Review: Palace of the End (Arcola Theatre)

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)

 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)

"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