortage. Ludmilla inevitably falls pregnant and rather than being pressurised into having an abortion, she walks out to start a new life, leaving the two men in a state of resigned amusement.

The transformation of a silent film into a musical is most successful when directly paying homage to the genre, offering some witty pastiches of the music that accompany the films that give Ludmilla so much pleasure (while she is in a version of one herself- how confusingly meta). The ‘Bed and Sofa’ refrain is certainly memorable as it accounts for a large percentage of the text. Taking the place of the title cards is the all-knowing Announcer, sharing various witticisms and tips for harmonious living under the Soviet regime, though I wouldn’t imagine the voice of Communism to have the quintessentially English headmistress-y tones of Penelope Keith.

Kaisa Hammarlund gives a thoughtful performance as the housewife longing for romance and finally independence, while Alastair Parker is bear-like and boorish as the cuckolded roofer Kolya and Alastair Brookshaw is aptly fresh-faced as Volodya. An uncomplicated plot doesn’t have to make for diluted drama. Bed and Sofa doesn’t feel complete because the characters never become anything more than archetypes. There is something charmingly quirky about this piece that could have been distilled into a pithy twenty-minute sketch. Stretched out over nearly an hour and a half, however, the joke wears very thin indeed.

Written for Exeunt

Review: The Kissing-Dance (Jermyn Street Theatre)

2011-03-31T17:15:00.001+01:00

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)

2011-03-28T21:36:00.001+01:00

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)

2011-03-23T16:57:00.000Z

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)

2011-03-21T16:53:00.000Z

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)

2011-03-15T16:54:00.001Z

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)

2011-03-10T17:06:00.002Z

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

Review: Accolade (Finborough Theatre)

2011-02-06T12:25:00.002Z

This first ever revival of Emlyn Williams's 1950 play is remarkable in how unlike a period piece it feels.

Williams enjoyed a long career in theatre and in Hollywood as a writer and an actor and never made a secret of being bisexual. Accolade concerns a man living a double life; not a relationship with another man - for there are references to him having sex with women - but an addiction to the hedonistic lifestyle portrayed in his novels.

The play is incredibly resonant. Will Trenting, a controversial novelist whose books describe dubious sexual practices in the East End, is about to be welcomed into the establishment with a knighthood.

This scenario is a familiar one in a society where the personal lives of public figures are constantly under scrutiny with rumourmongers desperate to get hold any hint of scandal. The real damage is inflicted on the accused’s family and friends, and the tension is almost unbearable when Trenting has to explain his predicament to his son Ian (a thoughtful performance by Patrick Osborne in the tricky role of an adult playing a child) in a way that an unworldly fourteen year old will understand.

Aden Gillett wonderfully illuminates the Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde sides to Trenting’s character. He isn’t the easiest protagonist to warm to, a man who is accustomed to having the best of both worlds- comfortable domesticity in Regent's Park with his wife and son, and the freedom to abandon it all in pursuit of inspiration for his books. The closest friends he makes on these exploits, Cockney good time couple Harold and Phyllis (Simon Darwen and Olivia Darnley), are genuinely caring towards Trenting and his family but not as entirely golden of heart as they might seem. The play isn’t exactly a defence of hedonism as the ultimate lesson than Trenting learns is that he can’t have things both ways without repercussions and shouldn’t expect to.

There is a skin-crawlingly sinister, rather Dickensian turn from Graham Seed (the much mourned Nigel Pargetter on The Archers) as the blackmailer, Daker. Oily in manner and appearance with a protruding tongue, this failed writer seeks influence, which in the literary world is far more valuable than money. Saskia Wickham, delivers an outstandingly sensitive performance as Trenting’s rather too understanding wife Rona, who was attracted to him because his unusual sexual preferences excited her and never turned a blind eye to her husband’s activities, but has become somewhat desensitised over fifteen years of marriage.

Blanche McIntyre’s beautifully understated production shows how powerfully emotion can be conveyed without raised voices. McIntyre and her impeccable cast make a strong case for Emlyn Williams to receive a similar kind of attention to the treatment that Terence Rattigan is receiving this year. Williams’s label as ‘the Welsh Noel Coward’ seems rather misleading- beyond the well-upholstered drawing room (designed by James Cotterill and lined with excellent bookcase wallpaper) is a very painful reality that The Master’s characters in their secluded little world are comfortably shielded from.

Written for musicOMH

Review: Double Falsehood (Union Theatre)

2011-01-25T21:16:00.003Z

Double Falsehood has a very chequered history: this curiosity has been hanging around in the Shakespearean apocrypha since its ‘discovery’ in 1728 by the Shakespeare editor and theatre impresario Lewis Theobald. He claimed that it was by Shakespeare and John Fletcher, with whom he collaborated on Henry VIII and Two Noble Kinsmen. Any credibility was lost when Theobald became a bit of a joke, after he was satirised by the acidic quill of Alexander Pope in The Dunciad (I’m feeling the need to stick up for poor Theobald and wonder if Pope was a little jealous). This outcast child was controversially legitimised in 2010 when the Arden Complete Works of Shakespeare published a fully annotated version of Theobald’s text, the version presented in this production, giving academics and regular theatregoers the chance to get a taste of what all the commotion was about.

What can be ascertained from an exercise like this is whether the play is any good dramatically. It’s neatly plotted (apart from some of the to-ing and fro-ing in the monastery where it gets a bit muddled) and tightly paced without any superfluous subplots. Phil Wilmott’s production is elegantly minimalist with its vaguely 1950s Mediterranean setting and lucid approach. The simplicity offers a freshness unburdened by intrusive gimmicks, encouraging the audience to pay attention to what’s on show, rather than fixating on the convoluted background.

In terms of content, this has all the ingredients of Shakespeare pastiche: star-crossed lovers, cross-dressing, a resentful younger brother, parents and children who are separated and reunited, and a miraculously contrived and bittersweet reunion scene. There isn’t much in the way of comic relief, but I can’t say I really missed that. Most of the characters aren’t particularly complex and the fairly workmanlike language only has a few striking turns of phrase, offering a sense of a play written by someone who is just getting to grips with the tricks of the trade – and perhaps trying a little too hard to get all the recognisable tropes in.

Gabriel Vick and Emily Plumtree speak the verse beautifully and have an affecting chemistry as the central lovers Julio and Leonora (an appealingly determined and outspoken young woman), who are separated by Leonora’s deeply unsympathetic mother (Su Douglas). She is forced to marry the bullying, snivelling Henrique, rapist of the servant girl Violante, before all can be resolved. Unfortunately, Adam Redmore’s Henrique is the evening’s weakest link, never seeming comfortable with his character or the language.

The unfortunate Violante (Jessie Lilley) is a breath of fresh air, a spurned woman who is more practical than desperate. She comes from the same tradition as the masochistic Helena who is happy to degrade herself for the sake of the moronic Bertram in All’s Well That Ends Well, and Mariana in Measure For Measure, who still loves Angelo after he abandons her. These are women who go to extreme measures to ensnare their men, but Violante doesn’t resort to trickery or grovelling and is clear-eyed about only being determined to marry her rapist in order to protect herself from disgrace (anyone who has sex in these plays automatically gets pregnant). I’d like to unearth a sequel (Double Falsehood: Take Two, perhaps) in which she murders him on their wedding night.

According to the gentleman sitting next to me, the official Shakespeare/Fletcher collaboration about thwarted lovers, The Two Noble Kinsman, is a real bore. Double Falsehood might not be a literary masterpiece, but it definitely isn’t boring. My totally amateur guess would be that it was based on a fragment of an anonymous Jacobean work, heavily embellished by Lewis Theobald. Whoever the author(s) were, they knew what they were doing.

Written for A Younger Theatre

Review: The Nutcracker (Pentameters Theatre)

2010-12-24T16:39:00.004Z

There are few things more quintessentially Christmassy than Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker, based on the German writer E.T.A. Hoffmann’s frankly really weird sounding 1816 novella The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. The ballet’s fame has long eclipsed its source material’s and this quirky interpretation presented by young company Butterfly Wheels led by Alice Old and Kayleigh Allenby (who have written and directed the show) has returned to the original story and given it a contemporary flair. There’s no Land of Sweets in Hoffmann and the gracious Sugar Plum Fairy and her friends are replaced by the young heroine Marie’s creepy clown dolls who descend from their shelf and dance- truly the stuff of nightmares.

It’s always fun to explore a ‘new’ theatre for the first time and the Pentameters is a lovely and very friendly above pub affair about a minute away from the Hampstead tube station with velvet scatter cushions on the seats (like a Hampstead Rosemary Branch). Entering the auditorium is like walking into a secret grotto and chocolate is very kindly given out. The set (designed by Alice Old and Amelia Marchant) has a really exuberant home-made quality, offering an exaggerated version of a perfectly traditional Christmas scene.

It’s undeniable that this ‘multi-sensory’ company throws just about everything except the kitchen sink into the production, reflecting the cast’s very varied backgrounds. Early nineteenth century Romanticism meets the New Romantics of the 1980s and it combines story telling, music and dance of all different kinds, video and shadow puppetry. A haunted mechanical remix of the Sugar Plum Fairy’s suite creepily illuminates the nature of Marie’s eccentric godfather Drosselmeir’s clockwork works of art (not toys) and the violin playing is beautiful- it’s a pity that more of the music isn’t played live

Much of the show is pre-recorded (the sound is bit of a problem- the Mouse King’s rap is incomprehensible), which adds a layer of distance between the characters and audience and there’s an emphasis on developing the atmosphere at the expense of narrative and character. The shadow puppet re-telling of how the Nutcracker came into being (Katie Mitchell uses a similar device in her production of Beauty and the Beast) offers the kind of story that you can get immersed in, in contrast to the rather stilted writing that peppers the main narrative.

This love child of Tim Burton, Kate Bush and Sarah Brightman is definitely an avant-garde alternative to the usual festive fare. Butterfly Wheels clearly have a lot to offer and have created an excellent, striking aesthetic, but the dramatic qualities need quite a bit of fine tuning to really make the piece flow and feel complete. I can’t say that it’s the most lovable Christmas show around and it’s hard to pitch exactly what kind of audience it’s aimed at. It’s too scary and conceptual for very small children but the moody quality may well appeal to teenagers. An Amazon voucher has just turned up in my inbox and a copy of the original Hoffmann seems an excellent way of spending it.

Written for A Younger Theatre

Review: Salad Days (Riverside Studios)

2010-12-21T21:16:00.001Z

In some ways, it’s quite difficult to believe that Julian Slade and Dorothy Reynolds’s musical Salad Days is set in the present day of 1954 as there’s something about the perpetual sunshine that feels so Edwardian. The balmy summer in which our protagonists learn how to dance and fall in love is enchantingly brought to life in this revival of a production originally presented by contemporary opera company Tête à Tête and directed by Bill Bankes-Jones last autumn.

It’s no wonder that Salad Days was the longest running musical in grim and grey post war Britain (prior to My Fair Lady) with its abundance of charm and sunbeams, combined with utterly glorious music, erudite lyrics and skilfully bonkers yet emotionally truthful book.

This is the silliest of silly musicals and the real magic comes from the way in which it is so cleverly done that the audience is more than happy to be swept away in a sea (or even a saucer) of whimsy. By the end, the songs and characters all feel like old friends.

Bright young things Timothy and Jane are graduating from the idyllic bubble of university after three years of avoiding lectures and enjoying picnics on the quad and finding the real world rather more difficult to navigate. Jane’s mother wants her safely married off to an eligible young man (preferably a Lord) and Timothy finds himself with a degree but no qualifications to do anything useful (that’s certainly still resonant today) without the help of his assorted high-flying uncles. While mulling over their options, the pair are unexpectedly given the guardianship of a magical piano named Minnie who makes everyone who hears her want to dance, be it Charleston, foxtrot or tango (showcased by Quinny Sacks’s sprightly choreography). And why on earth wouldn’t they?

In many ways, this is the 1950s successor to Gilbert and Sullivan, but it very much has its own character and it’s a true delight to hear such clear unamplified voices fill the air. While a small concert hall isn’t really the ideal space for what’s essentially a chamber piece and some of the transitions between scenes are a little muddy, it is prevented from feeling cavernous by the traverse staging and the non-threatening audience-cast involvement. The cast dressed as university dons escort the audience to their seats and at the height of the celebrations, members of the front row are invited to dance. Despite usually being audience participation phobic, I rather envied the ones who were chosen.

Earnest young Timothy is charmingly portrayed by Sam Harrison as a thoroughly decent sort with lots of wide-eyed charm. He is beautifully matched by professional theatre debutante Katie Moore who makes an enchanting ingénue as Jane, with that particular kind of English Rose vocal purity reminiscent of Julie Andrews and lots of brisk common sense. The entire cast are on tip-top form, including Les Miserables’s original Cosette Rebecca Caine as Jane’s glamorous and glacial mother (a pity she doesn’t have more to sing) and Tony Timberlake as the twinkle-toed police inspector.

This is feel good theatre at its purest and a period piece that fully embraces the sweetness rather than trying to put an ironic spin on it. A real heartwarmer that sends one wanting to Charleston out into the snow.

Written for musicOMH

Review: Once Bitten (Orange Tree Theatre)

2010-12-19T21:10:00.002Z

For the festive season at the delightful Orange Tree Theatre, Artistic Director Sam Walters offers a kind of grown up pantomime in the form of a totally lightweight French farce. I don’t think any kind of theatre makes me as nervous as, in my experience, farces tend to be either glorious or unbearable. Reggie Oliver’s translation of Alfred Hannequin and Alfred Delacour’s 1875 farce (a prototype in the genre) Once Bitten offers something in the middle: apart from some elements of snobbery that mark it out as very much of its time, the piece has its heart in the right place and the Belle Epoque costumes are delectable, but the writing isn’t consistently funny or frantic enough to sustain nearly two and a half hours.

As Reggie Oliver explains in the programme notes, farce developed in early nineteenth-century France as light entertainment for the emerging bourgeoisie who wanted to see elements from their own society on stage. I wonder if the new middle classes really were as rich and idle as the people who inhabit these plays and the attitude towards servants almost makes one wonder if the Revolution actually happened. I may be reading into something that isn’t there, but it did leave (to this reviewer at least) an aftertaste of smugness and snobbery.

The would-be lawyer Fauvinard is planning a rendezvous with his mistress Cesarine using his friend Tardivaut (a debonair Mark Frost) as his alibi, but nothing goes according to plan, especially when his interfering mother-in-law (played by Briony McRoberts with echoes of Endora from Bewitched) gets involved. An evil poodle also wreaks havoc and several hands have to be bandaged along with wounded dignities and egos.

David Antrobus’s high energy performance gives Fauvinard an appealing sense of an essentially decent man motivated more by a desire to escape from the home that his mother-in-law dominates than by lust (a pity that his wife Angele is such a nonentity). Michael Kirk has a small but rambunctious cameo as an officious Commissioner of Police and I liked Rebecca Egan in the brief role of a wronged wife in a potential divorce case, bringing a touch of stillness and poignancy amidst all the silliness.

Sam Dowson’s glamorous design makes full use of the Orange Tree’s unique space (I saw some children who seemed enchanted by the idea of being able to walk through the set at the interval) that acts as Fauvinard’s study, Cesarine’s boudoir and the study again. Sam Walters ensures that the cast embrace their characters’ one-note personalities and they mostly remain likable, which is no mean feat considering how limited they are. For frivolous escapism, it’s a show that’s mildly diverting, but not excessively so.

Written for A Younger Theatre

Review: Quality Street (Finborough Theatre)

2010-12-09T17:15:00.002Z

J.M. Barrie’s 1901 pre-Peter Pan romantic comedy invites a host of confectionary-related metaphors in this appealing production by Louise Hill, who recently directed Barrie’s What Every Woman Knows at the Finborough.

Quality Street enjoyed great success in London following on from its Broadway debut in 1902 and a film starring Katharine Hepburn was made in 1937, but hasn’t been seen on the British stage since 1946. In many ways, it is a gossamer thin piece that flirts with some ideas about the ‘Woman Question’ and ties everything up neatly with a rapturously romantic conclusion- which under the circumstances is exactly as it should be.

Like Barrie’s most famous creation Peter Pan, Quality Street has a distinct air of whimsy and childlike innocence about it, but unlike Peter who makes a point of never growing up, it celebrates the process of growing into maturity. It is the stalwart heroine who is rewarded for her patience and is loved for the woman she has grown into, rather than the silly, giggling coquette she assumes that men want.

The play is set amongst a community run by widows and spinsters during the Napoleonic Wars of the early nineteenth century, the conflict that Jane Austen notably (or notoriously, depending on your perspective) never mentioned in her novels. Barrie’s writing has some Austen-esque observations, and the sister relationship, to me, provides the play’s real heart. Confirmed old maid Susan Throssel’s (Daisy Ashford) devotion to her younger sister Phoebe and determination for her to have the things that she was deprived of is gently touching.

This is a society not dissimilar from Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford, filled with knitting, tea and cards, where the arrival of a man- particularly a young handsome one like Mr Valentine Brown (James Russell) whom everyone expects to propose to Miss Phoebe Throssel (Claire Redcliffe) is the source of much excitement and speculation. His exciting news is that he is about to enlist in the army, leaving Phoebe heartbroken and she voluntarily enters premature spinsterhood. She and her sister have also lost their money through an investment recommended to them by Valentine, forcing them to earn their own living by starting a school for genteel children in their parlour, which they are ill qualified to run.

Phoebe’s response when Valentine returns from the wars (minus one hand) is to masquerade as her imaginary niece ‘Livvy’ and becomes the most sought after belle in local society. The extraordinary thing about her transformation is that it is believable that she wouldn’t be recognised. It isn’t just the physical embellishments, but the way in which her entire manner changes. Valentine Brown is dashing but tactless, an entirely clueless young man who never goes through the jolt of self awareness that convinces the audience that he is entirely worthy of Phoebe.

The production values are remarkably lavish but tasteful. Alex Marker’s elegant and airy blue and white set (beautifully lit by Phil Bentley) and the stylish Regency costumes (by Mike Lees) ensure that this fanciful confection is dressed up to its best advantage.

Louise Hill directs with great charm and sympathy and a light touch. Although I would have liked a little more insight into Barrie’s views about the changing roles of women in society, rather like comparing Georgette Heyer with Jane Austen, it’s a piece that’s best enjoyed for what it is, rather than what it isn’t.

Review: The Merry Wives of Windsor (Richmond Theatre)

2010-12-02T17:58:00.001Z

Shakespeare’s Globe’s indoor tour of their highly successful and popular production of The Merry Wives of Windsor arrived at Richmond on the day of the first snow of winter and there couldn’t be a better pre-Christmas treat than Christopher Luscombe’s breezy and utterly charming staging.

Merry Wives seems to only occupy a very minor place in the Shakespearean canon, considered by many scholars to be too trivial to be interesting. I disagree- this isn’t exactly social realism about everyday Elizabethan life, but I think it’s fascinating to get an insight into the kind of provincial society that Shakespeare himself grew up in. Its semi-obscure status makes it doubly refreshing as, firstly, it hasn’t been done to death and secondly, it’s genuinely funny (humour becomes dated far more quickly than anything else) and full of good lines (“Heavens defend me from that Welsh fairy!”) and physical comedy.

Much has been made about this play as an argument for putting Shakespeare forward as the precursor of the modern domestic sitcom. Falstaff, perhaps somewhat like the great sitcom monsters Basil Fawlty or Hyacinth Bucket doesn’t have many redeeming features. He has an overly inflated sense of his own importance and attractiveness and thinks he’s much cleverer than he is, and yet he’s still lovable. What he has got is a huge amount of energy, something which is immensely appealing. Christopher Benjamin (Sir William ‘Capital, Capital!’ Lucas in the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice) imbues this irascible rogue with deliciously fruity intonation and plenty of warmth as well as the oily charm.

As the wives themselves Sarah Woodward and Serena Evans are the most extraordinary sister act as Mistresses Ford and Page, with their razor-sharp timing in which they fully ham up the pretence that they’ve created and make it seem utterly natural. This is a town where these shrewd, acerbic ladies are very much in control. Andrew Havil’s Ford (who disguises himself in a wig much like his future son-in-law’s hairstyle) does an excellent line in outraged, in which the word ‘cuckold’ is worse than any kind of blasphemy.

Sue Wallace is a warm and motherly presence as the go-between Mistress Quickly who doubles up as Gloriana in the ‘fairy pageant.’ As Falstaff was apparently Queen Elizabeth’s favourite character, part of me wishes that Falstaff had proposed to her at the end. The slightly star-crossed lovers Anne Page and Master Fenton are sweetly portrayed by Ceri-Lyn Cissone and Gerard McCarthy, alongside Anne’s other suitors, the Frenchman Dr Caius (Philip Bird) and the sexually ambivalent Slender (William Belchambers), who ends up much happier with another man.

Costume and set designer Janet Bird offers plenty of vibrant outfits, which include lots of colourful doublets and hose and huge ruffs that make modern clothes seem so dull. The music by Nigel Hess is a joy, which everyone came out humming.

Merry Wives doesn’t seem to appear on many reading lists and it’s true that the scope for essay questions is probably rather limited. However, I’ve never laughed at a production of, say, Twelfth Night or As You Like It (let’s face it, Feste and Touchstone are unlikely to ever bring about hysterics) nearly as freely as I fell about laughing over Falstaff’s misadventure in the laundry hamper. What a mercy public transport wasn’t cancelled due to the snow.

(Postcript: After my friend and I shivered and giggled our way back to the station, I found myself on the last Overground train home sitting opposite Falstaff himself (and several other cast members). Jane Austen’s Sir William Lucas couldn’t have hoped to have been portrayed by a finer gentleman than Mr Christopher Benjamin.)

Review: Alice In Wonderland (Little Angel Theatre)

2010-11-29T19:19:00.002Z

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)

2010-11-29T19:12:00.001Z

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)

2010-11-20T10:54:00.001Z

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)

2010-11-03T20:38:00.002Z

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

Review: Palace of the End (Arcola Theatre)

2010-10-30T21:27:00.009+01:00

The Canadian playwright Judith Thompson’s 2007 triptych of monologues about the Iraq war (winner of Amnesty International’s Freedom of Expression Award in 2009) makes for an extraordinarily harrowing yet mesmerising theatrical experience in this new production by Jessica Swale.

Like the Palace of the End of the title (the former 'Palace of Flowers' transformed into Saddam Hussein’s torture chamber), these pieces are simultaneously beautiful and appalling.

There’s a female soldier based on Private Lynndie England, the suicidal weapons inspector Dr David Kelly and an Iraqi lady Nehrjas, one of the many victims of Saddam’s reign of torture. These three characters are linked by the fact that they are all damaged from having seen so much brutality and Thompson’s script explores the divergent ways in which they respond to it.

First up is Jade Williams as a heavily pregnant trailer park girl from West Virginia turned soldier, awaiting trial for sexually tormenting Iraqi soldiers, claiming that she didn’t made her victims do anything that she hadn’t at some point done herself. This is a young woman given responsibility that she is far too immature and poorly educated to handle- she's more concerned about her image on the internet and place in popular culture than the consequences of her actions. Yet she isn’t a complete monster as she has grown up in a culture of bullying and has never been taught any differently.

The case of Dr David Kelly, the weapons inspector who killed himself in 2003 over the British government’s dossier on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, is a conspiracy theorist’s dream. Robin Soans portrays Kelly as a devoted and caring husband and father destroyed by the murder of his closest friends in Baghdad. The audience is placed in the awkward position of being asked to witness his death, as his family would try to revive him- you feel as if you should step in, but this is theatre. And it’s impossible to change what has already happened.

Thirdly, Imogen Smith delivers a highly dignified performance Nehrjas ('Daffodil' in Arabic), an elegant and well-educated widow in her fifties whose family was destroyed by Saddam Hussein’s secret police when they refused to divulge information of her husband’s whereabouts. Her unflinching descriptions of the torture that she and her sons endured juxtaposed with the anecdotes about day-to-day life in Baghdad before Saddam took over are narrated without losing control. It’s even more chilling that way.

Judith Thompson’s exquisite writing has a very welcome lightness of touch amidst the horror. Her attention to the little quirks that make characters human rather than archetypes is a delight. The poetic touches in the language never feel forced or overdone, but rather reflect the characters’ fragile state of mind as they slip further and further ‘Through the Looking Glass’ (a recurring motif). Jessica Swale’s direction is impeccably simple, letting the words speak for themselves.

All three monologues could be presented as stand-alone pieces, but as a trio, combined with three outstandingly sensitive performances, they make a remarkably powerful tour de force. While it deserves a larger audience than can be accommodated in the Arcola’s smallest studio, the intimacy is yet another one of the production’s greatest assets. The pieces may be miniatures in length, but there is nothing small about them. I haven’t seen anything quite so powerful this year.

Written for musicOMH

Review: Me and Juliet (Finborough Theatre)

2010-10-18T21:01:00.002+01:00

It’s probably fair to say that there’s a professional production of at least one of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Big Five” musicals (Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I and The Sound of Music) running at any time in the UK. All of these musicals have gained iconic status and having triumphed last year with the European stage premiere of the duo’s only musical written directly for the silver screen State Fair (which earned a West End transfer), Thom Southerland returns to the intimate Finborough Theatre with the even more obscure meta musical Me and Juliet. Me and Juliet played for 358 performances on Broadway in 1953 and has (to my knowledge) never been revived since.

Me and Juliet is almost two musicals in one, dealing with the backstage intrigue (will the nice guy rescue the girl from her boorish boyfriend?) amongst the cast and crew of a frothy revue, probably not dissimilar from the ones that dominated Broadway when Rodgers and Hammerstein had the audacity to open Oklahoma! with a middle aged woman churning butter onstage, full of contrived lyrics, stock characters and songs and dance routines full of hats, canes, feathers and fans. The ‘real’ characters are fairly weak by Hammerstein’s standards, but what happens offstage is still more engaging than the revue numbers.

The original production boasted a cast of 74, which is scaled down to 15 on the Finborough’s compact stage (plus the pianist) and features some ingenious staging. Alex Marker’s set evokes the bare bones of Broadway grandeur and the less glamorous backstage and choreographer Sally Brooks does her best to make the show-within-a-show numbers interesting. It’s a parody of fluffy schmaltz and although Hammerstein was the real radical of the partnership, he wasn’t a writer of seemingly effortlessly punchy lyrics like Lorenz Hart or Cole Porter and these numbers fall rather flat (not that Rodgers’s music is much more inspired). However, the references to meta theatre with The Big Black Giant, about the changing nature of audiences and Intermission Talk, in which audience members lament the decline of theatre are cleverly done and show how little things change, even if front of house staff no longer sell cigarettes.

I think the greatest aspect of Hammerstein’s genius was being able to make ordinary characters and stories extraordinary and there are hints of this in the central romance. Jeanie and Larry’s exploration of their feelings for each other through rehearsing the show’s love ballad No Other Love is very much in keeping with the ‘love song with a twist’ pioneered by Hammerstein. It’s fun spotting all the little references to Carousel, most notably in Jeanie’s macho, commitment shy boyfriend Bob (John Addison) a Billy Bigelow type, but impossible to feel any real sympathy for because of the delight he takes in mocking his girlfriend. His crisis of masculinity with a bottle of scotch and attempt at redemption doesn’t tug at the heartstrings in quite the same way.

Laura Main, who was a lovely ingénue in State Fair, is just as endearing as the uncertain chorus girl Jeanie and sings with a beautiful purity. Her romance with the utterly decent, nearly middle aged ASM Larry (Robert Hands) is a bit like watching Julie Jordan marry the Starkeeper, but the very warm and sincere chemistry between the two makes it work. Jodie Jacobs also has fun as sassy Southern soubrette Betty, whose duet with Jeanie It’s Me, about being able to become a different person deserves to be better known.

While I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this to a Rodgers and Hammerstein newcomer (better to start with one of the meatier offerings), that is not in any way to belittle Thom Southerland’s lively and unpretentious production and the spirited cast. It offers a fascinating insight into a rarity and the scale is spot-on- to try to recreate it in its original lavish form would be slightly ridiculous. Perhaps Thom Southerland could be persuaded to give the same treatment to Allegro or Pipe Dream to complete his collection of Rodgers and Hammerstein rarities- I’m sure many Rodgers and Hammerstein groupies would appreciate that. And as his next project is apparently Carousel, the most glorious of the canon, I hope he casts Laura Main as Julie Jordan.

Originally posted on A Younger Theatre

Review: The Company Man (Orange Tree)

2010-10-11T21:17:00.003+01:00

"You notice everything when you can’t move." So says the wheelchair bound wife and mother in Torben Betts’s play and, indeed, this theme of watching from the sidelines and being unable to communicate is central to the play which places human beings as mere micro-organisms in an infinitely larger and harsher sphere.

The word 'company' can refer to both business and friendship, and the eponymous Company Man's

decision to prize industrial success above everything is what ultimately isolates him from humanity at large.

Betts is a protégé of Alan Ayckbourn and the play is a rather bleak family drama with plenty of apocalyptic references. Betts portrays this family as embodying the best and the worst of this changeable world, in which anything can be achieved through hard work, but terrible illnesses can also strike anyone, regardless of privilege.

It's set in a lavish home in the leafy Home Counties, though Sam Dowson’s very simple set, consisting of a chintzy sofa, a garden table and chairs, a bedside cabinet and photographic prints of the play’s recurring motifs could belong to a family of any income. It is an oddly sterile and impersonal setting for a family home, perhaps intended to evoke the way in which the house is merely a gathering place, but like the play itself, only partially rings true.

The story is dominated by William Carmichael (Bruce Alexander), a self-made working class man, who endured a traumatic childhood and made his own way up to the top, which he never lets anyone forget. His resentment towards anyone who hasn’t had to overcome to same obstacles is what poisons his relationship with his son. It is difficult to feel much sympathy towards a character who is not engaging enough to earn it. His recurring catchphrases guarantee laughs from the audience, but although I appreciate that the repetitiveness of his lectures about cricket statistics, ornithology and capitalism are to illuminate his unwillingness to listen to others or connect with anything more emotionally complicated than bare facts, it is tempting for both his onstage and offstage audiences to grow restless during these tirades.

Isla Blair is excellent as his wife Jane, amongst the last of a ‘dying breed’ of women brought up to serve their husbands and under the death sentence of the horribly debilitating Motor Neurone Disease. Blair poignantly embodies Jane’s determination to maintain her dignity and sense of irony through the pain, and her resolve to make the final decision about her illness.

Nicholas Lumley has the well-meaning but unconvincing role of family friend Jim, who always wanted to be more than friends with Jane and has now found God, offering kindly meant but most unhelpful rhetoric about suffering being a blessing. Beatrice Curnew is nicely restrained in the underwritten role of the self-sacrificing carer daughter Cathy and Jack Sandle is appropriately volatile as prodigal son Richard.

The Company Man is well performed and full of ideas with some striking astronomical imagery, but it's somewhat let down by the characterisation. The permanently in-the-round Orange Tree Theatre is a wonderful space and although Adam Barnard’s direction (he previously directed Betts’s play The Swing of Things at the Stephen Joseph Theatre) is clear and unobtrusive, one rarely feels entirely absorbed in the proceedings.

Written for musicOMH

Review: The Rivals (Richmond Theatre)

2010-09-23T20:55:00.002+01:00

The Rivals is Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s homage to Bath, the city that was the height of fashion in the eighteenth century for its elegance, Palladian architecture and therapeutic waters (all of which it retains today- just not the huge frocks and hairstyles found in this play), and where Peter Hall’s production appropriately originated. There can be no better place to see it outside of the Bath itself than in beautiful Richmond, which has to be London’s answer to Bath. I am an admirer of Peter Hall’s ‘straightforward’ style, and his absolutely traditional production of Pygmalion (also with Christopher Woods’s sets and Simon Higlet’s costumes) was a great favourite of mine as every single aspect was so perfectly spot-on. The Rivals is played against the handsome backdrop of the Royal Crescent and the cast play their roles very appealingly, but the production itself is a little slow and lacked a certain flicker of energy to keep the exploits of Mrs Malaprop and friends consistently sparkling.

Eighteenth-century sentimental comedies of manners are tricky things to revive nowadays as the very mannered, formalised society they portray and satirise almost seem to belong to another world. They also cannot fall back on the innuendo and bawdiness found in seventeenth-century works (if you find that kind of thing funny; I personally do not). The humour is gentle, rather than laugh-out-loud funny, the plots convoluted with lots of mistaken identities and misunderstandings and there are plenty of stock characters- a flighty ingénue and her lover, a ‘she-dragon’ of an aunt, a disapproving father, an outspoken Cockney valet and a naive country bumpkin. In sentimental comedy style, the emphasis is on talking about feelings, but moments of spontaneous emotion are rather rare (Sir Anthony Absolute’s outburst being the exception).

As the poor little rich girl Miss Lydia Languish, who is smitten with her lover Ensign Beverley as a penniless soldier but disappointed when he turns out to be the son of a baronet (played by a smooth-tongued Tam Williams), Robyn Addison (in her professional stage debut) plays her role with assurance, but not for laughs. Annabel Scholey is demure and poignant as her friend and foil Julia and Kieron Self gives an likeable performance as the harmless buffoon Bob Acres, who is completely out of his depth in fashionable society.

Unsurprisingly a great deal of the publicity surrounding the production has focused on the reunion of To The Manor Born (one of the most accomplished British sitcoms) co-stars Penelope Keith and Peter Bowles in the roles of Lydia’s guardian Mrs Malaprop and Ensign Beverley/Captain Jack’s father Sir Anthony Absolute. Fortunately, both fit their roles perfectly. The ever formidable Ms Keith gives Mrs Malaprop a graceful dignity and whose misapplication of words (“The pineapple of politeness” receiving the biggest laugh) seem to stem from a desire to appear educated, in spite of her disapproval of women reading. Her purple gown is also absolutely splendid. Bowles, likewise, is excellent as the hero’s stern father, a role that does not come altogether naturally to him as he himself married for love.

This production provides a pleasant diversion, but I feel that it could have been a bit more than that if a little less stately and cautious. Underneath the affected politeness, there is a sense of mischief that is rather lacking here.

Written for A Younger Theatre

Review: Design For Living (Old Vic)

2010-09-15T20:51:00.002+01:00

This is probably as good a time as any to ‘confess’ to my fondness for watching bright young people in silk dressing gowns sipping cocktails and exchanging witty remarks. Anthony Page’s production of Noel Coward’s 1932 play Design For Living is lovely to look at and ought to satisfy my longings to escape into an artisan Parisian loft, a luxurious London apartment or a state of the art New York penthouse (designed by Lez Brotherton). Lisa Dillon’s blue-grey evening gown is also quite stunning. However, I never think it is a good sign when the design is by far the best aspect of a production. This is not to in any way devalue the designer’s work, but because I feel that the aesthetic ought to complement the play, rather than being the main attraction. It was quite a shock to discover that the man who is considered by some to be the greatest all-round theatrical talent Britain has ever had and whose plays I have very much enjoyed in the past could have written such an unrelentingly tedious piece.

It is easy to see why this play caused a stir in 1932: Gilda, an interior decorator, is living openly in Paris with her painter lover Otto, then Otto’s playwright best friend Leo (originally played by Coward himself) turns up and she runs off back to London with him. Eighteen months later, Otto returns and they sleep together as Leo is away at a house party in Surrey. Leo comes back early and he and Otto get drunk and share a kiss. In the meantime, Gilda has absconded to New York with old family friend Ernest. Not only is it all hopelessly dated nowadays, but (to this reviewer and her companion) not even at all witty. It employs the kind of visual and verbal humour found in bad sitcoms in which the audience knows exactly what is coming and laugh because their anticipation is vindicated when it inevitably happens.

Lisa Dillon (so good in Cranford) has the thankless task of trying to breathe life into a character who initially shows some promise, being a woman who has no intention of marrying because she doesn’t want children and has no need to obtain social position, but quickly becomes irritating beyond belief with her incessant rhapsodising about of a whole lot nothing. As her two gentleman friends, Andrew Scott certainly milks the frightfully affected camp mannerisms and Tom Burke looks quite good in a vest. It all comes to a head with the excruciating drunk scene that goes on forever. In real life, drunk people who think they are being so terribly amusing are the very opposite. It is no different on stage.

What was the point of reviving this? There was no doubt that a large percentage of the audience thought it was laugh-in-the-aisles hilarious, but there were also several seats that were abandoned after the second interval. I could have gladly pushed these narcissistic, vapid characters who nevertheless are adored and indulged by their creator out of the huge French windows of Gilda’s fabulous penthouse. It seems like rather an insult that the audience is supposed to root for them. It was hard not to be reminded of that ultimate dig in After The Dance (a superior play in every way imaginable)- “Don’t be a bore.” Well, Mr Coward, what an absolute bore you could be. I would much rather sit next to Terence Rattigan at a dinner party.

Originally posted on A Younger Theatre

Review: HMS Pinafore (Rosemary Branch)

2010-09-11T20:35:00.002+01:00

Despite my intense, non-ironic love for the American Musical, I have always found the very British Gilbert and Sullivan harder to get along with and regarded their work as something to respect rather than love. There was always something a bit too fussy and cutesy about it that made me long to go home and listen to some Sondheim. However, the colourful and zany productions by young chamber opera company Charles Court Opera, who have produced over 20 operas in five years and feature some of the most talented young professionals in the business, have helped to change that. Having now seen several operas in the intimate Rosemary Branch Theatre (a perfectly formed black box theatre above a pub that seats about 60), it seems the best place in the world to experience the genre, especially comic operas. There is something that makes the entire experience so much more all-encompassing by being so close to the proceedings.

Director John Savournin (who also lends his rich baritone voice to a pompous Captain Corcoran with a touch of childlike naïveté) certainly extracts the full comic potential from this tale of entertaining naval nonsense about class, camp sailors and accidents of birth, in which Captain Corcoran's attempt to marry his daughter Josephine off to the First Lord of the Admiralty Sir Joseph Porter KCB (a delightfully jaunty performance by Simon Masterton-Smith) is thwarted by her preference for lowly sailor Ralph Rackstraw. Sir Joseph Porter’s entourage of sisters, cousins and aunts are de-pluralized for the simple reason that a whole gang of them wouldn’t fit on stage (keep an eye out for the aunt’s droll cameo). James Perkins designs with elegant economy with a few nautical props and Sullivan and Gilbert’s own faces in the sun and moon keeping a watchful eye on the action.

As the bumboat woman Little Buttercup, Rosie Strobel is a total delight with her powerful voice and expressive eyes in the way in which she manages to milk the sensuality of the role without sexing it up (subtle distinction). Georgia Ginsberg and David Menezes are both very winning and sing charmingly as star-crossed lovers Josephine and Ralph, perhaps the hardest roles to make an impact in amongst all the clowning. The cast are supported by the four hands of Wigmore Hall piano duo David Eaton and James Young, who play with exuberance and sensitivity.

I can’t help wondering if you’re supposed to question or even notice the inconsistencies in the plot: Ralph Rackstraw can’t be that young a lover if he’s Josephine’s father’s age and is it supposed to be at all creepy that Captain Corcoran in his reduced circumstances finds solace in the arms of his former foster mother? Probably not. The idea of Gilbert and Sullivan with the subtext laid bare is not a particularly appealing thought. This has to be a case of accepting the ‘topsy-turvydom’ for what it is.

A merrier, more beautifully sung show in London would be hard to find. I would particularly recommend it to anyone who is feeling a little disillusioned as it would be very difficult indeed to leave without succumbing to the infectious charms of this compact and uproarious production. Take along all your sisters, cousins and aunts (and all other friends and relations).

Originally posted on A Younger Theatre

Review: The Thunderbolt (Orange Tree)

2010-09-06T20:42:00.004+01:00

Arthur Wing Pinero (1855-1934), a contemporary of George Bernard Shaw, is not exactly a household name these days in spite of being one of the most prolific and popular playwrights of his time with an oeuvre that included light farce, sentimental comedies, and ‘problem plays’ about contemporary society. Like Shaw and Ibsen, Pinero had a particular interest in the role of women in Victorian and Edwardian society, the most famous on the subject being The Second Mrs Tanquery, which was referenced by Hillaire Belloc in his poem about Matilda who told such dreadful lies (indeed, I never realised that it was a real play before doing my research for The Thunderbolt). The female characters in this play are shown to be grasping vultures (but no more so than their husbands), desperately nervy and almost too good and forgiving to be true. It is the illegitimate daughter who has far more class than any of her ‘legitimate’ relations.

The Thunderbolt could probably be best described as a family drama filled with unpleasant and desperate characters satirising greed, petty rivalries and the desperation of keeping up appearances in the fictional Midlands town of Singlehampton. At nearly three hours long, some of the long-winded passages could be trimmed, but it refrains from the tedious philosophising that certain Ibsen and Shaw plays suffer from and has an agreeable lightness of touch.

This play works beautifully from being presented in the round as the audience steps through the late Mr Edward’s library (designed by Sam Dowson) to get to their seats. Set changes are deftly handled by the cast re-arranging the furniture to create a whole new room. The dining room table in Act II is revealed to be three separate cabinets that form part of Mr and Mrs Thad’s drawing room. Very simple, but so effective.

The Mortimores have to be one of the most ghastly families in fiction. The sudden death of the eldest brother Edward Mortimore, a wealthy brewer who was estranged from the rest of the family has his three surviving brothers and one sister and their spouses descending en masse, calculating what they believe to be their rightful inheritance as next of kin to the last penny. The introduction of Edward’s lovely illegitimate daughter Helen (Grainne Keenan) temporarily complicates the celebrations. Helen refuses to accept an allowance from her newly discovered relations, determined to make her own living as an artist through the invaluable education that her father ensured she received, in spite of being deeply hurt not knowing whether her father meant to provide for her or not. The Mortimores are only too happy to respect her independence.

The acting amongst the entire cast is impeccable, including Geoff Leesley as bluff family spokesman and property developer Mr Jim and David Whitworth as local newspaper editor and insufferable pedant Mr Stephen. Brenda Longman and Julie Teal make the most of their roles as their sour wives. The sole sister Rose (Janet Spencer Turner) is an aspiring London society hostess and her husband Colonel Ponting (Osmond Bullock) might actually be the most avaricious of the lot.

The society of Singlehampton is one in which to be a grocer’s daughter is a fate worse than death, evidenced in the abuse that youngest brother Thaddeus’s wife Phyllis receives from her in-laws. Natalie Ogle excels in the role of this complicated woman who is deeply vulnerable and scarred from the years of cruelty. She is well supported by Stuart Fox as her husband. The very fact that Thad and Phyllis love each other and had the spirit to rebel by getting married sets them apart from the other Mortimores.

While I am not entirely sure if The Thunderbolt is a lost ‘masterpiece,’ it retains its power to expose the timeless themes of greed, hypocrisy and social snobbery in a quietly angry way. It is impossible not to feel indignant when Mr Jim grovels to Helen, stretching her generosity to the limit. It could hardly be better served by Sam Walters’s stylish production and the flawless ensemble cast. I am still not certain as to whom (or what) the ‘Thunderbolt’ of the title refers- perhaps it is the way in which the Mortimores’ smug complacency is suddenly threatened by public scandal. Of course they’ll never appreciate Helen’s compassion that protects them from this, but Pinero must be suggesting that she is the richest in the end, being the only one who can move forward with a clear conscience and build a life to be proud of.

Written for A Younger Theatre

Review: Into The Woods (Open Air Theatre)

2010-08-18T20:32:00.002+01:00

It is hard to imagine a musical and a venue more suited to one another than Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s witty melting pot of Grimm and Perrault fairytales Into The Woods and the gorgeously leafy Regents Park Open Air Theatre (the loveliest venue in London on a clear summer evening). The effect of starting the evening in partial dusk with darkness falling by the interval has rarely been so ideal. As there are few musicals that are more wordy, one can only imagine how difficult it must have been to get the clarity just right. Credit must firstly go to sound designer Mike Walker for his outstanding work. I only worry about how many people have missed the second act entirely, assuming that the ‘happy ever after’ that concludes the first act is the ending. The couple next to me certainly thought it was time to leave in spite of the lack of bows.

The episodic first act is a piece of theatre that is quite complete in itself, in which a childless baker and his wife embark on a quest to collect an array of items that will reverse the curse put on the Baker’s family by the witch next door, with the help and hindrance of assorted characters from other fairytales, who are all out to make their own wishes come true. The happy endings that ensue are then complicated when the murdered Giant’s wife (voiced by Judi Dench) wreaks her revenge. The lengths that people will go to in order to get their wishes through the manipulation of others or self-deception (often both) is one of Sondheim’s favourite themes, as are the subjects of parenting and self knowledge. By the time the last midnight strikes, everybody will have had to have lost something in order to move forward.

This is the only theatre where you’re lucky enough to get wittily timed appearances from visiting pigeons. The set by Soutra Gilmour, an intricate network of wooden platforms linked by ladders resembles a giant climbing frame and evokes just how easy it is to get lost and trapped in these woods. Regents Park ought to be given a special award for assembling the most wonderful ensemble casts and this is no exception. Co-directors Timothy Sheader and Liam Steel’s (who also provides the expressive choreography) attention to detail ensures that even the most minor characters are well drawn, including Valda Aviks’s cameo as Little Red Riding Hood’s knife-wielding Granny and Alice Fearn’s transformation from a young woman hidden from the world to embittered alcoholic in the rather thankless role of Rapunzel.

As the Baker’s Wife (the best role in the show), Jenna Russell (who was recently a highlight of the Sondheim Prom) brilliantly illuminates that fine line between being cunning and conniving. Rather like Sondheim’s arch manipulator Mrs Lovett in Sweeney Todd, the Baker’s Wife is an eminently practical woman of humble means who knows what she wants and sets out to get it, but also has an inclination to fantasise. While offering Jack a few ‘magic’ beans in return for his cow isn’t as extreme as turning unsuspecting customers into meat pies, the idea of twisting morality for the greater good, “If the thing you do is pure in intent/If it’s meant and it’s just a little bent/Does it matter?” isn’t entirely dissimilar. Russell beautifully embodies being smitten with the idea of royalty in her envy of Cinderella’s escapades at the ball and her yearning glances at the princes. When Cinderella’s Prince sweeps her off her feet with the least romantic chat up line ever, “Life is often so unpleasant, you must know that as a peasant,” it has never seemed so unfair that sex and death always have to be interlinked like that.

In the role of the Baker’s Wife’s husband, Mark Hadfield is not a natural singer, but he gives the character bumbling charm in the first act and poignant bewilderment when he loses the woman who has been the brains of the operation. Helen Dallimore is an endearing, dreadlocked Cinderella more baffled that charmed by the Prince’s attentions and grows in strength to become the matriarch of the new ‘family’ at the end. Maybe in the sequel to Act II she marries the Baker. Michael Xavier (doubling up as a Freudian rather than suave Wolf who seduces Red Riding Hood and granny too) and Simon Thomas provide excellent comic foils as the two narcissistic princes, who get some of the best lines in the piece in their comic lament Agony and whose aesthetic resembles Russell Brand crossed with something out of Tolkien. The ever so glamorous Hannah Waddingham is unrecognisable in her old crone disguise and she brings her characteristic regal flair to the beautiful but powerless Witch. Credit must also go to the costume department for the whimsical with a touch of grunge costumes.

Timothy Sheader’s fascinating innovation in his staging is to have a runaway child as the narrator who stage manages the events. “Children may not obey,/But children will listen”, has never seemed so poignant in the way in which very adult issues can cause damage by entering the consciousness of a child through the power of words.

This is certainly a blissful production for the greatest living (and in my opinion all-time greatest) composer and lyricist’s 80^th birthday year. My own wish is that the Donmar’s upcoming revival of Sondheim’s Passion reaches the same heights.

Written for A Younger Theatre

Review: Shakespeare the Man From Stratford (Richmond Theatre)

2010-07-27T20:27:00.004+01:00

Whenever I visit the pretty Warwickshire town of Stratford-upon-Avon to go to the theatre, it never ceases to amaze me that if one Will Shakespeare hadn’t hailed from there, it probably wouldn’t register on tourists’ agendas at all. It is hardly surprising that Shakespeare has been mythologised and put on a pedestal, but Shakespeare The Man From Stratford, a new play by world-renowned Renaissance scholar Jonathan Bate strips away the mystique to show us that Shakespeare came from a very ordinary background and yet was gifted with an extraordinary imagination and empathy with human beings from all walks of life, not to mention the hard work and intensive research.

The idea that his plays could not have been written by someone from a non-courtly background I think is similar to the ridiculous assumption that Jane Austen could not have written such incisive and heartfelt novels about love and marriage without having had a secret love affair of her own. Shakespeare’s upbringing as the son of a glove maker in a small provincial market town was not glamorous, but as Jonathan Bate comments ‘That’s the most remarkable thing of all’

The production is deceptively simple, skilfully directed by Tom Cairns and cleverly designed by Jeremy Herbert featuring some books, a mobile and a very special dog. Jonathan Bate bases the piece around the ‘Seven Ages of Man’ speech from As You Like It, peppered with anecdotes about Shakespeare’s life and Elizabethan culture. We follow Will Shakespeare’s early life as the first surviving child of the future mayor of Stratford John Shakespeare and his wife Mary, which was beautifully illustrated by the scene with the little prince Mamillius asking for a story from my personal favourite play The Winter’s Tale. Moving on to ‘the whining schoolboy, with his satchel,’ Bate argues that the education Shakespeare received in a newfangled grammar school (which taught only Latin grammar) where the boys learned how to acknowledge thanks when responding to a letter in 100 different ways as well as the language of the law and government was more than sufficient and indeed perfect to train him in the art of rhetoric. Conspiracy theorists can look away now.

Taking centre stage throughout, Simon Callow is delightful with his command of the stage and that extraordinary voice. He is charming company, like a favourite uncle sharing his stories. The way in which he offers snapshots of characters as diverse as Romeo and Juliet to Brutus to Falstaff, effortlessly capturing the essence of each one is astonishing. Let’s hope it is only a matter of time before we see Simon Callow as Prospero or King Lear.

I find that the one-person shows that work best are both entertaining and informative, which is why pieces about real-life figures work so well. This is beautifully written and performed and full of clever little touches in the staging. Shakespeare was the man from Stratford and the playwright from London- during his lifetime, he was only renowned in his hometown for the property portfolio he obtained in his forties. I wonder how he would feel about Stratford being the epicentre of performances of his works today. In the programme notes, Jonathan Bate asks ‘what was it like being Shakespeare? That is the question we ask in our play.’ I am still not certain what the answer to that is, but surely what matters most is the works themselves.

Written for A Younger Theatre

Review: Not By Bread Alone (ArtsDepot)

2010-07-06T20:22:00.009+01:00

A very wise actor acquaintance once told me, "Theatre should never be what you expect." When I go to the theatre, I usually have some kind of idea about the piece’s concept and subject matter, but I had absolutely no preconceptions whatsoever about Not By Bread Alone, a piece devised by Israeli company Nagala’at, in which all the performers are deafblind. It’s a predicament that seems unbearable to those of us fortunate enough to be able to see and hear. Perhaps the most famous deafblind person (or at least the only one I could name off the top of my head) is Helen Keller, who was taught a special sign language by her governess Anne Sullivan through touch. There are plenty of examples of that in this piece, as well as Hebrew, Russian and Israeli sign language, and the English subtitles. It’s slightly surreal, especially when the words are being translated amongst the performers themselves in more ways than is possible to follow.

Nagala’at is the only theatre company of its kind in the world and began life as a two month workshop led by the Swiss born actress and director Adina Tal, but was so successful that it has been running for ten years. The Nalaga’at Centre opened to the public in 2007 in Tel Aviv and this production has been three years in the making.

When entering the auditorium, the audience is greeted by the sight of ten people in a kitchen making bread and one typing away at a typewriter with cheerful music playing. It all looks quite idyllic. The bread itself acts as ‘the taste of nature’ and the purest way of sharing, and therefore communicating. We learn about the loneliness (like being in a foreign country and not knowing the language), the frustration of dependency on others and constantly being interrupted, but there is no self pity and plenty of humour.

I felt that some scenes, such as the Italian episode in homage to the company’s former member and friend Michael who died during the early rehearsal period at the age of 27, could have had a bit more narrative clarity. The simple stories are best, such as the lady who took refuge in fashion magazines when she could see and dreamed of having her hair styled by a famous celebrity hairdresser. This was taken away from her when she lost her sight.

I felt that the most poignant scene was when Genia, the matriarch of the group, expresses her wish to share her love of music and plays her favourite Russian folk song from when she was a little girl and before she lost her hearing. The fact that she can still hear the music through the vibrations seems remarkable and the way in which the performers are alerted to the scene changes through the vibrations of drum beats shows the most extraordinary sensitivity that I imagine most able-bodied people could never achieve.

I cannot praise the performers, director Adina Tal and the interpreters highly enough. I can’t imagine how challenging learning all the blocking must have been. In her extraordinarily emotional speech, Tal comments that “Nothing is impossible.” It is one of those sentiments that is used so often that it has become something of a cliché, but when watching this company, one can only agree.

The performance is accompanied by a pitch-black bar attended by blind waiters and an exhibition of artworks (including paintings, pottery, mosaics, collages, rugs and more) by blind-deaf artists. What I would love to know is how they choose the colours.

Written for A Younger Theatre

Review: After The Dance (National Theatre)

2010-07-04T20:05:00.005+01:00

As I am fascinated by the interwar period and am always intrigued by ‘lost’ novels and plays, this production of After the Dance by Terence Rattigan directed by Thea Sharrock was the most appealing looking item in the National Theatre’s summer brochure for me. Many plays and novels are forgotten for the perfectly legitimate reason that they aren’t very good, but there is also the matter of fashions constantly changing. It also must have been a lot easier for things to fade away in the days before the Internet. After the Dance was Rattigan’s second play after a making his name with a frothy comedy French Without Tears and opened in June 1939 to excellent reviews, but as the political climate grew ever more turbulent, it closed in the middle of August, two weeks before Hitler invaded Poland. Despite the fact that Rattigan’s reputation suffered from the fifties onwards and was perceived by many as hopelessly middle class and narrow in range, it was Rattigan himself who attempted to eliminate this particular play from his oeuvre by refusing to include it in his Collected Works, due to his discomfort with the fact that it was a financial failure (as Michael Darlow argues in the programme notes).

After the Dance tells us what happened next to the ‘Bright Young Things’ immortalised by Noel Coward’s ‘I Went to a Marvellous Party’ and Evelyn Waugh in Vile Bodies. These are people with no need to work, who thrive on alcohol and gossip about the good old days and live entirely for pleasure. It’s like an extended network connected by one big in-joke. The ultimate put-down in their world to avoid discussing anything serious is ‘Don’t be a bore.’ At the centre of the action are David and Joan Scott-Fowler, who married twelve years ago for the fun of it and are drinking themselves to death with no intention of stopping.

Observing this hedonistic lifestyle with disparagement are David’s earnest much younger cousin Peter and his fiancée Helen, the younger generation who do not drink before dinner and only engage in a few chaste kisses. This is the generation who will fight the war that may or may not be coming. Helen’s crush on her fiancé’s bad boy cousin and her plan to reform him are the catalyst of the tragedy that follows.

Apart from the cliff hanger between Acts II and III, there are few shocks or surprises in this play. It is very much a domestic character piece that builds up slowly. Without wanting to give too much away, I feel that the heart of the tragedy is the fact that the characters are unable to communicate with each other effectively. Joan is unable to tell her husband how much she really loves him in fear of being dismissed as a ‘bore.’ It is a classic example of English emotional repression, but also the obliviousness of people who never really grew up.

Thea Sharrock’s direction is clear and unfussy, letting the words speak for themselves rather than trying to make the piece ‘relevant’ to a contemporary audience. Hildegard Bechtler’s evoking a luxurious Mayfair apartment is spot-on and the performances are universally excellent. As the Scott-Fowlers, Benedict Cumberbatch is both debonair and compellingly tragic and Nancy Carroll is particularly powerful in her silent despair. John Heffernan is perfectly cast as Peter, the most sensible and level-headed character in the piece and newcomer Faye Castlelow is obnoxiously perky (I mean that as a compliment) as Helen, the young woman who thinks she is far more mature and knowing than she really is. Adrian Scarborough delivers one of the finest supporting performances I have ever seen as the Scott-Fowlers’ high maintenance hanger-on, delivering one wisecrack after another and eventually emerges to David’s shock as a voice of reason. There is also a fun cameo from Pandora Colin as Joan’s dreadful over the hill flapper pal Julia and Jenny Galloway milks every nuance she can find in her single scene. Only Nancy Carroll’s rather unflattering wig hits a false note.

After the Dance will never be considered cutting edge. I doubt it was avant-garde in 1939 either, but I suspect that one of the reasons why it failed then was because it hit too close to home. One of the most telling moments is when Joan is confronted with the reality of losing her husband to a younger model and comments, “When you know something is going to happen, it makes it seem further off to joke about it.” I think that this is the kind of sensitively directed, beautifully acted work that the National ought to encourage. The very fact that it was written before anyone knew whether there would be a war or not, let alone the outcome gives it an authenticity and poignancy in a way that a modern writer commenting on the era could never achieve.

Originally posted on A Younger Theatre

Review: Ballets Russes (Rosemary Branch)

2010-06-02T19:49:00.001+01:00

This UK premiere by A Stage Kindly of prolific writer David Reiser’s Ballets Russes is the soap opera version of the groundbreaking early twentieth-century dance company. This movement was led by impresario Sergei Diaghilev and incorporated ballet with contemporary music and visual arts with an emphasis on Russian, rather than Western cultural identity, causing huge controversy with the premiere of The Rite of Spring in 1913. This isn’t the absolute worst romantic historical musical I’ve ever seen (an honour that has to go to a musical version of Madame Bovary told from Charles’s point of view), but the very generic, American cabaret-style music, clunky lyrics and banal book (by Bernard Myers) in which character development is practically non-existent make it an underwhelming combination despite the intriguing subject matter and the best efforts of the cast.

The story focuses on a love triangle, in which a vaguely Machiavellian Diaghilev moulds the young Vaslav Nijinsky (a sexless James Muller) as his protégé and his lover, until up-and-coming ballerina Romola Pulzsky sets her sights on him. After a brief crisis about his sexuality, the two are hastily married and Diaghilev is left heartbroken. Frank Loman brings some gravitas to Diaghilev and Katrina Gibson is sweet voiced as young Romola. However, to produce a musical about one of the most famous dance companies of all time with a cast of non-dancers (particularly in the case of Nijinsky) is a bold move and not a particularly wise one as the intensity and physicality that Nijinsky was celebrated and the other characters rave about is all talk and never becomes a reality. The angular port de bras and jazz hands would also be better suited to a Bob Fosse revue than a musical about ballet.

The most bemusing aspect of the piece is the uncertainty as to whether it’s supposed to be ironic or not. Arabella Rodrigo and Fabian Hartwell ham it up as prima ballerina Matilda Tchessinka and camp company manager Serge, but other cast members remain entirely earnest. Ultimately, I don’t think it is intended to be tongue in cheek because the ‘jokes’- the stereotypical characters and childish rhymes (such as ‘Money, money we need money,’/Lacking funds is never funny./Money money, needing money/Keeps the sky from being sunny’) that make one suspect that Reiser heavily utilised a rhyming dictionary in his writing of the show- get old pretty quickly.

Ballets Russes is amusing in places, but not really for the right reasons. An angry Stravinsky comments ‘These dancers don’t dance/They stomp and they jump./Take this garbage to where it belongs- in the dump,’ which might be a little harsh, but less melodrama and more substance and more actual, you know, dancing, would be most welcome. David Reiser is the author of almost fifty musicals and if this is one of his stronger efforts, one wonders what the less impressive ones are like.

(Stage management by Award Winning Professional Ballet Dancer Kyle Davey- who recently appeared as the Prince in Swansea Ballet Russe’s production of The Nutcracker-was impeccable.)

The Winds of Heaven

2010-05-08T17:34:00.004+01:00

I think I must have picked this up at a jumble sale around the time I read my first Persephone, Monica Dickens's Mariana, but a story about an old lady didn't hold much appeal to me as a 13 year old and it's languished on my shelves ever since. Hopefully I'm less ageist now at nearly 22. I was quite excited to read in the Persephone Biannually that it's going to be one of their autumn titles and it seemed the perfect time to take it off the shelf. I have no idea what the rooster on the cover is supposed to represent and I very much doubt the person who wrote the tag line, "Her husband's death leaves Louise with nothing- except her freedom" had read the book. The whole point of the story is that a penniless widow is entirely dependent on others and has no freedom at all. You can only be a merry widow if you have money. Despite this rather gloomy predicament, it's just as enjoyable as Dickens's coming-of-age classic Mariana as it has the same wry humour, well-drawn characters and the feeling that things will be all right in the end.

The Winds of Heaven is set in London and the Home Counties of the early 1950s, familiar Persephone and Virago territory. The protagonist Louise in her fifties (when fifty really was elderly) and is left penniless and homeless after the death of her awful husband Dudley and is passed from one daughter to another: brisk, house-proud Miriam, married to a successful barrister, temperamental actress Eva and (the worst of the lot, in my opinion) Anne, a lazy, hideously insensitive, self-centered brat who could give Mary Musgrove a run for her money. Anne's husband Frank is 'socially inferior' and looked down upon by the rest of the family, but he's the only adult in the family to show any real empathy towards his mother-in-law's predicament. Louise bonds with her eldest grandchild Ellen, a kindred spirit who also doesn't really belong, and unexpectedly makes friends with a bed salesman who writes thrillers with titles like The Girl in the Bloodstained Bikini on the side. In the winter she's packed off to an old school friend who runs a haphazard seaside hotel on the Isle of Wight. Her attempts to help out are met with a lack of enthusiasm ('Oh, Mother, you're living in the past. People don't do great big washes on Monday anymore') and I think this passage perfectly sums up the agony of being dependent:

Going from one to the other and trying to pass the time and keep out of the way in someone else's house, temporizing with visit after visit, and no roots anywhere- what did other women do, who had been left alone without money or purpose in life? How did they bear this futile necessity to be house somewhere, like a surplus piece of furniture?

What did they do? If their children would not have them, they went to shabby hotels, or were pushed into old ladies' homes, if they were senile enough. It would be easier on the family, Louise thought, if I were an invalid. Then they could put me away in a nursing home without any qualms.

A bleak passage, I know, but this is a story about confounding prejudices and taking risks in order to follow your heart and develop the relationships that really matter, regardless of what anyone thinks of them. Perfect for snuggling up in an armchair with. I look forward to reading more reviews of it in the autumn and to seeing what kind of endpapers Nicola & co. choose for it.

Thanks very much to Claire and Verity for organising the second (annual?) Persephone reading week and I've had lots of fun reading everyone's posts. There are so many beautiful blogs out there (some of which I have to admit inspire a bit of lifestyle envy) and I'm making a resolution- in May, I know- to post more regularly on my little corner of the internet. Not because I expect anyone to read it, I just want to feel as if I'm being vaguely productive.

Hostages to Fortune

2010-05-05T17:25:00.004+01:00

'He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue, or mischief'- Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

Well, here's Francis Bacon's analogy from a female point of view. Hostages to Fortune isn't a title that you hear about often, or one that had ever really jumped out to me while browsing through the Persephone catalogue. I was very lucky to receive a token for two Persephones as a leaving present from the organisation I was doing a placement with and chose one that I'd had my eye on (To Bed With Grand Music by Marghanita Laski) and took a chance on the other. I'm certainly glad that I did because this is a novel that really challenges preconceptions of the domestic novel as something 'nice' and 'cosy.' In fact, this is a novel steeped in domesticity without a trace of sentimentality.

Like her protagonist Catherine, Elizabeth Cambridge was also a doctor's wife raising three children in isolated rural Oxfordshire after the First World War in middle class poverty (though I had to raise an eyebrow slightly at the way in which they have a house that is admittedly too large for them, a car, a maid and a gardener). Catherine's husband William is invalided out of the army and is ambivalent towards his children upon his return, they struggle with too little money, and Catherine's literary ambitions are stifled by rejection and lack of time.

Perhaps strangely, the book it most reminded me of was Lark Rise to Candleford (Flora Thompson's trilogy is exquisite and infinitely better than the schmaltzy TV show that shares its name, but very little else) in the way in which there is no plot in the traditional sense and it details a way of life soon to disappear over a period of about 15 years, from the birth of Catherine's first child Audrey to when Audrey is on the cusp of adulthood and her youngest joins his brother at boarding school. It's at the end of this era when she realises that the drudgery and tedium has been worth it.

The simplicity of the writing (at least on the surface) and understated tone also reminds me of Dorothy Whipple, particularly in her short stories, but Whipple is an extremely moral writer. As much as I love her, she can be a tad all-knowing at times, while there are no heroes and villains in Cambridge's novel. Her characters are people doing what they feel is best in less than ideal circumstances.

I'm becoming increasingly interested in life writing and autobiographical novels like this seem to blur all sorts of boundaries between reality and fiction. I wonder how Cambridge's children felt about this as Catherine's children aren't always portrayed in the most positive light.

A couple of sample passages:

She didn't want Audrey to love her if Audrey wasn't ready to love. She wasn't bound to, just because she and William had begotten her. Love had to grow, like everything else. She would have to obey, and at once, without argument, life was so sudden and dangerous for the very young. But love? She loved Audrey, that was enough for the present. (31)

'Fairies poached eggs!' Audrey said, pointing to the floating daisies.
Catherine laughed, her face close to Audrey's. She kissed her
'You don't encourage her for doing something for you,' Violet said, 'but you kiss her when she talks nonsense. As if she was always going to be a baby!'
Catherine said nothing. She thought her daughter had really done something more deserving of kisses than the dumping of discarded flowers. She stood up, the bowl of shelled peas in the crook of her arm, and reached for the basket of pea shucks with her other hand. (110)

It's only Wednesday and I'm 'between jobs', so what next? I have a Penguin copy of The Winds of Heaven by Monica Dickens, one of the autumn re-prints, so maybe I'll have a little sneak preview.

Paris (Lost Musicals)

2010-04-06T16:33:00.011+01:00

This performance of Cole Porter’s 1928 musical Paris presented by Ian Marshall Fisher as the first of this year’s Lost Musicals provided a delightful Sunday afternoon diversion.

Founded in 1990, the Lost Musicals project presents lesser known works by many of the most popular and distinguished American musical theatre composers, lyricists and librettists of the early twentieth century and are ideal for completists, or those seeking some light entertainment (or both). Despite the fact that back-row seats for a show that is essentially a rehearsed reading performed with scripts and devoid of fancy costumes, scenery and props are not cheap at £21, I did not feel as if I had been short changed as the talent and energy on display more than compensated for lack of spectacle.

Paris was created as a star vehicle for Broadway producer and sometimes composer’s E. Ray Goetz’s new French bride Irène Bordoni and was originally offered to Goetz’s brother-in-law Irving Berlin, who gave it to his more suitable Francophile colleague Cole Porter. The plot is one of those bits of entertaining nonsense not dissimilar to a comedy of manners by Nancy Mitford or P.G. Wodehouse (complete with a pompous butler) that gently satirises American-French relations and their ultimate incompatibility. Architecture student and Boston socialite Andrew Sabbot, portrayed by Richard Dempsey (best known as Peter in the BBC’s Chronicles of Narnia), falls for showgirl Vivenne Rolland and wants to make her his wife. Vivienne will only settle down in domestic bliss in Massachusetts (pronounced Must-You-Choose-It) if his mother approves of her. Meanwhile, her leading man Guy, played by a charming, if slightly mature James Vaughn, has other ideas.

I found it somewhat ironic that although the role written for Mrs Goetz, the hoofer with a heart of gold Vivienne (played here with great pizzazz by Sian Reeves- the only cast member in costume, wearing a gold fringed flapper frock), is great fun and gets to perform the Cole Porter standard and one of his craziest lyrics Let’s Do It with hilarious Gallic manic energy, the show really is stolen by her mother-in-law to be. Anne Reid’s performance as disapproving, teetotal, ultra-respectable Boston matron Cora Sabbot is a joy to behold as she humiliates her son by transforming into a woman of the world who stays out all night, bobs her hair and takes a toy boy (or two).

Would a full-scale revival of Paris, perhaps at the Open Air Theatre, work in 2010? Probably not. There isn’t really enough substance and the score isn’t nearly as full as Anything Goes. I think it is the way in which the musicals of this period are presented that should be adjusted to the times, rather than changing the pieces themselves. For those tired of huge spectacles with little heart, this production that relies only on the actors’ charms and passion for their work and the wit, music and lyrics of Cole Porter shows that small and simple really can be best.

What's Occurring?

2010-01-22T20:53:00.003Z

I've never been a regular blogger, but the past month or so hasn't been easy as my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer after a routine mammogram a week before Christmas and is having surgery next week. I know things are going to be difficult for a while longer, but it really makes me appreciate our wonderful socialist NHS service. I'm also extremely grateful for all the kind comments and words of encouragement from the members of the Virago Modern Classics group on LibraryThing- truly the loveliest corner of the internet. Christmas somehow was more enjoyable than expected, and I'm very grateful for all my presents, including new boots (very useful for keeping my feet dry in the recent snow), some jewellery, plenty of chocolate and three new Persephones (Fidelity, Manja and my own copy of my Persephone favourite, Saplings). I also got a copy of Paul Morel by D.H. Lawrence from my cousin (Lady Chatterley's Lover is the only one of his books that I've read- because I wanted to find out what all the fuss was about), which is apparently an early version of Sons and Lovers. The Oneworld Classics edition is lovely, and reminds me a bit of the Persephone Classics. I'm finding myself coveting several of the books they publish, especially the Russian titles.

In terms of books read, I was really annoyed by Hilary McKay's Wishing for Tomorrow: The Sequel to A Little Princess ('the' sequel? Surely it can only be 'a' sequel unless officially sanctioned by the author). It's quite extraordinary in the way in which Miss Minchin's abuse of Sara and Becky is completely glossed over. Is anyone supposed to buy into the idea that Maria Minchin only turned into a tyrant because she was so much cleverer than a Victorian woman ought to be? Funny that, as Frances Hodgson Burnett herself tells us that Miss Minchin was 'not a clever woman.' If McKay thinks that she, Lavinia and Lottie could live happily ever after in a little house together, that's fine, but I hope Miss Minchin burned in hell. The Brontës Went to Woolworths by Rachel Ferguson was a zany delight- what is about books with 'Woolworths' in the title? (Our Spoons Came From Woolworths was my favourite read of the year). So surreal and yet so deadpan- wonderful. I've finally broken the ice with Elizabeth Taylor as I really loved The Soul of Kindness. A brilliantly delicate, incisive depiction of a woman with a serious Lady Bountiful complex and completely oblivious to the misery she inflicts on others.

One of the highlights of the festive season was Charles Court Opera's production of Dick Whittington at the Rosemary Branch, a panto that truly is a cut above the rest. It's all gloriously un-PC, with sweets and bits of play-dough thrown into the audience, which must violate all sorts of health and safety regulations. Panto is much scarier in a tiny venue as there's a far greater possibility of being singled out by John Savournin's (pictured) Dame, but fortunately (for female audience members with chronic stage fright like myself), her tastes lean towards dads and granddads (I just about passed out with embarassment when my father was chosen as the object of her affection). Apart from that, I loved it, it's such a pleasure to have an entire cast who can sing beautifully, act and tell jokes effectively (not as easy as it sounds). My favourite bit was A Weekend in the Country (one of Sondheim's wittiest and trickiest songs) from one of my absolute favourite musicals A Little Night Music being transformed into A Voyage to Morocco. Loved Idle Jack doing the Henrik bit at the end. It shows that this panto really is the ultimate in class and wit, and I hope there were other people who got it. There was also a delightful duet for Dick and his cute Welsh lady love Alice (modelled heavily on Stacey from Gavin & Stacey), In Milton Keynes, to the tune of Somewhere That's Green from Little Shop of Horrors. It really annoys me that it's always the same pantos that get all the attention in the press: The Hackney Empire (yes, Clive Rowe is amazing, but once you've seen one of their shows, you've seen them all), whichever one has a 'serious playwright' doing the script (this year, Mark Ravenhill at the Lyric Hammersmith) and the one with the most ludicrous celebrity guest star (Pamela Anderson has to take top honours this year). Still, column inches in the broadsheets hardly makes or breaks a show.

I finally saw Bright Star in early January- what an anti-climax. I was expecting to love it as the subject matter is right up my street and it was being hailed as a masterpiece left, right and centre. I personally found it bit of a nicely designed and shot anemic bore. I'm afraid pretty cinematography doesn't compensate for insipid acting and pedestrian dialogue. The beautiful black and white cat was by far the most engaging character. Still, I'd rather watch that ten more times than It's Complicated once more- dire would be bit of an understatement. Absolutely nauseatingly smug, grotesquely unfunny gastro-lifestyle pornography, full of the most thoroughly unpleasant, self-indulgent spoiled brats with tons of money and no sense. The only time I vaguely cracked a smile was the bit with John Krasinski in the pink pyjamas. I don't know what Meryl Streep was thinking.

I have to admit I nearly started hyperventilating in the office when checking What's On Stage and saw that Shirley Jones is making her London debut. It's hard to express just how intensely I admired her when I was 13- her beautiful voice and radiant performances in Oklahoma!, Carousel and The Music Man made me fall in love with the musical genre. I think I also wanted to be her. In recent years, her politics (supporting George H.W. Bush and his son) and some lousy career moves have left me less than impressed. However, a celebration of her wonderful musical talent in person is something I wouldn't miss for the world. Now, that's something to look forward to.

My name is Julia and I am a Viragoholic

2009-12-09T21:03:00.002Z

I'm a bad blogger without the discipline to sit down and write. I'm very lucky to live in England, which is full of charity shops and temptations. I started collecting Virago Modern Classics about a year ago and now have about 100. I'm an absolute magpie for them (and Persephones). Unfortunately, I can buy things far more quickly than I can read them and I'm running out of space. There's no chance of my TBR pile running out for quite some time. Let's see, how did I accumulate my most recent purchases pictured above?:

• Blaming and The Return of the Soldier were very kindly sent to me by Mrs B of The Literary Stew. TRotS looks a lot shorter than most of Rebecca West's work (I'm often scared off by length...), so it should be a good place to start.
• I adore Rosamond Lehmann's writing, and was very pleased to find Dusty Answer (which I believe to be many people's favourite) in the Marylebone Oxfam Books, especially as it's one I was considering buying new.
• The Tortoise and the Hare came from Borders. I for one am sorry that they're closing. I remember when the first one opened on Oxford Street- I'd never seen anything like it. I'm so glad a manager wrote back in response to Rachel Cooke's rather smug article. Yes, independent bookshops are lovely, but when a huge business like Borders can't survive competition from the internet, does she really expect small independent bookshops to spring up now that they've closed? (I'm going off topic now, but it still irks me).
• I've been looking for a copy of The Sugar House (in original green to match the other three) ever since I had my heart ripped out by The Lost Traveller, and I thought The Soul of Kindness had an interesting premise. I managed to show some restraint as there were a few others that looked tempting.
• I found Deborah (I'm always interested in Jewish fiction) and The Play Room in a charity shop I'd never been in before- so I felt as if I had to buy something from them...
• I was sent to Oxfam to buy one of their special handmade cards for a distant relation about to turn 80, and having read a wonderful review of Lucy Gayheart by Book Snob just a few hours previously, it seemed like providence.

It's been over a year now since the bulk (or at least a great deal) of my re ading became Virago and Persephone based. Some of my favourites so far include The Diary of a Provincial Lady (the one that started it all off, really) by E.M Delafield, Invitation to the Waltz and The Weather in the Streets by Rosamond Lehmann, Our Spoons Came From Woolworths by Barbara Comyns, The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Armin, Mrs Miniver by Jan Struther, The Lost Traveller by Antonia White and of course everything by Angela Carter. It's impossible to love every single book they publish (The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy was a recent dud for me, and I normally love quirky coming of age stories), but it's fairly rare to come across one that I won't want to re-visit at some point for whatever reason.

Does anyone else have this 'problem?' What are some of your favourite Virago titles? Of course, the obvious solution would simply not to go into charity shops, but, realistically, I think I need to be more discriminatory with my purchases, however cheap they are. I need to ask myself how likely I am to read it. However, there's always the worry that a week later I'll realise I desperately need it for something and it's terribly rare...

A post with some actual substance will be forthcoming in the not too distant future...

Women Unbound

2009-11-22T20:59:00.001Z

Participants in this challenge are encouraged to read nonfiction and fiction books related to "women’s studies."

According to a Wikipedia entry, women's studies is an interdisciplinary academic field devoted to topics concerning women, feminism, gender, and politics. It often includes feminist theory, women's history, women's fiction, women's health, feminist art, feminist psychoanalysis, and the feminist and gender studies-influenced practice of most of the humanities and social sciences.

There are three levels for readers:

Philogynist: Read at least two books, including at least one nonfiction.
Bluestocking: Read at least five books, including at least two nonfiction.
Suffragette: Read at least eight books, including at least three nonfiction.

This is the first reading challenge I've decided to take part in- I've always been a little daunted about taking part in reading challenges in case I can't keep up (sometimes I read really fast, sometimes I'm terribly slow), but as this lasts for a year and I have plenty of books on my shelves that would be suitable, why not? These are the books I've chosen so far, but I'm sure more will turn up:

Fiction:
Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (nearly finished this...)
Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
The Crowded Street by Winifred Holtby
Fidelity by Susan Glaspell
Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell

Non-fiction:
An Interrupted Life: The Diaries and Letters of Etty Hillesum by Etty Hillesum
The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands by Mary Seacole
Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire by Amanda Foreman

Has anyone read any of these? I'd love to hear your thoughts...

And yes, I absolutely consider myself a feminist. In fact, there are few things that irritate me more than the phrase, "I'm not a feminist, but..."

Wives & Daughters

2009-11-02T15:31:00.003Z

What can I say about American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld, the novel that isn't-a-portrait-of-Laura-Bush-but-really-kind-of-is that hasn't been said already? I hate the Bush administration and everything it stands for and I've never been an admirer of Mrs Bush, but I nevertheless loved this book. I think it's because Sittenfeld writes so empathetically in the voice of a woman whose lifestyle and choice of husband few of us are ever likely to have much in common with. Alice Blackwell née Lindgren is presented as a sensitive, bookish child and teenager, whose life is transformed when she kills a classmate whom she has a crush on in a car accident, starts an affair with his dissolute brother and has an illegal abortion arranged by her (lesbian) grandmother. The often seedy side of life that we never hear about in relation to the (bloody) American Dream. She settles into a life as a spinster-ish elementary school librarian and unexpectedly falls in love with the charming ne'er-do-well son of the richest family in the state. I'm not sure if I can fully believe that Laura Bush is a secret liberal, but I could believe it of Alice Blackwell. I think it's important to separate the two. I like the cover, which is exactly how I imagine Alice to look, but I don't think she rides a bicycle once in the novel and the landscape looks far more Little House on the Prairie than small town Wisconsin...

At Mrs's Lippincote's, the first novel by Elizabeth Taylor is a finely written novel, but not one that really resonated with me. Although it is told from several different points of view, I found it difficult to really connect with any of them. My favourite character was precocious young Brontë-obsessed Oliver- I have to admit that I was a bit like that when I was younger. I was also ambivalent towards Angel, so I wonder what it is that's preventing me with connecting with a writer who, going by my usual tastes and preferences, I ought to love. I have a feeling Taylor is a writer who grows on you and I'm certainly not giving up.

I absolutely loved Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men after the First World War by Virginia Nicholson, the best non-fiction work I've read in goodness knows how long. This is my great-grandmother's generation- she was one of four sisters born in the 1880s and 90s and she was the only one who ever married (one lived with her lover for years but never married him, another was a fairly well-known artist in lesbian Jewish avant-garde circles and I don't know anything about the fourth) and that was to her cousin. I loved just how readable, sympathetic and moving this book was, the analysis is sensitive and spot-on and the case studies are fascinating. They include the campaigner Florence White (not the same Florence White of Good Things In England fame) and her sister Annie who campaigned for spinters' rights and set up the National Spinsters Pensions Association, Gertrude Maclean who founded the Universal Aunts agency (a fantastic enterprise- women could finally get paid for something that had always been taken for granted), Caroline Haslett, the first director of the Electrical Association for Women (who was cremated by electricity- I love it), lady's maid Rose Harrison who when asked what she'd do if she could live again replied, "I would live my life over again," and countless others. Winifred Holtby's books have also risen rapidly to the top of my TBR pile. Nicholson isn't afraid to take on questions that are still controversial in the C21, such as whether it's possible to be happy and fulfilled without getting married and having children. If these extraordinary women are anything to go by, the answer should be a resounding yes. The First World War was undoubtedly a tragedy of immeasurable proportions that caused all sorts of damage and it's fair to mourn for a 'lost generation,' but it is easy to romanticise what might have been. If it hadn't happened, expectations of women's lives might have remained based on getting married and having babies. I wish my girlfriends and acquaintances who do nothing but whine about their boyfriends would read this book. It puts so many things into perspective.

On the silver screen, I enjoyed An Education, based on Lynn Barber's memoir of coming of age in 1960s suburbia, despite feeling squeamish at the love scenes. It's really scary how Jenny/Lynn's parents encouraged the relationship. For me, the real treat was seeing a host of fabulous semi-obscure British actresses sharing the screen. As many have already commented, Carey Mulligan is wonderful as Jenny with an extraordinary way of appearing very young and older than her years at the same time, Olivia Williams (an actress I absolutely adore) as her English teacher Miss Stubbs (the scene in her flat at the end was beautiful), Rosamund Pike as ditzy blonde amoral trophy girlfriend Helen and Kate Duchene (Miss Hardbroom on The Worst Witch- my favourite TV show when I was 10) as the Latin teacher (I'd recognise that voice anywhere). There's also a cameo from not-so obscure but always brilliant Emma Thompson as an unpleasant anti-semitic headmistress. The period details are immaculate and the ending somehow seemed perfect.