Carousel of Fantasies

Review: Abigail's Party, Menier Chocolate Factory

2012-03-09T10:30:00.005Z

Written for Whatsonstage.com

It wasn’t all cheesy-pineapples and fibre-lights in the 1970s. Like Alan Ayckbourn’s Absent Friends, Mike Leigh’s best-loved play shows the undercurrents of misogyny and material aspiration swirling beneath the era’s gauche surface.

Leigh’s play, still a cultural marker thanks to the BBC film version, is by far the superior, achieving all that Absent Friends manages (and more) with none of the artifice. Where Ayckbourn needs the kick-start of a drowned fiancée, Leigh requires only the sort of teenage house party that pierces some suburb’s peace every weekend. The fallout is entirely driven by his unrivalled grasp of character.

One now realises that Sue, the middle-class mother taking refuge from that party with her nouveau riche neighbours, is the lynchpin of the play’s continued success.

Her plummy presence – Susannah Harker’s thank-yous are like the polite ding-dong of suburban doorbells – ensures the brash tastes of her horrific hostess Beverley (Jill Halfpenny) remain rooted in class, not just the mockable gaucheness of the period. She looks down on Bev and her husband Laurence, just as they look down on new neighbours Tony and Susan, with their smaller house and two jobs. Abigail’s Party shows the working-class suburban invasion, recalled by David Eldridge’s In Basildon, in mid-flow, so that the self-made find themselves shoulder-to-shoulder with old-pros and CEOs. Under the fixed smiles and forced niceties are values as clashing as the prawn and baby-shit wallpaper, and Bev’s soiree soon becomes a hostage situation.

Lindsay Posner’s production thrives in the Menier’s intimate surrounds. We’re so close that the sickly vanilla of Beverley’s Estee Lauder perfume rolls across the auditorium like poison gas. It allows everything to exist in the details, whether of Mike Britton’s intricately ghastly set or the fine-tuned performances of a cast treating plum roles with both relish and respect.

Halfpenny borrows the needling nasals and lashing lisps of Alison Steadman’s original, but her Beverley is a more determinedly glamorous creature. In a glaring lime maxi-dress, dolled-up to the nines, she looks like the Angel that Charlie forgot to call.

Andy Nyman is fantastic as her husband, deep-breathing his way through the emasculating humiliation of his wife’s overt flirtation with Tony (Joe Absolom), while Harker looks like she’s distantly imagining the stains waiting for her at home. Natalie Casey strays furthest from the original, but her lobotomised goat-herd twist on Susan is perfectly in keeping with the role, while wringing more laughter from it.

Posner gives us all we want, from Demis Roussos to chilled Beaujolais, but still finds the surprise punch to silence our laughter. He controls fraying tempers and momentary outbursts with a conductor’s sensitivity and confirms – if further proof were needed – Abigail’s Party as a truly modern classic.

Photograph: Catherine Ashmore

Review: We Hope That You're Happy (Why Would We Lie?), Battersea Arts Centre

2012-03-08T17:45:00.003Z

Written for Time Out

Do a little dance. Chug another Bud. Get down about Haitian earthquakes, Indonesian tsunamis and starving Africans. That's the secret to Western happiness, according to this 50-minute pocket-rocket from emerging artists Made In China, which sets out to expose empathy as a sham.

Guzzling beer and forcing down ice-lollies, almost to the point of choking, two best friends forever wallow in the world's suffering. They dance, faster and faster, to David Bowie's Rebel Rebel. They hope that we're happy, as long as we're one of them. The rest can go hang. Global inequality suits us fine.

The show's other line of thought, which sees performers Chris Bailey and Jessica Latowicki covered in flour and ketchup like ghosts of 9/11, follows Mel Brooks: tragedy is when I cut my finger, but when a natural disaster befalls your country, that's comedy. They munch popcorn and watch the world burn.

Drought-dry and drenched in irony, 'We Hope That You're Happy' is a performance piece shot through with liberal guilt, only just saving itself from sanctimony and self-loathing. It's also admirably fierce, thanks to Tim Cowbury's punchy, poetic text and the awesome - not to mention, stomach-churning - commitment of its two performers. However, articulate though their protests are, Made In China's absolute idealism ultimately feels adolescent.

Review: What I Heard About the World, Soho Theatre

2012-03-02T16:34:00.004Z

Written for Culture Wars

For the right price, someone, somewhere will fake it like they mean it. Fancy being kidnapped? Head to Amsterdam. Want a taste of married life? Try Iran. Need mourners to bulk up your funeral-crowd or protestors to kick-start a movement? Both very doable. (Tears and Molotov cocktails not included.)

Alongside this multitude of simulations, listed with the scatty quality of a television magazine show, Third Angel throw up harsh realities from around the globe. A role-call of massacres and poverty lines and sexual trafficking pierces the jollity, and shows the sickness at the very heart of capitalism. What I Heard… makes you question whether we’ve already reached its logical extension, tumbled headlong down its slippery slope into a warped world. Just how much further – sorry, lower – can we go in the hunt for ever-larger profits? And moreover, at what cost and who’s expense?

It’s a well-conceived pincer attack that takes its time in making its point. Allusions to the financial arrangements behind the various fake tales are well-disguised enough to require the audience to make the connection. The problem, however, comes at the other end and, once the penny’s dropped, What I Heard… merely continues in the same vein, arguably only increasing the volume. To really break through it needs more nuance and development on top of its basic stance of objection, no matter how sincere and valid that position is.

Performed with a no-nonsense presentational style, it’s likeably scatty. Admittedly, there’s a tendency to illustrate the instances cited rather literally, so that stories about mid-air hijackings are accompanied by a paper plane being ‘flown’ around the space and so forth, but easily overlooked given the scope of ambition of a piece that’s willing to chase big game. The result is as entertaining as it is unsettling.

Photograph: Craig Fleming

Review: The Leisure Society, Trafalgar Studios

2012-03-02T12:27:00.004Z

Written for Time Out

Just as you can have a great night out in a poky dive, The Leisure Society is a feeble, puerile play that nonetheless makes for an enjoyable 90 minutes. Taking aim at yuppie hypocrisy, its cheap shots come with a chaser of shame.

Well-to-do married couple Peter (Ed Stoppard) and Mary (Melanie Gray) invite divorced party-boy Mark (John Schwab) round for dinner, planning to break off their friendship. He turns up with his 21-year-old shag (Agyness Deyn) in tow and, while the hosts' baby bawls upstairs, the group's thoughts turn to sexual adventures.

As the spineless Peter, Stoppard over-pitches his best Woody Allen impression. While he motors for the laughs, former supermodel Deyn handles François Archambault's acerbic comedy with a lighter touch. Sometimes her conviction slips, but she's got great timing and achieves a droll combination of drowsy allure and blunt disdain.

Writer Archambault has a vivid, scathing satiric voice, but his flip-flapping characters haven't a scrap of psychological credibility and, rather than plotting a through-line, he offers a string of chronological snapshots separated by jump-cutting blackouts. (And then. And then. And what?)

Swerves into darker territory - think Saved as a sex farce - clunk into heavy-handed melodrama, and 'The Leisure Society's only depths are the ones it plumbs.

Review: Snookered, Bush Theatre

2012-03-01T15:31:00.003Z

Written for Time Out

Alcohol is the playwright's friend: it's the ultimate dramatic catalyst. And boy, do they catalyse themselves in Ishy Din's debut play. It's a miracle the four young British Asian men gathered in a pool hall to mark the anniversary of a friend's death can stand, let alone shoot straight. Snookered? Snockered, more like.

There's resentment from the off. Shaf and group dufus Kammy are stuck in rudderless jobs in Middlesborough. Old schoolmate Billy's back from London and Mo's just about to join him. Banter jostles into bitterness and, sure enough, old truths emerge.

Aspiration and materialism collide with heritage and custom, and the four have opposing views on subsuming themselves into wider British culture. There's a running competition over commitment to Islam, despite the level-peggings of Hajj and happy hour.

Din, a minicab driver of 20 years, shows remarkable technical accomplishment. While the truths get tangled at the end, he has a real knack for dialogue that both flows and follows. However, rather than heralding a new voice, Snookered is a perfectly decent mates-play in the late-'90s mould.

However, Iqbal Kahn's humorous production is made by its performances. Jaz Deol finds a kernel of sensitivity in Billy, Muzz Khan makes a lumbering giant of Shaf and Asif Khan is hilariously gawky as Kammy.

Review: Goodbye to all That, Royal Court

2012-02-29T17:36:00.004Z

It’s saying something when, fifty minutes into a young playwright’s debut, you can feel let down by a particular scene. Luke Norris demonstrates such an acute understanding of theatre’s ability to rattle your spine that, when he slips a mawkish little song and dance sequence into Goodbye To All That, you immediately want to remonstrate. “No!” I scribbled in the moment, “you’re much, much better than that.”

Admittedly Norris isn’t always in complete control and he raises a number of ideas without following through to fruition, but he has come up with several sequences that knock wind out of you like a well-aimed punch to the kidneys.

Take the Santa hat that’s plonked on an elderly stroke-victim or the firm pinch to stop him tugging out his cannula. These are heavy moments, horrific and hard to watch, but deeply human and complex. They’re match by dawning realisations that creep up behind you and leave you utterly slack-jawed and horrified. (To reveal would, of course, be to ruin them.)

At sixty-nine, more than half a century after they first met, Frank has decided to leave his wife Iris for his mistress Rita. Pumped with Dutch courage, he ends up having a stroke and is taken into intensive care and, later, an NHS hospice. Rita’s got the money to get him into private care (at a cost of £3,300 per month), but Iris isn’t about to give up her husband without a fight – much to the disapproval of her teenage grandson, David. Set in Romford, Goodbye To All That is brilliantly programmed alongside In Basildon; two more women feuding over a man in a hospital bed. At least this time, he’s the property they’re fighting over.

There’s so much going on here that Norris’s play doesn’t have a central thrust, preferring instead to flit from one subject to another. Politically, it goes after the stretched NHS, in which Frank’s poor health gradually gets worse and worse due to neglect. Those rich enough to afford private care, meanwhile, have a significantly higher chance of recovery.

If there’s an ounce of naïve idealism in this, it’s curious, because elsewhere Norris is particularly attuned to the grey complexities and compromises of reality. Where eighteen year-old David is steadfast and absolute, his elders have a more pragmatic approach. Iris knows you’ve got to be cruel to be kind, hence the pinch, Rita understands that love sometimes means sharing, and Frank’s humility and open fear shows up his grandson’s bullish invulnerability.

This is all part of the natural rhythm of life, which Norris paints in rather glib colours. Just as the scales are tumbling from David’s eyes, his grandfather is releasing that he’s lived a lie. Adulthood, as Norris conceives it, is nothing but a matter of fitting in with social norms; only in childhood and old age are we truly able to be ourselves and act according to our own desires.

And yet such independence doesn’t suit the rest of us and it’s startling to note the change in attitude towards Frank after his stroke when, unable to express himself beyond attempting to prevent pain, he sits staring at a television screen from which Dick and Dom blare out. “You’re not offering much to the relationship these days,” jokes David, “Bit of dribbling, but…” He wipes the spittle from his grandfather’s mouth, relishing the chance to demonstrate his maturity. It’s a horrifying moment to watch, doubly so, given the cheer with which David enters into banter. Frank just stares out. This is how we prefer our old folks, not shagging away, but shagged out, waiting for death.

Norris is clearly a promising talent. Once or twice, he pulls something astonishing out of the bag, such as Frank’s advice to his grandson: “You break heads if you need to and hearts if you have to…” Simon Godwin’s production is perfectly adequate and, like the performances, seems designed to let the writing showcase itself. Susan Brown plays a stern forward-defensive as Iris, while Linda Marlowe’s Rita is the soft cheese to her chalk. Roger Sloman is crushing when incapacitated; though he can’t express it, you can see traces of muscle tension that betray Frank’s terror and embarrassment.

Photograph: Tristram Kenton

Review: God/Head, Ovalhouse Theatre

2012-02-28T12:23:00.005Z

Written for Culture Wars

On the 21st April 2011, Chris Goode was walking home from the supermarket, carrying three shopping bags in two hands, listening to his iPod and thinking about another show, when, all of a sudden, he became absolutely conscious of God’s existence. He felt it at the top of his chest and he felt it just to the right of his heart. That patch of London pavement became his very own Damascan roadside.

“Nothing was more real or more vivid,” he explains, calmly, rationally, convincingly, “than God In whom, I don’t believe.”

God/Head, perfectly titled as it is, is Goode’s attempt to explore the implications of that moment, not just in terms of his own belief or non-belief, but expanding beyond the personal and into the abstract. The main thrust is about certainty and uncertainty. Goode has not converted, but has instead found cause to question his initial scepticism; to doubt his original doubt, as it were. Atheism has flicked into agnosticism. He wants to be able to talk like Iyanla Vanzant, a pro- inspirational speaker, but he hasn’t the heartfelt conviction. And that’s fine, isn’t it?

Formally, God/Head is a patchwork of texts that illuminate his experience and subsequent exploration of it. He’s also joined onstage by a guest. Not a guest performer. Just a guest. Like on Graham Norton or Jonathan Ross, only without the artifice or promotional intentions. This inserts an element of uncertainty into the event itself – partly through an unscripted voice, partly by granting control to an uninformed party. (Goode provides instructions in sealed envelopes, passing the reins to the guest.)

This, however, is not developed fully enough. It never threatens to derail the event – a key component of genuine risk – since the whole is content with its own informality and looseness. That, perhaps, is the point: that we must learn to tolerate and accommodate uncertainty as God/Head’s structure manages. What was intended to become a journey-style narrative, “all very Radio 4,” has proved too messy, full of blurred intangibility and loose ends.

However, I feel Goode has not fully cracked the form, and God/Head mostly reminded me of parodies of self-indulgent off-Broadway solo shows, in which a performer relates and over-philosophises a seminal personal experience to the point of losing his or her audience. (Those familiar with his work know Goode’s far smarter than that, so, in the spirit of honesty, I’ll admit to nervousness about voicing the thought.) He tells us early on that this is not about his experience being more important than any of ours, but – for me – that caveat doesn’t ring true enough. It felt a disclaimer, tacked on and intended as a get-around for a show that kind of goes on to do just that.

In fact, there’s an element of manipulation in God/Head that seems curiously unlike Goode’s usual practice. Recounting his experience, he seems to – at some level – act it out, or rather relive it in some way, and it rings a bit forced.

Nonetheless, there is some deeply fascinating content and some beautifully-sculpted articulations along the way. Not least Goode’s connection with his ‘religious’ experience and his previous experiences of depression, which questions whether both can be explained away in equal physiological terms. A conversation with an academic, restaged with his guest, raises the possibility of its being “a neurochemical experience” that was interpreted in such a way as a result of suggestibility; he had been reading the King James Bible for another show, after all, and it’s conceivable that the music in his ears had a hypnotic or numinous effect.

Yet, for all this rational explanation, which might once have satisfied Goode the atheist, it’s no longer quite sufficient. He speaks of wanting to believe – of really wanting to believe, to really believe – despite being unable to do so entirely. It’s this note of failure in the face of desire that he picks up to end, by playing a final – beautiful, haunting, resonant – recording of My Sweet Lord over an empty stage.

Photograph: Malcolm Phillips

Review: Brightest and Best, The Half Moon

2012-02-27T16:59:00.003Z

Written for Time Out

Thanks to all-round naivety, 'Brightest and Best' lasts just shy of three hours. It could boil down to a taut 90 minutes. But writer Matt Morrison, briefly a teacher himself, shows all of his workings. We see too much of former management consultant Rob's backstory, before getting to the thrust: his new job teaching English at an independent school.

Rob (William Owen) clearly wants his own Dead Poets' Society, but teaching proves harder than it looks, and his timid, over-friendly approach leaves him as flustered as his class.

Morrison's slack structure means low-level drama, which, in turn, sees him up the ante with compensatory artificial crises, including an overdose, self-harm and an affair visible from scene three. Director Natalie Ibu exacerbates the problem by promoting flair above functionality. She could save 20 minutes on scene changes alone, and much of the acting is bloated, attempting to do something with every single line or gesture.

Hetty Abbott comes out unscathed with a collected performance as Rob's wife Kate, but this school-set play feels like too long in detention.

Review: In Basildon, Royal Court

2012-02-26T09:38:00.004Z

In Basildon is brilliantly full. Were David Eldridge to try and squeeze one more socio-political point (no matter how waff-er thin) into his portrait of an Essex family, the play might very well explode all over the Royal Court auditorium, leaving its audience smattered with jellied eels. For two and a half hours, it jangles around the subjects of class and politics like a high-scoring round of pinball. Thatcherism – ding! New Labour – ding! Immigration, aspiration, culture, regeneration, welfare – ding, ding, ding, ding, ding!

However, what makes Eldridge’s play so sturdy is that (one major lurch into outright debate aside) it places the human first and foremost. Eldridge has spoken of his decision to use the four-act form, passed down from Chekhov, to let his characters lead the drama, and it pays dividends, upping the tautness and empathy. The play becomes an ethnographic case study. Its social-political observations – that third-act open-floor debate excepted – come to the surface through action and character.

Two warring sisters, Maureen and Doreen, are reunited at the deathbed of their brother Len in the living-room of the family home, its single most valuable asset. Len’s promised it to Doreen’s son Barry, but had recently changed his will, entrusting best mate Ken to pass on his instructions after the funeral. The question on everyone’s mind – and obliterating any remaining family ties – is who stands to gain and who to lose.

Eldridge also brings in two middle-class characters: Maureen’s daughter Shelley, the first of the family to go to university, and her plumy boyfriend Tom, an aspiring playwright who talks patronisingly about making theatre about and for the working classes. Though Eldridge can employ these two heavy-handedly at times, they add another layer to the complex debates that swish through the play.

Essex is, of course, Eldridge’s county of birth and he achieves a vivid picture of its inhabitants and their values, some of which are condoned, others criticised.

Two things emerge most prominently. First, a difference of aspiration; unlike Tom and Shelley, who have the luxury of not needing to do so, most of the characters aspire only to increased financial security. Barry’s face – not to mention his wife’s – crumples on hearing the house will be sold and proceeds divided. Both Maureen and Doreen, with varying degrees of cunning and subtlty, attempt to forge a life sponging of Ken’s relative wealth. Second, you see the working-class pride – in its heritage, its humour and both self-sufficiency and graft – that refuses to be compromised by the definitions or help of others, particularly when that’s passed down from more privileged social strata. Of course, in the case of Len’s will, there’s a meaty contradiction here, which Eldridge explores fully.

Where the play becomes more overtly political, as a tipsy Tom argues against the family’s firm Conservative values to the point of dismissing them as ignorant, momentum slows and opposing points of view bounce back and forth. It is, nonetheless, a big old subject, argued with passion, acutity and humour. Len, we find out early on, was a man who wouldn’t have a world said against Magaret Thatcher. It’s no coincidence then, that when the fifth act skips back to the point where family tensions first spark, it takes us to the morning after John Major’s election. This is a slice-of-the-nation play and it accuses post-Thatcherite politics of abandoning the blue-collar classes. The widening gap between rich and poor looms into view and the impression is of a nation sacrificing its own populace to appeal to corporations and immigrants.

It gets a full-bodied production (in traverse) from Dominic Cooke and the performances – almost without exception (Jade William’s is too BBC audiobook as Shelley) – are exceptional. Linda Bassett keeps you guessing about Doreen’s true feelings throughout with a stone-set poker face, while Ruth Sheen’s Maureen wears a conniving smile to peers down on her relatives. Lee Ross is a complex and clear Barry – as genuine in grief as in self-interest – and Peter Wight, a jovial arbiter as Ken, and Max Bennett’s Tom is a mix of spite and naivety. Wendy Nottingham makes a delicious addition as next-door neighbour Pam, at one point awkwardly sidestepping out of the room like a dressage horse.

Photograph: Keith Pattison

Review: 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, Barbican Centre

2012-02-23T12:01:00.006Z

Written for Culture Wars

Let’s start with Bridget Jones; an unlikely counterpoint to John Ford’s brutal revenge tragedy, admittedly, but one that surfaces in Cheek by Jowl’s thrilling revival nonetheless.

Like our Bridge, Annabella is torn between two suitors of opposing parental approval. Jack Hawkins’s Soranzo is the eligible, square-jawed nice-chap; Jack Gordon’s Giovanni, greasy-haired and dressed in a tight-fitting black T-shirt, is the irresistible bad-boy; the intriguing, bookish, chauvinistic social misfit with a magnetic sexual pull. He’s also her brother, and thus comparisons with Hugh Grant – sorry Daniel Cleaver – come to an abrupt halt.

Ok, so they’re not like for like, but my point is that Annabella’s lot is, in some ways, a cinematic staple. Think of American Beauty’s Ricky Fitts, James Dean’s causeless rebel Jim Stark, even Grease’s Danny Zucco. Or, slightly differently, look at the battle for Ryan Phillippe in Cruel Intentions. Were ‘Tis Pity… a rom-com it would end in one of two ways. Either with the bad-boy tamed or with the good-at-heart girl’s renouncement of him for the triumphant good-guy. Ford’s play, of course, is anything but (rev-trav?), and ends with Annabella and her unborn child dead and Giovanni brandishing the heart he’s ripped out of her.

In any case, designer Nick Ormerod leaves us no doubt that Hollywood (and, wider, pop cultural aspirations) should be at the forefront of our minds throughout. Annabella’s teenage bedroom – the production is contemporary and youthful, almost ‘in-thy-face’ theatre – is lined with posters: Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Gone With the Wind, True Blood. For every iconic ingénue there’s a femme fatale, and Lydia Wilson’s fantastic Annabella aspires to both simultaneously. In fact, she is split like a half-and-half musical hall act. Seen in one profile she’s perfectly demure; in the other, tattooed and shaven-headed. Her voice is just as schizophrenic: prim and clipped politeness interrupted by cavernous growls that burst from her gut. She truly is the “double soul” of which Giovanni speaks.

Donnellan’s production centres on attraction and revulsion, showing the two to be thoroughly connected emotions. Centrestage is Annabella’s bed, to which hopeful lovers – not just Giovanni and Soranza – are drawn. They circle it like hyenas descending on a carcass and call to mind the patrons of Baz Luhrman’s Moulin Rouge, salivating over Nicole Kidman’s showgirl. Yet, just as often, they spring back in disgust, and pin themselves to the walls, horrified, but nonetheless unable to avert their eyes. After Annabella’s death is revealed, each one in turn walks coolly over to the bloodstained en-suite bathroom and peers in, inexplicably pulled to the murder scene. Some recoil, wretching. Others stand transfixed. All must look, but none can bear to see. Omerod’s design is all lipstick and bile; deep red and chemical green throb discordantly together. The whole things pulsates with sex.

That finds a contrast in the hollow iconography – both sexual and religious – of the world around them. Annabella is first seen dancing as if in a Beyonce video, surrounded by suited men. She becomes a Vegas virgin Mary in Soranzo’s shrine, mirroring the gauche poster of the Madonna (not the popstar) on her bedroom wall. Here sex is everything and nothing at once, and Donnellan handles it – and the play’s violence, mostly half-glimpsed in back rooms, as elbows lash out and nosebleeds begin – with relished flair. At one point, Soranzo storms towards Annabella with a contorted coathanger; a sharp contrast to the mostly bouyant atmosphere of fiestas and folk-dancing. Nick Powell’s sound design is fantastic, adding to the tone of an Anthony Neilson-style hallucination.

For all this could, ultimately, be in Annabella’s head. Finally, she stands over Giovanni, looking at her own heart. Are these her dark fantasies, urged on by female role models seen onscreen: sexualised pop stars and Hollywood’s array of vixens, vamps and virgins?

Photograph: Manuel Harlon

Review: The Bomb: A Partial History, Tricycle Theatre

2012-02-21T10:13:00.004Z

Written for Time Out

Talk about going out with a bang. Nicolas Kent's final production as the Tricycle's artistic director is a two-part, ten-play cycle, on the subject of the atom bomb - or, as David Greig puts it, "a truly philosophical weapon".

Greig's offering, The Letter of Last Resort, is the highlight. On her first day in the job in 2015, the newly elected Prime Minister must decide whether or not Britain retaliates, in the event of London (and Radio 4) being destroyed by such an attack. If she does not retaliate, that would nullify the initial deterrent and render Trident void. "The only rational way to behave is to be irrational," her advisor warns.

Sixty years earlier, Clement Attlee faced a similar dilemma about the inception of our nuclear programme, as shown in Ron Hutchinson's excellent Calculated Risk, and equally absurd paradoxes of mutually assured destruction are a running motif. Schrödinger's cat, Pandora's box and Joseph Heller's Catch 22 recur, helping to paint a big picture of a Reservoir Dogs-style stalemate on a global scale.

The first group of five plays, First Blast, describes the history, with brilliant contributions from Zinnie Harris, Amit Gupta and John Donnelly, who gives Ukranian arms-dealing a twist of Martin McDonagh.

Part two, entitled Second Blast, looks at contemporary power play. It covers Iran, Israel and North Korea and adds both potency and urgency. An entertaining, provoking dossier, with admirable nuance and real purpose, The Bomb epitomises Kent's tenure. London theatre will miss him.

Review: A Midsummer Night's Dream, Lyric Hammersmith

2012-02-20T10:19:00.008Z

The first thing to say about Filter’s remixed Midsummer Night’s Dream – and it cannot be said too loudly or too often – is that it is absolutely hysterical.

Every Dream has to contend with the fact that its bulk rarely matches the its final five minutes for incapacitating hilarity. Pyramus and Thisbe, the tacked-on play-within-a-play (in which Shakespeare pips Frayn to Noises Off) that’s performed with glorious ineptitude, is almost always the highlight. Recognising this, Filter and director Sean Holmes have reframed the whole thing as a similar shambles and extended its delirium throughout. The mechanicals have taken over the fairy kingdom.

They begin with a bungled introduction, forever drifting into tangents, from Ed Gaughan’s Oirish Peter Quince, who, in trying to summarise the play, ends up harpooning its prospects. “You’ll be wishing you’d gone to see One Man, Two Guv’nors with that bloke off of Gavin and Stacey,” he blusters.

Nor does it help that their Oscar-nominated special guest, set down for a one-off turn as Bottom, has become trapped in a lift backstage. Aside from being very funny, the eventual solution (which it would be unfair to reveal) wittily illuminates the presumptuous gall of Bottom’s taking charge.

But Bottom’s not alone in that. Here, every actor, believing he or she knows best, wrenches the play in a different direction. The lovers – polo-necked, tweedy thesps all – upstage one another, until there erupts a massive food-fight (bready-brawl is closer to the truth). Jonathan Broadbent’s Oberon, seemingly given free-reign in the wardrobe department, becomes a speccy superhero, while Ferdy Roberts makes Puck a disgruntled and tattooed techie with no patience for posturing. Lord, what fools these actors be. Most of them exit pursued by an irate stage manager.

If Filter’s dramaturgy looks incoherent, well, that’s the point. More problematic is the question of whether the play benefits from this theatrical metaphor. Of course, it’s not the first to use it, and Hyemi Shin’s papery design harks back to Peter Brook’s white box, but it goes further than ever before.

The answer is only in part. While it works wonders for both the dream motif and the fairies’ magical manipulation – allowing different layers of reality, whereby Puck stomps through the walls and Oberon sulkily protests his invisibility, to co-exist – Filter come close to reducing the whole to single moral: ‘Aren’t theatrical types pretentious knobs?’

Combined with their determination to avoid any obvious or recycled gags (those that we’ve seen a hundred times before, that still please nonetheless), there is a sour whiff of smugness here. It seems to say, ‘We know best,’ and that applies not only to other productions, but also to Shakespeare’s writing itself. Rather than cutting to refine, Filter have ripped out anything they deem outmoded or padding. In the process, they’ve removed a few vital organs. More than their brilliant and equally riotous Twelfth Night, this is Shakespeare for those who don’t do Shakespeare.

There are, inevitably perhaps, as many losses as there are gains. Just as we’re not bothered about the actual story of Pyramus and Thisbe, the plot here often feels like a chore. While set-piece moments and individual inventions –particularly their stock-in-trade use of sound – are as sparkling as they are surprising, we end up waiting for the next. There’s no care for the overall narrative and the careful balance of individual strands – not to mention pace and momentum – is upset by a tendency to digress.

The ultimate problem is that their thrills and laughter fade. Filter’s preference of a gag means that they surf through the play, moment by moment, but don’t really get underneath it. As such, the further I got from the theatre, the more I cheated I felt. For all the fun, there’s not much purpose, and the sense is of a company torn between populism and interrogation, forever succumbing to the former’s temptation. With the lighter comedies, that’s just about fine, but what we really need is Filter’s irreverent take on the big, weighty Shakespeares; the tragedies, histories and complex comedies. It can be done – look at Propellor – but until Filter commit to the whole, rather than the moment, that will remain beyond them.

Photograph: Keith Pattison

Review: The Recruiting Officer, Donmar Warehouse

2012-02-17T10:43:00.005Z

Written for Culture Wars

BRAZEN: “A privateer may be ill-manned.”
PLUME: “And so may a playhouse.”

Not this one. Josie Rourke’s inaugural production at the Donmar Warehouse oozes class. Everything, from the starry ensemble to Lucy Osborne’s gorgeous rustic design, flickering under candlelight, via Michael Bruce’s folksy score, is perfectly pleasing on both the eye and the ear.

However, until the production’s inspired final coda, class is precisely what falls out of George Farquhar’s restoration comedy.

In The Recruiting Officer, the town stomps into the country and grossly exploits its populace for personal gain. Aided by the gnarled Sergeant Kite, Captain Plume (Tobias Menzies) strides into Shropshire and, with devilish cunning, tricks its yokels (male and female alike) into the army.

By having the five-strong house band playing various locals, Rourke loses the sense of a community being raided. This may be intentional, as a means to better sting us with her ending, in which the quintet sings Over the Hills and Far Away before, one by one, marching off to war. It’s undoubtedly poignant, but the flipside is to lighten the heart of a play that needs a snarl beneath its sniggers.

Even so, the comedy is still too genteel to really score. Admittedly, second night sluggishness seemed to have crept in at the same time as I did – the pace felt groggy and a couple of corpses betrayed hazy focus – but if you’re going to play it up, really play it up. It needs a strong dash of grotesque.

Only Mark Gatiss as Plume’s recruiting rival Captain Brazen – a foppish mix of Captain Hook and Wendy Darling – has the raucousness to raise unfailing laughter. As Kite, Mackenzie Crook manages it when disguised as a German fortune-teller, but elsewhere plays against his own nature by gruffing up for a machismo to which he’s not suited. Menzies’s Plume is standard-issue swagger (a case of the Flashhearts); he holds himself as if sitting for a portrait and hits first syllables with a full-on baseball swing.

Lucy Osborne’s set, which makes a wooden barn of the Donmar’s extraordinary auditorium (once again, the real star), is similarly decorous. All twinkling candles and powder-blue sky, its chocolate box charm only adds to the quaintness and the whole comes across a courtly and civil recreation of the Globe stage. It’s all a bit luxurious and cosy.

In fairness, the women fare better. Nancy Carroll is just delightful as Slyvia, the love Plume is too proud to admit, embracing a mousey vulnerability, while Rachel Stirling finds a neat caricature of new money in Melinda, with her forced elocution and a too-too-tight corset. Aimee-Ffion Edwards’s Rose is consistently amusing as the impudent Rose.

Perhaps all this is too harsh, for The Recruiting Officer is a beautiful production done well, but it’s ornamental appeal – like a oil painting restored –leads it into insipidness whenever it droops. However, when the stars align and the playing zings, I’ve no doubt that Rourke’s Recruiting Officer improves immeasurably.

Photograph: Johan Persson

Review: The Shallow End, Southwark Playhouse

2012-02-15T09:15:00.005Z

Written for Culture Wars

If, as an aspiring theatre critic, I didn’t come out of The Shallow End thoroughly depressed, it would be doing something seriously wrong. Doug Lucie’s play, first seen at the Duke of York’s Theatre via the Royal Court, presents the death throes of the newspaper industry. Reader, I’m pleased to tell you that it toe-kicked me into the bluest of blue funks.

However, that’s not to say that Stone Junction – the company behind last year’s fringe revival of Jez Butterworth’s The Winterling – is doing everything right. Lucie’s play, which is crass enough already, needs downplaying before it needs relish, and director Sebastien Blanc fills it with wide-boys, toffs and tarts.

The point, surely, is that the Street of Shame drags its ordinarily reasonable and respectable inhabitants down. In a media culture – indeed any culture – that puts profit above all else, standards of decency are continually eroded. Intelligent men and women choose to sell out, betraying the fundamental of journalism: truth. The noble and the ignoble, who face off in various permutations during each of the four distinct scenes, should not belong to different species.

The Shallow End is, of course, a thinly veiled attack on Rupert Murdoch’s empire. News International is here renamed World News Corp – there’s little more nuanced than that – and it’s Sunday paper is being reinvented by new editor Malcolm Kirk (Mario Demetriou, replacing the Scottish-accented Andrew Neil-alike with an Essex wide-boy a la Andy Coulson). That means culling his staff – the old and the idealistic – and bringing in new faces, brash and inexpert hacks every one. As Kirk himself says (and you to realise that, whatever the fate of newspapers, he’ll survive elsewhere), “So the wheel turns.”

Kirk‘s hiring and firing takes place at the mogul’s daugter’s wedding. Lucie takes us, step by step, towards the inner-sanctum, from the frivolity of arts and features (out with the critic, in with the straight-talking, sexualised columnist), through sport and politics and, finally, holding the whole company over a barrel, maverick foreign correspondent Harry Rees. That means the play can swell, but even where barnstorming conspiracy supplants pettier misdemeanours, it is fatally two-dimensional.

With the Leveson machine rumbling on, Lucie’s bludgeoning attack looks timely from afar. However, The Shallow End is very much a mid-nineties play, and – worse – a product of the very same culture it sets out to satirise. Full of blow, bubbly and banging, it slots quite snugly into the post-Mojo slipstream of men behaving badly. For every moment of Lucie’s lucidity, there’s another dragged under by luridity, and The Shallow End starts to look like the Fleet Street equivalent of Footballers’ Wives. Pravda, it is not.

Review: Muswell Hill, Orange Tree Theatre

2012-02-13T17:13:00.003Z

Written for Time Out

The pre-show instruction to switch off your mobile phone is also the take-home moral of Torben Betts's comedy of (bad) manners, in which bleeps and tweets ruin a middle-class dinner party on the night of the 2010 Haitian earthquake.

Everyone in married couple Mat and Jess's plush kitchen has their head buried in a handheld device. However, Betts digs beneath the ironic trope regarding our inability to communicate in the communications age, offering an astute and multifaceted diagnosis of a very modern malaise.

Every aspect of his characters' lives is infected by the internet. They're disconnected from reality, incapable of interaction and trapped beneath inflated aspirations. None of them accept, let alone tolerate, their own ordinariness. They are the stretched middle, torn by envious resentment of the A-list and liberal guilt for the Third World.

Darkly funny (Mike Leigh writ large), Muswell Hill thrives by transplanting online behaviour into real life. Characters speak in self-absorbed status updates, proffer irrelevant Wikipedia morsels and troll one another with acidic pedantry.

Sam Walters's boisterous production is richly performed, with Jasmine Hyde fantastic as the hostess holding it all together, and colourful turns from her oddball guests, most notably Dan Starkey - hilarious as the narked and lonely pipsqueak Simon.

Review: Absent Friends, Harold Pinter Theatre

2012-02-11T11:57:00.004Z

Written for Culture Wars

Absent Friends is basically Alan Acykbourn’s bread and butter. He is, after all, the grand master of awkward afternoon teas, and this one – held to gee up an old friend, Colin, after the death of his fiancé – has all the requisite ingredients from the off. It’s been three years since anyone saw Colin, a social butterfingers at the best of times, and there’s a sprinkling of adultery to enhance the unease. The social stiltedness, Ayckbourn’s signature, comes too easily and the playwright needs not bother with patient, piecemeal accumulation.

Played in one location and real time, it’s solid, textbook fare – perfect for the West End – and Jeremy Herrin’s production can’t afford to put a foot wrong.

Happily, it doesn’t, even building to an elegantly mournful conclusion in which five of the six friends stand staring into space, each locked in their own miserable thoughts. The other, hostess Diana, is zonked out on sleeping pills upstairs, more distraught than any of them.

All of them, except Colin, have been run down by the passage of time. Dreams have faded and romances, dwindled into routine. Melancholy has set in with blame laid squarely on the broad shoulders of masculinity, all forms of which are represented here. Steffan Rhodri’s Paul is a typical Ayckbourn alpha; distant, unfeeling and altogether unrepentant; John (David Armand) is beta, nervously twitching and limply sucking up; the unseen Gordon, Mr Gamma, permanently laid low with petty ailments, phoning in for motherly advice from his too-too-patient wife Marge (a droll Elizabeth Berrington); finally, Reece Shearsmith’s Colin, off the scale of omega, is sensitive and keen-eared, most of all cheerful, but ultimately a child. “He’s a nice boy,” says Marge, when he finally goes home.

To refine it, male arrogance is on trial here. Paul thinks himself a sports star; John, a comedian and Colin, the first to know true love. As Kara Tointon’s stony-faced Evelyn – Paul’s one-time mistress – suggests, “All men think that they’re experts with women. By the time they are, they’re too old to do anything about it.”

Where does this leave the women? Well, thoroughly depressed, trotting after their husbands and trying not to cause a fuss, mostly. Katherine Parkinson’s Diana grittedly soldiers on, but slips into black holes en route and, eventually, bursts into a bray of pent-up tears.

Tom Scutt’s design suggests t’was ever thus, not only capturing the gauche horrors of seventies décor (every shade of beige is here), but wittily implanting a prehistoric twist. Pot plants hang from the wall and a wood-carved crocodile stands on the stone mantelpiece, itself reminiscent of a cave wall. It is a perfectly Pangrean living room.

The flip side of all this is that Herrin is playing with archetypes, and only Shearsmith punctures through to give us a distinctive original. His Colin is a speccy little mole of a man with a bad case of the verbal squits. More specific are the various combinations of individual relationships. Nonetheless, there are some brilliantly arch comic moments – particular in the don’t-mention-the-dead-fiance mould – and its always emotionally supple and full of subtext.

Herrin has delivered a well-oiled, fine-tuned, and deftly-performed production of a decent play that’s come straight off the conveyor belt.

Photograph: Simon Annand

Review: The Devil and Mr Punch, Barbican Centre

2012-02-10T12:28:00.008Z

A Punch so strong it might well have been spiked, Julian Crouch’s meta-puppet show is the best Improbable piece I’ve seen to date. For anyone, like me, born too late to catch Shockheaded Peter it’s unmissable, for it works the same alchemy to restore theatre’s discarded junk into gleaming vintage.

Not that The Devil and Mr Punch is nostalgia fest. Yes, Crouch’s gorgeous glove puppets have the same evocative resonance as an old-fashioned sweet shop, but Crouch has here pinned Punch to the psychologist’s chaise-longue for a sharp, extensive and probing interrogation. This is Mr Punch played with Red Button extras, including player-cam and director’s commentary.

Its core is an extended version of the classic Punch sequence: baby goes out the window, wife gets thwacked to death before the various social custodians out to apprehend our crescent-faced villain follow suit. Thus, Punch weaves his way towards the gallows and, beyond, into a puppet hell lined with disused doll corpses and populated by inquisitive dinosaur phalluses - or phallic dinosaurs. (Either way, they're vile.) Even at this level, it’s barking mad – a mix of Terry Gilliam and Jean-Pierre Jeunet – and never spurns a chance to milk its gags dry.

But, characteristic of Improbable, The Devil and Mr Punch walks a drunken zigzag path, veering into tangential side roads. Alongside a miniature variety show, including a piglet formation team, a pair of singing butchers, a dancing skeleton and two knights destined to duel forever, Crouch zooms out to show the controlling hands of Punch’s Professors, Mssrs Harvey and Hovey (Nick Haverson and Rob Thirtle), who are forever popping out of panels like figurines on a Swiss clock. With their formal wear and whiteface, Harvey and Hovey resemble the Godot boys biding their time with roadside puppetry. Who, Crouch asks, is pulling whose strings?

Such haphazardly meandering structures can be offputting, but here the cast cock us knowing looks that say, ‘Stick with us.’ The reward is philosophy – of art, of human nature, of time – pulled loosely together, still leaving room for further work on our part, but illuminating its subject from all angles. What becomes of the unfashionable artist? Why is violence so entertaining? How does Punch exist in each of us?

Haverson, in particular, gives a virtuosic performance, clownishly contorting himself and blooming into the squeaking, squawking voices of his characters. He shows us the madness, the sadness and the solitude of the puppeteer, all perfectly punctuated with mock hamminess. Come the end, he sheds a single tear and seems as lifeless as a glove puppet without a guiding hand.Photographs courtesy of Improbable Theatre

Review: Paper Cinema's The Odyssey, Battersea Arts Centre

2012-02-09T18:02:00.004Z

Written for Culture Wars

As John Torode and Gregg Wallace might say: poetry doesn’t get more epic than this. Homer’s The Odyssey, a vast travelogue of Odysseus’s hazardous return from Troy, reads like a Who’s Who of mythical beasts. Amongst its celebrity critters are the Sirens, the Lotus-Eaters, Circe and Cyclops. When similar ancient epics – think Clash of the Titans or 300 – land onscreen, they’re usually chock-full of CGI and bare-chested muscleman.

Not so with Paper Cinema, who manage it – gracefully, exquisitely, honestly – on a micro-budget, armed with only black ink, paper cut-outs and a couple of camcorders. Delightfully homemade, the resultant silent movie is created live and accompanied by musicians. It’s an impressive feat that demonstrates impeccable technical aplomb, though it suffers from diminishing returns.

The technique is, essentially, one of childhood toy theatres, only infinitely more ambitious and honed with precision. Nicholas Rawling and Irena Stratieva manipulate 2D cut outs – all gorgeously illustrated in Rawling’s scratchy, but stylish hand – in front of a stationary camera. They replicate staple cinematic techniques, such that the camera seems to pan through windows and trail alongside moving characters. The delight comes from seeing their rudimentary process and charting its effects (at least, for those of us on the right side of the auditorium). There are profile shots and close ups, panoramas and perspective shifts. The effect is often witty and always impressive, especially given the minute scale, which means that two millimetres either way ruin a shot’s framing or perspective.

The story is told simply, without narration, and remains engaging enough throughout. Besides, there’s plenty to watch: film, puppeteers, musicians, instruments, audience, set. There are, admittedly, natural limitations to the form and once or twice Paper Cinema shirk Homer’s details. The Cyclops, for example, is detached with a stalactite to the eye and a quick scarper. There’s no attempt at sheep or Odysseus’s invented alter-ego Nobody. In fact, the whole is similarly simplified – a bit like a BBC Schools adaptation that trots through basic bullet points without getting under its skin. Is this, you start to wonder, a pointless demonstration of skill?

For all that you admire it, however, Paper Cinema’s The Odyssey must be sat through in real time and gradually wanes. Because we may well know the story – especially in this simple form – delivery becomes more important than narrative when it comes to retaining our attention. Unlike their previous show, The Night Flyer, we don’t itch to find out what will happen so much as how. Paper Cinema’s fault is to rely too heavily on the same tricks and techniques, such that, eventually, it drags with repetition. The cinematography needs variety to keep us captivated as well as impressed.

Photograph: James Allen

Review: Night of January 16th, White Bear Theatre

2012-02-07T08:30:00.002Z

Written for Time Out

Who knew Ayn Rand was a pioneer of interactive theatre? Her 1934 play signs its audience up for jury service and our collective verdict determines the ending. If the law is an ass, Night of January 16th is basically a donkey ride.

Intended as a serious illustration of objectivist ethics (Rand's system of self-interest), it's essentially a schlocky murder mystery: mediocre, but also great fun. Crooked financier Bjorn Faulkner, for whom wrong and right mattered less than can and can't (he always could), is found dead. In the dock, his lover and secretary Karen Andre (Francesca Secchi) stands accused of murder.

Fantastic work from Jonathan Rigby and David Mildon as the two jousting attorneys keeps things snappy and taut, making Night of January 16th a real guilty pleasure.

Review: The Changeling, Young Vic

2012-02-06T12:38:00.006Z

Written for Culture Wars

As problem plays go, The Changeling is right up there. Primarily because it’s two plots – the first of Beatrice-Joanna’s disastrous courtship with Alsemero, a vicious cycle of murder and infidelity; the second, of a paranoid husband’s jealousy in a local madhouse – run parallel without properly knitting together. It is widely held that Thomas Middleton and William Rowley wrote one each, semi-independently. On top of that, of course, you’ve got constant (crucial) asides, whereby subtext is writ uncomfortably large, and the small matter of an intervening dumbshow.

In this extraordinary production, director Joe Hill-Gibbins puts his head down, bares his horns and charges. “’Nuff talkin’,” you hear him cry, “Let’s do this. Leeeerrrroooooy Jeeennkins.” There is no trace of apology, nor any attempt to smooth the cracks. Scenes screech to abrupt halts. Music cuts out like a stalled engine. Lights snap to black, as if a fuse has blown. The play bunnyhops on.

By the time it comes to its clumsy conclusion – concurrent narratives wrapping up without intertwining – Hill-Gibbins has them drown each other out. His direction is of the Nike school and, by his just doing it, we don’t dwell on the inconvenient strewths. He that knows better how to tame a play, now let him speak.

There is, however, far more to Hill-Gibbins’ direction than brazenness alone. His aggression is countered with supreme control. At the production’s centre is a robust and straightforward performance of the play. His actors play the scenes simply and truthfully, taking care of the story. Hill-Gibbins then plays Buckaroo with it, hanging dramaturgical pointers off the core action, stopping just short of overloading it. A wedding cake remains onstage throughout. Cupboards, cages and boxes line Ultz’s unfussily bare stage. Food connects sex and violence, pointing (a touch heavy-handedly) to the animal urges that give rise to madness. Costumes are a collage: military uniforms, morning suits and high-street casuals.

The effect, like the different signature tunes that coarse through an opera, is to allow different perspectives on different elements. We can enjoy the narrative and decode it at the same time; the production is both plot and literary criticism. The play is exploded into its individual components, which are presented like a list of apparatus. If there’s a downside, it is that, occasionally, one sees right through the play to the other side.

When it holds together, however, this Changeling is brilliantly multi-faceted. Hill-Gibbins’s approach is that of a cocktail mixologist, finely balancing and counterbalancing individual scenes with dramaturgical seasoning. So, for example, when on her wedding night Beatrice-Joanna discovers Alsemero’s virginity-testing potion, Hill-Gibbins has the reception disco’s choons seeping through the walls, while at the banquet table the brother of her original fiancé Alonzo pieces together evidence of his murder.

The production’s other chief achievement is in making extreme actions seem utterly plausible, even sympathetic. Hill-Gibbins has a real eye for translating the text into startling images: Daniel Cerqueria’s De Flores, his pustulous face like a nest of maggots, becomes as accursed as he is abhorrent; as is his opposite number, Lollio (Alex Beckett) lusting in turn over his mistress; Henry Lloyd-Hughes’s Antonio, feigning the symptoms of cerebral palsy to get access to Isabella, is even more starkly repulsive. Yet, all are grounded in the strength of their motivating (animal) urges.

These, too, do for Kobna Holdbrook-Smith’s Alsemero, who bursts from straight-laced preppiness to raging cuckold like the incredible hulk and Jessica Raine’s Beatrice-Joanna, whose attempts to extricate herself from an undesirable situation only serve to tighten her tangle like a fly wrigging out of a spider’s web. That she seems collected and rational throughout, despite plotting murder, allowing herself to be deflowered by De Flores and bedswapping with her maid is an extraordinary feat in itself.

And all this without mention of the dumbshow. Infused with Gaga and Beyonce, it is warped and ironic, hysterical and hideous, and, for my money, provides ten of the most thrilling, squirm-inducing and brash minutes you’ll see in a theatre all year.

Photograph: Keith Pattison

Review: Love Letters Straight From Your Heart, Southbank Centre

2012-02-05T10:06:00.005Z

Written for Culture Wars

Perhaps someone at the Southbank Centre was cracking a joke by placing Love Letters Straight From Your Heart into the Blue Room. There may be no A-List nudity, but Uninvited Guests’ mutual love-in shares its ambition with David Hare’s play of the same name and La Ronde, on which it is based; namely, to celebrate love in all its permutations, smooth-running or otherwise.

“In this room”, says a suited Richard Dufty, “it is always Valentine’s Day. Everywhere.” Sat around a rose-specked, red-clothed banquet table, as if guests at a wedding, we listen to tales of romance and unrequited love, of broken hearts and bezzie mates.

At either end, behind laptops and sound desks, gazing into each others’ eyes, sit Dufty and his performing partner Jessica Hoffmann. Armed with well-stocked iTunes libraries, they start to duel with love songs, cycling through the anonymous song dedications and love stories donated by its audience. There’s Elvis and George Benson, Burt Bacharach and Beyonce. Some are gushingly overblown. Some are scorched with regret. Others, a tad inappropriate. All are elegantly, glowingly sincere.

Besides the fun of spotting the loved-up culprit (usually either teary or shame-faced), there’s a gentle, but unabashed, sentimentality in all this. Certain songs take a tuning fork to your spine (Fools Rush In gets me every time). Others tickle your tear ducts into life or tease your lips into a light smile. It can be pinpointedly affecting.

Yet, there’s a more cynical side to Love Letters..., which (knowingly) manufactures the seemingly personal as much as any inscription on a love heart. “This was our song and it will remain that way forever,” runs one dedication. “Hang about,” you think, “it’s my song too.” They are all out songs. Smartly, even as it uses such cultural triggers, it consciously undermines them.

Lit by the lonely glow of their computer screens, Dufty and Hoffman seem like two late-night DJs forever churning out dedications; a purgatory of other people’s romantic gestures. They grow increasing dishevelled and start to compete. Loving stares tense into sharpened glares. Love songs seem to slip out of tune like milk turning sour.

Love is…a lived experience. Not a greetings card slogan. It runs in the blood, not bloodless prose. And it can hurt like hell.

This is all part of the endless chase – itself a central (and beautifully constructed) image of Love Letters..., which manages to suggest that perhaps we are all placed on earth to scour its face for a mate.

At the same time, the piece rattles off a number of ideas, without really nailing its colours to the mast. Uninvited Guests open up an hour for the consideration of love, but, for all the delicacy of their offering, don’t really say that much. As a show reliant on lists, a post-dramatic trope that almost guarantees gratification, it is inevitably flattish and, I daresay, a little easy.

Photograph: Uninvited Guests/FUEL

Review: Shallow Slumber, Soho Theatre

2012-01-29T13:39:00.005Z

Written for Culture Wars

Looked at objectively, Shallow Slumber is a bit of a shambles. However, playwright Chris Lee handles his gut-wrenching subject, that of child abuse, with such rawness and empathy that the play holds you rapt in spite of clunking flaws. With a strict dramaturgical going-over, it could be shatteringly good.

Inspired by the case of Baby P, Lee works backwards in time, piecing together two disintegrated lives to the explosive moment that blew them apart. Three days out of prison, Dawn (Amy Cudden) turns up unannounced on the doorstep of her former social worker. As Moira, stood in her dressing gown, Alexandra Gilbreath freezes in shock. Her face gives nothing away.

Nor, at this point, does their conversation; Lee has them talk cryptically – unnaturally so – about their shared history, pointedly keeping secrets from us to allow his structure to work. The trouble is that the benefits of hindsight aren’t intricate enough. Lee takes us backwards not to illuminate the past, as in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, but simply because he’s building to a climatic scene that happens to be chronologically earlier. Besides his pained efforts to withhold the nature of Dawn’s crime is undermined by the openness with which the production has marketed itself.

Shallow Slumber subsequently rewinds through Dawn’s stint in prison and prior judicial procedures, until it reaches the fraught confession that led her there. Here, Lee unleashes everything. Dawn’s admission leaves images of stinging cruelty: experimental punches, cigarette-tips burning holes in baby-soft skin, a kettleful of water that finally scalds the life out of her child. The pain reverberates into the auditorium in collective gasps.

However, Shallow Slumber is no mere in-yer-face exercise. Beneath it are nuanced social points about class and the co-dependence of the care-system and its clients. Not only is Dawn aware of the injustice behind the assumption that she needs a social worked, deep down she knows that, in her case, it’s a fair one. For all that she might not have, Dawn needs Moira.

Yet Moira needs Dawn just as much, if not more; a point well-made by Georgia Lowe’s design of a corridor with two ends that reflect one another. Each becomes more fully human through the other. Their relationship is one of mutual gratification; of submission and domination. Moira has to visit Dawn in prison. When she gets up to leave, Dawn slams a knife into her hand. Even in the first scene, with Dawn begging for help, Moira’s gestures push her away as if resisting the temptation of an addiction overcome. Fixing things is Moira’s fix; it’s how she feels secure and superior in her own middle-class, comparatively comfortable existence.

Lee’s writing falls down when it comes to credibility. Though the characters and their relationship are rounded and three-dimensional, their language and actions are often incongruous. Dawn is certainly too eloquent, prone to poetic flourishes that jar, but both behave irrationally. They give up incriminating information too readily and willingly splurge backstories, some of which are too bloated, all suicides and murder. In this way, Lee neglects situation and his characters are self-consciously creatures of the stage; they would work much better in direct address.

Though director Mary Nighy cannot get around these problems, she has nonetheless drawn two stunning performances from Gilbreath and Cudden. Cudden’s Dawn is an open wound, emotions and inner-conflict always babbling to the surface and threatening to drown her. Gilbreath, on the other hand, is externally unflinching. She presents us the blankest of blank canvases, embracing the ambiguous mysteries of the text by forcing us to do the work. Her transformations are fantastic and she can go from fresh to drained in an instant. Hers is a remarkable performance that hints at hidden depths and keeps Shallow Slumber on track throughout.

Review: The Trial of Ubu, Hampstead Theatre

2012-01-27T14:11:00.006Z

Written for Culture Wars

Simplicity of premise provides the beauty of Simon Stephens’s The Trial of Ubu, but it also proves the biggest constraint. There’s great satirical potential in wrenching Alfred Jarry’s overblown despot Pa Ubu back into the real world to face the consequences of his grotesque actions in an ICC-style trial. However, the purity of the central concept is such that, with only a basic understanding of the original, one can grasp Stephens’s overarching ambition from brochure copy alone. The risk is one of triteness.

However, those that avoid the Hampstead on that basis will miss the craft with which the subject’s surrounding intricacies are explored in Katie Mitchell’s production. Admittedly, The Trial of Ubu has less to chew on than the superior Wastwater, which gave chase to a greasier pig, but there is nonetheless an awful lot to keep one’s mind occupied, both during and after proceedings, if you let it.

For starters, following a Punch and Judy-style synopsis of Jarry’s original, Mitchell presents the trial not as is, but at one remove, through two interpreters, who translate and repeat the words spoken inside the courtroom itself.

There will be those that cry tedium; that the commentary box has nothing on the match itself. They are wrong. This is a chance to engross oneself in the minute details that would otherwise go unseen. By refracting rather than simply representing the trial, Mitchell better reveals its component parts. Her production sees clearer precisely because it does not look directly at the sun. So dazzlingly grotesque is Pa Ubu that his presence would outshine any nuanced reflection.

Certainly, the text is delivered with all the tonal variation of Morse code. Reported back, it is stripped of emotion and, to a certain extent, intention. Punctuation becomes garbled, replaced with a steady, but stuttering, flow of words; pauses are scrapped as they struggle to keep pace; language warps. But do we not learn more from a fingerprint than from the lines on a palm, even though the contours offer less contrast?

Rather than the performative behaviour of a trial, in which everyone is aware of being watched, Mitchell can present genuine – often involuntary – reaction. Words send shivers and draw gasps, but can’t be fully digested or registered, such is the speed of their task. While Nikki Amuka-Bird’s interpreter is ever professional, getting the job done with a stony-faced, machinated aloofness, Kate Duchêne is entirely human. She fits with giggles, wells up with tears and succumbs to a cold. In the contrast – both sides of which are familiar responses – lies the production’s heart.

As such, The Trial of Ubu is not so much about the nature of such regimes themselves – though, of course, it can’t completely sidestep that subject, no matter how broadly Stephens treats it. Rather, it concerns the impossibility of a proper, fitting and just response in the aftermath. How, Stephens and Mitchell combine to argue, can we possibly begin to assign responsibility, let alone conduct a fair trial, given the enormity of expectation, of prejudice (in the strictest sense of the word) and of suffering. How, in other words, can we humanly respond to the categorically inhumane?

Paul McCleary’s Pa Ubu is both intensely human and, at the same time, not at all. He is a frail old man, whose jailor must help him smoke, let alone stand, so the maximum security that surrounds him seems ludicrous. “Is the architecture all for me,” he asks the Judge. However, made up with the same soaked clown face as Heath Ledger’s Joker, Ubu becomes a cartoon villain. Certainly, he’s tried as such; as a scapegoat, the very opposite of a puppet leader. “J’accuse,” the witnesses cry, shifting the blame from their own shoulders. “He told me to.” “He said I’d be killed.” In punishing him, they absolve themselves of any responsibility. Ubu is their Get Out of Jail Free card.

Interspersed with scenes outside the courtroom – Ubu in his cell, two lawyers in conversation over a cigarette – The Trial of Ubu becomes a fascinating indictment of the international justice system. The neatly packaged narrative belies a web of responsibility and reduces complexities into grim folklore – which perhaps explains the filmic quality of Lizzie Clachan’s individual box sets. Its central case is no less vengeful than the stringing up of Benito Mussolini or the uncivilised disposal of Muammar Gaddafi. If it lacks the horror of such hellish ends, Ubu’s trial is instead purgatorial: “I think I’m losing track of time a little bit,” he says to the judge. For all its criticism of the system, The Trial of Ubu isn’t so perverse to entirely undermine it and endless assessment comes to seem a fitting punishment in itself.

Mitchell’s production is characteristically well-drilled and precise, but the masterstroke is to re-invent Stephens’ play for the nuances around its edges than its straightforward centre. As such, The Trial of Ubu needs watching from an angle, with a willingness to make connections and grapple, rather than head-on, waiting for answers to be dished out.

Photograph: Stephen Cummiskey

Review: L'Autre, Southbank Centre

2012-01-24T16:47:00.003Z

Written for Culture Wars

For all its stylish serenity, L’Autre has all the substance of a mirage in the desert. It’s the sort of non-verbal piece that soaks up any interpretation we so chose to project and, while it wears its hazy existentialism lightly, Claudio Stellato’s solo-for-two is ultimately forgettable.

On a red carpet, which seems to scrunch up of its own accord, are two wooden blocks. One is a tall, thin cupboard; the other, a short, squat television stand. Stellato variously climbs over, under and inside each. Here he seems a hermit crab, there a trapdoor spider, and elsewhere an escapologist unconcerned by spectacle.

L’Autre is an advocation of play. Stellato defies the accepted order of things, the one that says square pegs belong in square holes. He encourages us to see with fresh – often quite disbelieving – eyes. At several points, gravity seems to stand back and gift Stellato the floor. He walks a plank that oughtn’t support his weight, until, in a hauntingly tranquil final image, he dissolves into darkness.

The question is, “To what end?” The possibilities of L’Autre are, exactly as the title suggests, simply other. They have no meaning except in relation to the usual state of play. For all it’s quietly mischievous beauty, L’Autre is rarely seems more than a demonstration of Stellato’s imagination and stage trickery infused with the aroma of vague philosophy.

Not one for the faux-naif goofing that wins its laughs by protesting it doesn’t deserve any, Stellato is a stoical, almost sage-like clown. His play is calm and considered, not haphazard tomfoolery and happy accidents. His every move seems to follow logically from the last, even if, ultimately, they are all equally pointless. Or rather, as Stellato would no doubt argue, who’s to say life is any less pointless than L’Autre.

Photograph: Martin Firket

Review: Kafka v Kafka, Brockley Jack

2012-01-23T19:38:00.001Z

Written for Time Out

Who is Franz Kafka's opponent? Is it the hearty father with whom he trades damning indictments, or is it his own reflected self? Howard Colyer has adapted Kafka's never sent but revealingly resentful letter to his father into a bitter war of words.

Neurotic and melancholic, Kafka Jr blames his father for childhood scars and personal shortcomings. In his shouted attacks, he often seems like a little boy mid-tantrum, swinging his arms while his father disarms him with a firm hand to the forehead.

Colyer interrupts the text of the letter with fragments from The Trial, suggesting that Kafka's fight is not only unwinnable, but futile. He rages against life's greatest injustice: that, try as we might, we have little control over our own character.

Best when it is simplest, Leigh Tredger's production occasionally makes Colyer's knotty text doubly cryptic. The abstract devices aren't necessary, as the actors are good enough to carry the piece.

Jack Wilkie deftly retains our sympathy despite making Kafka a pathetic weakling and Gareth Pilkington is drily unrepentant as his no-nonsense father.

Review: Constellations, Royal Court

2012-01-23T12:26:00.006Z

You can’t have a love story without the right click. The same holds true for this review.

As dramatic settings go, the multiverse is a damn sight more ambitious than most. Over the course of its 65 minutes, Nick Payne’s Constellations zaps between parallel universes to tell the stories of Roland and Marianne’s relationship.

Roland’s a beekeeper. Marianne’s a quantum physicist. They meet at a rainy barbecue, when Marianne charges up to Nick with an inane chat up line about the impossibility of licking your elbows. He rejects her outright. “I’m in a relationship. So. Yeah.” Then. Zap. Another barbecue, another attempt. “I’ve just come out of a really serious relationship. So. Yeah.” Zap. Another turns out to be married. Zap. And so on. At first, while we’re still unaccustomed to his rules, Payne dupes us into thinking this is something Marianne says to all the boys, but it soon becomes apparent that these are all different Rolands. This one’s too hot; this one, too cold; until eventually, one’s just right.

Going forwards, we see multiple versions of various pivotal moments in their relationship – from first dates through to proposals and beyond. The structure has it’s own parallels in Alan Ayckbourn’s Intimate Exchanges.

Constellations is, essentially, a good old fashioned postmodern romantic comedy. Rom-coms have their dramatic tension in the question, “Will they or won’t they?” Ultimately, we know that yes, in the end, they will, inevitably, live happily ever after, but the game is in the obstacles that get in the way. Payne’s multiverse allows the possibility for both at the same time. He can take us down dead ends, missed opportunities and vicious break ups, safe in the knowledge that, in another universe, everything is going swimmingly.

Payne’s subject is the impossibility of total control. Everything here is contingent: every decision, responsive; every happy ending as sweet and brittle as honeycomb. In this, language becomes central. Even something as unthinking as word selection, which brings the most minute shift of meaning, can, like the butterfly flapping earthquakes into being, have a significant impact. Not for nothing does Marianne lose the ability to find the right word towards the end. Payne also suggests that we are, to some extent, pre-destined; programmed to suffer certain illnesses or, like the ’umble ‘oney bee, to wind up with the same partner whatever happens.

Emotionally supple and engaging throughout, Michael Longhurst’s production goes a long way to covering the text’s shortcomings. At its heart are two blissfully easy performances from Rafe Spall and Sally Hawkins. Spall is tender, gangly and emotionally bunged up as Roland, while Hawkins is, by her very nature, the perfect rom-com actress. She is just as awkward as we all feel, but still attractive and likeable to the end. Tom Scutt’s elegant design – a honeycomb floor with a cluster of white balloons above – is full of resonance, suggesting everything from thunderclouds to stars, molecules to brain matter, celebrations to dreams.

Smart and delicate, Constellations ultimately falls short of its considerable ambition. It reaches for the stars and, though heavenly, doesn’t quite get there. (Zap.)

Review: Mundo Paralelo, Southbank Centre

2012-01-22T11:05:00.006Z

Written for Culture Wars

Mundo Paralelo, a collaboration between NoFitState Circus, National Theatre Wales and Théâtre Tattoo, purports to explore the “parallel worlds” of circus and theatre and to challenge “circus artists to find new ways of connecting with their audiences.”

How, then, does it manage to make circus seem so utterly untheatrical? It’s as if, grateful for the opportunity to step onto a proper stage, NoFitState have abandoned all the raucous energy that makes them so watchable for the airs and graces of polite society. Yann Tiersen style piano music twinkles throughout. Gracious courtly bows and dainty curtsies follow each act. Eliza Doolittle at the Embassy Ball was not so mindful of her p’s and q’s.

In trying to make the case for circus’s theatrical credentials indisputable, Mundo Paralelo manages to weaken both elements. The dramaturgy is so confused that it makes no sense as theatre, while, as circus, it never takes the handbrake off, leaving it largely safe, insipid and unspectacular. What’s wrong with creating pure circus that is nonetheless capable of metaphor and resonance, as NoFitState have managed so thrillingly in the past with work like Tabu or The Mill? The former insistently tells you it can do it. The latter just gets on and does.

Mundo Paralelo focuses on theatre’s liminal properties and its ability to step between different worlds. Performers follow one another through portals, vanishing and often appearing elsewhere a second later. As far as I could tell – and it’s such a miscellaneous mess that I can’t be sure – its narrative shows various individuals coming together in a magical forest type of space. Judging from the one audible voiceover section, there’s something about angels and humans in there too, but as for who’s what, I’ve no idea, as everyone seems equally capable of superhuman feats. Presumably, those in period costume are angels, but that rule doesn’t seem to hold fast throughout. Nor does it explain the waistcoated cowboy. (Again, I’m guessing.)

It’s only fair to mention the rapturous applause that followed, but, for me, it commits the cardinal sin of dullness. Circus is certainly capable of gentle tranquillity, but Mundo Paralelo struck me as tranquilized gentility and proves little more than that bad circus can be as excruciating as bad theatre.

Photograph: Kiran Ridley

Review: L'immediat, Barbican Centre

2012-01-20T14:59:00.006Z

Written for Culture Wars

A woman gets home. She puts her keys into the front door. It crumples into a heap of wooden slats. Unphased, she goes to put her satchel on the table, only for it to give way at the knees. Her keys jump from their hook, her scarf swoons off its rack and, eventually, chunks of wall cave in, until she and her husband (whose trousers, incidentally, just won’t stay up) are buried beneath the rubble centrestage.

Suddenly, as if panicked, he springs out and darts off, triggering a vast domino effect, as ladders, furniture, lighting rigs and junk clatter and crash to earth. Noise’s Off’s second act, in which everything that could go wrong unfailingly does, ain’t got nothing on the giddy bravura of L’immediat’s opening ten minutes. You sit open-mouthed, and watch the escalating chaos of a wittily destructive Heath Robinson device. In searching for solid ground, the cast bring the world tumbling down.

Then, from a door at the back of the stage, a lone, unsuspecting cleaner turns up with a binbag. It’s the equivalent of stepping into a warzone armed with a toy sword.

Created by Camille Boitel, formerly of James Thiérrée’s Junebug Symphony company, L’immediat is a series of physical expressions of rising panic, halfway between circus and slapstick, none of which quite match the first. How could they? In the end, it deflates instead of developing, repeats instead of refining. A shame, because were it structured otherwise, L’immediat would get the standing ovation it deserves. Instead, it seems self-absorbed, even a little smug.

One woman starts to float away; another is repeatedly kidnapped by furniture; the world tilts on its axis making everything an uphill struggle; people pop out of cupboards and drawers and dart headlessly off to nowhere in particular. Stagehands scrabble about in furcoats, as if feral and desperate hobos fighting off the cold and battling for resources.

Everything is fraught and frantic. Loud bangs and metallic clashes come from the wings. It’s a show that seems to hang on by its fingertips (even if its always totally in control).

As well as the problem of diminishing returns, there’s a lack of emotional connection. L’immediat describes a feeling without actually conveying it. Nonetheless Boitel nails his target and each sketch pinpoints the hollow horror of everyday existential crises, of heart palpitations and lonely nights, when just staying afloat in the present is all you can manage.

That, incidentally, connects the piece to its predecessors on the Barbican’s main stage during Mime Festivals past. It’s a narrative that reflects the times in which we live. From the precision counterbalancing act of 2009’s Öper Öpis, to the swinging pendulum of last year’s Du Godron et Des Plumes and now the scrabbling slapstick of L’immediat, staying upright seems to be getting harder with each passing year.

Photograph: Vincent Beaume

Review: Haptic & Holistic Strata, Linbury Studio

2012-01-17T17:50:00.005Z

Written for Culture Wars

Migraine-inducing, heart-palpitating, epilepsy-triggering, ball-dropping, but above all, extraordinary, Hiroaki Umeda’s double bill of minimalist movement and scenic design is a sensory overload. Were either to last longer than half an hour, your ears might well expel steam and your eyes pop out like champagne corks.

The stage – a white floor and backdrop that, together, resemble an open book – is used as a canvas for technical aspects. In Haptic, it is splashed with vibrant and vibrating colours, strips and washes. Holstistc Strata uses it as a projection screen for a universe of white dots that whizz head-swirlingly past in every direction.

In both, Umeda himself blends into (or stands out from) the overall composition, as one element among many. The performer becomes a fixed focal point with which to stave off motion sickness.

For long swathes, he stands still, but when he moves, each action chimes perfectly with its surroundings. Despite the fact that Umeda could teach Peter Crouch a thing or two about ‘the robot,’ he rejects the virtuosic for the maximum effect. Sometimes its as simple as shifting his weight from one foot to another.

Larger movements are rarely human; sometimes he’s mechanical, sometimes elemental and sometimes animal. At various points, he pulsates as if buzzed with an electric current, ripples like a series of connected joints and undulates with the utmost of fluidity. Once or twice, he flails his limbs and cracks his neck, looking like a zombie fast-forwarded into elegance.

However, there comes a point where your mind stops seeking analogies. Such are the sensory qualities of Umeda’s work that you’re too overwhelmed by stimulus to engage certain, more rational and linguistic, faculties.

“What I want,” Umeda says in programme notes, “is to transmit sensations, rather than messages, to the audience. Therefore there are no conceptual themes in my shows, which I empty of everything that might constitute a meaning.”

He’s certainly achieved that. At its best, Haptic throbs like the dance equivalent of a Rothko painting, even if, in blander sequences, it’s more like a Dulux colour chart. Nonetheless, there are two spectacular moments: one in which seems to refract his shadow into a rainbow of multiples, and another that recreates the gilt-edged effect of looking at the world through three-d glasses.

Holistic Strata is the more effective. A moving magic eye, it fires dizzying collections of dots until your eyes cross. Sometimes, Umeda seems a man in a snowstorm; elsewhere, when the dots cover his body, he seems the snowstorm itself. It looks as if light is escaping inside him, as if he’s breaking up on re-entry. Holistic Strata needs seeing to be believed.

All the while, Umeda pummells you with electro white noise: clicks and crickets, spasms and waves. The result is often maddening, but never infuriating – thanks to the bracing, cruel beauty of Umeda’s work.

Photograph: Bertrand Baudry

Review: Pss Pss, Southbank Centre

2012-01-17T15:18:00.004Z

Written for Culture Wars

A good prop can be the making of a clown. So, when I say that a stepladder is the star of Pss Pss, I mean no slight on Camilla Pessi and Simone Fassari, who go together under the name Baccala Clowns.

When a trapeze plummets from the flies, the two stand shoulder to shoulder, gaping upwards. The ladder, handily placed by a stagehand at the back of the stalls, is hauled through the audience, fast-ducking as it swishes overhead. Placed upside down, apparently unwittingly, it becomes an object so unusual that it is capable of surprising us just as much as them. They blow tunes through its rungs, spring it open and shut with their jaws and, finally, climb it in spectacularly awkward style.

The ladder – like the less everyday trapeze, on which they later sprawl and clamber over on another precariously – unlocks their play in a way that the staple objects that precede it can’t. Instead these generally give rise to standard clowning games of status and (happy) accident. There’s a touch of teacher-pupil to their relationship, with Fassari as the prissy parent, prudishly tucking his chin, to Pessi’s fidgety child, her pigtails frayed and frazzled.

Until 2010, Pessi and Fassari largely played circuses and cabarets, before turning their hand to theatre-based clowning. That probably explains the turn-based structure of Pss Pss, which trots through a series of individual routines without attempting any broader coherence.

Even so, these are cute and ticklish with a nice line in feigned ineptitude. They greet the unremarkable with astonishment – bowing after ‘juggling’ a single apple – and the impressive with unaffected nonchalance. Yet all this is the clown’s meat and veg and its only when the ladder breaks the mould that you feel Pessi and Fassari really own Pss Pss. The rest is time-filling tomfoolery by the book.

www.mimefest.co.uk

Review: Execution of Justice, Southwark Playhouse

2012-01-17T09:46:00.005Z

Written for Time Out

What's the point of verbatim drama when the wrongs it seeks to right have lost their topicality? Emily Mann's tribunal play replays the trial of Harvey Milk's killer, Daniel James White. It's a fascinating case but, 30 years on, Mann's forensic scrutiny can feel monotonous.

White was a conservative district supervisor in San Fransisco. That White shot Milk and Mayor George Moscone is never in question, but was it murder or manslaughter?

The play sets out to show that, at his trial, the establishment protected one of its own. Defence Attorney Douglas Schmidt (an arch Christopher Lane) argues that for a reasonable man to act so thoroughly out of character he must do so irrationally (thus ruling out premeditation) and fire chiefs, politicians and even the homicide chief, offer favourable witness statements.

Well acted by a cast of 20, Joss Bennathan's production plays it straight. But despite flashes of urgency, this too often feels like one retro suit after another, and I left wanting to know more about Milk himself than his killer.

Review: Lovesong, Frantic Assembly

2012-01-14T15:05:00.007Z

Written for Culture Wars

Lovesong is an intricate, nuanced essay that’s been smudged into illegibility by tears. While it glances off a wealth of complex and ambiguous ideas, none of them really take hold because ultimately, Frantic Assembly and writer Abi Morgan ultimately want to smack a lump in your throat and poke you in the tear ducts. What a crying shame.

In fairness, it’s devastatingly effective. But then Lovesong’s central formula is one of sure-fire sentimentality: an elderly couple, William and Margaret, consumed by memories of their younger selves.

Basically, William and Margaret are both abstract and particular. They stand for themselves and for any old old couple. It is the latter that, when contrasted with their younger selves, makes them sentimental. The combination of faded youth and missed potential is inevitably poignant. With its encroaching ends, physical restrictions and hopelessness – by which I mean it’s lack of a real future tense - old age always is.

That Lovesong is so determined to make you feel a certain way makes you push against its manipulation and mawkishness. Simulataneously, in weeping for them as abstracts – and we do, because as abstracts they stand for all of us; we are weeping for nothing less than our own inevitable demise – we lose sight of their particularities, which are drowned out by emotion. William and Margaret are infinitely more interesting as particulars than as hangers for latte-philosophy about life’s transience.

Of course, it’s impossible and unfair to put their respective contributions through a process of fractional distillation, but generally, Frantic Assembly treat them as abstracts and Morgan as particulars. Accompanied by sighing strings, the older couple dance with their younger partners, hopping into cradling arms and entwining their limbs in the characteristic – though never characterful – choreography that Frantic’s artistic directors Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett trot out time and again, varying only the pace and tone. Here its tender and mournful, and the reality of old and young dancing together is affecting, but really, what does it actually mean or matter?

Morgan, though her writing is infected by this tweeness, is onto more interesting specifics, in particular, the effect of childlessness. “They’ll come,” the thirty-year old William reassures his wife, “Children will come.” But they never do. Instead, the couple stop progressing through life. While it never splutters with a backfire, their relationship stalls. Life becomes an endless cycle through the seasons, marked by the starlings that circle overhead and the autumn leaves that litter the floor. Without children, William and Margaret are denied the developing shifts of parenthood that happen alongside one’s offspring.

Morgan’s deft skill is to neither rose-tint their relationship, nor demolish it with grayscale. Their love and fondness is plain to see and Siân Philips and Sam Cox manage to seem simultaneously content and incomplete. Sure, they still bicker and irritate one another by the simple fact of co-existence, but their shared silences are mostly comfortable and they tackle life’s little interruptions – dead birds and lost cats – together, clearly relying on one another.

However, all the promise of the past has waned. Life has passed William and Margaret by and they no longer have a future to care about in the way that they did at thirty, when newly married, recently emigrated and trying – hoping – for a child. Edward Bennett and Leanne Rowe are spritely and gooey, but take care to start the process of hollowing out which will lead to their drab future together.

By that point William and Margaret live only for one another. A cat, Biscuit, and a house are all that binds them together, and it’s not hard to understand why they opt for suicide and solitude respectively. Eventually, their teeth will be their only legacy.

Review: The Kreutzer Sonata, Gate Theatre

2012-01-13T08:16:00.009Z

Written for Culture Wars

Prior to its New York run in March, Nancy Harris’s erudite adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s 1889 novella returns to the Gate. Tolstoy had hoped to see it accompanied by Beethoven’s music, which courses through the story’s veins, in his lifetime and it’s obvious why. The two collide and entwine powerfully in Natalie Abrahami’s elegant staging.

Hilton McRae plays Posdnyshev, a man eaten away by jealous suspicions that his wife is having an affair with her musical partner. When his mind races, the music is nimble and dainty. By the time he reaches his conclusions it surges into a feverish swell, raging and spitting fury. McRae doesn’t so much speak the words as dance them, tapping out syllables like expressive footfalls. His voice is a drum kit; it can rasp like a snare or clatter like cymbals or swish like a soft brushstroke. The moment he hits upon the crucial detail – “That was it,” he says – his vocal chords seems to have become corroded by an upsurge of stomach acid.

Even after his acquittal for her death, on board a train home, Posdnyshev’s mind throbs with resentful misgivings. He imagines them tossing their instruments aside to gorge on one another; he sees her fingers scrabbling over the ivories like spiders and his bow thrusting away at the cat gut strings. The images appear, behind and projected onto a gauze in Chloe Lamford’s design, as if in the glow of scorching flashbulbs. It is searing as an unshakeable migraine and jealousy has left him quivering and swollen-faced.

And yet, for much of its build, The Kreutzer Sonata suffers from the pitfalls of the past tense. The dramatic vigour of events, when they are replayed as recollection, becomes viscous and swampy. “Nostalgia,” Posdnyshev mutters, “it’s a poison.”

But this is a staging that achieves the tone of its original form, absorbing you in the way that delicately enthralling books manage. It makes a pinhole of your focus, zoning in on McRae’s pinched features, as his mouth sculpts the words into being. He exhales the words “my wide-eyed wife,” snagging on a half-whistle. Around him, the piece teems with atmosphere. Accompanying images are fluid and ethereal, and the whole is as fragile and unctuous as a curl of smoke.

Such careful attention to tone is rare and McRae carries it off exceptionally: flickering with paranoia and sharp as lemon-zest, when keeping watch; humid and drowsy as he describes the murder; and, at the last, serene and remorseful with his wife – and, with her, his jealousy – finally dead. Exquisite.

Review: Frankland & Sons, Camden People's Theatre

2012-01-12T12:06:00.005Z

Written for Culture Wars

At the heart of this real-life father and son two-hander is an unearthed secret that takes an axe to their family tree. It cuts their entire through-line and leaves behind limp threads that need reorganising and retying.

What’s starts as a scatty and flitful stage equivalent of Who Do You Think You Are, birthed from a suitcase of love letters discovered left behind by grandfather Len, grows into a genuine attempt to handle new information and heal unexpected wounds. Tom Frankland and his father take on the repair-job together. There is a gorgeous final reflection: “I always knew. Even when I never knew or thought about it, I always knew.”

Like a home-made Father’s Day present, Frankland & Sons is to be prized not for itself, but for the love with which it is made. It seems held together in a tangled clot of sellotape and string, but the thought that counts is abundantly clear and worth displaying. Shambolic and clumsily executed – intentionally, though its unclear whether by design or acceptance – the piece has the feel of scrambling in the attic.

The biggest pleasure is to watch such an unnatural performer and have-a-go hero as dad John Frankland. Never entirely sure what’s going on, never quite in control, he makes a sweet and amusing stage presence. When he knocks a picture off the wall, his son darts over to patch the show together. When his trousers fall down, his son chuckles gently and steps in to cover his modesty. The relationship itself is beautiful: unforced, tender and fragile.

But that’s not really enough to nourish an audience and the first half, in particular, never breaks through from personal landmarks to universal appeal. It takes an hour to deliver the main thrust, because it needs to set up the lineage that becomes endangered. However, with the show's hinged as yet unrevealed, it is a series of births, deaths, loves and losses like any other.

The Franklands attempt to perk it up with sketch show assembly and a preference for humour – much of which doesn’t land – over honesty, but it never adds up to much more than fluff and flotsam.

Review: You Me Bum Bum Train, 21-31 New Oxford St

2012-01-11T06:45:00.003Z

For the uninitiated, there is still no greater thrill in theatre than tumbling through the rollercoaster of You Me Bum Bum Train. It is a kaleidoscopic head rush; the fullest of lives flashing before your eyes. The form – a rapid-fire succession of scenarios that plonk you, blinking and disorientated, into the protagonist’s shoes – is exhilarating, potent and unlike anything offered by day-to-day life.

For around forty minutes, you are thrown into the middle of a major identity crisis. One moment you might pop up at the despatch box in the House of Commons; the next in a soup kitchen’s late-night queue. You never know what’s through the next door. Strangers greet you by name and hurl you into the action, always apparently fully convinced that you know exactly what’s going on. Imagine a network of wardrobes leading to Narnia. Imagine a short-circuiting Tardis. Imagine Mr Benn with serious amnesia.

Riding The Bum Bum Train feels not dissimilar to running fast than you can manage, in that way that children do. Off-balance, you’re only able to remain upright by increasing your speed, which, of course, makes retaining poise and control even harder. Eventually – inevitably – you trip.

I’ve written before about the problems of return audience members. When you arrive front-footed and braced for anything, the experience changes. It becomes easier, slower and more about playful improvisation than unexpected impulse. It strokes your ego, rather than assaulting it; panders rather than challenges.

Morgan Lloyd and Kate Bond haven’t entirely solved that for the current incarnation, which has taken over an old sorting office on New Oxford Street. There remain too many empty corridors – perhaps a necessary byproduct of increasing the scale – which allows you to take stock and regain composure, but they have upped the stress levels of their chosen scenarios.

In previous years, scenarios have mostly involved a small handful of volunteer-performers, often integral to the scene. Burglars and barbers. Your actions are private, between you and the actors facilitating the scene, who are therefore acting along before watching and judging. Here, however, there are eyes on you at almost every turn: audiences, crowds and cameras watch your flailing efforts and getting it ‘right’ suddenly matters. After my first Bum Bum Train, I raised “the slightest of suspicions that the joke might just be on you.” In this instance, there are sequences where that’s openly the case, but that openness makes it more inclusive, less private snigger at your expense.

At present, what You Me Bum Bum Train has to say about the world, it still achieves largely through form, i.e. regardless of the scenarios within. It concerns the primacy of the individual and the ubiquity of televisual and cinematic fictions. That we know exactly what’s expected of us in each of the situations – no matter how removed they are from personal experience – speaks volumes about our cultural referents.

There are two related questions, here. First, does it set out to critique that culture or is it content to simply rely on it? Beneath this, then, is the question as to whether it warrants – or even wants – the status of art rather than extravagant fairground ride.

Presently, the shuffle effect – tossing us from celebrity to dole queue – means that YMBBT is no more than the sum of its parts. Individually, the scenarios provide a snapshot of someone else’s life and, as such, foster empathy. Often the roles you’re thrown into are much harder than you’d expect – and there are a couple of real corkers in this incarnation, which make you totally re-think the way you look at others in the outside world. But, at this level, the whole is pretty much a mix-tape: an assortment of semi-arbitrary ‘what-ifs’ and ‘wouldn’t-it-be-cools’.

Taken together, the important thing is that we find ourselves in a situation, rather than this particular situation. How, Lloyd and Bond need to ask, can it add up to more? How can the scenes coalesce into an overall dramaturgy? How can a particular Bum Bum Train journey achieve a thematic thrust in spite of its dependence on being unpredictable? How, in other words, can content match form in speaking about the real world?

If it is unable to do so – assuming we want to grant it meaning – then YMBBT is the equivalent of a playwright endlessly writing the same play under different guises. Each will say the same thing in the same way. If its creators don’t probe its possibilities, they risk making their form inert. For all its unique, elating brilliance, it’s time the Bum Bum Train got an upgrade.

First Light/Mr Darwin's Tree, King's Head Theatre

2012-01-10T10:17:00.000Z

Written for Time Out

Old-fashioned but effective, Murray Watts's two shorts are linked by a theme: loss of faith. In one, the heart abandons religion; in another, the head grows sceptical.

In the first, a recently bereaved school chaplain is grappling with doubt. He's disturbed late at night by a grieving pupil, Merry. Bright, flirtatious and 14, she sweet-talks her way into his study. In a long night, the pair find genuine solace in one another. School rules, however, entirely disapprove. As the regulations outlaw even a consolatory hug, they seem inhumane but - given the trickling undercurrent of lust here - not unfounded.

Watts has his sights on two twenty-first-century bugbears: red tape and total tolerance. Yet, despite a sprinkling of Robert Pattinson references, First Light's school is so quaint and obsolete, it could be Another Country. Ambiguity is key and Watts's own direction extracts it well. Natalie Burt is brittle and manipulative as Merry, while Andrew Harrison finds a predatory glint in the benign master.

However, Mr Darwin's Tree, a Charles Darwin biopic, feels uncomfortably tacked on to make up the double bill. Well written and piquant, it would nonetheless be more at home in the Science Museum than the back room of a pub.

Review: Fog, Finborough Theatre

2012-01-06T10:51:00.006Z

Written for Culture Wars

“Micky Mouse Britain,” as Tash Fairbanks and Toby Wharton present it in Fog, contains a Welfare State Mowgli.

Gary – or Fog, as he’s nicknamed, meaning ‘Fuck Off Gary’ – has just left a care home to move in with his newly-returned father, a soldier. He comes across as a mongrel; a lost boy playing adult in the only way he knows how. At home, he throws tantrums and loses days to his Game Boy. Alone and amongst peers, he puffs his chest, slashes a knife around and hypes himself as a gangster in the making.

His tragedy is never to have stood a chance and, in laying ultimate blame with absent dad Cannon (Victor Gardener), Fog is a play with its roots to the right. Its society is rudderless; expectant of reward rather than willing to earn it. Meaning has been lost, such that estate blocks are named after Romantic poets and rosaries are empty fashion symbols.

As such, Gary does not know how to be a man. He has none of his father’s practicality: while Cannon fits up the flat, Gary plonks himself in front of MTV Cribs. He imitates his father’s actions and reactions, echoing them awkwardly a split second late. The craving for an adult male role model is obvious. The welfare state steps in inadequately where families have failed to do so. All Gary has had previously are his care home elders, some of whom, we’re told, once locked him in a cupboard and broke his arm.

The mixture is one of timidity and savagery, and Gary has shades of a wolf-cub: alpha and aggressive amongst peers, but meekly cowering in the presence of elders. He’s unsteady in society, completely vulnerable, yet believes himself a ‘big man’. It’s a disturbing concoction with shades of Edward Bond’s Saved, played with extraordinary nuance by Wharton himself. He flicks between mewls and snarls in the snap of a switchblade knife.

Where Fog falters, however, is in its attempts to embed Gary and Cannon into a wider, real-world situation. The father-son relationship works best well when semi-detached; when it’s just the two of them alone in their flat, negotiating one another after years apart. By bringing in a reformed junkie sister and a university-bound best mate, Michael (Benjamin Crawley, with a delicate touch), Fairbanks and Wharton slip into unnecessary cliché. While these relationships allow Gary’s other side and past to emerge, they puncture the disconcerting intensity and warped isolation of the central relationship. Like Andrew Sheridan’s Winterlong, Fog presents a twisted, harsh bubble in a world that is just recognisable as our own. By stressing the latter point it dilutes the former.

Che Walker’s production – in particular Georgia Lowe’s design – follows suit, deflating as it grows increasingly naturalistic. At first, a right angle of concrete slabs with an upturned rusting tricycle serves as the flat with perfect sparseness. It stands in, but speaks volumes. Michael and his sister Bernice’s living-room, with its sofa, ironing board and framed photograph, is bland by contrast.

Nonetheless, Walker characteristically draws some fine, animal performances from his cast. He’s particularly good at finding characters’ own blind spots; the traits that they are not themselves aware of. Kanga Tainkye-Buah is brilliantly snags the flaunting vanity of Bernice, while Crawley catches the shrug-shouldered softness that her brother would never admit. Gardener is raw and brutish as Cannon, but finds the underlying cowardice that stops him from taking real control of his son.

Photograph: Finborough Theatre

Review: Don Quixote, Warehouse Theatre

2012-01-03T09:44:00.001Z

Written for Time Out

Staging Miguel de Cervantes's epic novel takes some serious cojones, but the Warehouse Theatre's in-house company get away with it through sheer charm. With more cod Spanish than a fish-and-chip shop on the Costa del Sol, the self-appointed saviour of La Mancha gets a Horrible Histories-style makeover.

There's goofy gusto and knob gags aplenty as Don Quixote's deluded chivalry goes into overdrive and, with his squire Sancho Panza in tow, he battles windmills and goats, believing them to be giants and demons.

While Vince Foxall's script turns somersaults - at times, it's so stuffed with wordplay that the sense falls out - the fun is largely in the playing. Philip Benjamin finds a sweet bewildered benignity as the titular knight-lite and Mark Sangster makes a droll, energetic sidekick as Panza.

What's missing, however, are the frazzled hysterics of a Ken Campbell Roadshow. To counteract the formulaic narrative, Ted Craig's production needs a bit more bonkers invention to keep things fresh. After two-and-a-half hours without it, half-baked, homespun charm runs thin.

Review: Jimmy Stewart, an Anthropologist from Mars, Analyses Love and Happiness in Humans (and Rabbits), Battersea Arts Centre

2011-12-28T16:17:00.002Z

Jimmy Stewart, that handsome Hitchcockian everyman, is a Martian. At least, that’s what Tassos Stevens would have us believe in this intriguingly dotty piece of storytelling. Why, you ask? Well, Stewart was held to make acting look effortless, but, inwardly, felt it rather harder than all that. From this disconnect, Stevens explains, he concluded that he must be an alien with the outward appearance of a human.

Believing love to be the most human trait of all, Jimmy sets out to understand its ways in a pseudo-scientific ethnographic study. The term itself is ineffable or, to follow Willard Quine as Stevens does, suffers from “an indeterminacy of translation.” While we can understand the word individually, we can’t fully communicate it without relying on one another’s analogous experiences. You only really know it when you feel it.

Given that each of us feels it differently, then, Stewart’s theory starts by assuming that love is defined by consensus. Where better to start, then, than with famous love songs; with funny feelings inside, eternal flames and three coins in the fountain.

Over a series of encounters – both with humans and talking rabbits – Stewart’s theory develops. Love becomes a combination of opposing forces, gravity and levity, which can be measured in Chakkas; one Chakka being a perfect balance of the two. To be ‘in’ love is, he believes, more potent than pure love, since one can love someone having fallen out of love with them. Perhaps love is mere narcissicism as lovers trade atoms through frictional contact and end up seeing themselves in their partner.

This is where Jimmy Stewart… is best, offering a gently nonsensical but meticulous philosophy of love that manages to be both cute and acute at once. It is as much about love as about language; a point elevated by Stevens’ employment of a synaesthetic sound system, which is, essentially, a soundtrack of surtitles that conjures noise through words alone. ‘Glenn Miller. His Band. On the radio. Reception Choppy.’ ‘A breeze, like a startled dog.’ Here, description is enough to summon the sounds. Why don’t those assorted metaphors, similes and clichés do likewise for love?

The question, however, is whether all this might work better reformatted as a lecture, rather than wrapped up in a surreal narrative that tends towards wilful obscurity. Though Stevens makes a warm-hearted, rumbling narrator, its hard to keep pace with his narrative and even harder to see through its indistinct motives. Instead you alight on moments and morsels, scraps of delightfully piquant thought. The result feels more a ramble than a carefully plotted route and, while that’s no bad thing in and of itself, it lacks that certain transformative something, that moment that punctures through and makes sense of the whole by revealing an overarching purpose (or two).

Review: Joking Apart, Union Theatre

2011-12-19T11:50:00.001Z

Written for Time Out

Richard and Anthea are one of Alan Ayckbourn's quintessential perfect couples; so bloody lovable that they would loathsome, if only they weren't so damned nice.

Over 14 years of garden parties, their regular charity-case guests unravel into middle age. There's Sven, the business partner who can't compete; 'Uncle' Brian and next-door neighbour Hugh, an awkward vicar with an awful wife.

Ben de Wynter's production is astute in its character analysis, but let down by the actual playing. His cast have caught the very particular social types, but none are realised with the necessary detail.

The clue to Ayckbourn's twenty-first play is in its title. Under the seemingly benign banter run deep currents of envy and sadness, which occasionally erupt in all seriousness.

Ayckbourn isn't as easy as you'd think and De Wynter completely misses the social awkwardness - faux pas and nervous laughter - that create vital surface tension. Without it, this intricate play simply deflates.

Review: Cinderella, Richmond Theatre

2011-12-19T11:46:00.003Z

Written for Time Out

There's no telling when and where the panto gods will descend. When they do, however, the effect is as dizzying as any office party. They have certainly smiled on Richmond this year and, boy, was I beaming by the end.

The suburb's seasonal fare can be rigidly traditional and blandly well-behaved. Not so this year. Christopher Dunham has thrown everything at the stage, including Shetland ponies and a gag about local celeb Fenton the Dog, and it aligns deliriously. Not least because of its twin motors, Graham Hoadly and Paul Burnham, as the Ugly Sisters, Beatrice and Eugenie, complete with pretzel antlers. One is round as a Christmas pud, the other spindly as any tree: they are a tremendous double act, wickedly funny and caustically callous.

This Cinderella is Disneyfied, but not deflatingly so. Some big pop numbers help to keep it buoyant. I left with only two grumbles: Jenny Eclair is misused as a fairy godmother, as her dottiness is never given space of its own, and the repeated sneering at poorer London boroughs becomes rather repugnant.

Review: Noises Off, Old Vic

2011-12-14T09:08:00.008Z

Written for Whatsonstage

Short of natural disaster or nuclear holocaust, nothing can derail Michael Frayn’s masterclass in farce. Noises Off is so fine-tuned that, even just short of its absolute finest form, as in Lindsay Posner’s nonetheless excellent Old Vic production, it delivers a laugh almost every thirty seconds. There isn’t a stand-up comedian on the planet that can match that for two and a half hours.

Farce usually takes time to wind itself up into orchestrated meltdown. Frayn’s masterstroke is to make his set-up a farce in its own right, namely 'Nothing On', a fictional stinker of a play chock full of sardines, fake Sheikhs and skimpies.

We see its hapless touring production from three perspectives: on its dress rehearsal the day before opening night, behind the scenes in Ashton-under-Lyme a month on, and, finally, it’s last mangled performance in Stockton-on-Tees. Frayn’s skill is such that the jokes in the first act, which seem so fully-formed, leave gaps for exponential comic exploitation in the second and third. Props go awry, cues are missed and understudies charge onstage misguidedly, but the show, so they say, must go on. First it frays. Then it implodes.

Ironically, the only course of action is to stick firmly to the script. Posner does just that and concocts some superlative sequences: Jamie Glover’s Garry LeJeune waddling about with his laces tied together, Amy Nuttall’s ditsy actress on autopilot falling out-of-sync with actual events, Jonathan Coy’s incessant nosebleeds at any glimpse of violence.

While Posner makes the most of moments, his production sometimes struggles with momentum, particularly in the wordless backstage sequence of the second act. At its best, this should leave us helpless, but here it moves too quickly, blurring the narrative as we’re not sure quite where to look. I suspect blame lies with the narrowness of the Old Vic stage, which prevents the crucial half-second of breathing space.

However, even just short of its summit, Noises Off remains one of the seven wonders of post-war theatre. Posner handles the spoof element with particular relish and the fictional farce is creakier than the boards on which it plays.

In a top-notch cast, Celia Imrie disintegrates delightfully as the show grinds on. Spritely and balletic in the dress, she limps on in Stockton like a horse waiting to be put out of its misery. Janie Dee makes a perfect head-girl as Belinda Blair, desperate to keep the show on the road, Paul Ready is hilariously hapless as stage manager Tim and Karl Johnson’s Selston delivers his opening line (‘No bars, no burglar alarms’) as if it were ‘To be or not to be.’

Most noteworthy, given how difficult the text’s prescriptiveness makes individual interpretation, is Robert Glenister’s director Lloyd Newman. Usually a sympathetic sane-man drowning in idiots, Glenister makes him a spiteful, snarling failure and adds some rare fight to Frayn’s delirious froth.

As much a masterpiece as the Mona Lisa, Noises Off is one of the few plays you must see before you die.

Photograph: Johan Persson

Review: A Christmas Carol, Arts Theatre

2011-12-13T12:29:00.002Z

Written for Time Out

Though it's about as surprising as the satsuma at the bottom of your stocking, Simon Callow's spoken-word rendition of A Christmas Carol has quaint Christmas charm to spare.

Dickens's story has always been a stage staple. Within three months of publication, there were eight productions running simultaneously. Neat, mystical and transformative, it's an inherently theatrical tale, complete with hardcore lefty politics.

Callow draws these to the forefront, emphasising the gritty social realism within the pearly fairy tale. As one would expect, not a syllable goes uncherished. Callow's voice - deep and crisp and even - explores every contour of Dickens's phrasing over a streamlined 80 minutes.

One or two characters are delivered with real comic aplomb. When Scrooge calls out of his window the morning after his visitations, a surly horn-voice replies: 'Uh, it's Christmas Day, innit!'

Tom Cairns's minimalist staging, with its revolving gauze and the odd scene-setting item, is classy, and Callow, as always, is warm as chestnuts roasting on an open fire.

But there's still something lifeless about this. It never really connects with us. On press night, Callow only acknowledged our presence when struggling with a tricksy bit of stage business, which leaves an unsavoury sniff of vanity in this otherwise fine Christmas fare.

Review: Haunted Child, Royal Court

2011-12-09T10:07:00.005Z

Written for Whatsonstage

Metaphorical resonance threatens to drown out narrative in Joe Penhall’s three-hander. Ostensibly a family play with a young son caught up in his parents’ battles, Haunted Child makes no secret of its real purpose. It shows the colossal tussle between a broken society and a new world order.

Penhall is open to accusations of over-directness and many will prefer their bitter pills better disguised, but there’s no denying the play’s forceful urgency.

It starts with a child’s midnight existential crisis. Convinced he’s heard a ghost – possibly his father’s – in the loft, Thomas darts downstairs to his mother Julie [Sophie Okonedo]. “If we’re just going to die anyway - what’s the point?” He is answered with a hug.

In fact, Dad is not dead, but disappeared. Douglas [Ben Daniels] soon turns up, bedraggled and shivering, having converted to some cultish pseudo-scientific spiritual system. He dictates a credo to his son. He chants, induces vomiting and starves himself, renouncing pleasures and proclaiming the “need to look for an alternative.”

Needless to say, Julie, faced with the everyday pressures of child and income, hasn’t got time or patience for what seems to her nothing but a mid-life crisis.

There are a swirl of potent questions here: Can a marriage survive one party’s identity overhaul? Are we responsible for our beliefs? Should children be raised to question or to accept? Penhall’s skill is to make both spirituality and practicality well-matched opponents: equally necessary, but equally selfish.

However, the narrative is transparent: where Julie represents a materialist status quo, Douglas is the alternative with unfledged answers. On fixing the radiator, he declares: “The thing about these old systems is the valves go.” These are old tricks: the unkempt house, a symbol of a broken society; the son, who leans towards his father and sees nothing odd about his behaviour, is one of our future.

Jeremy Herrin turns this into advantage with an extraordinary production that combines the robust thinking of new writing with the tonal attention of devised work. Slow, heavy and mournful, his staging has a devastating preciseness. Images tumble out of it. A banana momentarily seems a microphone for Douglas’s breakfast speechifying.

Daniels and Okonedo are astonishing, pulling off a blunt style that, in the wrong hands, can look like bad acting. Daniels, who finds hints of Julian Assange in Douglas, is captivatingly intense, embedding tai chi into everyday behaviour. Okenedo is more easily heartfelt; earthy, emotionally drained and – most of all – urgent.

That quality is Haunted Child’s best and, in the final image of the torn family hugged together while the ceiling of Bunny Christie’s restrained design lowers, Penhall’s message rings clear and strong: the old system’s valve is going and we need to find an alternative.

Photograph: Johan Persson

Review: The Ladykillers, Gielgud Theatre

2011-12-08T11:42:00.004Z

Written for Whatsonstage

A heist movie that trips into farce, The Ladykillers is a patchwork narrative. Originally a 1955 Ealing comedy starring Alec Guinness, it flicks between genres, so that what starts out noirish, ends up nutty.

Graham Linehan’s ticklish stage adaptation succeeds because it honours that, spicing up old-fashioned goofing with a contemporary knowingness. It is both homage and histrionics.

What the original’s flitting prevents, however, is the escalating intoxication of truly great farce, which needs to build in pressurised chaos until it whistles like a kettle. The Ladykillers hasn’t the frenetic overlap for that, but its fitful routines are packed with classic slapstick and fine-tuned asides. The result is a caper that delights, even if it can’t disarm.

Led by Peter Capaldi’s lithe Professor Marcus, a ragbag gang of five old-school crooks plot a robbery while operating out of an old widower’s London residence. To keep the scheme hidden, they pose as a string quartet (plus conductor), but a cello case that falls open to reveal the loot gives up the game.

With their landlady Mrs Wilberforce insisting that they turn themselves in, they attempt to bump her off; a feat that proves far trickier than any of them initially imagined.

Linehan offers some cracking lines (“You’re making a mockery of teatime.”) and sensibly embraces the stage, even, bravely, playing with the awkwardness of transposition itself. The robbery itself sees remote-controlled cars crawling the walls and crashing with delicious bathos.

Director Sean Foley, once of the Right Size, throws in textbook trickery: blackboards clatter against foreheads, five squeeze into a cupboard and knives – even a banister – stick out of body parts.

Unlike their musical efforts, the gang make a well-tuned ensemble. Linehan hitches up their individual characteristics for comic effect and the casting is note-perfect. Each actor is on home turf, allowing relish and freedom in the playing. Capaldi is always best when surrounded by morons and there’s a touch of Peter Sellers in his facial gurning and blithering obsequiousness.

Ben Miller has fun with a Romanian accent and an over-zealous attitude. James Fleet stutters sweetly as only he can, Stephen Wight is a half-cocked cockney and Clive Rowe dopes with aplomb as the former boxer One-Round, who has just enough brainpower to stay conscious.

They have a tidy foil in Marcia Warren’s Mrs Wilberforce, whose genial obliviousness becomes prim disapproval.

Best of all, though, is Michael Taylor’s jaunty and jumbled set, which received two separate ovations of its own on press night.

The Ladykillers might lack the lethalness of crack comedy, but it still proves the Ealing power of laughter.

Review: Lecture Notes on a Death Scene, Camden People's Theatre

2011-12-07T07:51:00.007Z

Written for Culture Wars

The death scene up for consideration in this reflective spine-tingler from Analogue is your own.

At least, it is one of your own, for the lecture doing the considering concerns Jorge Luis Borges’s short story The Garden of Forking Paths, an illustration of parallel lives and universes. So, as well as victim, you’re also lecturer and killer, witness and writer. The result is like a refracted reflection; a fly’s eye view of your selves.

Essentially, Borges holds that we multiply at each choice we face, with an infinite number of different selves diverging. The life we live is one forked path amongst an infinite number.

In this instructional (not fully interactive) piece for one, Analogue make you feel the presence of those ghostly selves on your shoulder. Each time you act, you’re aware of the choice and, as such, the divergent selves peeling away from you. It’s a canny use of the solo audience format, which is inevitably – perhaps inherently – reflexive.

Dressed in a blue hoodie, you glimpse these other selves in the mirror that faces you. They sit with their backs to you, their faces obscured, holding the same photograph you hold. They sneak out the door just before you catch sight of them. They feel as if they’re standing just behind you, but you daren’t turn around to check.

Admittedly, it’s a slight piece; one that elegantly catches a familiar philosophical idea, but never quite shakes it about. The same goes for its sensations, for it induces a shudder without actually unsettling; it’s too easily thrown off once you’ve left.

The multiple narratives, which fades in and out of the fog of philosophy and sets you driving into the woods at night, could use a little more care. However, this is an inventively staged and smartly structured experience, which makes a hall of mirrors of a darkened room and surrounds you with warped reflections.

Review: Goodbye Barcelona, Arcola Theatre

2011-12-06T12:04:00.003Z

Written for Time Out

''Ere Mum,' squawks 18-year-old cockney Sam, 'You seen this 'ere Spanish Civil War in this 'ere newspaper? That there General Franco, one of them fascists, is staging one of them coup d'etats in this 'ere year of 1936.'

Alright, it's not as bad as all that, but KS Lewkowicz and Judith Johnson's musical is pretty patronising. It dearly wants to be 'Los Miserables', but it educates its audience about the historical backdrop instead of telling a story against it.

In fairness, the skeleton structure is in place - naive Sam travels over to join the International Brigade, followed by his worried mother, and both fall in love - and there are a couple of rousing numbers that would be fine in a more varied and interesting score.

However, Lewkowicz's lyrics are dreadfully inane ('I wish I had a book/I'm learning how to cook') and, were it not for the efforts of the cast, this would be unbearable. Mark Meadows, in particular, finds genuine depth in the world-weary Jack, but Goodbye Barcelona is best avoided.

Review: Hamlet, Barbican Centre

2011-12-04T12:40:00.004Z

Written for Culture Wars

In Britain, we tend to take our Shakespeare as it comes. Directors that dare draw out – or worse, impose – particular concepts are best advised to round off the edges and tie up the loose ends. The warning message: please don’t feed the purists.

Thomas Ostermeier, artistic director of Berlin’s Schaubühne, eats them for breakfast. He ended A Doll’s House, seen at the Barbican in 2004, with gunshots instead of a door-slam. His Hamlet is just as wilfully inverse. It’s as if he’s making the play undergo wear-and-tear consumer testing. It’s Hamlet subjected to a thousand structural knocks.

So, on a pitch of earth – a good deal of which ends up in the performers’ mouths throughout – Hamlet’s most famous monologue, ‘to be or not to be,’ comes early on. Later he’ll skid across the stage and launch into it again as an angsty teenage tantrum. He plays The Mousetrap in panties and suspenders, obliterates the poetry with mouthfuls of party food and proffers up a well-timed fart, wafting it into the auditorium.

Just as Sarah Kane twisted Hippolytus into a monster in Phaedra’s Love, Ostermeier strips Hamlet of his nobility and focuses on his faults. He turns what we accept as tragedy into a warped comedy.

There are, inevitably, losses; the largest being a sense of the narrative's emotive power. It’s a hefty price to pay, but the intellectual illumination offered is revelatory enough to (just about) prove recompense. Ostermeier’s not so bothered about the story; his is a character study. It shows a Hamlet often glanced, but never before given such free reign. Lars Eidinger’s Hamlet is drama queen, spoilt brat and, um, general dick. He is the ultimate surly stepson and, for two hours and forty minutes, he throws the mother of all Oedipal wobblies.

And yet, Eidinger’s podgy Hamlet remains a figure of perverse admiration. He takes no prisoners and obliterates anything vaguely sycophantic or preening. Above all else, he is a man of action. The maudlin, dawdling Dane is nowhere in sight. If we are to hold anyone in scorn it is Laertes, a stick in the mud who so defers to the rules that he can barely strike the blow to kill his opponent. By contrast, Hamlet goes for him with a nearby shovel.

True, Ostermeier comes close to a Hamlet without Denmark. The rest of his six-strong cast, who double inventively, are reduced to props and puppets in the cyclone. In spinning everything so furiously, Ostermeier’s approach tosses Gertrude, Ophelia, Claudius and the rest aside.

But that is precisely the piece’s thrill: to watch Ostermeier sink his teeth into the text and shake the carcass for his own ends. That is, perhaps, the only way to get to its heart today.

Review: The Comedy of Errors, National Theatre

2011-12-03T10:39:00.005Z

For a winter vacation of sorts, Dominic Cooke has skipped from his Sloane Square office to the biggest stage on the South Bank. Presumably, he took a roundabout route. His Ephesus has Soho’s neon and hookers, Wapping’s warehouses and dockers and a Harley Street clinic in place of an abbey.

While it may not make you see London in a new light – these are mostly familiar stereotypes of a metropolitan underworld presented for entertainment, rather than education – it certainly reveals Shakespeare’s play in almost all its glory. This is concept Shakespeare at its very tightest and the context Cooke has created leaves no loose end untied.

Into this London-Ephesus, Cooke trafficks Lenny Henry’s Antipholus of Syracuse and his sidekick Dromio (Lucian Msamati). The move means their mistaken identities become enveloped into the unfamiliar and strange-seeming customs. Alternately, flirted with and harangued by apparently familiar strangers, Henry and Msamati jump to the conclusion of witchcraft, hopping back with every greeting, clicking and clucking to ward off evil spirits. It manages the near-impossible feat of making the farce convincing, not contrived.

What’s missing, however, is the giddiness of it. The Olivier is too large for quickfire chaos and Bunny Christie’s design – gorgeous and multi-faceted though it is – further slows the pace. It’s not without goofy humour – far from it, Msamati and his opposite number Daniel Poyser, in particular, are nicely doltish and there’s plenty of slapstick and colour – but it never disarms you as the best farce manages.

Cooke’s skill is to make the laughs feel a bonus, for he has managed the drama exquisitely. From the start, he stresses the urgency of the situation. Joseph Mydell’s Egeon is frogmarched out, bound and on the brink of execution. His thousand mark debt for illegal entry is a dire situation and Cooke proceeds to draw out the financial transactions throughout the play.

No one misses an opportunity to pick a pocket or nick a wallet. Prostitutes demand payment and bribes are slipped in place of bail. You realise that every comic routine between the Antipholuses (Antipholi?) and their mistaken Dromios is formulaic and monetary: each time a large sum is given and the wrong goods are returned. What’s more, because Cooke animates the long (and often tiresome) opening speech, it’s clearer than ever that the Dromios were purchased in infancy. The rich exploit the poor; the overlords prey on and pay off the underworld. This is the London in which financial inequality faces off across a single post code.

Henry gives a strong comic performance, showing off the best poker-face in the business. Towering over Msamati, he just looks down, features still, before erupting and raining snooker cue blows down on his head. His opposite number Jarman lacks his inimitable natural warmth and the violence seems less comic in his hands, without being replaced with threat.

Adriana and Luciana become Stratford wives; women of leisure soaking in skin treatments and tottering in four-inch heels. Inventively played by Claudie Blakley (channelling Tracy-Anne Oberman’s stint on Eastenders) and Michelle Terry, they become a considered essay in feminism; the one brassy and barking orders, the other timidly clinging to her, advocating acquiescence. There’s great comic support from Amit Shah’s weedy Angelo, whose one-note interruptions make moreish comic morsels.

But Cooke’s greatest coup is the ending, in which the two sets of twins are reunited alongside Egeon and his wife, now the Abbess (Pamela Nomvete). Cooke stages it beautifully, emphasising the truest reconciliation with just the right note of sentiment to pop a lump in your throat. Their dignity and love, neither flash nor needing to prove itself, proves the point that the younger generation have missed.

Review: Same Same, Oval House Theatre

2011-12-02T09:00:00.009Z

Written for Culture Wars

Asha was born in a cubicle in a ladies loo at Kings Cross station at 17.13 on the 2nd July 1989. Her twenty-one year old mother abandoned her there, returning quarter of an hour later to a now empty cubicle. On the cusp of her own twenty-first birthday, Asha still hasn't met the mother that gave her up in her first few minutes of life.

Shireen Mula’s haze of a play peers inside the minds of both mother and daughter, separated by who knows what distance. Their thoughts seem to entwine together, as each reflects on their own past and imagines the other. The one’s reality is presented in the same register as the other’s dreams, so memories mingle with possible versions – some hopeful fantasies, others nervous nightmares – and you’re never entirely sure of the true picture. The narrative swirls like currents in smoke, perceptible but ungraspable.

In the most exquisite moment, they invent the same meeting, spotting one another across a street. A nervous wait outside Boots is filled with rehearsed hellos. A flicker of eye contact grows protracted and certain. The traffic lights turn amber, then red, but the pair never meet: in both versions an inattentive driver prevents them.

Same Same is elegant, eloquent and hugely empathetic, leaving a strong impression of the parent-child connection that exists only as an abstract idea and an ineffable sensation of longing. It captures mother’s need for daughter and vice versa, but also the fear that holds them back from acting upon it. Mula has a strong handle on multiplicity. She wisps casual contradictions and fleeting alternatives past us, and much like a scent that brushes smell-sensors to trigger a blurry half-memory, it bypasses the controlled mind. It is impossible to harvest every fragment (though the edges are softer and less defined than the word suggests), so the play goes to work beneath the surface.

That Asha is mixed race only adds to the potency of her longing. Her need to place her mother grows into a wider cultural notion of heritage.

The play is also particularly strong on the accumulation of personality through experience and the onset of adulthood. The shards of memories seem embedded on the mind like the after-images caused by flashbulbs. In each, the exact time appears, as if the moment has been marked with a glance at some nearby clock face.

It’s bravely directed by Dan Barnard and Rachel Briscoe, who have Zoë Nicole’s Asha and Bharti Patel’s Nid walk concentric circles around each other. They often brush shoulders, cross paths and momentarily fuse together before separating. The sense is of a magnetic field. It’s hypnotic, but soothingly so. Nicole and Patel renegotiate their relationship tenderly, turning on a sixpence but allowing moments to bleed together like running watercolours. Both speak the text beautifully, such that the words grow comforting and warm as a cuddle.

There’s a final shift in register that is either unnecessary or not handled boldly enough, but Same Same is a tender and poetic charm that will long linger in the memory.

Review: Frontman, Chelsea Theatre

2011-11-29T13:25:00.004Z

Written for Culture Wars

In the past, Action Hero have miniaturised the big screen Western and the stadium daredevil. On one level, Frontman does the same, scaling down arena-sized rock until it could fit into a matchbox.

However, their latest drops any retro charm and droll irony for a more direct approach. This time, despite the roadie in a cute fluffy bunny hat, it’s dead serious.

On a raised stage in a smoke-filled room, Gemma Paintin eventually appears. She wears a sequined cut-short cat-suit with a cute bow on the chest. She sits on a stool, legs at ten to two, and lipsyncs to a live recording of Elvis Presley’s Heartbreak Hotel, stomping her right foot. She coos to us with a Marilyn Monroe husk, flattering us as her favourite audience to date, even stepping into our midst for an acoustic, tambourine special.

All this is in contrast to the aggression and noise that will come later, when she screams herself hoarse onstage. A deep roar right from the stomach that squeezes the air out of her lungs. The speakers behind her surge with noise, screeched feedback and deep rumbles that set your insides to vibrate.

That said, it’s nearly not as loud as I was expecting and certainly nothing on Ann Liv Young’s Solo, during which Ain’t So Sunshine seemed to shake the foundations of Battersea Arts Centre in 2009. There’s an unexpected musicality beneath the blasts of sound and it’s a surprise to find your foot tapping along in reflex reaction.

More transparent than their previous works, which have wrapped their ontological enquiries about the nature of performance in more layers, Frontman is itself a front. It’s less a commited exploration of its central figure than a vehicle through which to explore the nature of performance more generally. Focus is largely drawn to the invisible threads between performer and audience. We’re alternately drawn in by warmth and sweet talk, then pushed away with aggression and volume. It’s clear that the former is the route to popularity, but which is the more honest and potent?

There’s a nice line, too, in the relationship between limelight and backstage shadows, but Frontman is largely driven by dichotomies. It’s refusal to admit the existence of grey areas between is to its detriment.

The musical icon proves an adequate mode of performance from which hang what is essentially a performed essay on performance, but it never feels irreplaceable. For all Frontman’s gusto and deftness, it doesn’t fully skewer its subject.

Photograph: Briony Campbell

Review: The Malcontent, White Bear Theatre

2011-11-29T12:47:00.002Z

Written for Time Out

Written in 1603, as Shakespeare worked on Measure for Measure, The Malcontent sees a leader smuggle himself into the society he rules.

Predictably enough, when Duke Altofront (Adam Howden) disguises himself as the misanthropic Malevole, he's not happy with what he sees. Once-trusted peers set about a-killing and a-cuckolding, sycophants swap sides and lusty singletons get down and dirty.

Rae McKen's flirtatious production makes sure we know we're implicated in all this vanity, lust and power-hungry usurpation, throwing a steady stream of winks and raunchy asides our way. It's a contemporary twist on Elizabethan court entertainment.

However, the spirited performances reduce the play to a parade of archetypes: some even enter to their own signature tune. Gershwyn Eustache makes a commanding villain and there's droll support from Richard Kiess and Matthew Gibbs as two fey dandies. But Penelope Watson's twisted period costumes come close to stealing the show.

Review: The Kitchen Sink, Bush Theatre

2011-11-25T16:10:00.003Z

Like a Mike Leigh play with laughter lines where furrowed brows should be, The Kitchen Sink marks Tom Wells out as an extraordinary young writer.

Its title is an affectionate, gently ironic backwards nod to a once-fashionable style. Kitchen sink dramas are strict social realism famously championed by the Royal Court from John Osbourne onwards. Generally speaking, they’re depressing affairs: all squalor, frustration and hopeless dreams. Wells not only pulls that off, he punches through the other side with a comedy that cares.

Pipe dreams and nightmare pipes abound for a working class family in Withernsea, Yorkshire. Dad Martin’s milkround is dwindling from supermarket competition and his milk float is sinking out of service after twenty years. His two children have bigger dreams. Billy is off to Art College in London and Sophie is hoping for a black belt in ju jitsu. Mum Kath just wants a happy family and a fully functioning kitchen.

Wells charts a calendar year in the household, which is hugely affected by seismic change in the world beyond. The reality of the economic crisis puts paid to both high ambitions and lowly achievements.

Built into this is a younger generation’s fear of failure and subsequent self-sabotage: Billy almost talks himself out of his interview, Sophie belts her examiner and her boyfriend Pete struggles to pluck up the courage even to enter the house, let alone go in for the kiss. They are boom-time children, puffed with parental backing, but entering a crowded market.

Wells is nicely noncommittal in generational comparisons. It might seem better to dream naively than to be content with coasting, but there are moments when satisfaction and family seem more than enough to compensate for lack of ambition. After all, Martin and Kath’s hard and unrewarding graft is responsible for the home and the kids’ upbringing. Perhaps Wells is championing Pete, a lad with “a love for drains,” but what was it Socrates almost said about satisfied plumbers?

But all this is done with real aplomb. His characters say exactly the right things at the right times and some of the lines they come out with are unexpected delights. Wells also has the ability to hollow out a laugh into poignancy and then turn it inside out into a smile once more.

Once upon a time, The Kitchen Sink could well have reached the West End. It has just the right measures of cynicism and sentiment, humour and heart to attract a ‘night-out’ audience, but also the necessary lacing of astute – often rather damning – social critique to justify its importance.

Tamara Harvey directs beautifully, catching moods like waves and orchestrating her characterful cast in the round with both intuition and diligence. Steffan Rhodri plays Martin with a real deft touch, getting to grips with both good intentions and gruff, uncommunicative masculinity. Ryan Sampson is both brilliantly camp and sweetly tender, as is Lisa Palfrey as his mother, dispensing both hugs and advice without a word of complaint. Until, of course, a very unusual bout of waterworks on Christmas Day.

Best of all is Andy Rush as the nervy Pete. Despite swallowing his sentences, bumping into the furniture and never once working out what to do with his (presumably clammy) hands, he comes across as the most grounded of the lot.

Review: Matilda the Musical, Cambridge Theatre

2011-11-25T08:37:00.013Z

Written for Culture Wars

Matilda’s got its own Spiderman in the first five minutes: a spoilt brat in crude, homemade fancy dress. The RSC’s homegrown musical proves that you don’t need $75 million and mid-air battles to make a musical smash. It takes massive heart, fizzing wit and songs that stick with you like a superglue-lined trilby. Matilda’s got the lot and it already feels like a West End mainstay.

It works so brilliantly because, unlike so many musicals, it makes sure that it’s always one step ahead. There’s so much going on – never too much, mind - that just keeping up is all you can do. Nor does it ever shirk or sugarcoat the story’s harsher side, particularly the loneliness and cruelty. Each scene, number or routine knocks whatever came before completely out of mind, so that you spend two and a half hours completely in its thrall.

Faithful to Roald Dahl’s original story, Matilda makes a must-have playground accessory of outsider status. No matther the mockery, the little girl, scorned by her repulsive, slobbish family (if ever the term noveau garish needed inventing…) for preferring books to the box simply keeps on reading. By the time she gets to school, the terrifying Crunchem Hall, she’s standing up to anyone and everyone, including the dreaded Miss Trunchbull.

Where it makes additions, you’d think someone had a direct line to Dahl himself. We get Matilda’s story about a fantastical circus act, which turns out to enhance Miss Honey’s as a specifically Dahl heroine. In fact, this show makes sure that we see Miss Honey’s own struggle in its own right.

That a musical should have a message is rare these days. That it should have several – about standing up for yourself, intelligence and the fallibility of adults – is nothing short of astonishing. Matilda never patronises its audience, nor its young performers.

Dennis Kelly’s book is a brilliant, full of pace, snap and the savagery that makes Dahl such a delicious read. It’s in perfect sync with Tim Minchin’s score. His lyrics dazzle – miracle/umbilical anyone? – and around half of the songs are as catchy as the headlice at Crunchem Hall. When I Grow Up, a sudden jolt of sentimentality that opens act two, catches you offguard. It is a song destined for signature tune greatness.

Matilda’s famous powers of telekinesis feel rushed through, but this is a minor quibble. Matthew Warchus’s production, with ambitious choreography from Peter Darling, is a headrush of exuberance and perfectly captures the writer’s child’s eye view of the world. In Rob Howell’s scrabble-influenced design the colour is all out of reach.

The kids are tremendous, particularly (in the matinee I saw) Cleo Demetriou’s tiny Matilda and James Beesley’s mature Bruce Bogtrotter, and there are deliciously grotesque turns from Paul Kaye and Josie Walker as the Wormwood parents.

It is, however, Bertie Carvel’s show. His Miss Trunchbull is extraordinary: Richard III in a skirt. Carvel plays against your expectations. Rather than a bloused barbarian with a booming voice, he plays up the femininity. It’s a masterstroke and the result is a monstrous and steroidal amalgamation of Hannibal Lecter, Noel Coward and Margaret Thatcher. Cross ‘The Trunch’ and she drops to absolute zero, seething with buttocks clenched, before striding towards an arbitrary victim, her bosoms a waist-high battering ram.

An Oliver! for the 21st century, don’t be surprised if this is still around in ten years time. Quite simply, Matilda is a Giant Peach of a show.

Photograph: RSC

Review: The Riots, Tricycle Theatre

2011-11-24T08:15:00.004Z

Written for Culture Wars

London was still burning when Nicolas Kent proposed that writer Gillian Slovo assemble a verbatim piece on the subject. Only three months later, it’s onstage at the Tricycle, charting and dissecting the four days of civil unrest that sprung up this summer. The distillation of fifty-five hours of recorded interviews, The Riots is everything you expect it to be. Nothing more, nothing less.

It pulls off the extraordinary paradox of being absolutely necessary and almost completely unnecessary at the same time.

On the one hand, you have a consistently fascinating account covering a diverse range of witness statements and diagnoses of an event that demands attention. At the same time, however, The Riots offers very little that hasn’t already found its way into the media and the public consciousness – certainly not when one looks to its broader arguments: cuts to youth services, excessive consumerism, the excessive powers and negative perceptions of the police and extreme societal imbalance.

Its advantage over other media presentations on the subject, however, is that The Riots happens outside of everyday, real time. In other media, an issue intrudes into life momentarily, whereas theatre puts life on hold for the sake of that issue. The Riots open up a space in time, a window of two hours, in which we might properly and purely consider its subject, then sends you back out into the real world with a headful of opposing arguments that need – no, demand – further thought and a sense of social responsibility.

This, Slovo does well. Both narrative and argument are treated judiciously, with opposing testimonials and opinions fitted together to appear as direct debate.

However, the inherent problems of verbatim theatre as a form are such that The Riots can’t entirely stand up to deeper scrutiny. Its foundations are rather insecure. For starters, the familiarity of the opinions is hardly surprising given that the interviewees are largely the sort of people that the media has also turned to. Indeed, The Riots is theatre at its most journalistic. To a certain extent, it has (perhaps unavoidably) sacrificed depth for breadth and speed. It’s also open to accusations of being over-reliant on and over-eager to secure false dichotomies.

There is also – understandably, perhaps – an imbalance in the interviewees. The rioters presented by name are remorseful and relatively sympathetic. Those that are not – at least two, though they could just be symbolic figures – remain anonymous. That’s understandable, given that Slovo’s material is constrained by their willingness to come forward and it is better to have those voices than not.

More questionable is Kent’s decision to use them comically, with older (and rounder) actors in hoodies relishing the street slang. That’s arguably countered out by comic representation of Michael Gove – who comes across as a relic of Edwardian values. He’s played stiff as a marionette by Rupert Holliday Evans, also ten years too old.

What we do learn, however, are the sorts of curious details that only first-hand witnesses can provide: that regional police had only A to Zs to find their way around, the rioters that hopped over the MacDonalds counter to fire up the grills, the Met Chief Inspector trimming his hedge while trouble brews, the call to leave the Hackney Empire untouched, the woman trying shoes on her infant to ensure the right fit. Combined with the productions grasp of feelings, both what it feels like to wear the uniform in a situation born out of hatred for it and the exuberance of a temporarily lawless High Street, Slovo has sculpted a strong sense of events, mining some knockout soundbites to boot. Told in the past tense, Kent directs with the flickering excitement and danger of the present. At one point – rather distractingly – flames lick the set.

Most interesting is the question of who has the authority to intellectualise and reflect on those four heated days. Not the politicians, certainly, who turn up after the explosion. Rather those that have watched it brew and build in pressure, those within the affected communities, such as Stafford Scott (a charismatic Steve Toussaint), who gets the first word. There are those that also have the right, such as Mohamed Hammoudan, who lost his flat in the fire at Tottenham. He is a dignified present, well played by Selva Raslingam, able to chuckle at the absurdities through forceful grievances.

All in all, The Riots is a success. It is intelligent, impassioned and empathetic. But that success is as surefire as it gets. If handled with a modicum of care, the subject matter, style and initial concept will do the work on their own. It is a raw riddle that needs dissecting and The Riots adds to the overall conversation, albeit without adding anything to change one’s view of it. As Gove says, people have hooked their own agendas to the rioting. Slovo’s multi-sided and all-inclusive collage hasn’t revelation enough to shatter that.

Photograph: Alistair Muir

Review: Reasons to be Pretty, Almeida Theatre

2011-11-20T18:14:00.005Z

Written for Culture Wars

Reasons to be Pretty offers none. Early on, in fact, it looks like an errant ‘r’ has snuck into its title. Reasons to be Petty seems much more appropriate.

Neil LaBute’s play – the third in his trilogy about physical appearance – begins with a monster of a barney: Sian Brooke’s Steph screaming blue murder at her genial, jocular boyfriend Greg (Tom Burke). She’s wounded and furious after his overheard, offhand remark describing her looks as “regular.” That it was followed by “but I wouldn’t change her for the world” does nothing to temper her temper.

She’ll later read him a viciously spiteful checklist, in the very public space of a shopping mall, of his own physical shortcomings. Steph seems to be hideously and callously over-reacting and our early sympathies are with Greg: literary, reasonable, gently wry and sensitive as he is. LaBute’s skill is to slowly turn that inside out, without ever making a villain of Greg. His offence is just as much ours. It is society’s wrong and runs deeper than the surface criticism of over-elevating physical appearance.

Because to see Reasons to be Pretty only in terms of looks is to watch a slimline morality play, almost an anti-rom-com. In fact, LaBute plays with that, constantly tiptoeing around narrative clichés. He teases us by dangling the possibility of reconciliation or an unexpected new romance with Carly, the disapproving wife of Greg’s misogynistic best friend Kent.

In fact, LaBute’s play is not simply surface didacticism. Beneath is a further layer of diagnosis and what looks to be about looks is actually concerned with actions. Keeping up appearances, it suggests, goes further than cosmetics. You see it in Kent’s two-faced approach to relationships, cheating on Carly but treating her extra nice, and in Steph’s assertion that “flowers don’t save the day.” In fact, with every nicety so manufactured (each scene is housed in Soutra Gilmour’s shipping container design), it is the very honesty of Greg’s initial remark that makes it so hurtful: “It is,” says Steph later, “completely and for all time’s sake true. You meant it and that’s why I’m leaving.”

Greg, then, only seems good because he does no wrong, but he doesn’t really ever do right. His one lie is to cover for Kent, but he never tells the whole truth, because - exactly as Kent accuses – he “hates not being liked.” The secret of Burke’s performance (and LaBute’s writing) lies in letting the intricacies of this dichotomy seep out so gradually; he gradually opens our eyes to Greg and, by extension, ourselves.

Even without this smartly ingrained layer, however, LaBute’s writing is psychologically astute and full of his usual flair and humour. It misses the scale of the greatest nights at the theatre – there is no rollercoaster within – but it is constantly fascinating and played with real panache. Michael Attenborough has drawn first-rate performances from his (brilliantly cast) cast. Alongside Burke, Brooke manages to be both repulsive and attractive as she softens in time. Kieran Bew is horribly unsympathetic as the unreconstructed Kent, his mouth a sluice spill, and, as Carly, Billie Piper switches brilliantly from bitchy to brittle.

That Greg’s comment serves as the spark to change all their lives for the better, shows the lies they were previously living. LaBute’s call is for heartfelt honesty as opposed to half-truths, white lies and weaselling flattery. Were we genuine by default, he suggests, the truth might not hurt so much. Perhaps a better title still would be Reasons to be Shitty.

Photograph: Keith Pattison

Review: TaniwhaThames, Oval House Theatre

2011-11-19T15:34:00.005Z

Written for Culture Wars

There is a sirensong quality to this watery devised piece from Shaky Isles Theatre – a London-based company with strong ties to New Zealand. With soft sea-shanties and breathily whispered texts, it exerts a gentle pull despite the vague sense of something ominous beneath the surface.

Perhaps it is a taniwha, the Maori equivalent of the kelpie; a shapeshifting sea creature or mystical spirit that could, perhaps, be lurking in the River Thames. Here, it becomes an idol for emigrants; a nebulous but nagging symbol of a far-off home.

TaniwhaThames, a blurry series of short scenes and movement sequences, is full of interesting ideas, often uninterestingly expressed. Appreciation requires a certain generosity on the part of its audience. One must plunge under the surface – too often banal and old-fashioned in form – to the conceptual currents swirling beneath, tantalisingly vague and elusive.

The taniwha in the Thames is an expression of the emigrant’s dual identity, both New Zealander and native Londoner. All the capital’s attractions cannot eradicate home thoughts from abroad or compensate for the sense of rootlessness, of disconnection from the city’s own history. “Just being beside the water,” they say, “makes me want to cry.”

Under Stella Duffy’s direction, TaniwhaThames was created using a process based on Open Space, the all-inclusive, all-permissive format employed at Improbable’s Devoted and Disgruntled events.

While I am a passionate advocate of Open Space, I’m not convinced that it best suits the devising process. One of its main frustrations is the excessive sway of the lowest common denominator, since consensus requires everyone onboard. This accounts, I think, for the obviousness of some of the final forms: chorus walking about saying individual lines, ships physicalised, illustrative movement that includes an air steward safety routine. But the go-where-you-will permissiveness also, I think, leads to TaniwhaThames’s inconclusiveness, with harder questions shied away from rather than cracked.

Devised companies must, at some point, get stuck in and grapple with both process and piece until they break through. Breadth is easy. Depth is difficult. I fear the former will always win out in Open Space.

Nonetheless, TaniwhaThames also bears the hallmarks of Open Space’s strengths, particularly in its humility and the vocabulary it has developed – albeit still loose –to discuss fluid, complex ideas that have their basis in intuition rather than encyclopedias.

TaniwhaThames reaches no conclusions, nor even definite connections, but its central trope is potent and its churn of associations, appealing. This is a work that holds the attention by speaking in tongues; the result is less concretely cognitive than physically sensed.

Review: Salt, Root and Roe, Trafalgar Studios

2011-11-17T12:51:00.004Z

Written for Culture Wars

Eroded by dementia, Iola’s mind has lost its sharpness in the same way as the pebbles she collects from the beaches of South West Wales with her twin sister Anest. The stones will eventually fill their pockets as the two women clacker down the beach, conjoined with a skipping rope, and wade into the cold Irish sea to die.

They leave behind Anest’s daughter Menna, wittering about dogs as she dishes out the stones, having spent the past few months caring for them like a parent of toddlers.

Tim Price’s play, his second after For Once earlier this year at the Hampstead Studio, tackles the emotions of all this before the ethics. At its best, it is agonising and familiar, but several times it finds itself becalmed. It is a play of chronological snapshots, windows on the world of others, rather than one of narrative drive. Individually, they can be devastating – as when Iola grows aggressive in her disorientation – but together the whole is somewhat tideless. It’s possible that this is intentional – a reflection of the drawn out, unpredictable nature of dementia – but it saps the energy of a piece that could have been more than just promising. Without real narrative development, Salt, Root and Roe drags in parts, despite Hamish Pirie’s strong, simple and unobtrusive direction.

Nonetheless, Price is very strong on both atmosphere and character. Helped by Chloe Lamford’s design – a breaking wave that sometimes glows to become icy veins – he unnerves from the very first moment. Iola and Anest, tethered together, twirl and babble with one another like a pair of Wyrd Sisters. They have an infantile quality, a pair of wrinkled schoolgirls in duffle coats, matched by Imogen Stubbs’s Menna, her voice a cloying gurgle. Menna’s OCD – which Stubbs often lets slip – only furthers this childishness.

Price’s point – and its well embedded beneath the action, never directly outed – is a reminder of our place within nature and, as such, the surety of our individual demise. That’s treated delicately, still horrendous, but also comforting and, as the elderly twins stride into the sea, their dignity remains wholly in tact.

It helps that it’s strikingly performed. Anna Calder-Marshall catches the stuttering of Iola’s synapses beautifully, such that she seems to stall and splutter like a clapped-out car engine. When words escape her, its as if she tries to wretch them up only to come out with a nugget of startling eloquence. Yet, like a cornered animal, she is as capable of forcefulness as of frailty. As her sister, Anna Carteret is outwardly serene, but lets slip a hollowing grief beneath that must be kept in check.

Stubbs, too, is strong, frayed at the edges and seemingly awkward in her own skeleton, but with a constant amiability. In spite of the vulnerability, Stubbs lets you see how hard Menna’s trying to be tough. She’s weepy, but never actually weeps, just as Price’s play is brittle, but never actually breaks.

Review: Yerma, Gate Theatre

2011-11-15T12:40:00.004Z

Written for Culture Wars

Anthony Weigh has distilled Federico García Lorca’s ‘tragic poem’ into a litany of the life-cycle. It hammers away, insistent as unquenched thirst, with images of food and drink, piss and shit, flesh and blood in contrast to a landscape as barren as its protagonist. Here, Yerma’s desire for a child is shown to be as natural and burning a human urge as any other. It is not simply a want, but an fundamental need and, when it goes unfulfilled, the effect – like starvation or suffocation – is dehumanising.

If Weigh captures the ideas behind Yerma’s position, he is less successful in conveying the feeling. Though he radically reduces the play to a skeletal form without losing the narrative’s robustness, Weigh gains no extra emotional potency. His Yerma is always a degree above body-temperature, never a furnace, which makes her eventual act of murder more one of exasperation or exhaustion than of passion. Its humid, but never heated and, while that reflects the stretch of her slow torture, it also lets the pressure out of the drama.

Ruth Sutcliffe’s design, a parched desert of scab-coloured sand and rusted corrugated iron, serves the text just as well as Natalie Abrahami’s blunt direction. By playing it with a deliberate awkwardness, unfussy about tonal range, Abrahami scuffs the sheen and poetry that could be found in Weigh’s writing and offers instead an intonation. It knocks quietly but relentlessly, like the soft repeated blows of a hammer on a chisel.

Yerma herself, played pallid, brittle and simultaneously rooted by Ty Glaser, is a naïf waif, whose husband Juan (Hasan Dixon) builds a rampart between them. Her every kindness is deflected by a man grown gnarled. Like Jack Spratt, Dixon is all gristle and Weigh suggests his cold unwillingness is rooted both in ambition and repressed homosexuality.

Those around them are thick-set, earthy stock. Ross Anderson’s wholesome butcher, the object of Yerma’s fancies, and Alison O’Donnell’s crude Maria (they’re always called Maria, aren’t they?) set up strong contrasts with the malnourished central couple, while Sharon Duncan-Brewster’s Dolores, a witchdoctor, also has a smooth sexuality that further isolates them.

If Weigh’s coolly meditative adaptation neatly entwines intelligent literary-critical interpretation with narrative sense, it perhaps lacks the heart of any real drama. However, its so well executed that its own rhythms and reasons take over, and the result is an absorbing and pointed theatrical exploration.

Review: Next Time I'll Sing to You, Orange Tree Theatre

2011-11-14T19:19:00.002Z

Written for Time Out

If a hermit falls over, does he make a noise?' That's more or less the question asked by James Saunders's 1962 play, though it begs another: might these two hours be just as well spent elsewhere?

A neglected precursor to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Saunders's text is undoubtedly profound, but ultimately inconsequential. Like Tom Stoppard's play, it has grown stale and its passé postmodernism now seems an indulgent display of mental gymnastics.

Saunders uses the theatre to explore existentialism, as actors and writer discuss their predicament, trapped by script and stage: 'You said that last night,' etc, etc. However, you need a working knowledge of existentialism to keep up and, if you've already got that, the play adds little extra. It's wittily clever-clever but, really, what's the point?

To work, the play needs to fizz like popping candy, but Anthony Clark trots out a 1970s corduroy-and-turtleneck staging rather than finding a contemporary tone. That does Roger Parkins no favours as the clownish Meff, who is too forcedly old school to be funny, though Brendan Patricks is nicely withering as his opposite number Dust (imagine Withnail, sober and in work) and Aden Gillett finds the tension in pretension as writer/director Rudge.

Review: Festen, Barbican Centre

2011-11-14T13:15:00.005Z

Written for Culture Wars

The tipple of choice at Helge Klingenfeldt-Hansen’s 60th birthday party is a glass of bitters. Appropriate indeed for an evening that reveals a walk-in wardrobe’s worth of closeted skeletons.

Festen, originally a film by Thomas Venterberg and Mogens Rukov but previously seen onstage courtesy of David Elridge’s 2004 adaptation, remains a grippingly ambiguous story. Following the suicide of his twin sister Linda, the adult Christian (a brooding and bruised Ion Grosu) confronts his father over the sexual abuse that marked their childhood. Its trick is that Helge’s guilt is only absolutely confirmed at the end when Linda’s suicide note is inadvertently read-out as a dinner-table speech. Until then, you can’t be sure that Christian’s insistent attempt at armour-piercing isn’t a warped joke or a childish provocation.

Vlad Massaci’s production for Bucharest’s Nottara Theatre presents the event naturalistically, which leaves those not blessed with fluent Romanian at a massive disadvantage. This is a work that requires close attention. With the family sat around a long dining table (Massaci has cut the more private scenes elsewhere in the house), we need to spot how accusations land with different onlookers. Who’s embarrassed? Who’s confused? Who’s shocked? Who’s ashamed? In short, the game is in searching for clues as to who knows what and what’s let slip?

To do so, one needs to look microscopically, which the need to constantly refer to the (awkwardly positioned and sometimes out-of-sync) surtitles almost entirely scuppers. What we see is doubly disaligned and we can only play ineffective detective.

Problematic though this is, it cannot be held against the production itself only its current circumstances. By placing us so close to the action – we are more or less the dining room’s walls – Massaci forces us to play zoom lense, splitting our attention onto individuals rather than the overall panorama. Nonetheless, the play’s embers desperately need stoking to make a furnace of the festivities. It has all the motions of intensity, but none of the corresponding effects.

Massaci wants the play to chime as an examination of the state. “The Klingenfeld-Hansen family is the very society we live in today,” he writes in the programme, “One that rejects dealing with recent history, and consequently looks hideous.” He lines the back wall with wire animal skulls and dresses Alexandru Repan’s bulbous Helge in ostentatious white-tie, as if nodding to fashionista autocrats. When he is finally thrown, blood-stained, onto the table, it calls to mind the captured Muammar Gaddaffi, dying on the bonnet of a jeep. His son Michael (Dan Bordeianu) then attempts to urinate on him.

Repan’s Helge orchestrates the party like a military parade, dishing out prescribed roles to his children and demanding that proceedings run to plan. Chairs must be perfectly aligned; glasses, spotlessly clean. These are the traces of propaganda – a fact drawn out by Massaci’s use of a video-camera to catch private moments and a microphone for the public speeches. It is key that neither Christian’s accusations nor Linda’s suicide note are amplified.

In these terms, Festen becomes a usurpation and Massaci has Christian take his father’s chair for breakfast the next day. Helge and his wife excepted, all still wear dinner dress. The ambiguity, then, is whether the cycle will repeat. After all, both Christian and Michael have followed their father into the restaurant trade, albeit overseas, and the best (slightly awkward) praise that can be found for Helene (Ada Navrot) is that she has followed her own path. Just as children struggle to throw off ingrained aspirations from childhood lifestyles, so too the establishment survives through a cycle of self-replication.

If watching Festen might not reach its fullest potential in the moment, Massaci’s robust and crisply intelligent interpretation nonetheless leaves plenty to chew over.

Photograph: Ciprian Duica

Review: Hamlet, Young Vic

2011-11-11T09:02:00.009Z

It’s the mental state of Denmark we should be worried about in Ian Rickson’s concept-heavy Hamlet, which places Michael Sheen’s long-awaited Dane in a psychological institution.

The result is an Elsinore teeming with cranks and crackpots. Sally Dexter is a gurning Gertrude; Michael Gould, a pernickety Polonius and Hayley Carmichael makes a House Elf of Horatio, bobbing along like Hamlet’s squiffy sidekick. They’ve more tics between them than the residents of Battersea Dogs Home.

The cast have clearly divvied up the disorders, leaving the first half exhausting and laboured, as any narrative momentum is stunted by a multitude of individual traits to be established.

Overseeing the hospital, aided by an army of anonymous scrubs, is James Clyde’s oil-slick head doctor Claudius, an unusually genial and guilt-wracked figure of authority.

There is, however, method in the madness (groan) and Rickson catches a wave in the second-half as a strong metaphor reveals itself. Leave aside the Freud-Laing debate knocking around elsewhere: Rickson’s Hamlet is more political than it is psychological. It is a call to open our eyes, an incitement of Plato’s cave and a cry for revolution against a deep-rooted, self-elected establishment.

In this context, Sheen almost flips the role around and has Hamlet grow increasingly sane as he drives towards revenge. He starts an awkward, frazzled man in hotchpotch clothes. His chin is tucked into his neck; a hand rubs his heart and forehead. His father’s ghost is Hamlet himself – presumably a display of schizophrenic behaviour. (Internalised, it removes the validity of Hamlet’s convictions. When Jonathan Pryce used the same technique in 1980, his Hamlet was possessed. As Peter Brook, citing Edward Gordon Craig, once said: “If you’re not prepared to accept the supernatural in Shakespeare, go home.”)

Sheen’s journey is one of alignment, elevating the subversive rationality of Hamlet’s ‘mad’ quipping, until he eventually rivals Claudius for sanity and overthrows the entrenched controlling hierarchy of the asylum.

In this, Rickson finds real and urgent contemporary relevance in the play. That is, however, not the same as making a success of it and there are serious misgivings nonetheless.

Though it grows thrilling in the second half, its first is stilted and flat. The cast – and Sheen is the worst offender – mostly speak the text as if it was written in size 14 font, pronounced the highlighter marks over their chosen key phrases. It bloats the text and, in aiming for absolute clarity, it becomes almost unfollowable. In coming to us, it cannot draw us in.

Nor does Rickson find a sense of dis-ease in this Elsinore beyond the imbalance of a sane Claudius and a pyscholigically vulnerable Gertrude. There is no guilt about either murder or union. And there are a number of odd moments. What sense has ‘get thee to a nunnery’ from inside an institution? Why does Hamlet look up the effect of drama on the guilty in his own Moleskine notebook?

The overriding problem is that the world never feels real. It lacks the detail, preferring instead generic symbols of institutions – flashing lights, parping alarms, plastic chairs. The result is an anime vision, a production that aims a la Rupert Goold, but misses the attention to micro-moments that grounded, say, his Macbeth.

Yet, this is a Hamlet imbued with humour. Sheen leads a clownish ensemble, his eyes darting innocently, and there are great turns from gawkily square Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (Adeel Akhtar and Eileen Walsh) and from Gould as a Polonius like an officious janitor elevated to second-in-command. By contrast, Vivnette Robinson plays Ophelia straight with both purity and clarity and actually achieves a painful, red-eyed mad-scene, rather than the usual whimsical warbling.

Still such is Sheen’s quality that, by the time his motivational fuel powers through his over-poetic speaking, he becomes a gritted, gripping Hamlet. His best are his final moments, a death that creeps up like an incoming tide and is met with a snarl that subsides. Finally, it is his acceptance that registers: with his final words spoken, Sheen simply waits.

At least, it would have had Rickson not attempted a Sixth Sense twist too smart-arse by half. First, it suggests the whole thing never happened anyway – a frustrating end to a lengthy watch – and rewards your efforts with an unimpressive trick. (I note that Derren Brown is thanked in the programme.) Worse though, it is difficult to square with the rest, feeling like an early ‘what if’ that has since tripped up the process. Rickson both cheats his audience and further muddles a bold vision badly executed, which suffocates both play and performance.

Photograph: Simon Annand

Review: Roadkill, Barbican Centre/Theatre Royal Stratford East

2011-11-10T14:19:00.004Z

Written for Culture Wars

Roadkill sears itself onto your conscience. It is a desperate and anguished scream that refuses to recede quietly, but rather shakes you into at least acknowledging the existence of sex-trafficking; a subject is too easily and too often swept under the carpet of urban existence and filed under ‘Someone Else’s Problem’.

Its potency comes from the proximity and intensity that comes from placing us ring-side. Perversely, though, it is both an easy and an impossible watch at the same time.

On the one hand, its overarching plot – uncomfortable as that term may seem – is bog-standard, allowing us to zone out rather than forcing attention. We have seen, or rather heard tell, of all this before. A Nigerian girl, possibly as young as 14, arrives in London full of excitable expectations and travel-guide titbits. None of that is to be, however, as her card has been marked for prostitution, an existence both inescapable and destitute. We see the usual array of pimps and punters and police as she is stripped of her passport, real name and dignity, trapped because there is nowhere else to go.

However, two things provide ample compensation. First, the horrifying details – the deliveries of condoms, the sex toys inserted violently, the mouthwash that pools in the sink - that needle away at your throughout.

Second, and far more devastating, is the way that, given the extremity of the situation, naturalism becomes expressionistic, a factor elevated by our being squished inside the decrepit council flat-cum-brothel. Mercy Ojelade’s Mary repeatedly curls up into a ball and bawls: a caged animal trapped, tortured and – essentially – raped. She looks up – I can still see her face days later – like a child in urgent need of a parent, of some human comfort. She begs, silently, unable to express the pain – both physical and mental – in words. We look on as incapable of helping as she is herself. It is one of the most gut-wrenching experiences I have ever had in the theatre.

Ojelade is almost intolerably good, but the more complex performance, swinging between humanity and monster is that of Adura Onashile as Martha, an ex-prostitute promoted to managing madame. She is torn between financial self-interest, fear of her boss (John Kazek, who plays all the male roles) and genuine empathy for Mary’s situation, the horrors of which she knows all too well.

Cora Bissett’s explosive production never lets us off the hook for a moment. Not only are we – good little liberals all – implicated in the form of a gentle middle-class punter, who shows a trace of kindness to Mary but still makes use of her, Roadkill leaves no excuse for ignorance. This, after all, is not taking place in the empty space of a theatre, but in the heart of the city most of those watching call home.

Photograph: Murdo MacLeod

Review: Fanta Orange, Finborough Theatre

2011-11-09T11:34:00.005Z

Written for Culture Wars

Another day, another ethically complex play about our relationship with African nations. Perhaps even more than The Swallowing Dark at Theatre503, Sally Woodcock’s debut play leaves us seesawing with moral uncertainty. It’s questions about the principles of aid – undoubtedly, but not categorically, a good thing – are as urgent as they are neglected.

Woodcock’s point is that the nature of such aid, not to mention the motivations behind it, is as important as the mere fact of it. To borrow momentarily from Brass Eye, there exists good aid and bad aid. It is remarkably easy for the hand that giveth to be the same one that ultimately taketh away.

She makes it with a debut that, though very rough around the edges, deomstrates barnstorming promise. Here is a play that manages to be truly epic in scope with only three characters onstage; a play packed with really potent, purposeful metaphors that contains at least one scene that could rival Bond’s baby-stoning for firebranding. As debuts go, I’d place it right alongside Polly Stenham’s That Face and Andrew Sheridan’s Winterlong for sheer guttural gutsiness.

That said, the jagged qualities are evident enough to cause Fanta Orange to snag along the way. Woodcock’s plotting is over-extensive. There is a more purified play within and, even if it’s never baggy, Fanta Orange feels bloated. Perhaps more perceptibly and immediately problematic is Woodcock’s tendency to overwrite speech where sparsity and silence would work better. Her best scene, in which a woman miscarries and immediately suckles another’s baby, is undermined by the calm rationality of words used where action and emotion, visceral as they are, would more than suffice.

Fanta Orange’s starting point, based on an Amnesty International report, is Regina’s rape by British soliders, a stark illustration of a nation abused by its supposed sympathisers.

Regina works as a housemaid to Roger, a Kenyan farmer whose child she is carrying when he meets – and soon proposes to – Ronnie, in Kenya to study local soil-eating practices. Her impulse to devote herself – and her trust fund – to supporting the local community drives the play and her charity slides into self-interest and Africaphilia. Though she attributes the natives with unwarranted halos, Ronnie ends the play with Roger’s farm, Regina’s first-child, a new and moneyed Kenyan partner and a sense of self-worth, albeit deluded and blind to the destruction she has caused.

The title relates to her obsession with milk, which is difficult to supply in Kenya without serious health risks, as opposed to the chemical-filled, but safe and abundant, eponymous fizzy drink. It’s another snappy metaphor from Woodcock, who also makes extremely clever use of the phrase ‘Nusu nusu’ – yes and no – throughout.

Gareth Machin can’t entirely heal the textual potholes, but he certainly delivers an engagingly bumpy ride and, rather ingeniously, folds the whole thing onto the tiny Finborough stage. Alex Marker’s design, full of hidden compartments and closing panels, easily manages the multiple locations without sacrificing atmosphere or landscape: a perfect pastel-blue sky wraps around the space.

Jay Villiers, though tripped up by his Kenyan accent too often, provides the standout performance as Roger. There are moments where his brain seems to stall, caught between two possible answers. Kehinde Fadipe is tender and dignified as Regina, while Jessica Ellerby catches the supercilious bluster of Ronnie without scuppering it with external judgement.

Review: Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, Southwark Playhouse

2011-11-08T07:44:00.004Z

Written for Time Out

This fragile two-hander - as delicate and devastating as anything on the London stage right now - glistens with hope.

Two lost souls - Danny and Roberta, a bruiser and a broad - get talking in a downtown bar. They are deadbeat barflies drawn to each other's light in the absence of anything brighter. He greets the world with a clenched fist, she with open legs. Both are numb, hopeless and self-loathing, but they find a flicker of possibility in each other. Whether that will survive when moon gives way to morning is another matter.

John Patrick Shanley's script is symphonic, in its lyrical language and structure, which is based on an Apache dance in which dancers represent pimp and prostitute. Set in pre-Giuliani New York, a city of dirt and danger, it nonetheless resonates with the present and by chipping open a chink of light, it draws the most fragile of tears.

Not that it's remotely sentimental. You shouldn't care for these characters, but, in Ché Walker's intricate, heartfelt and sexy production, you just can't do otherwise. Everything is earned, built piece by piece as the pair gain each other's trust like horse whisperers.

Jonathan Chambers and Clare Latham are alluring and vulnerable. They let their defences drop like clothes peeled off in slow seduction. Surely one of the best Fringe shows of the year, Danny and the Deep Blue Sea shines like a black eye.

Review: The Swallowing Dark, Theatre503

2011-11-07T10:05:00.005Z

Written for Whatsonstage

Lizzie Nunnery’s taut and terse two-hander defies black and white thinking. Like the best drama, it presents an ethical quandary that refuses to be boxed up as either right or wrong, with the implications of its central decision a matter of life and death nonetheless.

Nunnery’s focus is immigration and she makes you realise the complexities of a single case. Canaan (Wil Johnson) is from Zimbabwe, where he worked in Mugabe’s security force and as an MDC activist. He has been living in England for five years, but, having forgotten to resubmit for his status, he must go through the process from scratch under case owner Martha (Allyson Ava-Brown).

Like Joe Penhall’s Blue/Orange, The Swallowing Dark shows an individual tossed around by a bureaucratic system that cannot afford to admit his humanity. Canaan is a case to be judged, before he is a man – indeed a father – worth pitying. When Martha talks to him as such, it is off the record. If her dictaphone is whirring, she must stick to an official script.

The dilemma is between the right to refuge and the need to maintain its value. Cleverly, Nunnery makes you variously side both with and against a system that is over-cautious, inhumane and perfectly rational.

It seems clear that returning to Zimbabwe would leave Canaan in danger, but since the process must be legally watertight, the onus is on him to prove it beyond doubt. Martha, who gives her fifteen-year-old brother the benefit of the doubt against a manslaughter charge, is obliged not to offer the same kindness to Canaan.

Paul Robinson’s production makes the most of Nunnery’s knack for logical conversational courses, maintaining the back and forth ping, but opening up for Canaan’s carefully recounted stories. Alex Eales' intelligent design follows Canaan’s complaint of "having to justify myself every minute in this country," by making Britain seem one interrogation room after another.

However, the play’s underlying metaphor diminishes towards the end, which approaches television drama as it succumbs to ‘and then’ plotting. An ambiguous ending would have been more effective than the definite one Nunnery provides that lets sentiment seep in at the last.

Johnson and Ava-Brown give top-class, complex performances nonetheless. He leads us to presume Canaan’s innate goodness, but leaves cracks enough for her to sow seeds of doubt. Johnson treats every sentence tactically until passion or fear overwhelms self-censorship, while Ava-Brown shows the turmoil of the person behind the bureaucrat’s clipboard.

Review: Speechless, Arcola Theatre

2011-11-01T15:58:00.005Z

Written for Time Out

Something's not right when a programme is more enjoyable than the show it's supposed to supplement. It suggests a fascinating subject with unfulfilled potential.

June and Jennifer Gibbons, the twin daughters of upstanding West Indian immigrants, react to bullying, condescension and social exclusion with a vow of silence. But, in taking us only as far as their teenage rebellion, culminating in arson that coincides with the Brixton Riots and Royal Wedding of 1981, Shared Experience only tell half the story. It seems odd not to show their subsequent stint in Broadmoor, which might be expected to exacerbate their isolation.

There's lots to admire here, not least the poetic text that Linda Brogan and Polly Teale (who also directs) have based on the twins' extensive, sprawling diaries. However, Speechless is most absorbing when it uses the Gibbons' public silence, rather than sidestepping it by showing them in private.

That's where Demi Oyediran and Natasha Gordon really flourish, playing the twins with a tender, bruised compliance. In silence, they are heartbreaking, but Shared Experience trust neither audience nor ambiguity enough and, in spelling out its story too deliberately, Speechless says too much.

Review: The Last of the Duchess, Hampstead Theatre

2011-10-27T10:48:00.004+01:00

Written for Whatsonstage.com

You wait years for a drama about Wallis Simpson and then three turn up at once. Last Christmas, she popped into 65 Eaton Place during an episode of Upstairs Downstairs and, this year, she got a biopic of her own – albeit somewhat derided – courtesy of Madonna.

Now here she is in the opening dream sequence of Nicholas Wright’s latest play, leaning louchely against the mantelpiece of her Boulogne chateaux and fixing herself up with small buckets of ‘vawd-ca.’

That is indeed the last we see of the Duchess. For the rest of the play, adapted from Lady Caroline Blackwood’s book of the same name, she is bedridden upstairs, rumoured to be senile, shrivelled and mute. Possibly even dead.

In April 1980, Blackwood was dispatched by the Sunday Times to profile the Duchess of Windsor, only to be denied access by her lawyer and protector Maitre Suzanne Blum (Sheila Hancock, outmoded and frosty as granita). Instead, with Blackwood sniffing around for a scandalous scoop, Blum herself becomes the piece’s subject and faces accusations of theft and abusing her power of attorney.

That sets up a rather fascinating game of cat and mouse between interviewer and subject, though it takes a long time to get there. Wright’s first act, teeming with high-society tittle-tattle, is like a staged edition of a vintage Tatler. It lacks the double perspective to mine universals from its aristocratic subjects.

However, after the interval, Wright settles down to business proper and presents a proper journalistic duel. While Blackwood, joyfully played by Anna Chancellor with the lolloping surliness of a tipsy teenager, builds towards a cry of "J’accuse", Blum guards the Duchess with parries and deflection. Wright makes an entertaining and even bout between the ruthless and the rueful.

Beneath all this is the question of truth and representation. With both Blackwood and Blum’s versions skewed by their opposing motives, Wright’s concern is with history’s gatekeepers. As the piece ends on a mournful note, he sides with neither Blum’s self-elected censor nor Blackwood’s bitter megalomaniac. Nor, in an admirably neutral piece, is he naïve enough to advocate unbiased truth above all else.

Chancellor and Hancock make worthy adversaries, each filling their role with characterful forthrightness, but Richard Eyre’s production would be better served by a less literal staging. Though Anthony Ward’s copper green gauze walls add a ghostly quality, the naturalistic setting – all regency sofas and antique statuettes – emphasises Wright’s light drawing-room comedy over its titanic clash. It does, however, allow decent comic turns from John Heffernan and Angela Thorne as Michael Bloch, Maitre Blum’s own loyal protector, and Lady Moseley respectively.

Review: Death and the Maiden, Harold Pinter Theatre

2011-10-26T17:43:00.005+01:00

Written for Culture Wars

Sometimes a faulty production can be as instructive as a great one. Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden reads as a taut and sinewy distillation. It seems to spit and tear itself from the page as Paulina Salas, a victim of gang-rape and torture under a recently ousted dictatorship, takes justice into her own hands. Jeremy Herrin’s West End revival, the first in London since the play stormed into the Royal Court Upstairs in 1991, reveals its slickness. And not in a good way.

Paulina is played by Thandie Newton, pristine as a porcelain doll, and even though she never seems as brittle as all that – she’s still steely – there’s a composure to her performance that makes the play a pop thriller. In her glossed lips, “It turned out just as I planned” gets the cunning inflection of a mastermind detective, relishing the moment the final jigsaw piece fits into place.

That clever, twisting structure is the foundation of Dorfman’s play, which needs to thrill in any production. However, if it is not concealed, Death and the Maiden becomes a flippant exploitation of deadly serious events. Reduced to a pop thriller, as Herrin’s production manages, it seems to dance on the mass graves of such regimes.

All of which makes Paulina the piece’s lynchpin. The actress needs to almost work against the play, to deliver a performance that knocks it off its pedestal. Paulina needs to overpower the play’s neatness, to upset its clockwork heartbeat.

This is beyond Newton, who would be adequate in a less viscerally demanding role. Instead, dressed in an Armani blouse and skirt, she is every bit the nourish film star. She points a gun like a pro, but she remains as dangerous as saline solution and strips Paulina of her essential unpredictability.

Because when Paulina takes the man she believes responsible for her systematic abuse hostage after he turns up by chance, having rescued her husband from a roadside flat tyre, she must be capable of anything. Just as important, we must – at least in part – not begrudge her anything, even if we acknowledge the ethical conundrum. For the duration of the play’s events, Paulina must be a very sympathetic psychopath.

Herrin is, however, more interested in a making the play look good, crackle along and pulsate with a creepy atmosphere. In Peter McKintosh’s design, the Salas’s home resembles an open grave, an underground bunker and an interrogation room. Headlights surge through the window like searchlights that stop escapees in their tracks.

Nonetheless, Tom Goodman-Hill and Anthony Calf make interesting, complex and credible choices as Paulina’s husband, who tries to regain control and maintain composure, and the doctor taken hostage. Calf, for example, strikes a very fine balance between a distinctive voice and a unique one. In another production, you’d trust them to explode, but here, in a production made safe as a stage handgun, they can’t pierce the poise and polish.

Photograph: Alistair Muir

Review: 13, National Theatre

2011-10-26T10:29:00.004+01:00

Written for Whatsonstage.com

Theatre is championed for its ability to react to current events. With talk of social media revolution, impending war with Iran, riots and chasmic class-divide, Mike Bartlett has certainly done that.

Rather than state-of-the-nation, Bartlett does state-of-the-globe and, here, he attempts to cram the whole thing onto the Olivier stage in three hours. It was never going to fit and 13 is overstretched. Broad archetypes serve as political mouthpieces and the narrative skips like a scratched CD to set up a showdown. But, in spite of such faults, the piece captivates throughout. Its direct address demands our attention.

At its centre is John (Trystan Gravelle), a saviour in sweatpants preaching a new world order of genuine choice and possibility from on top of a bucket in a London park. Amongst a group labelled “his disciples” (Bartlett labours his Christ parallels unnecessarily) are a casual prostitute, a reformed lawyer and two activists with whom John went to university.

As John goes viral, this movement amasses followers until half a million have occupied Trafalgar Square to protest against Conservative Prime Minister Ruth (Geraldine James) and her informal advisor, her former lecturer and public atheist Stephen (Danny Webb). Beneath their anti-war cause is a deep-rooted and unpinnable dissatisfaction.

Bartlett’s chief success is in his portrayal of the symptoms that breed this dissatisfaction. Once again, he shows an uneasy world fuelled by coffee and e-numbers. Each night, the whole of London wakes from the same nightmare.

But Bartlett’s real target is atomisation and the cult of the individual. Everyone here is out for themselves - they can’t even remember one another’s names – and, if John catches the zeitgeist, he does so because everyone feels the same problem without actually sharing it. Bartlett shows unity built on the alignment of individual concerns to be inherently fragile.

The second half whittles down to a Newsnight-style debate as John and Ruth, with the help of Stephen, face-off and, though worthy, it’s not earned in theatrical terms. Nonetheless, Bartlett works hard to leave us with a question rather than a solution, showing how cautious conservatism wins out against equal opposition.

Like Headlong’s Earthquakes in London, premiered last year in the Cottesloe, 13 really needs an aircraft hanger and a cast of hundreds, but director Thea Sharrock does well to capture the piece’s scale. Tom Scutt’s design, a huge black cube revolving in the shadows, is vast and uneasy.

The cast are all in comfortable territory and Bartlett’s archetypes leave little room for manoeuvre. Gravelle suits John’s genial charisma; James, Ruth’s unflinching resolution; and no one does terminal illness as well as Webb. Only Adam James’ rambunctious lawyer and Shane Zaza’s zany student offer a slant on their stereotypes in a big play with its fingers on the pulse, if not its eye on the ball.

Review: A Round-Heeled Woman, Riverside Studios

2011-10-25T07:51:00.004+01:00

Written for Time Out

Taboo-busting doesn't get much tamer than this. Jane Prowse's adaptation of Jane Juska's best-selling memoir, subtitled My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance, offers a gently comic, sweet and affecting peek into the sex lives of the superannuated.

Aged 66, Juska - played by Cagney & Lacey star Sharon Gless - placed a personal advert in The New York Review of Books: 'Before I turn 67 next March, I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.'

Among her 63 replies were Georgio from Utah, 68 and sex-hungry, and Wilson, a horny New Yorker of 72. Neither makes the maybe pile.

Those that do are either unpalatably forthright about their motives or gentlemanly until the deed is done and Juska's excitement hollows into embarrassment. The exception is Graham, a Trollope fan the same age as her son.

Gless has an ease onstage that most of us reserve for relatives and her wicked, sassy humour brings out the best in a script that has little up the sleeve on which it wears its heart. Ultimately, there's nothing wrong with A Round-Heeled Woman, but there's nothing much to get excited about either.

Review: Jumpy, Royal Court

2011-10-22T11:34:00.005+01:00

Jumpy is just that. April De Angelis relies on momentous events – pregnancies, marital crises, affairs, gunshots – to make her points, only to subsequently bottle them with some coincidental get out clause or other. It’s a shame, because, not only could tighter plot-points have carried equal weight, this tendency is the only major fault of an hilarious theatrical firecracker.

At its best, Jumpy matches One Man Two Guv’nors for laughs, but without sacrificing real-world purpose and political drive. It can be elegantly poignant and Nina Raine’s direction is among the best you’ll see this year: never showy and concept-heavy, but full of intelligent and restrained choices that eventually hit home. On top of that, Raine has drawn performances of extraordinary emotional suppleness from a first-rate cast.

Unlike De Angelis’ early work, Jumpy is not an outright feminist play. Sure, it sees the world through a prism of feminism, but it is far from restricted to the subject. As well the ageing process and family, De Angelis targets the replacement of ideology with irony and a society so materialistic that it views children as lifestyle accessories.

Tamsin Greig plays Hilary, a mother-of-one recently turned fifty and undergoing a delicately underplayed mid-life crisis. De Angelis tells us all we need to know in the first pinpoint image: Hilary enters, shoulders slumped with the weight of her shopping. She wears sensible clothes, black and olive green, and no make-up. Her fifteen-year old daughter Tilly (Bel Powley), dressed and dolled up like a rainbow, bounces down the stairs to the beat of her iPod, blasting out Florence and the Machine’s Dog Days Are Over and goes out for the night. Immediately, a bottle of wine comes out of the shopping bags and Greig sorts herself out with a large glass and a sigh.

Ostensibly, then, Jumpy charts Hilary’s mid-life crisis through separation, burlesque and dalliances with men both her own age and half it (including a neat nod to Saved when a twenty year-old cleans a cut on her knee). Raine has various items – a cuddly toy, iPod dock, make up bag, duster and blanket – accumulate on the stairs, marking the several ages of woman.

However, there’s plenty more going on beneath the surface and Jumpy really stirs as it gradually refines. De Angelis diagnoses our society with a fatal insincerity deep-rooted in materialism.

Frances once protested at Greenham Common with Hilary, now she’s busy “ironically deconstructing” burlesque. Tilly’s friends share a gun “for a joke…like men having long hair in your day – or women taking the pill.” The clinical white walls of Lizzie Clachan’s set, with their cupboards of hidden clutter, suggest an anxiety about self-revelation. “Why won’t anyone take me seriously,” is Hilary’s final lament. It’s as much about her age as the world that refuses to do so.

But Jumpy’s flipside concerns a crisis of youth. De Angelis draws comparison between Hilary’s first period, marked with a miniature rite of passage to demarcate childhood’s end, with Tilly’s claim about fresher’s week, during which a childhood totem is set alight for the same purpose. Children, she suggests, remain children too long; nineteen is the new thirteen. They’re mollycoddled and responsibility-free. They’re helped with homework and plied with toys throughout their teens. “We gave them everything,” the adults intone, not realising that they have treated their children like status symbols or pimped up accessories, like Tamagotchis to be displayed around the playground.

At one point, De Angelis manages to implicate us exquisitely. Tilly returns after running away. Her hair is knotted and her make-up smeared. Her tights are laddered and she only has one shoe. And, while we assume the worst, she cheerily takes herself off to bed. “I lost a shoe. Off the pier at Brighton.” De Angelis nails what Aleks Sierz has called “the culture of fear,” by planting it in us alongside her characters. Why can we not trust a sixteen year-old girl to take care of herself?

Powley is terrific as Tilly, contrasting a vulnerable child with a spitting gremlin. Doon Mackichan is in her element as Frances, given free reign with a free-spirit, which reaps huge dividends and hearty laughter in an extended, excruciating burlesque routine that almost tears through the pages of De Angelis’ text. There’s brilliant work from a characteristically oil-slick Richard Lintern and Susan Woodward as a cold and corrosive mother.

But Greig is best of all: absolutely, but invisibly, controlled, her emotions flow in streamlets. She keeps Hilary real, finding brittleness without tipping her into fragility or nervous breakdown. Greig handles comedy like a tap-in merchant: laughs are mostly scored through reactions and her touch is light but accurate, but, as she proves with a burlesque of her own, she can goof with the best of them.

Photograph: Robert Workman

Review: Inadmissible Evidence, Donmar Warehouse

2011-10-19T12:59:00.004+01:00

Written for Whatsonstage.com

The old criticism of John Osborne is that he wrote not plays, but character studies. It holds true for Inadmissible Evidence and, though it gives Douglas Hodge opportunity to dazzle, the play never gains momentum of its own. As the chaotic and splenetic solicitor Bill Maitland, Hodge is both protagonist and power generator. Were he to stop, you half suspect the lights would switch off.

Osborne himself was notoriously insecure and, like Jimmy Porter before him, Maitland is a bottled expression of the playwright’s own emotional state. The famous anger remains, but unlike Porter’s, it is turned inwards in self-loathing. Maitland recognises that he is the root cause of his own problems, but can’t get a decent foothold on life to turn things around. We see him over two days in which he barely leaves his grimy office, which, in Soutra Gilmour’s design has the look of a fish-tank that needs cleaning.

Maitland is an alcoholic, a serial adulterer and an absent father. His marriage is disintegrating, his legal practices are of dubious legality and his sense of self is in tatters. Life is a vicious circle of guilt and distraction that here catches up with him.

For a man whose idea of a to-do list is a role-call of his secretaries, the future always arrives too quickly and it terrifies him. No calm sniper, Maitland is a blunderbuss taking pot-shots in the dark. Always on the cusp of hyperventiliation, he bats away oncoming problems with forced charm and puerile humour. Hodge plays him like a rhinoceros learning to rollerskate, slipping and sliding around, but occasionally pulling off an inadvertent triple pirouette.

Hodge’s energy is, in itself, remarkable, but he still maintains several layers with real care. His Maitland is both entertainer, chasseing across the stage and twisting case notes into punchlines, and embittered depressive. It is a complex performance that never loses sight of either humour or torment, even as the latter grows dominant for Maitland’s eventual breakdown.

It’s here that director Jamie Lloyd pulls off his best move, warping Osborne’s play to further reflect Maitland’s mental state. The string of divorcee clients that come through his doors, all played by Serena Evans, are disarmingly similar. In one, Maitland sees a vision of his own life; in another, Mr Maples, a newly-out homosexual collected and at ease with himself, all he wants to be. Lloyd smartly has Al Weaver double as Maples and Jones, the young clerk whose youth and togetherness Maitland so envies.

There’s great support from Esther Hall as Maitland’s level-headed mistress Liz and Daniel Ryan as Hudson, the lawyer tired of holding the fort, but Karen Gillan’s fans might be disappointed, since her cameo role has been over-billed.

Photograph: Johan Persson

Review: Sixty-Six Books, Bush Theatre

2011-10-18T11:21:00.005+01:00

Written for Culture Wars

Scale, ambition and a spirit of collaboration make the inaugural event at the new Bush Theatre, which has moved from its compact warren above an O’Neill’s pub into a gorgeous new building, a former public library next to Shepherd’s Bush Market.

A few words, first, on the new theatre, designed by architect Haworth Tompkins in a mere few months. It is, quite frankly, a brilliant new addition to London’s cultural scene. It has always seemed a miracle that great new plays were tucked into the tiny, dishevelled black box of old. The new theatre, at last, fully befits the work inductive reasoning suggests it will house.

Overall, the Bush feels like a halfway-house between the Donmar Warehouse and the Battersea Arts Centre. It has an elegant auditorium similar to that of the former and the latter’s welcoming, homely nature.

The auditorium itself – the natural state of which is perfectly shown off in Amy Cook’s simple, elegant design for Sixty-Six Books – is an open and flexible space that allows the seating to be reconfigured at will. Despite four pillars, which limit capacity in any formation to 144, sightlines are barely an issue. There is plenty of legroom and the work feels like it can breathe, not only for the first time, but better than in most London theatres.

However, the real joy is that the Bush doesn’t stop there. The theatre now is now a complex. It’s new bar is spacious and cosy, better than those at the Finborough and the Young Vic, not least because it comes with a playtext library and a garden. Behind the auditorium, unseen by audiences, are an office capable of actually fitting the theatre’s staff, a passable rehearsal room and, in due course, proper dressing rooms. All this must feel like a luxury to those that have played sardines above Shepherd’s Bush Green and ought to bring in better work and, given its 125-year lease at peppercorn rent, increased income.

It opens with Sixty-Six Books, a collection of sixty-six plays by sixty-six assorted writers drawn from a number of disciplines, each inspired by a book of the bible and played by a cast of 130, none of whom double up. I can’t think of a better way to open a theatre. The pieces can be viewed together over 24 hours, with another marathon closing the run on the 28th October, or in nightly sections.

Of course, the quality varies as widely as the angles of approach taken. Of the seventeen I saw, those drawn from the New Testament generally worked better. Perhaps this is down to familiarity – for one is always aware of source material and, where one is unfamiliar with it, the inability to crack the code is frustrating – or perhaps it has to do with the more human focus of the New Testament.

The best of the collection present something present-tense, breaking through the original’s tendency to sit outside of a story as reportage. Some apply an easy and literal filter of modernity, such as Jeanette Winterson’s take on Genesis Godblog, which casts God as CEO of World.com with Catherine Tate dictating tweets to an angel secretary. Elsewhere Paul talks of taking Christianity viral in Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran’s knowingly Pythonesque Epheseus-Schmepheseus.

Others burrow into the stories with more commitment. Chris Goode’s The Loss of All Things (Philippians) finds in St Paul’s activity echoes of a peaceful, but provocative, revolution against an old order, as two gay schoolboys wear down their teacher with passive resistance during his detention. Stella Duffy’s The Book of Ruth (and Naomi) humanises the text with an empathetic and emotive version told from inside rather than out. For Leviticus, full of prohibitions and maxims, Caroline Bird explores morality and sin through a woman brain-washed to self-destruct.

Those that seek to dissect rather than dramatise are harder going. Exodus, densely handled by Anne Michaels in The Crossing, is poetic but tangled, while Neil Bartlett’s fusion of Numbers and a memory of chapel-reading is unfollowable without a base understanding of the original. Both suffer from an reliance on spoken text over dramatic dynamic and, in a crowded context of information overload that benefits dilettantism and lightness, neither provide a necessary foothold.

For all its faults, Sixty-Six Books is nonetheless a triumphal fanfare to welcome a remarkable new theatre.

Review: When the Chickens Came Home to Roost, Brixton Empire

2011-10-18T07:22:00.004+01:00

Written for Time Out

Laurence Holder's biographical drama about Malcolm X is the inaugural production of the Brixton Empire. Daljinder Singh's new venue is better known to ravers as the nightclub Mass. Though it can't conceal its dual purpose, it offers a decent-sized flexible hall, set up here in traverse.

Blending fact with fiction like Peter Morgan (Frost/Nixon), When the Chickens… charts Malcolm X's relationship with Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam, from his conversion in prison to his assassination by members of the organisation in 1965.

Holder glosses over more unsavoury beliefs to suggest a righteous, media-savvy moderniser scuppered by commitment to his cause. Beneath the outward civility, there's a nuanced and tactical power struggle.

However, while Holder's dialogue is absolutely believable, he sacrifices context for realism, never providing a crucial leg-up for those new to the subject. Singh's production, dark and dreamy thanks to Azusa Ono's minimal lighting, boasts fantastic performances from an enigmatic Ricky Fearon as Malcolm X and Peter Landi as Muhammad.

Review: Third Floor, Trafalgar Studios

2011-10-18T07:18:00.001+01:00

Written for Time Out

Jason Hall 's Third Floor is a broad comedy about neighbourly etiquette among residents of a London apartment block. Number 10 irritates the occupants of 11 and 12 (Craig Gazey and Emily Head play the anonymous leads) by leaving smelly binbags outside her door.

As the pair bond over mutual irritation and gritted-teeth tolerance, everything points towards a budding romance, right down to their contrasting doormats. Hers is a tasteful, orderly Mondrian; his welcomes visitors to the 'House of Love'.

The romantic-comedy-of-manners contains enough laughs to overcome the sort of heavy-handed funnies for which BBC studio sitcoms get torn to shreds. Despite overusing the downward inflection, Gazey makes average material funny as the gawky oddball in 11, while Head proves a likeable foil with a good line in polite, hasty retreats.

However, Hall tries to squeeze in too much drama from his slight situation and, for all director Russell Labey's efforts, the play's unexpected lurch into comic thriller is both clunky and unnecessary.

Review: Saved, Lyric Hammersmith

2011-10-15T07:36:00.003+01:00

Edward Bond hasn’t granted permission for a London production of his second and most famous play for 27 years. If that seems self-righteous, Sean Holmes’ Lyric Hammersmith production shows why. It makes you realise that Saved is a play to be broken out only in case of emergency.

In fact, there should be a fine for its misuse. Played too often or too carelessly, Saved loses the potent toxicity that makes it fit only for a crisis. It is an alarum of a play: relentless and monotone, too grating to be ignored. With diligently restrained ferocity, Bond shows how a society that is incapable of providing its citizens with purpose strips people of their humanity. When the world outside does not echo the one onstage, Saved’s warning shots become empty cries of wolf.

Holmes certainly can’t be accused of shirking the play’s brutality, nor its uncompromising bleakness. If anything, he goes too far, almost tipping the play from gruelling to torturous. He leaves us nowhere to hide. Bond’s specified empty space is given a white backdrop, allowing no room for distraction. There are only people, actions and words.

Those words are never merely spoken. Instead, everything is barked, snapped, yelled, spat, screamed, whined or needled. Bond’s words are monosyllables, rhythmic and grinding as a saw through wood. With every scene whittling down to a hoarse argument, the effect is as incessant as tinnitus. Holmes has prodded his cast’s performances just beyond naturalism, as a digital photographer tweaks and enhances the colours of reality. Scenes are elongated until they become unbearable; the nagging and backbiting goes on and on.

As such, the frustration transfers from stage to stalls and we find our jaws clenched in sympathy with Len, who bears the brunt of the badgering. He’s first seen attempting to sleep with teenage prostitute Pam, while her father readies himself for work. They give up and sit instead, sharing sweets – children despite adult appearances – and Len moves in to the impoverished family’s home.

Morgan Watkins finds the right note of sweetness amongst brutes. He’s strong, but soft; a good lad who constantly fails to intervene. He watches the baby’s death from the trees and fails to stand up either to or for Pam, a ragged and vulnerable Lia Saville. When she accuses him of sitting on the Radio Times, he goes through a full-blown slagging match before finally standing up for proof.

There is no respite from such frustrations for Len. Pam’s parents’ arguments have grown into a permanent state of war. The mere existence of one spouse sets the other’s teeth grinding. His friends, led by the callous and cowardly Fred (Calum Callaghan), goad each other on until any intervention becomes impossible: too big an ask, too risky a self-sacrifice. And so, on it goes, cycling through scenes, stretched and hernia-inducing, that flare up and simmer down, but never get extinguished.

It is a hot sleepless night of a production, all dead eyes and discomfort. Holmes attacks with a nail-file rather than a sledgehammer. Sure, even now, the stoning draws sickened groans – the unseen proving its power with each wet slap of stone on raw meat – but he also manages to make Fred’s hooking of bait repulsive, even mimed, when the worm’s flesh resists the barb before being punctured. Then, there’s the baby’s crying, unattended for five minutes, that scratches away as only crying babies can. It sounds like a shrill accordion vomiting bile.

As such, for all the bravery and skill of Holmes’ production, Saved is hard to recommend. My notebook is littered with torture references, from hairdryer’s held against skin to drips tapping on foreheads. Certainly this is a piercingly effective production, but it leaves you irritable, not morally outraged. Perversely, were its edges softened, Saved might prove more effective.

Photograph: Simon Kane

Review: Fit and Proper People, Soho Theatre

2011-10-14T11:19:00.006+01:00

She’s here. She’s there. She’s every-fuckin’-where: Georgia Fitch. Georgia Fitch, who crams every major footballing scandal from recent years into a single season at a single East London club. There are bungs changing hands and guns in the changing room; there’s gang-rape, infidelity, an injunction and, just to complete the set, a multi-millionaire investor wanted on terror charges.

Fit and Proper People dearly wants to be professional football’s Enron, but in trying to kick the ball right out of the park, Fitch puts it into her own net. While Lucy Prebble achieved a graceful epic with a neat and singular central narrative, Fitch sprays her drama around and so overloads her plot. It’s not quite the stuff of Dream Team – there’s too much political impetus for that – but it’s certainly 'Transfer Window Shopping and Fucking'.

At its centre is players’ agent Casey Layton, played as a maternal predator by Katy Stephens. Layton manipulates the club from every angle, hopping into bed (literally) with new chairman Frank Wong and moving the players around like Subbuteo figurines. All she wants is to oust manager Anthony Whitechapel (Steven Hartley with a larynx like a buzzsaw), a “sortuffeeurf” local lad and former footballer, responsible for her being raped as a teenager.

Brushing up against wider cultural concerns about media, politics and big business, Fit and Proper People is an accusation of comfortable corruption. It draws a stark division between the loyal fans, who prop up the club with their minimal salaries, and the crooked insiders that stand to profit. The case is relentless but restless.

Steve Marmion’s production goes to town in transforming the theatre for an embedded experience. Tannoy announcers call the show and we troop past fluorescent-jacketed ticket tearers before filing onto the hallowed turf of Tom Piper’s 360° design. There are half-time pies, programme vendors and advertising hoardings, but, like a champagne signing intended to sell replica shirts rather than make a difference on the pitch, it all feels like morale-boosting window-dressing.

Review: Something About You (makes me want to hurt you), Asylum Chapel

2011-10-12T11:31:00.004+01:00

Written for Culture Wars

Electra, with all its grand, sweeping passions that seem to have knotted the intestines of its characters, with it’s epic sweep of royalty and revenge, with it’s frisson of incest, is boiled down to a domestic fantasia in this devised piece by Dirty Market Theatre. The result is like sub-par Caryl Churchill.

I say ‘boiled down’, but the process is closer to dilution. Despite running at ninety minutes, Something About You… feels flabby. It’s swirl of images, scattered over the vast, crumbling Asylum Chapel, has prosaic, non-literal dances sidle up to over-written snapshots of suburban psychosis, but lacks the potential energy of a coiled spring. Where there ought to be burning inevitability, magnesium-bright, there is only a banal blancmange of self-pity and sobbing. It dearly needs an adrenaline shot.

Electra herself becomes Egg (Francesca Dale), a depressed, agoraphobic woman whose sap of a husband sleeps in the car outside and pushes cuddly toys through her letter-box. Her brother Orestes – sorry, Dave (Tom Harris) – looks like he’s just returned from a gap year, while their mother, played by a bouffant Benedict Hopper in a pink skirt and kitten heels, has stepped out of the 1960’s.

The aim is to marry expressionism with a modern ‘neurotic middle-classes’ slant on the original myth, but, for all that I admire the ambition of Georgina Sowerby and Jon Lee’s production, the two sides neither sit comfortably together nor work on their own terms. There’s a strong, dreamy atmosphere, but everything – text, acting and movement – remains approximate; a fact testified by an over-reliance on the word ‘fuck’ to stand in for anything more specific or meaningful.

Beneath all this is the fatal problem of an adaptation that dresses the original in fancy post-modernism (“Weep. Change your sex. Ask questions to which the answer is Electra”) without ever really adding to it. Rather than excavating Electra’s story, getting beneath its skin to tear its guts apart, Something About You... functions only in relation to it, as a redundant translation of a vastly superior play.

Photograph: Roelof Bakker

Review: Farewell to the Theatre, Rose Theatre

2011-10-11T09:10:00.002+01:00

Written for Time Out

Delicacy is insufficient recompense for tedium and there's plenty of both in this previously unseen two-hander by Harley Granville-Barker, who drew up the blueprint for the modern stage.

Written in 1916, months before Granville-Barker enlisted in the army, Farewell to the Theatre is underscored by melancholy. Dorothy (Jane Asher), an old-school actor-manager no longer capable of drawing the punters she once guaranteed, visits her lawyer to discuss the final curtain. Decades devoted to her art have left her with a country house and a decent pension, but little sense of legacy and impact.

On the other side of the table, Richard Cordery's Edward is her missed opportunity. He has loved her throughout, but his various proposals have always been met with rejection. Granville-Barker extends ephemerality from theatre into life to poignant effect.

In Stephen Unwin's production, Asher and Cordery have the ease of lifelong friends, but ultimately there's nothing at stake and, even at 55 minutes, this wistful mood piece struggles to sustain itself.

Review: Bound, Southwark Playhouse

2011-10-11T07:47:00.004+01:00

Written for Culture Wars

Jesse Briton was still a student at East 15 when he wrote Bound, a story of six Devonshire trawlermen facing an economy crashing down on them like forty-foot waves. You’d never guess because his debut play is absolutely watertight.

Briton handles dramaturgy like an old pro, exploiting fissures amongst his characterful crew and raising the stakes notch by notch all the way to eleven. That his direction should also achieve atmosphere, elegance and genuine emotion absolutely belies Bound’s grass-roots beginnings. It could easily have come from the pens of Lee Hall or Simon Beaufoy.

Without ever feeling indebted to them, Bound has much in common with both Billy Elliot and The Full Monty. It is a working class drama that shows an unlikely, fractious team struggling together to ward off poverty.

With the recession digging in and his last catch sold off at half-price, Woods (John McKeever), captain of ‘The Violet,’ is unable to pay his crew. Instead, he asks them to sacrifice their leave to take advantage of competition-free waters.

A trip built on such premises, however, is never plain sailing and, sure enough, the weather turns on the trawlermen. Woods is forced to take risks, gambling their safety for economic gain. It’s a neat reflection of the behaviour that caused the global financial crisis, only inverted as result rather than cause. It’s rooted in desperation, rather than greed, seeking survival instead of excess.

Much of Briton’s skill is in the balance of his characters. Young upstart Graham, given a twist of camp metrosexuality by Joe Darke, clashes with Alan Devally’s old-timer. James Crocker’s jaded business-partner John does likewise with his arrogant old friend, Woods, and Thomas Bennett is magnificient as Kerdzic, the Polish agency worker whose mere presence sets tensions running, not least for Daniel Foxsmith’s outspoken Rhys. In such a pressure-cooker environment – cramped, isolated and increasingly dangerous – tempers are bound to flare.

That inevitability is a mark of Bound’s absolute solidity, but it also means it’s incapable of really rocking the boat. Beneath the surface, there’s a familiarity to the narrative structure that leaves pre-emption possible. If anything – and indeed, if possible – Bound is almost too perfect.

Review: The Taming of the Shrew, Southwark Playhouse

2011-10-09T11:28:00.006+01:00

Written for Culture Wars

There’s colour and character aplenty in Robin Norton-Hale’s production of Shakespeare’s least agreeable play, but in trying to smooth its rough edges, the director has sanded it down to nonsense. Not only is the end result bafflingly implausible, it’s no more a Taming of the Shrew than Hamlet is.

Of course, directors today must approach The Taming of the Shrew tactically. Contemporary audiences will not readily accept the straightforward success of Petruchio’s methods and the usual solution involves reframing Kate’s eventual acquiescence as irony, rebellion or tragedy.

Norton-Hale opts instead to sidestep misogyny by having Elexi Walker’s Kate freely chose to drop her guard. Essentially, the play becomes a rom-com between two anti-heroes. The lovers end up playing the same game, cynically toying with a world to which both are utterly, arrogantly, indifferent. What does it matter whether the moon shines or the sun? Or if old men be deemed young women? The world can be as these two lovebirds see fit to dub it or else it can go hang.

Why then does Walker deliver Kate’s final hymn to obedience with sincerity? True, there are half-smiles in Petruchio’s direction, leaving it possible that this is another of their private jokes, but she seems to be in earnest and Dave Fishley’s Baptista wells up at her words, genuinely touched by his daughter’s transformation.

The only plausible explanation, what with Petruchio’s concern for dowries and high-stakes betting, is that Kate and Petruchio have gone all Rooney Senior and fixed the match unseen on the journey home. The Taming of the Shrew as a scamster’s con trick? “Split the winnings, Kate, then split?” Hmm.

But where Norton-Hale’s cosmetic surgery morphs the play out of recognition is by cutting the attempt “to kill a wife with kindness.” On arrival in the countryside, Kate is served not a fine meal dismissed “in reverend care of her,” but a microwaved lasagne dished up in its plastic packaging. Worse still, it’s actually burnt. Is it any surprise that she has trouble sleeping, given that they all seem to be kipping down in sleeping bags?

Why, this is the way to drive a wife to suicide; less hospitality surplus than hostage situation. Perhaps Norton-Hale is advocating the treat-em-mean, keep-em-keen philosophy.

Or perhaps she simply hasn’t read her Sparks Notes. As if in pointed defiance of the text, the outfit Petruchio has delivered is perfectly tailored. Kate’s even happy to wear it for the remainder.

If you can forgive all this – and you shouldn’t – there’s more than enough humour and fizz to satisfy. Norton-Hale has a sense of theatre, even if she misses that of the text.

Oddly, though, the solution is staring her in the face, namely, class. In fact, it’s the central pillar of this production, which offsets Brixton girls against gents made in Chelsea, but goes unused, dramaturgically at least. It certainly provides humour: Giles Roberts making a brilliant buffoon as a Barboured Gap Yah Hortensio, signing off phone calls with an abrupt ‘Anon.’ But with echoes of colonialism and Bullingdon bluster, Norton-Hale has all the negative spin she needs. As is, class simply becomes excess, unconsidered noise.

A shame, because it has allowed Darwen, in particular, to mine a smart link between Petruchio and Iago, namely a radical indifference that allows him to treat others as playthings. He seems, at first, a man who can’t even be bothered to summon up callous disrespect, shrugging as he schemes in self-interest. His is a Petruchio up for the challenge and out for the dowry and, were he not handicapped by such woeful misdirection, Darwen could have nailed a part that few get right.

Photograph: Peter Dobiesz