Review: Breakfast With Emma (Rosemary Branch)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Written for A Younger Theatre

Review: HMS Pinafore (Rosemary Branch)

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: Ballets Russes (Rosemary Branch)

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.)