Review: The Cradle Will Rock (Arcola Theatre)

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

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


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

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


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

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

Written for musicOMH

Review: 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