EVITA by Andrew Lloyd Webber and TIM Rice

I must begin this review in honestly saying it is not my favourite musical in its linear structure that the character of Che narrates and the dancing/singing chorus, representing the people, dramatise. This is the whole style of the show where the music is appropriate for the dancing and background settings but less so vocally with only Don’t Cry For Me Argentina being the one significant song, first sung in triumph and then repeated again in mourning. Grandage creates a flourishing moment with this song as Evita overwhelmingly makes her entrance upstage on the balcony and delivers her message to the people. The big sensation was bringing Elena Roger from Argentina over to play the part of Evita. Though all the critics are enthused, her tiny size and modulated voice are noted. She comes to life when she dances. Evita needs to dominate the stage with her sensual presence. Roger is almost an engenue with more sensitivity than sexuality. The love scenes with Peron, the persuasive Philip Quast in his over six foot size and glorious deep baritone in his embrace with Tom Thumb Evita are close to satire. But what a fine interpretation to a non- descript part of Peron does Quast give. Matt Rawle as Che conveys a sense of danger throughout and carries the recitative with high drama. Lorna Want as the young mistress is a talent to watch…her voice and presence are engaging. The clarity of the staging, the passionate choreography, the energy, the inventive set of portable balconies creating immediate locations and sense of power, the orchestra and its artistry of the music, the intensity of the chorus and actors, are all first rate. If you are interested in depth of politics in a musical and find the intelligence important, this is a show to see cloaked in its musical aspirations. No export.

June 2/06…

BLACKBIRD by DAVID HARROWER

The current English reviews on this transfer from Edinburgh are not as explosive as the original. Mind you they are fairly positive on the theme of paedophilia and rather intrigued at the back-story of 12 year-old Una’s three month sexual relationship with 40-something Ray, neighbour and friend of the family. The play begins sixteen years later when Una has tracked down a changed-name Ray, a salesman in a sleazy pharmaceutical company. What ensues is a tennis match between them, the emotional ball in his court, then in hers. A screaming match of who did what to whom becomes repetitive as the director Peter Stein keeps blowing up each round. Is Ray’s punishment in goal more damaging than Una’s living on in a community that questioned her morality? Why did Ray arrange a rendezvous in a small village and then abandon her, Una demands. But Ray refuses to believe he abandoned her. He left to get some cigarettes and then drank away his guilt in beer. When he returned she was gone. They missed each other like ships in the night. But sooner or later the affair would have been discovered. What does Una want now? It’s not revenge but a continuance of the relationship that is acceptable in their current ages. Ray has married a mature woman with a young daughter of 12, whom we see at the end…very much an innocent child whom Ray paternally loves, but which Una interprets otherwise. In the original author’s ending Ray exits with the child leaving an hysterical Una calling after him. The author is obviously trying to strip down the complexities of some forms of paedophilia. But in the director’s generally over-dramatised interpretation, he also changes the author’s intent of the play by attaching a Hollywood film ending. Ray and Una continue their passionate struggle on the floor of the car park near the car in which Ray has started to drive off. However, unbiased the author might have felt he should be, the act of paedophilia on Ray’s part cannot be excused by Una’s sexual aggression. Continuing their affair because of Una’s determination, does not justify Ray’s initial sexual encounter, no matter how provocative Una may have been. The filthy recreation room with food containers dumped all over the floor and the odd passer-by looking through the glass picture frame window added a sense of atmosphere. The progressive destruction of Ray is a gigantic feat by Roger Allam, whose body crumples like a paper bag that has burst after filled with air. His agony is that of a man who will not recover. However, he never oversteps into melodrama where the direction does. Jodhi May is effective but she alludes to contrivances that question her sincerity. This is not a popular subject, nor does the production carry star names, as a result, I am not quite sure on its import /export.

February 7…..May 13/06

DUCKTASTIC by Hamish McColl and Sean Foley

This is the second West End show of Right Size in which The Play What I Wrote, the first one, had such success as a send-up of the adored Morecombe and Wise with whom the audience were affectionately familiar and where the interplay whether competitive or mutual of a double comedy-act had a source of dependency that acted upon the emotions. This go-round they’ve chosen to send-up the duo-act of illusionists Siegfried and Roy who were famed for their tigers, but terminated their act because of the public mauling from them.McColl is the failing Las Vegas magician Christophe Ursula Sassoon, a fictional character, who has produced this new show for Las Vegas in order to win back his wife/assistant Judith whom he thinks is in the audience despite her making several stage entrances. He then chooses from the audience a pet shop owner from Portsmouth (in actuality his partner Sean Foley) and renames him Roy de la Rue. Sassoon manages to involve a stage-struck usherette who falls in love with Roy who in turn is fired out of a cannon into her bickering parents’ theatre box seats. After that mama becomes part of the disappearing act through fire, screens, floors etc. The usherette is the lady sawn in half who also sing songs and twirls about. The point of the mockery is to show up the tricks of illusion and magic while actually performing them to perfection. But there are so many confusions and unfocused twists and turns, such chaos, such seaside vulgarity, McColl becoming a hefty woman or a naked Eve or Liberace, nothing remaining long enough to stay in the mind or bear any relevancy to any theme. It ends with a big Hollywood Follies spectacle with sparkling-studded eggs for ducks to crack out of and silver-sequenced show girls with ostrich feathered headdresses. Why add to this show the live duck, which was stolen using its understudy instead? It seems to be only a gimmick when all it does is walk across stage or pop up out of a box or sofa. Its dubbed voice falls flat. In addition, you have to be interested in magic to even enjoy all this bemused spoofing. It seems a double-barrelled ennui if magic is of no interest, then certainly the spoof is even less impressive. The show is reckoned for a happy Christmas one presumes, but this egg is not for cracking. No import or export.

October 11/06...

HECUBA by Euripedes

This production was to be the jewel in the crown of the continued classics the RSC has scheduled for this London season at the Albery. Sadly it is no jewel and there is no crown. There was keen interest in the RSC interpretation of Hecuba with Vanessa Redgrave, after the Donmar with Claire Higgins who won the Olivier Award as best actress in the title role. The long awaited arrival fell with deep disappointment. This is no Euripedes Hecuba but a Brechtian Mother Courage with a chorus of young girls who are her followers. The adaptation using modern language to show us how close Euripedes is to today’s warfare is unnecessary. Updating the classics is a matter of balance and this translation is vulgar. We lose the identity of the times when 2000 years ago Euripedes was decrying the same injustice of the powerful over the powerless as one is today. Constantly calling the Greek army ‘coalition’, or Odysseus words as ‘spinning’ , or soldiers’ wishes to ‘fuck-off home’, or Polyxena describing her death with the alliteration of ‘girl’s gullet gashed opened’, or Hecuba’s alliterative answer in order to die with her ‘good glugs of blood’, are samples of his contemporary speech which demolish the heights of tragedy. Only Alan Dobie’s words of pity to Hecuba ‘ you have the best of children, the worst of times’ remains with me as cogent from the only classic performance of stature coming from this fine actor alone. Instead of the Gregorian chants for the music giving the forebodings of mournful women which the chorus sang and would have not intruded on the play, there was a modern musical chorus of young girls that interrupted the scenes and made a foolishness of the tragedy, especially when Vanessa Redgrave, with no voice, sang solo. The famous scene which tore the heartstrings of when the Trojan women describe the brutality of the Greek soldiers in sacking Troy was sung away in light harmonies. The casting is dire in that Redgrave gave us the suppliant Hecuba begging for her childrens’ lives but never the murderer brutalised by the atrocities forced upon her which is the essence of Euripedes’ theme. There is no epic size to her, in the writing, or direction. The initial drum of the set opened into an amphitheatre mold in sandy brown to emulate land but seemed unidentifiable. The story is about the aftermath of war as Hecuba, once Queen of Troy and her daughter Polyxena are taken as slaves by Agamemnon (before reaching Argos) to Thrace where King Polymestor was friend to Hecuba and King Priam. They sent their youngest son Polydorus to Polymestor as a protection against the Greeks with enough gold to re-establish the Trojan family. Upon her arrival in Thrace , along with the Trojan women, Hecuba is told that the Greek army demand the death of Polyxena to soothe the dead spirit of Achilles whom she loved. Hecuba is torn to shreds over losing her child but Polyxena would rather die than lead an undignified life in being a slave made into whoring. She gives strength to Hecuba’s despair. Hecuba in pleading with Odysseus, whose life she saved, is betrayed by him while Agamemnon refuses any involvement for political reasons. Added to this destruction is the sudden dead body of Polydorus washed upon the shore. Hecuba is devastated at the death of all her children except for Cassandra whose death in Argos was obvious. Her breaking point has been reached and her humanity squelched by the horrendous betrayals. Hecuba deceptively moves Polymestor to come to her with his two sons for the hidden gold she has secreted. Greedily he does so denying Polydorus’ death. She with the help of the Trojan women kills the two boys and plucks out the eyes of Polymestor who is given no mercy by Agamemnon. But Hecuba’s soul has been destroyed in the process of revenge and of seeking justice. This is one of the great tragedies pertinent for today and should be produced in epic size with epic actors and director. This production is supposedly headed for New York and cannot reach those heights even with changes and growth in time. No import/ export.

March 26 – May 7/06

GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS by DAVID MAMET

This is one of the early plays which hit London thirteen years ago like a bomb in its colloquial language, its bombastic energy, and in the revelations of the act of selling, the actual environment where the hard-sell happened and not the reflections of that life as with Arthur Miller. These are soulless men. The play is still valid, still strong in its theme and dialogue. Jonathan Pryce and Aidan Gillen marvellously interpret their characters…the desperate old timer once the success of the office and his protégé who can sell anything with no sense of morality. In 1969 David Mamet worked in a Chicago real-estate office where worthless land in Floridian swamps was flogged to retired people who could not afford it….. flogging land with such zest, such chutzpah without conscience in selling cancer. The title of Glengarry Glen Ross is a pastoral name and its scene is painted on the front curtain. Little do the clients know it is a far cry from the Scottish highlands but a call for alligators. James McDonald powerfully revives this work after 13 years with the brashness of its jazzy poetic dialogue, its streetwise logic, its outrageous bravado, its cruelty and stress. Aidan Gillen as Roma could sell you your own false teeth as he persuades and cajoles you out of your senses. He’s the top saleman in the office and has won the top prize of the contest for the Cadillac. And what a persuasive performance he gives!!! Losers get fired. Moss is the heavy weight, the ruthless thug played shrewdly by Matthew Marsh while George is the frightened loser who jumps out of his own skin so precisely drawn by Paul Freedman. Jonathan Pryce, who towers over his part….the best naturalistic actor the UK has produced… gives us everyman, the common man, man, with a sense of such vulnerability, sweating, pushing away his doom, as his spirit constantly rises above defeat as demonstrated in his final act of robbery to get ‘the lead, the best leads,’ for selling real estate in Florida to the good clients. The suspense of who robbed the office is held to the last and it’s a surprise that Pryce’s Shelly Levene would stoop to such criminal measures. Peter McDonald’s coldly removed John, the office-manager, is a very credible enactment especially since his being a fast replacement. The plot is watching the men fail or succeed in selling, knowing the victims are not only the customers but the waste of their own lives. It is a dog-eat-dog world Mamet is painting, and the energy never drops. But that is the problem…half an hour of the atmosphere makes its point. We get 1 hour and 45 minutes with a half hour interval for the set change from a restaurant to the office strewn and wrecked by the robbery. Reviews have been very positive but is the theme saleable? Import no export.

September 27/07...

KEAN by JEAN PAUL SARTRE

This is truly a controversial production with most of the reviews decrying the play and polarising reactions of love/hate to the gargantuan performance of Tony Sher as Kean. It is a natural part for Sher who resembles Kean in size, swarthiness, bravura, and extroverted style in the same Shakespearean parts of Richard III, Shylock, Macbeth, etc. It is Adrian Noble’s concept and direction which mars the production. The play was never a good play as Satre based his version on the 19th-century melodrama of Dumas. Satre was concerned with the truth in role playing, with identity, since we all reinvent ourselves as we go along in life. So to continue these transformations Adrian Noble has converted the piece to part Satre’s 1950s and to part of Kean’s Regency period. There is no way he will reconstruct comment on Satre’s existentialism by doing so…not on this subject regarding Kean who from grinding poverty and street player to provincial tours and then spectacular acclaim at Drury Lane followed by his boozing years and scandalous adultery, died young. All Noble has done is to confuse the periods with the basic concept of the play in which the actor does not know the line between himself as a person or as an actor. The role playing on-stage or off-stage are overlapping with only hazy distinctions. As Kean says ‘playing true feelings are quite simply bad acting’. It is enough to deal with the intricacies of the constant perceptions required to follow Kean’s realities or role playing. Mixing the 1950s New Look for women and dinner jackets for men may look chic to the jazz score but it adds to more perplexing Regency images with concepts that lack credulity. The story concerns the rivalry between Kean and the Prince Regent, Prince of Wales, over the wife of the Danish ambassador, Elena. Into this triangle comes a young Irish would-be actress Anne Danby who is determined to marry Kean and thus become a famous actress. When Kean explodes with jealousy onstage while playing his Othello to the young Anne Danby’s Desdemona, who can’t remember her lines, he stamps off stage leaving a scene of comic relief which also brings a mutual recognition that his affair with Elena is over. He goes off to New York with Anne as his wife. The set of a Regency proscenium frame which fits onto any stage allowing open space for the size of Drury Lane’s stage is clever and quite suitable for the touring it has done. It also opens up to the dressing room sequences quite conveniently. Sher is at times seriously playing the Shakespeare parts including his own rendition of Richard III and then spoofing it slightly so that one has a sense of fun. It is always enjoyable to see transformations onstage as Sher puts on his make-up, wigs, and costumes before our eyes, morphing into his characters. Only Alex Avery’s Prince of Wales stands out as a character and as a fine actor. Joanne Pearce’s Elena is directed into a phoney and artificial languor while Jane Murphy’s Anne is simply wooden. Robert East’s Danish ambassador Count de Koefeld and Sam Kelly’s Salomon are worthy players with Kelly bringing a humour and poignancy to his role. This is an enjoyable production watching the electric energy of Anthony Sher who may not be reproducing Kean’s bravado but his own which is the closest one could get to Kean in the 21st-century. The past memories of Alan Badell’s wild interpretation and Derek Jacobi’s ham actor are examples of why actors are fascinated with this vehicle. Import no export necessary.

May 24/07 - July 14/07

THE GLASS MENAGERIE by Tennessee Williams

This is one of the first successful plays of Williams actually based on his life with his mother and sister Rose on whose abandonment he never forgave himself and remained a masochist for his entire life as a result. Having attended the rehearsals of its first performance on Broadway in March 1945 with Margo Jones directing and Tennessee sitting next to me, I knew what Tennessee intended. He wanted a dream play very deliberately and not social realism, nor flashbacks. Eddie Dowling, a middle-aged actor/ director /producer who first picked up and directed the play, enacted the son Tom. Tennessee asked for an older actor recalling his past and transforming himself into the young man with his mother. Because of his age Dowling would automatically keep the dream and a nasty nagging mother would be avoided. Laurette Taylor, a big risk, a fey woman who had secluded herself for years, was making a comeback as Amanda the mother. She was ephemeral, hardly touching earth and stole all the notices with her magic which is now a myth. Tennessee clearly suggested an expressionistic, symbolic interpretation but has usually been given realistic more naturalistic versions following the dialogue closely. Rupert Goold is the first English director that I have seen bring that dreamlike quality to the play. He has that precious gift of storytelling with his eye on the text which he can translate into images that add to illuminating the story without any distraction. The illusionary set in this production is expressionistic, a bit over the top with the exaggerated fire escape looking more like New Orleans than St Louis, but which he uses to the hilt in its mood and movement particularly breathtaking in the lighting (Paul Pyant) when Tom’s sister Laura plays her famous scene by candlelight. Goold captures the essence of the play and the author’s stylistic intentions about the crippled girl Laura who is shy in fitting into life in St Louis after coming from Mississippi where her mother expects her to be courted as she was in her youth. The creative son Tom, who is a writer, works in a shoe factory until he can steal away from home. Goaded by his mother who depends upon him for financial and emotional support since the father left them, this dysfunctional family are struggling to survive. The focus of the piece and its climax is when Tom finally arranges for his friend Jim to be a gentleman caller by coming to dinner to meet Laura. Jim is kind and gentle with Laura who opens up to him as the boy she had a crush on in high school. They are both moved by the re-acquaintance, but he is engaged to marry a less sensitive girl. Laura is left bereft by candlelight whose light Tom can never blow out even now as he looks back on his exit from the family. The play is magic and not even Jessica Lange’s portrayal of a Blanche Dubois rather than Amanda can spoil it. Ed Stoppard’s Tom is that of an angry young man but he is rather involved in a Southern accent to be totally absorbed in his part. It is Amanda Hale’s Laura that is captivating and pulls at the heart with her fragile soul while Mark Umbers’ gentleman caller enacts his part with sweet sincerity. This is the famous scene of the play which never misses but here we are given sprays of sadness in the almost could-be world of love. The haunting music, the mysteriously conjured set, the tragedy of an uprooted family, the imaginative hand of the director and the unforgettable portrayal of Laura reinstates this masterpiece. Bill Kenwright produced a faulty production of it in New York so there is no export. However, his courage to reproduce another version in London has to be given a special star of achievement in addition to his choice of director Rupert Goold and discovery of a new star in Amanda Hale… Don’t Miss It! Import! Import!

January 31/07...

SUMMER AND SMOKE by Tennessee Williams

This is not a particularly good play of Williams but it is the base which later developed into Streetcar Named Desire with an older Alma renamed Blanche. This play began as a monologue called The Portrait of a Madonna and evidently so intrigued Williams as to keep developing the tragedy of an intelligently attractive woman who searched for physical as well as spiritual love but never found the sensitive man with whom to share those feelings. In Streetcar Alma/Blanche tells of her marriage to a young homosexual boy who displayed that kind of sensitivity. But in Summer and Smoke there is John, the doctor’s son, with whom she flirts but never is allowed to fully express her passion. It is a near miss for him as he finds it easier with less intelligent women or with plain carnal sex. The tragedy lies in the parallel lines of their lives almost crossing but never on the terms of either one’s desire. The play paints a vivid picture of restricted middle class life in a small Southern town and the restraints on a free spirit. Alma copes with running the household for her preaching father in place of her demented mother who mocks Alma’s aspirations. Mrs Bassett is the typical town gossip who attends Alma’s meetings and scorns her unwedded state with reserved politeness. In the end Alma maybe treated as the town spinster, the teacher whose students manage affairs with John, but secretly she does succumb to a passing stranger in town. The pain of loneliness, of being the outsider in a closed community is fully realised in this play. Rosamond Pike as Alma may have had the beauty and softness but never reached the depths of despair. She seemed to be playing the accent rather than the character. Chris Carmac as John caught the passion and frustration of the character and gradually matured from his wildness into the discipline of being a doctor with the realisation of his missed meeting of the minds with Alma. Michael Brown as Dusty/Vernon/Archie Kramer played the dullard who tried courting Alma and the passing stranger with a precision of characterisation while Hanne Steen as Rosa revealed the sexy passion of a Mediterranean loose lady. Kate O’Toole as Mrs Bassett caught the exact bitchiness of a Southern matron while Angela Down enveloped the contrived madness of Alma’s mother. The set overlapped the households of Alma and John with a phoney sense of place while the statue of the angel in the Square made another pretence of a set rather than a location. The direction seemed so heavy handed aiming towards effect with little authenticity of the southern town or characters. Noble usually has a musical flow to his work but somehow failed to inject it into this production. It is still an historical piece worthwhile seeing since Williams writes even at his worst like the poet he is. No import or export.

October 17-November 4/06

FOOL FOR LOVE by Sam Shepard

Again this is not my favourite Sam Shepard play that is located in a sleazy motel near the desert where poor white trash live. Eddie and half-sister May are locked together in an incestuous love-hate relationship. The father led two separate lives with two women each having a child with him. When the siblings meet they fall in love….Eddie wanders off and May moves on to make her way. Eddie has just returned to start a new life with May. She is angry and distrusts him. The play centres on their highly charged emotional battle involving the tormenting of an innocent bystander, May’s date. The ghost of the father sits and comments communicating with Eddie or it could be Eddie’s recreation of the father. In the end Eddie runs out to look after his fire destroyed truck his ex has burned down and May packs her bag to follow him or is it to escape? The ghost-father remains as does the bystander bewildered by the whole episode. The piece is superbly directed, paced in tumultuous crescendos while Mark Henderson (gifted Hollywood star on London stage) gives an incredible performance as he inhabits the character so completely, capturing its essence and holding the moments with such dangerous violence. Juliette Lewis (Hollywood star on London stage) holds her own ground and Larry Lamb creates a character out of a vacuum. It is a high intensity production of quality that keeps the suspense tightly drawn. No export but import.

JUNE 7 - September 9/06…

PROOF by David Auburn

Having seen this play with Gwyneth Paltrow playing Catherine just after her father’s death, the performance was deeply felt with a person in a depressed condition. There was a dimension to the play and the part that was most moving, a daughter grieving for her father both in the play and in life. This Pulitzer prize piece has been scoffed at in London, particularly at this production. Questions are asked about the mathematics that the genius father had originated and now his daughter who seems to have followed in his footsteps. What is this great work of genius, the critics ask?? The author’s point is not in the mathematics, it is only a suggestion. The concern is in how does one prove truth? Does it take genius without training or skill like a Catherine or is it the trained deduction of scientists that can formulate proof? Where does the truth lie? The storyline is quite straightforward…two sisters Claire and Catherine, are clearing up the family home in Chicago. Their father was once a brilliant maths professor at the university, except for his last years when he grew senile and Catherine took care of him. Refusing to send him to a hospice as Claire hoped, he died at home where Catherine wishes to remain. She has allowed an ex student now professor Hal to collect and assess all the notebooks her father doodled in these last years. Claire has been following her career and marriage in New York, trying to sell the house and move Catherine to New York. While working through all of the father’s notes which contain only the scribbling of a lost mind, Catherine and Hal pass a night together, so New York is far from her choice. However, when Hal discovers a completion of a great mathematical formula he cannot believe it is Catherine’s work, nor can Claire. When Hal comes round to thinking it could be possible, it’s too late as Catherine has decided to go with Claire. But will she continue with her genius in maths? It’s true the play is slight and Hal is more a tool for the concept than a credible person but exploring where genius or truth lies and from whose head such profundity is derived, is enough premise for a play. Peter Shaffer has been writing about it for years. The production is simple and direct. The back porch of the house-set gives off the location with ease. Sally Oliver’s Catherine may not have the allure of Paltrow but she does portray a distressed and bemused girl whose scenes with her ghost-father are touching. Aislin Sands’ Claire seems far more neurotic than Catherine but she is convincing and funny. Terence Booth’s father and Neal Foster’s Hal give fine support. No export but import for an introspective play produced with sincerity.

February 17 – March 17/07

2 GRAVES by Paul Sellar

The Arts Theatre reopened its doors once more with this unique monologue written in stylised verse. The mastery of verse spoken as dialogue is a difficult accomplishment which has been brilliantly achieved by Jonathan Moore and adeptly directed with subtle and sometimes savage lighting effects on a bare stage with a chair that resembles, metaphorically, an electric chair especially when stage lights are electrically blue. In a Cockney (south London working class) accent against stylised verse he tells how one misthrown dart in the 1978 World Championship became the cause of ruining his entire family which this young man has tried to revenge. Humour invades some very stark and grisly accounting of this tragic tale. If you seek revenge, is its moral, then dig two graves…one for yourself. His revenge begins on a professional dart player Big Ron and his sidekick Mad Michael Franks which leads him into the East End underworld and paints a gory picture with characters like Jim the Knuckle or Sneaky Sid. His vivid telling of the rigged darts match that ruined his father’s dreams as champion or the rigged horse race that killed his hopes opens the world of criminal gambling. He is mesmerising in the descriptions. Because of a debt inherited from his late father, he gambles with his boss’s money and loses. And then just missing getting shot dead as a reprisal, he spends years in prison for taking the rap for the murder that saved him. He peels off layer by layer the making of a decent man into a brutalised thug. A red line of blood across his cheek symbolises his transformation at the end of the monologue. Earth shattering. No import or export.

November 3-December 7/06

MONKEY, JOURNEY TO THE WEST

Damon Albarn’s new opera covers foreign territory as he usually does from cult animatiors to African drummers with so many multi cultural artists as well as incorporating the Peiking Opera Company with its spinning plates, twirling umbrellas, one-wheeled bicycles, trapeze silk columns, in choreographed formations, in addition to flying singers singly or choral in dances on high. Albarn’s music along with Gorillaz designs and Jamie Hewlett ‘s concepts and animations, conceived and directed by Chen Shi-Zhang commissioned by Theatre du Chatelet, Manchester Internal Festival and the Straatsoper Berlin to create a rock’n’roll musical circus with video and live stage action integrated into the film along with 50 Chinese acrobats, marshal artists, contortionists and actors. From this description alone, you can see the size of epic in this production. The tales emanate from the Tang Dynasty manuscripts but this version is based on 1970’s Japanese manga hero. Monkey, born out of a rock torn open by lightning, is unhappy to be mortal. So he collects his troup of Buddhist-monk, sand monster, and a pig as they invade heaven to seek immortality. There’s a spiritual thread somewhere in order to motivate the journey, but it’s lost in the shuffle, nor do surtitles help as they interfere with the continuity of all the simultaneous actions on stage. The journey through Taoism and Confucianism is only a comic book journey via the circus. Monkey has a series of adventures. However, to begin with he must deliver a cruise missile from the bottom of the ocean with dancing star fish and such underwater creatures around him; then onto extinguishing a volcano with a gigantic fan after battling the enemy by martial arts. He turns into a bee and yet goes on for further adventures ending up in the sacred temple where the great Buddha is worshipped as the monks climb the ladders to pray. A colossal ending for a show that has tumblers, trapeze artists, contortionists, spinners of plates and umbrellas who fold into origami figures. The acrobatics are stunning, colours and videos eye-catching, dances exuberant, music eclectic reflecting more background than melody. The essential lack is in the non-dramatic or climatic feel to the whole piece where the scenic changes are abrupt without continuity. Albarn has extended the conception of an orchestra by using a collection of Chinese percussions, rare electronica, and his own invention of a Klaxophone. But still the overall conclusion is that of a Walt Disney show..a cartoon of a Chinese opera which is half circus, half music with singing and dancing. Fei Yanh as Monkey is a fabulous acrobat, actor and singer who never endears himself to the audience but wins our admiration over his skills…. very much a key to the whole show. He is renamed Sun Wu Kong, ‘the realisation of emptiness,’ and that emptiness is contagious. The entire cast are superb in each of their categories. There is no room to list them. But the choreography, graphics, designs, videos, costumes are all spectacular…. the technical extravaganza is all. The children in the audience cheered. It is sold out as far as import is concerned and set to tour the world as far as export. Played from June 28 – July 7 at Manchester International Festival Palace Theatre and Stratsoper Unter den Linden Berlin in July

September 26-October 13/07

ACOSTA AND THE ROYAL BALLET

The programme is a assembled series of segments from the various ballets that are performed on a bare stage with subdued lighting which allows the concentration sololy on the dancers and the dancing. The fabulous orchestra accompanying these enormously talented dancers from the Royal Ballet along with the glorious Carlos Acosta is the best there is in just enjoying the dancing without the distraction of production. Of course, the main attraction for this programme is Acosta where few can follow his charisma, his extravagant jetés, his fantastic technique which he dedicatedly masters into his delivery of dancing in his twists and torques. There is enormous joy in him when he dances with a kind of fearless passion. His pas de deux with Tamara Rojo as a severe Diana to his Actaeon not only reveals his dazzling dancing with his high jumping fouttées in countless numbers and his twirling pirouettes but is matched by her easy revolves as she calmly frees herself from his hold. He then dances and acts so comically as a drunk in Les Bourgeois that it becomes an articulated climax of enormous bravura, loquaciousness, and precision. Sarah Lamb brings a gentleness to her Les Sylphide and Dying Swan with a modern twist to Je Ne Regrette Rien, Lauren Cuthbertson her own thrilling technique to the angles and curves of the modern Agon, Tamara Rojo a serene expertise in her turns and extensions. The eclectic selection of modern pas de deux from Agon, Je Ne Regrette Rien (Edith Piaf), End of Time (Rachmoninoff), A Buenes Aires (Argentinian), Les Bourgeois (Jacques Brel); combined with the romantic classics of La Sylphide, Dying Swan, the tragedy of Winter Dreams Farewell (Macmillan choreography) followed by the virtuosity of Diana and Action, all mainly pas de deux till the finale of the entire company with their joyous Majisimo (from Ballet Nacional de Cuba) gives an idea of the range of programme to a stunning evening which Acosta has brought to London. Not possible on import or export…but look out for this programme of Acosta!

March 31-April 3/08

BOEING-BOEING by Marc Camoletti

Here comes a victory that will triumph for years and years in London as well as New York and the USA. I laughed till I almost burst my seams! Here is farce so brilliantly done. It is not a particularly great play but like all farces it’s the expertise of the execution that matters. It is directed with the precision of a Swiss watch, performed by a team magnificently cast in type and timing who never try to be funny but truthful instead. There is no signalling to the audience, but always absorbing the dilemma, then reacting to it and finally taking an action. By that time the audience is involved and splitting their sides. There is no pumping of them. The laughs are at the characters and the situations which come fast and furious. The skill of the whole production is remarkable and must not be missed. A homme fatal (ladies man) Bernard has three air hostesses as mistresses who never meet because they are on different airlines… French/Italian, German, and American. His old friend Robert comes in from the country as a house guest, a shy unsophisticated man not used to city ways and certainly not to such morality. He asks simple questions like maybe flight schedules changing and possibly air hostesses colliding. Never says Bernard. His housekeeper Bertha is very caustic, not knowing what foreign dishes to prepare for each of the ladies and always having to be careful in remembering the right names. The stress is getting her down. And then it happens… flights are cancelled and three air hostesses descend. It’s a good thing this meticulous white set with stunning modern décor has so many doors to support all the to-ing and fro-ing for Robert to handle. He tries to remain cool, Bertha improvises, and Bernard gradually discovers all the dilemmas by the time he arrives. Who goes where without missing the wrong door and who is bedded or courted is the joy of the exercise but most of all the German hostess, with her Hitlerian orders to be kissed and attended by Robert whom she barks at like a soldier in the art of love, is hilarious. He needs a firm woman and she likes a docile man. The American hostess gets a USA proposal of marriage and leaves, while the French/Italian wins the hand of Bernard in marriage and Bertha manages to raise her salary after each escapade. The whole cast, director and set designer are to be congratulated for bringing in an old war horse that one thought would be stale but instead has stolen the limelight for the season. NOT TO BE MISSED!!! Import and Export as it will go to New York.

February 2/07…

DONKEY’S YEARS by Michael Frayn

This is a season of farces and what comparisons are possible! Being one of Frayn’s earliest plays (1976) it’s a bit slow in getting going but succeeds eventually in the second half to mock the snobbery of Oxford University. I do remember its first production being hilarious and marvellously paced with Penelope Keith playing to perfection Lady Driver who was once the easiest lay on campus. However, this current show despite its great English notices, forgoes the first lesson in directing farce…to keep the characters real and not to send them up which only creates caricatures. It is the obsession in each character pursued to the bitter end. that causes laughter. The general feeling in this production is characters are performed mockingly except for Edward Petherbridge, James Dreyfuss, and Mark Addy who play for the truth of their characters allowing the audience to make up its mind about the humour. See How They Run runs rings round this production that has a terrific cast and could have been very funny and not so deliberately manipulative. The play itself with eight men and one woman is still hilariously relative in its government minister being caught-in-the-act… reminding one of our current deputy prime minister John Prescott and his recent scandal. The plot of the play is simple… a college fundraising reunion is being held for the male alumni of 25 years ago. The one lady in the show was once, 25 years ago, the glamorous student-tart of the Oxford campus, servicing most of these men. Though having ended up marrying the current master of this college, she still rides her bicycle as she did in those free-loving days. She has invaded, secretly, the territory of these nostalgic reunionists in search of the one man she had a yen for. He, of course, is the only one who doesn’t show up and Snell, who never lived in rooms on campus, is assigned the room instead. Lady Driver is caught in the bedroom but it’s with the wrong man and so it goes. In addition, the alumni, in very drunken condition, tear the place apart, much to the don’s apoplectic reaction who reminds them of their job of raising money for the new building and not spending money on repairs of the old. The usual slamming of doors, revealing of secrets, falling down stairs, hiding behind curtains, jabbing of needles, accelerate in rapid succession of pace and timing in the second act until David Haig, the leading actor as MP, is pushed from high jubilance to deep distress. Mark Addy is the underprivileged outsider Snell, James Dreyfus is the soured civil servant Guine, Edward Petherbridge is the traditional palely-civilised porter, in their honest portraits of real people. The clever set duplicates the building and the student room lending a genuine air to the atmosphere of Oxford University. No import or export.

May 27/06....

SMALL CHANGE writer/director PETER GILL

This is a play I have loved through the years since its first production at the Royal Court in 1976 because Gill conjures up that small town in Wales in a working class suburb near a river where one can smell the cooking of meals midst the smoke of the industry. Through the lyricism of the language, in its impressionistic simplicity, minimalised to exact perfection without a set and with just a few chairs alternately placed, you are drawn inside the heartbreak of two families, inside the growing up of two boys, Gerard and Vincent, side by side as their mothers support one another in marriages that are brutal to them. One feels the oppression of the place and of the families. Yet those early years meant love of Vincent for Gerard which is never matched by anyone except his mam. Vincent grows up and goes off to sea which causes his mam’s suicide. He marries, has a child, divorces without word to a still-longing Gerard. Returning home, they both meet as grown men, Vincent calling for a beer at the pub with Gerard who cannot outgrow the hurt of his love. Will they ever come to terms with their past? Can they begin again in a town which gave them roots but from where they both fled? Gill directs with musical precision and drives the tragedy of broken lives to penetrating depths. The scene of the two mams singing a favourite song as they dance together says more with less than can ever be expressed with dense dialogue. Sue Johnston portrays a woman of strength and love worn away by her life with such intense feelings that make it unbearable to witness. The melancholia of Lindsey Coulson pulls at the heart as one feels a girl of quality destroyed by her life. Matt Ryan and Luke Evans play at being boys without that embarrassing pretence of youth but with its full vitality. They evolve in front of us transforming in age and emotions that are startling. The ensemble work of the actors and director make this become the magic of theatre where language and acting jell into one and through emotional stripping gives us the story of their lives. Don’t miss it! Import and export for Off Broadway.

April 10 – May 31/08

THE MAN WHO HAD ALL THE LUCK by ARTHUR MILLER

Miller’s first play already showed signs of the Miller obsession with the relationship of brother-to-brother and father-to-son…One son who makes it and the other who is left behind…just as Miller always felt about his older brother. But here he is also playing with the idea of fate being luck given not only to those who deserve it. The original play attempted to present itself as ‘small-town genre comedy’, and closed four nights later on Broadway. After much rewriting from the novel to this version, he added the fable element to deepen the work into a mystical drama. David is the lucky man who knows nothing about cars and yet gets a job as a self-taught car mechanic in crippled Shory’s garage. When his friend JB has a rich farmer Dan needing his posh car repaired, into his life, at midnight, steps Gustav an Austrian immigrant wanting to make a place in the community and who knows all about cars. So up the ladder David goes without trying. When he courts Hester and wants to marry her, her father Roy comes to the garage to warn off David. And then what happens? Roy is killed by Dan, accidentally, with the newly repaired Marmon car. The path is clear to marry Hester. But David becomes haunted by his lack of skill, by his lack of identity; and as Miller says, ’a longing for a break in the cosmic silence that alone would bestow a faith in life itself.’ He is full of fear as to how long the luck will last. As David watches his younger brother Amos being trained by his father to become a big baseball player in the professional leagues, he notes Amos’ skill, his intense sense of direction. And what happens then? Amos is evaluated by a professional talent-scouting manager to never be able to pitch a ball in the open playing stadium because he was trained in the cellar of the house in a confined space without the inclusion of noisy baseball fans. Amos is designated to being a lowly attendant at the petrol station, his father goes back to sea as a cook and David moves up yet again when he is offered and buys farmer Dan’s lucrative mink farm. Gustav stays with David since his own petrol station never took off and Hester has created a beautiful home… but no children. When Hester becomes pregnant, David cannot believe his luck and when she gives birth he is stunned that the baby is not stillborn, but a son he craved for. When will luck turn against him? He is driven almost to madness as he invests everything in the mink farm. At last the day of doom arrives with a terrible storm and David has to feed the minks. Somehow and for some reason he looks at each kernel in the feed bag and throws it away because it looks spoiled. Dan rushes over to stop David from feeding the minks with the poisoned seeds. But David of his own free will made his own luck this time round. Gustav departs for the big city leaving David to shift on his own but will the terrible storm kill the minks or will his luck save him yet again? The play is so gripping, with the characters, the atmosphere, the challenge, that it creates a compelling event. The repairing of the car, the fierceness of Roy, the miracle arrival of Gustav, the tragic defeat of Amos, the sense of the father’s betrayal, the birth of the baby are all scenes that glue you to your seat. Yet this production does not match the production at the Young Vic which starred a mesmerising David in Iain Glen but the strength of remaining cast is excellent supporting the mood and realising the individual characters along with the hand of God that seems to play with them in a myth-like fable. The set is composed of stripped wooden slats that immediately identify the small town; the posh car is lowered from the ceiling, the storm is ominous, the lightning flashes, the thunder roars. The lighting of the show is a gem, the direction very slow paced adding to the repetition of the play, but the feeling for the undercurrent drama is highly focused upon. A moving evening in the theatre. Import but no export.

February 28 – April 5/08 afterwards tours The Lowry Salford, Liverpool Playhouse, Hall For Cornwall

OTHELLO by WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

From the last few years, finding an Othello that would not be overshadowed by the various intriguing Iagos is difficult. But in this amazing production we stand before an Othello in Chiwetel Ejiofor that is world-shaking in a physical production that is unencumbered by sets and concentrates on marvellous atmosphere in its design, lighting effects and music. This is what carries us in ultimate ecstasy with the additional vibrant performances from a commanding Michelle Fairley as Emilia, Edward Bennett as pathetic yet comic Roderigo, and a dashing Cassio to entice our imagination in his physical flirtation with Desdemona. Michael Grandage has that special flare with the classics in which the emotional intensity is captured in suspenseful moods The flaw in the ointment is the star-catcher Ewan McGregor as Iago who gives an intelligently motivated but flat-one-noted modern interpretation and a Kelly Reilly whose white alabaster skin and blonde hair is great visual casting until she opens her mouth with her Betty Boop-a-doop voice that rings out with such comic tones that one wished Othello would silence in Act I. But one must overlook those choices and rejoice in the heights this production has reached in giving us an Othello who clearly is a general in battle and knows the rules of conduct in the army but is totally naïve in the social nuances of the Venetian mores. He counts on its interpretation through Iago whom he feels is all knowing and a friend which is stronger than any professional status. He does not begin to understand his overlooking him in the army structure of rank and is bewildered by Desdemona’s father in his sense of betrayal. It is the agony of his jealousy that dominates and not a man who reveals his savageness through the jealousy. The misplacement of his social life builds so carefully in its delineation which gives a continual flow to the storytelling…. the great strength of Michael Grandage along with the enormous capacity of this romantic Eljiofor in his tragic depths. There is also the added touch of Cassio’s attraction to Desdemona and their physical flirtation which tips the scales a bit. The back wall of the theatre is painted in abstract colours of greens and browns as water falls overall into a stream that is symbolic of the Venetian canals with cornices that are crumbling and Byzantine latticed windows lighted to reflect their patterns for Venice. The water on the back wall ceases for Cypress…enough to indicate the change with a white canopy that expands overhead. A storm greets the arrival of Desdemona on Cypress, a warning of the doom yet to come. The chair, a couch, the bed are brought on as necessary to complete this efficiently sparse set that tells all with a few props. Even the settings indoors in the army camp or on the street are altered by the deliberate lighting used with such invention. This sharp cleanness is indicative of the whole production. The story we all know is of a Moorish general Othello, brilliant in the strategy of war but hopeless in matters of social climate, marries a Venetian beauty Desdemona, who loves him as much as he loves her. He does so without her father’s consent and is immediately sent off to Cypress to conduct an imperial war. He is flanked by his personal aid Iago and has Cassio as his under-officer. Iago feeling he deserved the promotion over a younger less experienced Cassio determines his revenge on Othello. He uses his wife Emilia from whom he snatches Desdemona’s prized handkerchief and plants it on Cassio whom he will finish off by feeding Othello with lies of Cassio’s adultery with Desdemona. The naïve Othello believes Iago and allows his jealousy to torment him into murdering Desdemona. He then kills himself but not before he kills Iago who had in turn killed Emilia for her protesting and proving Desdemona’s innocence and iago’s treachery. Michael Grandage has taken on the Wyndham’s Theatre in the West End to run drama as a counter measure to the musicals….what an auspicious foretelling we have here in his Othello and what a centrifugal force he is in the theatre!!! Import!! Import!! And Export for Broadway!!!!

November 30/07 - January 23/08

PARADE

Michael Grandage has the courage of his convictions in presenting theatre that has emotional depth and meaning, and particularly, in choosing such a serious sing-through musical or more accurately a modern near-opera in which the tragedy of the story has that much weight for an opera. It is only when the musical comedy touches are pasted on that it loses its power as exemplified in the difference between the integrated first act which carries the plot murder-mystery as compared to Act II where a sentimental love story of the protagonist Leo Frank and his wife Lucille are focused upon. Though the show is uneven with its flaws, it is still enormously absorbing. There is a vitally sharp book with lyrics, music though reminiscent of Sondheim that is illuminating in blues to spirituals, hymns to ballads, folk music hyped to a pitch of expressionistic mania for the dancing. Ashford is marvellously inventive as a chorographer setting dances that story tell the plot and the mood. The folk dances are elaborated into modern ballet reflecting the reactions of a bigoted society being fed sensationalism through the newspapers. The whipping up by the newspapers made this murder trial last for months. The base story is a true case history of a notorious miscarriage of justice in Georgia of 1913, thrust upon a sophisticated Jewish Northerner, Leo Frank, a young man with business acumen married to a Southern Jewish belle. He could not understand the Southern mentality so kept only to his work and family. On Confederate Memorial Day, which Lucille enthusiastically celebrated to Leo’s disbelief in celebrating a day of defeat, he gave a pay packet to a 13-year-old worker in his pencil factory where he was plant superintendent. She in turn gave him a Confederate hand flag which he actually waved. She was found strangled to death in the basement the next day ,with Leo being the last person to have seen her alive. He was made the scapegoat for the murder as the attorney general needed a conviction and Leo was the person (even discarding a black petty crook) despite being white against whom he could bribe or threaten witnesses to testify falsely, such as the black cook and the handyman at his home or the girls working in the factory. Disregarding his constant protest of innocence, he was judged and sentenced to death. Lucille, usually dominated by Leo, instead of falling apart took on the courage of battle to finally convince the ambivalent governor to reduce the sentence from the death penalty to life. At any rate, Leo was hanged by secretly hooded bigots from the community. Was it racialism against Jews rather than blacks? Was it the newspapers that increased its circulation by goading an already racialist society? The real killer was never found. In the struggle to save his life, Leo became less arrogant and more loving to a Lucille who grew in stature as she fought for Leo’s life. She would not leave the town even after Leo’s death in order to pursue his innocence. The choral dances are marvellously expressionistic, choreographed with such sadistic hyper-energy when the death sentence is pronounced or when Leo is hanged which is he finale highlighting the Southern fanaticism. The temperature of the times is measured through the dances whether it’s the community reaction or the governor at a ball with his wife. Gary Milner, as governor, sings and dances like a dream besides being an excellent actor with distinction who doubles also as the vicious reporter. There’s a very special moment in a fishing scene of the judge played by Steven Page whose wonderful voice carries the feeling of country life mixed with Southern bias. Carvel's Leo is superb not only in his negative nervy characterisation but also in his fantasy sequence of being a letcher. Lara Pulver, despite a rich voice, seemed to sing with shrillness in her higher register but her portrait of Lucille was quite moving. The doubling of actors gives the individuals an uneven quality but as a chorus they are excellent. The overall effect of the evening though is the content of the musical, the political underscoring, the Southern spirit in its defeated confederacy (symbolised by the Civil War belle.. all lace and grace as a mirage) while underneath lies the deep hatred of racism, all of this expressed so vividly through the dance and music. The staging is clever in using movement to keep the fragmented scenes flowing. The range of music is catchy, the tragic story compelling, the simple balcony set unobtrusive, the two leads beautifully cast, the dancing inventive, and the tension building in Act I by the reporter and attorney gripping. The Donmar has done it again. Import no export.

September 14 – October 24/07

ABSURDIA by NF SIMPSON and MICHAEL FRAYN

Absurdism has travelled long distances in time and place so to witness the early English days from the 50s via NF Simpson in this triple bill as directed by Douglas Hodge filled me with high hopes for a novel experience. Disappointment is always worse when expectations are high. Ionesco and Jarry, even Beckett have been so productive. The Simpson pieces are not only belaboured, they are over-extended and would have been fine as ten to fifteen minute sketches. Chaplinesque characters in bowlers set the stage and the style. Bro and Middie Paradock, a lower middle class couple in A Resounding Tinkle, are concerned over the over-sized delivery of an elephant. That is the old burlesque joke of, ’get rid of the elephant from the garden, says the wife. I can’t, he won’t fit through the gate, says the husband. He came in that way, says the wife.’ The elephant joke plus their neighbour receiving a shortened snake which they exchange for the elephant is the base of this Monty Python-like sketch which we endure for 40 minutes. There is also the appearance of Uncle Ted, recently turned into a female blonde bimbo whose trip to London is to listen to the radio…… another 10 minute sketch stretched to twenty minutes. There are a few one liners like Bro thinking he lives in a bungalow that has no first floor and not in a semi-detached, books served as tea, shoes, slippers, and wellies as domestic jokes, all about conformity that is nursery level in intelligence. So the un-focused pieces hop here and there between so called send-up and satire but never going beyond the point of the earthbound joke. Its ending of the house crashing down on the terrified couple is inventive… not for defining the sketch but more as a set-up for the next sketch. Then into Gladly Otherwise where the lower middle class couple of the Brandywines are intruded upon by the paranoid bureaucrat from the ministry (or is he a trade unionist?) who’s surveying the house according to paranoid standards by measuring the doorknobs, drawer-handles, and whatnots. It’s another sketch kept shorter but it too ends with a house-crash on a terrified couple with an Altzheimer’s husband which leads us into the next scene…The Crimson Hotel. This is a take-off on French farce which is so elasticated that it is stretched way beyond farce with as much snap to it as the eroded elastic. Not funny and so repetitive! An adulterous farce writer and actress are to rendezvous in a hotel with crimson curtains as in the play they are doing but instead meet in the desert. They mime the terrible furnishings from the play onto their hotel which is, of course, not visible. The creaking non-doors are opened and closed in sense memory to sound effects. They pretend her husband may have caught them but he too is invisibly there…. with a cute little number. The actress is voluminously jealous and shouts instructions where he can find the light switch…while martyr-like bemoans, ’My God when I think of all the hundreds of times I’ve been faithful to him.’ There is a moment of hilarity when trying to be invisible the actress calls out ‘Shimmer (and she shakes, trembles, quivers in ripples) …they’ll think we’re a mirage.’ They carry on and on till the writer disappears under a picnic blanket (a trap door, of course) and so does she. There are no more houses to fall down so the trap door endings will have to do. The acting is strained and non-comical, the staging wooden without pace or farcical timing. Is French farce that important when there is no real content to satirise? I think I prefer Ionesco’s The Rhinoceros.

July 26 – Sept 8/07

BETRAYAL by HAROLD PINTER

Another revival yet again! There was David Leveaux’s at the Almeida, Trevor Nunn’s at the National, Peter Hall’s at Bath and now Roger Michell’s at the Donmar. It’s an intriguing play for directors since it starts in 1997 and goes backwards to 1968 when the affair started which stimulates the style of the piece that would be ordinary if it began in 1968 and ended in1997. Jerry a literary agent, Robert a book publisher and his wife Emma are the triangle generating the action. Robert and Jerry are best friends, Emma is Robert’s wife who has the affair with Jerry. The base root is about betrayal in which each past version focused on the lovers betraying Robert. In this interpretation the interest lies in Emma feeling betrayed by her husband Robert who closes his eyes to her affair and then she learns only later about his affairs with other women; there is her feeling of betrayal by Jerry when he makes no effort to marry her and turns away at her pregnancy by Robert. Jerry’s sense of betrayal is Emma’s pregnancy by Robert and his guilt of betraying Robert and his wife Judith. Robert’s betrayal by his best friend Jerry and his wife Emma is submerged as Robert in a state of denial keeps up the pretence without revealing his own affairs and his betrayal of Emma. Jerry is warmer than Robert and nostalgic of the attachment to the children and family closeness. He underestimates Robert’s hurt at the break in their friendship more than in his marriage. Robert’s pain is revealed at a luncheon with Jerry. In addition there is a silent attachment that both men have to each other in the sharing of the same woman and a sense of betrayal to their early idealism while now acting as cynical players in their work. Damage is done to Emma who starting out as a loving wife turns to Jerry for warmth and passion but in the end finding disappointment in both men she hardens and takes on a career of the art gallery plus a new lover. Michell catches the emotional ebb and flow, the penetrating pain of accumulated deceit, the price paid for love and its complexity. Dervla Kirwin’s Emma is delicately balanced between expectation and fulfilment, between the spoken and unspoken grief; Toby Stephen’s Jerry carries a naivety and an easy sexual charm that is compelling; Sam West’s Robert appears to be a cold fish indifferent to the adultery until he reveals his broken heart with shattering emotion. The play, direction and acting are not only a breath of fresh air, opening the window to a renewed life of this work which can be interpreted in so many different ways, but is also magnificently performed and staged. Import! Import! And even export for Broadway.

May 31 – July 21/07...

KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN by MANUEL PUIG

The revival of the play after a musical and a successful film adds more stress to fulfilling a raison d’etre for its revival. The first time I saw Kiss Of The Spider Woman, so skilfully performed by Mark Rylance and Simon Callow, was at the Bush theatre, a confined space which gave the prison cell the claustrophobic atmosphere so necessary to the piece. The set at the Donmar is magnificent, the best I have ever seen in a three dimensional sense of a prison building and its Argentinean location, but the space is ample enough to live in privacy. It loses the high-powered energy of the relationship. The actual story does not hold beyond an hour and so the repetitious delivery of groceries and sessions that Valentin has with the inspector of the prison does not build nor does it need that kind of time to establish the stages of development between the men. Our times are such that we move much faster and are given shorthand suggestions that cut time to a minimum. The play in that sense has dated. Two men confined in a prison cell, one gay (Molina), the other a macho political rebel (Valentin) who must live together and survive, is the base of the tale. The gay prisoner is used as a spy to gain information from the rebel and as payment is allowed his choice of groceries. Being so concerned over his sick mother which is his excuse for reprieve, the groceries are an easy camouflage from mother. The tragedy lies in Valentin falling in love and not wanting to leave prison knowing he has left behind a Molina that has been betrayed even if it is for his own sake. Will Keen is cunning in his femininity as Molina… his seductive head movements, fluttery hands, soft shuffle, and precise gestures in making the bed or changing clothes into a Japanese kamona, his domesticity in bathing, cooking, dressing, always so precious, capped by a high pitched voice that eventually irritates. Keen plays the sensitivity, the softness with perfect balance, and shows his disturbance over spying with a double edged ambiguity. He is moving in being ripped away from a potential love and the irony of his reprieve. Keen gives a heartfelt performance as does Evans as the passionate revolutionary. His burning intensity is an incentive to his personal passion and during his illness he is as inflamed as his temperament which Molina can soothe as well as cure. Yet with all this craft of theatre in the acting directing, designing, lighting, and music, there is such a sense of deja vue that there are no suspenseful or unpredictable moments. The rush to see this production is negligible but the quality of it cannot be questioned. No import or export.

April 19 – May 26/07

JOHN GABRIEL BORKMAN by Henrik Ibsen

We go from the ridiculous Boeing-Boeing! to the sublime in a subdued translation of John Gabriel Borkman in keeping very much to Ibsen’s original intent and directed and performed with passionate anger. The painter Munch, who did the original scenic design, called the play ‘the mightiest winter landscape in Scandanavian art.’ The set is awesome here dominated by a heavy dark wooden back wall of windows with the snow falling in constant measures and a sparse sitting room with spartan chairs. A hidden heavy wooden wall slowly descends for the upstairs scene and both walls are raised on high for the snowy outdoors on desolate ground. The sound of agitated pacing feet on the ceiling is in rhythm with the falling snow. The twin sisters Ella and Gunhild meet after so many years. Ella is dying and has come to ask Gunhild to give her son Erhardt to her until her death. Despite Borkman living upstairs, Gunhild, a deeply bitter wife, has not seen or spoken to her husband, released from gaol for embezzlement after seven years. It is he who marches back and forth like a caged bear. Gunhild is narrowed with blinders on her drive for Erhardt to make up for Borkman’s reputation. It is Ella who tries to unite the whole family, to appease Borkman and Gunhild. She succeeds with Borkman but faces him for the first time in his lust for power rather need of love. Having left his isolation to build on his plans of resurrecting his power structures, Borkman dies when exposed to the wintery outdoors or the pulse beat of life. When Erhardt arrives it is with the gay cavorting Mrs Wilton and it is she who will win him over to her fancy-free life of pleasure. Erhardt is desperate to escape from the realities of his mother’s grasp; his aunt’s death; and his father’s fantasies of conquering the earth. A life of frivolity is his goal after the heaviness of the doomed family. Borkman dies, Ella is dying, Erhardt has left the country with Mrs Wilton and only Gunhold remains holding on to her empty house. Deborah Findlay and Penelope Wilton as the two sisters are formidably played and carry the weight of the play. Erhardt is not an essential character and hasn’t much impact here. Mrs Wilton is beautifully fulfilled in her dominating pleasures with a touch of sexuality that brings a life force to the stage. The interpretation of John Gabriel Borkman is open to taste. Ralph Richardson playing Borkman as a man whose vision of winning new worlds for mankind is unforgettable in my memory. He had another worldliness that carried mystery with it. It was a symbolic portrayal which Ibsen preferred for his plays…expressionism in its style against the naturalistic dialogue which Tennessee Williams followed. With Ian McDiarmid it is a realistic performance of a man whose vision was cut off by pigmies and would take that giant step even if it meant death rather than remain a fragment. It doesn’t carry the same size of the tragedy but it is an intense version which balances the play and offers a performance of distinction. Michael Grandage as always creates a theatricality to his smooth productions, generating an awareness of the accomplished skills of professionalism which make the intimacy of this theatre epic. Import but export is not possible.

February 15 – April 14/07

DON JUAN IN SOHO by PATRICK MARBER updating MOLIERE

Marber is an important contemporary writer following the Stoppard generation. This play gives us the degeneracy of the morality using Soho of today as a symbol. The swank new hotels juxtaposing the clip joints and whore houses, the film companies festering next to the crackheads in the alley ways or the cokeheads in the sex clubs, the famous courting the delirious is the Soho of today and where Marber transposes Moliere. Marber reflects the amorality of today as Moliere reflected his day. Hell is no longer an abstract or imagined place but an internal process affected by the hellish environment. There is no sense of joie de vivre in running so close to the edge or the triumph of winning as in Moliere’s day. One absorbs the joyless life even in victory. It is not his best play but it is relevant, sharply witty, cynical, and well observed. Nor is it Moliere in its intentions. But Marber should be followed in addition to the work of Grandage who will probably become the next artistic director of the National and whose work is always inventive as well as carefully produced with a follow through of his concepts. The cast is uneven in performance but solid actors have been chosen with Rhys Ifans looking like a young Peter O’Toole in a withered air of deja vue and jaded sophistication. His junior servant played by Stephen Wight is a delight and captures the sly wit of the dialogue while trying to rid himself of his master and his cruel escapades. For me, there is no insight into updating the amoral behaviour of Don Juan other than an in-yer-face vulgar display of his being fellated by one woman while he courts another and can't quite articulate as he reacts sexually. That is the highpoint of comedy in the production which is beautifully produced in its detail including the statue which moves with great surprise and suspense ending up as a pedal-taxi (rickshaw) in his helping Don Juan to suicide or is it his challenge to death he thought he could win? There is one speech of Don Juan where he defies hypocrisy and the false morality compared to his honest amorality in which Marber suddenly takes Don Juan seriously and reveals a sense of judgment. Neil Bartlett updated the play to a belle epoch Paris set in a hotel which had style and somehow brought the existential concept of hell into the production. The reason and point of view for the update seemed so clear and important. Revealing only the seedy sexuality with no disposal towards conscience or hell when a world is falling apart seems trivial to me. The reviews have been raves and audiences enjoy the intense sexual perversity. You can’t miss the spit and polish of the production nor can you overlook its high quality of production and a theatrical experience. Export and import for Broadway.

November 30/06-February 10/07

THE CRYPTOGRAM by David Mamet

The sense of a mystery…something gone wrong…the room upstairs seeming evil…all are apparent from the very moment the play begins and the characters keep us on tenderhooks. The direction immediately establishes the mood as it flows like wine from step to step. Donny is receptive to Del since he is so good with John… calming his fears about camping. John’s father is going to take him camping tomorrow. Slowly as if unravelling the stitches of a knitted garment we begin to see Donny looking at evidence and trapping Del into the truth. Donny the self centred mother is more concerned about her husband’s fidelity than her son’s happiness. She sacrifices his fearful nature based on his insecurity about his parents for her own ends. The kind Del and his need of friendship is finally destroyed by Donny as she gradually uncovers her husband’s infidelity to which Del is an accomplice by lending his flat. The camping trip with his father will never happen for John and all because of a hunting knife that Del vowed was from his last camping adventure with the father which never took place. The boy, Del, and the comfort of friendship are demolished by Donny quite ruthlessly. She justifies it all by blaming Del and not herself, venting her bloodcurdling anger at her husband. Beautifully cast and directed…another carefully produced work at the Donmar. No export or import.

October 12-November 25/06

FROST/NIXON by Peter Morgan

This is the most exciting drama, and if necessary to be more accurate, docu-drama in the West End. Run do not walk to the Donmar at your nearest available date. I remember seeing the television broadcast in which the ‘master deceiver’ Nixon met the ‘grand inquisitor’ Frost where the deceiver at the end of the long interview finally confessed to his crime which everyone already knew he committed despite Nixon’s denials. No one was surprised at the guilt…but no one expected him to confess because of new evidence he did not know was discovered. Under improvised conditions of being confronted with new findings, Nixon crashed and caved in. There was relief not surprise that Nixon was finally trapped. What had the docu-drama to offer after all these years? And why would it be of any interest at this point? There’s no doubt that the dimensions of these interviews were of Greek tragic proportions where two contestants… a has-been entertainer/ presenter and a disgraced president of the USA were confronting each other and one wondered who would win. But knowing who won has been clearly established, so why would a docu-drama hold any suspense or further insight? The surprise is for you to see….Not only are the characters crystal clear in their characterisations but to see Frost as a fading star making his way back under such odds and seeing his team so defeated at the results of the interviews before the last one on Watergate, reveals for the first time how isolated the so called popular Frost was. What becomes apparent is Frost’s great struggle in putting this project together and the uphill climb to success. But more importantly, one discovers that he is emotionally at the same point as Nixon who also stands alone at great odds. The sense of equal vulnerability is made obvious for the first time. Nixon who entered the deal for the million dollars also felt he could woo back the public, but didn’t count on a simpatico with Frost. He trusted Frost because he was winning all the rounds until the Watergate interview where Jim Reston at the last minute found the transcripts of the unused tapes that irrevocably found Nixon’s direct involvement. The timing of this discovery was unknown to us as a viewing television audience. Frost’s attack with such never-before ammunition froze Nixon into a state of shock and then into a confession that he could not escape. We discover from this production that it was not a deliberate structure of the television team but a natural climax of events that could not have been more dramatically planned. Watching the process of making this television programme becomes the fascination as we gain insight into the leading characters. Peter Morgan, a television writer, has devised such a brilliant script that so accurately depicts the television process and captures the nature of both beasts. Grandage has directed this work with the kind of staccato energy that brings the sense of urgency and emergency to the fore and paces the storyline with suspense. His use of the screen which videos the close-ups of Nixon and Frost while we see the live figures on stage is a highly inventive move in combining the use of television and the stage which is intrinsic to the piece. No one will forget the lingering sweaty face of Nixon in panic as he confesses his ‘mistake’ at the end of the play. Grandage also gets performances from Langella and Sheen that are the peak of their careers. Credit must also obviously be given to both these actors who by invading the characters so deeply give us acting that is being and not acting. What you will see is the imaginative skill of a team where all has jelled, making the whole become as important as its parts…. and that dear reader is the essence of art. IMPORT AND EXPORT for Broadway!!

August 10 – October 7/06

THE PRODUCERS by Mel Brooks

The reviews don’t really matter as this fantastic musical cannot be affected by any critical comment. Though Nathan Lane is no longer in the show having been scheduled only to January 8th and though its success is largely due to his performance, the show still remains a hit. The New York production with Nathan Lane as Max and Matthew Broderick as Leo were a much better balance than with Lee Evans as Leo who broadens the comedy out of proportion to its intent and causes the broadening of Lane’s performance. Lee is so contrived rather than naïve. The innocence of the accountant is crucial as he becomes gradually corrupted by the manipulative producer. It is important that the scenes in the producer’s office are natural as compared to the theatricality of the production numbers in the theatre. The basic concept of finding a musical so bad that it would close quickly thus becoming a means for the producers to get rich, is a wonderful base for a farce, particularly when the terrible show becomes a hit. The send-up of Hitler, the dances in Nazi uniform with boots, the formation of dances in the shape of the swastika, etc, etc all colour this vibrant work. The production numbers, the sets, the fun, the dancing, the hilarious songs and events bounce with such hilarity that jokes are unnecessary. There is also the six-foot Leigh Zimmerman taller than all the men, dancing and singing, who is a laugh a minute without even trying. She is the assistant to Lee Evans, the sexy girl that he conquers. The replacement for Lane, Brad Oscar,has happened as the show carries on. Richard Dreyfus backing out made it possible for the London opening to be a great success with Nathan Lane substituting in his original part. Now that Brad Oscar has replaced Lane, he too is also a familiar Max having played 900 performances. But the genius of Susan Stroman as director/choreographer must be highlighted for the inventive energy she possesses. Forget reviews or import /export. This show will last forever.

October 22/04 - January 06/07

THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES of SIR ARTHUR COAN DOYLE

The play is a spoof from beginning to end with a tedious script that repeats itself continually as it follows in exact detail the original story. The writing of the play could do with some literary style. The production relies on the three actors who are stand-up comics and who send up their characters whether by mugging, leg rolling, quick switches of wigs and moustaches, shifty movements, prop play, but always timed to a tee. The Spanish actor, Javier Marzan, who plays both villain Stapleton, his exotic sister and Sherlock Holmes or the servant Barrymore and then his wife by the flash of an apron, speaks with a thick accent at times impossible to follow but easy to catch his meaning in his body language. There’s a gag in the show by pulling a letter from the audience which says ‘they can’t understand a bloody word the dago is saying’. The house lights come on and there’s the old cliché ‘playing with the audience’. The fast rerun of Act I in Act II is one of the high moments as they pass through doors or lose trousers behind the fireplace. Dr Watson is played by a small actor with liquid legs. The Lord of Baskerville, Sir Henry, has arrived from Canada and sought help of Sherlock Holmes because his life has been threatened. They journey through the foggy moors to get to the castle as the hound howls. They slowly sink in the killing Grimpen mire but are saved by a botanist who of course is really the villain. The fun starts in the castle with the servant and his breakfast tray who instantly switches to his wife in front of our eyes. He is also the love interest, the exotic sister, with Sir Henry. We know Stapleton has trained the hound to kill any strangers and so there is danger to overcome! Stay far away from the moors….at night!! The reviews have been positive even with a dire first act that speeds up in the second half. It’s the three actors with their timing, versatility, and mime and physical movements that carry the parody of the show. This may seem to follow the 39 Steps in its genre but it can’t compare with the slickness of 39 Steps. Import but no export.

April 16 – June 23/07

UNDER THE LINTEL by Glen Berger

This one man show of one and half hours is about an obsessed Dutch librarian who receives the return of the Baedeker travel book 113 years after its original selection. Having lost out in life and love, he decides to fulfil that lost destiny by following the mystery of where and how this book was returned and from whom. He deduces it is the Wandering Jew who was cursed to keep wandering after not allowing Jesus to rest with his cross under the lintel of his shop. The journey takes a world wide turn in places and in time which resembles the Da Vinci Code in its adventures, except when it leads us to the dry cleaners on Holloway Road or a post office in China. He concludes that if the Wandering Jew is not a myth then God is not a myth and therefore exists. The play is repetitive in its journey and boring in its structure as a lecture given to the audience with evidence that is pinned up on a blackboard. The Toby Zeigler of West Wing, the communications director, is a far cry from this actor whose vocal tricks and constant gurgling deny the essence of his absorbing character on television. This USA transfer is as deeply disappointing as a vehicle as it is in the performance. No import or export.

February 7 – April 14/07

SEE HOW THEY RUN by Philip King

If you want to see farce as it should be done and laugh till you weep, forgetting logic or the story, but seeing skill of timing in actors and rhythmic pacing in theatre, then don’t miss this show. It’s one of those old hat rep plays that were frequent in the 1940’s when this was written and set. Cliché as it may be about vicars with not a chance of credibility and limited to English humour, it transcends all of that because it is so funny. All the actors play their character dead straight and are involved in their parts with no send- up of character which is the first rule to observe in farce. A young vicar in a market town has married an ex-actress who seems to upset everyone by her trendy ways such as wearing trousers. The town spinstervisits the vicar to complain about his wife decorating the church hall that she has done for the past twenty years. Little does this spinster realise that she is in for a turn of events that will last her a lifetime. The maid Ida, who adores the vicar’s wife, has punctured her bicycle wheel. As a result the spinster has to return where she is given brandy that causes her to go into spasms of drunkenness that bring the house down. In addition, an actor friend of Mrs Toop is in the army stationed nearby. She entices him to go to the films and dinner with her in town. He can’t do that in uniform so she gives him one of her husband’s suits and collar. Off they go when the bishop, Mrs Toop’s uncle, shows up after an escapee from the prisoner-of- war camp forces a suit and collar as camouflage from Ida. The Reverend Humphrey makes his regular visit and as a result there is so many vicars real and in disguises that the bishop has a fit. He asks the local police inspector to arrest the vicar…but which one? Between the confusion of vicars, drunkenness, deceptions uncovered, a bold maid, and an indignant bishop, the endless run-around and hiding places become an hysterical series of continual chases of laughter. All the actors are superb in a fabulous cast directed with such astute awareness of farce by actor/director Douglas Hodge. Don’t miss this farce of farces that will perk you up for a week. Export for Broadway with this cast.

June 20/06...

RENT REMIXED

It is called ’Rent Remixed’..more updated than before which is an update of Puccini’s La Boheme. When it first appeared its author/composer Larson died on opening night and made news in the New York Times. It immediately zoomed into a hit as the younger generation picked up on its theme of drugs, wannabe ambitions, not paying the rent, and trying to sustain human relationships while facing death. The musical hit an emotional chord at that doomed generation facing an epidemic of Aids. In 1996 it was a reflection of the times, not matching Hair in its quality but in that category. Its rough edged production captured the rawness of their lives. In this version Roger is still a musical aspirant in love with Mimi a musical comedy dancer who’s an HIV-positive heroin-addict. His mate Mark is a struggling film-maker whom Maureen has jilted for a lesbian lover. Tom a computer-crazed friend falls for a drag queen, Angel who is also dying. It carries the same plot as before only under different circumstances. It’s fashionable Manhattan with white walls, perspective screen dividers, chic carpeting, etc etc. There’s a four piece orchestra that provides less noise than the original making the lyrics audible this go-round. But where’s the current identity… social protest from what period? Some of the ballads still hold. However, showing newsreels of famous people dying of Aids does not relate to the original intent of the show nor the music. Van Outen is the star of the production, leading the protest against the eviction notice from the building. She sings well enough in her sultry tones and has a magnetism to an audience, but there’s nothing original about her. Donaghy as Mimi is well cast with a pleasing voice and Jay Webb as the drag queen Angel has his moments. But what is the point or theme of this version other than a star vehicle for Van Outen which has had its day. No import or export.

October 2/07...

IN CELEBRATION by DAVID STOREY

There is a peculiar way with the timing of plays. If you revive them too early they are dated but if you wait for a decade or so they become period. You can’t call In Celebration period, not yet. But it can become a period play representing the 60s when working class children were educated out of their class like Chekhov in becoming a doctor who came back to support his whole family. But not so in the UK where the Yorkshire miner in this play remains a miner at 64 refusing to retire while his three sons cannot relate to him or their painful childhood. It is difficult now to accept the tragedy status of the play as severe when events have since taken over and demolished the miners’ culture causing such grief and tragedy to so many that one dysfunctional family who still have roots whether they accept or reject them stands only as unfortunate. But when so many families and villages were destroyed by Thatcher in closing the mines there is such a scale of tragedy that this Shaw family are trivial in comparison. In time the proportions of the piece will prevail as history of the 1960s. The occasion is celebrating the 40th wedding anniversary (represented by rubies) of the Yorkshire Shaws (Dearbhla Molloy’s stoically restrained portrait with Tim Healy’s lively shouting miner) to where their three sons living in the southeast have journeyed for a family dinner. Their long serving neighbours (fine support from Lynda Baron and Ciaran Mcintyre) come in for a toast and a few memories. But is it a celebration when they get together and their unhappy childhood is conjured up? Steven (understated Orlando Bloom), the youngest had the talent but submerged it in working for years as a married teacher with four children who gave that up for writing from which he has just removed himself. He remains aloof and silent and only gives away his depression when crying in his sleep at night. He is a lost soul who will not admit his despair to the family. Andy (angry but witty performance from Paul Hilton) the eldest, is the most energetic extravert who never stops plying into all their lives. He gave up being a lawyer to become an abstract painter who has divorced his wife and flits from female to female without any cash in his pocket or in a bank account. It is Andy who reminds them of their brother Jamie who died at seven years of age after which mother tried to commit suicide despite being six-months pregnant with Steven. Andy is the one most disturbed in his relationship with his mother who never kisses or hugs him. He flirts dancing in a most physical manner with her immovable presence. He still hangs on to the child locked out of the house crying, ‘let me in’, which mother still does not do. Andy lets his brothers know that mother only married their father because she was several months pregnant with Jamie. She has always felt father was beneath her socially and he treats her as a special lady of consequence whom he loves. It is her coolness that appears as dignified grace but has in fact caused the turbulence in the two sons leaving Colin (Gareth Farr’s well marked performance with so little to go on), the middle son, the least affected by the mother’s lack of affection. He is not creative and has made a great deal of money as a negotiator in middle-management. Colin is just about to get married to a dentist. As Andy says maybe it’s a way of saving money, if you have a dental problem. The next morning, the boys pack up to go back to their lives, an escape route from the past with no sense or purpose of the future. Mother stands at the window and with a silent burst of tears bends over in pain at an unfulfilled life. The direction by Anna Mackmin is slow paced and literal in following the script which still holds as a close autobiography. It is Lez Brotheston’s set which is imaginative in having a second level revealing the continuity of the family life. With so few dramas in the West End and several closing, it is important to import this play though not suitable for export.

July 5/07...

LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS book/lyrics HOWARD ASHMAN

This is an absurdist musical that uses the horror of a devouring plant which grows with the human flesh it eats and a torturous dentist who delights in causing abusive pain as its send up. Don’t cry out for morality because there isn’t any. You go for the jokes or you don’t. Don’t ask for weight or depth because there is none. It is not an invigorating musical I particularly care for but it does amuse and is so well produced that it has moved to the West End. The Menier Chocolate Factory has a knack for original productions in musicals. This one has the ingenious plant named Audrey II that grows in each act and is superbly created with a delicious puppeteer inside the plant and a vocal whose rattling voice roars for more and more flesh. Audrey II is far from frightening, as it’s supposed to be, because McShane and Heath are so gorgeously comic and become the stars of the show. But they are not alone with a trio of girls Katie Kerr, Melitsa Nicola, and Jenny Fitzpatrick, who sing like Motown and are simply fantastic as the chorus playing the onlookers from the street. They are funny and harmonise in the most enchanting fashion. The florist on skid row is on the brink of bankruptcy and about to close when Seymour its nerdy assistant nurtures this strange plant which causes business to erupt. He names the plant AudreyII after the salesgirl whom he loves. The plant tastes human blood from Seymour’s finger and then grows in its greed for more and more blood. The need of human blood allows Seymour to feed the villainous dentist to this non-sweetening plant since the blood of Seymour is not enough. Soon Seymour is torn between fame through the monstrous feeding of the bloody plant or his love for Audrey whose dentist boyfriend on his motorcycle had been frightening to Audrey. Of course, they all end up in AudreyII which only proves blood must have blood so don’t play around with evil or it consumes you. The sadistic dentist is the main comedy in the show which Jasper Britton only touches upon as leader of the plaque. He’s more rakish than comic. Sheridan Smith sings like a dream but also brings an endearing humour to Audrey. Seymour is played with remote control by Paul Keating who has a pleasant vocal quality. The intimacy of the Menier allows its size to keep the show’s proportion and so one enjoys its light-weight in a small theatre. Beautifully paced with an agile set that moves with the songs, it’s a hit show in a slick production. No need for export or import.

March 6/07...

ROCK‘N’ROLL by TOM STOPPARD

If Tom Stoppard’s name were not attached to this three hour and fifteen minute play would it be produced? I have yet to see Trevor Nunn direct a new play with any pruning but instead extending production gimmicks to compensate for the non-structure of a play. It’s a shame because the basic idea of this piece is so brilliant and so relevant….to show the social and creative revolution that happened in the UK with the advent of the rock ‘n’ roll of Syd Barrett of The Pink Floyd or The Rolling Stones as compared to the suppression and eventual jailing of the top rock ‘n’ roll band The Plastic People of the Universe in Czechoslovakia under communism. Sappho and Syd Barrett are juxtaposed, as is the concept of systems…the one of communism versus democracy. Stoppard reviles all systems and certainly not a closed one which breeds fanatics who suppress all others. The play switches from Cambridge to Prague and Prague to Cambridge during the Soviet invasion in 1968 of Czechoslovakia running to the Velvet Revolution. The concentration of the play should have been on the psychedelic band of The Plastic People, but instead it consumes so many pathways that the band is lost in the shuffle. In Prague, we follow Jan (marvellously played by Rufus Sewell), the Cambridge student, now back in Prague, in a constant struggle with his friend Freda (accurate Peter Sullivan) over their dissent in the underground movement opposing the reactionary Husak government after the fall of Dubeek who brought a human touch to socialism. Jan’s love of rock ‘n’ roll has a perfect symbol for him in defending the Plastic People which leads them all to jail and the trashing of Jan’s unique collection of rock ‘n’ roll records. Freda finds the band a bunch of creeps with no political significance. It is Jan who understands that the band’s very indifference is more popular and hence more frustrating to the authorities than the limited cult of intellectuals. Stoppard knows that the police need their dissidents to earn their place in a rigid society. It is Jan who could easily be Stoppard had he returned to Prague. Oddly enough the band’s trial in 1976 eventually led to Charter 77. Nunn emphasised the rock music in video segments where Pink Floyd, the Stones, etc, etc were projected between the segmented scenes with time changes from 1968-1990. It may extend the play but it also is the liveliest aspect of the production and justifies the title. The other part of the Cambridge story relates to Max Morrow (bombastic but plebeian Brian Cox), Jan’s tutor at university, a passionate communist eventually disillusioned by New Labour and communism as it has been exploited, but who still remains adamant about the October Revolution in 1917 and to the concept of giving voice to the working class. His cancer-ridden wife Eleanor opposes his materialistic approach to human society and in dying leaves a lonely man without an opponent till he marries Lenka (lusty Nicole Ansari), another fierce debater. You can imagine how many repetitious political debates go on in each relationship and each generation. We see Max’s daughter Esme, a creature of the flower-power drop-out generation, grow up and nurture a brilliant daughter who knows where she is going compared to her searching-for-identity mother. Sinead Cusack plays both wife Eleanor and daughter Esme in an astonishing performance. It is Esme who had a crush on Jan as a teenager who finds her way to Prague and marries Jan. There are so many intellectual and political avenues to follow, sometimes beautifully delineated within the characters and then just having characters like Max be a mouth piece for Stoppard’s ideas. If only a director could edit and structure this play, what a great work it could be. The show is selling out on Stoppard’s name with tickets as high as £45. If you have patience to delve into all the various romantic nostalgia mingled with the intellectual academia, you will be enticed and challenged. If not, you will be exhausted. Please note David Calder will replace Brian Cox

July 22/06 - February 25/07

ABSURD PERSON SINGULAR by ALAN AYCKBOURN

To celebrate the Christmas season there is only one play of Ayckbourn that could possibly adorn the West End stage and that is Absurd Person Singular. It covers three years in a row (1970) of Christmas parties in each of the neighbour’s houses somewhere in suburbia where three social classes are depicted supposedly celebrating the season’s greetings. Does Ayckbourn give us the parties? Oh no, he doesn’t! Does he give us the happy celebration? Oh no, he doesn’t! What we are given are three kitchens each the essence of their class…first the upwardly-mobile couple (Jane and Sidney) rising from their lower middle-class in a trim immaculately-neat kitchen looking like a Littlewood’s catalogue; the second (Eva and Geoffrey) the professional bohemians (he’s an architect) in avant-garde decorations of pine wood cupboards messed with dirty dishes, books and papers strewn everywhere, greasy cooker, stopped–up sink, etc; the third is an upper-class Gothic kitchen with arched windows and doors, cold as ice, all antiquey with no living atmosphere, the home of a banker and his alcoholic upper-class wife (Marion and Ronald). All the drama of fretting before and after the parties take place in the kitchen and reveal the stress and strain behind the camouflage of suburban life. Of course, it seems dated since we now inhabit a world of ‘don’t give a damn’. However, it is refreshing to reminisce upon those days when social decorum had meaning even when it went painfully wrong. Ayckbourn by exaggerating all of their foibles not only paints cartoon figures at whom we can laugh, but by progressing each year we are given a darker insight into the growth of each couple’s problems. At Jane and Sidney’s party there is a delightful scene of Jane standing in the rain in her husband’s boots, rain hat and coat, locked out of the kitchen and having to go round the front entrance where banker Ronald takes her for a servant using the wrong entrance while his wife Marion, having no other means of communication with this lowly couple, admires the doors and drawers of the cupboards. Little Jane terrified of all these important neighbours goes back to her fluffy slippers and polishing. At Geoffrey and Eva’s Christmas in the kitchen, Eva by this time is suicidal over her husband’s philandering and his exit from their marriage. Last year, at Jane and Sidney’s, she was just a neurotic, wild-haired bohemian on drugs. Now, like the old burlesque formats adopted by the mimists as a standard act which even Charlie Chaplin copied, we have Eva trying to commit suicide by gassing herself, jumping out of the window, poison, hanging, while each time no one reacts to the suicide attempt but manages to misinterpret her intention so that it becomes a running gag of will she ever do it!!! When we finally reach Ronald and Marion’s turn, Marion is now an alcoholic and Ronald depressed, finding his only release in do-it-yourself electrical repairs. Eva now recovered, trim and efficient, Geoffrey helplessly cooperative, Jane spry in her expensive dress and Sidney the only male capable of taking charge as they all end up dancing to his tune. The moral of the story being the upwardly-mobile have the drive to succeed and so they do. Has the social face of England changed? Oh yes, it has!! We are now even multi-cultural!! Does this mockery of our lives relate to today? Oh yes, it does!!! And is it masterly directed, gorgeously cast and performed in every role, perfectly designed? Oh yes, it is!!! So have yourself a Merry Christmas by enjoying Ayckbourn in the West End after all these years!! ‘Here’s mud in your eye’, Bill Kenwright, the producer of this happy revival!!!

Dec 11/07...

BAD GIRLS

Taking a favourite television series and transforming it into a musical for the stage is a big yet easy jump. It’s an all female enterprise from cast to writers, composers, director, designer which gives it an added distinction for a female audience. The bad girls are those in prison and follow the story of at least six of them. The effective songs are a short-cut to getting to the stereo-type girls…some real, some completely cliché. Prison life in songs like I Shouldn’t Be Here or The Baddest And The Best and individual characters through ballads such Sorry or One Moment, or comedy patter as in All Banged Up, or prison pecking order such as A Life of Crime or even the big fantasy number which projects a jazzy stage revue in The Future is Bright sung by Jim and prison officers bring a vitality and zestful means of exposure. We have the fairy godmother who is the warden Helen Stewart, an awakened sleeping beauty who is discovering her lesbian inclination while defending an embittered lesbian killer Nikki accused of a murder she claims to be self defence. We have Satan who is the evil prison guard Jim paving his way up the ladder of success at the cost of the female prisoners along with his partner in crime the come-as-you-go prison guard Sylvia. The prison is realistically visualised in the video settings which illustrate the ambience in the successive bars on winding staircases, dizzying passageways, and cells. Added three dimensional doors, chairs, tables and beds complete the picture. So how shall we tell this story which is half mockery, half serious in taking a stand in reforming prisons, and half fairytale? Once upon a time there was a special place called prison in a faraway land where bad girls were locked. Some set fire to their homes when lied to for years over a mother not returning. Some were murderers, prostitutes, petty thieves, even kleptomaniacs with a touch of Jesus. Some were hard and cruel, some crushed into suicide, and some formed teams of power using drugs as barter. Into this tough existence came the fairy godmother who was determined to change the rules and spread light and happiness for a better world. She would bestow justice with her magic wand… determined to prove the innocence of Nikki through an appeal of self defence. But how would she achieve this when Satan Jim was brewing evil in trapping the girls or even raping them as he did with fragile Rachel who committed suicide. The gusty Shell who bossed it over the girls soon found her match in sexy Yvonne who knew the ropes in prison and called a strike while they connived to trap evil Jim caught in the act with Shell. However, cowboy Shell put the devil in hell with burning flames so hat he was not only caught but injured. Fairy godmother then reigned in the prison kingdom and awakened to her love of Nikki whom she freed. But Yvonne was not to be outshone by any means… a helicopter flew over the prison dropping its rope ladder for motherless Denny to climb with Yvonne as they escaped into Yvonne’s underworld. And they all lived happily ever after. There is a vast import for all the television audiences to see some its original stars on stage and for all those women in flights of fantasy. No export needed.

August 16/07...

TREATS by CHRISTOPHER HAMPTON