LondonTheatreGoer

No Naughty Bits - Hampstead Theatre - 12-Sep-2011

2011-09-13T00:08:00.000Z

Written by Steve Thompson
Directed by Edward Hall

I wondered if this play labours under acouple of misapprehensions. The first is that the business of comedyor backstage stories about comedy are themselves funny. It is morenormal to depict the opposite as true, those cliches of the unhappyclown or the comedy duos or troupe that hate one another's guts. In this casethe writer wrings quite a few jokes out of this fictionalised tale ofa law suit brought by the members of the Monty Python troupe againstthe US ABC network over cuts made to a 1975 broadcast of the fourthseries.

The problem here is, possibly, thatbecause it's based on Monty Python we expect it to be a lot funnierthan it actually is. An interview with the author in the programmeseems to suggest that play started life as a quite serious almostdocumentary piece and he had to work to inject humour into it (he's rather pleased with putting his Terry Gilliam character in silly costumes). AsI've said I think it succeeded in being funny – Matthew Marsh'sjudge, presiding over the case, was particularly good – butsomething made me want more and made me sensitive to occasional thedips in action or when humorous lines misfired.

I found the fictionalisation of thepiece bothered me quite a lot. It wasn't just being told in overlongvoice-overs at the beginning of each act, that the play was fictionalthat grated. It was more that I kept wondering just how much wasfiction. I was prepared to allow it all to be fiction but I knew thatthe author had studied Michael Palin's diaries for the period and hadto wonder if some of the seemingly un-Palin-like schoolboy outburstsfrom Harry Hadden-Paton's Michael were based on reality orill-rendered imagination.

I also had a problem with the playfailing to mention the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail which wasreleased before the play was set and did reasonably well at the time.Maybe it didn't fit in with the author's desire to suggest that 1975was a time when the Pythons were facing up to the fact that they hadbroken up and that some were facing uncertain futures. Of coursecrying “fiction” can cover this but I found it jarring.

I thought the other possiblemisapprehension in this play was the idea that this is “still anostensibly Python-worshipping country”*. We are told by the mediaand comedy nerds that we should revere Monty Python, the troupe, themovies and the TV series. I am enough of a comedy nerd to be quitehappy to do that but I'm not sure how many other people could say thesame.

In the 40 years since Python was firstbroadcast in the UK it has been repeated about 3 times on terrestrialtelevision (BBCs 1 or 2). I was too young to see the original seriesand did't catch it until it was repeated in the late 80s - I thinkit has been repeated once since then. It has been played quite a loton satellite and cable channels over the years but not recently.Copyright disputes meant that the videos of the series disappearedfrom shelves in the mid-90s and the DVDs of the full series were notavailable in the UK until 2007.

My point here is that in spite of beingtold by the media that Python is important and main-stream, thereality is that the series hasn't been watched that often and might becompletely unfamiliar to people seeing this play. It means thatnuances might be lost on them and the play doesn't explain why weshould care that the series was funny

I would love to feel that everybodycould tune in somewhere to see an episode every night but it hasnever really been the case here and that's a pity.

*This comes from an excellent Not theNine O'Clock News sketch about the Life of Brian controversy and youmight not have seen that either.

Red Bud by Brett Neveu, Royal Court Upstairs – Directed by Jo McInnes

2010-10-27T00:51:00.001Z

I saw this play on the 21st of October and thought it well performed and directed with a good set that included a pick-up truck (not bad for 5 storeys up). It had believable characters that seemed to speak authentically (although I'm no judge of Michigan accents or speech patterns). So far so good but I was left unsatisfied. There was action but no story and in the end, there were too many unanswered questions about the history and relationships of this group of (mostly) men who attended the Red Bud moto-cross event for the past 22 years.

As is my habit these days any notes on the play (physical, electronic or mental) were discarded long before I reached home and I didn't attempt to write a blog about it.

Then in the last few days, as blog and newspaper reviews have started to come out I've begun to have a touch of esprit de l'escalier about this play. People aren't being kind about this play. They are generally complimentary about the acting, direction, set and even the dialogue but they all have the same basic complaints. They say that they don't have any feeling for the characters or their background. They can see that the relationships are tense but the play never explains why. Most of all they (like me) don't feel that they've been told a story.

Reading these reviews got me wondering whether the author of this play was deliberately trying to do something here. It appears that he can competently write character and dialogue so why did he ignore basic tenets of story-writing? Perhaps it is an experiment intending to show real life.

Reality, which can often be dramatic, needs to be shaped in order to become drama. Reality is just one damn thing after another; It doesn't explain itself. Real people don't reveal (often mutually known) information to each other for the benefit of an audience.

In this play there is one concession to exposition in the introduction of the 19-year-old girlfriend of one of the protagonists. It allows everybody to be introduced and a little interpersonal history to be shared but it doesn't go to far. The explanations are realistically fragmentary and don't reveal much more than is necessary to continue with the piece.

If I am right about this being an experiment, an attempt to show a slice of reality in more or less real time, then it's actually rather fascinating. It doesn't work, of course, in fact it is a bit of an object lesson in why you need dramatic fakery and disguised exposition to shape real events into a story.

Going against all the reviewers means I'm probably wrong but if I'm not then this experiment, however failed, should be applauded, a bit.

Welcome to Thebes by Moira Buffini, Olivier Theatre, 15-June-2010 – Directed by Richard Eyre

2010-06-17T07:38:00.000Z

This is a play of impressive ambition, essentially a retelling of the Greek play (with surrounding mythology) Antigone and some offstage and Theseus bits from Phaedre, all against a modern backdrop of a bitter African civil war. On stage we see Thebes as depicted as a ruined presidential palace, a remnant of some forgotten peaceful time.
There are lots of juicy parallels and clever connections if you like your Greek Mythology; In the civil war seven militias descended on the city like the Seven Against Thebes; The three most senior ministers are named for the three Graces; The body of the warlord Polynices is decorated with a necklace of fingers echoing the cursed necklace of Harmonia (first Queen of Thebes; An avenging child soldier is named after one of the furies and other characters are named after gods, goddesses and suitable figures from Greek Mythology.
In this play Athens becomes America, David Harewood's Theseus an Obama or Clinton-like First Citizen (though smoother and much more of a political operator) and the offstage Sparta becomes China, each vying to help and probably dominate the ruined Thebes.
This is a well thought-out piece, you can see the links between the Theban wars with their gods-inspired viciousness and some of the recent West African (and elsewhere) civil wars with their strange dressings-up (soldiers would paint their faces or dress as women in battle). Each descended into chaos and in some cases cannibalism.
For all this play's cleverness and ambition I think it is let down by the language. The mix between the epic and the contemporary language didn't really work for me, even though the play worked well in terms of setting. Maybe the epic language wasn't epic and stirring enough to counterpoise the jumps to the modern slang. Then again, powerful heightened language may have jarred too much with speech that used phrases like “you are now my bitch”.

Posh by Laura Wade, Royal Court, 12-Apr-2010 – Directed by Lyndsey Turner

2010-04-15T06:49:00.001Z

For a group of young who consider themselves to be the inheritors of the mantle of British leadership, the Riot Club (modelled on a certain Oxford University Dining Club) are remarkably bad at organising a dinner. The restaurant is wrong with a too-convivial host who won't easily accept compensation for the damage they expect to cause, someone forgets the drugs and the prostitute turns out to be a jobs-worth.

Against this backdrop the several members vie for the presidency of the club while the existing president is pre-occupied with his Masters degree and, like some of the older members, wondering what life will be like beyond the University and their privileged circle.
I thought the author juggled the different characters of the ten members of the club very well, although three or four of the minor characters seemed to fade into sameness when they weren't rooted in their chairs. You could argue that those four characters were needed for the plot, the crowd dynamics and to provide weight to the shifting loyalties in the group. That said having to introduce everyone and flesh them out makes the first half play grind slowly at times.

The play works by showing this dining club and letting them speak unchallenged. There is skill in the way that they appear to agree politically on things like the tawdriness of Britain and how things were better when their grandparents (and older generations) were in charge, leaving the audience to detect the flaws in their arguments and imagine countering them. These young men are pretty obnoxious in their snobbery and attitudes but until almost the end they maintain a pretence at being gentlemen. I even suspected that the author might have succumbed to their self-mythologising and belief in their natural superiority.

These young men are portrayed as remembering their great forebears whilst ignoring the ignominious. They believe in their right to be in charge because that is the way it has always been or at least should be, maybe they don't question how and why that expectation happened.

Private Lives by Noel Coward, Vaudeville Theatre, 26-Feb-2010 – Directed by Richard Eyre

2010-03-02T02:28:00.001Z

It was with a creeping sense of dread that I anticipated Kim Cattrall's entrance and the inevitable brainless Broadway-inspired “Applause for the Star” that would interrupt the action. When this didn't happen I was in such a good mood that I started enjoying myself and almost failed to find any fault with this production. I'm not saying that the applause won't happen on other occasions I was just happy that it didn't happen on my watch. I might be wrong but I like actors to earn applause

Actually Kim Cattrall as Amanda, definitely earned applause and although the accent slipped on the odd vowel, she was pretty brilliant. She was relaxed, assured and with the exception of her first entrance in a towel and later in the scene swinging an agile naked leg over a chair back, she didn't seem to be trying to cash in on any Sex in the City (or even Porky's) notoriety.

Matthew MacFadyen as Elyot was also good and I couldn't help feeling echoes of Noel Coward in his performance. It was not an impersonation, which could well have been ghastly and the performance was nowhere near as mannered as Coward might have been. There was something more than the actor's tallness and enlarging forehead that seemed in a way, for me, to conjure the author.

Although there is a great deal of good chemistry between Cattrall and MacFadyen there was part of me that thought they each needed a more suitable sparring partner. I'm not going to admit that I thought of this in terms of age at the time, I was sitting far enough back not to be able to see any age difference. I think the slight mismatch (and it is slight if not entirely imagined by me) may be more about acting styles not quite coming together.

There is excellent support from Lisa Dillon and Simon Paisley Day as the abandoned spouses. Day also mangled his vowels but for comic effect and oddly seemed to be suffering from some kind of shell-shock towards the end of the last act. It sort of fitted his character and age but it was rather sudden.

I'd like to finish by mentioning the Paris apartment set which is circular and furnished with low circular or curved divans, the requisite grand piano and a most excellent fish tank consisting of three interconnected globes.

Really Old, Like Forty Five by Tamsin Oglesby, Cottesloe Theatre, 27-Jan-2010 – Directed by Anna Mackmin

2010-01-28T01:14:00.001Z

It appears that Tamsin Oglesby doesn't know the difference between Giant Tortoises (long-lived, land-living, slow moving with domed hard shells) and Giant Turtles (sea-living, flippered, with leathery hydro-dynamic shells which allow them to glide gracefully through pelagic oceans). The third scene of this play is all about Darwin and how his discoveries were inspired in part by his encounters with the giant 'turtles' (in reality giant tortoises) of the Galapagos Islands. On display under a big picture of Darwin is a stuffed turtle (a turtle not a tortoise), it is supposed to be alive and so old that Darwin met it (sea turtles unlike tortoises are not known for their longevity). Darwin probably did encounter sea turtles of his voyage as there's a lot of good eating on a turtle and it would have been a bit of a treat when the sailors caught one but on the Galapagos Islands he met Giant Tortoises.
Okay, I realise I'm being overly pedantic here, I also know that Americans indiscriminately call almost any shelled reptile a turtle and it might even have been a deliberate comment on Alzheimers but for some reason it really annoyed me. Most of all, it spoiled my enjoyment of what I normally would have thought was, if I could get past the turtles (and clearly I can't), a good play. When it's not misrepresenting chelonians and testudae, this play is witty, erudite and at times touching in its portrayal of a dystopian overcrowded near-future where something has to be done about all the old people. It has a meaty twisted civil servant part for Paul Ritter to shine in, it has excellent performances from Judy Parfitt and Marcia Warren as a pair of sisters facing their old-age in mental or physical sickness and there is even a nicely thought out (and performed) comedy robot. I thought the future was well imagined with some nice subtle touches, like referring to Britain as a developing nation. There was also good future-thought in the discussion of planning for speed lanes on pavements and the way that old people had to earn their place in society by adopting “grandchildren” or submitting themselves for drug trials.
But the last word is “Turtles”

The Whisky Taster by James Graham, Bush Theatre, 20-Jan-2010 – Directed by James Grieve

2010-01-26T08:33:00.001Z

Barney (Samuel Barnett) is an advertising account executive who lives a quiet life, fearing the colours and the sensations that are set off by his synaesthesia and unable to express or acknowledge his love for his colleague and work partner Nicola (Kate O'Flynn). His inability to face his condition is depicted on stage by all but one of the characters, in the first half, wearing shades of grey. The only exception is John Stahl's Whisky Taster, brought in to pass judgement on a new brand of vodka and fill the account team with buzz words and other ideas. The Whisky Taster's character is an uncomfortable mix of wide knowledge of the world (particularly its culture) and unworldliness (not happy about leaving Scotland and unfamiliar with music videos on TV) and his kilt contains the first strong (and painful to Barney) colours we see. It is this character who in a strong scene on the making and tasting of whisky, awakes Barney to all the sensations that he has avoided – brightly coloured neon tubes crackling into life as he allows himself to be drawn into the feelings.
I usually associate Samuel Barnett with fey almost camp roles so it was good to see him doing something different. He grew impressively from a timid and shy young man to someone wanting to fill his life with more than vapid advertising and weak instant coffee.
I wasn't entirely convinced by the advertising world they showed – it was too full of jargon phrases and samey characters for me – although the idea of people not really listening to one another was well depicted. But this play is strong and I slightly regret not following the writer earlier.

Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov, translated by Christopher Hampton, Lyric Hammersmith, 19-Jan-2010 – Directed by Sean Holmes and Filter

2010-01-20T08:37:00.001Z

I was expecting something a deal more experimental than this. The stage was without scenery, costumes were more or less modern dress and there was a large sound mixing desk to one side. There was some experimentation with strange microphone placement so that unexpected sounds and voices would leap out at you - at one point there was a very long pause in the action while a kettle boiled and the sound was amplified to suggest a passing storm - but after a while they seemed to give up on the idea. It was as if the play was making them play it straight.
In the end I think we got a pretty good version of the play although I was more aware than usual that some characters give long expository self-introductions which are really clunky. The sisters Poppy Miller, Romola Garai (possibly the first time I've seen her in a really adult role) and Clare Dunne were all fine and close to the ages that they are supposed to be. It was interesting also to see Nigel Cooke as the doctor at about the right age, it made him seem much more satisfyingly disreputable.

Rope by Patrick Hamilton, Almeida Theatre, 18-Jan-2010 – Directed by Roger Michell

2010-01-19T00:52:00.000Z

I'm only familiar with a couple First World War Poets, Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, having read their autobiographical accounts of war service. I would not expect either of them to speak in the fey and affected manner that Bertie Carvell lends to his character Rupert Cadell, a fictional poet and survivor of the war. That said Carvell's portrayal manages to make his character more believable and perhaps less pompous than a straight playing of his lines might have done. I just couldn't think of him as a former soldier but there's no reason why they shouldn't come across as squeaking fusspots. As I said, though, Carvell makes the character believable in almost all areas and he is rather good.
Apparently Patrick Hamilton thought that Hitchcock made a mess of the film adaptation and although my memory of the movie isn't too fresh I think Hamilton had a point. I'm not sure that the all Cadell's speeches in the play were included in the film and I'm not sure how Jimmy Stewart would have brought them meaning if they had.
The play is not without problems, for me, especially the handling of the denouement. This isn't to do with the debate between Cadell and the murderers about whether they are wrong or Cadell's decision about what to do, that was all handled well (acting and writing). It is more the detective story side of things that I thought were fairly ropey (wrote that without realising the pun). There's some really great psychological drama going on (which is something I love in Hamilton's work) but I thought that the setting up of clues was heavy handed, as was the forcing of the confession and just how did Cadell persuade a policeman to hang around outside the house in the few minutes he was out of the room.

The Caretaker by Harold Pinter, Trafalgar studios 1, 12-Jan-2008 – Directed by Christopher Morahan

2010-01-18T00:58:00.000Z

An obvious thing struck me while watching this production starring Jonathan Pryce, this is a very simple play. Like I said obvious, it's set in one room, there are only three people in it and I've see the play several times but it was more that I realised the elegant simplicity that Pinter used to make his play work. There's no fat on the play and it delivery its mix of power games and menace efficiently and effectively.
Another thing I had failed to notice before was that the brothers (played by Peter Macdonald and Sam Spruell) don't seem to talk to each other – I think I recall a scene where the brothers share the stage and monosyllables are exchanged. Mick, the “normal” brother was sometimes seen (via a transparent wall) as if he was monitoring the situation. Strangely this realisation gave me the perverse feeling that they were somehow colluding in some kind of social experiment involving the tramp Davies (Jonathan Pryce with an accent I couldn't quite pin down). It was as if they were playing with the tramp's vanity and mendacity but unlike a real experiment they didn't have an end in sight they just waited until they were bored with the man then sent him on his way.
This sort of thing has probably been endlessly discussed elsewhere and by people who pay more attention. It does normally take me three productions of a play before I think I've noticed most things in it – I hadn't remembered the business with the window, in great detail, either.
I thought that Jonathan Pryce was good, not quite as flamboyant as I've seen others play the role but for all his hygiene issues and lying I actually had some sympathy for the character. I'm not sure that I'd felt that before and not as much.
I think I've seen the brothers played with more threat in the case of Mick and more damaged I the case of Aston. However the actors in these roles were still good at what they did.

The Little Dog Laughed by Douglas Carter Beane, Garrick Theatre 11-Jan-2010 – Directed by Jamie Lloyd

2010-01-13T08:15:00.000Z

I'm not sure that this play, about the hypocrisy surrounding the need for leading gay Hollywood actors to stay in the closet, is quite as biting and funny as it wants to be. There are plenty of laughs – not quite as many when Tamsin Greig's agent character Diane is not on stage – but I didn't think it was telling me anything I didn't know already or doing it in a way that made me feel strongly that the situation in Hollywood ought to change. It is arguable whether satire should have to generate those feelings but I do think that satire should produce more righteous indignation than shrugs and “whatevers” that I felt. Of course that is probably just me and I should have let myself have fun because there was fun to be had in this play.
The plot essentially is that an up and coming Hollywood leading man, Mitchell (Rupert Friend), falls for a hustler, Alex, (Harry Lloyd) who he hires one night. Mitchell's feelings are reciprocated by Alex which is problematic because he has a girlfriend, Ellen (Gemma Arterton), and has never really thought of himself as gay in spite of being a rent boy. The affair threatens Mitchell's career – according to the play you can only get a away with being gay and a leading man in Hollywood if you are British and have a knighthood – and his up to his agent Diane to sort things out. My problems with this play may have stemmed from not believing that Rupert Friend's Mitchell was enough of a Hollywood star but I couldn't say whether it was the acting, direction, writing or me that was at fault. Rupert Friend was certainly good, as were the others, but I didn't think Hollywood when I looked at him. There is also a sense of nervousness that I feel whenever I watch British actors play Americans; questioning whether or not they are getting it right. I couldn't fault the accents and they didn't seem to waiver much but the uneasy feeling was still there.
I wonder if this play is born from a Broadway Hollywood rivalry that isn't strong here – maybe we don't discriminate between east and west coasts when we sneer at Americans. Also I had the feeling it was behind the times. Maybe I just wanted more darkness and savagery than the light-hearted fun that was on offer here.

The Misanthrope by Moliere, translated by Martin Crimp, Comedy Theatre, 7-Dec-2009 – directed by Thea Sharrock

2009-12-09T02:08:00.000Z

I wonder if people's pre-conceptions about Keira Knightley will colour how they see her in this production. I suppose it did in my case. She isn't an actress that really interests me but I would acknowledge that well directed and well scripted she can be good even very good. In this production I would say that she easily held her own and didn't look out of place -in what was a good cast - but I am aware that that might say things about the production rather than her performance.
I saw a version of this translation, which is a contemporary update of Moliere's play, at the Young Vic in 1996 and recall enjoying it. The script has been updated with new cultural references and with a vicious attack on a Tory leader replacing a tamer attack on an adulterous Tory MP in the old version. What wasn't updated was the elaborate attack on David Hare's play Skylight – the play/scene that the critic Covington (played by Tim McMullan) is hawking about is a very unflattering summary of Skylight. Unfortunately I was seemed to be one of only a few people to get this joke. Maybe the author couldn't find a recent play that has both captured the imagination in the way that Skylight did and is as ripe for satire.
This was an early preview so hopefully certain things will get ironed out as the actors get used to the play and playing the audience. In the first half I found the rhyming a bit relentless and overbearing. This certainly improved over time and by the end of the play I either didn't notice the rhyming or didn't mind when I did. I also thought that some of the jokes fell a bit flat, there would always be some laughter but nothing huge. There were certainly a number of pauses where I got the impression that the actors were waiting for some non-existent laughter to die down (of course they could just have been pauses). It was also a little disconcerting when sometimes the cast were laughing louder than the audience. This sort of thing tends to work itself out as the actors get a more accurate idea of where the laughs are so I'm not sure I'd worry about it.
The play improved massively after the interval when the play took a darker turn and by the end I decided that I'd enjoyed myself.

The Habit of Art by Alan Bennett, 5-Nov-2009, Lyttelton Theatre – Directed by Nicholas Hytner

2009-11-09T01:03:00.002Z

I realise that I am horribly cynical but I got the impression Alan Bennett had really wanted to give us the play within this play. The idea is that we are watching a fairly advanced rehearsal of a play which is by turns brilliant and and comically terrible (talking furniture, talking wrinkles etc.). We get pretty much all the rehearsed play but the players are allowed to comment of on the plot and their characters, query the writer or stage manager (the director is away) and are allowed to try out ideas.
I know that Bennett has done this sort of thing before (Forty Years On has an interrupted end of term play at a school) but I got the feeling that he had started to write a fairly straight play about an imagined final meeting between W H Auden and Benjamin Britten and given up. Possibly this is because of the disjoint, I felt, between the good stuff in the rehearsed play and its more humorous even nonsensical parts. It is as if the funny bad bits are a later thought (but not an afterthought). Of course if you just take the good bits of the rehearsed play, you get a captivating fragment but it wouldn't be enough. You need the explanations and the discussions to make it work and they could not have been fitted elegantly into a straightforward narrative.
The only problem, perhaps, with the play within a play device in this case was that some of the points he was trying to make (which were mostly part of the rehearsed play) didn't quite come across as forcefully as they were probably intended. Of course I'm cloth-brained about these things so he would have had to use a loud-hailer at close range to get his ideas across to me. If I had to say what Bennett really meant by the the phrase “Habit of Art” I'd have to hide behind meaningless waffle until you went away.
All the same it is great fun, Richard Griffiths occasionally playing W H Auden was a treat, Alex Jennings as Benjamin Britten was very slightly underused and Frances de la Tour as Kay, the Stage Manager was her usual quietly brilliant self.

The Pains of Youth by Ferdinand Bruckner, translated by Martin Crimp, Cottesloe Theatre, 21-Oct-2009 – Directed by Katie Mitchell.

2009-10-26T01:35:00.001Z

Katie Mitchell seems to have developed the habit of using naturalistic lighting (i.e. the scene is almost entirely lit from onstage props) and having actors talk at a normal conversational volume. In a tiny studio space it would work perfectly but in a larger space I don't think it is good, clever or artistic to do it. This “habit” ruined her production of Women of Troy for me (I was in the Lyttelton sitting 12 or so rows back) and yet the play was continually praised by at least one national critic as one of the greatest things she had seen. Katie Mitchell got away with the “habit” in this Cottesloe-based production, in fact it worked quite well, but I was sitting only four rows from the stage, feeling very glad I wasn't at the back of the upper gallery.
The play is about a group of medical students in Vienna in the early 1920s. Part of a defeated nation and dissolved empire they consider the alternatives of a stifling bourgeois life or suicide. I only found there to be one sympathetic character in the play he had served a prison term for manslaughter. The most vibrant characters were an aristocratic young woman (Desiree played by Lydia Wilson) and her pimp (and an attempted rapist) of an ex-lover (Freder played by Geoffrey Streatfeild but there was no empathy from me for either of them. I found Freder particularly disturbing not because of his appalling actions but because the author seemed to want us to be convinced that he held a magnetic attraction for all the women in the play.
I had to wonder, watching this play, just how important a piece of drama it is supposed to be. This was because I didn't think that I was getting the most out of the play. Normally I would blame my own insensitivity but since at least six people didn't return after the interval, at least two people (on separate occasions) left while the play was happening and a couple behind me only seemed to be staying so they could complain to one another about it, it might not be entirely my fault.
I couldn't fault the actors, they all seemed good, nor did I think there was anything wrong with Martin Crimp's translation, it flowed well and didn't seem awkward. Katie Mitchell's direction also seemed fine, with some nice touches like the CSI/Men in Black figures who would change scenes by covering or uncovering furniture with dust sheets and taking or putting props in or out of plastic bags (sometimes in the middle of scenes), as if collecting evidence or staging a reconstruction. All the same I didn't think that I was really being sold this play.
I found myself checking the internet after the play to see how the play is viewed in mainland Europe. It appears that this play is well regarded but from what I could glean (courtesy of Google's Translate this Page link) but the few productions I read about did appear to be somewhat more adventurous and expressionistic. I began to wonder if, notwithstanding the People in Black, this production may have been too naturalistic; quietly intense and honest rather than artificially heightened and full of significant pauses. Of course this was a very early preview so it might have changed a lot by the time it is properly reviewed.

The Author by Tim Crouch, Royal Court Upstairs, 30-Sep-2009 – Directed by Tim Crouch

2009-10-01T07:36:00.001Z

There is a particular pose sometimes adopted by people listening to classical music. It is a still, studious and appreciative posture that attempts to denote the the music is doing the listener's soul a lot of good. I was reminded of this as I stole glances at Mark Ravenhill and Martin Crimp as they sat either side of Tim Crouch during this play. It was as if these playwrights (and there appeared to be other writers in the room) were avoiding either over or under reaction to the play. Perhaps they were just aware of the scrutiny.
The play consists of four actors (an “audience member”, two “actors” and “writer/director Tim Crouch”) seated among the audience who were in two raked banks of seats facing each-other. The play starts when “audience member” engages the real audience in talk about the experience of being in a theatre audience, singling out individuals trying to get them to share something. There a deal of truth in what he said about being in an audience and going to the theatre regularly especially the Royal Court where he marvelled at the sex, violence and bodily functions that he has seen there. I thought one note didn't quite ring true when he tried to depict an audience as a friendly place – for the most part I tend to find (after a lot of theatre going) that you begin to dislike audiences in general and hate every member of them in particular. Probably just me being anti-social.
After a while the “audience member” the “actors” and the “director” begin to describe a their involvement in a previous, shocking production and how the preparation and playing of an imagined world affected their lives.
I got the impression that the audience were expected to react more to this play. Everyone seemed engaged and attentive but unwilling to draw too much attention to themselves (when the “audience member” asked if there were any Friend subscribers of the theatre in the audience, I know of at least one Friend of 20 years standing who remained silent and tried to be invisible). The actors described shocking things (or things intended to be shocking) but to an audience used to the depiction of a wide range of sex, violence and bodily functions at the theatre. Maybe we were too jaded to do anything other than sit studiously and attentively trying to look as if what we were seeing and hearing was doing us some good.

Mother Courage and her children by Bertolt Brecht, Translated by Tony Kushner, Olivier Theatre, 14-Sep-2009 – directed by Deborah Warner

2009-09-17T00:33:00.002Z

As somebody that spends much more time at the theatre than I do reading about it, my knowledge of things Brechtian (especially Brechtian alienation) are pretty hazy. I do know that alienation is a slight misnomer, as Brecht didn't want to alienate the audience rather he wanted to engage it with his underlying message and not lose itself in spectacle and story. As such he would keep things simple and expose the mechanics of playmaking. Is that right? What I probably should have done is copied the Wikipedia entry on Brechtian Alienation instead of trying to give my own interpretation.
Anyway this production, only a few performances into previews (which have been heavily delayed, I was originally due to see this on the 9th) certainly showed its makings. There was almost always a couple of stage crew hovering at the edges of the set, which may have been because things weren't quite ready but sometimes it looked intentional. Most of he stage was bare, the wings and backstage exposed and scenes were depicted by hand-written descriptions on screens lowered from above. When there was scenery (e.g. when the scene required tents) it was very plain and simple and preponderantly white. The cart, pulled by sons, daughter, chaplain and finally Mother Courage alone, was the only major price of (mobile) scenery, reflecting Mother Courage's varying fortunes, almost always with a covering of white plastic sheeting.
I enjoyed this production although it was probably too scrappy (or not scrappy enough) for some and perhaps its touch may be thought to be too light. I did have a slight problem with Fiona Shaw's portrayal of Mother Courage, I want to be able to say that she was too perky without using as strong a word as perky. Mother Courage has to be, at times, ebullient, witty and feisty which Fiona Shaw was great at, but she also has to be brought low and fight to the last of her energy. I thought that (even as she was exhausted from pulling the heavy cart) she always had something in reserve that would enable her to spring back. Maybe this is intentional, maybe they were taking it gently because of the difficulties that the production has had, it might also be my imagination or my lack of understanding about the play. I'm pretty sure that if it is a problem it will be fixed and I feel a bit awkward about wanting more pain and anguish from Fiona Shaw.
The oddest thing in the production was the promotion of the musician and composer Duke Special. We were constantly told who he was and he was treated almost as an equal to Mother Courage (especially at the curtain call). I quite liked his music and don't have a problem with musicians being integrated into the play but it seemed a bit much. They'll be story behind this and I'll probably have to read about it.

Prick Up Your Ears by Simon Bent, Richmond Theatre, 29-Aug-2009 – Directed by Daniel Kramer

2009-09-02T07:42:00.000Z

I think I was expecting more Joe Orton in this play. As far as I could see there were plenty of quotes (I suspected that Mrs Corden, although a real person, was written as a combination of characters from Orton's fiction) but I didn't think there was as much as might be expected about Orton himself.
The play is set in the bedsit that Orton and his lover/teacher/muse Kenneth Halliwell shared from 1960 to their deaths and as Halliwell spent much of his time haunting the place, not liking to go out, it might not be surprising that the play focuses on him. From the rumours that I've heard about Orton's diary (on which the play is, in part, based), it seems to detail his sexual activities which happened outside the bedsit and means that Orton in this play sometimes appears just to flit between rehearsals and random sexual encounters leaving Halliwell isolated and popping pills.
Matt Lucas is probably most impressive when he is allowed to show the tragic side of Kenneth Halliwell's nature. It feels too easy and familiar when his character is being funny perhaps because we all expect comedy from him. As this play began, a man decided that that would be the perfect time to nosily find his seat at the end of a row. This was treated with great humour by the audience (and some mild corpsing from Lucas) and it may well have made us more willing, initially, to see the comedy in Lucas's performance and
less to feel the tragedy.
The tragic thing for Halliwell was, perhaps, that he had many gifts but they only went so far and he could never focus them into crafting something great. Maybe the effects were worsened as he saw Orton coming out of his shadow and quickly outshining him. The play indicates that Halliwell was an essential inspiration to Orton's work (although it sometimes seems like Halliwell just provided titles and quotes) but that Orton was able to go further and make something of his own.

The Rover by Aphra Behn, Sothwark Playhouse, 2-Jul-2009 – directed by Naomi Jones

2009-07-04T01:20:00.001Z

I can't claim that Aphra Behn was a great playwright (I would go so far as good) although she appears to have been the equal, in writing, of many of her contemporaries. It is problematic that these contemporaries were are Restoration playwrights whose work (with a few exceptions) is under-performed and often seen as second rate. Behn has another handicap because as practically the first woman to earn her living by the pen, it often seems that her work is supposed to support some vast Feminist edifice and every word of hers is to be solemnly uttered as if it were a votive flower let fall on to the author's grave.
Flowery writing aside, basically she's good but I think her Restoration and Feminist burdens cause people to shy away and unjustly neglect her.
Fortunately it isn't the case in this production: It appears that the cast wanted to treat it with much of the fun and spirit with which it was written. I was reminded of why I have always thought of this as one of my favourite plays (ever since I first saw it 30 years ago).
This not a perfect play of course the plot can feel like trying to concentrate on a single ball in the hands of a juggler using 6 identical balls, some characters feel under-used or underdeveloped (particularly the Viceroy's son Don Antonio and Valeria the cousin of the sisters Florinda and Helena) and there are a couple of near rapes that are too easily forgiven (perhaps just for modern tastes).
Both halves of the play started in the theatre's bar area before we were sent into a nearby street (the main theatre where we could all sit). This worked quite well although, as with any promenade production it was sometimes difficult to see the actors through the other audience members, Also there was a little awkwardness when the actors had to manhandle the audience to clear space for an apparently rushed and impetuous duel. Also getting the audience into their seats did seem to delay the action a bit, although they did occur during at fairly logical places in the piece.
The light touch and sense of enjoyment in this production made me hope that others will be prepared investigate Ms Behn, it does seem to be rewarding.

Hamlet by William Shakespeare, Wyndhams Theatre, 1-Jun-2009 – Directed by Michael Grandage

2009-06-02T07:43:00.002Z

This is, at least, my 17th Hamlet and I think it has clouded my opinion of this production.
Firstly, relax, I thought that Jude Law was pretty damn good in this. He has a relaxed and confident style that stopped me from thinking “Oh that's Jude Law up there” and he really seemed to be addressing most of his soliloquies to the audience rather than the to the darkness of the hall or the lighting rig in front of the Circle. I sometimes wonder whether you could use Hamlet's talking to the audience and braking the fourth wall as some kind of indication of his madness (of course that means he'd has to be mad from the start and a director might not want that).
This production went by at quite a lick, I didn't feel the three hours and some of the set-piece scenes (e.g. the Gravedigger scene – second time I've seen David Burke as the gravedigger, first was with Daniel Day-Lewis 20 years back), while not rushed, were over before before I was able to savour them. I found this a spare production, no fat or business beyond what is on the page and I felt the actors were living in the moments dictated by their lines, rather than having a living characterisation moving from scene to scene. I might be the only person who noticed this and that might well be because I've imagined it.
It did mean that I had a problem with this production, possibly caused by 16 other Hamlets. I have long thought that Hamlet is badly structured, though brilliantly written. There are gaps in the plot (like seeing the progression of Hamlet's madness between Acts One and Two – you are just presented with the fact that he has gone mad) and scenes that seem to contradict earlier ones (fierce graveside fight between Hamlet and Laertes followed by a civilised apparently formal fencing match). I wonder if the spareness of this production and apparent lack of continuous inner life of the characters was the thing that made the flaws and the cracks in the play really stand out for me.
I won't fault the acting although I'm not certain that Penelope Wilton's Gertrude or Gugu Mbatha-Raw's Ophelia were really given the opportunity to sink their teeth into their roles and have a good chew. I might have imagined it but I thought that Kevin McNally's Claudius was a little more sympathetically played than usual.

A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen, version by Zinnie Harris, Donmar Warehouse, 14 May 2009 – Directed by Kfir Yefet

2009-05-18T07:18:00.002Z

tend to think it unwise to criticise adaptations simply for diverging from the plot or characterisations of the original. Adapters, directors and auteurs have the right play and re-interpret any play, although they might have to negotiate with the living writers a bit. At the same time I hope I have the right to say that the that an adaptation doesn't quite work without sound too much as if I'm wailing “Why, oh why didn't they just stick to the original plot and setting.”
The changes that Zinnie Harris has made are interesting and topical in a way that could make it feel rather dated in a few years. Helmer is no longer a petty provincial tyrant who has just succeeded to an important position at a bank and Krogstad is no longer a bank clerk, lacking in morals and fearing unemployment. Instead the setting is Britain and Helmer (referred to as John in the play) and Krogstad (now Neil Kelman) are senior politicians, in fact Cabinet Ministers. In this version Helmer has replaced the disgraced Krogstad in the Cabinet and Krogstad is desperate to get back on his feet. The reasons for Krogstad/Kelman's disgrace are never fully stated but they have something to do with dodgy financial transactions.
At first sight this looks like up-to-the-minute topicality looks convenient (as if there were some very late changes) given everything in the news at the moment. However it is worth bearing in mind that as they chose Christopher Eccleston for the Krogstad/Kelman role, they must have already decided to make his role larger and more important. I suspect this was done to bring the other couple's (Krogstad and Mrs Linde) relationship more into the foreground to provide a stronger contrast with the Helmer's.
The social elevation of Krogstad/Kelman is one of the things that gives me a problem with this adaptation. I hope it isn't to do with Christopher Eccleston's accent (which it shouldn't be) but it felt unlikely that his character would ever have been given a Cabinet position – there was just too much intense wayward passion. At first I did think, rather uncharitably, “ah yes an Eccleston performance”.
The other major problem I had with the adaptation is that by making it about Cabinet Ministers (echoing An Ideal Husband a bit) Zinnie Harris raised the stakes and while this didn't make his behaviour any more acceptable, it did make Helmer's fear of disgrace much more understandable. This effect of this was to make Nora's behaviour appear much more reckless.
I have spent far too long on complaints about the adaptation, even if they are justified the proper reviews are unlikely to spend more than a couple of sentences on similar doubts. Because the most important thing about this play is the acting and that is superb. Even with a little first preview stumbling over lines, it was easy to see just how good it is going to get when the ensemble has really come together. It is difficult to pick any one of the main five actors out for special mention but this play is supposed to belong to Nora and Gillian Anderson was certainly in control of that part.

Othello by William Shakespeare, Rose Theatre, Kingston, 25-Apr-2009 – Directed by Barrie Rutter

2009-04-28T01:36:00.002Z

In spite of the fact that Lenny Henry has mastered and impressed in dramatic roles on TV before, it was difficult, in this play, not to see his comic persona coming through. However I think it was more that I was recognising very familiar mannerisms and tones of voice that would often presage a joke or a laugh, rather than Lenny Henry doing anything wrong. It could well be that someone unfamiliar with his work would reckon that his performance was very good. And other than my brain expecting jokes around the corner, my only real complaint about his performance was a feeling that he was isolated (especially when surrounded by others) from the rest of the cast – he didn't quite seem to be part of the team. Of course Othello is meant to be an outsider but I felt it was more his own separation from the cast rather than his character's. It's as if the cast was a unit and he wasn't part of it. As ever this could all be imagined on my part, I don't think it is deliberate and definitely doesn't indicate any tension backstage. He wants to be part of the team, the cast and crew want him to be part of the team, I just think he wasn't quite there and I'm probably making mountains out of molehills.
It's a shame to have doubts because in the final scenes I forgot about Lenny Henry and saw just Othello – he was powerful and convincing. He wasn't quite Chiwetel Ejiofor who is my benchmark of Othello perfection but he was certainly bears comparison to some of the other half-dozen Othellos I've seen.
Of the other cast members I particularly liked Conrad Nelson as Iago (in spite of his uniform which had a slight air of old-time cinema usher about it), Jessica Harris's Desdemona (even if the line Desdemona, If Only You Had Spoken kept popping into my head in the last scenes, and Maeve Larkin's Emilia.

Rookery Nook by Ben Travers, Menier Chocolate Factory, 21-Apr-2009 – Directed by Terry Johnson

2009-04-23T07:37:00.001Z

I wanted to start this with a paragraph about how, with the Aldwych Farces, the actors aren't playing characters so much as doing the Ralph Lynn part (monocled silly-ass), the Tom Walls part (smooth lothario), the Robertson Hare part (henpecked husband or servant) or even the Mary Brough part (cockney battle-axe or mother-in-law). While it is at least partly true a little checking suggests that Rookery Nook was too early an Aldwych Farce for the roles to be set in stone and that Travers re-wrote the plays late in his life to concentrate on character more than slapstick.
All the same, I think the chemistry between the three main male characters works best when it is relaxed and familiar and I'm not sure that's what happened here. I think it was primarily that that Neil Stuke's Gerald Popkiss (the Lynn part) and Edward Baker-Duly's Clive Popkiss (the Walls part) didn't gel completely as a double act. They came close but I didn't think they were, as I said, relaxed and familiar with each other as I think they needed to be. For some reason I needed Gerald Popkiss to come across as completely non-threatening and innocent when the beautiful young girl (or rather gell) in pyjamas, Rhoda Marley, seeks refuge in the house, Rookery Nook where he is staying. While he wasn't threatening I didn't think Neil Stuke was quite the pleasant silly-ass that I thought was required.
I've done the usual whining about petty things and could go further with the pacing – the first act seemed to have been over-extended with long silences and business simply in order to make the interval after it happen closer to half-way through the night. However there were plenty of laughs in this production and they seemed to be in the right places – Terry Johnson is not one of those directors, who are afraid of audience laughter or can't find the jokes and who hide behind the “we are looking for the dark-side of the play” excuse. Perhaps though, the jokes didn't get quite the size of laugh they could have. People had fun but I had the sense that it could have been a deal funnier.
I have to be a little cautious, given the director and actors (some like Sarah Woodward, quite capable of comic genius – if underused here) there is potential for great things and I suspect it was just an off-night where things didn't come together.

Edward Gant’s Amazing Feats of Loneliness by Anthony Neilson, Soho Theatre, 31-Mar-2009 – Directed by Steve Marmion

2009-04-01T23:30:00.000Z

I am a little worried that there comes a point in Anthony Neilson's plays where he gives up on his strange (sometimes fantastical) but compelling narrative and does something really odd like bringing on Teddy Bears that demand imaginary cups of tea. I didn't think this play lived on much past the Teddy Bears, the author still had enough to produce a coup-de-theatre at the end but it almost felt that he lost interest in the original story and just wanted to end it.
The play is scripted as a recreation of Victorian travelling show and depicting the last ever performance. Edward Gant, our showman and his troupe of three actors, replay stories from Gant's life or rather stories that were told to Gant on his travels.
While I would have liked to see many more of these “feats of loneliness” (there were only two stories of this kind) I don't want it t sound too much of a complaint. After all the Teddy Bears were excellent, if anachronistic (play set in 1880s, Teddy Bears invented 1900s) but I greatly enjoyed the inventiveness of the 'feats' stories and thought there was a shortage of others.
As seems inevitable I also wanted to know a lot more about the characters of the participants in the performance. We get suggestions of tensions and the 'real' lives of the troupe towards the end of the play. It is done in a way that tries to pretend the the breaking of the fourth wall is deliberate but might not be. I'm not not certain that this was successful.
Reading back over this I realise that I haven't made it absolutely clear that I had a good time. I did. Honest

Tusk Tusk by Polly Stenham, Royal Court Upstairs, 30-Apr-2009 – Directed by Jeremy Herrin

2009-03-31T00:56:00.000Z

I have to admit that Polly Stenham's previous play, That Face, sort of passed me by. I remembered it as well put together and enjoyable (if enjoyable is quite the right word given the subject matter). However the scenes that lived most in my memory weren't the intense Oedipal ones between Matt Smith and Lindsay Duncan but the bullying committed by schoolgirls in bunny slippers. Maybe I need to pay more attention.
This play with its offstage and possibly mentally-ill mother, together with a son who was just a little too close to her, seemed to be going over similar territory. The son in this case is younger and there is little suggestion of anything other than the mother being badly messed up and damaged. I'm not sure that we were ever given a reason for the mother's problems but as the play is played through the eyes of her children, they, as children apparently do, seem to accept the situation rather than try to analyse it. That said I'm not sure that I got a detailed picture of this mother who abandons her three children the day after they move from the country into a new flat in London. And, I felt, her motivation for the move and subsequent flight was merely explained rather than fully justified.
It is probably unfair to go on about a character that wasn't actually there especially when the three children (Eliot, 15, Maggie, 14 and Finn 7) felt real and grounded. Their dialogue felt a little sophisticated compared to the monosyllabic grunts that are normally used to depict teenagers – the phrase “precocious erudition” popped into my head and wouldn't go away.
In general I thought the acting of the three principals was strong and I believed in their predicament. What I didn't do, was care about them. I had more sympathy with their unseen angry upstairs neighbour than I did with this gaggle of troubled children trying to stick together. Perhaps it is the onset of fogyism on my part.
As I left the theatre I thought I'd seen a good play – writing good, acting excellent, sympathy nil was my summary – but as I sit here writing and analysing it is beginning to crumble and I'm seeing more and more flaws. Perhaps this is a good place to stop.

Dido Queen of Carthage by Christopher Marlowe, Cottesloe Theatre, 17-Mar-2009 - Directed by James MacDonald

2009-03-18T22:58:00.001Z

I believe one of the theories is that Marlowe's death was faked and he ended up in Italy sending plays back to an actor called William Shakespeare who claimed them as his own. While on paper there may be similarities between writings of Marlowe and Shakespeare - and maybe you can come up with some “Dead Poets Society” graph to show them – only one of them truly understood the theatre. If Marlowe wrote Shakespeare he would have had to have gone through a radical transformation. He would have had to learn to avoid very long colourless, speeches in extremely static scenes. He would have had to find out how to string a decently complex plot together, full of people with conflicting strong motivations. He would have kept his Latin at schoolboy level so that ordinary people could have understood it. Most of all he would have realised that his audience was not just made up of university educated grandees of the court but of apprentices and clerks who couldn't get into the nearby bear-baiting.
There is very little in the way of plot in this play – Aeneas turns up, Dido is tricked into falling in love with him, he leaves, she commits suicide. There are no real bad guys, only Dido's, ambiguous spurned lover and a half-hearted Juno. Everything seems to happen in rather easy steps with little threat of conflict. The programme reminded me that Shakespeare wrote a version on Aeneas' story to Dido in Hamlet. Frankly, I think, Shakespeare's version of the speech is vastly superior being more powerful when spoken by the Player King even as it is undercut by silly lines from Polonius.
The actors did their best, especially Anastasia Hille and Mark Bonnar as Dido and Aeneas but they struggled to put any drama into the piece. I don't think that the director took too many risks with the play it felt fairly straightforward. Perhaps a wilder interpretation would made it fail more spectacularly but maybe that would have stopped the four people sat either side of me from walking out at the interval.
It is a pity that Shakespeare's contemporaries don't get performed as regularly as Shakespeare. That regularity means that the problems, imperfections and staging difficulties in Shakespeare's plays have been ironed out by discussion and practice. The contemporaries have to rely on a very few revivals in every generation and the hope that they strike it lucky. Some of these plays are better than some of Shakespeare's and they deserve as much attention.
I'm not sure how much of this applies to Dido but I do think that this production could have done with more fire and innovation.

Madame de Sade by Yukio Mishima, Wyndhams Theatre, 16-Mar-2009 - Directed by Michael Grandage

2009-03-18T01:33:00.002Z

I could start this with some fatuous mention of the fact that Yukio Mishima committed suicide as if to imply that this play was somehow the cause.
In theory this is a play where five women with connection to the Marquis de Sade paint a portrait of this wicked man. Actually they seem to stand still and spout long speeches so dull that they need lighting changes and echo effects to indicate how near they are to a climax.
It didn't help that a malfunction in several of the automatic follow spots left them swinging erratically and grinding gears loud enough to drown out several speeches (requiring Michael Grandage to nip out of the auditorium presumably to strangle the lighting people). The pity was that the lights interrupted Frances Barber who made by far the best of her material. It's not to say that others were bad, I'm not sure that there was enough life in this play.
I keep promising myself that I won't bang on about the writing course theory that you should show not tell, but I am too often confronted by things that I think break the rule. And in spite of being told about the Marquis and how maybe we should understand his sadism because underneath he was so pure, I never felt that I got close to understanding the man himself, to say nothing of his women.
Mishima appears to be a fascinating person and it would be nice to be able to say that I'd spent a good time in his mind but I didn't think I did. Pretty much the same applies to the Marquis de Sade and the women in his life.

Burnt by the Sun by Peter Flannery from a film by Nikita Mikhalov & Rustam Ibragimbekov, Lyttelton Theatre, 24-Feb-2009 – Directed by Howard Davies

2009-02-26T08:41:00.001Z

So you have a successful and brilliant General with a beautiful young wife and he is politely despised by her family. At which point the similarities between this play and Othello are probably not worth pursuing but it was nice to feel I'd spotted (or imagined) it.
It would probably be better to make allusions to Chekhov - thirty yeas on but I felt that at least one of the writers (Peter Flannery or the writers of the original film) was self-consciously aware of this. There was a chorus of former land-owning hangers on who could be loosely described as Chekhovian but I had the sense that they were fully aware that they might be seen like that.
OK (after the waffle) the setup:A former Revolutionary and Civil War hero General Kotov (Ciaran Hinds), lives in semi retirement with his young wife Maroussia (Michelle Dockery) and their daughter. He tolerates the presence of her her snobbish semi-aristocratic extended family while they, politely, regard him as some kind of ill-educated thug – I think the play didn't try to feature the disgust that the family might easily have felt to the married couple. Into this idyllic Stalinist world comes Mitia (Rory Kinnear) a former student of Maroussia's musician father and lover of Maroussia. The General seems to know Mitia and is surprisingly tolerant of the closeness between Mitia and his wife. Of course Mitia has an agenda...
I think that while enjoyable, I could see that this play had plenty of places where it could have taken a much more raw and powerful turn but it chose a steadier path. It may well have been for the best but I think it lost out on intensity. Maybe that was the work's film origins showing through, perhaps it was insufficiently theatrical.
I didn't feel that I was given enough of a reason for Mitia's shallow behaviour perhaps a film would show lots of close ups etc. to illustrate it better. I doubt the too many others will mind as it sometimes seemed as if the part was just a brilliant showcase for Rory Kinnear's talents (bit suspicious about some of the piano playing but the singing and dancing were excellent).
I sometimes worry that people might cast Michelle Dockery just to stand around looking beautiful and imperious because it is always better to see her act. I particularly noticed a secret look of girlish delight at Mitia's return and a more prominent occasion when she was spellbound by his presence, simply tapping a glass.
I want to say that Ciaran Hinds had the look of Stalin about him but that wouldn't convey his character's generous, almost innocent spirit or how well he played it.

Three Days of Rain by Richard Greenberg, Apollo Theatre, 9-Feb-2009 - Directed by Jamie Lloyd

2009-02-11T08:32:00.001Z

I did think of starting this with a clumsy Beatles parallel. You know the sort of thing: in the early sixties two musicians called John and Paul had a song writing partnership. Of the two John was better looking and seemed more obviously creative. Yet it was the quieter, more skilled musician, Paul who created their first classic hit Yesterday.
Of course this parallel doesn't bear close inspection, if only because the play is about an architectural partnership and has a love triangle. It probably also gives away the ending of the play.
I saw this play about ten years ago and I seem to remember it being a great deal quieter. That was in a smaller venue (the Donmar Warehouse) so the earlier production didn't need to make as much noise as this one. They seemed to be trying to fill up a larger space and give the audience more opportunities to laugh. I wouldn't say this approach didn't suit the play, many lines worked better, in the first half, done in a more heightened, nerve-jangling way but I did feel less interested in the characters' stories before the interval. It was almost as if we had been presented with a finished tale – An Architectural partnership where one had all the talent and died earlier, while the other was a hack who, afterwards, lived off their shared reputation, always feeling guilty about taking undeserved credit. In spite of knowing the play already, I felt as if I didn't need to find out what really happened to the parents. Somehow there was no mystery.
The second half, where we see the parents' stories, was played more quietly and gently and had more people get soaked to the skin in a narrow curtain of rain at the front of the stage. The “getting soaked” was especially true for Nigel Harman who spent much of the second act standing in the rain striking “struggling artist” poses.
Actually I had a slight problem with Nigel Harman, which will sound odd or even familiar, I didn't think that he had that easy sex-appeal that either of his characters seemed to require. In fact I spent some of the first act wondering if his character was meant to be gay.
James McAvoy was far too unsympathetic in the first act but made up for it in the second. These complaints about theactors are really about what they were being asked to do rather than what they actually did.
Nowadays every time I see Lyndsey Marshal I hope that she'll get a decent love story with a happy ending (something she was robbed of in A Matter of Life and Death amongst other things). Not, of course, that she'd want to do something so easy but somehow I think she deserves one.
I seem to remember that when I first saw this play I enjoyed it but couldn't see what the fuss was all about. That is pretty much how I felt this time.

King Lear by William Shakespeare, Young Vic, 29-Jan-2009 – Directed by Rupert Goold

2009-02-02T18:02:00.001Z

I'm not entirely sure why they had a character called “the boy” in this production, he wandered onto the broken stone steps (which formed the rear of the performing area) at the beginning of the play and seemed to hang around for most of the rest of it, saying very little but sharing occasional significant looks with King Lear and others. This is no reflection on the actor, who was just doing a job, and I may be imagining it but his presence did seem important and was never explained.
After the show I had a quick scan through the reviews from Liverpool (where this production started); it does that there have been a few changes. There weren't too many things to complain about in this production. It is as if a good solid straightforward play has been rescued from a mess. There are still some messy bits that seemed to interfere; such as when Lear crowd surfs his way on in the storm scene, and then has to perform with the rest of the cast throwing shapes (and I don't mean dancing) around him. I'm not sure what it was supposed to mean but it just looked silly and people giggled. Another thing to produce inappropriate tittering was the final duel which is still fought with obviously plastic toy swords. Edmund gets despatched in a rather odd way. Edgar appears to stab him in the mouth which is logically awkward as Edmund then has a few more speeches to make (through the fatal mouth wound).
Although the elements of football hooliganism mentioned in the earlier reviews are still there - in the looting and the St George's flag face paint – I didn't think it was foregrounded; at least I didn't think football hooligan before I read the reviews.
What we did get was a strong and powerful central performance from Pete Postlethwaite, even if he was wearing a dress for one scene (appropriately I thought). The rest of the cast were, I thought, good too – it's always good to see Nigel Cooke and Charlotte Randle. I liked the notion of Goneril's (Caroline Faber)pregnancy even if it made no sense at all. It was also good to see Forbes Masson as the fool although I got the impression that the director hadn't really worked out how to get rid of his character, he seemed to hang around a bit like “the boy”.

Entertaining Mister Sloane by Joe Orton, Trafalgar Studio 1, 27-Jan-2009 - Directed by Nick Bagnall

2009-01-28T01:51:00.001Z

Part way through this play I suddenly thought of Pinter's the Caretaker – I reckoned there was a passing faint echo of the play in a few brief moments. Another play that I thought of was Epitaph for George Dillon by John Osborne and I wondered if somehow Orton was responding to it. Of course both the Caretaker and Epitaph... were written some years before Mister Sloane and Orton may not have seen one of them, so I'm probably just filling up lines here.
First things first, I enjoyed myself, I thought the play and the acting were very good especially in the second half when things got a lot darker.
However here are a few of the things i didn't like:
In the first part of the play things felt a little bit too literal, even the subtlest innuendo seemed to be played for big laughs. This might have been the fault of a willing and pliant audience – fuelled by pre-performance alcohol – looking for laughs and reacting accordingly. Also the actors seemed to be having a wonderful time, often appearing on the verge of corpsing
Another example of literal mindedness on the part of the production was Imelda Staunton's negligee. There is a line in the script where her character Kath complains that the material that she is wearing is almost see-through. The negligee was see-through, very see-through, nothing-left-to-the-imagination see-through. I shouldn't complain about virtual nudity and Imelda Staunton has nothing to be ashamed of.
The only thing that did worry me about Imelda Staunton was that in the first half she was too nice, gentle and lonely, nowhere near the grotesque that that I associated with the role.
Possibly the worst thing but still a fairly minor point was Matthew Hornes's accent which wobbled between Essex and a non-geographical northern.
This play is still in preview so if I'm right not to like something then it may well be fixed before they put it in front of the critics – not that they'll have taken any advice form me of course.

Private Lives by Noel Coward, Hampsted Theatre, 26-Jan_2009 - Directed by Lucy Bailey

2009-01-27T02:32:00.001Z

The worry I always have with Noel Coward and Oscar Wilde's plays is that an idiot director might decide to delve too into whichever play they are doing, in an attempt to unearth a non-existent dark-side to the piece. I have seen this done and it has never been pretty. I'm not going to deny that there are deeper messages or meanings in the plays of these dramatists but I don't think they work properly unless they are played at the surface and kept apparently frivolous.
Fortunately Lucy Bailey allowed the audience plenty of laughter as well as some moments when I had to dab a little moisture from my eye.
I was not sure that Jasper Britton's Elyot and Claire Price's Amanda had sufficiently upper crust accents but it probably would have made them sound like bad, stereotypical Noel Coward impressions. Although I missed the clipped and rather frosty delivery that I normally would have wanted, instead I got something that felt more realistic and thought I could feel the love between Elyot and Amanda more.
A major departure from other productions that I seen was Amanda's Paris flat. Normally this is a chic abode with Bedroom, bathroom and kitchen leading off from the the living room where all the second half's action takes place. In this production it was a studio flat in a slope-roofed attic. The kitchen was hardly divided from the main area, causing some awkwardness as the maid (Jules Melvin)had to be seen to be doing something when she was there. The bathroom looked too small to actually have a bath in it and the only other room (where Elyot retires) was a box room or walk-in cupboard. The main area consisted of a grand piano and a bed. This arrangement had a certain logic to it but it did seem to present a few minor problems for actors who would normally have been hidden from view.
I didn't find myself having any sympathy for the characters of Sibyl and Victor and I don't suppose I was meant to, although I have felt a bit sorry for them in other productions.

Mrs Affleck by Samuel Adamson (adapted from Ibsen's Little Eyolf), Cottesloe Theatre, 20-Jan-2009 - directed by Marianne Elliott

2009-01-27T01:47:00.002Z

I suppose what I want in an adaptation is for the adapter to bring something new to the piece. Otherwise they may just as well have done a fairly straight translation. Samuel Adamson moved the play's setting to the 1950s rather effectively and updated the mechanics of the relationships and jobs well but I never really felt that was enough. Also I noticed the period setting speeches - lots of stuff along the lines of (not an exact quote) “What would the new Prime Minister Eden do?” - rather too much. I kept thinking that in normal conversation you don't go round dropping heavy phrases to illustrate the period of history that is happening at the moment. I suppose that it is a trap that writers often encounter and maybe if I'd been enjoing myself more I wouldn't have noticed so much.
I was also a little unsure why he chose the title, I didn't feel that the play belonged to Claire Skinner's Mrs Affleck any than it belonged to Angus Wright, Naomi Frederick or the boy playing Ollie. She had plenty to say but didn't reveal much of herself other than the motive in the original play. This compared with a nicely thought out back story for the half-brother and sister.
I looked up the play Little Eyolf (on which this is based) afterwards and I noticed that the character of Flea, who stands in for the Rat-Wife in the original, was saying extremely similar lines to his counterpart. Not unexpected of course but I remembered how strange and awkward the lines had been coming from Flea. I couldn't quite believe that rats would be devouring communities along the Kent coast in the 1950s.
The set was designed to look a little like the space between two groynes on a beach with seating on three sides. This only came into use in the second and third acts of the play, in the first the unseated end of the space was taken up by the Affleck's kitchen and dismantling that set took the best part of half an hour but this was an early preview.
I couldn't help thinking that it that this could have been, given the actors and standard of acting, an excellent straightforward version of Little Eyolf but it didn't really work as an adaptation.

Every Good Boy Deserves Favour by Tom Stoppard and Andre Previn, Olivier Theatre, 12-Jan-2009 – Directed by Felix Barrett and Tom Morris

2009-01-19T00:23:00.001Z

My immediate thought after the play was that this was a Russian short story (or what I think of as a Russian short story given almost zero knowledge - blackly comic with authoritarian overtones anyway) with orchestra. The more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve wondered if the music and the play meshed. Certainly with one actor seemingly imagining or controlling the orchestra and another actor and sundry dancers in the orchestra, there was a great deal of integration but with the benefit of hindsight I’m remembering them as being separate; existing in the same space but not communicating. I’m not absolutely certain that I felt this at the time and it does seem to belie the facts of the play. However I get the feeling of the music and the play allowing for and acknowledging the others presence but not actually talking rather like a long married couple who still communicate but have nothing to say to each other anymore.
I’m not going to say that it wasn’t good because it was and I enjoyed myself and my initial thoughts might have more to do with me mulling it over too long. If I had problems with the piece it was that I wanted more substance from the play. One example is that the comic pay-off of the play happens as a result of two characters having the same name and although I was aware of the fact I didn’t think that it had been clearly enough stated or that other comic misunderstandings had been attempted. Of course it would have been very easy to overdo the setup and make the joke too obvious. I wanted to feel that the two characters with the same name were really cellmates and, possibly, had bonded in some way. I would have also liked a more complete picture of the Doctor or at least something that left me wanting more rather than feeling that I hadn’t seen enough (I realise that it’s a fine, maybe non-existent, distinction).
I was completely taken in by Bryony Hannah’s portrayal of the boy Sasha, in that, in spite of having a programme and reading the cast list, I missed that fact that he was a she.

Hamlet by William Shakespeare, Novello Theatre, 1-Jan-2009 – Directed by Gregory Doran

2009-01-04T03:29:00.002Z

I suppose I can be philosophical about David Tennant’s absence from this play. I have, after all, seen him in about 13 other plays over the years and will hopefully see him in a few more in the future. Also I would have gone to an RSC Hamlet anyway, whoever was playing the prince.
There were a few gaps in the seating as the lights went down and (probably patronisingly) I did feel a little sorry for those that had swallowed their disappointment and come to the play for the good of their immortal soul, or something, especially as some of the early scenes felt incredibly static when the stage was full of people. I realise that there are a lot of long speeches where everyone on stage has to pay attention to the speaker without fidgeting but something made me aware of just how still they all were. It may have been that the audience didn’t react, at all, until the farewell scene between Polonius, Laertes and Ophelia. This is a minor quibble because the play warmed up quite quickly after that and any silence from the audience felt more like wrapt attention than bewilderment.
The most disappointing thing about the play was that I didn’t find myself missing David Tennant in the slightest. I’ll not use any fancy words about Edward Bennett’s performance other than that I believed it and he seemed to fit the role well. Some masochistic part of me probably wanted some traces of a David Tennant-shaped hole in the production but I couldn’t spot one. There were one or two things I didn’t like: The duel at the end was a little chaotic and unpractised and Edward Bennett left out about four lines from the “To Be or not..” soliloquy which would have been an unlikely cut even if no one cares about making quietus with a bare bodkin these days.
The production re-ordered some of the scenes and I thought it made the story hang together quite well. One problem with the swapping around of scenes was that it was a long two hours until the interval and I was certainly beginning to flag as it approached. Something I noticed strongly this time was the sheer stupidity of the scene where Osric delivers the news of the wager, setting up the fencing match/duel. I think it has always bothered me a bit – the way that Osric seems oblivious to the passions that have ripped through the court, introducing Laertes as if he is a visiting celebrity rather than the man who tried to storm the palace just days earlier and has recently had a fight in a grave with Hamlet.
It was good to see the likes of Patrick Stewart, Penny Downey and Mark (I’m sure it’s him in the “Water in Majorca” Heineken TV ad) Hadfield doing their stuff, as well as the underused John Woodvine.

Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare, Wyndham’s Theatre, 8-Dec-2008 – Directed by Michael Grandage

2008-12-10T02:33:00.000Z

I’m a little worried that I am about to be nasty for the sake of being contrary.
This production was a good, efficient and easy version of the play. All the jokes were in the right place (and pretty much worked) and time passed without any drags – in fact some scenes seemed to go by rather quickly with just enough opportunity to be savoured.. It was definitely the sum of its parts and considering half a dozen of the actors on were worth the price of admission on their own, it’s a pretty huge sum. However I didn’t feel it was greater than the sum of its parts and that was a pity. The production was clean and it worked but perhaps I wanted something more flawed and adventurous. I have seen this play more than half a dozen times so I could well be jaded and my standards absurdly high.
It had all the bits that could have made it fantastic and yet for me it didn’t catch fire. It might be that this was only the fourth or fifth performance and by the twentieth, when everybody has got used to each other, there will be a scintillating ensemble. I couldn’t claim that they lacked communication but I think I didn’t feel a sense of community. It’s a small thing that I’m blowing out of all proportion.
Possibly my biggest problem was Derek Jacobi and it was only slightly to do with his strange spiky-topped crew-cut. At first his Malvolio was merely stern and correct and I didn’t feel that he was pompous or self-serving. This changed rapidly after his first two scenes and he developed into the Malvolio that I had expected him to be. But by that time I had been reminded how old Jacobi is and how unsuitable (possibly unbelievable) he is as a suitor to Olivia. I didn’t believe that he would believe himself to be favoured by her.
There was also something slightly odd about the costumes, while all the Illyrians were dressed in vaguely 1930s style, Viola and Sebastian seemed to be wearing something from about a half or even a whole century before – I thought I saw echoes of the Corsican Brothers in their colourful jackets and their sash belts.
I liked Zubin Varla’s Feste and the triumvirate of Samantha Spiro, Ron Cook and Guy Henry as Maria, Sir Toby and Sir Andrew.

August: Osage County by Tracy Letts, Lyttelton Theatre, 26-Nov-2008 – Directed by Anna D Shapiro

2008-11-30T13:08:00.002Z

Watching this I found myself having a desire to sneer at it. Certainly people behind me on the night and other reviews since have done that. It wasn't that the play was bad (it was good) or the acting wasn't top notch (it was), it's just that sceptical feeling that I get whenever something comes along laden with awards and over-hyped in previews. It was very much “I'll be the judge of how good it is thank you”. I wouldn't say that the play completely conquered my desire to sneer but I can definitely see what the fuss was all about and I am very glad I saw it.
Of course I do have quibbles. An actor/actress in one of the major parts was initially (and only initially) ACTING and I prefer my acting to be a little less capitalised. It might just have been that that actor/actress took a little time to get a sense of the space he/she was in.
Another rather odd thing was that the I felt that the third act was a little sketchy and underdeveloped. This was in spite of having already watched almost two and a half hours of play. It seemed rather rushed with its loose ends being tied up (or at least brought to some kind of conclusion for the play's sake) in short scenes, characters being sent off and its large leaps in time. There were some interesting plot ideas and developments in the third act -especially the relationship between the matriarch and her eldest daughter – but I didn't think I had enough time to really savour them.
The quibble about which I got the most disproportionately exercised happened in a scene where the three sisters discussed their parents being part of the “Greatest Generation”. You have to understand that I have a strong sense of historical rightness so unintentional anachronisms really annoy me (I'm okay with situations where people deliberately and completely throw history out of the window). The thing is this: the play cannot be set before 2007 (14 year old daughter born during the Clinton administration); the matriarch (according to Wikipedia) is supposed to be 65 meaning she was born in 1942. I believe that the “Greatest Generation” usually refers to those Americans that lived through the depression of the 30s and fought in the Second World War. So if she was born in 1942 the matriarch would not only be more of a “Baby Boomer” (i.e. One of the children of the “Greatest Generation” ) than anything else she also would not have witnessed (as she claims) the depression of the 30s which was effectively ended when America entered the war. It is deeply sad (if only for my personality) that I should feel the need to get annoyed about this but this an American play and Americans are usually obsessed enough about different generations to give them names so why did the writer get it wrong?
I think I need to have a lie down now.

In a Dark Dark House by Neil LaBute, Almeida Theatre, 25-November-2008 – Directed by Michael Attenborough

2008-11-26T08:04:00.005Z

I'm not sure what I am supposed to think about Neil LaBute. Personally speaking I always find his stuff interesting (which is never a good word to use in a review even if, like now, it's used sincerely) , with plenty of good bits and often challenging ideas. However, given his popularity with some theatres, I wonder if I am supposed to gush about his plays more and praise his use of language or something.
This play took sometime to get going with lots of ducking and weaving in speeches between two brothers (David Morrissey's Terry and Steven Mackintosh's Drew) which did not reveal character as much as it reminded me that I wasn't watching American actors. Once the evasions were over and the brothers' stories began to unfold it became much more satisfying and gripping.
The middle of the three scenes was effectively creepy producing an uncomfortable mixture of arousal and shame. In the cold light of hindsight I realised that I hadn't actually been all that convinced by the seduction that took place: What did this fifteen year old girl (Kira Sternbach) see in this forty-something man (David Morrissey) that made her so willing to flirt and play along with him? It had been all a little too easy and I hadn't seen enough into the girl's character to understand her motives in the scene.
The final scene of this interval-less evening was the strongest, with all the past histories flooding out. I did wonder if we should have been told, sooner, a little bit more about the relationships between the brothers and their father. I didn't feel that it had coloured the first scene enough. That said, if this information had been there then the final revelations would not have been as powerful as they were.

The Norman Conquests by Alan Ayckbourn, Old Vic 18-Oct-2008 – Director Matthew Warchus

2008-10-24T00:48:00.002Z

This is what I think anyway - Table Manners, the first play in the Norman Conquests trilogy (the first one I saw - which may have clouded my judgement) was probably nearly completed before the trilogy thing was thought up. I know that they say that the plays can be seen in any order but I'm not sure. Table Manners felt like a complete play, funny touching and sad, there are definitely gaps but you don't feel you've missed anything. Also the characters feel rounded and sympathetic, even if you don't completely like them.
Living Together felt a little like filler in comparison, other bloggers who saw this first (and only) hated it and I can see why. Characters seem nastier, not as well drawn, the plot feels scrappy and the jokes don't really work. That is, if you haven't seen Table Manners first (preferably an hour and a half before), then you see how the scenes bleed into each-other, how jokes in Table Manners are prefigured or paid off in this one and you feel that you are seeing different aspects of the characters. LT is still not as complete a play, it fills in gaps and has unnecessary silences where solitary characters are left doing very little.
Having filled in the gaps Ayckbourn seems to have decided to throw away most of the plot for Round and Round the Garden. Characters that were changed subtly in from Table Manners to Living Together get a more extreme makeover here. Also the minor characters of the six (from the previous plays), Tom and Ruth, get an entirely strange subplot of comic misunderstanding which really wasn't alluded to in the other plays. Round and Round the Garden also has what feels like an epilogue where much that was likely to happen after the end of Table Manners was overturned. For me the play was more complete than Living Together and possibly able to stand on its own but it wasn't quite as satisfying as Tables Manners.
This is rather long winded way of saying "see Table Manners first" whatever you are told to the contrary. The plays are not equal; there's a great one and two lesser ones rendered good by seeing the great one first.
Paul Ritter was fantastic when he wasn't being forced to be the "car bore" (I hate that character in Ayckbourn plays with the nasal voice, obsessed by cars, tools and the A147). Stephen Mangan made Norman sympathetic and sexy each time his character's boorishness was about to take over.
As a piece of nerdishness and to help me see the plays more clearly, I thought I'd write down the trilogy in chronological order:
Saturday 5:30pm - Round and Round the Garden - Act 1 Scene 1
Saturday 6:00pm - Table Manners - Act 1 Scene 1
Saturday 6:30pm - Living Together - Act 1 Scene 1
Saturday 8:00pm - Living Together - Act 1 Scene 2
Saturday 9:00pm - Round and Round the Garden - Act 1 Scene 2
Sunday 9:00am - Table Manners - Act 1 Scene 2
Sunday 11:00am - Round and Round the Garden - Act 2 Scene 1
Sunday 8:00pm - Table Manners - Act 2 Scene 1
Sunday 9:00pm - Living Together - Act 2 Scene 1
Monday 8am - Table Manners - Act 2 Scene 2
Monday 8am - Living Together - Act 2 Scene 2
Monday 9am - Round and Round the Garden - Act 2 Scene 2

Oedipus by Sophocles, version by Frank McGuinness, Olivier Theatre, 8-Oct-2008 - Directed by Jonathan Kent

2008-10-14T00:07:00.003Z

I'm probably not allowed to do the Oedipus-Schmeedipus-so-long-as-the-boy-loves-his-mother joke so I won’t.
The evening started before the actual when a group of men dressed in dark suits and collarless ties arrived and seated themselves strategically near the stage. Their presence wasn't that odd, after all they were members of the chorus gathering to make a big entrance at some point.
The stage was a shallow dome or top chord of a sphere with a mighty set of doors at its top. The whole thing rotated slow throughout the play and the only other piece of furniture was a large wooden picnic style that appeared to sit on the dome without moving with it. I did find this effect clever so much as a distraction while I worked how it was being done.
Noticing immovable may suggest to some that there wasn't better stuff on stage, but there was. I just get easily distracted by stage trickery that I feel compelled to work out. Ralph Fiennes and Clare Higgins were good although I didn't sense the heat between them that I thought the story demanded. The parade of talents – the actors coming in to deliver messages or have a row with Oedipus - were also good if a bit too much like a parade. I realise it's the play's structure but I don't have to like it.
Actually there was something about the play that I didn't like: It is a mystery yet all the pieces of the puzzle felt pretty much in place well before the end. I know I'm familiar with the story from reading Robert Graves Greek Myths and I've seen the play before but I've never been so aware of the structure or the fact that most of the interesting stuff happens off-stage. Also I noticed that although the Riddle of the Sphinx is alluded to and the solution is given, the actual question is never mentioned.

Coming Dancing – Book by Ray Davies and Paul Sirett – Music and Lyrics by Ray Davies, Theatre Royal Stratford East, 23-Sept-2008

2008-09-25T00:18:00.000Z

I don’t like musicals. It’s not that I look down on them with disdain; they’re just not for me. I could make up some intellectual sounding reasons – something along the lines of a song’s ability to compress plot and emotional development into concentrated three minute bursts, often with the potent cheapness of legend, allowing writers to try to get away with not putting plot or emotional development anywhere else – but I would be making it up to sound as if I knew what I was talking about.
But the thing is, the music is by Ray Davies, the story is based on my favourite Kinks song and Mister Davies himself appears in it so I had to go, didn’t I?
People foolish enough to wish for a Kinks jukebox musical would be disappointed - I only recognised Tired of Waiting and the title song – but music used was at times sublime, there was a good mix of styles and some of the songs in pre-rock’n’roll style felt so accurate that I was sure I’d heard them before. I liked the acting and the story but could have done with a lot more character development to really nail down the relationships and tensions within Ray Davies imaginary family. I also felt the need for more specifics about Ray’s made-up youngest older sister Julie. I got a lot of knowing there was something better out there and the determination to get it but little of how she was going to do it.
The idea of the play is that it is the story, as told by Ray Davies, behind the writing of Come Dancing and I didn’t find it entirely convincing. I didn’t think that Ray Davies believed what he was trying to tell us. I didn’t buy the idea that the lyrics of Come Dancing referred to Ray’s tragic imaginary sister Julie when they actually suit the character of another older sister, Brenda, better.
This isn’t perfect but I was won over by the music and the charm of the cast. I still don’t like musicals though

Riflemind by Andrew Upton, Trafalgar Studios 1, 16-Sept-2008 – Directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman

2008-09-17T00:28:00.002Z

I was slightly distracted watching this play, by trying to work out who the models for the Riflemind band were. From what I could see as I was watching, they were supposed to have flourished in the very early 90s producing half a dozen albums, touring the world and filling stadiums before splitting in the second half of the nineties. I don’t rate my musical knowledge too highly but I couldn’t think of any British bands that got close to fitting that pattern. Most decent British bands of the early Nineties (that I could think of) seemed barely to manage to finish their second album before imploding. I reckoned that it would have been a better fit to make them a Seventies or Eighties group (reading the blurb seems to indicate this). Then I realised, belatedly, that as the play I was watching an Australian play I should look for a model (but not an exact correlation) for the band from down under. And I could think of at least a couple. I blame the Scottish accents employed John Hannah and Paul Hilton for fooling me.
This play left me wanting more, which arguably is a good thing. It also left an awful lot unsaid which is probably a bad thing. I wondered if the playwright reduced the number of characters from seven to four and concentrated on the relationship between John (the band’s leader and composer), his wife, his band-mate brother and the drummer (and I’m not sure about the drummer), then perhaps it would have been much more powerful. I felt that the scenes between John, his wife, his brother and the drummer were the most effective but perhaps it would have been much more difficult to tell the story and set the scenes without the extra characters.
Of course, who am I to tell people what they should have written – I’ll be suggesting amendments to Hamlet next. The play works fine as it is and maybe letting too much light in on the personal relationships between the four would have diminished the whole.

Ivanov by Anton Chekhov, Translated by Tom Stoppard, Wyndham’s Theatre, 15-Sept-2008 – Directed by Michael Grandage

2008-09-16T00:57:00.001Z

Half through this play I was praying for Kenneth Branagh to be sexier. I’m not sure that I’m a good judge of sexiness in men so I may have missed it. I thought Ivanov was supposed to be a moody, interesting and sexily messy and Kenneth Branagh was more of a cuddly mess.
Before the interval I kept thinking just how good Branagh is going to be when he gets to play Uncle Vanya. The problem is that he should probably have been making me think of Doctor Astrov (from the same play) who is just as listless and possibly as self-pitying. Of course Ivanov seems to have given up on love and life while the Doctor still does passion.
In the second half we got glimpses of fire from this Ivanov, just in case anyone wondered what all the fuss about Kenneth Branagh was. All the same I didn’t feel that he possessed that magnetism that had attracted his wife and was now pulling on the daughter of his friend.
I wondered if it might be the play that doesn’t really allow you opportunity to see and understand why Ivanov is or was such an attractive person and personality. I keep saying this in my blog entries but we were more told that shown what Ivanov is like and it is never really explained what got him into his present funk. Obviously you can guess at factors like debt, no longer being in love with his wife and crossing the threshold of forty but I didn’t feel that I was getting the full insight into the why of Ivanov.
The play rattled along at a pleasingly brisk pace which I tend to think is a good thing for Chekhov. Tom Stoppard also played up the comedy in some scenes especially those featuring Lorcan Cranitch (Borkin), Malcolm Sinclair (Shabelsky) and Kevin R McNally (Lebedev). Also having just checked another translation it appears that in one major self pitying and potentially histrionic speech from Ivanov was peppered by Stoppard and/or the director with comic interjections from Lebedev and delivered in a deliberate monotone by Branagh. My description makes it sound appalling but actually I was rather impressed at the time. If the speech had been done straight I’m not sure it would have worked as well.
I couldn’t work out whether I was supposed to like Tom Hiddleston’s Doctor Lvov, I suspect not but I would have liked to know more about his motivation.
I would also like to say that there is no such thing as too much Kevin R.McNally.

Hedda (from Hedda Gabler), by Henrik Ibsen, Adapted by Lucy Kirkwood, Gate Theatre, 01-Sept-2008 – Directed by Carrie Cracknell

2008-09-07T13:13:00.001Z

One of the criticisms levelled at this production is that we never really get to understand how this modern day Hedda Gabler has come to be the rather unpleasant creature that she is. While this criticism has some validity I think it has more to do with the adaptation not being adventurous enough. There are plenty of changes – maiden aunt becomes spinster sister, Lovborg’s work on a memory stick, General Gabler becomes Professor Gabler and so forth – but the plot, motivation and most of what people say remains about the same. If there isn’t enough detail about Hedda’s motivation it is, I think, actually the source material that’s at fault.
In its original setting we can take a lot of Hedda’s background for granted, There’s the position of educated women in the late Nineteenth Century and the fact that Hedda is raised as the only daughter of a widower General. We can see where she comes from just by the corseted dress and the senior military background of her father. Modernising the play means that you can’t use that convenient shorthand and you have to come up with other ideas to create a convincing modern Hedda; especially one who chooses marriage and possibly children over independence and a possibly career. I don’t think they quite succeed but it is certainly a worthwhile attempt and they get very close.
One of the things that I most appreciated about this production was that feeling of claustrophobia that I remember from when I first saw this play (Hampstead Theatre starring Lindsay Duncan) twenty years ago. It could just have been the smallness of the set in each case.
Another thing that has been said is that this Hedda isn’t very pleasant, of course I’ve never found the character sympathetic any way. I thought the point was that you are interested in her plight and I was.

Her Naked Skin, by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, National Theatre – Olivier, 24-July-2008 – Directed by Howard Davies

2008-07-30T23:55:00.000Z

The problem, for me, with setting a love story against a backdrop of major historical events is that history can easily overwhelm the romance. It is also a problem if you leave gaping holes in the history which have to be (only partially) filled by the programme notes and if the love story doesn’t feel strong enough.
The love story felt as if it needed a smaller more intimate space to make it feel intense. It also needed considerably more danger and risk and not just be the momentary fancy of a bored aristo.
I was confused by the mix of factual and fictional characters. Were any of the main characters (other than the politicians) based on real people? They didn’t feel that real, which actually and oddly made me wonder if they were based on real people. You can arguably get away with a bit of sketchiness using real people but fake people need to be fully rounded and with motivations and back-stories.
I wanted more from and about the men. They seemed, at times, to be brutish caricatures, even when spouting lines that their historical counterparts had said. I wanted more motivation and reason from the men (if it comes to that the women too). With 20-20 hindsight and even a few years after the events of the play, the male anti-suffrage ideas were shown to be clearly wrong-headed and stupid but at the time they were, presumably, sincerely held and effectively argued. I don’t think that the author wanted to go there but I felt its absence.
I didn’t feel that I got to know why some of the main characters were Suffragettes. Obviously they were doing what they believed to be right and the aim of universal suffrage was right, but I didn’t feel what was driving them. I understand that one of the reasons for commissioning this play was the ninetieth anniversary of the suffragette movement and perhaps it should have looked a little at the present. There are people, in the world today, who would happily refuse women the vote and many other rights, claiming, as the Victorians and Edwardians did before them, that they are doing it to protect the dignity and honour of women. They place woman-kind on a pedestal but ignore the exploitation of women who don’t meet their standards. Perhaps they put them on a pedestal so that they not in the way and can be ignored. I didn’t see any modern echoes in this play; given its subject matter I think there should have been.
In the end (as the programme acknowledges) it wasn’t the Suffragettes or the more reasonable Suffragists that brought about votes for women but a Great War that managed to shatter Britain’s Victorian and Edwardian self-delusions.

Relocated by Anthony Neilson, Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, 11-Jun-2008 – Directed by Anthony Neilson

2008-06-15T20:47:00.001Z

When I booked for this play it didn't have a title. I suspect that it may only have been a very early draft then, if it existed at all. The powerful presence of a Germanic figure keeping his daughter as a brood mare in the cellar indicates that it must have undergone a major rewrite in late April. Other people, Germanic and otherwise, have been discovered to have kept young women locked up for a long time, recently but the Austrian case that broke in April must have been an inspiration.
I didn't think that it suffered from this “up to the rehearsal” writing, the actors certainly seemed to know what they were doing. What I found remarkable was how closely integrated the new material was with, what must have been, the older stuff.
Overall it did have a ripped-from-the-headlines feel almost as if it had been written with a TV news channel on in the background. The story showed the way a woman had to shift her identity as she fled from public suspicions of her complicity in a Soham-like murder. It reminded me of a fictional or factual depiction I'd seen of a woman with multiple personality disorder who would create a new personality as a reaction to a major stressful incident. The new personality would become the dominant one for a time and other identities would be forgotten but would slowly impinge on the new one.
Another real story that I thought was woven into the structure was the case of a man that pretended to be a secret agent and kept a group of deluded recruits on the run from imagined terrors and plots. They gave him money, bore his children and changed their identities at his whim.
The set, which we had to pass through on the way to the seats, was a completely black low-ceilinged room with black shuttered windows to let in light when opened. We were divided from the stage by gauze screen which was sometimes lit from the front and side to obscure the room. There was a vexatious thread dangling from the middle of the screen which was noticeable when these lights were on. I’m not sure that the thread was a deliberate annoyance but it looked too big to have been missed by the stage-crew.
I’m not sure if I’d claim that there was a theme to Anthony Neilson’s work but this play did have the dissociative quality of a dream, which is familiar from other works. In this case it may have all been a dream by a woman who has fainted while doing the housework with a TV news channel on in the background.

Topless Mum by Ron Hutchinson, Tricycle Theatre, 3-Jun-2008 – Directed by Caroline Hunt

2008-06-06T07:10:00.001Z

The phrase that came to me at the interval was, “a rehearsed idea”. It was as if the author had had what he thought was a good idea but had not really been able to grasp it, hold on to it and form it. Like a sculpture that's only perfect when still encased in a solid block of stone and how ever you hack it out it will never be quite right.
I’m not sure that it is an entirely accurate assessment of the play and certainly owes too much to my desire to do flowery writing. My interval thought was partially inspired by the director’s description, in the programme, of the play’s long gestation and many revisions. I have a, probably unwarranted, suspicion that the more something has to be revised (and heavily revised) the more likely it is, not to work. Seeing the first half of the play hadn’t helped, there was a story, certainly, but the cast seemed just to going through well-worn arguments as if following them in a diagram. It wasn’t that it was badly written it was more under-written as if the author hadn’t ever become interested in his characters.
I thought there were some good touches, the way that the injured soldier and his wife used careful language to lead the journalist to the wrong but desired conclusion and the incoherence of another soldier seeking to tell the truth. However the idea of making the injured soldier into a hero with the use of topless pictures of his wife didn’t make sense to me. It felt like it was only there to justify the title of the play

Fast Labour by Steve Waters, Hampstead Theatre, 2-Jun-2008 – Directed by Ian Waters

2008-06-06T00:10:00.001Z

A good thing about political correctness is the way that you avoid obvious stereotypes and lazy generalisations. A bad thing about politically correct plays is that the author expends so much energy avoiding obvious stereotypes and lazy generalisations, that the drama ebbs away, leaving something anaemic and without conflict. I'm probably being lazy and generalising here but I felt this play had far too many decent people in it. Of course there were illegal immigrants [insert standard and well rehearsed arguments about the black economy of economic migrants being essential for cheap food - here] and the gang masters that exploited them but none of the nightmare stories of people trafficking. The most villainous person, arguably the gang-master Grimmer, was far too concerned about his position in society to really do anything vile. He was certainly an exploiter and, in keeping migrant workers money, a thief but he also wanted to keep his people on side.
No doubt there’ll be plenty of research to back up the facts in the play but I wanted more jeopardy, to feel that there was more at stake. The story of an illegal immigrant, working their way up and starting a briefly successful business has echoes of powerful films like Scarface but it seems the author didn’t want to go there. True, it would have been over melodramatic especially in a piece that argued that at least in Britain there are fair rules to play by and it is possible to win the game.
I’ve gone on far too long trying to say that it was all a bit too agreeable. The play itself was well put together and I was impressed especially by the switching in languages (everything spoken in English but jumping between imagined languages through accent and context). It made me think about the way that completely coherent, intelligent people can sound and look like idiots when dealing with a language that is unfamiliar or different. It was interesting to notice (though not surprising) that the author avoided the comedy of miscomprehension that is often a safe comedic retreat.
I could have done with knowing a lot more about the demons that Victor (Craig Kelly) had encountered and more about his motivations. He wanted to be a good man and to give people work but I needed more than that. There was a fair bit of talk about how perestroika and the fall of communism have changed life in the former Soviet Union but I wasn’t convinced that it was coming from anywhere or was intended to reach any conclusion.

The Common Pursuit, by Simon Gray, Menier Chocolate Factory, 1-June-2008 – Directed by Fiona Laird

2008-06-01T23:43:00.002Z

While I watched this play I couldn’t help being reminded of a programme note in N C Hunter’s A Day By The Sea which I saw at the Finborough a couple of months ago. As I pointed out at the time, the programme mentioned that N C Hunter’s success may have had much to do with the high calibre actors that performed his plays. I was reminded of this because when I saw this play twenty years ago, the cast which included Stephen Fry, Rik Mayall, John Gordon Sinclair, Sarah Berger and John Sessions was pretty damn good and possibly the suitable for the play at the time.
I realised that the comparison with N C Hunter was probably unfair, and that the play doesn’t so much need good or even great actors, it just needs the right actors. And it isn’t all the actors, the ‘wrong’ actors in this play were arguably the actors in the comic relief roles of Nick and Peter. I began to think that it is those roles together with the role of Humphrey (a self-loathing homosexual don – played first time by Stephen Fry, who else) that really made the play something special. Otherwise, you could claim it was an underwritten romantic triangle. Reece Shearsmith, who played the literary hack, Nick, was suitably acidic but didn’t have the flamboyance and anti-heroic schoolboy charm that Rik Mayall brought to the part. I didn’t like him enough this time round, and as his character’s glasses frames got thicker, Reece Shearsmith started to make me think of Ronnie Corbett – his shortness relative to the other actors added to that feeling.
Casting Nigel Harman as the lothario lone-ranger Peter seemed to miss the point that Peter is chaotic but very lucky in keeping his infidelities secret. Harman was a convincing philanderer but too smooth for the part. John Gordon Sinclair may not have been as sexy playing Peter but he made a better muddling liar and had much more chemistry with Humphrey. I didn’t really get the strength of the attraction between Humphrey and Peter in this production although the elements are in the play.
One of the bits that I remembered most about this play (although it may have only been in the TV adaptation) was a touching speech from Stuart (was John Sessions, is Robert Portal) comparing his situation with the ‘fixed’ tom-cat who is unable to perform with cat-like agility anymore. It was missing from this production, I’m not sure why or even whether the play would have been better (or worse) for its inclusion but I felt its absence.

King Lear by William Shakespeare, Shakespeare's Globe, 23-Apr-2008 – Directed by Dominic Dromgoole

2008-04-27T14:25:00.000Z

I sometimes regret not seeing productions at the Globe later in their run. I suspect or possibly just hope, that they improve as the actors get used to the space and the way they need to play the lines to the audience.
While there is something to be said for seeing the play on Shakespeare's birthday, I'm not sure that all the performances hit the mark. I didn't think David Calder had quite got the menacing petulance and sudden anger of Lear, although it was certainly ready to break the surface. The delivery of another actor, who has been doing stuff at the Globe a few times now, seemed to alternate between extremely effective and very flat. Also there were a few longeurs where actors slowly processed across the stage. This was especially noticeable at the interval when the audience wanted to applaud but had to wait for the recently (and bloodily – eyeballs and everything) blinded Gloucester to be led the long way off the stage.
All of this will improve by the day but I think that people are going say something about the awkward storm scenes where the 'cuts' back to the to the castle were performed on the balcony leaving Lear, Kent, Gloucester et al. to walk slowly in a circle on the stage.
Another thing that has been creeping up on me over the years of watching King Lears (I think it is about 15 productions now) and is now fairly obvious to me is the incredibly poor 'time management' in the play. I'm not talking about how long it is (in this production the 3+ hours went by fairly quickly with a few drawn-out bits) but how Shakespeare manages the passing of time. The major problem for me is Edgar's transformation into Mad Tom which seems to last a night but that doesn't explain how he's so good at it and why people appear to know who Mad Tom is. Doubtlessly there are essays and explanations in books but I'm not going to take the time to read them.
Something I would like to see (slightly prompted by a feeling of colourlessness in tonight's Cordelia) in a production of King Lear is to have Cordelia and the Fool played by the same actor. I'm not saying the Fool should be Cordelia in disguise, that would be obvious and kludgey, but I'd like to see an echo of it. Of course there will be good reasons not to do it , probably because they want a good comedian to make the fool actually funny and aren't looking for too much in Cordelia. Still I'd like to see it tried.

Fram by Tony Harrison, Olivier Theatre, 15-Apr-2008 – Directed by Tony Harrison

2008-04-16T08:59:00.004Z

The problem with writing in rhyming verse is that it can become clunky and predictable. You find yourself groaning or giggling at the forced rhymes and deliberate wit or humour can become predictable because you can see what the rhyme is likely to be.
Of course there are times, in the hands of an expert that the rhyme scheme is a muted backbeat driving transcendently beautiful language.
This play has both the clunk and the beauty. I wondered sometimes, if the awkward rhymes were supposed to relate to Gilbert Murray, the classicist and alleged writer author of the play we were watching, and his reputation for pedestrian verse translations of Greek tragedies. Certainly I thought I found myself noticing the clunk more when he was speaking. It isn't a reflection on Jeff Rawle who played him and was ,I thought rather good.
I could understand Tony Harrison using a classicist as his narrator and the resultant links to Greek drama: Harrison's version Orestia was my first play at the National (seen in a single day's school trip) and I've seen several other of his translations. However I rather doubted whether Nansen's story was really Greek or tragic (the programme notes mention a Nansen biography subtitled a hero in a Greek tragedy). While he lived through and was involved in deeply tragic times, Nansen appears to have strolled through them with relative ease and was even able to develop a rampant sexual appetite (allegedly) to accompany his fame. This is a problem with this play, there is no drama at its centre, or at least no flawed hero. Although he is followed by the ghost of his former close but hated companion from an arctic expedition, it isn't exactly a haunting. I couldn't quite see the point even with the character well played by Mark Addy. At the interval I couldn't quite see what was left to tell of the story after its first 90 minutes.
There are brilliant things in this play – the 'starvation speech' played out by Sian Thomas as Sybil Thorndike is a highlight – but there are also many dull bits which make the play's three hours seem longer.
I also began to notice the occasional habit of repetition where an actor would describe something then repeat the description in elaborate detail. The elaboration would often be beautifully stated but was underscored with a voice in my head saying “but you only just said that”.
Another thing, which might be imaginary was that I began to associate Harrison's most powerful and effective poetry with the more disturbing and crude images or descriptions. Blood, cannibalism and sex seemed to bring out the best verse.
Some bits to mention: There was a shocking video projection featuring two victims of the Russian famine; A pleasant video projection drifting along a bridgeless Thames from Waterloo to Westminster. There was also video of two of the actors rushing into the theatre and arriving for real in the auditorium, as well as Nansen walking off the stage and into a projection.
And at the end we get the ship rising out of the Olivier stage. It's a very nice touch but I didn't really get the point.

Visiting Mr. Green by Jeff Baron, Trafalgar Studios 1, 9-Apr-2008, Directed by Patrick Garland

2008-04-13T12:22:00.001Z

Over the years I seem to have picked up a great deal about Jewish culture from watching plays. This play managed to introduce me to something new: The concept of Flayshick and Milchick which is the dietary prohibition on eating meat (e.g. flesh) at the same time as dairy products (e.g. milk) and not mixing the plates or cutlery either. Generally there's a sound what-happens-to-food-in-desert-conditions reason for most kosher rules but I'm not sure of exactly the reason for this one. It also has the ring of a faddish diet.
There's another strange thing to do with food in this play: the young character brings take-out food from an upscale kosher deli (I vaguely recalled hearing of it at the time but now its name esapes me). He opens the three tinfoil boxes to reveal carrots & peas, mashed potato, and stuffed cabbage. Admittedly there didn't appear to be a hob or oven in the appartment-room set (although there was a fridge, a sink and cupboards for 4 sets of crockery and cutlery - falyshick and milchik for standard and passover use) but plain carrots, peas and mashed potato seemed really ordinary for a take away.
The programme notes mentioned the awards it has won and the number of places it has been produced in a way that made me a bit suspicious. It had the feeling of the producers saying “it is good, honest” knowing that they aren't going to be believed.
I didn't think the play was anything ground-breaking but as I've intimated I've seen quite a few 'Jewish' dramas. I also thought that with its short scenes and a running time that didn't justify an interval (less than 90 minutes overall), it didn't really stretch the actors.It is a simple story, simply told and I wanted more. It was carrots, peas and mash and I wished that I'd had something more substantial and classy. The actors also deserved much better fare.

A Day By The Sea by N. C. Hunter, Finborough Theatre,7-April - 2008, Directed by Tom Cooper

2008-04-12T13:49:00.000Z

The programme notes told me that N. C. Hunter was once described as the 'English Chekhov'. So I knew what to expect: Lots of talk; Relatively little action (there was an offstage rock climbing bit but without real danger); Tidy and potentially happy endings dangled in front of the audience only to be snatched away leaving us to think that we were weak simple-minded and overly sentimental to want a happy ending in the first place; And, of course, a Doctor with plenty of charm and most of the best lines.
We got all of that of course but it wasn't exactly Chekhov. Far too many of the characters sat around telling the world what they were like instead of it coming from dialogue or characterisation (have you met my show-don't-tell hobby-horse?). I should point out that the programme notes also point out that his success at the time might have had more to do with the quality of the productions and cast than the actual plays themselves.
The reason the Finborough have 'rediscovered' this play is to act as a companion piece to Nicholas de Jongh's Plague over England which showed earlier this year and dealt with John Gielgud's arrest for importuning in a public convenience while he was preparing to bring A Day By The Sea into the West End. I was interested to imagine how some of the original actors (in truth I've only seen Gielgud and Ralph Richardson act and just heard of Sibyl Thorndike) would have played the parts. I felt that Stephen Omer, who played the John Gielgud part of Julian Anson, was more convincing in the role than the Gielgud of my imagination. I reckon that Gielgud would have been more mannered and come over a sight more ridiculously when his character was required to loosen up and rediscover romance. Of course the play originally ran for over a year so what do I know. On the other hand I could really see Ralph Richardson in the Doctor's part. It is probably unfair to William Maxwell, who did a good job, but I could see how convincing Richardson's batty charm would have been and I would have better understood why the nanny fell for his character.

Another thought about the comparison with Chekhov is that although Chekhov's plays have a strong, almost exact, sense period (i.e. the decades just straddling the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) they are somehow timeless, this play feels stuck in grey post-war mud. I could say that almost every hide-bound attitude expressed in this play was swept away in the next decade and a half, but much the same fate arguably befell Chekhov. Perhaps in Chekhov the way of life changed but the people and their attitudes didn't, while the kind of people in this play have probably ceased to exist.

Bliss by Olivier Choiniere, translated by Caryl Churchill, Royal Court Upstairs, 31-Mar-2008 - Directed by Joe Hill-Gibbins

2008-04-05T00:22:00.002Z

I probably shouldn't forgive Caryl Churchill. Strictly speaking it isn't her fault, she only translated the play. That said she must have chosen to do so.
Of course you aren't going to get me to say the play was bad. Odd, muddled and unsatisfactory perhaps but I wouldn't say bad.
The problems that I had with this play had more to do with the fact that felt compelled to check a few things later. Now I know much more than I ever wanted to about Celine. We weren't told her surname but the biographical details fit the self same Celine who sang Switzerland's entry in the Eurovision Song Contest in 1988 with what appeared to be an extra row of teeth (actually a couple of misplaced canines).
This woman's singing leaves me cold, so when the play started with a description of a concert almost as if it was a mystical rite, I felt strange. I couldn't work out if the narrators' seemingly heartfelt adoration of Celine was meant to be ironic. As unfair as it may sound I wanted there to be a sneer somewhere at the back of things but I don't think that the playwright had that in mind.
I wondered slightly about the potential of the play to generate lawsuits, not only did we have the un-surnamed Celine, the audience were required to wear Wal-Mart tarbards. Of course Wal-Mart doesn't exist as a brand in the UK but they have a presence through Asda and could have taken offence. Not that there was really anything offensive in the play about the singer or the brand.
The stage was set up as if the audience was viewing a piece of washroom story-telling from the other side of a mirror (with backwards-written grafitti on the cubicles and everything). The play shifted between its three stories (told sequentially) a little bit too easily. Celine's parents suddenly became the parents of an abused (physically and sexually) Celine fan and I thought I'd dozed off and missed a chunk. Much the same happened when the now hospitalised fan became a misfit Wal-Mart checkout girl. Like I said, confusing.
It is a recurrent theme in this blog that I seem to miss points in plays and I have to say that I missed the significance of the Oracle stuff. The audience were all wearing the name-badge 31CARO which when seen in a mirror comes close to being ORACLE. I just didn't see how the misfit character Caro, whose name badge it was, was acting much like and Oracle.

Never So Good by Howard Brenton, Lyttelton Theatre, 17-March-2008, Directed by Howard Davies

2008-03-18T08:27:00.002Z

I wonder if I suffer from some kind of ingrained anti-Roman Catholicism. I can't think of any actual event or specific influence in my background that could cause it but I feel deeply uncomfortable whenever a writer makes a claim that it was an historical figure's open/hidden/latent/repressed/rejected/anti Roman Catholicism that was a prime motivation in that person's life. I'm not saying that this wasn't the case with Harold Macmillan and I don't know where Howard Brenton stands on the matter - he could easily be completely disinterested - it is just a pea under a layer of mattresses and I can't get comfortable. I can understand that there might be historical reasons behind Roman Catholics wanting to 'claim' people for the 'true church' (denial of power and oppression etc.) but I'm not sure it fits in with more our secular times where religion shouldn't be an issue. I've probably made too much of this particular theme in the play anyway.
Although the play was long (not that it felt long) I got the feeling that I wasn't getting enough detail. There was plenty going on and I wouldn't fault the writing or the acting but I always felt that something major had happened off stage and that Macmillan was either sidelined or reacting to the situation even if he had played a major part in the offstage events. It could well have been a deliberate decision by the author, after all it helped show him as a nearly-man for much of his career but I would have liked more of the beginnings and middles of his relationships with his wife, Churchill, Eden and Eisenhower. It also meant that we had to be told what was going on or what had just happened rather than been shown it happening.
I wonder what the reaction to the Suez scene's parallels to the Iraq invasion is going to be from performance to performance. For us it was a laugh of recognition but I could see how easily it could become a groan at the heavy-handedness of the similarities.
The production, probably sensibly, didn't seem to go for imitations of characters, Ian Macniece certainly looked like Churchill (although he never smoked the cigar constantly in his hand - there was a split in the cast as to smoked and who handled but never lit up) but made no attempt to sound like him. Also Jeremy Irons didn't try to do a Macmillan although Pip Carter as his younger self delivered a version of Peter Cook's Beyond the Fringe impersonation of him.
I thought the use of the older and younger selves to comment on one another was effective but I was initially unsure what the younger version thought had died in the older. It also made me wonder about doing the Thatcher play (I don't doubt that Howard Brenton has thought about it himself) because unlike Macmillan there doesn't seem a place in the Iron Lady's life for a youthful voice of doubt or a Bolingbroke, Buckingham or Richmond from whom she would have accepted criticism. If to do a good Thatcher play and not just a left wing rant (they'll be plenty of them in a few years) you have to get into her head then there is only twenty-twenty hindsight to tell her that she was wrong.

The hour we knew nothing of each other By Peter Handke, translated by Meredith Oakes, Lyttelton Theatre, 6-Feb-2008 – Directed by James MacDonald

2008-02-12T00:45:00.001Z

Before the play started, a man in front of me asked my neighbour (female and better looking) if there was a plot summary for this piece on the free cast list. I was slightly tempted to ask him, after we’d watched the play, whether he’d be able to put one together for future reference. If you want a plot, I suppose it is the comings and goings in a city square throughout a day. What that means is a large number of little vignettes, small stories (comical and tragical), familiar observations of people watching and a nice dollop of weirdness often including some fictional, historical, mythological or biblical figure. And whenever there was a lull in the proceedings one of a number of well put together young women would process across from upstage left to downstage right.
The city square was represented by sculptural, abstracted and slightly organic-looking office buildings around the three sides of the stage.
Describing the play becomes a little like trying to remember the contents of a conveyor as prizes pass in front of you – Actually I can’t remember if there was a cuddly toy, or whether it was a man dressed as a football mascot. Here are a few things that stuck in the mind:
Recurring characters such as a street cleaner (played by Mark Hadfield) who discovers the script for the play that he is in; a hiker (played by Richard Hope) who had constantly to empty sand and stones from his shoes and clothes; an annoying person (played by Jason Thorpe), possibly meant to be a small boy, a grown-up that acted like one or a representation of the spirit of annoyingness who spent his time imitating the actions of passers-by.
A business man emptying the pockets of his suit pulling out strange items until he finds a apple. One of the well put-together young women in a dress made from fragments of mirror and holding a large leaf with an eye-sized hole to cover her face. A looping line of old men, then teachers, then old soldiers made up of the same dozen or so actors. A couple sexually aroused watching a man collapse and die while the annoying man tried to imitate him. Abraham leading Isaac (who was carrying a convenient bush) across the stage, clutching a sacrificial dagger, Papageno getting mugged. A queue that almost spontaneously formed.
While I found this wordless parade highly enjoyable there was still a feeling at the back of my mind that it was all a bit insubstantial. It was like an endless supply of gourmet snacks and treats, while they take as much time and skill to prepare as a normal meal, you get the feeling that there’s a big feast that you are missing. There were so many characters and little stories that I never felt that I got to know any of them well or even at all.

The Vortex by Noel Coward, Richmond Theatre, 4-Feb-2008, Directed by Peter Hall

2008-02-07T01:24:00.000Z

So you’ve got this character called Florence Lancaster, she is an ageing actress, afraid of her age and needing desperately to be loved. The problem is that she’s played by Felicity Kendal who, it is widely accepted, is charming and lovely and it’s probably a criminal offence not to like her. All this means that how ever well she manages to convince you that she’s Florence Lancaster (and she is both very convincing and good at it) there’s always this voice at the back of your head (okay my head) that says “but that’s Felicity Kendal – we like Felicity Kendal”. As I’ve said it’s largely in my head and almost certainly doesn’t detract from her performance.

I wasn’t entirely sure about Dan Stevens who played Florence’s son Nicky. He was certainly pretty and vulnerable enough and I wouldn’t complain about his acting but I thought some of the easy-to-parody Coward witticisms (brittle brilliant wit with something nasty ready to break out when thing crack up) weren’t delivered well enough. I could imagine that it might have been that fear of slipping into parody that stopped him from taking pleasure in the language and from saying beautiful things beautifully. Another thing that bothered me was that he seemed to change enormously between the first and second acts. I realise that he is supposed to be reaching a crisis about his drug taking and his relationship with his fiancée is breaking down but in the play it’s only two days later and things don’t start to go wrong until act two.

For some reason this three act play with short peppy acts had two intervals lasting a total of 45 minutes out of the two and a quarter hour running time. I might be argued that the 20 and 25 minute gaps were necessary to move the set but the set had a monumental simplicity about it with free standing doorways and staircases set against long black curtains and with only enough furniture to be useful in the scene. Perhaps we were expected to spend the intervals drinking cocktails and having witty, sophisticated conversations.

I seemed to have missed the mildly suggested lesbian sub-plot in the play when I saw it at the Donmar in 2002 but even here it was gentle and entirely one-sided. Also I realise that people have compared the play’s mother son relationship with the same relationship in Hamlet, but I kept being reminded of the Seagull which I saw Felicity Kendal in a decade ago. It is slightly odd to think that the Seagull was only about 30 years old when Coward wrote this play.

I would also like to mention Mah-Jong which people play off stage during the second act. It is not the tile-matching excrescence that which might be called Mah-Jong on your computer but a game, using the same 144 tiles, which is a cross between Gin Rummy played with three packs of cards and Lego. It is a wonderful game and I encourage you to learn it because it will increase the chances of me finding three other people to play it.

Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov, The Rose, Kingston, 28-Jan-2008, Directed by Peter Hall

2008-02-06T01:17:00.000Z

Inevitably I’m going to spend most of my time here writing about the theatre. After all it’s new and it was my first time there so I’m probably allowed an opinion. I have to confess that it felt a bit like a rather upscale school assembly hall. There was a suggestion of echoes and feeling of being distant from the stage. I was in the stalls under the cover of the circle so there was also an uncomfortable sensation from being in a low ceilinged area when compared to the height of the rest of the theatre. Perhaps I should have learned from my experiences at Shakespeare’s Globe where if you have to sit it’s best to do so in the middle gallery rather than the ground floor where you see the action through the groundlings. Of course here the groundlings sat quietly and politely but I could still feel how far away the action was. Also unlike at the Globe, the seating curved round in slightly more than a semicircle (almost a three-quarter circle) but the stage wasn’t thrust into the middle (or wasn’t in this case anyway), it was a shallow, very wide, low flat platform at the back of the hall.
There was one striking similarity with the Globe: There are long passages where characters talk to themselves, in a normal theatre these are addressed to the darkness but here (as with the Globe) the speeches stood out as if they were being directed at a real audience (which they were, of course). I remember being rather struck by this, imagining momentarily that this was some invention of the translator (Stephen Mulrine). It may have been my fifth or sixth Uncle Vanya but it felt like it was the first time I was seeing these soliloquies.
Any hope of such high-minded appreciation was slightly spoiled by a near neighbour who developed a fit of the giggles towards the end of the second act. The play was directed in such a way to allow people to laugh occasionally (didn’t Chekhov always called his plays comedies) but this woman went too far. Any miss-mouthed line, slipped prop or potential double meaning in the script was treated with loud laughter which removed any hope of concentration. My near neighbour calmed down after the interval which is when I noticed that a couple of the actors seemed to have developed an attack of ‘the hands’. Every emphasis suddenly seemed to be accompanied by manual flourishes which, in reality, were probably just noticeable rather than silly butit didn’t stop me smiling a bit.
As I felt a bit too distanced I didn’t feel as connected and/or electrified, as I sometimes have, by the play. I liked everyone’s performances and I seem to have seen Michelle Dockery in a few things before (Dying for It at the Almeida and the UN Inspector at the National to name two) without noticing her which was probably a grave error. I didn’t think Neil Pearson was sexy enough (of course I am probably the wrong sex or sexual persuasion) but I did find his character’s slightly nerdy interest in trees and wildlife much more believable – these things are probably connected

The President's Holiday by Penny Gold, Hampstead Theatre, 24-Jan-2008 – Directed by Patrick Sanford

2008-01-31T00:14:00.000Z

A few years ago a teenage colleague at work assured me that the socialist revolution was just around the corner. Whatever the merits of such a revolution, I'm not sure that any it is any closer now than it was then. It does appear, however, that he's not the only person who thinks like this. Penny Gold's author's note at the beginning of the play text as well as her hopeful message at the end of the play seem to indicate that she'd like to see a return to some kind of proper socialism if not a full blown revolution.
Watching this play I kept feeling that there's a lot that could be included in the story of Gorbachev's three day detention during the Soviet Union’s 1991 August coup. I kept reminding myself of other verbatim work like Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest which dealt with the Romanian revolution that somehow ended up with similar people in charge. I would have liked to see a lot more of Gorbachev’s life story and motivations as well as getting a better picture (if only second hand) of some of the characters involved in the coup. The trouble in this play, where I saw good actors struggle unsuccessfully to bring life to the text, Penny Gold seems to have gone for what she sees as accuracy. Other than some clumsy parallels with the Tsar Nicolas the Second’s execution, which may not have been understood by people that hadn’t read the play, it appeared that Ms Gold was sticking too closely to a single source. The play is apparently based on the diaries of the late Raisa Gorbacheva and the writer appears unwilling to depart from the facts contained in it.
The play has the feel of documentary without editing tricks or dramatisation and at the same time without imagination. It seems too literal and the dialogue feels almost diagrammatic; people tell one another how they feel rather than allowing it to be expressed in what they say. Sometimes it was as if reported summarised speech had been turned straight into direct speech simply by enclosing it is quotes or rather putting a character’s name and a colon in front of it.
I wonder if the writer would claim that she was trying to tell the unvarnished truth but what comes across is clunky dialogue and the feeling that she didn’t dare to use any imaginative licence. I would be fascinated to find out how this play went wrong and how it was allowed to go so wrong. It’s not difficult to see the potential in this story: One of the world’s most powerful men is cut-off from the world for three days and finds that his power has entirely vanished. But you have to see his power (whether power as a person or power as a head of state) in order to understand its loss and you have to understand the character of all those that betrayed him in order to feel the betrayal.
I was going to do a joke about the Hampstead Theatre looking for a new Literary Manager but it doesn’t feel funny at the moment.

The Vertical Hour by David Hare, Royal Court Downstairs, 23-Jan-2008 – Directed by Jeremy Herrin

2008-01-29T01:46:00.000Z

I think that I missed the point of calling this play the Vertical Hour. The phrase refers to the first hour after injury or tragedy when help is most useful. The thing is that the play doesn't seem to deal with anything recent enough to qualify as a Vertical Hour so unless it refers to having missed the vital period, the title appears meaningless. The Vertical Hour is mentioned in the play but I didn’t feel that it connected to the rest of the piece. I remember feeling similar things about Hare’s play Amy's View. Somehow I missed the bits where Amy expounded her ‘view’ and had to wait for another character to explain what it was. It could all be that I’m not paying enough attention.
I got the impression that this play was being built up with the expectation that there was going to be some explosive argument about the Iraq war. Although there was lots of fencing around the subject, which built tension, when it came to the point, it was all rather tame.
Hare made Nadia's position on the war (I found it similar to what Tony Blair tries to sell and no one believes) relatively weak and idealistic and it seemed easy for her ideas be defeated. In fact it almost looked as if she was broken in a speech lasting around thirty seconds. Nadia’s stance that it is a moral duty to intervene when dictators oppress their own people is easy to question. Hare didn’t go down the trite route of simply by listing the places that it was not seen fit to intervene nor did he go deeply into the idea of why Iraq was chosen at that point in history.
Of course had if Hare had made Nadia more of an ultra neo-con figure (Anne Coulter springs to mind) and still had his Olivier character defeat her, it would have looked like left-wing wish fulfillment. I would, however, have made the match more even and incendiary.
If I felt brave or knowledgeable enough I could claim that Hare seems to regard drama as what men do to women, or at least that he thinks women are still defined only by their relationships with men. Probably unfair but it was any impression I got even if I thought of the ‘drama is what men do to women’ line a while back and have been looking for an excuse to use it. What I did see was lots of the relationship between the father and son but didn't get the sense of what had made Nadia tick other than a charismatic man in her past. There was even a line where Nadia’s character was summed up by her boyfriend and again I felt that I was being told something about someone without having noticed when that person showed those character traits. I felt that there was little evidence of Nadia’s personality other than what she told the world and aren’t characters supposed to be unreliable narrators when it comes to themselves?

Land of the Dead/Helter Skelter by Neil LaBute, Bush Theatre, 15-Jan-2008 – Directed by Patricia Benecke

2008-01-20T17:50:00.000Z

There has (by the time I’ve got round to writing this) plaenty of stuff written about how terrible it is for the Bush to lose 40% of its funding. Mark Shenton seems to have summed it up fairly well in his blog including a bit about the sheer impossibility of Bush artistic director Josie Rourke’s figures countering those of the Arts Council. The Bush claim that their attendance figures are nearer to 40,000 as against the Arts Council’s estimate of 14,600. Given the 80 seat capacity of the Bush they’d need to put on almost 500 performances to reach 40,000 and the real figure for the Bush itself is probably nearer to 25,000. To be fair to the Bush they are counting the extra attendances from shows like Elling and Whipping It Up which transferred as well as touring productions, which they admit on their homepage.
In a situation like this where the accountants at the Arts Council seem to be making the muddle headed decisions I wonder though, whether it is wise to play the emotional cards (the theatre is unique, it has a special history, reputation etc.) when it is rationality not passion that seems to be the deciding factor. Also using misleading figures against an enemy will always allow that enemy to point out that the figures are misleading and ignoring the substantive arguments that they ought to answer.
Another thing is the Bush claiming proudly that their free script reading service is well worth keeping: Certainly the Bush’s literary department (including the script-reading) is well worth keeping but anyone with an accountant in their head might quibble about the need for the script-reading to be free. I wouldn’t dare to put it forward as a real suggestion but on the face of it charging fifty quid for a script to be read would probably wipe out any Arts Council induced deficit. Of course a problem that I can see with this idea is that it might put off the timid and talented writers while proving no bar to the conceited and rubbish ones. You could also make the argument that £50 is a lot of money to some people which I’d have to agree with although I wouldn’t go so far as to buy the idea of writers as artists starving it a garret.

Anyway the plays: I found them rather mild, especially for LaBute. In previous plays by Neil LaBute I’ve always found a great energy; even if, as in the Shape of Things, he tries to get me to like the Smashing Pumpkins (the appalling incidental music used in the 2001 Almeida – I still think that it’s why Pinter walked out). It could have been the shortness of the plays but I remember being very stirred by bash-the latter day plays which was a sequence of short pieces.
Land of the Dead was, I thought a rather heavy slice of American Irony, I hadn’t paid attention to its 9/11 (or 11/9 if you prefer) connections. It was written to mark the first anniversary of the attack but it came as one of those unsurprising surprises when it turned out that way.
For Helter Skelter I made the foolish move of reading the last few pages of the script and kept wondering if the damage caused to the lacework of Ruth Gemmell’s dress by a serrated steak knife would be repairable or if they had a dress for each night. The play itself has a woman wanting the reaction her discovery of her husband’s infidelity (with her sister) to have the power of a Greek tragedy. While the ending is a bit Greek it is only a bit Greek.

Masque of the Red Death, devised by Punchdrunk, 10-Jan-2008

2008-01-13T23:41:00.001Z

It is extremely difficult to make any pretence about writing a review for this (not that I claim to review) as I only managed to see one complete scene played out in front of me in almost two hours of wandering through darkened corridors and empty rooms. I'm fairly sure that I went everywhere I could go but I just kept missing things. I occasionally encountered actors in the middle of something but at the time I assumed I wouldn't be able to follow what they were doing so I would move on.
Clearly this was a mistake, clearly I'm a fool, please feel free to laugh at me for missing a major theatrical highlight. I got so frustrated and bored at wandering around missing things – feeling as though I was at a great party that was happening wherever I was not – that I left early. Another mistake as apparently they do try to make sure that everyone sees the finale and the finale is reportedly wonderful.
I thought when I went that I'd be cool with all the nonlinear story telling and lack of formal structure and narrative and I like to think I would have been, if I'd seen anything. I can blame myself for much of this: I was impatient, moving on if I encountered one of the empty rooms instead of lingering, appreciating the attention to detail and soaking up the atmosphere, giving the actors time to turn up and do something or even following them. As for the partial scenes I witnessed (and I only saw about half a dozen) most of the time I arrived at the end of a scene or at a point where the actors were intensely concentrating on doing nothing. I also saw a bit in the bar including a mind-reading trick which was impressive until I remembered the Jonathan Creek episode where I’d seen it explained.
While in admitting this I'm likely to provoke laughter and have people pointing at me in the street, looking round the web it looks like I'm not the only one who saw very little action (maybe not as little though). If there are a number of people with a similar experience then Punchdrunk probably ought to shoulder some of the blame. I’m not sure it should be possible to do it wrong.
As I journeyed home I couldn't help comparing it to non-linear computer games (and I've spent half my working life in the computer games industry). The problem with offering people a 'sandbox' where they can go anywhere and do anything they want is that after a while they feel that they've been everywhere and done everything and they stop playing the game. To get round this – without going with a completely linear game which players hate more - game designers plant clues and create quests so that players have something to do if they get bored with wandering. Another thing that game designers try is to create training levels where the player learns the strategies most likely to be rewarding often while trying not to make it look like a training level. I did wonder if Punchdrunk wouldn't benefit from a bit of game design training, if only to be able to deal with those malcontents like me, playing the loser version of their game.
I also remembered that we were given a quest as we entered the building (you had to ask about a golden bean or was it a mask), and that I'd not paid it sufficient attention.
Looking around the web afterwards I came across the West End Whinger's advice about getting the most enjoyment out of the piece and had I read it beforehand I might have enjoyed myself much more.

Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare, Olivier Theatre, 10-Dec-2007 – Directed by Nicholas Hytner

2007-12-13T23:22:00.000Z

An enquiring mind can be a terrible thing; I made the mistake of checking up on Zoë Wanamaker's age and discovered that she's 3 years younger than Felicity Kendall. Not really relevant other than that I first saw Much Ado about Nothing in 1989 starring said Felicity Kendall and Alan Bates and I mistakenly thought she was a little old for the role. I was wrong of course, age-wise (and otherwise if I could claim to remember) she was fine.
Age-wise Zoë Wanamaker is probably too old for the role of Beatrice and although she didn't look or act like it, the fact of her age popped into my mind at inopportune moments. Interestingly the programme goes into some detail about how old Benedicks could be which may have been coincidence or a way of saying that if the men could get away with being old then why not the women?
In fairness if anyone wasn't quite right for his role it was Simon Russell Beale who was a bit too much the Prince's jester and not enough the tall, fine-looking soldier as I believe Benedick is described somewhere. This isn't really a complaint because he was a lot of fun in the role and he and Zoë Wanamaker had good chemistry.
One thing that I think they tried to do in this production was to indicate that the Beatrice and Benedick are in love before the play starts but are each too scared of ridicule from the other to announce it. I heard familiar lines illustrating the interest they had in each-other (Beatrice wanting news of Benedick, Benedick pointing out the greater beauty – age memory alert – of Beatrice) with more or just imagined emphasis. There were also little touches like the bunch of flowers that Benedick appeared to be bringing for someone when he first entered. It also made me realise that the line about Beatrice lending Benedict her heart, really needs to be better explained in the play.
Mark Addy and Trevor Peacock are likely to get a lot of praise for Dogberry and Verges, their scenes were funny, assured and moved along quickly. However, for me, Mark Addy didn't quite surpass Sarah Woodward in the all-female version of the play at the Globe a few years back. I realise of course that I'm not comparing like with like, the performances had each had their own style.
I keep wanting to describe the set as a grandiose rotating pergola. That doesn't make it sound as good or as impressive as it was but somehow captures it for me. Although it was an open structure with close set wooden uprights forming a central see-through wall I failed to notice people uncovering the pond. And although Simon Russell Beale was very funny when he fell into the pond, I felt that when Zoë Wanamaker fell in later it was almost because her agent had insisted on her having a comic immersion too.
The rotating set together with several cast members in common (Zoë Wanamaker, Susannah Fielding and Maggie McCarthy) reminded me of The Rose Tattoo earlier this year. I half expected a goat to be chased around the set.

Othello by William Shakespeare, Donmar Warehouse, 5 Dec 2007 – Dirested by Michael Grandage

2007-12-09T16:14:00.000Z

I'm not sure if this was the best production of Othello (of a half dozen or so) that I've seen; it was certainly the best Othello. In fact this was the first time that I've understood why great actors in the past have chosen to black up as Othello rather than play what seemed (according to the productions I've seen) to be the stronger role of Iago.
It has been a pet theory of mine for a while, that productions have centred on Iago because, since no white actor is allowed to black up anymore, that is where the casting people put their biggest star (who would most likely be white). Of course I could mention the dread phrase institutional racism but I'll leave that to those who believe it to be true or just want to twit liberal theatre establishments. It is certainly true that the Othello productions I’ve seen have focussed more on Iago and have been sold to the public mostly based on their Iago (in my case people like Ian McKellen, Simon Russell Beale and Antony Sher).
On the face of it this, production has its biggest star playing Iago. However in play itself Ewan McGregor’s acting was several notches below that of Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Othello. You couldn’t say that Chiwetel Ejiofor stole the show because it is meant to be Othello’s show (hence the name) he outshone almost everyone else. Actually I could not quite buy McGregor as the villain; there is just a little too much un-dissembling charm about him. He certainly was not the nice guy but also he was far from the Machiavellian bigot that I’ve seen before. I didn't get the feeling that he was motivated hatred or that he was transferring of his own jealousy about his wife onto Othello. It did make me wonder if the Iago's jealousy about Emilia might be a good way of explaining his motivation. Certainly in this production I got the impression that Emilia was trying to be in love with her husband even if he had given up. Doubtless this will have been speculated about many times before by people who study Shakespeare rather than just watch it but it was the first time that I've noticed it.

Absurd Person Singular by Alan Ayckbourn, Garrick Theatre, 4 Dec 2007 – Directed by Alan Strachan

2007-12-07T08:30:00.001Z

There was a time when I couldn't stand Alan Ayckbourn's plays; the problem is that I can't remember exactly why, other than it had something to do with the way that he seemed to sneer and laugh at the very people that made up his audience. Of course that was probably what he was trying to do. The thing is that, in the case of this play, he created a group of very unsympathetic characters almost fitting into stereotypes: the upper middle class couple, polite but grounded in their superiority; the intellectual couple who can’t quite cope with the world and the chiselling lower middle class box-wallah couple who act almost as the nemesis for the rest.
This difficulty for the audience in caring about the cast wasn't helped in the production by the glacial pace of the first act. Still worse were the several occasions when the stage was left empty and the silence in the theatre was so profound that I imagined hearing conversations of passengers as their tube trains rattled past a few feet from the auditorium. Perhaps this will be seen as an exciting and dangerous innovation by the time the production gets reviewed.
I can't help feeling that this production has been a bit rushed. It was only announced a few weeks back as a replacement for Bad Girls so it was possibly being prepared for a tour. The odd month of single week-long runs around the country would probably have knocked things into shape and certainly would have upped the speed and the laugh count.
As it was my companions for the evening decided that they'd had enough after the first act and left. This was a bit of a pity because the play picked up in the second and third acts. They also missed David Bamber stripping down to his vest which was remarkable because he seems to have acquired the arms and torso of a body builder. He looked a bit like Brad Pitt's body double and I half expected him to start shouting “Stella, Stella” and stalk off looking for a Blanche Dubois to ravish.
Another oddish thing was that David Horovitch seemed to be channelling William Franklyn. It suited his character quite well but it was strange to see.

Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco, Royal Court, 24 Sep 2007 – Directed by Dominic Cooke

2007-09-26T12:38:00.000Z

If you have a wish to upset your fellow theatre goers and are prepared to look like a complete idiot, you could do worse than to say, in a loud voice, “Of course, it’s based on the Invasion of the Body Snatchers, you know”. This is almost certainly completely untrue but once the thought entered my head, as I read the final scene before the play started, I couldn’t help seeing some parallels. People getting replaced by inhuman creatures; the surviving group of humanity dwindling to a man and a woman; finally the woman succumbs leaving the man alone to continue the fight. Also the play is said to be about the rise of fascism in the thirties while film is said to be about the rise (or fear thereof) of communism in the fifties.
This is just mischievous; there are almost certainly armies of academics who can prove the conventional wisdom, that this is a play about everybody conforming to a bourgeois herd mentality. There are plenty of differences: In the play people transform; in the movie they are replaced. In the play they become animalistic, instinctive and driven by feeling not thought; in the film they become emotionless and cold. However as the film came out three years before the play, it is not impossible that it created a spark or help kindle one – it’s just very unlikely. I did spend a little time wondering if any other American sci-fi horror films of the fifties could be adapted or re-imagined as absurdist comedies. I shall have to think about whether anything can be done with The Day the Earth Stood Still, This Island Earth or I Married a Monster from Outer Space.
I first saw this play in a hut built in the middle of the Lyric Hammersmith’s rehearsal rooms, the rhinoceros transformations were handled by plunging the hut into total darkness. In contrast this production uses some very realistic looking rhino parts although as I was sitting in the circle I was able to see balaclava’d people manipulating scenery and poking horns on blocks of wood through bits of the set. As I’ve mentioned the set there are a couple of vaguely pointless things to point out. First Benedict Cumberbatch pushed bits of balustrade into the stairwell when the staircase collapsed in one scene which I thought odd because they weren’t in the way or anything. Second they seemed to take an inordinate amount of care in replacing the wooden slatted backdrop used in the first two acts, with a more wrecked version for the third act. The way that they were inched up and down the fly-tower (respectively) seemed to indicate that they were too heavy or bulky.

Fragments (five short pieces) by Samuel Beckett, Young Vic - Maria, 17 Sep 2007 – Directed by Peter Brook

2007-09-19T17:20:00.000Z

There are times when I go to the theatre that I feel as if I’ve missed something. It isn’t that I’ve failed to enjoy the play (or in this case playlets) or the performances, it’s more that there was something bigger going on, a subtext obvious to everybody else, that I just couldn’t see.
In this case I think it has something to do with the fact that I don’t really know what’s so special about Peter Brook. It isn’t an Emperor’s New Clothes situation, I’ve only seen two other productions directed by him and they were both good (his Hamlet with Adrian Lester was a bit short and over cut for my tastes but still good) and this collection of small plays was fine. It was just that I felt as if ought to have seen something extraordinary and I didn’t think it was. I’m not saying it was dull or flat or in any way bad but while I thought it was good and enjoyable I got the impression that the rest of the audience were thinking “Wow!”.
Peter Brook has been revered as a director for about four decades and directors and actors head to Paris to “learn at his feet” so may be I’ve picked up enough second-hand Brook to be unfazed and unamazed by the real thing. Am I that jaded?
It was similar with the performances, it took me a while to get into Kathyrn Hunter and Marcello Magni but now they are firm favourites and I always find them excellent. However if I say to myself that they were “excellent as always”, somehow, in my head, it feels as if I’m saying that they were just ordinary. It didn’t help that the thoughts going through my head as watched Kathryn Hunter doing Rockaby had more to do with wondering what it would have been like to see Billie Whitelaw do it. I was rather taken aback by the rapturous applause at the end of the piece and felt that my neighbour clapping with out-stretched arms was a little over the top but I knew that I could well be wrong and I felt as if I hadn’t been paying proper attention.
Marcello Magni had me thinking along the lines of “I’ve seen him do stuff like this before; he’s very good”, which, to me, sounds conceited and almost like a reverse compliment. Actually one of my major thoughts about mister Magni was how much better he looks with the remnants of his hair cut short.
For all the enjoyment I had during the performances, I left the theatre feeling as if I’d missed the point.

All About My Mother. Adapted by Samuel Adamson from the film by Pedro Almodovar, Old Vic, 3 Sep 2007 – Directed by Tom Cairns

2007-09-05T10:45:00.000Z

There’s been a lot of stuff in the media and blogs about adapting films to stage recently, much of it prompted by this production as well as other adaptations this year like Elling and A Matter of Life and Death. I can’t say that I have a general opinion about this as it will always depend on the adaptation. Simply trying to put a film on stage is unlikely to work: the scene changes are far too rapid for the comfort of the stage management team and the audience; it is difficult to create atmosphere using montages or settings (although it can be fun to see it attempted); and you can’t really do close ups, where the acting can be just eye work, unless you are in a small intimate space.
Elling, I’ve been told, suffers because of this last factor; what worked at the Bush is lost in the bigger space of the Trafalgar. I had a similar feeling about some scenes in All About My Mother either because the acting didn’t seem to get past the first few rows or because I thought they’d had to add a little too much pantomime in order to reach all parts of the Old Vic’s barn-like auditorium. It was only in a few scenes though.
If I have to generalise I think that stage adaptations should always feel very different to the film and if possible make you go back to the film with fresh eyes or renewed curiosity. This was certainly the case with A Matter of Life and Death (a film I love dearly) even if they changed it to show that RAF bomber pilots were war criminals undeserving of second chances and had the love story being motored by only one person instead of the normal two. This production of All About My Mother will certainly send me back to the movie but I suspect that it will be more because I haven’t seen it before than if they’ve done something innovative with the adaptation.
Nobody seems to worry about the adaptation of plays into films which, of course, is much more common and can create just as many great films as mediocre ones. The thing to do, as far as I can see, is always to compare the adaptation with the source and relish the differences rather than whine about them.
Something that I found myself missing in this production was Spain. It would have been idiotic for everybody to speak in Spanish accents and I thought that giving Catalan people Welsh accents was a nice touch but I missed having the sense of place which is almost certainly in the movie. Of course attempting to give a “flavour of Spain” to the piece might have led the production down the path of cliché and lazy stereotype.
There was something else that bothered me which I’ll come to after saying that I enjoyed myself, liked that fact that Lesley Manville was playing the main character and was able to dominate proceedings and that rest of the cast, especially Mark Gatiss and Diana Rigg, were fine even if there was some mixing up of names like Lola and Rosa among the older cast members. This thing that bothered me is integral to the whole piece and to the original movie, the mother is just too good, her demons external factors not internal ones, she has the capacity to make everyone love her and everybody does. That is probably the point of the whole thing and I’m missing it because I want drama, conflict and inner turmoil.

In The Club by Richard Bean, Hampstead Theatre, 4-Aug-2007 – Directed David Grindley

2007-08-06T20:42:00.000Z

James Fleet who stars in this production, was in the first professionally produced Shakespeare play that I ever saw. It was an RSC production of Taming of the Shrew directed by Jonathan Miller and starring Brian (the better Hannibal Lecter) Cox and Fiona (there’s a danger she’ll only be remembered for playing Mrs Dursley in the Harry Potter films) Shaw, back in 1988. Not really relevant to a modern take on a sex farce but it gives me the opportunity to mention that I completed the set of 37 main Shakespeare plays last year when I saw Titus Andronicus. I’d like to pretend that this gives me the right not to allow people to pontificate about Shakespeare within my earshot, without my written permission but it wouldn’t be enforceable even if it were true.
I have the feeling that I’m not going to be pleasant about this play so I would like to say that I enjoyed myself, got all the jokes and laughed in all the right places. It was only afterwards that the doubts started to creep in. It is a rather well thought out and constructed but I felt that I could still see the scaffolding. I sometimes found it too obvious when future gags were setup, an example being the two identical suitcases that you knew were going to get swapped at some point.
I reckon the biggest problem with trying to create farce these days is the sex. It is handled well here (a touch of the Measure for Measure or All’s Well that Ends Well) but in general the problem with sex these days is that it’s too easy. Sex farces used to be based on people desperately attempting to have sex but being prevented by the forces of morality or society, the agents of those forces or the vicar. Here the desperation for sex of the hero was the same but most of the characters are happy to help him out. Sex is no longer meant seen to be naughty or to be giggled at, it is actually rather serious, potentially hurtful and only to be avoided through great effort and strength of will. This play may have got it about right but how many other ways are there of doing it (doing it, he-he)?
Another thing that bugged me was the depiction of women, while I didn’t find them sexist or stereotypical they did seem to conform to some well-worn archetypes. You have a mild German version of the dragon lady, a French nymphomaniac of a certain age and an intelligent, capable, sexy-yet-unavailable young woman who might as well have been called Polly and played by Connie Booth. Most disheartening was Carla Mendonca’s character whose sole function seemed to be to show various forms of disappointment with her man while not actually contributing much to the comedy. I know the writer is a bloke but I’ve seen women do comedy, I’ve even seen Carla Mendonca doing comedy; I just wish he’d made more imaginative use of them. Of course similar things could probably be said about the male characters if I’d bothered to notice.

Absurdia: 2 Plays by N.F.Simpson and 1 Play by Michael Frayn, Donmar Warehouse, 26-Jul-2007 – Director Douglas Hodge

2007-07-27T02:50:00.000Z

If I wanted to be more pompous than usual I would point out that it was rather absurd for those three people to leave halfway through the performance (perhaps following the diktat of certain bloggers). It was a little mystifying; everybody else seemed to be having a rather good time and it certainly wasn’t at a natural break (i.e. in the gap between plays – as there was no interval). Whatever their reasons (at the time I suspected that they where disgusted at the notion of so much laughter in the Donmar), they missed a rather interesting mime where Lyndsey Marshal had an invisible man burying his head in her bosom. They also missed Judith Scott almost corpsing during Gladly Otherwise.
While I enjoyed the plays, especially the N.F. Simpson ones I did get the odd feeling that I was watching museum pieces as if “one simply doesn’t do plays like that anymore”. It’s a pity but I suppose that a genre where the extraordinary, weird and/or absurd are treated as ordinary is easily open to abuse by bad writers and worse plays. I could see how things could feel contrived and heavy handed if wrongly handled.
Michael Frayn’s play the Crimson Hotel didn’t really fit with N.F. Simpsons pair of plays, it was perhaps too cerebral and not as linguistically playful. All the same as a fan of Feydeau farces I enjoyed the setup of the play and it wasn’t just because mister Frayn happened to be in the audience.
When I first saw the set something about it reminded slightly of a very famous Buster Keaton stunt (I also think that a recreation of it won the Turner Prize – later, Deadpan by Steve McQueen). It turned out that they did a variation on the stunt to change the set between plays.
One last thing to remember if you see the plays: In the Crimson Hotel don’t applaud until the spotlight shining on the picnic basket goes out, otherwise, as happened during this performance, the actors have to wait for the applause to die down before they say (or repeat) their final lines. Of course with Michael Frayn’s reputation for changing his plays (almost every major production of Noises Off seems to produce another heavily re-written version of the play) he may have altered it the next time it’s performed.

The Enchantment by Victoria Benedictsson, Cottesloe Theatre, 25-Jul-2007 – Director Paul Miller

2007-07-26T03:35:00.000Z

I like to see Nancy Carroll in a role where she can dominate proceedings because I reckon that when she is in that kind of part, she’s pretty fab. If I used the phrase I’d say she was electric. I spent most of the play wishing and willing her to shake a little vitality into the piece but I’m not sure that the material allowed for it. I felt it was Niamh Cusack that had the stronger part and even though Nancy Carroll was of stage for almost thew hole play I could muster a great deal of enthusiasm for or interest in her character.
Additionally Zubin Varla who is usually an actor I look forward to seeing wasn’t quite as sexy or hypnotic as the play seemed to suggest his character should be.
The play was done ‘in the round’ and something I think I’ve noticed about plays ‘in the round’ (mainly at the Orange Tree in Richmond) is that there is almost always a control-room bias, where the performance seems mostly to be directed towards the lighting/stage/sound control room where, presumably, the director sat during rehearsals. This tends to mean that the further you are from the control-room, as an audience member, the more that there is a distance between you and the action and you often look at the back of actor. Another disadvantage of ‘in the round’ productions is that you can often have some actor’s back blocking your view of the rest of the actors. Some directors experienced in ‘in the round’ productions manage to strike a balance between keeping actors shifting the angles and stopping it from looking like a whirling dance. In the play the material and the direction seemed a little static.
Something about the set that I found almost unforgivable was a piece of set used as a window or door onto a garden. It wasn’t the objects (windows and doors) but the fact that they were placed in between two banks of seating (opposite the control room) in line with the backmost row. The result of this careful planning was that people sitting in rows E, F and G get several minutes of action (split over the play) taking place behind them. This is where I was sitting and it wasn’t until the interval that I saw the picture of a sculpture of a prone figure that served as a backdrop and may well have had a significance lost on me because I had my back to it.
Reading the programme notes it appears that this play was finished by a colleague after the playwright committed suicide. I couldn’t help thinking of Sarah Kane’s play 4:48 Psychosis which was also written shortly before the author’s suicide. Of course that’s pretty much where the similarity ends; I probably just wanted to show myself my erudition.
Finally I found myself being annoyed in the early part of the first act by the sound effect of a collared dove (I think) cooing its three syllable song. The only thing that calmed me was the thought that a critic might mistake the sound for the call of the cuckoo (the first two syllables of each bird’s call sound similar but the cuckoo is more strident and the collared dove has an extra syllable) and then mention it as being a significant clue to unlocking the mystery of the play. I would then be able to feel superior to them and all would be well.

In Celebration by David Storey, Duke of York’s Theatre, 17-Jul-2007 – Director Anna Mackmin

2007-07-18T17:32:00.001Z

I get the feeling that when this play was first produced back in 1969 people would have understood the problems that two of the brothers had, without needing any explanation. Perhaps it can be said that there was a time when working class people with an education would fret and worry (or cry themselves to sleep) over things like leaving their roots behind and going to live a stultifying middle-class existence that is nowhere near the ambition or the promise that was the motivation for all that book learning. The modern suspicion of educated people being fake or not ‘real’ and the idea of the impotence caused by over-thinking a subject, are probably echoes of this. Of course I can guff on about the attitudes of the working classes for ages (even with my ignorance of the subject) but the point I’m really trying to make is that this is something the play doesn’t do. It takes it as read that people will get it and the thing is that I’m not sure that people do. I was left, along with other members of the group with whom I went to this play, with the feeling that there were several pages of dialogue missing from the play which would explain just what was troubling the brothers, Andrew and Stephen. There are intimations that the mother was somehow a hypocritical tyrant (a desire for extreme cleanliness together with being immorally six months pregnant when she got married) but they never really came to anything and the mother was not anything like harridans such as the mother in the Anniversary or even Sailor Beware.
I also wondered if the play should have been set on an earlier wedding anniversary - the twenty-fifth would have been much suitable for the brothers’ characters and given more immediacy to their problems. Of course you wouldn’t have got the retirement sub-plot or the settled self-satisfied success of the middle brother.
The reason I went in a group was that a large number of people wanted to see Orlando Bloom on stage and he didn’t disappoint, even if they would have preferred him in a starrier role with some pyrotechnic acting (Paul Hilton had that role). What I couldn’t quite understand is why he was made up to look like Richard Benjamin (it was the moustache and the slicked-down curly hair). I think if more of the Orlando fans in the audience had seen ‘classics’ like Westworld or Love at First Bite, there might have been giggles. There’s been some stuff on websites recently about applauding the star on their first entrance and I was expecting a bit when mister Bloom came on but I only heard one unconfident clap which quickly faded away.

The Hothouse by Harold Pinter, Lyttelton Theatre, 11-Jul-2007 – Director Ian Rickson

2007-07-13T01:44:00.000Z

OK, so this is how Harold Pinter does a stage kiss: Firstly he draws his lips back in a toothlesss grin so that they are pressed hard against his teeth, then he attaches his mouth to that of the kissee and rolls his head from side to side in the manner of an old-fashioned hand-blotter. I mention this because I first saw Pinter’s kissing method in a production of The Hothouse at the Comedy Theatre back in 1995. I have also seen him do the same thing in a number of other productions of his own plays. Perhaps it is actually the correct way to do a stage kiss, maybe it’s the best way to do a real-life kiss and I should stop leading with the tongue.
The part that Pinter played was Roote, the head of the ‘rest home’, which was taken by Stephen Moore in this production. I’m not sure he was quite as menacing as I reckoned the part warranted also he had to be prompted several times which spoiled the flow rather. All the same when he wasn’t adding his own pauses to Pinter’s he did convey slightly dotty authority in a pleasing way.
At one point Paul Ritter, playing the part of Lush, entered smoking a cigarette which reminded me both of the smoking ban which it flouted in the name (and legal loophole) of artistic integrity and the paean to tobacco that he once delivered in the opening lines of a production of Moliere’s Don Juan. I couldn’t help feeling that although theatres can get away with smoking on stage (so long as there aren’t too many anti-smoking jobsworths in the local council), the fear of potential litigation or even just awkward questions, is going to put them off showing plays which feature smoking. It isn’t just the usual suspects like Noel Coward’s plays or Don Juan but I wonder if they would have produced more recent plays like President of an Empty Room (at the Cottesloe) or Anna in the Tropics (at Hampstead) both of which were set in cigar factories (with attendant smoking). Neither of the plays could be described as classics but they were worthwhile attempts at drama.
I also found myself thinking that Paul Ritter is in danger of becoming the best character actor in London (if he isn’t already – his Robin Day impersonation in The Reporter was a classic) especially when, after his first major speech, he received a round of applause.
A very petty point that I took perverse joy in noticing was that the glasses or tumblers that they used for the whiskey drinking scenes weren’t really Pinter regulation issue. They were a little too much ‘garage giveaway’ and didn’t possess thick or heavy enough bases to make me think that they were the real thing. I’m sure it’s not actually in the stage directions (or even important) it’s just that I associate any drinking in Pinter plays with a certain heavy bottomed style of glassware.
Finally if you want to chuckle at the National Theatre’s expense you might want to read the details of the Gala to celebrate Olivier’s Centenary which appears at the end of an article about Olivier which seems to be in all NT programmes at the moment. It’s just that it appears that Mister Olivier hasn’t been born yet.

Glass Eels by Nell Leyshon, Hampstead Theatre, 10-Jul-2007 – Director Lucy Bailey

2007-07-11T13:59:00.000Z

I get the feeling that at least one review of this show will start along the lines of, “Although thisplay is set in the Somerset Levels, I couldn’t help think of the problems they’ve been having in Yorkshire recently”. Basically the stage gets gradually flooded during the show. It’s quite a nice effect, a small stream (pretty much just a groove cut into the floor) trickles and occasionally gushes throughout, from under a bed, the covering the dried out mud-effect floor. It was odd to notice that although the actors showed no difficulty in wading about in (sometimes) ankle-deep water, when it came to taking the bow at the end several were on tip-toe trying to avoid getting any wetter. I suppose I could go through a list of other waterlogged plays I’ve seen such as the Almeida’s Tempest or Terry Johnson’s play Imagine Drowning at the Hampstead where Sylvestra Le Touzel was dropped into a large glass-sided tank of water at front of the stage, but there really isn’t much to say other than I’m always unnecessarily concerned about the practicalities and the potential damage it does to the props. Actually I did spend a little time thinking that they’d have to use a reservoir of some kind to feed the stream, rather than just turning on a tap from the mains, so that they’d get the right amount of water on stage. I really should think of more interesting or uplifting things at the theatre.
I have to say that I didn’t really get the point behind the imagery of the eels and it did feel over-repeated at times. The back of the play text mentioned “a girl’s sexual awakening” and at the time I didn’t see the connection with eels stirring in the mud, building up their reserves of fat for their great migration to the Sargasso Sea. Thinking about it now I’d concede that there probably is one and I was too obtuse to think about it.
I’m not sure whether there’s much to this play really. Pretty much a father and daughter need to have a good chat about the death of his wife and her mother. All the same it didn’t feel like I’d spent as much as 90 minutes waiting for this to happen when the play ended. I think I would have liked more insight into the character of the father (played by Philip Joseph) and Kenneth (played by Tom Burke).
The only actor I had any problem with was Tom Georgeson as the grandfather. His part seemed to be written as a frail crotchety old man but he didn’t convince me that he lacked the strength of body or strength of will that this character needed. It was a casting thing not a performance thing, perhaps I always see too much iron in Tom Georgeson’s soul.

Love’s Labour’s Lost by William Shakespeare, Globe Theatre, 3-Jul-2007 – Director Dominic Dromgoole

2007-07-06T19:56:00.000Z

It took me well into the afternoon to realise the connection between seeing Love’s Labour’s Lost at the Globe and Doctor Who (it’s the play that they did before the Doctor met William Shakespeare in the recent series). That said if I were collecting Doctor Who connections with this play I could point out that I saw John Barrowman as Dumaine in the play four years ago. God this is the second time I’ve started with an anecdote about Doctor Who (note to self – get a life).
My afternoon’s realisation did start a familiar train of thought about the way they recreate the theatre audiences of Shakespeare’s day on TV and film. I’m not sure that they do the bad teeth anymore – rotten teeth were solely a rich person’s affliction before sugar became widespread and affordable. If I have problems with the way that the audience is depicted it’s the women, who have been allowed in the galleries but wouldn’t have been in the pit unless they had something to sell (oranges, their bodies etc.) and the general wealth of the pit audience. Although it was cheap, a penny (I think), to get into the pit, that penny had to be disposable income and since many people were getting paid just a few pounds a year a penny becomes a sizable chunk of cash (equivalent to about £10 nowadays, perhaps. The point is that the pit audience probably wouldn’t be filled with the dregs of society. Nowadays the pit seems to be full of students and tourists who probably don’t quite count as the dregs.
I have a bit of a bee in my bonnet about the Globe, in that I reckon that Shakespeare wrote for both the courtyard style of theatre (i.e. derived from an inn courtyard), such as the Globe and the darkened hall, such as the Blackfriars theatre that he helped by late in his career or the halls of great houses where he’d give more intimate performances. These two approaches give a different style of play: in a courtyard the actors are very aware of the audience and the need to keep them attentive so that things like soliloquies could be thought of as one sided conversations; In a darkened hall soliloquies are addressed into nothingness (or the lighting gantry attached to the circle) and become more solitary. The thing is that after the Restoration and pretty much until now all theatre has been the “darkened hall” type; the audience reactions beyond laughter and applause in the right places becoming less and less acceptable.. Even open air theatres like Regent’s Park or Greek/Roman theatres expect the audiences to be quiet, attentive and invisible. With the Globe you could argue that they’ve reinvented the courtyard style of theatre where the audience becomes more of a participant, which is unfamiliar and possibly uncomfortable to both actors and critics. Of course there may be good reasons why courtyard theatres died out. They tend to encourage a raucous and pantomimic style of playing, where it is difficult to be quiet (especially at the Globe with its attendant aircraft going over head) and subtle and fine language loses out to playing things for laughs. That said I’m glad the Globe has a go.
This particular play certainly upped the laughter and pantomime at the expense of the dialogue but with Love’s Labour’s Lost and its rhyming verse-speak, I didn’t think it was necessarily a bad thing. There is rather too much of Shakespeare doing the ‘fooling’ stuff where people stand around to explain and analyse puns – was that ever funny? Everybody seemed to behaving a good time even if William Mannering as Longaville over did it slightly and sometimes gave the impression that he would rather be copping off with one of the men. On the other hand Timothy Walker (who I saw as Hamlet in a Cheek by Jowl production back in 1990) was almost too slow, melancholic and incomprehensible as the comedy Spaniard, Don Adriano.
Anybody thinking of the standing in the Pit should avoid standing too near the right hand (as you face the stage) zig-zag platform that comes out from the stage unless they are happy to see a very great deal of John Bett. I’m not sure if it was justified by the plot but it certainly got some shrieks and lots of laughter.
A name that jumped out at me in the cast list was Oona Chaplin, who played Katherine. And I do mean the name – I’m not sure I have anything bad or even good to say about her acting although she did mange to pull a string of pearls apart which may not have been intended. The only other Oona Chaplin I’ve heard of was Charlie Chaplin’s last wife and I thought it was unlikely that anyone other than a member of Charlie Chaplin’s family would name their daughter Oona so when I got home I checked the web and discovered that she was Geraldine Chaplin’s daughter (and thus Charlie and Oona’s granddaughter). Not that interesting, I know but watching her and wondering I couldn’t help feeling how unlike Charlie Chaplin she looked. Of course the same could be said for the statue of Charlie Chaplin in Leicester Square.

Bedroom Farce by Alan Ayckbourn, Richmond Theatre 25-Jun-2007 – Director Robin Herford

2007-06-28T03:02:00.000Z

Time was when if I wanted to impress friends who were Doctor Who fans I would tell them that I’d once sat six feet away from Louise ‘Leela’ Jameson while she got naked and had sex in a play. These days, with the all new Doctor Who series, I’d probably have to tell them that I’d once seen David Tennant in his pants (‘What the Butler Saw’ Lyttelton 1995 – as it happens) to earn the same kind of Doctor Who related kudos. Of course what I never mentioned was just how clumsy and awkwardly I thought Louise Jameson’s sex scene was written.
I mention this Louise Jameson stuff, obviously, because she was in the play but also to mark a kind of turning point. This was the first time I’d seen her play the part of an old woman, well not exactly old but late 50s. I think the phrase I’m looking for here is playing a part where she was no longer expected to be sexually appealing. Of course I haven’t seen her on stage for over 10 years nor have I followed her recent TV career so any switch to less sexually vital parts may have happened a while back and I’ve been too slow to notice.
Although the programme was full of blurb about the seventies, when the play was written, this production was updated for modern times. Doing this didn’t seem to involve much more than the casual mention of emails. However it did make the older couple (Colin Baker and Louise Jameson) seem even more old fashioned than they were originally written (50 somethings of today expressing attitudes of 50 somethings from 30 years ago) and now I think about it, the absence of mobile phones was a bit odd – although their presence would have made the second half of the play pointless.
Another point of interest for me was that my namesake Timothy Watson was appearing as the bed-bound character Nick. I’m never sure whether I want him to do well as an actor or not. He always seems to get pretty good reviews in the stage stuff he does but I haven’t seen him that often. Also for some reason I never got round to see him when he was in the Woman in Black for what seemed like a couple of years.

Betrayal by Harold Pinter, Donmar Warehouse, 21-Jun-2007 – Director Roger Michell

2007-06-24T22:54:00.000Z

I’m beginning to think that I don’t really like this play. The conceit of telling the story backwards is fine, the characterisation is great and the dialogue is mostly brilliant but there’s something about the play that leaves me cold. It is the single Pinter play that I’ve seen the most (four times now) so familiarity could be making it pall but I’ve seen the Homecoming three times and I still think well of that play. It might be a combination of not being able to warm to or care about Dervla Kirwan in this production and the whole stew business. The stew has never felt right, it’s like an indigestible lump that, for me, fixes the play in its period (late sixties/early seventies – when this production was set) and doesn’t seem to belong as part of an afternoon romantic tryst. I know that there are all sorts of practical reasons why the couple would want to dine in the privacy of their Kilburn flat but it’s a fragment of unromantic domesticity that find jarring. It would be even worse if the play was set or updated to the twenty-first century where the cooking reference would either feel anachronistic (the female lover cooking for her man) or would have something to do with heating up a couple of Marks and Spencer ready meals. Maybe I’m bothered by the notion that everything else in the play would allow it to be set at anytime in the last fifty years which would make it more timeless and universal.

Another thing that bothered me about this production was that I found myself distracted by the set while there was action on stage. It wasn’t the moth that seemed to have got trapped in the projector that showed the year of the scene. It was the tracks of the curtain rails on the ceiling; I couldn’t resist trying to trace their complex route before realising that I should be watching what Toby Stephens was up to. The set such as it was, was really just several sets of long, thick, white net curtains that were swished around the stage between scenes by the stage hands and left in different configurations to indicate the walls for different rooms. Oddly when I came in to the theatre and saw single curtain almost forming a box on stage I was reminded of one of the last Pinter’s I saw at the Donmar. That play was Old Times and it was, if memory serves, performed entirely inside a large Perspex box. The odd thing is that, that production had the same director and designer, Roger Michell and William Dudley which I didn’t know until I looked it up in the programme.

I discovered that I can’t really remember the male actors in previous the productions of this play. The only one that really rests in my memory is Martin Shaw who played Robert in the first production I saw back in 1991. The pity is that the man who played Jerry in that production was Bill Nighy several years before he became BILL NIGHY; I just can’t call him to mind.

The only other that might just be worth mentioning is that there was a fleeting moment where Sam West’s mouth was set exactly like his father’s. It lasted just long enough for me to notice it and wonder if it was going to happen again.

The Five Wives of Maurice Pinder by Matt Charman, NT Cottesloe 18-Jun-2007 - Director: Sarah Frankcom

2007-06-20T00:21:00.000Z

Someone is going to get hurt. Someone in Row A. Someone in a seat numbered between fifteen and twenty-something. I know this because I was in Row A and I saw the chips of masonry fly in the direction of those seats as the breeze-block wall was knocked down with a sledge hammer. OK I’m being overly dramatic but it was slightly unnerving to have a young man swinging a hammer within a few feet of where I sat.

I wondered if perhaps the designer hadn’t quite taken into account that there would need to be an audience sharing the same space as their transverse set. It did seem to take up most of the Cottesloe’s floor space. Also people in my row were turfed out during the interval so that stage hands could lay a concrete (concrete-effect on wooden board anyway) floor on part of the set [Insert slow builder joke here].

As the play got underway I sorted through what my nice liberal opinion of polygamy/polyandry should be. Basically I concluded that so long as it wasn’t abusive or fraudulent then it wasn’t worth complaining about. See, nice, liberal and just a bit glib. Actually I got the feeling that this is more or less what the author, Matt Charman, felt too, although he seems to have concluded that polygamy is always going to be abusive even if there’s no overt violence and little psychological bullying. There was only one outside character expressing moral outrage at the situation but he was driven in part by lust and wasn’t given a strong enough argument against Mister Pinder’s lifestyle. I’m not sure that I entirely bought the set up and maybe there was a more powerful play in the story of the introduction of the second wife rather than the introduction of the fourth and fifth ones. Also perhaps there would have been more tension if Maurice Pinder had been written as more charismatic and manipulative but then the situation would have felt almost ordinary which I think.was the author’s intention.

I felt the need to remind myself about Matt Charman’s first play A Night at the Dogs which I saw a couple of years ago (and which won the Verity Bargate award). I couldn’t remember whether the reviews of it had been positive or excited and my own recollection doesn’t go much beyond ‘interesting’ which is my usual unhelpful comment. I think I missed any common themes between the two plays. They both end, I reckon, with the optimistic possible future slightly outweighing the pessimistic one but in the case of Five Wives… I’m not sure that there was a strong sense that Pinder had learnt anything or changed. Perhaps that isn’t necessary and it probably wasn’t the intention; it’s just me wanting a bit more of a battle.

Gaslight by Patrick Hamilton, Old Vic 11-Jun-2007 - Director: Peter Gill

2007-06-12T00:56:00.000Z

For some reason during tonight’s performance I kept wondering if I’d ever seen Rosamund Pile in colour. Something about her pale skin and hair together with her grey dress made me wonder if I’d ever seen her in colourful than a beige or cream. Thinking harder I believe she wore some bright colours (or brightly coloured trimmings) in Summer and Smoke last year.

When I first heard about Rosamund Pike she annoyed me. It wasn’t her fault of course it was that the publicity for Die Another Die seemed to talk about her as if she was already well known (none of the usual ‘newcomer Rosamund Pike’ stuff). As her name and face were unfamiliar to me from TV, film or theatre I wrongly assumed that she was some model-turned-actress doyen of the style pages and celebrity mags. I never saw any evidence of that, though and she impressed me in things like Hitchcock Blonde and Summer and Smoke. That said I’m still a little uneasy about exactly where she earned her top of the bill status. She’s good but is she that good?

I suspect that the director and cast decided that they couldn’t do this play as straight melodrama. It wasn’t quite played for laughs either but there was a slightly jokey feel to things when Kenneth Cranham was on stage. I hope it was deliberate because if the occasional, sometimes nervous laughs were unintentional then it won’t look good in front of the critics. It certainly didn’t match the descriptions of the play and subsequent movies which talk about the play as a psychological thriller. Perhaps playing it straight would have looked too ridiculous to modern eyes.

There was one incident that almost halted the play tonight, Ms Pike managed to drop one of the important-to-the-plot rubies which bounced nosily of the stage before disappearing from sight. Pike and Cranham struggled not to join in with the audience’s laughter (which turned into applause) and it was rather lucky that an interval started a couple of minutes later because I’m not sure that they or the audience felt willing to take anything too seriously at the time.

I was actually mildly disappointed with the play given my knowledge of Patrick Hamilton’s novels – I remember being astounded at the depiction of madness and obsession in Hangover Square and it was a book that I’d only picked up because I’d heard it was something that I vaguely ought to read. The play’s ending is telegraphed well before halfway and there is never enough jeopardy for the heroine. I almost wanted it all to be in her imagination or some tortuous trick cooked up by her husband and the ‘detective’, maybe even that the detective was the bad guy. I’m not sure that the husband was given enough opportunity by the play to convince her that she imagined everything.

I’m complaining too much so I ought to mention that everybody seemed to have a good time and even booed the husband (Andrew Woodall) as if he were a pantomime villain (not sure that the cast and director were necessarily looking for that reaction).

I’m always reminded when I see Rowena Cooper (who played Elizabeth) of the first time I encountered her. It was on TV in the eighties where she played Alan B’Stard’s male election agent who got a sex-change part way though the series.

Andrew Woodall was in Peter Gill’s play Certain Young Men and I remember in that play he played a man in a monogamous homosexual relationship who has an affair with a younger man (possibly played by Danny Dyer). His character cursed himself for his weakness but still gave into temptation. Not relevant of course.

Henry IV part one - National Theatre Olivier - 19 April 2005

2005-04-26T19:48:00.000Z

Written by William Shakespeare
Directed by Nicholas Hytner
Designed by Mark Thompson
I find that the third time is the charm when it comes to Shakespeare’s plays. The third time I see any individual Shakespeare play I seem to see the whole of it for the first time. I am always aware that I haven’t really heard some scenes properly before and the third time it all seems to fit together. Of course I still miss stuff; I remember, in my sixth watching of King Lear, when I suddenly heard the “could you undo this button” line. In fact at the time I remember wondering if it was a genuine ad-lib.
Is this production there was a whole “anon, anon, sir” bit that I don’t remember before.
Having said that I stopping missing bit in the third viewing I was up against Michael Gambon’s accent which I couldn’t quite place (West Country, Irish or both?), and which swallowed many of his sentences. When Gambon as Falstaff, first entered with Hal they both apparently urinated. Hal was standing near a tap on a standpipe but I couldn’t see is Falstaff were using anything. Directors seem to like showing characters urinating especially in Shakespeare. They would probably argue that it ‘grounds’ their characters, makes tem seem more realistic. For me, I know that it is more often than not faked – too difficult to guarantee the timing or amount (I think Jane Horrocks as Lady Macbeth was the only time I’ve seen it for real and that’s only because she was dressed in Y-fronts and a vest at the time) – so I don’t quite see the point. It is all faked on stage. Why unnecessarily fake something extreme when everybody knows that stagehands would object to mopping up the real stuff. Jane Horrocks had to bring on a small piece of carpet for her scene.
Michael Gambon’s performance reminded me of his performance in the Caretaker a few years. His Falstaff had more dignity and authority than his tramp but the voice the hair and the drunken attempts to ingratiate himself with Hal did have echoes.
Michael MacFadyen’s Hal (wearing greyish jeans to Falstaffs red/crimson crushed velvet baggys), seemed to be more of an observer than a participator in Falstaff’s revelry. His character seemed to be controlled by his early line about one day having to give up his debauched ways. Another character that seemed different to how I remember him was Ned Poins who here seemed to be a criminal rather than an upper class rogue in a similar mould to Falstaff (much thinner of course) as he is usually seems to be played.
I thought, initially that this was the first time I’d seen Matthew MacFadyen but I have seen him several time before, including a warm and slightly sweaty version of Much Ado About Nothing with Saskia Reeves half a dozen years ago (the heat and sweat was a stage effect rather than bad air conditioning).
The costumes were by and large modern but worn and arranged to give them a slightly older setting. Court characters, especially David Bradley’s Henry IV, wore long coats or modified priests’ robes.
The set was a broad stepped wooden platform in the centre of the stage. It was slightly curved and at the back rose more steeply to a hill-like hump. To the sides were trees receding into the darkness that could produce a gloomy or even desolate appearance to a scene. At the back of the stage were three wide strip-like screens onto which would be projected trees, London streets, stained glass windows or castle ramparts, as appropriate. Mostly they would use a curtain or arras that dropped to halfway back along the platform making a smaller acting area. A hidden flight of stairs led down under the stage from the platform.Ever since I saw the seven of the eight plays in Shakespeare’s Richard-to-Richard sequence (I missed Richard the second) I find myself tempted to trace characters throughout the sequence. For instance the troublesome Aumale in Richard II succeeds his father to become the Duke of York and is killed at Agincourt in Henry V. Of course he doesn’t appear at all in either Henry IV play, but there are others like John of Lancaster who becomes the Duke of Bedford in the Henry VI plays as well as Humphrey the Duke of Gloucester. The male Percy (Duke of Northumberland) line eventually died out in the reign of James I (gunpowder plot I think). Most problematic are the Edmund Mortimers that run through the plays. The Mortimer family seemed to have a habit of naming their first two sons Roger and Edmund. This appears to have gone on for several generations with Rogers calling their first sons Edmund and vice versa. As a result of this there were a lot of Edmund Mortimers knocking around and Shakespeare managed to conflate several of them in later Henry plays.

Julius Caesar - Barbican Theatre - 18 April 2005

2005-04-20T00:36:00.000Z

Written by William Shakespeare
Directed by Deborah Warner
Designed by Tom Pye
I think that I might be very suggestible. During the interval I overheard a complaint, from another member of the audience, about the terrible acoustics in the Barbican Theatre. I’ve long heard this theatre vilified and declared the ‘worst’ but I’ve not seen it myself. I don’t find the seats that uncomfortable, like the fact that I don’t have to stand up every time people want to pass, and will put up with the brown plush trim. I also like the doors at the end of the rows that shut automatically just before the play begins.
Of course I’d never really thought about the acoustics and once I did I really started to notice. I also remembered not being able to hear some things properly in the first act. It probably wasn’t too bad but there was strange echo effect that occurred once or twice when Simon Russell Beale stepped into the small trapezoidal apron that juts out from the stage.
One of the selling points of this show, other than the quality director and all-star cast, was the 100-strong crowd, some of whom were members of the public. The crowd was obviously well orchestrated but there were a quite a number of proper actors among them and have seem quite a few of them on stage. It was probably intended that the crowd would bring the roman mob to life, but I kept thinking that there weren’t enough of them. It had something to do with the good marshalling. They would flood onto the stage take positions behind crowd barriers and then politely follow the lead of the actors amongst them. If they had use real actors or background artists, they may have got an organised chaos that would have added to the mob feel of things. There would have been danger and no need for barriers or the ring of security guards that were always there.
The problem with an all-star cast is that some of the stars aren’t required to do much. The main case in point in this production was Fiona Shaw as Portia. Shaw was fine, walking stick, falling over etc. but there wasn’t enough of her – it’s too small a part. Also now I come to think about it I didn’t believe a word of her character’s professions of weakness (Fiona Shaw – weak? – pah).
All-star is a relative term as it was only a starry cast if you know your theatre actors. Simon Russell Beale and Anton Lesser might be recognisable outside theatre circles but the likes of David Collings, John Shrapnel, Struan Rodger, Clifford Rose and John Rogan are respected actors but the names mean nothing to most. Actually John Rogan who I saw doing a frightening Inquisitor in Don Carlos a few years ago was also in the tiniest of roles.
The major ‘star’ in the production is probably Ralph Fiennes and this was probably the first time I can remember seeing him, enjoying a role or being so relaxed. Antony was the ‘good time’ guy whose eventual demise in Antony and Cleopatra was signalled.
There were a couple of other actors who I was interested to see. Paul Shearer was in the “Cellar Tapes” Cambridge Footlights Revue with Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, Emma Thompson and Tony Slattery, as well as being a regular in the Fast Show. I sometimes think he ought to have made more of an impact.
A few weeks ago I saw an item on an Internet message board that went something like “Robert Demeger. What’s the point?” I didn’t read the full message thread and it was removed not long after it was posted but it did make me think. It is as if I have difficulty in believing that he’s an actor. It isn’t that he can’t act, in fact a quick Internet search produces glowing reviews for some of his performances. It’s more that if you were asked to point out all the actors in a room, you’d never pick him, even if he were the only person in the room. It’s horribly unfair to say or think it and there was nothing wrong with his performance in this.
Another actor to mention was Tim Potter who I remember as Dali in a production of Hysteria by Terry Johnson and as Charles II in the Libertine. He played the soothsayer carrying a consistently filled thin wine glass that his character had obviously been regularly draining.
Initially the set consisted of a wide shallow set of marble steps (filling most of the stage area) surrounded, on three sides by glass panels. There was also a number of square-cut stone columns of different low heights at the side of the steps. I wasn’t at all sure why they were there, other than that some actors stood on them during the crowd scenes so that they could be seen as they spoke. I seem to remember something similar in the way of columns in Deborah Warner’s production of Good Person of Sichuan at the National 16 years ago – almost certainly a coincidence.
For the second half (or final third) the stage was emptied, with furniture whisked on and off, when necessary, by rushing soldiers. In the battle scenes household debris (broken furniture, clothes and toys) was dumped on the stage from on high. This obviously had a deep significance but I chose not to think about it. There seemed to be some kind of video projection on the back wall of the theatre in the last scenes and there were all sorts of video designers and operators mentioned in the programme. However the video seemed to be random noise patterns (like an untuned TV) in green. It was probably art.

Someone Who'll Watch Over Me - New Ambassador's Theatre - 13 April

2005-04-18T00:24:00.000Z

Written by Frank McGuinness
Directed by Dominic Dromgoole
Designed by Anthony Lamble
The first time I saw Aidan Gillen he looked a little as if he’d lost a few fights. Hooded eyes, flattened nose, more a failed pugilist than a romantic lead. That was in the early 90s. A few years later he had somehow transformed himself - eyes lager, nose sharper. It may just have been losing the puppy fat but I can’t get rid of the impression that it was more surgical. Looking at the programme there is a picture of him that is reminiscent of his old self. In this picture as with his old publicity photograph he is looking down which narrows and hoods his eyes so perhaps that explains it.
As with mister Gillen the play seems to have changed since I first saw it 13 years ago. I doubt it’s the words; it is down to the direction and the set. The first production, which starred Stephen Rea, Hugh Quarshie and Alec McCowen, seemed cleaner and gentler. I think I remember that the set was more along the lines of a closed off room in an apartment block, than this production’s grottier, high ceilinged dungeon-like room. The actors in the first production were cleaner in clothes and bodies. The differences probably have a lot to do with failure of memory on my part but there is also the fact that the Hampstead Theatre (where I saw the first production) stage was smaller and the make-up and costume budgets weren’t high enough for ground-in filth.
Another major difference was the playing of the relationship between Edward and Michael (the Irishman and the Englishman). It felt softer the first time not quite so acerbic. I don’t remember Edward being quite so angry and antagonistic, although it is all there in the script. Also Alec McCowen was much more sympathetic as Michael, more comfortable and more stable. It felt as if David Threlfall was giving a caricature of a stiff Englishman while it was more natural for Alec McCowen. I also wondered if he was wearing false teeth in order to give his character a more buck-toothed expression.
As I suggested, this may well have been the intention of the script (more anti-English, more spite) and the first production got it wrong. This production made me wonder if Frank McGuinness was putting all his anti-English feeling into the character of Edward and not allowing Michael to mount an adequate defence. In the first production Edward and Michael seemed to part with respect and affection, in this it felt more grudging.
My companion had never heard of the hostage crisis in the late eighties, and I did wonder whether this would be the same for others who didn’t have the excuse of coming from a different country and having been in this one for less than ten years. In spite of contemporary echoes with the taking of hostages in Iraq, I do wonder how many others in the audience remembered names like Keenan, McCarthy and Waite. For myself the hostage taking in The Lebanon always gave me (and still does) a sense of impotent fury. I still have a badge that says “John McCarthy – Hostage”, which I carried around with me for several years, rarely actually wearing it. I don’t know what that says about me.
As I said the set was dirtier than the first production: two radiators (on the left and back walls of the room) and a pipe along the floor (on the right) providing the respective anchor points where the actors were chained by the ankle. There was an extractor fan in the back wall and during scene breaks, the fan would spin while a powerful white light shone from behind. At the same time two thick wall-like panels would descend diagonally to block off the set and an old recording of Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me would be played.It is interesting to contrast the roles I’ve seen Jonny Lee Miller in, in films and in the theatre. In films like Trainspotting and Plunkett & MacLean there seemed to be a wildness and exuberance about him but his theatre work (Festen and Four Nights in Knaresborough as well as this) seems to show something more intense and vulnerable.

Previous Convictions - Orange Tree Theatre - 12 April

2005-04-15T00:03:00.000Z

Written by Alan Franks
Directed by Michael Napier Brown
Designed by Sam Dowson
There are things about the Orange Tree that make me uneasy. It isn’t the rack of mugs on hooks, Dymo-taped with the names of the cast and crew, which I once saw on a wall at the side of the bar. That was just a cute and homely touch. It’s really that I’d like to see Octavia Walters acting somewhere else. I have actually seen her acting somewhere else (Jane Eyre at the Young Vic eight years ago) but not recently and her biog in the programme doesn’t mention too much other than the Orange Tree. It isn’t that I’ve heard her acting being criticised and I have seen some of her performances praised. It is just that she’s the “daughter of the house” so it is easy for things to look like nepotism. It is no worse, I suppose, than a director choosing a bed-mate in a lead role but it still doesn’t feel quite right.
Actually Octavia Walters seems to have established a pattern in the last couple of roles she has played at the Orange Tree. Both roles had her playing well educated, rather self-absorbed young women, going nowhere, spouting environmentalism and anti-capitalism and being capable of manipulative cruelty. It probably says more about the choice of play than her true personality but I’m not sure I can think of her differently just now.
I haven’t seen her mother, Auriol Smith, in anything like as many plays and only one at the Orange Tree. I have a slight problem with her, which I’d noticed on occasions I’ve seen her watching plays at the Orange Tree. Her face and her hair don’t match. Her pale face with the bags under the eyes, seems to tell you that she ought to have grey or greying hair, perhaps even dyed blonde to hide the onset of grey, but her hair is a rich brown with only the tiniest hint of grey near the ears. I don’t like to think that she hides the grey by dying her hair - it would seem too vain somehow. There were times during the play however, when colour came to her face and animation to her eyes, that her hair colour ceased to matter.
I last saw James Woolley playing Lord Hutton, in the Tricycle’s Hutton Inquiry restaging, Justifying the War. At that particular production the theatre was insanely hot and stuffy, largely because of the presence of large plasma screens on stage and the fact that the air conditioning was too noisy to be kept running during the play. There was something I found chilling in one drunken rant his character made. He was talking about the failure of his life, how he had drifted through his twenties and thirties without really achieving anything (not really trying either) and how he had reached the age where men become invisible.
One of the things that the Orange Tree prides itself on is that it is London’s only permanent theatre-in-the-round. While this is true I sometimes feel that the plays aren’t always directed with that in mind. It might be that I like sitting in the rows of seats farthest from the door and opposite the control room but I often feel that plays are being played towards that control room. Of course the only way to test this would be to see plays multiple times from all the different angles. It is just a feeling that some plays aren’t made with all sides in mind.The set was a disused bedroom slowly being cleared of clutter. A bookshelf with old Penguin paperbacks interested some of the audience before the play and during the interval. None of them particularly caught my eye other than a biography of Mussolini that was left in the open. I did wonder if it was significant but nothing was made of it. Another book of which nothing much was made, was a diary found towards the end of the play by the daughter. She went into hiding shortly after discovering the diary but it didn’t look as if she’d been able to read it. Yet she was able to talk about what was in it. Not that, when it came to it anything was made of its contents.

My Name Is Rachel Corrie - Royal Court Upstairs - 11 April

2005-04-12T00:21:00.000Z

Edited from the writings of Rachel Corrie by Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner
Directed by Alan Rickman
Designed by Hildegard Bechtler
It seems enormously petty to mention that I first saw Megan Dodds in a production of Hamlet at the Old Vic in 1999, even if the production featured Paul Rhys giving what I always claim was best performance in the role Hamlet that I’ve ever seen. It seems pointless to point out that, not knowing anything about her, although her name was familiar, she seems to have settled here from America and that that may have been why here accent sounded so authentic to my cloth ears.
This was the story of an American peace activist who died under a bulldozer in Rafah in the Gaza strip and, doing a bit of research on the web, I realise that the middle-aged American couple sitting in the row in front of me, wearing black and white checked Palestinian scarves, may well have been her parents. A newspaper article from their home town talked about the play and said here parents had stopped off on their way back from visiting Gaza and were planning to see it.
One of the problems with the play’s subject matter was mentioned in the play itself. It is the conflation of the Israeli government and the Jewish people – that to criticise the Israeli Government or army is automatically anti-Semitic and a vile attack on the Jewish people. Also any show of support of the Palestinian people gets argued to be support for the suicide bombers. In fact only a few clicked links from the RachelCorrie.org memorial website gets you to an article that describes Rachel Corrie action in standing in front of a bulldozer as an idiotic “suicide on behalf of terrorists” and others that show her burning an American flag drawn on a piece of paper.
The play is in her words, her testimony and her point of view. It is edited and designed to evoke your sympathy. In my case I wanted to know more about her, the background to her activities and her death. There are some rather graphic photographs out there.
Some of the unsympathetic websites paint her as an unpatriotic freak or an oddball but it is a little difficult to justify that point of view when you hear her eloquent, touching and often amusing words. It could be argued that this is all due to skilful editing and there may be some truth in the matter. However the final speech sounded unedited and was taken from a long email she sent before days before her death. It seemed sincere and, although she backed the right to armed struggle in the defence of family and land, she also wrote about the need for non-violent civil disobedience in a Gandhian manner.
The problem I’ve always found with non-violence is that it only seems to work against people that have a sense of shame. Or that the protest effectively shows the people against whom it is being made, that their self-image is a lie. Britain liked to think it was fair minded and treated India well but Gandhi showed them up. The Chinese soldiers in Tianenmen Square didn’t seem to care about the peaceful protestors.There was a photographer on the stairs up to the theatre just outside the upstairs bar. He seemed to be there to photograph dignitaries as they entered and the staggered up. Actually the only time I saw him take a photograph was after an important sounding flurry of activity in front of a blue suited man who turned out to be Karl Johnson. I know who he is because I’ve seen him in more than a dozen plays and he steals every scene he is in, but a photograph at a first night?

The Cosmonaut's Last Message To The Woman He Once Loved In The Former Soviet Union - Donmar Warehouse - 7 April

2005-04-10T12:53:00.000Z

Written by David Greig
Directed by Tim Supple
Designed by Melly Still
Brid Brennan has the kind of face which if you saw it on a pvc catsuited and booted, spider-web stockinged hostess at a night club, you would probably know that you’d taken a wrong turn somewhere – in life if not in the street. The clothes worked reasonably well on her but as she turned to face the main part of the audience, I was a little shocked. I was slightly grateful that it was left to Anna Madeley to do the actual pole dancing. Incidentally the pole dancing was done in a slightly strange way: the poles were thinner versions of the real thing about eight foot long and carried and supported by the actress dancing or posing, rather than being fixed.
To be fair to Brid Brennan, her cat-suited character Sylvia, was almost certainly meant to be grotesque - described as a crow in later scenes. Also in other plays, she could certainly do sexy when she needed to. The only real problem I had with her characterisation of Sylvia was that her Tyneside accent kept heading off towards the Irish Sea.
The start of the play was delayed by quarter of an hour, which is normally a sign that the designer has been at it again and their elaborate set doesn’t work or will catch fire in the second act. However when we were let into the theatre I wondered what all the fuss had been about. The set seemed bare with just a couple of pouffes centre stage and a television in a corner towards the front. The wall at the back was blank and black with wide folding double doors set in the middle opening on to the stage. It wasn’t until the play started that there was an inkling of what was held up the play. The back wall lit up showing an array of stars and cosmonauts floated into view. They were, of course, suspended by wires and harnesses. It was well handled, the actors moving slowly and bracing themselves on the wall so that they often stayed horizontal, which prevented the impression that they just hanging. I dare say it’s going to break down one night but at least it worked on the first preview.
The stage had a few points of interest: A long narrow strip trapdoor was opened to show a flowerbed on one side of the stage. A larger trap on the other side contained a bed and the doors of the trap – made from three sections – were folded into triangular sectioned headboards.
As with the other evening there was occasional set change activity while scenes were going on in other areas (unfolding the bed took a fair bit of time) and it was occasionally distracting. Another distraction is that one person in the audience began laughing. For some reason I missed the line that they found so funny, there was some funny stuff in what the cosmonauts were saying at the time but little of it was laugh out loud. I got the impression that a private joke had set this woman off giggling. Her giggling, in turn, set someone else off but until the lines got funny, a little later on, not many others joined in. I find this sort of thing worse than heckling because it felt as if they were having a private laugh at the actors’ expense rather that paying attention to what they were saying and doing.
As I said I’ve seen Brid Brennan a good few times – about ten judging from her biography in the programme. Last year I saw her in The Bog of Cats with Holly Hunter. The last thing I saw her in at the Donmar was a play called The Dark which I remember mostly for scene for a scene where a boy takes a baby from a mother just to see her experience the terror of it. It is the only time that I can remember wanting a scene to end so much that I felt like getting up and stopping it.
Paul Higgins, who played one of the Cosmonauts, is one of the first actors I saw at the Royal Court in the late 80s. It was a play was called American Bagpipes and the only thing I really remember about it was Ken Stott, playing the drunken-policeman father of Paul Higgins character, trying to summon up enough authority to arrest his son and failing.
It may just be that this was the first time that I’ve seen Anna Madeley rushing around with almost nothing on and – as I’ve mentioned – pole-dancing but she’s never caught my attention before. I must have seen her half a dozen times in RSC stuff as well as at the Royal Court, even in the play Russian in the Woods where she was the only woman. I should pay more attention.
Previous plays can often seriously colour my view of actors. The last thing I saw Michael Pennington in was a Hanif Kureishi piece called When the Night Begins. In the play his character apologised for his “old man’s smell” (or stink); that phrase stayed with me and kept running through my mind as I watched him in this. It was relevant to his performance it was just an association in my head.

Stoning Mary - Royal Court - 6 April

2005-04-07T00:07:00.000Z

Written by debbie tucker green
Directed by Marianne Elliott
Designed by Ultz
There probably should be a law against designers being allowed to adopt a single name. It’s fair enough, if a designer or artist has achieved so much that they are instantly recognisable by a single name but to deliberately adopt one seems like wishful thinking. I rather hope that Ultz’s real name is something ordinary like Brian Smith and he will one day be exposed.
Ultz doesn’t just design he also directs, in fact Martin Marquez (who was in the play tonight) and his brother wrote a play which Ultz directed. The play, The Snowbull, was a rather patchy affair and on the night I saw it an old women chose a quiet moment, towards the end of the piece, to leave announcing to the world that it was the worst thing she’d ever seen. This was at the old Hampstead theatre and she was sitting less than ten feet from the stage.
It is a little unfair to have a go at Ultz, silly name or not, his designs are often very interesting. I remember a piece called Fireface, where the action took place on institutional Formica tables and the audience sat on office chairs that were chained to the floor. The thing is that Ultz decided that this play required a thrust stage, painted blue; covering almost the entire stalls area. The design was described as ‘exciting’ in the letter from the Royal Court that told me that the seat I’d booked in the stalls was no longer available. I doubt that the finance people at the theatre, found the prospect of losing almost a hundred seats a night, terribly thrilling.
It isn’t the first time Ultz has pulled this particular trick at the Royal Court. A couple of years ago in the play Fallout by Roy Williams the stalls were once again covered over with a steep wide flight of steps leading down into them at one end. In that case I seem to recall that they built additional seating over the stage forming an oval arena for the play. Tonight we just got a blue stage stretching to the back wall of the theatre. Not a uniform blue, lots of different shades but in no particular pattern. At the edges of the stage, especially when it met a vertical surface like the boxes, were outcrops of bubbles that may have been intended to be beach pebbles or stones but were too circular. That was more or less it as far as the set went. There were a few ordinary looking tubular framed chairs in each of the sections. Each of the three settings in the play occupied a different area of the stage although there was some overlap. The areas were only lit while action was going on in them and the names of the settings were projected using moving lights that swept across the stage and ended up on the black back wall of the theatre.
The actors were on stage for the whole piece, leaning against the back wall when they weren’t needed anymore. When the action of their scene was interrupted by a scene in a different area the actors didn’t always freeze, as you might expect, but often fidgeted or repositioned themselves.
I quite liked the device, in the play, of having of somebody playing the character’s ego. I thought it illustrated the arguments well. Also I think I’ll just mention that the egos were both dressed in turquoisey-blue clothes.
Reading the play script beforehand brought up a couple of things. There were several sections that dwelt on the smell of people and with this blog in mind I had hoped to write some stuff about how smell is both a deeply intimate and very public sense but the play didn’t really explore this.
Another thing that was very clear in the script was the deliberately degraded quality of the language that was used – plenty of ‘dunnos’ and lack of glottal stops. The thing is that I could help thinking that Emily Joyce was struggling with this. It felt as if she was battling years of good enunciation and losing but it might just have been my imagination. Knowing her best from a tame sitcom may have played tricks on my perception of her performance.
Another actress to mention is Claire Rushbrook. A couple of years ago I saw her in a play called Food Chain Upstairs at the Royal Court where she had a dreamily weary glamour. It contrasted with tonight where she was distinctly heavier and chavier, which was what was required.
There is an instruction in the script that says that all characters must be white. Presumably this (together with the adverts and pamphlets for action aid in the programme) is to draw attention to the plight of third world countries by putting problems like the mistreatment of women, child soldiers and Aids into a white English context. Unfortunately I didn’t think that the world hung together properly. It is a trivial point but in a place where a young woman can get stoned to death, for killing the boy soldier that killed her parents, the man would always get the Aids medicine before the woman and there would be no debate about it.
In the audience tonight was David Tennant and I was tempted to interpret his glances around the auditorium, as attempts to find out if he’d been spotted by weirdo Doctor Who fans. I studiously avoided his gaze.

Tristan & Yseult - Cottesloe Theatre - 5 April

2005-04-06T00:45:00.000Z

Presented by Kneehigh Theatre
Written by Carl Grose and Anna Maria Murphy
Directed and Adapted by Emma Rice
Designed by Bill Mitchell
Outside the theatre tonight there were a number of white banners on flagpoles. Each banner had a single word on it – war, trust, honour, love and other stirring sentiments. Around the flagpoles were some shallow metal dishes on frames, which were presumably braziers or torches of some kind but looked more like ornate ashtrays and had already attracted the odd cigarette end. I mention these because when I came out of the theatre, the white banners had been replaced with black ones (in keeping with the story).
I first saw a production by the Kneehigh Theatre at the Cottesloe about five years ago, it was a fairly conventional play called The Riot. The next two shows, The Red Shoes and The Bacchae, weren’t. In the first we were treated to an entire shaven-headed cast spending most of their time wearing just Y-fronts and vests – only occasionally putting on clogs. In the second there was a lot of use of sheets of newspaper to make improvised props and costumes were tutus lowered from the fly tower. I may be muddling things up but I’m fairly sure that the Bacchae also featured a number of ladders hung from ropes and pulleys, in such a way that they could be angled and moved.
The ropes and pulleys were back tonight. This time the ropes (three of them) spent much of the time attached to a disc-shaped portion (large enough to hold a person) of the circular stage, in such a way that the disc could be raised up a mast through the disc’s centre. At other times the ropes held character spying on the lovers, a sail for the ship and, most impressively, the lovers as they drunkenly danced – suspended by the wrist - into one another’s arms, under the influence of love potion and alcohol.
When I first entered and saw the band in grey balaclavas, I thought that they might be supposed to be a reminder of chain mail worn by medieval versions of Arthurian knights. It quickly became apparent, as the cast entered and milled about the auditorium, that the balaclavas, blue cagoules (or anoraks), heavily black-framed glasses and the nasal quality of the actors’ voices showed that they were supposed to be spotters of some kind. In this case, love-spotters, observing the story through binoculars and making notes, in the knowledge that they’d never be involved in a love story themselves.
The spotter chorus would occasionally don extra headgear to indicate setting: ‘deely boppers’ with a stars on them for a starry night, the same with beer cans on top for the drunk scene and bushes for a woodland tryst.
The spotter/nerd costumes made it rather difficult to spot the main characters when they were being part of the ensemble rather than the main character (I hope that makes sense). In fact there was a striking difference in the way one actor behaved between playing his main character and being in the ensemble. I’m not saying it was anything special or remarkable, just that I noticed it. The actor in question was Mike Shepherd, one of the founder members of Kneehigh. He has a way of behaving in ensemble that I noticed when I saw him in The Red Shoes and The Bacchae, which drew my attention towards him. It is a sort of deliberate wariness or nervousness in the face of an audience, as if to say ‘don’t stare at me’ while drawing attention towards him. I don’t think that it is intentional attention seeking, it may just be my imagination or the set of his face. The thing is, when he was called on to take off the balaclava and anorak, replace his glasses with fashionable shades and become the King, he was the King. All this may simply be a difference in style between acting with the ‘fourth wall’ up and with it down but I can only say I noticed it.
As might be expected with the cast wandering around the auditorium before the first and second halves there was a fair bit of audience interaction. I have to assume that the spotters were trying to identify and write up lovers on those occasions; I was never close enough or girlfriended enough to hear them properly or attract their attention. If you bought a programme, in addition to a small tube of Love Hearts, you received a balloon that you were asked inflate (without tying a knot in it) and then release to mark the King’s entrance (“I entered to the sound of rapidly deflating balloons). The person sitting next to me disobeyed instructions and knotted their balloon and it spent the interval being batted around the audience with increasing annoyance until someone burst it loudly, eliciting a heart-grip response from (you’ve guessed it) Mike Shepherd. We were instructed in the balloon etiquette by Giles King (a man with pointed sideburns stretching halfway across his cheeks), playing Frocin and he berated a young woman in the audience for not bothering to buy a programme and therefore not having a balloon. He picked on her again when the audience failed to make a good luck toast to the King and Queen but it was all part of the script and not vicious ad-lib.
As well as the odd balloon descending on me from the circle, the audience was leafleted by an invading army (“People of Kernow. Don’t be alarmed” etc.), and in a love scene, silk flower petals were dropped.
The wedding party had a strange and rather joyous dance routine. The most interesting move consisted of the actors holding a leg in the air and kicking it out to the side while slowly rotating.
Something else that I think I remember from the Bacchae was some of the actors breaking into different languages. In that case it was possibly because two of the actors were from different eastern European countries and it had felt right during rehearsal to do it. It might have been the same tonight as the Hungarian actress Eva Magyar said many of her lines in Hungarian (I think) before a discreet hand gesture from the members of the cast caused her to repeat them in English. Tristan Sturrock (who broke his neck last year according to the programme) playing a French Tristan also did many of his lines in French but was only required to translate when it went beyond ‘schoolboy’ vocabulary.
The only other things to mention are the model ships to carried by the actor sailing in it, the small cello that Tristan occasionally carried strapped to his back and which he played like a guitar (across the knee and plucking), and the strange greeting gesture some characters used that a cross between looked like a slow-motion vertical clap and a sedate estimate of a piskie’s height.

Hecuba - Albery Theatre - 4 April

2005-04-05T00:11:00.000Z

Written by Euripedes (version by Tony Harrison)

Directed by Laurence Boswell

Designed by Es Devlin

I was thinking that this was the first time that I’d seen Vanessa Redgrave in a really tragic role. When I’ve seen her previously there’s always been humour in her performance; something relaxed and knowing. Even when I first saw her years ago, in a “Redgrave” Three Sisters where she played Olga, she seemed to be having immense fun with the part, at least not taking it as seriously as her sister and her niece. Having seen Claire Higgins doing an intense Hecuba last year, I did wonder how Vanessa Redgrave would approach it.
There were no tears or screaming, in fact there was something very cold and calm in the way she took here revenge. Her justification for murder was well argued and efficient but I wouldn’t have called it heartfelt. This isn’t to say I wasn’t convinced by her but there was a placidity there which may well get interpreted, by the critics, as repressed intensity.
On trivial matters there was a moment when Vanessa Redgrave reminded me of her daughter Joely Richardson. Hardly surprising really but suddenly as she crouched over Polydorus’ body her blue eyes pierced out into the audience and I thought of her daughter. Another thing was that as she dragged Polydorus’ body off the stage, I thought “here’s someone who wants to play Mother Courage” – it was the way she carried herself and she’s probably played the part anyway.
The set was made up of a number of curved walls that, at first, formed a drum (before the play started), spent most of the play as a semi circle and finally turned in on themselves, to form a passage between two curved walls. There was probably some significance in this that escaped me, as a black backdrop with a huge white splash was revealed. Actually I suspect something went wrong here, the rear wall of the drum slowly and non-silently moved to reveal the backdrop while Vanessa Redgrave was speaking.
I always like to think that I like Tony Harrison’s Greek translations but that may well be because his reputation is a good one. I’d like to say that I hadn’t noticed his point-making before (Troy equals Iraq, references to bombing or blasting Troy, the Greeks in a ‘coalition’ and a digs at Europe attacking Asia), but I remember that when he reconstructed the Trackers of Oxyrynchus fifteen years ago, it was peppered with social comment.
The Chorus who sang almost all their lines (requiring Vanessa Redgrave to almost sing along with them at one point) were dressed in a style that I’d associate with places like Turkey or possibly Georgia – long coat-like dark coloured dresses (mostly green) and dark head scarves. They also wore make-up to make their faces much paler. This had an unfortunate (possibly deliberate) effect on one olive-skinned actress as she ended up looking a pale green – almost green enough to be a Kathikali dancer. I found myself a little disappointed with the music. It wasn’t bad but I couldn’t help thinking that given the costumes the composer should have gone for Spanish Phrygian mode and some very close intervals in the harmonies but perhaps that would have been a cliché.