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

THREE DAYS OF RAIN (1995) by RICHARD GREENBERG

This is the second go-round of the play originally and effectively performed at the Donmar with Colin Firth and David Morissey making startling impact. We now have James McEvoy and Nigel Harman playing the same parts and though starring mostly in television they make an appealing stage presence. It is directed well… full of Jamie Lloyd’s usual trend towards atmosphere while individual scenes, though being dramatic, do not necessarily add up to the whole plotting line of the text. The structure of the play opens in the present (1995) where brother and sister Walker and Nan wait for Pip (son of Theo, who is Ned’s {dad to Walker and Nan} architectural partner) to appear at Ned and Theo’s old abandoned New York workshop so that Ned’s will can be read. Only then will Walker and Nan know about their inheritance of the remarkable house Ned designed. It was their home in a New England small town which should be resolved in their favour. Walker wants it for himself despite being a wanderer. There is one other clue…Walker found Ned’s diary under the disintegrating mattress in the workshop with only one written page saying, ’three days of rain.’ We are given a picture of their parents through the siblings’ eyes…a mad mother and a silent preoccupied architectural father. When Pip finally arrives at the derelict workshop, they discover the house has been left to Pip. Why? That is the big secret Act II unravels. Has it to do with three days of rain? We’ll see. Act II goes back in time (1960) for us to become acquainted with the parents in the reality of their youth and what happened during the three days of rain that caused it to be the only entry in Ned’s diary and why Pip should inherit the house and not Ned’s children. Lina, smoothly played by Marshall, is not the mad woman as described by her children but wildly unconventional, the mistress of Theo and adored by a reticent stammering Ned. While Theo went off to a client to sell his architectural plans, Ned and Lina fell in love and spent three days in bed together during the rain. Theo returned unexpectedly, having been rejected, and discovers the lovers. Whereupon, he leaves the workshop, Ned, and Lina facing his lack of genius on his own. It is Lina who not only falls in love with Ned but with his drawings of a house that Ned finally builds which sets his career afire. He becomes famous as the ingenious architect. It is Ned’s guilt that makes him want to repay Theo by giving the house to Pip. The play is about families… parents and children…slight, delicate, but basically a vehicle for three actors to bring onto stage the strength of their own personae. Lindsey Marshall has the chance of being the reticent poker-face Nan while Walker projects the wild freeness of Lina. In Act II Marshall has the wildness of Southern belle Lina contrasting Walker as the reticent stammering Ned. Harmon is the sweet innocence as Pip and aggressively vulnerable as Theo. There is skill and warm appeal from all three actors but somehow or other there is no magic. The chemistry brews well but nothing simmers. The play is clever but that’s just the problem, it’s schematically so. Within the intimacy at the Donmar its size made less of it but in the expansion at the West End it becomes obvious. It is a highly professional production with a nice twist to its tale/ tail. The music and set provide all the eyrie greyness of mood required. Import but no export on this play from the USA.

January 30/09...

WELL by LISA KRON

I’m not sure how or why Well transferred to the West End….Do you know the story of the 3 wells? Well, well, well…It arrived in between the rains…Rainman and 3 Days of Rain…..just a slight shower that will drizzle away. Daughter thinks mum’s a hypochondriac and mum thinks the world should integrate with everyone and everything. A play is then improvised by the daughter with a series of friends as mum watches and at times participates inviting an audience to have a drink. Daughter talks to the audience about mum, about good health, about being ill related to a state of mind, and finally agreeing with mum about the world integrating with everyone and everything….all talk and no dialogue except when mother and daughter argue. And what do they argue about? The things they talked about. So if you are inclined to hear the arguments you have at home, a trip to the theatre will be very familiar. Sarah Miles and Natalie Casey give fine performances with the material at hand. No import or export.

Dec 29/08 – Jan 24/09

RAIN MAN by RONALD BASS/BARRY MORROW

Based on the fabulous Oscar wining movie which Dustin Hoffman made memorable as Ray, the suddenly discovered autistic brother, it was quite a challenge to theatricalise this film for the stage. Could Ray be duplicated after Dustin Hoffman? The story follows the explosive life of Charlie Babbitt who at 16 years of age, borrowed his dad’s car and was apprehended by the police on his father’s calling. Furious at his father, Charlie left home determined to make his way on his own. Dad dies leaving Charlie some rose bushes but no money from his fabulous millions. Susan has been Charlie’s devoted lover seeing him through all his financial dilemmas, especially now at his worst credit crunch. To inherit rose bushes infuriates Charlie until he questions who will inherit all the millions. It turns out to be his unknown autistic brother Ray who is protected in a special hospital under the care of a concerned doctor. Charlie, far more concerned on cornering the money and saving his business, meets the doctor and his newly found brother whom he takes on a frantic rollercoaster trip to Las Vegas. Why Las Vegas? Because Charlie, discovering his brother’s gift for numbers, decides to save his business through gambling with the aid of Ray. Ray, on the other hand, enthralled with the fast living, the gambling, the learning to dance, breaking the forced restriction of his yearning to drive, of being kissed, and living with a brother who challenges him on his tantrums, opens up his life. He remembers his brother Charlie as a baby. A whole world unfolds for him beyond the protection of the hospital while Charlie having begun with the idea of forcing cash from Ray begins to respond to real love and need of his family. His relationship to Susan blooms along with his ripening of love. When Ray is asked to choose between the regimented hospital he is so dependent upon or his brother, he chooses both his brother and the hospital. The brothers have cemented their relationship after a wild journey both physically and emotionally. Adam Godley gives the performance of his career catching the truth of the character in its warmth and humour. He never appears to be imitating the symptoms of autism but reflects enormous credibility. What a great performance! Mary Stockley is beautifully endearing and Josh Hartnett, when audible, carries off a tempestuous Charlie. The set ingeniously shifts from scene to scene matching the precise pace and timing of the direction. The fluid production is frisky in its authentic speed catching the pace of the USA ambiance. The director should be congratulated on his handling of the actors’ performances. Tight in its script structure, Dan Gordan has adapted the screenplay to perfection. Import for a rewarding evening or matinee and certainly export this company and production for Broadway.

Aug 28 – Dec 20/08

THE VORTEX (1924) by NOEL COWARD

Strange how plays are left neglected and then suddenly revived several times such as The Vortex. It was last seen at the Donmar starring Francesca Annis as Flo, the leading character. But it is not just bringing back Coward’s play that matters, it is bringing back Peter Hall to the West End directing Felicity Kendall in the best work she has ever done in his hands, just bringing good drama into the West End is enough. We must thank Bill Kenwright’s enterprise for his persistence in keeping that drama alive, being loyal to his team such as Peter Hall, and risking the exposure of new young talent in the West End  with Cressida Drew, Dan Stevens, and Daniel Pirrie. This is Coward’s first play professionally produced in 1924 that brought him fame. The leading character of Flo (Florence), a middle-aged woman refusing to grow old, indulges in love affairs with younger men to avoid reality. She has a bohemian son, Nicky, a drug-ridden pianist, the same age as her lovers which has disturbed the whole of his emotional balance. Flo does not bother to look at the effect she is having on her passive husband grown gently old or on the dynamics of her son. It is only when Nicky brings home his fiancée Bunty, a bright acutely aware young woman who meets up with her past lover Tom, currently Flo’s lover, that the fur starts flying. Tom and Bunty find each other again while mother and son are abandoned. It is only then in the turbulent third act that Nicky violently accuses his mother in order to make her face the destruction she has brought upon him and the family. She is no longer the femme fatale rushing from one affair to the next. Her time has passed and she must face all the damage she has done to him. Coward may have seemed stylishly clever in his day but one sees his sense of morality in admonishing Flo and Nicky for whom he feels greater sympathy than the stable self-seekers. Coward‘s distaste of the trendies in the 1920’s is clearly marked. The production in Act I and II is stripped of the usual sophisticated Coward style which is not Kendall’s forte and thus played realistically. It certainly does pay off in Act III where the cat is put among the pigeons and feathers of raw emotion fly. It doesn’t matter that it’s a copy of the Closet scene in Hamlet between Gertrude and Hamlet, it is so effectively used. Kendal steams through it with full power. Her petty vanity, her self absorption in Act I and II do not indicate the emotional sweep yet to come. There is a new effective touch of making Helen, Flo’s most loyal friend, approach Flo in a lesbian kiss at which Flo is repelled. Kendal breaks the heart, Dan Steven’s Nicky reaches his peak in Act III as we see the hysteria and neurosis unravel in what first appeared as an obvious public-schoolboy rather than a drugged bohemian. Cressida Trew with Daniel Pirre have an appealing sincerity as actors keeping a real sense of their character. The set has no walls so that the London flat in its art deco furniture gives immediate identity to the period which deftly changes into the country lounge and then the famous bedroom scene where the bed dominates. There is a feel for quality framing the in-depth concepts of this play which personifies this production and brings a professionalism of English drama to the West End due to Bill Kenwright’s passion for theatre. Import with possibilities of export for Broadway.

February 26/08...

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

SUNSET BOULEVARD

Sarah Travis from her Watermill Theatre production rides again and as always… in triumph. She illuminates us along with the actors/singers/ musicians who are used to create mood, dramatic climaxes, and characterisations. It opens with a violin mourning the murder of someone fallen into the swimming pool (indicated only by the pool’s diving-ladders) as the actor/musicians edge around it. Bravo to this individualised chorus who excel in all three categories in which they perform. Their animation, their excitement on their instruments, their freshness as actors bounced the cliché story into action. Ben Goddard as the failed Hollywood writer trapped by being broke and by the weird household of rich Norma Desmond gives us a melancholic version of the young man naively drawn into a world of fantasy in order to support himself. Max, Norma Desmond’s menacing manservant stands guard to keep reality hidden and Joe in line. Joe is involved with an alive and current Hollywood talent, a girl named Betty Shaffer to whom he wants to return. His efforts to extricate himself from the claws of Norma fail as he succumbs to her emotional fragility. But the passé silent movie star, Norma Desmond, living madly in a world long gone, in clinging to him so obsessively, shoots him rather than lose him. How does this condensed set with a spiral staircase storing the piano at its base; a few potted plants; a chaise lounge used as bench or bed and when turned up on its end to read Schwabbs Drugstore, the younger actors and writers hangout; a camera on wheels and director’s chair signed DeMille signifying Metro Studio, how does it work? Marvellously well because the focus is on the Hollywood tragedy and its cruelty. Songs like Perfect Year, Everyone Needs New Ways To Dream, We Never Say Goodbye, Sunset Boulevard, Ben’s rebellion song, With One Look, Norma’s illusion, bring cheers from the audience and remain in perspective to its size rather than the epic production of Trevor Nunn’s original version. The New Years Eve Party scene, the bustling anger of Joe’s build-up to departure are musically blended into the drama so successfully, it highlights the theme of ruthless Hollywood as never before. What becomes obvious is the minimum size and the concentration on the musican/actors places this musical where it belongs…. in Lloyd Webber’s lesser works which allows a chorus to shine in an ensemble production. Ben Goddard is a superb actor who brings a poignancy to the part and a bitterness to his Sunset Boulevard defeat in song that is in contrast to the usual interpretation of a sophisticated roué who is destroyed by a sinister trap of fate. Laura Pitt-Pulford’s Betty Shaffer as a singer/actress/ musician brings a sense of humanity that is real in addition to her musicianship. Unfortunately, gloriously powerful as Kathryn Evans voice may be and despite spilling out the famous line, ‘there are no small actors only small parts’ or is it ‘no small parts only small actors’? ….despite all of that and her expert musicianship, she is no star… faded or otherwise. She is a small actress who caricatured the part to such grotesque proportions that she outsized this small scale production. However, taking in the whole picture, it all makes for a new experience to this musical. But is it of interest to the public over the Christmas cheer? Import but no export as in Sweeney Todd to Broadway

Dec 4/08 – April 18/09

FAT PIG writer/director NEIL LABUTE

The prevalence of obesity is so dire the government is forced to issue directives with serious priority. Even The Today programme, the most important news programme on Radio 4, had Labute talking about his play regarding fat people. This is the theme of The Fat Pig. What interests Labute is the social attitudes towards obesity in treating them as freaks. However, so widespread (pun) is the problem that social attitudes are beginning to change. In complete contrast to obesity is the issue of anorexia amongst teenage girls in order to be as thin as the models in the glossy magazines. Still, Labute’s concern is obesity. He is not a writer of depth in character development as profound theatre requires, but as a filmmaker he is used to establishing the nature of the character to be quickly identified, and recognised from thereon, as he tells his story through plot and situation development. Once you accept the flaw in his writing you can be sure that he will direct with Swiss-watch precision and pace his play with musical timing. You are intrigued by his cynical attiudes of people’s cruelty, the sudden twist in the tale, at the surprise ending. He manages to give you compassion and vulnerability in one character while setting up the diabolical vicious villains in the other characters. You never leave a production of Neil Labute without a spit-and-polish to the evening. So what have we here with this new play whose title seems so gross yet in the treatment of the fat lady, Helen, there is delicate sentitivity. She is freshly sweet in her directness, her humour in sending up her size, her interest in real things and not just money, status and marriage. Helen is a librarian who indulges in food, eating slices of pizza and double sweets. You could call it compensative eating or any name close to compulsion. By chance, a young man, Tom, of basic good nature, slightly uncomfortable in his own skin sits next to Helen at lunchtime in a business restaurant. At first taken aback by her openness regarding being fat, he gradually begins to date her. They see each other privately and then fall in love with a sense of ease with each other. But the world within his office is not inhabited by the same sort of people. Jeannie, an office coordinator, having dated Tom thinks they should have been engaged by now and has a scene of hysteria when discovering she with her sexy trim figure has been passed over for fat Helen. Then there is his colleague Carter, the typical air-head following all the clichés of acceptability who taunts Tom and reduces Helen to a joke. Only when he describes his shame over his mother’s fatness is there any heart. The day of reckoning comes when the office celebration on the beach arrives and Tom, unable to face the derision of the office, sits with Helen quite apart from the rest. Helen is not only aware, but is approached by Jeannie in her bikini, looking like a glamour model.  At this point, Tom realises he is too weak to fight the lot and with tears breaks down to let Helen know he can’t handle the relationship. There are several aspects to the play which were criticised because of lack of detail particularly relating to the office. But Labute always keeps to plotting his story in an abstract manner. The set brilliantly highlights this quality in a revolve that divides the sides to Tom’s life…the private domestic side with his office…. and behind the revolve is an angular back wall that changes colour and texture to the change of place. There are wonderful lines of wit and whim…such as Helen describing herself as Helen of Troy who would need a thousand ships to launch her. There are sensitively tender love scenes as when Tom and Helen are in bed together watching old films and eating popcorn. Scenes are always climaxed emotionally then move to the next plot sequence in perfect timing. But the real joy is the discovery of Ella Smith as Helen who has a charismatic endearment, a sincerity of character, and a fine sense of timing. She is accompanied by Robert Webb as Tom who is the most enchanting comic and delicious partner to Helen. His body movement is as hilarious as any of his timing of the lines. Webb brings a joy and pain to Tom that is memorable. These are two sad love birds that have made a dent in the story of lovers. Import for all sizes and ages and export it will for Broadway.

Sept/08...

THE LOVER/THE COLLECTION by HAROLD PINTER

These are old one-acters originally on radio and television connected only because of similar themes on marriage and deceptions deliberately played. The Lover is easily predictable when Sarah tells her husband Richard upon his leaving for work that she is preparing lunch for her lover Max. We are aware something is too casual to be the truth. Richard leaves in his business suit but when there is a knock on the door, it is opened to Max in a leather jacket. The game is up, we know the husband is playing the lover. Sarah enacts both wife and whore with cool collection but it is Richard who tires of the charade. He wants to stop. Is it because he’s bored or because he can’t take the split role playing and wants his wife to be just a wife? In this production, it is more quickly discernable that Richard is husband and lover, a choice the director has made. I have seen it when the husband enjoys the role playing more aggressively and when he wishes to stop, it’s seems to be for another game. It was Michael Billington’s direction of that play in which he had an agitated husband and an aggrieved lover that one thought for a while there were two separate men until the role playing increased as the wife became more and more aroused whilst the husband looked for other games. It was much less predictable with the couple themselves slightly kinky. It is interesting how the chemistry changes with the actors. I found Richard Coyle as the rigid husband and the casual lover dexterously comic especially in the cigarette lighting scene where his wife refuses and he persists. The Collection is the larger more complicated piece within a double set of two flats plus a telephone booth for the street which is confusedly designed in this production. Here we have a game played with so many twists that there are several conclusions each of us can draw. The difficulty of knowing other people’s intent or motivation or real personality is given full measure. Is the mistrust misplaced or accurate? Is the action subtler when more deceptive? Bill lives with his older partner Harry. There is a phone call in the middle of the night asking for Bill. The next day the stranger arrives at the door and accuses Bill of sleeping with his wife Stella in a hotel in Leeds during a dress-designing convention. Was it Bill or Stella who instigated the seduction? Did Stella do this to challenge her husband James? Or did she do it at all? Bill denies it at first and in a cleverly staged wrestle, James causes Bill to confess to it. But somehow the ambiguity is whether James is interested in Bill. Or is it possible Bill is testing his attraction to women and thus provoking Harry? We do witness a day with Harry and Bill over breakfast and find Harry quite irritating as the older lover. The precise detail of their performances is delightful to watch. The fight over the newspaper, Harry’s demand for his juice, the suppressed anger between Bill and Harry, is so adeptly handled. But then again is Stella playing a game to taunt James or is James competing with her over Bill? All three male actors give such accurate performances in their timing and characterisations. The picture puzzle of Pinter is fully realised by the director as the audience still enthuses over the guessing game. A clever evening well worth the quality of the actors’ performances with such spritely energy in the drama and the staging.

January 15/08...

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....

DIMETOS by ATHOL FUGARD

Having seen this play in 1976 with Paul Scofield in another version not too removed from this, we found the isolated Dimetos, an expert civil engineer, in a remote cottage in a backwater with a pathway shaped with all sizes and shapes of stones living with his housekeeper Sophia and his niece Lydia. In this version it is a primitive wooden cottage with hurricane lamps and a well for water. The play was and still is an obscure piece so distant from Fugard’s political apartheid plays. It was actually autobiographical but obscured deliberately as it related to his own incestuous feelings about his daughter. The emotive undercurrent could be related to Greek myth rather than made personal and camouflaged with metaphors. It failed in 1976…the confusion was too compounded and even the great Scofield could not salvage it. Here is a rewritten version less obscure but still highly flawed. It is only watching the emotional brooding intensity of Jonathan Pryce and the high-voltage imagination of Douglas Hodge’s staging that we forget our bemusement and are completely taken in by these talented artists and the untouched honesty of Fugard which at times finds the writing soaring in its lyricism and intimacy. Pryce is a mesmerising actor who even convinces us of accepting his destructiveness as he portrays a tormented man gone mad who sacrificed his life for his work and who no longer believes in man’s goodness nor his progress nor in himself. The science he absorbed as fact is no longer enough and has only wasted his life. His own suppressed sexual feelings towards his niece are subjugated to voyeurism when he encouraged the young engineer Danilo, who arrived to convince Dimetos to return to the city to salvage the water works, to stay on until he could make a decision. Dimetos watched Danilo’s attempted rape of Lydia. Lydia in the powerfully undaunted opening of the play (in this version and not previously) is lowered by rope down the well shaft to rescue a horse who fell into it. She is half-naked revealing a young woman whom Dimetos carefully instructs in the rescue but also secretly reacts to her sexuality. It is after the attempted rape and her realisation that Dimetos observed but never came to her aid that Lydia hangs herself before us. Sophia loves Dimetos unrequitedly, but also came to love Lydia as her adopted child…she has lost her child and the possibility of being loved. She follows the wandering Dimetos to the next isolated cottage and the next, till they settle close to the sea to escape the pain of Lydia’s suicide. A dead porpoise on the beach fills the air with an unbearable stench symbolising the quality of their vacuous lives. But the play becomes contrived and loses its credibility when so many years later Danilo returns no longer eager to bring back the engineer but to exorcise his quilt of Lydia’s death and let Dimetos know he was finally aware of Dimetos’s motive in encouraging him to stay on. Danilo is not a real character at best and certainly even less so when used as plot in his confrontation. The final scene of Dimetos madness is the tragedy of a Lear that redeems the play. Pryce’s desperation in the use of his hands, his need to invent as he spars with stones, his hopeless coping with the pain of Lydia and the wasted life stretched out in time, is gut-tearing. Only Pryce can distress us to such a degree as he digs that deeply into the heart of the matter. Ann Reid renders the other side of survival with such inner control. Not even the raw acting of Holiday Grainger and Alex Lanipekun, shouting rather than reaching for real emotional depth, can distract from the treasured performance of Jonathan Pryce and the dramatic skill of Douglas Hodge plus the exquisite production which carries an emotional pull of haunting quality.

March 19 – May 9/09

BE NEAR ME

The book has been a best seller and a fascinating study of introspection about a sensitive gay priest educated at Oxford who loves the good life of fine wines, gormet food, Delius music, and highly stylised literature. Because of his gay inclination he was sent to an outpost Scottish village where the bigotry runs rife with the unemployment. He is now more than just a misfit or outsider; the death of his lover at Oxford still haunts him and so he is a loner as well. This is the nature of a difficult book to adapt into a play. Ian McDiarmid has spent the whole of the first act on the exposition which is difficult to absorb. But by the second act the action takes off in the establishing of the trial. Father David, a middle-aged catholic priest, takes an interest in Mark, a 15 year-old dropout who drinks, drugs, and rubbles in a Scottish town that is being smothered by its poverty and for an innocent kiss (plus smoking marijuana) Father David is put on trial for ’sexual assault’. It is this kind of mood and atmosphere so difficult to convert from book to play where the only action is the trail for ‘sexual assault’. The fact that the priest’s pastoral care is deficient thus preventing him from bringing god’s message to the people, is expressed by the inventive use of the villagers as chorus singing the church hymns. The temperature of the village is immediately established through the chorus and Father David’s chandelier from Oxford along with his wine drinking dinners quickly sets the differences in the environment. Danger is alerted through the threatening songs of the chorus; their articulated movements within the songs project highly dramatic moments. Father David’s housekeeper dying of cancer has had her life fulfilled by the culture he brings but her life still fades into death and at the trial she can not defend him. After the trial his rectory is burned down and Father David is forced to leave. But again it is never seen in action only commented upon. In the end, he is supported by his mother who salvages his life once again. What becomes implausible is Father David’s choice of yobbish Mark and at times his girlfriend Lisa who as outsiders in their behaviour never are educated or altered by the priest. Why then is Father David involved, one asks? Even after the trial and the devastation brought upon him, there is no feeling from Mark of any loss of friendship or guilt over his betrayal. What is never resolved is whether Father David’s priesthood is merely a place for him to hide or does he truly feel such little shame at his defeat. Why could he not express as much pleasure in serving God as he does in serving food and wine? There are colourful scenes so wonderfully acted by the company and sensitive direction which attempts to tell the story so absent of drama. Ian Mcdiarmid carries with distinction a melancholia within luxuriant breeding always carefully passive, Blythe Duff’s Mrs Poole the housekeeper is beautifully poignant, Jimmy Yuill’s Bishop Gerard projects the spirit of the church, Helen Mallon’s Lisa and Richard Madden’s Mark are strong yobbish teenage portraits whose Scottish accents are sometimes too colloquial to follow, Colette O’Neil’s Mrs Anderton, Father David’s mother, brings a lovely energy that lifts the play as one questions her age as David’s mother. The company is of such professional quality where one can appreciate the Donmar’s support of its London run. Import but no export as it goes on a Scottish tour.

January 22 – March 14/09

THE COCKTAIL PARTY by TS ELIOT

This is a very special TS Eliot Season where The Family Reunion runs as a full production and readings are being given of the other plays such as Murder In The Cathedral and Cocktail Party, plus poetry such as the Four Quartets, in between the run of The Family Reunion. Four Quartets, which Eliot regarded as his masterpiece, consists of four poems, 'Burnt Norton', 'East Coker', The Dry Salvages', and 'Little Gidding,' into which he wove his experiences in World War II as a watchman checking for fires during bombing raids. These quartets represent the four seasons and four elements. They are philosophic poems on time and time's losses and gains. It will be on later in January about the 15th. The Cocktail Party in blank verse deals with religion through idle cocktail chatter in a modern abstract way in which loss, identity, truth, self-sacrifice, and redemption are related to the conscious desire of the audience and their identity with the characters. When it was first performed and at that time when Eliot was using the in-thing of a cocktail party while putting a twist in the tail, it was a high intellectual puzzle put into a common everyday occurrence. That was really intriguing and everyone talked about its meaning with confusion. Today such symbolism and abstract subconscious analysis is fairly common with Samuel Beckett, Sam Shepard and Harold Pinter who were influenced by Eliot. The actors in this reading of Cocktail Party are fabulous as they are performing for the season and not just for one night. There were instant characterisations irregardless of the actors holding scripts. They all sprang to life and gave us people we had to follow with intense curiosity. The only actress that caused me any difficulties was Rosamund Pike as the romantic mistress who commits suicide… Unfortunately, she was inaudible with no vocal stage projection but one cottoned on to her character intuitively and through the other actors. Una Stubbs as a nosy intruder was terrifically funny as was Nicky Henson cooking and describing his exotic travels. Alex Jennings and Anna Chancellor as the husband and wife were incredibly real….. one almost felt these characters were more real than the actors. The mood amazingly was sustained inside The Family Reunion set. Husband Edward is giving a cocktail party for the friends he didn’t manage to reach to tell them the party was off as Lavinia his wife had gone to her sick aunt. In fact, she had left him without warning after five years of a stable marriage. The fact that he was having an affair with Celia who Lavinia knew about without mentioning and she was having an affair with Peter about whom Edward did not know, seemed to be irrelevant to Edward. To the party came Alex with his bizarre stories, Celia trying to re-establish the affair, Peter asking Edward to help him woo Celia, Julia busy trying to uncover everyone’s secrets and always returning on any excuse after leaving. But in this mixture of friends is a stranger, an uninvited guest. Who is he? He’s called Sir Henry, but who is he that promises to bring back Lavinia to Edward? He will do so, only if Edward asks no questions of Lavinia but looks into his own identity and motivation. Neither Edward nor Lavinia have faced the truth about themselves. Sir Henry is the modern concept of God…not an abstraction but a psychoanalyst and hell is no longer a destination below with fiery furnaces but within ourselves. Truth alone can prepare us for our heaven on earth. Through his mysterious manner he cuts the illusions and salvages Edward and Lavinia’s marriage. Edward and Lavinia having worked out a feasible life together, five years later, give a cocktail party where everyone comes early to leave for the next party up but need to catch up with each other first. Only Sir Henry keeps on with the never ending truth. Celia having gone off to a third world country died of the local disease, Alex returns after spending serious time in a colourful island to stabilise the upheaval, Peter has become a well known screen writer, and Julia still tries it on to intrude into everyone else’s life since she has none of her own. Where do the others really go and have they found answers to their life? Eliot only opens our minds but we have to find the answers as he shifts from the brittle cocktail lingo to the undercurrents of pain and death. It’s a rare treat to hear the plays and poetry so seldom performed, and now read by such wondrous actors. No possible import or export. But follow the poetry coming up next.

Dec 17/08

FAMILY REUNION by T.S. ELIOT

This is yet another family play written in quite a different era based on the Greek tragedy of Orestes who having killed his mother to avenge his father’s death is then haunted by the Furies who sought justice as was traditionally meted out. T.S. Elliott intended to fuse this concept of the god’s seeking justice to the contemporary concept of conscience and self awareness of the individual’s guilt. The story he assembled was that of the imperious matriarch Amy, in her stately mansion, gathering together for her birthday her family which includes her sisters Ivy, Violet, unmarried Agatha (principal of a woman’s college), plus her brother-in-laws Charles and Gerald Piper and penniless cousin Mary. Harry (Lord Monchensey) her eldest son and heir after eight years abroad returns home haunted by the death of his wife. Did he murder her as he confesses to the family he holds in contempt or did she by accident fall over the ship’s rail into the sea? His neurotic guilt is not appeased, his peace of mind hardly achieved as the avenging spirits, the Furies, now become visible not only to him but to cousin Mary and Aunt Agatha. Amy anxious over Harry’s sanity summons Dr Warburton who warns Harry that any sudden emotion could cause his mother’s death. Agatha and Harry sympathetic to one another confess their inner pain. Agatha reveals that Harry’s father had loved her and not Amy whose riding ambition was merely to have children, a title, and a landed estate. His father’s frustrated drive to murder his wife may have been inherited by Harry whose profound guilt is part of his atonement. His deeply rooted misery may have been in his genes from birth. Amy accuses Agatha of stealing her husband and her son. Harry leaves his mother and home forever noting his two brothers will be there for her. Harry in his ‘pilgrimage of expiation’ kills Amy which destroys the family unity. We are led into a sinister drawing room dark and damp with the curtains drawn, the candles and fire are then lit. This reunion is ominous, a mystery highly styled where the language must be matched by the staging. The poetry is written for inner thoughts, the choral speeches by the aunts and uncles for public comment. This is play about a homecoming that carries with it the family sins of the past making the future a shadowy possibility of redemption. Atmosphere abounds in the striking clocks, the dim lights, the dark panelling walls, the secret doors. Will the torments of the past in Amy’s family come to an end? We enter into a hidden world, beyond the reality of now. The metaphysical overtakes the reality, the psychological tempers the mythological. But I have seen the mystery far more intense with the chorus of aunts and uncles as ghostlike Furies tormenting Harry in menacing black dress and white faces speaking out at times as real people then receding into the imagination while inhabiting the haunted house. Here the Furies are the spectral children barraging Harry over his unhappy childhood. The direction is timed well in its movement and choral moments without always succeeding in conveying the meaning of Elliott’s intent or language. The choice and awkwardness of the child-Furies make it far less effective. The cast of the aunts, uncles, cousin, doctor, butler, policemen (Gemma Jones, Una Stubbs, William Gaunt, Paul Shelley, Hattie Morahan, Kevin Mcmonagle, Christopher Benjamin, Phil Cole) are all super actors adding to the production’s top quality. It’s a joy to see such a beautiful cast of actors in one play produced with such technical skill in the set, lighting and sound effects. But Sam West as Harry is too bland, too ordinary, lacking that neurotic danger, that on the edge of madness to effect the torment of a man driven by his need for redemption. The high praises for Penelope Wilton escape me since she gives the same performance of reticence as mystery in The Family Reunion as in The Chalk Garden and in many other parts. Her lack of vocal resonance makes her inaudible when speaking sideways or upstage. Only direct lines to the audience are clear except for her stage whispers which resist audibility. However, the play about family that emanates from as far back as Greek drama also reflected here concerns the digging of the truth. The curse of the Monchensey dynasty, similar to Oedipus who could only cure the plague in Thebes by uncovering the truth which destroys him, also destroys the Monchenseys. To bring into focus and fuse the classical Greeks into contemporary thinking is a mountainous task and needs the imagination of a great thinker to realise this piece. Still there is enough in this production to wet the appetite and for an audience to explore the play. Import but no export.

Nov 20/08 – Jan 10/09

CREDITORS by STRINDBERG

This violently realistic three-hander, interjected at times with black humour, analyses marriage as a sexual torment as is usual with Strindberg. He is far more detailed in Dance Of Death than in this short play of one and a half hours. However, the writer Tekla (Anna Chancellor), once married to Gustav (Owen Teale, a Nietzsche superman driven by his fantasies), and now to the painter/scupltor Adolph (Tom Burke), are the triangle of hell from which there is no escape. Gustav alone with Adolph feeds on his suspicions of love/hate, his overwhelming need of Tekla, and fills him with fear of epilepsy. Then Gustav alone with Tekla almost seduces her until she realises his evil intent…. the battle of the sexes ensues. But outside the door is Adolph who has overheard it all. He collapses into Tekla’s arms destroyed by Gustav who exits in triumph having crucified Adolph and demolished the marriage.  Strindberg’s concept of marriage, with or without love, is that of enslavement blinded by the sexual bond. Women are the demons of lust, causing the destruction through disloyalty, adultery, and egotism. Men become their victims, giving all and taking nothing. Only a man of strength, hardened by the cruelty of women, can defeat them. The imaginative all-white severe set containing two white chaise lounges in a wooden frame depicts the coldness of the emotions and the locale in Sweden. Alan Rickman’s production is fast moving in its intensity of passions with little staging needed in movement. He actually finds no villains in his interpretation and is more sympathetic than anticipated to all three victims. Tom Burke’s Adolph, Anna Chancellor’s Tekla give stunning performances where the pain of love cuts into the heart. Rivetting performances carry the day with the hand of director/actor Alan Rickman who can bring out such striking emotional levels. Donmar hits the mark again for import and export.

Sept 25 – Nov 15/08

THE CHALK GARDEN by ENID BAGNOLD

This is the best there is in theatre as far as the script, the director, set, actors, music, lights and sound. It’s the top of perfection in a production that will have to transfer to a larger theatre in the West End. The play was first performed by Gladys Cooper in New York because it was looked upon sceptically in London. I saw Chalk Garden with Edith Evans playing the eccentric old grandmother Mrs St Maughn at the Haymarket and was so overwhelmed by her performance that the play became a shadow in my mind. It wasn’t till four years ago that I saw it again at Richmond Theatre produced by Bill Kenwright when Sheridan Morley directed Moira Lister as the grandmother, Belinda Lang replacing Maureen Lipman as Miss Madrigal, and Nicholas Grace as Maitland that the quality of the play hit me. It not only withstood time, it is a great classic rediscovered by Bill Kenwright which was beautifully acted and directed by the late Sheridan Morley whose real grandmother was Gladys Cooper. To watch Margaret Tyzack equal a performance to Edith Evans yet make it her own is viewing a miracle. She is so startling in this amazing play that it is to her credit she allows breathing space for the play itself. Set in Mrs St Maughn’s Sussex conservatory in an old manor house by the sea, she lives with two servants, a butler Maitland nervously serving as man of all seasons despite being unstabilised by his tenure in jail as a conscientious objector, an old butler dying in an upstairs’ bedroom while ruling the roost and the garden, a nurse for the dying butler, and her hiring an enigmatic governess  without references for her outrageous 16-year old grand-daughter. Labelled as a comedy, it is the brilliant wit and quips by Tyzack that make the comic strokes. The play looks like a free-for-all household where the eccentrics all play their own game till we reach the dark hidden agenda and discover the metaphor of the chalk garden where the rhododendrons planted will never grow. There is no warmth, no nourishment in chalk soil so nothing can grow. This is what we finally discover in Mrs St Maughn, an unloved lonely woman hanging on to her grand-daughter Laurel for life, giving her no boundaries to shape her wild behaviour. Laurel, so like her grandmother, (the irony of ironies) left her mother Olivia in a jealous fit when she remarried making up stories of her rape at the age of 12 and playing with fire like a pyromaniac. Into this household of chaotic self expression enters the governess Miss Madrigal who keeps her past a secret, her emotions at a distance, but begins to nurture the garden taking into account its chalk soil. As she reforms the garden so does she tame Laurel and relieves Maitland of total responsibility. Olivia has returned to retrieve her daughter where she will be living abroad. The battle between mother and daughter begins to reveal the tyranny of Mrs St Maughn causing her estrangement to Olivia and the continuation of Olivia’s estrangement to her daughter Laurel, the next generation. Laurel being like her grandmother leaves little room for Olivia who one hopes will do better with her child than she did with her mother. But it is Miss Madrigal who began to shape Laurel and firmly pronounces her place with her mother. The old butler dies leaving the nurse to exit. With Laurel’s departure, there is no place for Miss Madrigal whose past becomes exposed when the high court judge, an old friend of the St Maughns, who sentenced her for murdering her step-sister, comes to lunch. The cry of injustice erupts from a deeply damaged Miss Madrigal, a woman who lived under constant surveillance, then in a lonely room excluding the past, and by chance allowed through the door of this household. It is only then the judge admits he is fallible, as most humans are; but still feels this home is not for her and serves only as an embarrassment. She can’t quite simply leave without pause. Just as Miss Madrigal has slowly revived the garden and disciplined Laurel surely she will only bring peace to the old lady as they grow old and older together. And so, Mrs St Maughn begins to see the light at the end of the tunnel as she casually asks Madrigal to stay. Injured as they both are, there is a daunting spirit for life. Whereas the celebration of individual eccentricity as opposed to conformity is analysed with great depth, there is no simple answer other than living with truth and growing in your garden that which its soil can sustain. Tyzack’s entrance after keeping the applicants for the tutor position waiting is calling out for her false teeth…What an entrance!  Did the play in its time mock the comedies of its day or is Tyzack’s great timing? She is the magic, she is the fulfilment of theatre! If the play is a comedy, it is a haunting one full of dark corners of suspense. The direction of Michael Grandage is delicately suspenseful, dramatically nuanced and sensitive to every mood. The set of Peter McKintosh perfects the feeling of the house and the village life, Penelope Wilton tackles a wonderfully mysterious Miss Madrigal with tight reins but gives away too soon the settling into the family, Jamie Glover’s Maitland is an hysterical servant with just the right prickliness, Felicity Jones’ Laurel is taunting in its emotional flares, Clifford Rose’s judge is so precisely right, and Suzanne Burden’s Olivia is finely polished while sincerely played. Don’t miss this once in a lifetime! Import and export for Broadway.

June 5 – August 2/08

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

LORD OF THE RINGS

There has been such hype over this musical mainly because of the power of the film and its spectacular scenery revealing mystical areas of New Zealand that could easily be the Middle Earth. In addition to the film you have the three volumes of the book which have a deep morality of good fighting evil with good winning to such a degree that Gandalf, the wizard of goodness, will move on to the next place to destroy evil. The book is not that original in taking the central theme of Wagner’s Ring Cycle where it is the evil of the ring that has to be conquered; but at least with Wagner the gold represented greed. You also have a slice of Morte d’Arthur in the Lord of the Ring’s hero of Gandalf and villain Saruma (like Malory’s Modred) plus a sword drawn from magic in both Wagner and Malory. In addition it has made history in costing £12.5million which breaks all records of musical budget. The production also comes with a back-story of its Canadian run of the ups and downs in its creation where Matthew Warchus as director, along with the special effects of Gregory Meeh, lights of Paul Pyant, set and costumes of Rob Howell, and illusions /magic of Paul Kieve are to be congratulated for all that complex coordination. It has opened in the famous Drury Lane where the greatest technical spectacles have been held in the history of the theatre. The machinery used for set designs were invented at the Drury Lane long before anyone had such technical skill. Drury Lane was the first theatre to be so recognised. So this advanced technical production adds to the glory of Drury Lane’s reputation. The production is a metaphor for the world of today…no humanity, no identity of characters or development of them, no way of knowing who or what they are, but a fantastic fantasy spectacle of the technical age… the Las Vegas kind of creation of Pyramids in Egypt or the Taj Mahal reproduced. At Drury Lane there is a circular revolve that is cut into twenty carved shapes of platforms that rise and fall in as many designs for whatever location and on as many levels within those designs. There is spellbinding lighting that illuminates each place from darkness to light and underbrush surrounding the whole stage, growing into the auditorium so that there is no separation from stage to audience. Fireflies flicker their lights all over the theatre and in pantomime style the hobbits (peasant creatures) chase them on or off stage over seats and under them while the sinister black orcs and Uruk-hai (3rd-age orcs on spindle high sticks) leap up and down the aisles.. the black riders on stilts pursue the hobbits like the Greek Furies reminding one of Antony Sher’s Richard III. The special effects man has worlds disappear, with the magician, characters disappear in bursts of flames. The music accompanies in bellowing crescendos the moving scenery, the awesome lights, the frantic gallops of orcs and the black riders that cause chase and battle scenes. There is the opening which has the best choreography with the rustic sounds to sing and dance to…lively peasant music as opposed to the eerie dark music of the chases and battles. Following is the romanticism of the mystical Galadriel (lovely Michelle Kelly in see-through bodice) in sweet ballads of love contrasted to the music of the great spider Shelob, its gigantic claws of blackness hovering over Frodo (engaging James Loye), our hero hobbit, and is killed, falling apart within spitting time and distance. Gollom, the psychophrenic creature whose twisting body glides and slides in contortions of betrayal and pretence is vitalised in music and lights by the magnificent Michael Therriault. The story abridged is that of Frodo Baggins, a junior hobbit, and his mates who set out on a long journey to dispose of the evil ring in the fires of Mount Doom as dispatched by the wizard Gandalf (a harsh and angry Malcolm Storry). In their quest they find adventures with the good elves, the rangers, the dwarfs and encounter battles with evil black riders, orcs, and Saruman (a non-descript Brian Protheroe), passing through the Golden Wood until doing battle with the evil forces of the Dark Lord, Sauron, and then finally disposing of the ring in the fires of Mount Doom. It is time to return home only to find their rural life all changed with smoke and factories. Frodo decides to leave with wizard Gandalf and mystical Galadriel to the next land where they can destroy evil and build new destinies. All the described technicals are the best the production has to offer and if a childlike musical full of sound and fury signifying nothing is appealing then you will follow those critics who loved it. But if you expect storytelling, following the events and where you are plus characters that are fully developed, then the three and a half hours will exhaust you. This is a complicated series of books to condense in order to feel for any of the characters, many of whom are better cut so that others are fleshed out. Otherwise if you have not seen the film or read the books you will follow the effects and forget the people. Personally I prefer Mother Earth to Middle Earth.

May 9/07...

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

PLAGUE OVER ENGLAND by NICHOLAS DE JONGH

The play centres around the newly knighted John Gielgud when he was caught in 1953 soliciting a plain clothes policeman in a public lavatory which is called ‘cottaging’, not exactly a sophisticated sexual engagement. The play reveals the social/political tremors of the 1950s towards homosexuality and its illegal reinforcements mainly because of the spy-ring scandals of the Cambridge politicians. Burgess and Maclean escaping to Russia in 1951 caused judges to claim gays as a virus, a cancer in society. It was a criminal offence even for consenting adults to perform private sexual acts. Paranoia on the part of the government made naïve Gielgud one of its victims. How he managed to survive his malevolent arrest is also part of the story. The episode is still shocking…his behaviour a bit strangely lecherous in being so addicted to ‘cottaging’. However, all he did was wink and smile at the policeman who was set up to entrap him. That wink almost destroyed his career…. He felt great shame to the point of suicide to have his private life so publicly exposed. Nevertheless, he conducted himself with dignity and remorse. What the government felt was not the mood of the people. Instead of booing him as he feared when he tremulously continued his starring role in A Day by the Sea, the audience applauded and cheered. De Jongh in panoramic episodes reveals the activities in the gay clubs compared to the courtroom and Lord Goddard, from the cruising corners in the parks to the political establishment and Home Secretary David Maxwell Fyfe, from the public lavatories to Tunbridge Wells, from Binkie Beaumont, the great theatre impresario of the time, to backstage with Sybil Thorndike. He presents in contrast to all of this the subplotting of two sets of virile young men in actively sexual affairs and the friendship of the campy old theatre critic Moncrieffe. The subject covered is deeply descriptive and would make an illuminating book. One wonders how Gielgud would react in seeing this play. Today, he could sit quite objectively and understand his victimisation. But seeing it in 1953, if it were even allowed to be staged, he would have trembled with fear at further punishment for the exposure. Respect must be given to de Jongh for writing about this period and to Bill Kenwright for taking such a high risk in the West End. Import but no export.

February 12 – May 16/09

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...

VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE by ARTHUR MILLER

This is a Miller play deliberately structured on the Greek tragedy in a contemporary setting. It was aimed at the custom of illegal immigrants so overtly brought into the longshoremen’s union working the docks near Brooklyn Bridge and living in the slums of Brooklyn. The Italian Dockers brought over their relatives in this way helping them to settle in New York through the work. There was a strict code of loyalty never to inform the immigration officers and to make sure the immigrants kept a low profile. It is coincidental that On the Waterfront should open simultaneously so that one sees the difference in the theatrical approach. The impact of Stephen Berkoff’s stylized version is overwhelming and the insight into the dockers’ stevedoring will remain timeless. Miller captures the language of his characters, very much an American requirement in socially realistic drama with specific people with whom you become familiar. Yet it’s the telling of a tale…a myth of morality…that counts. Eddie Carbone is on fire for his young niece Catherine just blooming into womanhood and fears to express it in his own home revealing the danger to his wife whom he no longer desires. When his two Sicilian relatives arrive for work staying with them, events take over. Rodolpho, being of a younger generation, has absorbed the American films, its jazz, and culture. He is not interested in remaining a docker but keen to explore the world. This meets with Catherine’s yearnings as she gradually heads towards independence, first with a job and then with the pleasures of youth. Eddie thinks this Romeo is less of a man and more of a sissy…while the other brother Marco challenges his manhood. Eddie is obviously jealous, resentful, of these intruders, but basically terrified of the unknown change in his life. The narrator/lawyer is actually the equivalent of the Greek chorus as he spells out the morality, the dangers, and the eventual downfall. Eddie is not evil, he is baffled by the new ways of living and overwhelmed by his own emotions. Drunk on Christmas eve, he comes home early to find Catherine alone with Rodolpho. Eddie rolling with fury, kisses Rodolpho to prove he’s gay and only shocks his niece without shaming her. It is the great climax to the play and remains the testing ground for the actor. Michael Gambon who performed this role at the National was unforgettable. When Eddie phones the immigration officers, it is not vengeful. He knows it’s breaking the code but the code seems to belong to another world which is disappearing. Catherine, who moved away from the Carbones, is about to marry Rodolpho when the immigration officers appear to pick up Marco and himslf. Marco seeks the revenge his Scilian blood demands and Eddie, who pulls a knife, is killed by his own weapon. Thus the gods are revenged and the morality is maintained. Catherine marries Rodolpho while the lawyer frees Marco. It is Beatrice who is left on her own but still open to Catherine’s love. The music and soundscape of Cork are evocative heightening the mood with the eerie lighting and emphasising the period and the place. But where was the bridge? Not even a shadow so basic to this mythical tale? Only exposing the slum apartment is not the full story. The docks and the bridge coloured their lives. However, the performances of Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio and Hayley Atwell as the wife and niece are extraordinary in their nuanced and quiet appeal while Harry Lloyd endeared himself to us with his lively charisma. The direction kept an even pace climaxing all the right moments but that magnificent Ken Stott who is a powerhouse of emotion left me unsympathetic to a man who only expresses himself by shouting. Well cast in a spit and polish production, it’s worth its stay in the West End. Import no export.

January 24 – May 16/09

NO MAN’S LAND by HAROLD PINTER

This is Pinter’s least definable play and the most focused production of Rupert Goold. First performed at the Old Vic in 1975 with the great John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson in a historically magnetic production, it is curious to see the current impact of this Pinter play that has been so polarised by critics. With no leeway in adapting the script and confined to only directing a very tightly structured conversational piece that concentrates on the acting performance to make it work, as with all Pinter’s plays written for actors, it is the most accurate and disciplined staging by Rupert Goold and one of the most brilliant performance from Michael Gambon who conveys the deeply manic/depressive but wealthy Hirst who is an alcoholic in order to change his mood to a high manic. In his depressive state of drunkenness he wipes out all memory. The bagman/poet Spooner whom he brings home is himself, the other side of himself, that his dementia has created as he connects with his Oxford days. The stranger/bagman Spooner talks eloquent nonsense and is always calm. The carers Briggs and Foster are strongmen of a violent ominous nature particularly Briggs who dominates the loquacious Foster. The demand for action in a play is the usual expectation. But Pinter is painting an action of the mind and the effects of an alcoholic on the brink of dementia. Gambon and Bradley are actors with fascinating character faces that have been lived in as each line and creased fold has been earned by the wear and tear of their vulnerability laid bare in their performances. Bradley contains a special Mona Lisa malice as he unfolds his lanky body with his shuffling feet timing his lines with dead pan accuracy. Gambon oozes his pain or bewilderment wrestling with the mood changes with such a sense of familiarity and yet can inject humour at surprising moments. His vacant stare into his disconnection with the world is hair-raising, his melancholia vaporises the air. The thuggish carers play security in menacing contrast to the two old men who as lushes wallow in their own acceptance. There is such precision in every aspect of the staging with an ensemble feel to the whole production. The set has none of the usual distortions but represents a rich man’s lavish home. Only the window in its perspective widening slant indicates an unreality. It’s the acting of Gambon and Bradley that’s worth any price of admission. Import. Import, too bad no export is possible.

Oct 20/08 – Jan 3/09

UNDER THE BLUE SKY by DAVID ELDRIDGE

The play begins with an IRA bomb exploding at Canary Wharf in 1996, but despite the closeness of Nick’s flat to the bombing, he remains indifferent as does his girlfriend Helen. They are both more involved in their own emotional explosions. Nick has invited Helen for dinner, cooking a spicey chilli concarne that will not burn as intensely as his news. Helen thinks he is about to propose but Nick has invited her to soften the blow of his departure from teaching at the state school to his position at a minor-private Essex school. He is tired of acting as a disciplinarian to rowdy students, conducting, ’crowd control’. He wants the intellectual stimulus of an exciting school. Helen also teaches at the same state school and unsuccessfully tries to convince him things are changing. She goes through all kinds of tirades including taking the carving knife to Nick. He, of course, is working on having his cake and eating it too; he’ll move on with his career and keep Helen on the hop. The vacillating Nick promises to invite Helen for week-ends, but never says he loves her nor does he ever propose. The thoroughly modern set built of wood rendering an ultra modern Ikea kitchen then tracks sideways as we reach the next scene, a wooden bedroom where the drunken and jealous Michelle, a sluttish maths teacher at the Essex school, is drinking on Graham‘s bed babbling on and on about her dumped relationship with Nick who has been unfaithful to her in his on-and-off week ends with Helen. Graham, the virgin teacher, ‘the least sought-after member of the staffroom’, is Michelle’s revengeful pick of the week. But she can’t make it with him. When she starts to leave, he pulls out sexually exposed pictures of Michelle which he will use unless she’ll seduce him. He wants her to instruct him. More rape than seduction, a struggling Michelle has met her waterloo in a wanker. The emotional bomb has once again exploded and another battlefield has been entrenched but only after the hilarious romping of a lascivious Michelle. The third tracking leads us into an open field where Anne is being wooed by Robert, both teachers at the Essex school who talk about an unhappy Nick. His hopes of intellectual challenges have been dashed and his continual relationship to Helen has come to a sad end in her death by a car accident when running for Nick. So Helen dies at a fairly young age and Nick has changed schools. Robert being twenty years younger than Anne doesn’t care…he loves Anne and wants a life together. Anne in the most touching scene of the play that resembles La Ronde with Nick being the connecting link who symbolises the lack of commitment to love, tells the story of her maiden aunt who had an unconsummated love-affair with a soldier who died in World War I which affected her whole life. Will Anne and Robert end the circle of non-commitment and consummate their love in marriage? The war and battleground are in the third story but in a generation removed. Are the bombings in civilian war affecting the commitment to love just as the death on an actual battlefield? The play was originally performed in a much more intimate space at the Royal Court which captured the aura of the piece and the perceptive writing of this sensitive writer. However, the yearning of a loving Helen is so painfully performed by Lisa Dillon; the hilarious drunk of Catherine Tate who falls foul is shocking to the core; and the lyricism of Francesca Annis as she captures the soul of a profound woman are indented in my brain. The men all give fine performances but it’s the women who carry the emotional impact. Import but only export for Off Broadway or university theatres for here is an exceptional drama in the West End.

July 15 – Aug 20/08

THAT FACE by POLLY STENHAM

The play opens with two schoolgirls about to operate a club initiation on a third girl by diabolical means. She is hooded and tied to a chair. Mia, whom we do not know has given her an overdose of valium so that the victim becomes unconscious and has to be taken to hospital. Next scene is a drunken woman in bed with one thinks is her lover. The set is a huge double bed with white sheets and pillows in the centre of the room with a white lighted ceiling above and a white carpet underneath. Three white doors lead to other rooms in the house as we in the audience observe a dysfunctional family of an alcohol-and-pill-poping addict of a mother Martha in a bizarre incestuous relationship with her drop-out 18 year-old son Henry and a 15 year-old daughter Mia sent home from boarding school for indecent behaviour. It is only then we discover Mia is Martha’s daughter who is treated as an intruder in her own home. The schoolgirls are frightening especially when seeing the victim in hospital all bruised pretending to be asleep when the girls visit her. The middle of the play focuses on Martha and her seductive teasing followed by violent jealousy when her son tells her of his sexual experience with a young girl. She viciously cuts up all his clothes into squares which he finds under her covers and throws all over the floor where it remains until her ex-husband, the rich stock broker from Hong Kong, arrives to take her to a clinic. Mia and Henry have desperately tried, to no avail, to sober Martha up and make the home look normal in order to prevent any action from the father. In between the angst are moments of wit. Martha has a hilarious scene on the phone with the talking clock as compared to the passive aggression she overloads insanely on her son who is focused upon in the latter part of the play. His outburst of not wanting his shambolic mother to be taken away is played out then in his physical love for her and his deprivation if she is removed. He stands alone against mother, father, and sister. Mother goes but what happens to the drop-out son and the expelled daughter? This is a first play by a 20 year-old writer who has a knack for characters, dialogue, and powerful emotional scenes. The switch of focus is uncertain, leaving the father and Mia both underdeveloped characters. The story is really about the mother and son. The disarray of Lindsay Duncan in her slip and messed hair then latterly in a stunning red dress projects a beauteous Duncan, even in disarray, running the gambit of emotions, from tenderness to cool calculation, to tempestuous jealousy, to sly wit. She is enthralling!! In Matt Smith as Henry there is a revealing portrait of a chaotic young man hysterical or deliberately indulged while trying to take on the responsibility of sobering an alcoholic mum to save his emotional base. Here is an exceptionally vulnerable actor with the bravery to open his wounds to an audience. The three young girls are haunting yet un-nerving in their basic fears camouflaged by acts of cruelty. The sensitive direction, the standard of acting, the inventive set, are all so impressive it dresses over the flaws of the play which shows an enormous talent in this new playwright. Import and export for Broadway in discovering rising stars.

May 1 – July 5/08

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

ZORRO

This show is a pot pourri of four distinct styles, fantasy-fairytale, spoofing farce, freedom fighting, and flamboyant gypsy-flamenco. The spoofing is great fun and should be focused upon since it can include the other three in their rightful place and perspective. Just watch the farce and fall about with laughter or be amazed at Zorro’s magic and acrobatic invention. We see Zorro in mask and cape asking his gypsy lover Inez about wearing the preference of a red cape and hat while donning her earrings. He leaps with six other looking-Zorros to the rescue of his girl back home Luisa when she is about to be shot. As she calls out,’What took you so long?’ His reply is, ’You think it easy finding six other capes and masks in this town?’ Or when the villain Ramon is about to hang three Spanish settlers Zorro swings in from nowhere and rescues the lot with his great sword play. He sits in the confessional listening to Ramon’s confession without Ramon knowing the deception until the priest falls out of the box. It’s the fun of the piece that captivates and then the fantastic energy of the flamenco dancing and singing which is repeated just a little too often. You have to get the beat with the clapping, stamping, skirt twirling, and stomping of chairs to boot. And when done brilliantly but slightly tongue in cheek you get the full effect in a consistent spoofing style. The throbbing energy is infectious with that slight mockery as Lesli Margherita’s Inez absolutely captures. She can sing, she can dance, she is sexy, she is charismatically beautiful with a stage presence that dominates the show…she is the star outshining even the naïve but twinkling-eyed Matt Rawle as Diego who is no mean star to outshine. He is endearing without the Errol Flynn machoness and performs with élan his magical tricks. He sings and dances to the delight of all. But going back to the confused book…one can see the Helen Edmundson-Jane Eyre hand in the script giving motivation to Ramon of how his mother loved Diego more. Do we really need that in a playful fantasy? Why can’t he be the bad guy just because he is the bad guy. The opening of the musical is the clear indication of where the show doesn’t work. It is so uneven…when it works it’s fabulous and when it doesn’t it is frustrating. The opening takes place, where? Oh, I read in the programme, San Francisco, a Spanish colony. You wouldn’t know it from the structure of the set….a stockade I presume? Is it wood, stone or dobie plaster? And then a Spanish aristocrat gives us the place. He’s Diego’s father who sends him off to a Spanish academy to become educated for his role in life. By the way, Diego becomes the masked Zorro. Next scene…it’s a gypsy camp. What is he doing there? The first rule in a musical is to open the show where the focus of its theme lies. Well, you could have fooled me. Ah, but we discover that he’s there because his boyhood girlfriend Luisa arrives to tell him his father died and their close friend Ramon has taken over as a tyrant. How did she find Diego? She went to the academy and they told her about the gypsy camp. There’s only one gypsy camp in all of Spain? By the time you get all exposition and where you are it’s time for the Flamencos to start the clapping, the stamping, the twirling, and the singing, bringing life at last to the show. Why not open in the gypsy camp with the best of the music setting the style and then watching a homesick and sad Diego. He wants to go back to California where the gypsies will not be treated as outsiders. America is the land of the free. Next scene they arrive only to find Ramon as the leader, a tyrant who is in command and a heartsick Luisa who tells Diego of his father’s death. This is only an example of how to clarify and yet establish the style. The added songs of non-flamenco origins are mostly love ballads which don’t carry the weight of the Flamenco. The impassioned song of Luisa asking, who is the man in the mask, would be far better as a send-up with six Zorros as possibilities. That’s where the heart of the show lies and if it intends to go to the USA it would work as a musical farce with exciting Flamenco, a delicious star in Lesli Margherita, and a Zorro of enticing fun. Hats off to the The Gypsy Kings Music, Flamenco guitarist Flavio Rodrigues, m.d. Dean Austin, director Christopher Renshaw, lights of Ben Omerod, sound of Mick Potter, illusions of Paul Kieve/ Scott Penrose and action of Terry King. Remembrances to Emma Williams’ straight-laced Luisa, best actor in the show Adam Levy as Ramon, and lovable Nick Cavaliere as the unfortunate Garcia. Import for popular taste and export only if reworked.

June 30/08-January 10/09

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

This is an early play of the author performed at the Royal Court originally where it still belongs not because of its short length but because of the slightness of the piece itself. Hampton reveals here his gift of gab, his wit and though such literate dialogue is pleasing to the ear plus seeing three characters on stage that are real people where the emotional behaviour does not follow the rule, it is still only a one- acter in content. Why does Ann allow Dave to physically as well as mentally abuse her? Why does she choose such a dud mate as Patrick to compensate for Dave? Why not choose a man of some character and substance who could be protective. Obviously, she prefers the animalism of a Dave and his exciting foreign reporting assignments. Besides, Patrick can be easily dropped when Dave returns. The surprise in the play is watching her reject Dave and then allowing him back into her life where he immediately becomes abusive. Ann may weep a bit, but she’s back in his arms before you are aware of the scene change. The play has an impact in its intelligence which is well directed in its smooth transitions and surprise endings, well played in the particularly feisty and charismatic Kris Marshall…No, I’m not a masochist, he has an animal energy that is fiercely compelling and should play Stanley in Street Car Named Desire. The play is a modern reminiscent of Streetcar. Laurence Fox has the stance, gestures, garbled speech of a nerd and seems to have a natural gift for the part. It’s Billie Piper who is the star celebrity from television that has been the big press push, postponing the opening because of her illness after all her publicity, made it obvious that she would be given the space in the reviews. She is quite acceptable as the young wounded female, not startling, not over-impressive. The evening is carried by Kris Marshall, another star in the making by Bill Kenwright, and the crispness of the play as it’s directed. Import in moderation, no export.

February 20/07 - May 26/07

AMY'S VIEW by DAVID HARE

It’s a surprise package starring Felicity Kendall at her best. The play originally starred Judi Dench who overshadowed the play and caused its theme to be centred on her and the decline of a great actress. A great aging actress’s descent into nowhere, but surviving by reinventing herself at starting point seemed the core of the play. However, seeing this production with a more ordinary actress exuding less charisma or larger than life presence, the play suddenly changes in its meaning and becomes focused on the essence of loss. Kendall loses her status, her daughter Amy, her money through investments by her lover/neighbour, her mother-in-law, and her home base but survives by adjusting and finally reinventing herself. We also learn Amy's view far more clearly...love conquers all...which her mother cynically proves is a naive view for her survival. Amy defies her mother’s judgment and marries the self centred journalist whom she eventually divorces though still loves. She dies without ever renewing her relationship to her mother. It is the grief related to loss that one watches as time changes everything and easing pain becomes a distancing process from feeling as deeply as in innocence. Peter Hall has directed this piece with such sensitivity..such personal touches. Felicity Kendal delves deeply into grief bravely revealing raw emotions. Gawn Granger gives a subtle performance of an inept lover who salvages his own finances while losing all of Esme’s. A fine drama in the West End not to be missed.

November 14/06 - February 17/07

ENJOY (1980) by ALAN BENNETT

Enjoy is a problematical early play of Bennett…. if you enjoy working class humour from Leeds where the seaside jokes relate to dirty sex, it’s your cup of tea. If on the other hand it is cliché and adolescent in its comedy, then it is not your cup of tea. Alan Bennett takes the ordinary retired working–class couple Connie and Wilf who live in the last 2-up, 2-down on their street and exposes the death of an era by their removal to the new high-rises with modern kitchens and bathrooms. He strikes at the myths of the town-hall planners who thought they could establish a new working-class future while sustaining, via false illusions, the home-making family loyalties in traditional rituals of a community. The idea of Wilf and Connie being taken as living museum pieces living in their house in a theme park adorned by a steam engine and genuine hardship is Bennett’s cruel way of satirising, in a cartoon fashion, what actually happened to the working-class. He also attempts to abstract the subject by keeping the dialogue and jokes realistic while the characters are caricatures mocking the stereotypes. So we have Ms Craig who is really a transvestite son returning home in disguise as a social worker, never saying anything till Act II. We then see a call girl for a daughter named Linda whom the parents think is a freelancing secretary even when she brings her clients to her upstairs bedroom. Since Connie and Wilf don’t bother about facing any truths or realities, we are confronted with watching their boring lives. There is a bit of excitement when Wilf has a stroke and he is thought dead. The only way of making sure he’s dead is by testing the penis, says the neighbour Mrs Clegg. Well, there is almost a quarter of an act of mileage on that. Is he or isn’t he dead ? If you like that kind of comic relief please be my guest. Connie’s only fear of moving is that she might be put into a home. Her memory is going bit by bit and maybe they will find her unqualified for her own place. After Wilf’s stroke, the transvestite is recognised as a son, Wilf is hospitalised, and Connie goes into the next stage of her dementia. The house in the end is taken apart piece by piece and maybe reconstructed on the high-rise ground as a showpiece or just an excuse given for not upsetting the Craven’s. But at any rate neither one of the Cravens is capable of moving into a new flat or house what with Wilf paralyzed in hospital and Connie now in a home recognising no one. You can take the destruction of the house as a metaphor and the dying of a working class era that killed a community culture, a heritage culture if you wish. It is a bitter sweet story with its added humour in a replica set, with lights and pacing, all kept to its era. David Troughton’s Wilfred Craven, Alison Steadman’s Connie Craven, Richard Glaves’ Ms Craig their transvestite son, Josie Walker’s Linda Craven their call-girl daughter, Carol McCready’s Mrs Clegg their neighbour, give very specific interpretations of their characters with credibility and perfect timing. It is smoothly run and correctly staged with no ironing out of the script’s difficulties, from the festival last summer in Bath to the West End. If you are looking for enlightenment this production has no torch but for earthy entertainment of a social satire nature, it may well be to your liking. Import no export.

January 27-May 2

SIX CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR (1921) by LUIGI PIRANDELLO

The rubic cube allows you to shape and reshape the cube but you must follow patterns to succeed. So is it with Pirandello in this cubic play where he poses reality against fantasy and fantasy against reality until you find it difficult to follow which is which and which is real. This was a breakthrough in early 20th-century theatre where the style of melodrama was being supplanted by naturalism affecting the actor as so distinguishly perfected by Eleanora Dusa. There is enough to deal with Pirandello who has six characters of a father, mother, older and younger sons, older and younger daughters intrude upon a company of actors and a director in the midst of their rehearsal, thus imposing upon them their tragedy which they contend is far greater theatre. The actors never understand the characters who portray their story more accurately and dramatically. The father has evicted the mother with her lover making her abandon her son. She takes up residency in another town and has three children with her lover who dies leaving the family impoverished. They return to their old hometown where the mother sews for a milliner and sends her 13-year-old daughter to deliver the work. But upstairs above the shop is a bordello which the owner forces upon the innocent girl. Meanwhile, the father sees the destitution of the family and invites them to live with him. His son is angered by the intrusion refusing to recognise his mother or the sisters and brother. All the while, the 13 year-old step-daughter is seduced by the pervy step-father who is unaware of the girl’s identity until the mother, by accident, comes upon them. There begins the accumulated shocks that follow. The step-daughter has neglected her younger brother and sister who in their unhappiness of rejection and hostility commit suicide in the garden, the girl by drowning, the boy by shooting himself upon his sister’s death, leaving a ravished mother and destroyed sister. Only the hate of revenge on the father causes the need to find an author for their play. What the highly imaginative adapters have done is updated the story and created the making of a docu-drama with two actors instead of a theatre rehearsal with actors. This adaptation has a prologue and epilogue to Pirandello’s drama. In the prologue the docu-drama is being produced and directed by a a woman concerned with the assisted suicide of a young boy dying of a disease. Since the film crew were not allowed to conduct a direct interview, the executive producer questions the validity of the documentary. And now comes the added reality-fantasy of Goold and Powers in introducing the question of truth in documentaries that reconstruct the events as close to the reality that existed. Is it the truth? To complicate Pirandello with the truth in docu-dramas may be related to the play but extends it into another dimension. We are given, for example, the doctor on the video in the prologue who looks as if she is about to cry. Why is she crying? Ironically, it is because she is losing her plastic eye lense. Should the director use it out of its context and have her crying over the boy? It is all well and good to use an assisted suicide in the prologue of a young boy in comparison to the two children of Pirandello. But the adapters go overboard in the second act, which becomes an extended epilogue, creating another  play when the director, live and on video, gets caught up in Pirandello’s play, chasing about with Pirandello’s dead boy into Chichester’s theatre of Music Man and then commits suicide herself. Well, that’s really egging the concept way beyond the acceptable perimeters. We are now in the territory of Six Characters In Search of an Editor. In addition to all of this we have the fun of the documentary technicians mockingly axing to death the executives of the Chichester theatre. Act II becomes such a melange of fantasy confused with the reality of another story that the audience cannot figure out the whole and just enjoys the first half enormously while intermittently appreciating here and there, in the second half, the vast imagination of Goold and Powers. There is an operatic display of the mother’s dirge upon discovering the daughter’s profession and with her husband that goes into another saga on its own while the drowning of the young daughter in the pond is breathtaking. Ian McDiarmid reveals an amazing range of pathos, anger, and cold bloodedness as the father. His scene of debauchery with the step-daughter is shattering. Denise Gough’s step-daughter is a tribute to this young actress who captured the hate with a sense of justice yet maintained the innocence of the young. Docu-drama producer/ director Noma Dumezweni carries the burden of the show with enormous energy and profound feelings. This production may not make it further than Chichester as did their Dr Faustus which brilliantly wedded Marlowe’s script with the shock-artists Chapman  Brothers or their Stalinist Macbeth with a No Exit colouringwhich ended up in the West End and Broadway, but it is not to be missed at Chichester, nor can there be any doubts about Rupert Goold’s genuine rise to fame as one of the most ingenious new directors. Import and export when re-edited.

Aug/08...

GOD OF CARNAGE by YASMINA REZA

The best one can say about this show is its cleverness in taking the familiar, without ever becoming cliché, to which we all identify with no problem and serve it up  with an exaggerated freshness that makes theatre, providing gales of laughter as you roll with the satiric wit and acerbic tongue lashings. It has all the necessary elements of comedy, despite the lack of depth, compensated by such a quick intelligence. Like music, it is orchestrated to start at an allegro pace then build slowly into the adagio whirlwinds to a climax where the frenzied emotions take over and each of the four characters explode. It may not always be rational or credible to real life but it certainly hits the mark dramatically. So to the critics who had reservations on the validity of some of the characters or situations…you are barking up the wrong tree…it is hilarious because of its incongruity. The fact that four absolutely marvellous actors are performing in roles just made for them is an added bonus to the same perfect technical team of Art now present in God of Carnage. You may wonder about Ralph Fiennes playing comedy….well he’s the poker face straight man who delivers the pay-off lines which are all the funnier because he doesn’t try to be funny. He’s the corporate lawyer, Alain Reille, dealing on a hard pharmaceutical case of a drug that has catastrophically lethal effects on some people and who is never off his mobile phone doing business. He is only present at this meeting in the home of the Vallons by default and feels his son, who smashed the face of the Vallons’ son, is a savage…all boys are…the God of carnage, within us all, needs constant civilising. He thinks the meeting an unnecessary bore and will willing pay for the damages. Then of course, there is Ken Stott who is ‘uncouth’ as he finally admits after exploding in a rage which makes our sides split. He‘s Michel Vallon, the entrepreneur in domestic furnishings whose treatise against marriage (‘the most terrible ordeal God could inflict on man’), especially being wedded to a liberal crusader writing serious non-fiction on Darfur, is full of fury. His act of defending his daughter from sleepless nights, because of the hamster’s nightly activity, by dumping the damn thing on the Parisian street, is later held against him as murder. Never mind the fact that he can’t abide to touch the rodent. It is Alain’s insight about men having the macho image of John Wayne they will never live up to pictured against Michel’s fear of a hamster that once again demystifies and takes away the camouflage of middle-class conceptions with such cynical humour. The opening of the show reveals the thin veneer of two bourgeois couples who obviously dislike each other and have to pretend in order to create peace through an apology between their 11-year-old sons who have had a serious brawl.  Ferdinand Reille with a weighted stick smashed the face, broke two teeth, and damaged a facial nerve of Bruno Vallon. Imagine two bourgeois couples drinking expresso coffee plus eating apples and pears with a dash of ginger bread (clafoutis), discussing how to apologise for the primeval savagery of two boys. It’s that slow unravelling of good manners into losing their cool by their explosive verbalising that gives this 90 minute piece its structure which was interrupted by an LEB grid blacking out most of the stage lights, forcing an interval on us. It was not a catastrophe but another bonus. The play was just becoming repetitious when the lights when out and after dramatic ten minutes the actors had to start on a lower scale to do the climatic build-up which was a blessing. After all the drinking of rum, the vomiting of Annette Reille over all of Veronique  Vallon’s favourite art books which Michel Vallon salvages with a hair dyer and uses yet again to attempt a salvaging job on Alain Reille’s mobile phone which Annette tempestuously threw into the vase of tulips and then threw all the flowers on the clean carpet. To boot it all Michel’s mother is recommended into taking Alain’s drug and therein lies another frenzied hysterical scene of laughter. All matters regarding the parents and not the boys erupt. So what about the boys and the apology? Well, Annette feels there was right and wrong on both sides, Veronique will not forgive the loss of two front teeth and an injured facial  nerve without an apology plus the belief in the goodness of man to conquer evil, while Alain thinks it is all so normal for boys to fight and sort out their own allegiances, and Michel thinks the whole mess of the boys, the Reilles, his marriage, are all worthless. In a blood red set with modern furniture we are in a bullring of who catches who with the cape of truth and then goes for the kill of the bull or is there a bull’s eye? I know what side I would choose and what of you? You’ll have to see the play first. Import, import and Export for Broadway!! 

March 25/08...

MACBETH by WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Macbeth is the story of ambition, of a man who murders king, comrades, and subjects in his climb to the crown, only to lose all after his devastating destruction of others. It is primitively set in medieval Scotland where tribal rituals and social structures still remained with supernatural undertones. Goold as director takes this plot and places it in a timeless and nameless country ‘with a law of its own,’ says the programme. Yet the Russia of Stalin is clearly marked in the video newsreels of marching soldiers or masses of Muslim protesters projected on the wall of the kitchen, the cazatska is danced in the halls, the fur hats of Moscow are worn, the uniforms of the French and army fatiques of World War II are used. It is set in a windowless kitchen with a sink with running water that gushes blood when lady Macbeth washes the spots on her hands. A huge frig is upstage, an ominous lift with imprisoned gates creeks down down down to this floor of hell with human victims. It’s a psychological thriller pre-empting the chilling eerie tragedy and depths of murder, spreading paranoia like butter and threatening the court into frozen fear which besmirches every corner. The kitchen is hell’s kitchen unlike New York where the slums once invaded the streets of the west 40s which bred the gangsters and criminals of notoriety. It is so inventively conceived to produce shock, suspense, excessive violence, rigid dread, and revulsion. In the opening, operating tables or slabs are brought into the kitchen now transformed into a surgical room with dying soldiers being operated upon with the help of three nurses who turn into the witches. It’s an abattoir flooded with the blood of World War II soldiers. It morphs into a train where Banquo is poisoned like the Russian spy of today then shot by the police with silent guns. He pulls the emergency break to allow his son to escape. The banquet is served by the witches who conjure up corpses in body bags as a projection of the future. They’re the forerunners of evil and not supernatural figures from a primeval forest. Banquo’s ghost descends from the lift as he then bestrides the banquet table in one scene but in the repeat of that scene is absent. The combination of using the kitchen as his surreal metaphor of hell in which the epic battles take place sometimes stretches the mind. But he has deliberately blended the domestic with the worldly murders so as to indicate the danger lurking everywhere. Macbeth and his lady planning the next step in Duncan’s death are interrupted by her bringing out the chocolate cake. Macbeth opens a bottle of wine or eats a sandwich with the hired murderers for Banquo’s end. Macbeth stops Banquo’s son from taking a midnight snack or Macduff shoving his children and wife home after seeing King Duncan as guest. The horror movies of today are the blood and guts of Goold’s approach to the wild terror of the modern world drawn in relationship to the supernatural by surrealistic metaphors. His scope is gigantically epic with an imaginative energy that is phenomenal. Patrick Stewart’s Macbeth progresses cleverly… nervy at first, he’s driven by the iron will of Lady Macbeth into murder. He grows away from his lady and slowly goes mad with the power, brilliantly terrifying the court in the banquet scene as they freeze with forbodings. Macbeth’s famous speech of ‘tomorrow and tomorrow’ is fascinating over the news of Lady Macbeth’s death. Kate Fleetwood’s Lady Macbeth is fierce, frightening, cagily deliberate yet unrelenting; driven mad by the murder and its consequences she cannot wash away the blood spots on her hands in the sleepwalking scene. The design of the show is fabulously sophisticated in advanced use of multimedia, a working lift, and the hell’s kitchen concept. Michael Feast’s Macduff is soul-tearing in his shocked grief over the news of the death of his entire family; the speechless gaze of a man thrown into the dark shadows of hell. Paul Shelley’s Duncan is clearly articulate and Martin Turner magnetic as Banquo. Who can forget the sound and fury signifying nothing of this production. Import! Import! Is it possible export for BAM or Lincoln Center ?

Sept 24 - 01/Dec/07

EQUUS by Peter Shaffer

The revival of this play now called old hat for its psychiatric dialogue but nonetheless sensational because of Daniel Radcliffe who is not only the star of Harry Potter but is performing the sex scene in the nude with the stable girl, belittles the impact of Peter Shaffer and in the casting misreads the basic theme of the play. You can’t buy a ticket currently because of the razzle-dazzle and rampant publicity on the Harry Potter star… but Radcliffe is limited in his engagement so does it mean the play will collapse when he goes? The casting of the gently passive actor Richard Griffiths as the psychiatrist to analyze Alan Strang’s sexual-religious obsession with horses ending in a violently passionate act of blinding six of them with a hoof pick unbalances the driving energy required in the part and the matching anger originally enacted by Alec McCowen. The first production in the West End in the 1970s was a great event because of the realistically open discussion on the hugely cruel act to horses, the honest revelation of the sexual perversity counter pointed by the symbolic style of actors as horses on stage wearing metal cage-like masks for horses’ heads and wired hoofs in choreographed majestic movements. The theme of Shaffer in this play is similar to Mozart and Salieri in that Shaffer decries genius or the capacity for huge passion being given to the wrong people such as Mozart or Strang, leaving the sane ones confined to mediocrity. The price for genius is too high, says Shaffer, but his theme is timeless. The tension in the original production came from Doctor Dysart whose frustration for profound emotional feelings is as disturbing as curing the boy’s psychotic behaviour. However, there is less concern in this production for the theme, the tension, the casting as it is for proving that Radcliffe can project in a theatre and hold his own on stage. The whole emphasis is away from the play, its style or theme and concentrates on Daniel Radcliffe that the teenagers will crowd to see not only in person but in the nude as an added treat. The grace and beauty of the actors as horses in majestic choreographed movement is the real highlight of the show and hopefully will sustain its run along with the muted theme of regret over the price of genius or originality. No need to stress import or export…it has its own momentum.

February 16/07 - June 9/07

PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY novel by OSCAR WILDE

Here we go again with another Dorian Gray where the stage adaptation is directed by the author and we are into a dark basement of the theatre in Soho which immediately creates the jaded atmosphere; and is certainly druggy enough to bring a genuine eeriness to the piece. The elegance required is missing but the attempt at red velvet curtains and a grand piano lends an ear to a feeling of Victoriana. The back streets of what might have been are vastly stronger. Mostyn James’s Dorian Gray glides from innocence to corruption at the hands of Lord Henry but never loses his initial beauty as the painting by the society artist Basil moves from one stage of evil and debauchery to the next. Hidden in his attic, the famous portrait is seen by no one, not even by the love-sick Basil. Dorian destroys every life he touches but never finds happiness or even pleasure. Though not nearly as colourful or as precise as Matthew Bourne’s version, it loses any finesse by its lack of elegance. The songs are an interruption but the music played by the pianist and actresses reveal real initiative. The space at Café Royal must have given the production more polish. But being so tightly spaced here accentuates any failings. Mostyn James is not handsome enough for the part nor steady in his stylisation but Joanna Hickman as the tragic Sibyl Vane who falls in love with Dorian and is also Leaf the servant boy who is gradually corrupted in addition to her singing is the gift of the evening and a talent to watch. It’s a very noble attempt by Linnie Reedman. No import or export.

Jan 9 – Feb 1/09

ALEX – THE PLAY by CHARLES PEATTIE and RUSSELL TAYLOR

The material and the comedy of Alex the banker have ironic tones in the writing and drawings in the newspapers. The humour is less so on stage. The combination of the video images of characters mouthed live by Bathurst plus acting the Alex character make for a technically well achieved show in a theatre very suitable for the video. The timing and integration of video with live action is perfect with a very skilled performance from Bathurst. But is it worth even the 50 minutes in time? The technical combinations with the cartoon effect of movement and sound are important strides in the changing style of theatre, but it is still back to the old story…does the script contain enough stretch and literary qualities for the stage. So with all the talent revealed, the play is still the thing. The play was not there. All we see is Alex pursuing his wife when he needs her for his banking deals. We watch the deals, the pitfalls, the harassments of Alex and finally his victory in the deal and in his wife becoming pregnant. Import for a casual drop in, no export. It does go on tour and would make a fun cabaret act.

Nov 25 – Dec 20/08

BLOWING WHISTLES by MATTHEW TODD

The actors giving their all is what shines in this production about a gay couple celebrating their tenth anniversary by having a threesome with a young man they meet on the Internet. Each of the three represents a gay “type”: one is the young, modern gay; the second is the camp queen; and the third is the sexually promiscuous hard-party-player. Paul Keating starts off as a walking stereotype, but reveals himself to be a mature and much more complex character. He is pulled between two worlds: the era of rainbow flag-waving for sexual freedom and that of contemporary, responsible adulthood. In the dramatic denouement, Keating beautifully demonstrates a range of emotions when facing the hurt of re-evaluating a long-term relationship with the person he loves more than life itself. Keating is the star of the show, but young Daniel Finn, in his London stage debut, demonstrates the talent of a far more experienced actor. Finn gives a brave (and revealing) performance as the 17-year-old modern gay male: a guy like any other, but who just happens to fancy other men. He sees no need to adhere to any gay rules (e.g. you must love Kylie, pride should be observed and your participation mandatory, clubs become home away from home, etc.). As a character and performer, Finn is intriguing and stands out among the three men. His strong stage presence will be recognised quickly. Blowing Whistles may be good for ‘a gay ol’ time’. However, the one-liners and other attempts at humour are heavy-handed and superficial; there’s camp and then there’s tired stereotypes as demonstrated here. The writing leaves something to be desired despite the issues of what does it mean to be gay? What is the true definition of gay pride? What is a gay lifestyle? Each act begins with projections of videos showing blatant sexuality; the public displays of homosexuality in the videos are juxtaposed with the private side of homosexuality in the play’s action. The problem lies in that this has all been addressed before. There is nothing inciteful or provocative about these issues. The heterosexual community will learn little from the discussion presented onstage. If anything, there is the very real possibility that they will leave the theatre with their preconceived notions confirmed. The gay community, which made up the majority of the audience, may find some humour or food for thought but it is doubtful that they will have their world rocked in any way. The playwright clearly had good intentions, but this is sadly just another retelling of the same old gay story. Import no export.

Oct 23 – Nov 29/08...

LA CLIQUE, C’EST CHIC

The pre-show music of La Clique, a modern-day collection of vaudeville and burlesque acts presented in a format that is part circus /part cabaret, is upbeat and nostalgic; echoing those easy and simpler days when going to the circus was the highlight of the season. “This is not the kind of show where you can sit back and watch with your arms folded,” so wisely advises a stagehand at the start of the show. From the moment you enter the Hippodrome, you know it’s extraordinary territory. The disco balls hanging from the ceiling cover the floor in swirling circles of red and black lights; music typical of a piano bar (e.g. “Fever,” “Quando, Quando, Quando,” etc.) fills the lobby. To add to the circus ambience, concessions include popcorn and candy floss. Audience members are even welcomed to the arena with a flourish of drums and carnival music. Seating is in the round, the stage being no bigger than the length of a grounded person, hardly big enough, one thought, for staging such acts. The format of the show allows for alternating local and international performers every night. The main troupe cast on this particular night, however, consists of six single acts and two duos, one immediately following the other, commanding complete attention. The top headliner, well worth the wait in Act II, is Yulia Pikhtina. The extraordinarily beautiful Pikhtina’s sensual and mesmerizing hula-hoop act defies all expectations and shows off her gymnastic ability. Gymnast David O’Mer’s “Bath Boy”-act is a woman’s pleaser/teaser, erotically cavorting in a bathtub filled with water while performing amazing aerial tricks that display his balance, grace, and athleticism. Watch out if you’re in the first two rows to eschew getting wet. O’Mer and Pikhtina are the only two in the cast who perform only once during the show. The “British Gents of the Chippendales”, impeccably dressed in three-piece suits and bowlers, perform, without strain, incredible feats of strength and acrobatics along with old-fashioned British charm, wit, and stature, even when stripped to Union Jack underpants. The double-jointed Captain Frodo astounds and shocks with his acts of contortionism. Ursula Martinez’s in her “Where’s the hanky?” strip makes a handkerchief disappear in unison with her clothes. Your guess is as good as mine as to where she hides the hanky on/in her naked body. While several of the acts are sexually suggestive, this is the only one restricted to adults.  The master of ceremonies Mario, “Queen” of the Circus, a juggling-comedy-karaoke act, carries on far too long with few laughs or innovations. He redeems himself, however, when rousing the audience to join him in a Queen song, and then taking advantage by stage diving into them which keeps his body aloft before they move him back on stage. Awe is the theme of this production which urges you to leave your troubles and the world’s chaos at the door before losing yourself in its ribald and exotic world for two hours. La Clique has arrived in the West End at a most opportune time. Don’t miss it

October 2 – February 1/09

CABARET

The musicals keep pouring into the West End at one go with more and more about Hitler and the Weimar era in Germany, but none can touch Cabaret in hitting at the core through a personal story and with music that is eternal. This production is highly provocative with stunning moments or others that may fall by the wayside. There is no in between here…not when there’s such highly inventive direction (Rufus Norris) that you can accept or refute. The approach is seriously political; the degeneracy of the Kit Kat Klub ingeniously permeates the whole show but the over-sexed spanking and writhing dances in bum revealing leather and metal, so frequently used in Act I become less ferocious in its constant repetition. Act II amends that overstatement and the other genius, the choreographer (Javier de Frutos), floods the stage with a vitality that is amazing. The production numbers at the Kit Kat Klub are show stoppers. Sally Bowles (Anna Maxwell Martin) is made into an ordinary untalented cabaret singer which may be true to the original concept but is one of the drawbacks in her performing the songs or acting with an easy devil-may-care. For my part she is miscast and we never get the full impact of those riveting songs. But then again there is the emcee (James Dreyfus) who not only carries the narration and comments on what is happening but weaves himself into the story participating to the point of symbolising the era. The rendering of songs like The Money Song (money makes the world go round) as he consumes it bite by bite is only one of the many fascinating characters he plays. He changes like the wind in so many perspectives. It’s a blazing performance and a brilliant concept from Rufus Norris. Unfortunately, that same director throws so many ideas together at times that one wants to say...please stop. Ending Act I with Sally singing her heartbreak song of Maybe This Time is counter pointed beautifully with the rising of the young Nazis as a bell-like tenor sings Tomorrow Belongs to Me along with the company. It is a confusion to add the Kit Kat girls becoming concentration victims at the same time. The contrast of the two young people… one with a future and the other with none… is enough comment. We are given the concentration image at the end of Cabaret which is a horrendous vision on that stage with overwhelming implications. Geoffrey Hutchings’ Mr Schultz is portrayed with such sincerity that one accepts his belief in the passing of this era and feels the pain of his rejection. It is Sheila Hancock almost parodying Frau Schneider in her acting and singing that I found unconvincing. The high points swing high and the low points swing low but never is there a sense of loss when such originality pulsates in its interpretation, such powerful images are projected, such wonderful music fills an entire theatre and one leaves consumed by a relived era. It’s the one seriously adult musical in the West End. Import no export.

October 10/06...

WHIPPING IT UP by STEVE THOMPSON

This is the funniest and most intelligent political farce about the whip's office and its power through its machinations to control the government. Yes Minister is back on course and running with great starring performances and direction. Robert Wilson as chief whip pulls his sour face to sabotage everyone and finally pulls a reverse on us all. Robert Bathurst runs panic through the office but keeps the team on course with a sense of timing for a straight man that is fast-moving with grace. The cockney apprentice learns manipulation with the greatest of ease in the hands of Lee Ross and the idealistic Nicholas Rowe grows up pretty quickly. Helen Schlesinger as a politician is the romantic lead but pulls the ring through Bathurst’s nose while Fiona Glascott is the really tough cookie who will get her scoop at any price. There's a sting pulled on the audience and it works!!! What a joy to see adult humour done with such expertise which requires a little grey matter from its audience!! Bravo, bravo Mike Bradwell and how much you will be missed upon your departure!! Import but no export

February 22/07...

LOVE SONG by JOHN KOLVENBACH

A UK production originated by the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in which Michael Mckean and Kristin Johnston have performed the same parts in the USA. They capture the comedy and the rhythmic patter so marvellously making the dialogue just zing along. It’s an internal piece on the power of love (John Donne)...not romantic love but love as a life force. One could almost call it a modern fairytale…a fragile fairytale with an impressionistic quality into which the director unfortunately styled too realistic a tone attempting a commercial comedy in the first part. Set in Joan’s home where she reveals firing trainees in her office because of their lack of experience, her patient husband Harry tries both reasoning with her and guiding her backward brother Beane. The following scene takes us into the land of the imagination where Beane, returns to his flat as the walls cave in and a stranger named Molly belligerently appears out of nowhere. She becomes his figure of love who opens the walls and the closed doors for him. He tries to explain his miracle to Joan who challenges reality all the way. In the end Molly disappears but the door opens with a golden light proclaiming Beane’s readiness for the world through the strength of love. It maybe he is going out into the world or some ray of power has entered. Whatever you choose Beane has been redeemed. It’s an hour and a half with no interval, haunting in its analysis. There is humour in Beane’s relationship to Joan and in her relationship to Harry. It's so well acted by (5 actors) and sensitively directed. It is a tender piece that is seen so seldom today. Love Song has had very mixed notices. The hard core critics wouldn't go with the sensitivity of the imagination or the concept of John Donne's power of love. The sensitive critics adored it. Some thought its economy of plot was too flimsy..no developed motivation, but it’s meant to be impressionistic fantasy. The set is masterly and almost speaks its mystery while Beane surprises us with his offbeat whimsy. Keep the spirit going if you like a bit of joyous fantasy. It’s already an import and no export.

Nov 25/06 - Feb 17/07

IMAGINE THIS

This musical has the ingredients for a powerful, heartstring-plucking, classical drama. It is actually a musical-within-a-musical. The large cast portrays a Jewish acting troupe that has been allowed by the Nazis to continue putting on shows while in the ghetto. The troupe performs a retelling of the Masada legend in which the ancient Jews face persecution by the Romans, a tale that mirrors their current situation. They learn of the Final Solution and, like the characters in their play, must eventually decide whether individual freedom is more important than freedom of the whole. All the songs are epic anthems; each sounding like it should be the finale ultimo trying too hard to appeal to the emotions. They seem like one 3-hour long tune. The actors perpetually belt out their numbers which become numbing after a while, losing the possible chance of provoking any emotion. Only two songs (“The Last Laugh” and “Don’t Mind Me”) offer a respite from the musical barrage because they are light and amusing. Since the majority of the songs are so intense and unvarying, the light ones break the monotony and bizarrely appear out of left field. And yet the audience howled and applauded at the end of each rendition, each song seeming better than the last. The same can be said of the show’s humour. It’s difficult to take the horrors of the Holocaust seriously when the book contains a bevy of old Jewish jokes and religious knee-slappers (one theatregoer heard them from her father) that negate the situation being portrayed onstage. The comedy is weak, but, again, the audience found all the jokes utterly delightful. Glenn Berenbeim has predicted the composition of his Jewish audience and is clearly catering to them.The real loss, however, is what is downplayed. Glimpses of Holocaust terrors like bodies being piled onto a cart or a man’s beard being cut off, are included, but almost as an aside thus making little impact. One feels more compassion for the male swings because of the choreography consisting of actors standing or walking on their backs and shoulders. Regardless, the company gives its all with fine performances. Peter Polycarpou [Daniel/Eleazar], a charismatic actor with strong vocals and stage presence, deserves his top billing; Leila Benn Harris, the show’s young leading lady, has a lovely voice and is winning in the roles of Rebecca/Tamar; Sarah Ingram’s [Sarah/Naomi] voice is stunning and emotive. Despite its apparent faults, the show’s inevitable conclusion is touching and effectively relays a message of hope in the face of adversity. Its highly positive audience response will surely help towards a healthy run. No Import or export

November 19...

KING LEAR by WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

King Lear is Ian McKellen’s height of glory. He has waited all these years to be able to do Lear and it is well worth waiting for. The run at Stratford and its tour has deepened his portrayal of an old man gone slowly mad. That madness is filled with such pain, that one must weep. When he loses Cordelia in death, he is no longer capable of life. His dementia is so vulnerable, so pathetic that it pulls at the heartstrings more than his death. His playful wit is outlandish; his sense of power as divine King is unyielding and therefore finds difficulty in understanding his misplacement when he is divested of his regal role. He has never lived with truth, only the veneer of obedience. The shock of reality in addition to his age turns him slowly mad so as not to have to cope with a wayward world. His attempts at comprehending his changing condition are so disturbing with McKellen’s kind of wit and intelligence that stirs it stirs both the mind and heart. His constant bafflement tugs at the core. The realisation that children will react to power rather than to love is something strange to this old man. It is a such a memorable portrait of old age where McKellen has dug deep into his soul to reveal such intimacies. His frontal nudity is done like a babe taking off his clothes in defiance of any garments restricting him but it is the direction of the full frontal that had previously caused the sensation which has been less so in the London run. As to the production, it seems so loosely conceived. I don’t know why Nunn has chosen Tsarist Russia with a set that looks like a palace combined with a baroque theatre which disintegrates as time passes leaving little room for the battle scenes. There are some lively Russian dances but this is not a musical. The killing off of the Tsar is not allied in any way to Lear since Nicholas died united with his family. Lear’s daughters, I suppose, could stand as metaphors for the communists and the social collapse. Nunn brings out the destruction of Lear with the social destruction as the palace of elegance falls into debris and the divine king who gave blessings when in power is now dependent on the wild storms of humanity and nature. It is Edmund, the bastard with no social status, who grabs the opportunities to make his fortune, while Lear is stripped of everything before he recognises the true humanity. But the story of the downfall of a family is as strong as any Greek tragedy. Let it pass and accept Nunn’s premise. However, one cannot react positively to the undercasting. Edgar and Edmund are unnoticeable, undermining the secondary storyline while the harshness of the two daughters leaves no subtlety for any sympathy. Thank goodness for Jonathan Hyde and William Gaunt who give us Shakespeare’s verse plus full characterisations. Sylvester McCoy has morphed himself into the part of the fool with much emphasis on being fool rather than a wise man. His hanging still feels as a means of closing the first half of the play with a dramatic climax accompanied by crescendoing music. But in waiting for Cordelia’s death scene, McKellen redeems the production with a performance of such destitution to be recalled in every personal tragedy. He touches chords so deep within, such emotional strains that whatever the production may or may not do one shall rarely see such a Lear again. Surely deep resignation shall overcome me if I remember the acceptance of death that Ian McKellen bestows. Import no export as it was on its international tour!!!  

Nov 15/07-Jan 12/08

THE SEAGULL by ANTON CHEKHOV

The title itself has always carried specific significance especially when Trigorin writes on his notes an idea for a short story inspired by Konstantin, who in a fit of jealousy, shoots a seagull which he lays at Nina’s feet. He takes it from that action and directs it towards a girl happily living by the lake like the bird who is destroyed as casually by a passing stranger as the shooting of a seagull. This is the story of The Seagull in a nutshell but there is also the story of Arkadina, Konstantin’s actress mother who, in fear of ageing, is stingy and selfishly self-centred holding on fiercely to her lover Trigorin. She visits the family estate in the country but carries on her full life in Moscow leaving her brother Sorin and her son Konstantin to live in poverty in this once elegant home. Sorin flourished at one time but now gives everything to keep the estate and the farm lands going. It is the crossing of the two love stories when Nina steps into her affair with Trigorin that tragedy ensues and lives are broken. Adoring theatre and fame she abandons her family home by the lake to live with Trigorin who drops her after the baby dies and she proves to be a repertory actress. By that time her family have disowned her and Konstantin, who has always loved her, remains only her friend. She will always love Trigorin. Konstantin unhappy as a writer, unrequited in his love for Nina and his mother commits suicide while Nina returns to her tours from town to town always a has-been actress. But Trigorin and Arkidina survive in the halls of fame. There is the unrequited love of Masha for Konstantin to add to the melting pot. Chekhov never goes into melodrama but reveals the broken hearts in understated terms so that the melancholia never intrudes on others. Life is hopeful only when looking to the future and the change it will bring. Into this naturalistic theatre of Chekhov, Trevor Nunn steps with the baroque set of King Lear and melodrama galore climaxed at the end of part one by showing Konstantin’s attempted suicide accompanied with the cries and desperate turmoil of the whole household running in and out of everywhere to save him. (This being an attempted suicide to have taken place off stage according to Chekhov.) Maybe King Lear was set in Russia to accommodate The Seagull but the dacha is no palace; it’s supposedly rundown. This also is Frances Barber’s star turn as Arkidina whom she vulgarises in shouting like a fishwife and reveals an ego without heart. Gerald Kyd’s Trigorin brings no identity as a writer or a lover in addition to being an odd choice. Richard Goulding’s Konstantin is also unformed along with the most negative Masha by Monica Dolan who never attracts our sympathy. Romola Garai’s Nina is moving, Melanie Jessop’s Polina is accomplished and Dorn the doctor finally gives us a Chekhov character in his suave demeanor played by that skilled actor Jonathan Hyde. But once again it is Ian McKellen as Sorin, the distracted brother, who lights up the stage bringing warmth, humour, humanity, and Chekhov. His capacity to become the character he is playing transports us to where he is and involves us in his journey. As Stanislavsky said, ‘there are no small parts, only small actors.’ There is the proof in Ian McKellen, he carries the show in his part as Sorin and creates magic on stage No import or export necessary as it already has happened.

November 22/07- January 12/08

DIVINE COMEDY OF WILLIAM BLAKE

The 250th anniversary of William Blake has been celebrated for two weeks with a full programme of seminars, concerts, poetry readings, and the production of this play which follows the life of Blake alternately with scenes from his poetry, Book of Job, engravings, and paintings. Dances follow the etchings of the nymphs and angels while music is composed for the dances and songs sung to the poetry. The company of actors and dancers enact Blake, his wife, her family, and the various people who affected Blake’s life. Blakes’ engravings from the Book of Job are enlarged and projected on the screen to accompany the dances enacting those scenes. It is an attempt at dramatising the man and his work by the Theatre of Eternal Values, a company of international artists who meet regularly all over Europe to perform Blakes’ works and other artists or writers who are spiritually inclined.

November 20-December 2/07

A MIDSUMMERS NIGHT’S DREAM by WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

And so after the opening of a casualty Hamlet (David Tennant’s back operation before opening) the RSC’s London season at the Novello continues with a revival of its extremely successful version of the 2005-year production of the Dream from Stratford’s Courtyard Theatre. Shakespeare’s magical thinking in this particular play is quite intense as he uses the great difference between the dark and the light, between darkness in the wood under a primeval spell which is frightening in its distortions and the light of day in the city of Athens where the law of the land is realistically fearful. In this work we have the story of the royal Theseus and Hippolyta, the Rude Mechanicals (workers), and the two pairs of upper-class lovers. We have life in the dark woods which can be dreamlike and lyrical or nightmarish and ghoulish as in this production. Because this version is modern and costumed in black and white, we have punk-rockers for nightmarish fairies who taunt and tease maliciously, even ghostlike when tearing a bike apart and frightening the Mechanicals or disobeying deliberately the rules of Oberon, their king, and emptying the suitcases of run-away Hermia throwing her dainty underwear as weapons of destruction. These fairies are dressed in black rag-like garments with blackened dirty faces that play voodoo games with dolls. There is great fun in their deliberate rebellions despite their eeriness. A feisty but tiny brunette Hermia battles her way through the turmoil of love in the woods to win her slack but pop-trendy Lysander, in the light of day, through Puck’s (an older freakish fairy) corrections of the love potions. She is adorable and enchanting. The wonderfully hilarious dumb blonde of Helena helplessly anticipating the rejection of love is also saved by Puck, in the light of day. Stodgy Demetrius is broken in by the constant assaults in the woods and in cold daylight adheres to loving Helena. The Amazonian Hippolyta duels with Theseus but is furious at his demanding complete submission of Hermia to her father’s rule. Puck who never gets anything right…a bit fat and over-mature…does his master’s bidding because he has to and only enjoys his mistakes when Oberon does. We have a fierce King Oberon and a colourfully sexy Queen Titania who has as much morality as Oberon in stealing the Indian child. But after the foul play of Oberon’s love potions and Titania’s awakening from her dream of lovemaking to an ass there is once again harmony and love between them. We are left with the Rude Mechanicals and their rendering of the play Pyramus and Thisbe before Theseus and Hippolyta plus the four lovers, all now married and dressed in white, which is the main farcical scene in the Dream. Joe Dixon’s Brummie Bottom, when not eating falafel and drinking a cup of tea with his matey Mechanicals in the daylight, also goes through a transformation in the dark woods when he assumes an ass’s head making love to Titania. But he too recovers his old self in cold daylight and performs with the Rude Mechanicals Pyramus and Thisbe. Here he milks the humour beyond bounds but it’s compensated by the comic performance of Ricky Champ’s Wall whose chink he could never find. So how does the audience feel after seeing such characters on a set of mirrored walls with a huge white plastic balloon for the city of Athens and hundreds of light bulbs descending for the woods with an added reflective moon at times? Or about the delightful choreographed fighting of the lovers or the majestic flying up-and-away of Oberon and Titania as they disappear in the coming of the dawn. It’s partly intoxicating, partly ominous, partly comic, and completely original in Gregory Doran’s concept which he not only cleanly and clearly stages but manages as always to extract performances from actors that are distinctive yet at the same time weave the company into an ensemble. His interpretations of Shakespeare move with the times while keeping the emotional depth. He causes us to weep at the tragedy or burst with laughter at the comedy, to be awed by beauty or tortured by tyranny. He is the National treasure of the RSC and its stronghold. Import, its export is set in a touring programme set by the RSC.

January 15 - February 7/09

DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN

Sorry, the show is, as they say, bad, and as bad shows go, it went or it will. The film to stage plays or musicals are getting to be a habit which really requires skill if one can justify that transference. There has to be some enhancement or deepening of definition….What is the great inducement here?..... The inducement is combining Blondie songs to the film story of Desperately Seeking Susan which was so well cast with Madonna as slut and Rosanna Arquette as appealing suburbanite Roberta. It’s not only the synthetic characterisations that are tiring in this production, because both stars playing Susan and Roberta, Kelly Price and Emma William, have great voices, but the songs are just that… songs… and do not make a musical score for a musical. In addition to a book that destroys the once endearing film-storyline we have here the gradual transition of Roberta to a look-alike Susan happening so fast it becomes a mechanically contrived morphus.  A devastating set of a dank dark New York landscape of no significance, consisting of tenements with fire escapes against a corrugated-rusty iron back-wall with A encircled on it for a punk symbol, is a poor-man’s version of West Side Story. In addition to an imitative set, a lack of musical scoring, the songs, allied to a text, are simply pasted on and sometimes with distortion of meaning. The live band with their tinny chords amplified so loudly that the lyrics are inaudible, the copy-cat vocals, reprises altered in different registers but with no purpose, phoney high pitched emotions, no real energy, choreography and dancing that are unoriginally repetitive, are enough reasons to desperately seek an exit.  The only positive aspect of the whole production is listening to the Blondie songs which could easily pass in a concert evening without an awkward script or uninspired direction and acting. Let them all just sing the songs!!! The story is about a suburban New Jersey housewife Roberta who in reading the personals in the local papers comes upon ‘desperately seeking Susan’. Frustrated over her own lifestyle and intrigued by the free lifestyle of Susan, Roberta begins to spy on her, dress like her, and is mistaken by a gangster for being Susan whom he pushes into a lamp-post which causes her to lose her memory. She then thinks she is Susan. The real Susan has stolen a pair of ancient gold Egyptian earrings and is being chased by a gangster for their return. After a series of adventures, and of course, the misidentity of Susan, Roberta’s memory returns. She finds love with filmmaker Dez leaving her boring husband while Susan finds her love in Dez’s best friend, Jay, a pop singer. Nostalgia has gone with the wind and this too shall blow away. No import or export.

October 16/07

DROWSY CHAPERONE

You will find this production is purely a matter of taste which each one must decide for oneself. It is not my cup of tea as I found it heavy handed, deliberately funny, needing knowledge of 1920s musicals to understand the spoof, indistinctive music, banal choreography, set design as pastiche as the show, but the tap dancing alive and kicking with performers of electric talent. The reviews have been delightful but I wonder at audience interest. Some have compared this piece to The Boyfriend but it is not anything as styled, fresh or original. The import came from New York as a Tony winner it but started in Toronto. Bob Martin is the non-singing narrator who initiated the original project in 1998 and Elaine Paige stars in the title role as a gift to this company. This non-interval work of 100 minutes goes relentlessly from one production number to another as Martin, slightly camp and a reminder of Gene Wilder in his frayed cardigan, sits depressed in his armchair. He fills the gap with old records in his tinsey flat; in playing the old record of The Drowsey Chaperone it comes to life to lift his spirits. He comments all along the way on the performances, beginning in the dark with ‘I hate theatre’. The characters come out of the frig, or windows, from the side walls that open into beds and chaise lounges. They are costumed in the 1920s and set pieces appear from the same period. The songs parody Gershwin, Porter and Rogers and Hart, the dancing is Busby Berkeley meshed with Ginger and Fred. The plot of this invented musical is a wedding about to take place between glamorous actress Janet, the leggy Summer, and her fixed-smile fiancé Robert, the tapping genius Partridge. (Actually, they are both stunning dancers.) She has her chaperone that dismisses her job, too busy falling for the Latin lover Adolpho, the sleazy Italian Romeo who is the funniest man in the show with his skunk-tail quiff and Chaplin moustache. Elaine Paige’s chaperone is drowsy but be-jewelled and be-furred with huge hats and cigarette holders to match in which she evidently enjoys strutting. Paige is sent-up by the company and herself in her big moment As We Stumble Along, upstaging the bride at every opportunity arms akimbo to cover the bride. Janet is to give up the theatre for marriage. Her funny number here is Show Off sung to photographers and an entourage as Janet explains why she’s giving up the theatre for marriage. Her producer and his dumb blonde girl friend arrive for the wedding to persuade Janet to do otherwise, two gangsters disguising themselves as pastry cooks (straight out of Anything Goes) also join the celebration. Rogers and Grace are an aging vaudevillian act who come to the occasion and marry as well. There is a hitch in the loving and Janet breaks off the wedding. We have the leggy Summer in a French accent dancing Accident Waiting To Happen with a blind Partridge tapping on roller skates. Through this comedy song and dance they make-up and restore the wedding plans. It is a feather-brained musical with not much in the spoofing department nor in the musical numbers but if you need to be entertained without thought here’s the place to go. No import or export.

May 14/07 – February 23/08...

TEMPEST by William Shakespeare

Here we are again with the vibrant storyteller Rupert Goold having directed Glass Menagerie also directing The Tempest. He is a classical director of epic theatre and has conceived an interpretation of The Tempest in the arctic wasteland that is dominated by dark skies and torturous winds which produce a winter storm at sea, a tempest, whose waters invade the whole production even after the opening storm. It begins in the pilot’s room showing the panic of the crew and passengers as the raging sea breaks the ship forcing its abandonment. The moving curtain has the turbulent sea projected onto it while snow falls and grey skies are furiously blown. The constant winter is in Prospero’s bear skin cape with a whale’s head skeleton or the wooden shack called his cell/home. Broken wood and mounds of barren land covered with snow permeate the atmosphere. Life is hard, there is no sun or lush island in this production and Prospero reflects its harshness in his own fury… an internal tempest. Ariel is another stroke of inventiveness never visualised before…a white-faced Frankenstein whose menacing presence is no spirit of air or goodness but a grotesque monster erupting from the furnace-like stove and then startlingly so from a dead fish. Caliban is chained like a wild dog on a lead filled with rage and resentment. It is only Miranda that softens Prospero and the realisation of her awe of men that melts Prospero into a gradual state of forgiveness even to his brother Antonio who usurped his dukedom and caused his exile. The passengers on the ship are the self same characters who were involved in Prospero’s downfall and the tempest was created to end his time on this wasteland…to return home to Milan with Miranda wedded to the Prince of Naples and his eventual kingship. His departure from the island is no passive resistance but rather an act of violence as he thrusts his magic stick into the flames of the burning shack-cell. However, before leaving he gives freedom to Ariel and Caliban who may also one day learn to forgive. The darkness of the arctic will soon be lost as they sail back in the illumination of the sun. The comedy of Triculo, the jester and Stephano, the druken butler in their conspiracy with Caliban is tempered down like the greyness of the setting. The use of the pagan goddesses in the wedding ceremony is an unusual ritual meant to lift the spirit and celebrate the purity of the young lovers but somehow misses in the ritual and the young lovers. Still from beginning to end this is a most remarkable production… imaginative beyond words, stimulating in its vision both physically and mentally, bringing out performances of such peaks of sustained energy in Patrick Stewart, Julian Bleach, Ken Bones. This is what theatre is all about when one is so carried away by the language, the images, the enlightenment, the characters and best of all the unfolding of a story worth telling. IMPORT! IMPORT! IMPORT! Unfortunately no export is possible but should be!

February 22-March 24/07

ANTONY and CLEOPATRA by WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

The hand of Gregory Doran is everywhere in this production so that you immediately know the story will be told with crystal clarity. He focuses on the whole political situation so that the love story is fitted into the historical context. No we do not have the great lovers zoomed in upon while the historical events are merely background. And so within this inversion we see the undoing of a great general in Anthony and the secondary character of temptress in Cleopatra. Patrick Stewart is probably one of the best Antonys as a result. We follow his triumph and believe in his position as a commander which could capture the heart of a queen such as Cleopatra…that is his sex appeal. The climate in Rome is to Anthony’s liking and he truly is involved in the leadership. John Hopkins’ Octavius Caesar is here interpreted so uniquely as the protégé of Antony and determined to do well by his responsibility. His grief at causing the death of Antony is extremely moving. This is a very refined and defined performance. We are aware of how ingrained the use of power is in both men and failure to uphold it is death. Their emotional ties of Antony to Cleopatra and Octavius to his sister Octavia cut deeply into both men. We pursue the political upsurge including Pompey’s role in the hierarchy with enormous suspense and root for our hero to win. And what about Cleopatra? Harriet Walter is a delicate actress with a gift for humour but she is no Cleopatra in the great allure of the woman. However, it doesn’t matter in this production since the core of the play is on Antony. The set is at minimum with the warm reds being Egypt in the lighting and the green/violet being Rome projected on to a backdrop of a map of middle-eastern Europe and the Mediterranean. The costumes are period but not overdone as to evoke a replica of the times but rather to keep a low profile on costumes and scenery while concentrating on the text and the story. Ken Bones Enobarbus’ famous description of Cleopatra is beautifully phrased and the dying scenes of Antony and Cleopatra sustain the poetry of the moment. The climax of Cleopatra in her golden royal robes and crown on her golden throne eulogising her death is kept as the highlight of the production in its image and incantation.

January 11-February 17/07

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING by WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

This is a production not only full of fun but bursting with the chemistry between Beatrice and Benedict which is delicious. She playing a spinster left on the shelf caught up in her attraction to a younger man but which she denies in self defence is marvellous. He not believing that such a clever woman whom he must match could ever go for him, works wonderfully. There's more farce than wit as played out with a leaf-covered Benedict falling backwards into the potted plant in his eavesdropping scene where Beatrice’s love for him is plotted while Beatrice in her hidden eavesdropping scene accidentally sets off the scooter's horn. Her bobbing head blending into the handlebars so as not to be discovered is a hoot. Add to that Beatrice’s use of the tannoy to call Benedict into dinner and you have an idea of the constant horseplay that brings on the gales of laughter. The stage is alive with such energy and vitality amongst real people. Being set in Cuba before Castro in 1953 allows more for rumbas, tangos, and even the cliché conga line in the music plus a palace slightly decaying and in need of repairs where a faded aristocracy could live and where army life has a sense of being regal. There are real people and not just games of word play in this Much Ado where the detail gives such a feeling of reality. The story needs no introducing…Beatrice lives with her aristocratic uncle whose name and honour is his life’s blood. The lordly army officers are invited to stay at the palace after their successful war engagement. Her adored cousin Hero is happily engaged to the army officer Count Claudio, a dear friend of Benedict. Beatrice and Benedict vie with each other until they accede to their love. Cousin Hero’s name is blackened by villainous Don John (made a Castro revolutionary in this version), brother to Don Pedro the head of the regiment. However, the villain is uncovered, Hero marries Claudio, Leonato’s name is cleared of shame, Beatrice and Benedict marry, and Don Pedro remains quite alone, no longer in the bachelor camaraderie of Claudio and Benedict. The season at the Novello will have Antony and Cleopatra and The Tempest to follow from its Stratford-upon-Avon transfer…a season well worth seeing. No export but import.

December 7/06-January 6/07

SPAMALOT by Monty Python

The uninhibited fun of Monty Python exudes over the whole evening with certain scenes that are particularly special for me. The knight in battle whose state of denial may seem grotesque yet is hilarious in having one arm cut off and denying it, and still going on denying when he is only a stump, or the French knight telling off the English knight by calling his mother by a series of insults such as a whore, or the serf when confronted by the problems in the forest gives off the old labour manifesto. The lady in the lake singing out her identity, King Arthur striding his horse-like pace, Galahad and Lancelot in their many variations, corny songs that are unmemorable yet endearing, Broadway musicals sent-up mercilessly, characters in constant exits and entrances dropping one-liners, all of this non sequitur nonsense piles up in continuous non structures and creates a continuous laugh-line. Cast to perfection and staged with such musical fluidity, jokes are timed, scenes are paced, as the professional hands of humour rule the day. Don’t miss it, especially because of the grim times in which we live. No export but import is at its peak.

September 30/06...

SOUND OF MUSIC

The long hunt for Maria on television was just another commercial exploitation since Connie Fisher was the only professional that could possibly win and now the question arises…Is she that good? She has a tomboy quality, a freshness, but still quite in need of training in her acting skills. Her arm gestures are constant so that control of her body is something for her to concentrate upon. Her voice is expressive and powerful. She has a vivaciousness that is sustainable…and carries her weight in the show. And so do the children especially Molly May Keston as the youngest of the Trapp children. There is such a sense of relaxation and enjoyment for her on stage that being five is no problem. Alexander Hanson came in on a week’s notice and managed a very confident performance. The fact that there is no chemistry between himself and Fisher is a small hindrance that might right itself in time. The conventional direction with no sense of originality is the weakest point. But the show is compensated by the voice and presence of Leslie Garrett as the abbess. The opening of the nuns’ chorus in Church is still very moving and one of the show’s highlights. However, the set being also conventional lends no pleasure so that the music as always is the triumph of the production. Add the children and Marie and you have the consummate joy, fun and life on the stage. The story of Captain Trapp who hires a nun as a governess for his eight children, whom he does not allow to sing since his wife’s death, is well known. Maria and the Captain gradually fall in love prompted by the children whom Marie teaches to sing. How ironic that the singing becomes their escape route from Austria. This musical is one of those miracles that never withers with time and seems to capture the best of singing children that make the heart skip a beat. As for Marie…there always seems to be someone to fill her shoes. Don’t miss it!! No export but import.

November 3/0...

TRACES by LES 7 DOIGHTS de la MAIN

This company following the dramatic motivations of Cirque de Soleil is only a company of five instead of the thirty as in the Cirque du Soleil and though there is no overall story, still these five bring drama to the acrobatics in the motivation of the movements. For example, they argue as to who is to go on the see-saw and then one is pushed as he flies high speed through the air at the shove and lands on his feet on the mattress-trampoline. Heloise sits in an arm chair reading a book when it topples over into so many diverse movements you could not believe were possible. She is a trained ballerina so that her acrobatics have a style of beauty that is uncanny. Their finale is through the first level of a hoop, then the second, zooming through the third which stands high above human height, then through the fourth, and finally incredibly diving through the fifth level. They always talk and fool around, a form of modern casual clowning, whether on the piano or the ropes or sliding up and down on the Chinese poles, but always defying gravity in their communication. Their body language constantly expressing fear, doubt, challenge, affection, enthralled my deaf son and his wife who look to theatre for emotional satisfaction or some kind of enlightenment that the deaf find in the visuals. The fantastic energy was electrifying for them because this kind of power hits the deaf with an enormous satisfaction. The leaps into space against the laws of gravity drew gulps of disbelief at the visual excitement. The communication between the performers was immediately picked up by them and appreciated including all the subtleties hearing people would not notice. The actual loss of hearing in the words or music made no difference to their comprehension of the actions and the joy at viewing the vital skills of each member. They also identified immediately the differences in personalities, constantly surprised how each one exceeded their expectations. The Chinese poles, the German wheel (a dual hoop), the single wheel, the Russian swing, the tumbling, the hand balancing, the trampoline leaping, the juggling, and the skating/dancing on the teerboard, all performed to a motivated act with the proficiency of experts…looking so at ease, so casual after such dynamic feats. The actual performances of these fabulous acrobatic skills integrated into a group related company personalised the show to the entire audience who would not stopping applauding or cheering at the end of Traces. The dancing acrobats feel the end of the world will not leave a trace of them behind. Well, they’re wrong…..that audience cheered them into eternity. Not to be missed by children or adults, deaf or hearing people. Import and important export for Broadway.

February 3 – March 13/09

GUYS AND DOLLS

Before there is any assessment of this production, which by the way has received four stars from most English critics with split reactions for Ewan McGregor, let me give the cast of Richard Eyre’s production which lingers on with a nostalgia that seems eternal. Yes, yes it was a beautifully detailed production as only Richard Eyre can do with his special gift of recreating the place in all its physical and atmospheric essence so that the stage breathed Broadway including all its neon signs. He conducted his cast like fine instruments in exquisitely toned performances with choreography that was out of this world. Ian Charleson as Sky, Julie Covington as Sarah, Julia McKenzie as Adelaide, Bob Hoskins as Nathan Detroit, David Healy as Nicely Nicely, choreography David Toguri, décor John Gunther were the team that created magic. The actors could sing superbly and singers could act superbly, except for Julie Covington. The surprise was the sweet voice of Ian Charleson. The interpretation was that of a play with songs that continued the dialogue and always in the character of the character. Who could forget McKenzie’s farcical Adelaide in Take Back Your Mink or Healy gospelling Sit Down You’re Rocking the Boat where the audience would not let up until it was repeated.Having projected that historic production the pronouncement on this one is simply you cannot miss no matter who directs or choreographs or stars or performs. It is probably the greatest musical of the 20th century with songs that cannot be matched. Whoever heard of a Bach–like fugue set to a horseracing sheet, or a psychological hymn to a person can develop a cold in Adelaide’s Lament? Having Ewan McGregor in this production will keep the show sold out no matter his delivery or his reviews. My own reactions are simple…he can’t sing + no sense of projecting his space on stage resulting in little stage presence=not much impact as Sky but all eyes on Ewan. The audience finds him charismatic, is it Star Wars in their eyes? The choreography of Ashford steals the show with a fabulous energy and invention particularly in the scenes in Cuba where the tango and rumba make quite a numba and turning the benches of the misson hall into a boat sets sail the biggest hit of them all in Sit Down You’re Rocking the Boat.He is a true Broadway choreographer with that kind of dynamics so why must he push it so hard in his vulgarity for the women? It was the same drive in On the Way to the Forum at NT. The two Americans in the show are the best in the cast Jane Krakowski as Adelaide and Cory English as Benny Southstreet. They capture the rhythm of the language and the balance between real characterisation and mocking it. Krakowski is weepy and sweet or sexy and vivacious… hilarious in her phony heartbreak of Take Back Your Mink or poignant in Adelaide’s Lament. She sings, dances, and acts like a like a dream with a sense of fun that’s contagious. English gives us a credible Runyonesque character the others fail to do. All the characters, symbolising the characters of Broadway, are the charm of the whole piece through whom the story is told rather than through plot. Sarah is saving souls at the mission house and Guy is a heavy gambler for the sake of adventure. He bets and wins taking the missionary to Havanah where she drinks too much and brawls with the leading Flamenco dancer. But Sky falls in love because underneath he is really decent, brought up on the bible, so no wonder they marry. Nathan Detroit is the guy who gets his percentage from the gamblers by keeping the floating crap game going with no time to marry Adelaide , a showgirl in the Hot Box Club whom he loves. By Nathan Detroit surreptitiously moving the crap game to the mission house and then into the sewer, he keeps both story and crap game going to its happy ending in his marriage. It’s labelled a fairytale but Michael Grandage plays it for real and has kept his eye on the commercial potential with stars like McGregor, choreographer like Ashford, American players like Krakowski and English, and keeping Nathan Detroit a goofy loser rather than a slick gambler too indifferent to love. The surprise is Douglas Hodge who sings sweetly, moves agilely, sweats heavily, and plays excessively. Only the heavy dark set with a Manhattan skyline in lights and no sense of Broadway is disappointing. Grandage usually takes the flawed musical and brings it into focus by his updating style. But here is the greatest of musicals, nostalgically remembered for Richard Eyre’s artistry that Grandage has concentrated on for its commercial success. Grandage’s tables are turned for a don’t-miss show that will run for years. No import/export necessary.

Opened May 19/06 - April 14/07

LA CAGE AUX FOLLES by JERRY HERMAN and HARVEY FIERSTEIN

This comic musical in which two middle-aged gay lovers who run a transvestite nightclub in St Tropez find married life with a grown-up son a little complicated. It was first produced last January at the Menier Chocolate Factory with Philip Quast and Douglas Hodge very successfully and joyously reviewed in LTR. This is the same production reset and recast as it sparkles into the West End, dazzlingly directed and choreographed. This sentimental, extravagantly costumed and designed show includes all you want for sheer entertainment. Its humour is good natured about gays, farcical about married life and middle-class morality, entertaining with transvestite and musical talents in its fantastic chorus of athletic drag queens of mixed gender. Douglas Hodge’s Albin is still dressing flamboyantly as his Zaza morphs into a song-bird drag-act. How he switches from a nasal whining matriarch in rubber gloves and headscarf into his fantasy of Zaza! Hodge luxuriates as a shimmering drag-queen imitating Piaf or Dietrich. Showing off his transformations, weeping over Georges’ boy as his own, worrying over a wedding, and behaving like any good wife. Denis Lawson’s night-club owner Georges is a tender and loving partner, a devoted father to Jean-Michel, to whom Albin is surrogate mother. He has a sweet voice. When confronted with Jean-Michel’s need for Albin to temporarily disappear in order to prevent any embarrassment to the right-wing parents of his fiancée, Georges is painfully disturbed. And Albin’s response to the betrayal is a defiant rendering of the theme song I Am What I Am. But after Jean’s real mother passes on any involvement, Albin is persuaded to play the part of the mother. Can he pass for a real woman? He does play his part as a proper lady with hilarious repercussions. The intended father-in-law is brought to his knees as it all ends happily ever-after along with an unmasked Albin. Terry Johnson’s production fits into the Playhouse like a glove and happily belongs in the West End. The opening number of huge, partially-undressed chorus girls, who are men, dance and sing the theme song: We are what we are and what we are is all illusion. What a fantastic opening it is and what a great chorus line showing the backstage tattiness compared to the glamorous onstage extravaganzas. Who can forget that giant birdcage dance filled with the exotic plumage of a quiveringly erotic chorus or their amazing cancan ending in unbelievable splits. Then add to all of this the side-splitting farce of Jason Pennycooke’s rebellious, stage-struck maid. What a change from the National’s dark dance theatre To Be Straight with You. The other side of life can be pure joy. Don’t miss it. Import no export.

October 20/08 – January 10/09

RIGOLETTO by GIUSEPPE VERDI

The good aspects of Rigoletto are the discovery of tenor FRANCESCO MELI as the Duke of Mantua and Ekaterina Siurina’s Gilda who are fabulous. They are worth the whole production as is Kurt Rydl’s Sparafucile, the professional killer and Sara Fulgoni as his daughter Maddalena. The conductor Daniel Oren should be given special notice for his sensitivity to the music and the singers, never outblasting them to show off his skills. It’s the production that fails badly. Relighting the opera and making it visible is necessary; murky shadows can bring out the threatening mood while giving enough light to follow the story. Separate areas and locations must be distinguished through lighting as well. The set does not help…a single unit with one grey side the palace and the other Rigoletto’s house or the inn. It offers no clarity of the palace with a staircase looking like the seaside. It’s a cheap touring design not worthy of Covent Garden. Some enhancement is possible with red velvet trimmings on the throne, walls, and staircase. Why not use a baroque staircase from a Mozart opera and assist the singers in making an entrance? As to the costumes…. all this black, white and grey on an under-lit stage is a ruination. The duke was impeded at the start because of his excessive costume which is awkward enough and only when trim is he regal. As to the Rigoletto….he is so uneven. At times Paolo Gavanelli is superb and then on sustaining notes he goes flat. He seems hampered by the canes he uses as a cripple. Rigoletto can be hunched and walk distortedly without the added burden of canes which distracts from the singing. Gavanelli is a very good actor and an obviously skilled opera singer whose voice is no longer as steady. The direction is not up to the usual standard of McVicar. For example the duke's singing from the distance which is one of the high dramatic moments in the opera is much too soft, hardly audible and loses the dramatic climax! It is a disappointing production.....but it will go with flying colours on the singing, conducting, and music. Summary of story: Jester Rigoletto is despised by the court for his black humour and sharp tongue. He keeps his place in court by being so. The Duke of Mantua, the ruling power, is a debauched roué who seduces every woman he desires, experienced married ladies or virginal young girls. As a result Rigoletto keeps his daughter Gilda a secret. The Count Monterone, whose daughter has been dishonoured by the duke, puts a curse on the sardonic-tongued Rigoletto. Meanwhile, in order to avenge themselves, the noblemen, having discovered Gilda living with Rigoletto, kidnap her with the help of a blindfolded Rigoletto and carry, they think, Rigoletto’s mistress, to the palace. However, previously the duke, disguised as a student, has secretly wended his way into Rigoletto’s house and wooed Gilda with love. She falls for the duke and makes love to him at the palace. Rigoletto finds her and plans their escape. He is sure she is dressed as a boy and has left Mantua. It is then that he hires Sparafucile to kill the duke who is lured to the inn by Sparafucile’s daughter Maddalena. She too falls for the duke and saves his life by asking her father to kill the first guest who appears at the inn instead. Gilda has not left but overhears the plot. She knocks on the door and is killed. Sparafucile puts her body in a sack which Rigoletto triumphantly carries away until he hears the duke’s voice singing. He opens the bag to find Gilda who dies in his arms. Monterone’s curse on Rigoletto to mourn for his daughter has come true. No import or export.

February 10-March 1/09

TURANDOT by GIACOMO PUCCINI

The refurbished sets of fabulous newness, the colourful set pieces of horses, carriages and emperor’s golden throne descending from the flies, the permanent set of Chinese balconies for the chorus playing the crowd scenes, the reconstructed choreography using the chorus of dancers like flowers enveloping the singer at the end of each act or tumbling in acrobatic dance always with clean clear discretion integrated into the singer’s movement with fluidity, is an unbelievable dream come true at Covent Garden’s Royal Opera House. The stunning costumes add to the eye’s delight but then add the singers with glorious voices who can act such as Jose Cura as Calaf, Svetla Vassileva as Liu the slave girl, Paata Burchuladze’s ex-king Timur, Giorgio Caoduro’s Ping, Ji-Min Park’s Pang, Alasdair Elliott’s Pong, Robert Tear as Emperor and Irene Theorin as Turnadot, and you have a recipe for the best Christmas show in London in a fairytale that Puccini has invested with fantastic music directed with such imagination and revived completely intact! Import, import, import!

December 22, 27, 29, January 2, 5, 8, 12, 14, 17, 20, 23/09

TALES OF HOFFMAN (LES CONTES D’HOFFMANN) by JACQUES OFFENBACH

The joy of this production was Pappano conducting the orchestra while keeping a beautiful balance between the singers and orchestra. It had the delightful and rarely gifted tenor Rolando Villazon as Hoffmann acting and singing with a confident and relaxed bravado, Vassiliki Karayanni’s Olympia in doll-like movement that was full of fun matching her exquisite voice, Christine Rice’s Giulietta the courtesan singing with full throated sexiness and fine character singers in Lynton Black’s Luther the tavern keeper and Robert Leggate as the weird inventor Spalanzani. The dark lighting, the crowded and fussy sets in dull colours, the cluttered staging, the cliché choreography were disappointing and redeemed only by Maria Bjornson’s superb costumes. But oh what a special musical experience to hear the singers with Pappano!

Nov 13 - Dec 13/08

THE TEMPEST

This new opera has been brought back by popular demand. It is marvellouslly cast with an Ariel more mysterious and strange than in any drama and a design of abstract magic of the island contrasted by the wreckage on sand. It moves scenically with spectacular imagery. The fantasy characters of Caliban and Ariel are played in an unearthly manner and are severely controlled by a vengeful Prospero. The Naples king, court, and crew are the reality being mostly the chorus dressed in cocktail dresses and black tie and tails. Shakespeare’s plotting and themes, the mysterious island with its muted sounds, the collection of characters, are kept to in general with the familiar and the original mixing well. It applies mostly to the music and to only some of the libretto where Shakespeare is sorely missed. It’s the eerie and airy music and imagery that is breathtaking. The stratospheric sounds in Ariel’s arias, the choral passages are unique. The music is haunting as it reflects the growing love and forgiveness leading to redemption. There is the sharpness of the storm, the anger of Prospero, the revenge of Caliban, the cold fury of Ariel seeking freedom that plays against the love. The love duets for Miranda and Ferdinand, the nostalgic aria for Bostridge’s Caliban, Philip Langridge’s anguished King of Naples and Donald Kaasch’s malicious Antonio, in addition to the choral sections, ring out in fullness, originality, and emotional heights. The surreal set with glowing cubes and sleepy alligators keep the fluid set in constant colour. With Ades conducting the musical sounds in the air of the island were played with real magic and the remake of the Tempest into a contemporary opera is the hope of a reformation in opera. What an innovation! Import and export are in demand.

March 12 - 26/07

CAROUSEL music RICHARD RODGERS lyrics OSCAR HAMMERSTEIN II

It may be an old fashioned musical staged in an old fashioned way, but the songs are enchanting which the orchestra plays superbly and the cast sing beautifully. The fantasy element may be slightly sentimental but the heartbreaking story of young love is cynical. It’s a bittersweet fantasy about broken lives set in the New England of the 1870s. The music is the strength of this piece and when you have singers of such quality in every part down to every chorus member, it makes for a captivating evening. Despite the poverty of the mill-girl Julie, she is open to life and love and falls for the funfair barker Billy Bigelow, the stranger from Coney Island. Unlike the shy Julie, the working girls and boys are all excitedly participant in the community life… the clam bake is the big event. Julie and Bill marry but Billy loses his job at the funfair because he no longer continues the sexual relationship with the owner Mrs Mullin. Tension grows as Billy tries to find his way. He involves himself with Jitter in a robbery that goes wrong and kills himself rather than go to goal. He missed his chances in life bringing not only love to Julie but the pain of parting. Carrie, Julie’s best friend, and her fisherman beau, Mr Snow, may end up happily married with eight children, a house by the sea with a garden and lots of fish to eat, but it’s Julie who experiences a rich life in being deeply in love. It is Billy’s atonement when he is allowed to leave heaven and return to earth to prevent his daughter from following in his footsteps. The design of William Dudley is the next best thing in the show. The opening with the three dimensional fairground carousel mixed with rear projections, his projections of skies at dawn or sunset, the jetty where the fishing boats dock, Billy’s rise to heaven, are breathtaking. The rendering of the songs, Adam Cooper’s lively choreography of exceptional balletic dances, director Lindsay Posner’s deliberate stress on the dramatic scenes and his timely pacing, the natural quality of Alexandra Silber’s Julie in her glorious singing, her reticence in contrast to the extroverted young couples, her enduring the violence of Jerimiah James’ Billy whose bullying portrait in their short-lived marriage and his suicide after the failed robbery is so skilfully acted with a poignantly sung ‘I let my golden chances pass me by’, the charismatic villainy of Graham Macduff’s Jigger who leads Billy astray, the yoho ho of over-the-top Yorkshire gesturing and acting of Lesley Garrett’s Nettie being compensated by her sensitive delivery of ‘You’ll never walk alone’, and Billy’s scene to heaven, are all divine aspects of the charm of this production. It’s a perfect Christmas show. Import but no export.

November 24/08...

NEVER FORGET from songs of TAKE THAT

This has been panned by most critics but quite frankly it’s no more cliché than the other teenage musicals. The book has been criticised for little plot yet it’s the same old plot which seemed sufficient enough in the other musicals. Young Ash is in love with Chloe and struggling to make his name with his band plus earn enough money to pay for his mum’s pub. They audition and are taken on by pop manager Ron.  When they win further attention, Annie comes in to take over as agent. But she only has eyes for Ash and moves in on the romance as well as the career. The remaining band competes in the same contest with Ash and win. The rational result is making–up with Ash, all joining together, getting rid of Annie. and continuing as of old with a repentant Ron who had tried to outmanoeuvre them with the money. Well, mum sells the pub, the band takes off, and weddings bells take place on-stage for Ash and Chloe. The music is more rock than roll with a steady beat, there’s vibrant sexy dancing, and songs the band sing, play, and dance as the audience joins in on every occasion going wild with participation. The sets work, the singing of Dean Chisnall and Sophia Ragavelas as the lovers is great, a charming band with the comic giant Craige Els as Jake Turner, a timid Tim Driesen as Adrian Banks, an extroverted dancer Eaton James as Dirty Harry, and a charismatic Stephane Anelli as the Mexican Jose. It’s directed fast and furiously with one song followed by another for an unsophisticated audience, as it may be, but it’s the songs, the beating rhythm, the energy of the vital dancers, that woo them. Not my cup of tea but certainly enjoyable for the adolescents. Import no export.

May 7-October 25/08

LEGAL FICTIONS: The Dock Brief and Edwin by JOHN MORTIMER

The first play, the Dock Brief, centres on a poor working-class prisoner who loves nature to such a degree that he willingly piles chairs upon a table to reach his cell window. He has unfortunately murdered his wife, but because of his senile solicitor’s alluring fantasy, is drawn into the drama of a courtroom forgetting the possibility of the death sentence. Edwin is a longwinded sketch made into a one-acter about an old solicitor gabbing with his old friend Tom while tea is served by his devoted wife Margaret. A storm erupts over who is the father of Edwin the son, Sir Fennimore or Tom. Both men are left in the dark because Margaret had an affair with the gardener as well.  Capably acted and directed in a well planned set, the plays are not adequate enough for the West End much less the Savoy. They began originally as radio plays and so they remain. This production started at the Theatre Royal in Bath where Edward Fox would be their delight but please pack these old pieces into moth ball boxes. No import or export.

February 21-April 26/08

FIDDLER ON THE ROOF

What enthusiastic response to this musical coming down from the Crucible Sheffield and what kudos to Henry Goodman whom they are clamouring to stardom. The fact that this musical has always been a huge favourite with audiences helps to make a success of any cast. But since Topol put a permanent mark on the part of Tevya, the Jewish milkman in his shietl of Anatevka, it is difficult for anyone to measure up to that memory. Goodman is a good actor with a pleasant voice that is not nearly as rich as Topol’s bass, but he remains a better actor, that is when the director sits on him to keep his manic, over-the-top playing down to normal temperature. He carries Tevya’s innocence yet authority, the tuneful humour yet the melancholy, the acceptance of fate yet his fingering of God, his vulnerability yet his courage, his passivity yet his outrage. The relevance of the story is another aspect in addition to the music, songs and characters that keep this musical alive. The destruction of the Ukranian village by the Russian Cossacks in their progom is an old story we are finding today in the current ethnic cleansing. Still this is the ending of our story with its beginning centred on Tevya, his wife and three daughters he has to marry off. It shows the passing of the old traditions as Tevya gives in to his headstrong girls who each marry for love and not by the arrangement of the matchmaker. The husbands they choose are outside of Tevya’s preference…a revolutionary student, a gentile Russian and a poor tailor. His relationship to his feisty wife Golde, from whom he seeks approval and affection as when he asks her in song, ‘Do You Love Me’ like his daughters love their men, is a poignant moment. The tradition of men dancing with men and women dancing with women is altered despite the wedding where we see tradition so marvellously captured. The fabulous bottle dance, the student rabbis’ dance, the gazatska, performed at the wedding with bottles on their heads, remains a life-lifting joy. There are songs that linger on such as If I Were A Richman, Tradition, Matchmaker, and the moving Sunrise Sunset. The tragic ending sees not only the destruction of the village but the families broken up with the children settling in different cities and Tevya leaving with his wife and young daughters to America putting oceans between them all. The set is the only discrepancy since its transition from the Crucible with the backdrop of the Chagall-like floating houses replaced by huge wooden beams that surround a so called diminutive cottage that negates the claustrophobic atmosphere. Beverly Klein as Golde, Frances Thorburn as daughter Tzeitel, Alexandra Silberas daughter Hodel, Natasha Broomfield as daughter Chava, Tomm Coles as Mordcha the tailor, Simon Delaney as Motel the student rebel teacher, Damian as Perchik a Russian villager, Vincent Pirillo as the rabbi, and Juliet Alderdice as the Angel are an ebullient team who alight the production with their talent. Import no export necessary.

May 19/07 - Sept 29/07

PORGY AND BESS by George and Ira Gershwin

This version has been edited by Trevor Nunn in order to make it more accessible, so he says, and thus it changes from being an opera to a musical. I am not sure where opera ends and a musical begins. The only quality of a musical it has is that the singers are not operatic but with thin-textured voices, dimmed tones and resonance, and lessened range. The recitative is gone and dialogue substituted… dialogue very close to the recitative. The acting may be of musical standard but opera singers today are dramatically well equipped. In editing the libretto, there are transitions that are rushed in time causing incredibility such as Bess’s sudden change of heart in leaving Porgy. But a masterpiece is a masterpiece and it being the first jazz opera it is still an innovation with music that still soars to the skies. Its actual content is more of a period folk piece since such places like Catfish Row do not exist, not even in the slum ghettos of the South nor does it matter? The 20 piece band rather the usual 50 or 60 in an orchestra diminishes the sound. However, the triumph is in that glorious chorus whose rich voices bring the house down. Summertime, I Got Plenty of Nuttin, Bess You Is My Woman Now, It Aint Necessarily So, are very powerful no matter who sings them. The ebullient character of the roguish Sportin Life is danced well but O-T Fagbenle does not catch that American timing and humour and is far more venomous than a creature of snake temptation. Clarke Peters has a dignified air of seriousness, Nicola Hughes transform Bess in a smooth and warm transition dancing and singing in a gracious body that fills the stage. Cornell S John is a ferocious Crown with a full bodied voice to match his physique. Melanie Marshall is a red hot mama with a vocal capacity to rule the roost. Trevor Nunn directs this epic size work with his old panache and the shanty town of Catfish Row is well plotted on a stage far too small for this epic musical. The next step in modern opera has been taken by Caroline or Change, an amazing work already reviewed. No import needed nor export.

October 25/06...

DADDY COOL

Another version of Romeo and Juliet set in London and not an original West Side Story but the music of Boney M integrated into a story that makes more sense than Mama Mia! Evil Ma Baker has raised her son Benny to lead the gang with violence but her daughter Rose falls for the Montague like Sunny and ther ein lays the Romeo and Juliet. Sunny’s gang battles Benny’s but in the end peace and love prevail. Even the two rival mothers manage a truce. The sets are paper thin and look as if the flats were painted by children; the costumes and props are puny and yet that is its very charm. There is sincerity in its naivety with an energy that is fresh. It is a perfect piece for the adolescents who sing and dance in the aisles. Wayne Wint as Sunny has a pleasing personality singing and dancing extremely well while Camilla Beeput as Rose is an appealing rose with a sweet voice. Davie Fairbanks is the rapacious Benny with a fierce vitality, but it is Michelle Collins who dominates the stage and carries the weight of the show. Director Andy Goldberg keeps a rapid pace evolving. Import no export.

September 21/06 - February 17/07

ON THE WATERFRONT (1954) by BUDD SCHULBERG

Taking a fantastic film of legendary fame (1954) that has made cinematic history and translating it into a stage play is a mammoth job which failed when originally produced on Broadway and is a work which glistens with the best of Berkoff in this production. Appling the structure of Greek tragedy Berkoff uses the chorus to be both mafia and dockers and then as members of the community. This ensemble move in slow motion and not only characterise corrupt dockers but a group of cooing pigeons on a roof with twitching hands and nodding heads. They are men of the most characterful faces reflecting a hard life of survival. Against this stylized chorus which switches character with a change of hat is a stark set with chairs, a silhouetted back wall of the statue of liberty with the longshoreman’s hook for a hand, extraordinary musical scoring from jazz to rock to tumultuous percussion, and the most beautifully punctuated lighting to match mood and movement. The dialogue and dramatic scenes glide in and out…flowing like wine as the tragedy and love story build. Strange as it seems that two old American classics about the dockers structured on Greek tragedy should appear at the same time. Miller’s A View From The Bridge weaves into the longshoremen’s story the personal betrayal of a man not able to understand the change in life styles from the younger generation and thus loses his identity as he also cannot cope with his fiery passions for his young niece. In On The Waterfront the tragedy pertains directly with the corruption and tyranny of the gangsters ruling the longshoremen’s union and how a younger generation of man, Terry, slightly backward, is cajoled into the betrayal of his co-worker Joey. How Charlie betrayed his young brother Terry, (‘I could have been a contender, I could have had class,’) by forcing him to forfeit the winning of a fight that finished his career. And all this because of the dictates of Johnny Friendly, the boss of the union, played brilliantly with enormous menace by Steven Berkoff. Terry, the ex-boxer turned docker finally finds the strength to be ruled by his sense of morality when he realises how he was used to kill his friend Joey and by Johnny’s murder of his brother Charlie when he tried to save Terry from Johnny’s death knell. Edie, the girl he loves and Joey’s sister, plus Father Barry, whose famous speech of putting Christ on the streets of Brooklyn and his church being the docks, turn the final key for Terry to confess all the crimes to the governmental investigation committee. The performance of Simon Merrells may not have the Marlin Brando charisma but he captures so poignantly the inarticulate backwardness of the character contrasted to the masculine forcefulness, his tender feelings compared to the physical expression of boxing. Steven Berkoff is the master of menace, Antony Byrne’s Charlie is spot on, Coral Reed’s Edie is compelling, and Vincenzo Nicoli as Father Barry carries the passion and outcry that made this film famous. One should not compare but it is impossible not to….On The Waterfront universalises the tale in pure theatrical drama using style, music, and movement to text which lifts it into timelessness while A View from the Bridge is a period classic. Don’t miss On the Waterfront, it’s another captivating experience. Import and export for Broadway.

January 28 -April 25/09

TREASURE ISLAND by ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

“The script isn’t very seaworthy, but the actors are trying their best,” said one theatregoer. This sentiment pretty much sums up Ken Ludwig’s adaptation of Treasure Island. Protagonist Jim Hawkins (Michael Legge) acts as narrator to his memories of the fabled treasure hunt. He guides the audience from the procurement of the treasure map to the discovery of the treasure in question. Along the way he meets Long John Silver (Keith Allen), fights off pirates, faces treachery, uncovers the circumstances of his father’s death, and is jettisoned into manhood. The story is a relatively simple adventure yarn that appeals to the imaginative child within the child or adult. Yet watching this show produced several questions. Should this production be taken seriously? Is this show geared towards children or the general public? Is the audience meant to believe that Long John Silver’s mechanical parrot is real or a fake? Why do the two female pirates look as if they are on their way to a fancy dress ball when their male colleagues all resemble dirty scallywags? And why are there even women aboard the ship in the first place? The production has aspirations of being a feast for the senses, but one leaves feeling unsatisfied. The opening scene features a turbulent ocean projected onto the back wall, but this visual gimmick of celluloid background scenes rapidly becomes distracting. Moreover, many of the projected images are random and indecipherable. Any drama is lost when time is spent questioning a skeleton from a bowl of cereal. Then there is the onstage band wearing alternate sailor and pirate hats who continuously provides background music, even when unnecessary; there is no need for ukulele accompaniment to a mass sword fight. The saving grace is the acting done by the two leads, both of whom are badly served by the weak script. Allen is charismatic notwithstanding the corniness of his character. And despite his narration being rather obtrusive, Legge is nevertheless winning in his portrayal of a lad full of youthful spirits and naïveté. The other cast members occasionally shine with rare instances of genuine humour, but mostly overact with camp delivery. The play is not rubbish, but it certainly is silly and confusing. Sean Holmes couldn’t decide whether to take the production seriously or stage a farce. The children may be wholly entertained, but the parents may regret waiting until the interval for that first drink. At least the numerous sea shanties are fun. Import, no export.

Nov 7/08 – Feb 28/09

MARGUERITE

It is amazing how the theme, of a courtesan having risen to fame and fortune who falls in love and is then driven to her downfall and death, has been identified with Dumas’ La Dame aux Caméllias. Dumas as well as all the others used the theme which we might as well call the ‘Marguerite’ theme. So this new musical Marguerite, Miss Saigon, (same authors), Pam Gem’s play, Madame Butterfly, Verdi’s La Traviata, the ballets, Garbo’s film and films, etc are all constantly being done on that theme, each set under different political circumstances as well as different times. But all the other ‘Marguerite’ thematic pieces always have the heroine so in love that she willingly sacrifices her love for her lover’s own safety and security. Not so here in Michel Legrand’s Marguerite. Marguerite in this version is an opportunistic collaborator with the Nazis in occupied Paris as she lives a high life with a Nazi general named Otto while all her hangers-on (the chorus) enjoy the privileged gifts she brings from the black market. When Paris is newly liberated they all turn on her, kick her death, and claim their allegiance to France, denying their participation with the Germans. So Marguerite, the famous chanteuse of Paris, on her 40th birthday, falls in love with Armand, the pianist of the band, while celebrating with her hanger-on friends. The love develops into a secret affair in the afternoons. Even so, it is dangerous for both of them. Armand selfishly, recklessly continues in the affair till they are discovered and his drummer of the band, Pierrot, is tortured for the truth followed by his sister Annette, in love with Lucien, a Jew, who is part of their band. Armand has put everyone in danger. But when he shoots and kills Otto, Marguerite’s protector to whom she swears faithfulness by giving up Armand, he kills the very person who protected them both. Armand escapes with his band into the resistant movement to which his sister and her lover Lucien belonged. However, Marguerite is left to face the music and is kicked to death for collaborating. Armand returns to find her dying and carries a dead Marguerite to her grave. What is basically flawed is the book. It is narrative without a dynamic dramatisation. Events are developed in the love affair and only when we see Armand and Marguerite in bed juxtaposed with the secretly underground departure of Lucien and a brutally beaten Annette is there any image of the political life. Or when a jaded Gay Soper sings a depraved song of Paris’s survival at a louche New Year’s Eve party do we get musically as well as dramatically any of the detail of life in Paris at that time. There are mostly love ballads like China Doll which are very melodious but they dominate the score which lacks the sweeping colouring necessary in a serious musical or opera. Contrasting the ballads allowing some change of pace are: Day by Day sung by the chorus of  hedonistic friends of Marguerite representing Paris which is continually reprived to give us the ongoing events plus The World Begins Today where again it’s the chorus of Marguerite’s fair-weather entourage who sing,’ Out with the Reds, Out with the Jews.’ The ending is rushed in letting us know Paris is liberated through one line on a radio broadcast which I missed. It is no way to reveal the most significant climax of the musical. Yes, the chorus are given the job of explaining Paris’s liberation by giving us their change of heart and denying any collaboration. Nonetheless, I happen to have related it only to Otto’s death. You have to take the moment for the liberation of Paris and not slide it into a fast ending. The development of political events would have given more scope to the music’s variety. In addition to the structure of the book, it’s the asking of an audience to feel sympathetic to the leading characters Marguerite and Armand when they’ve each collaborated in their own way and jeopardised other people’s lives. However, what is worth the price of admission is the exquisite singing and range of acting of Ruthie Henshall whose artistry in colouring and texture of voice is one of the finest the musical theatre has produced in the UK. She brings charismatic warmth to an empty role. So is it with the birth of a new great star in Julian Ovenden who plays jazz on the piano fantastically, sings with full-throated passion and richness of tone, while acting on a level which is hugely impressive. These two great artists in their unsympathetic roles redeem an adult musical on a serious theme. Import no export.

May 7 – November 2008

THE SEA by EDWARD BOND

This is one of Bond’s lesser plays, though given more prestigious productions than Saved with the National Theatre starring Judi Dench and at the Royal Court in 1973 starring Coral Browne. It opens with a tempest storm at sea in this production—startling in its impact as we see one young man drown and one managing to come to shore. In the distance a man is shouting but makes no attempt to save the drowning figure. On the beach, the young survivor begs the help of a drunken old beachcomber to no avail. It is Willy trying to find Colin’s body with the help of old Evans. It then changes to the village affected so profoundly by the sea and a draper in his less than well-stocked shop who is desperately trying to sell his fabric to a very dominant elderly lady, Mrs. Rafi, escorted by her neighbour Jessica Tilehouse. She orders and then disorders the draper, Hatch, who is already slightly bonkers as we discover, and who heads the Coast Guard. He was the figure in the distance with his torch, yelling at the drowning young man to go back to Mars. He was not about to rescue out of the sea the two men from outer space. His climactic scene cutting rolls of fabric Mrs. Rafi ordered and then disregarded is one of the high points of comedy partially fallen by the wayside here because of David Haig’s over-the-top moment of madness. He is the counterpoint as he frantically cuts a yard of material at a time flinging the cut cloth onto the floor wherever it might land….faster and faster....slash after slash...furiouser and furiouser…bolt after bolt. The play itself is badly structured, fragmented from scene to scene which Jonathan Kent patches together by using that startling opening of the turbulent sea video-ed onto a screen with the violent sound of the waves smashing against the rocks. Because of the amount of fragmentation the sea is constantly used and thus diminishes its aura which is meant as a vital part of the village. We are painted a landscape of a coastal village, Forebeach, on the East Coast of England (Anglia) in 1907 and its various characters. As it opens with a tempest at sea, the drowning of Colin, the attempt of Willy to save him with the help of drunken Evans, the old man who lives in a shack on the shore away from the villagers, the play also ends with them. The town, and Mrs. Rafi especially, want Willy to remain and take Colins’ place. He was the golden-haired boy—the great potential mayor of Forebeach, engaged to marry Mrs Rafi’s niece Rose. Someone has to take Colin’s place to keep the village going. But as Willy says goodbye to Evans he asks should he stay and have a glowing future. Evans’ answer is for him to “catch the 11:45 and change the world.” Willy leaves but not alone…Rose goes with him. In between opening and closing are scenes of the various villagers in the draper’s shop, Mrs. Rafi’s home while rehearsing her production of Orpheus and Eurydice for the Coastguard fund, and especially on the beach where Hatch stabs violently the dead body of Colin swept ashore thinking it was Willy followed by the sermon given by the vicar with the piano carried in for the songs of prayer as the ashes of Colin are to be thrown into the sea. Jessica sings loudly on her own throwing the songs and pianist out of kilter to the irritation of Mrs. Rafi. A fight ensues and the ashes fall upon the villagers in the process—Colin is now embedded upon them. Again it’s the great comedy scene climaxing Act II which is hilarious. The theme is about change—change in the world because of pollution, power struggles, bombs, poisoning of the earth itself where the threat is so great the villagers will disappear. The sea and nature itself will overwhelm man who instead of doing something only reacts in fear. There is a moment when Mrs. Rafi, a fearless woman, leader of the town, drops her mask of dominance to reveal a woman of great loneliness.Jonathan Kent has directed a hit show for the West End Haymarket. The two bickering old ladies played so splendidly by Eileen Atkins and Marcia Warren will fill the theatre with matinee ladies loving their comedy and the credible characters they portray plus the madness of David Haig. The dynamic set in which the sea dominates the stage by the brilliant Paul Brown and the usual dramatic epics Jonathan Kent creates—always finely polished and slick—should keep the Haymarket glimmering. Import no export.

January 23-April 19/08

THE COUNTRY WIFE by WILLIAM WYCHERLEY

The opening season of the Haymarket is an important event since it is a brave attempt at keeping drama in the West End and classics at that. Jonathan Kent has to be applauded along with the Haymarket Theatre for such a daring project which one instinctively wants to praise in order to boost its success. To open with a rip roaring comedy such as The Country Wife is a welcoming beginning and as it will run through Christmas it is even better. So with the best and greatest of hopes I looked forward to the occasion since it is also one of those Restoration plays in which dirty sex and smutty lines were a form of protest against the rigidity of the Puritans who had closed the theatres. How marvellously appropriate to use the theatre to target them. I thought what fun to see such vulgarity performed in the style of its Restoration period which gives it added dimension. But this production attempts to update the play in its modern way of speaking the lines, with broad and crude sexual gestures, with swaggering exaggerations, with strained attempts at drollery going over the top from the start by David Haig and Toby Stephens so that there is no place to go but on a steady stream of contrived energy and manic toppings. Toby Stephens plays it all surface, the adoring David Haig is in a constant state of frenzy while Fiona Glascott jumps up and down and screeches like a 6-year-old. (She’s no match for a Maggie Smith, a Judy Dench, or a Joan Plowright). Several of the male critics had a ball in the crudity and couldn’t care less about style. If you are adolescent at heart you will ignore the theatrical miscalculations and feel free and easy at laughing. But if you enjoy the style of Restoration sexiness then you will adore Patricia Hodge’s Lady Fidget who glistens with hypocrisy as the restrained lady of manners who digs into a torrid sexual encounter, or the basic truth in John Hopkins’ Harcourt who shows smouldering passion and a deviousness with such aplomb. Or Elizabeth Dermot Walch’s Alithea timed and played straight thus getting genuine laughs or Jo Stone-Fewings who captured the style, the comic gestures, the character, and the buffoonery, all at once revealing the strength of this Restoration comedy. He was genuinely funny. The costumes are a strange combination, similar to the way of speaking the period lines in contemporary rhythms. The men’s jeans seem to be covered by period dressing gowns while the ladies are all in excessive period. The set of vibrant turquoise for Horner’s house and the patched up floral pinks and yellows for Pinchwife are contrived comments and seem simply cartoonish. Kent has hoked up the comedy to a farcical level of speed and intent. The play is not a farce and though one welcomes the swift pacing, it leaves little space for the undercurrent of nasty comment the play was making. The story tells of fashionable London where the horny Horner lets slip deliberately that instead of being the town’s rogue with the women he is now impotent. It’s his passage to every household especially the town’s aristocracy, in particular, Lady Fidget. In another household Pinchwife, in order to have a virginal wife, takes a young country girl Margery whom he hides or disguises, especially from Horner who in the end seduces and changes Margery’s character. Pinchwife’s sister Alithia lives with him and in order to trap the man she loves, Harcourt, she engages herself to the town’s idiot, Sparkish, who provides us with the most delicious japing of the Restoration period. Harcourt wins his lady, Margery escapes from Pinchwife’s clutches, and Lady Fidget has her passionate fling with Horner who sustains his Don Juan position in the town even after his deception. The fraudulence of the life and its duplicity are revealed through the parody and the exaggerations in the characters. By evening’s end one is worn out by being worked over. Imagine how the cast must feel? There is no conclusion for this production…it’s personal taste all the way. Import no export.

September 27 – January 12/08

LAST CONFESSION by ROGER CRANE

How refreshing to see a play of intelligence, an adult story, a murder mystery based on history of a dubious pope’s death with actors of such quality and superb direction. This is what theatre should be able to convey. David Suchet is an actor of such intelligent sincerity that following his truth as an actor allows you to follow his journey wherever it may be. His study of complex characters in authority has amazing resonance. Here he is Cardinal Benelli, the self doubting cardinal, the pope-maker, who ventures into the Curia of infested rivalry and corruption where Bishop Marcinkus, the Chicago mafia-export as banker of the Vatican’s money,i is encouraged in his banditry along with Cardinals Felici and Villot, the reactionary power-mongers of the Vatican, who keep the status quo by ruling the Curia who rule the pope. Into this vicious circle Binelli, backed by Pope Paul VI, politically manoeuvres to place the incorruptible Cardinal Luciani instead of himself as the next pope. Good-natured and eager to reform the Vatican, Luciani, made Pope John Paul, the smiling pope,’ gives notice to Marcinkus of his return to the USA and of ridding the Curia of Felici and Villot by transferring them as cardinals to Italian cities. No one expected the strength of purpose and the courage of the ‘smiling pope’, played so endearingly by Richard O’Callaghan with such wit. But before those papers could be executed Luciani is found dead in his bed, the exit papers having disappeared and replaced by the Imitation of Christ papers, the servant dismissed, after only 33 days of being the pope. Binelli investigates the death interrogating the cardinals. He proves the guilt of Villot (marvellously ferocious Bernard Lloyd) and Felici (precisely arrogant Charles Kay) and gives himself a moment to contemplate being pope. Sacrificing his ambition for the good of the Vatican, he brings in John Paul II, the Polish pope, who becomes his confessor before his death. Binelli gives him the ammunition to rid the Vatican of the two demon cardinals by confessing it all to Pope John Paul II upon his death bed. ‘Everything being confidential and nothing being secret’ within the Vatican, the pope will not act without evidence. But there are many questions regarding church, religion, and power covered in this work which have been carefully researched by the author who is a lawyer with professional knowledge as to how to lay out the facts. Through Luciani we hear that the church is a house of god and not the house of Rothschild, as he calls out to the Vatican gardener. Luciani is sure he can perform Christ’s teaching by using the pope’s power for the people and not as the reactionary cardinals who would preserve the old guard institutions without consideration not only to the morality but also before the salvation of the soul. The play explores the politics as well as the characters of the ambitious men in red robes as clickish as the Klu Klux Klan. ‘Where is the line between divine providence and human intervention?’ is used over and over again but not portrayed dramatically. There is much repetition in the writing, flattened out by legal justifcations. Dramatic music is used to cause the climaxes; Dudley’s inventive design, of iron gates cutting out the living world or prison bars if you prefer with entrance doorways on other side of the gates for the living dead institution or the outside affluent world, with murals of Michael Angelo figures painted on the back wall, is constantly turned to change location breaking the dramatic flow. These are flaws in the production I have briefly mentioned but just as the dialogue goes under, the mystery of the story comes up and that is the dilemma of judging this work which has so much going for it. It will open in the West End at the Royal Haymarket, not to be missed for a wonderful collection of actors rarely seen. Import and export.

– Sept 09/07

THE LADY FROM DUBUQUE by EDWARD ALBEE

This work, written in a depressive period, could not have helped Albee by lasting 12 days on Broadway despite starring the supreme actress Irene Worth who must have given a weight and depth the play couldn’t carry. This go-round, almost 27 years later, it’s Maggie Smith’s turn with that great capacity to time a line with sarcastic wit, use that querying voice as she smiling inserts the knife, and in magical transitions turns inward with grievous pain. Yet there is always a lightness to her touch, a sense of humour that shields her into detachment. Is she not the angel of death dressed in black with urbane pearls as proposed in this play? Could she be the lady from Dubuque as the founding editor of the New Yorker once said about his magazine not being for ‘the little old lady from Dubuque’. No, not Dubuque, she, Elizabeth, is cosmopolitan, travelling the world as angels do. Is she the mother of Jo who claimed her mother to be pink-haired, fat and a recluse in New Jersey? But then Albee is playing with identity and as long as she is there to mother Jo into a gentle death then she is entitled to call herself mother. This theme does not get focused upon until Act II. You have to attend Act I before getting to the central theme and what a diversion that is. The play opens with Jo dying in great pain from cancer and aggressively vicious to her guests who’ve been invited to drinks. Sam, her husband, forgives all of Jo’s behaviour because he loves her and tries to keep her alive surrounded by friends. Are these friends? She attacks her oldest mate, Lucinda, until the poor girl escapes into the garden eating up the grass while weeping. She and Edgar are the uptight constipated couple while bigot Fred and his down-to-earth mistress Carol, with a heart of gold, are the other odd couple. Only Carol escapes abuse till she’s called Fred’s whore. Carol’s double take on that uncovers a delightful comedian. It isn’t until the friends are driven from the house that the angel of death arrives with her assistant, the black Oscar who matches Maggie Smith in fast quips about racial prejudice and deft movements in karate. The bungled handling of loved ones’ dying is the theme of Act I, the enigma of letting go. Curtain. We have to endlessly endure in verbose dialogue the same attacks, the same game playing, the exposition of a dying wife and holding-on husband…all in this very modern posh house in Connecticut, for one hour in Act I with direct lines spoken to the audience so as to include them in the party. Sound familiar? Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is round the corner and in Act II Delicate Balance is not far away. Are there two themes going which de-focus the play? Yes. Elizabeth and Oscar go into their routine (in Act II) of identity as Sam hysterically carries on as to ‘who are you, you are not Jo’s mother’. Jo, after the comfort of a mother’s arms, is carried upstairs gently by Oscar to die; Sam is left to grieve on his own as the angel of death and her partner disappear. The sense of mystery, the unknown identity of strangers, the expressionism of those characters onto the realism of the arguing unappealing couples stamp the piece in Ibsen territory but the plot and theme are thin with not much meat to fill out the bones. Maggie Smith is her magnificent self and will carry the show for its run, Peter Francis James’s Oscar is the find of the year, a new star with timing that is musical and wit that is mischievously delicious. Tony Page has deftly given the piece pacing, emphasis on its theme, and lightness despite the manipulative asides to the audience. It’s worth seeing Maggie Smith and Peter Francis James who have earned the three stars, even if the play fails. No export but import.

March 3 – June 9/07

PINTER’S PEOPLE by Harold Pinter

This is a collection of 14 revue sketches in an incoherent assembly which has no chronological order that would give us a sense of progression of Pinter’s work and bears no relevancy to the plays. The daily critics were united in panning this production of comics interpreting Pinter while the Sunday critics praised it. What has been left unsaid is that the daily critics saw many of these sketches at the National, the Lyric Hammersmith, and on television played by actors who proved beyond doubt the humour of Pinter through actors’ timing and characterisations and not by sign posting to the audience the punch lines in caricatured renditions such as the comics performed. The direction was dire without the understanding of dramatic climax instead of the punch lines. There was no pacing of scenes so necessary in the timing and no colouring of tone. Seeing stand up comics perform in this material and not be funny is a disastrous result despite Pinter’s approval which is of no consequence. Here are some of the sketches ranging in time which should have presented his comic timing with his precise ear for rhythms especially in banalities: Political pieces…80s-90s Precisely… satirises mobile phones by 2 bureaucrats bargaining over the deaths possible through nuclear war, played here as 2 drunks negating the point of the piece and The New World Order…2 torturers in tailored suits torment a blindfolded lecturer in peasant theology and Press Conference… a minister of culture being secretly the chief of police who calmly talks of murdering children whose parents resist the free market, hardly noticeable irony in any of the sketches here. Night…a couple reminisce their courtship with completely diverse memories, best performance here. Tess…an upper-class girl recalling her call-girl mother, impossible performance here. Victoria Station…menacing piece of radio cab controller trying to communicate by phone with a witless driver who just may have a corpse in the cab and doesn’t know where Victoria Station is, acceptable performance here of a great piece. …50s revue Black And White…2 old vagrant women at all-night milk stand chattering away about night bus routes, an absolute howl when Sheila Hancock and Frances de la Tour originally played it, but nothing here. …50s revue Request Stop…a bourgeois woman waiting for the bus accuses a silent man, also waiting, of molesting her…paranoia, missed the boat here. Last To Go..newspaper seller and a coffee stall owner spin out conversation to avoid going home, pointless here. That’s Your Trouble ……2 men argue whether carrying a sandwich board can cause a headache, well done here. Trouble in The Works…a foreman smashes the hopes of his gaffer when reporting the workmen hate the factories’ favourite product, hemi-unibal-spherical-rod-ends, well done here.

January 30 – February 23/07

SIX DANCE LESSONS IN SIX WEEKS by Richard Alfieri

This is still running but I don’t know how. It is a disastrous play for Claire Bloom to have launched in London. A cliché predictable story of a bored rich married lady, we are told, and a married dancing teacher....Oh my, the secret is out…she’s a widow having moved to Florida and he’s a widowed gay also a transient. You know that as soon as the play starts and thus it becomes two lonely people in constant friction till they admit their need of one another. He comes once a week to give her dancing lessons and so builds their mutual caring. She has cancer and is dying; he will nurse her to the end as he did with his partner. Repetitious six lessons become a torture to wade through while one gives thanks to six and not twelve. Bloom is wooden, stiffly performing the steps in an uncomfortable performance while poor Zane is charming, funny, dancing with versatile expression as he attempts putting life into a corpse. The set and direction need no comment.

November 23/06 - March 03/07

HAY FEVER by Noel Coward

This is the biggest event of the season as it stars Judi Dench who is England’s 8th wonder of the world and that well loved along with it. The play is the closest to farce Coward has written with his usual undertones of slapping down the so-called gentry or those who play at it. The plot is simple…mum was once a star in clichéd melodramas but has past her prime and now lives a country life with husband writer and her two grown children. She never stops playing her parts in her domestic life and only faces reality when necessary using her gardening as her escape mechanism. The farce involves each member of the family inviting their own guest for the weekernd without informing each other. How they treat each guest and for what purpose are the driving currents of farce. The self involvement of each member of this family and their selfish behaviour towards their guests which make them so unhappy in their weekend invitation that the guests all steal away in a queue as the family sit round their breakfast table chatting about dad’s new novel oblivious to their guests’ departures. This is the famous climatic scene of the play and its ending. Peter Hall has slow paced the timing and given Judi Dench exaggerated direction for an over-the-top character. She brings the woman down to earth with wit in her marvellous way with throw-away lines as only Dench can do, at some very sarcastic and bitter moments. She also manages to sing as well as play the piano which is Judi Dench at her very best. Peter Bowles plays his role with a sincerity and truth, straight down the line as the straight man to Judi Dench. He makes the husband a real character as do daughter Kim Medcalf and son Dan Stevens who are the foundations for the humour to be bounced off. Good for them! The guests all played as caricatures of stereotypes except for William Chubb who performs as bank manager friend with perfect timing in keeping with a real person. The magic of Coward and Dench needs no review….the show was sold out on its announcement. Bill Kenwright and Thelma Holt should be awarded the peerages they deserve for presenting plays and productions of such quality in the West End. Hay Fever will be going to Broadway in the fall of 2007. They have also brought the great show of RSC’s Canterbury Tales to the West End. I reviewed it when it was performing at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon and cannot enthuse enough over the joys of this show. Don’t miss it. What a gem for export to Broadway despite the overwhelming economics of almost 8 hours of theatre and such a huge cast.

April 11 – August 5/06

ENTERTAINING MR SLOANE (1964) by JOE ORTON

It seems to be a season in pairs. Entertaining Mr Sloane may be a forerunner of Enjoy, an Alan Bennett play of 1980 but it is an attempt at the same brutal satirising of the working class. Here in this play, it is on the hypocrisy of their morality. Kath speaks very properly…as refined as she possibly can…. but watch her sexual aggression, called passive aggressive these days, and her foul means of play. Only then will you have caught Orton at his apex of black humour. Imelda Staunton as the would-be landlady never stops wiggling and flirting with her new tenant, Mr Sloane, a youth who’s half her age. ‘But you need a mother,’ she claims as she hugs and kisses him in sexual passion. Why should he not respond and have a free run of the house and not worry about the rent. It doesn’t matter that the carpet and sofa, the curtains and chairs have had their day, it’s all neat and tidy. The double entendres fly about like the sprinkling of spring and when Imelda Staunton in her see-through housecoat covering her nudity appears in something she just threw together, the audience splits with laughter. But that is the quality of the show until brother Ed finds out the young man is a criminal involved in a murder at which point the power game and double entendres with Kath leap like flames from a burning bush and the clash of wills is resolved only by fierce compromise. Businessman Ed and his landlady sister Kath will both sexually share an ac/dc Sloane behind those lace curtains on a proper working-class street. Staunton is an actress who can reach the depths of despair or the heights of irony. Personally I prefer the despair, but what an actress she is as she manoeuvres and twirls keeping up the pretences with a false sincerity that is absolutely winning. The young actor Matthew Horne as Mr Sloane, already known as a television star, is also a perfect match as straight man for Simon Parsley Day’s brother Ed and Richard Bremmer’s dad Kemp, both striking actors in capturing their fine balance of realistic enlargement which gives the exact amount of abstraction to the character. The set is realistic, the lighting and direction quite conventional which is a peak interpretation for the play. As to Orton, it is probably his first but best play which is withstanding the test of time. It is entertainment though cruel.

January 22 – April 11/09

FAT PIG writer/director NEIL LABUTE

The prevalence of obesity is so dire the government is forced to issue directives with serious priority. Even The Today programme, the most important news programme on Radio 4, had Labute talking about his play regarding fat people. This is the theme of The Fat Pig. What interests Labute is the social attitudes towards obesity in treating them as freaks. However, so widespread (pun) is the problem that social attitudes are beginning to change. In complete contrast to obesity is the issue of anorexia amongst teenage girls in order to be as thin as the models in the glossy magazines. Still, Labute’s concern is obesity. He is not a writer of depth in character development as profound theatre requires, but as a filmmaker he is used to establishing the nature of the character to be quickly identified, and recognised from thereon, as he tells his story through plot and situation development. Once you accept the flaw in his writing you can be sure that he will direct with Swiss-watch precision and pace his play with musical timing. You are intrigued by his cynical attiudes of people’s cruelty, the sudden twist in the tale, at the surprise ending. He manages to give you compassion and vulnerability in one character while setting up the diabolical vicious villains in the other characters. You never leave a production of Neil Labute without a spit-and-polish to the evening. So what have we here with this new play whose title seems so gross yet in the treatment of the fat lady, Helen, there is delicate sentitivity. She is freshly sweet in her directness, her humour in sending up her size, her interest in real things and not just money, status and marriage. Helen is a librarian who indulges in food, eating slices of pizza and double sweets. You could call it compensative eating or any name close to compulsion. By chance, a young man, Tom, of basic good nature, slightly uncomfortable in his own skin sits next to Helen at lunchtime in a business restaurant. At first taken aback by her openness regarding being fat, he gradually begins to date her. They see each other privately and then fall in love with a sense of ease with each other. But the world within his office is not inhabited by the same sort of people. Jeannie, an office coordinator, having dated Tom thinks they should have been engaged by now and has a scene of hysteria when discovering she with her sexy trim figure has been passed over for fat Helen. Then there is his colleague Carter, the typical air-head following all the clichés of acceptability who taunts Tom and reduces Helen to a joke. Only when he describes his shame over his mother’s fatness is there any heart. The day of reckoning comes when the office celebration on the beach arrives and Tom, unable to face the derision of the office, sits with Helen quite apart from the rest. Helen is not only aware, but is approached by Jeannie in her bikini, looking like a glamour model.  At this point, Tom realises he is too weak to fight the lot and with tears breaks down to let Helen know he can’t handle the relationship. There are several aspects to the play which were criticised because of lack of detail particularly relating to the office. But Labute always keeps to plotting his story in an abstract manner. The set brilliantly highlights this quality in a revolve that divides the sides to Tom’s life…the private domestic side with his office…. and behind the revolve is an angular back wall that changes colour and texture to the change of place. There are wonderful lines of wit and whim…such as Helen describing herself as Helen of Troy who would need a thousand ships to launch her. There are sensitively tender love scenes as when Tom and Helen are in bed together watching old films and eating popcorn. Scenes are always climaxed emotionally then move to the next plot sequence in perfect timing. But the real joy is the discovery of Ella Smith as Helen who has a charismatic endearment, a sincerity of character, and a fine sense of timing. She is accompanied by Robert Webb as Tom who is the most enchanting comic and delicious partner to Helen. His body movement is as hilarious as any of his timing of the lines. Webb brings a joy and pain to Tom that is memorable. These are two sad love birds that have made a dent in the story of lovers. Import for all sizes and ages and export it will for Broadway.

May 16-September 6/08

DEALER’S CHOICE by PATRICK MARBER

The play, production, cast and director have produced a work of art as all the pieces come together in a jelled form that is unforgettable. This is Marber’s first play told with the passion and pain by a young man whose story is that close to his own life. He has since written Closer which extends his talent of sparkling dialogue, punchy humour and the cruelty of love relationships but it doesn’t hit the gut with the same reality as this first play does. This production gives us the two acts in a visual reality that reveals in Act I the background of the restaurant by candlelight with its tables and chairs plus the kitchen with all the utensils where we observe the waiters, cook, and owner in their routine life while in Act II their stakes are displayed by participating in a ritual Saturday night poker game held in the basement with its round table and green cloth carefully ready for the challenge of gambling. Stephen, the owner, is a controlled business man keeping his staff together with a disciplined hand but at a loss with his son Carl who is a waster addicted to gambling at the risk to his life while being bailed out by his father. Sweeney, the cook, is persuaded to gamble this night staking the money he’s saved to take out his young daughter from whom he’s been cut off. Mugsy, a waiter, is the joker, the dreamer, the loser, who is determined to start his own restaurant having found the perfect location… a disused toilet on Mile End Road he’ll call the Bow Tai. (Mile End being in Bow and food being exotic). Frankie, a waiter, is more cynical…the confident Romeo who is ready to leave for Las Vegas and a gambler’s life… will participate in the game to win. Into this unit comes Carl, whose only tie with Stephen is seeing him on Saturday nights for the gambling session. The real intruder is Ash who has dinner at the restaurant as he awaits Carl and the payment of £4000 Carl owes him due that night or else. Carl persuades Ash to win the money at the poker game about to happen. Stephen recognises the professional gambler as they play the game and his son’s connection to Ash. Ash wins it all though Stephen takes his turn as well. But the pain of knowing he is responsible for the waster his son has become and that the stranger has been held with more respect than himself is shatteringly played by Malcolm Sinclair. Without knowing how to play the game of poker, it is fascinating to behold each one of the players’ true nature and how they play the game of life. The crisp dialogue that evokes the sharp humour, the cutting insights so marvellously timed holds every moment in suspense until the end of the game. Amazing how much we are in the restaurant and in the room involved with each character. The original at the National gave us a peripheral restaurant and a dominant gambling table. We were never part of the game. It also was considered rather shady to even consider a poker game as the centre of a play which had such criminal associations in those days. But the poker game did take place and the players are real people. Malcolm Sinclair is a brilliant actor with great truth who stirs the heart as Stephen, Roger Lloyd Pack as ruthless Ash has the ominous quality that scares the hell out of you, Stephen Wight’s Mugsy is hilarious yet adorably winsome, Samuel Barnett’s Carl is a perfect match in character, Ross Boatman’s Sweeney is so credible you believe he can cook, Jay Simpson’s Frankie hits the spot. It is the astute direction of the play that marks an important leap for Sam West and the exact taste of Tom Piper’s designs that make this production so special and one that must not be missed!! Import! Import and export for Broadway!!!

Dec 6th - March 29/08

ELLING based on novel by INGVAR AMBJOMSEN play by AXEL HELLSTENIUS

If ever wish fulfilment has been achieved it is in this contemporary fairytale of two madmen who find salvation through each other and not through the mental hospitals, therapists or social workers that have interfered in their lives. Elling, a constipatedly tight, compulsively tidy, prissy mother’s boy, is room-mate at a mental hospital to Bjarne a virginal giant of a man as untidy physically and mentally as Elling is tidy, a doe-eyed orang-utan as Elling described him. Bjarne longs for sex/women and food but can’t be alone or make any decisions, the village idiot would have been his identity at one time. They are discharged together to a halfway house, a flat of their own where a social worker Frank looks after them and warns how rare these flats are and if they don’t improve, they’ll have to return to hospital. Elling is wary of Frank and treats him as an enemy. He will not leave the flat though Biarne wants to roam around and is desperate for a pizza. Bit by bit life comes to them. Christmas is celebrated with an exchange of presents so the outside world has been explored. Elling receives a wooden doll’s house made by Bjarne who in return is given a pen with a nude woman from Elling. The pregnant woman Reidun from upstairs falls dead drunk at their door on Christmas Eve; Bjarne takes care of her throughout the night. She is his fallen angel. Elling, slightly jealous, goes out to a poetry reading and by chance meets the great Norwegian poet Alfons who becomes his friend. Elling discovers his vocation as a poet and finds his life through the affably floating Alfons. Elling has begun to accept his mother's death and transformsher into the Madonna. Bjarne fixes Alfons’s car and they all go to his cottage in the woods including Reidun. She gives birth to a girl that Bjarne wants to father and Elling has become the famous secret sauerkraut poet through the poetry he slipped into the packets sold at the supermarket. Will they ever return to the mental hospital? Never!! Have they a flat? Forever!! Is this a happy ending? Why not!!! Simm as Elling is as precise as a Swiss watch and subtle in his comic turns as any great artist. Jonathan Cecil as Alfons the famous poet is a perfect match, Adrian Bower as Bjarne is engagingly seductive as the naïve giant and Ingrid Lacey gives excellent support along with Keir Charles. It’s a real triumph for Paul Miller and Simon Bent in so brilliantly executing a comedy of today’s paranoia where the greater the chaos the closer to normal life becomes as madmen become sane and the sane go mad, and triumph for the Bush in its new era with Josie Roerke as artistic director.

June 12/07 - Oct 06/07

THE DUMB WAITER by Harold Pinter

This is early Pinter where menace of the unknown is sharp and focused, closely influenced by Beckett. Two gangsters are in the basement of a decayed tiled kitchen in a deserted restaurant waiting for orders from their boss who never comes. It’s certainly not Godot they are waiting for. The more experienced mobster Ben reads his paper while the mentally backward Gus asks too many questions. Ben, the authoritarian, corrects Gus on whether it’s light the kettle or put on the kettle…a banter that gets much mileage. There is a dumb waiter in this production that looks like an huge oven and when the cryptic food orders are sent down it is with an overwhelmingly crashing noise as the contraption follows a long series of piping. Gus is terrified of who is sending them messages. Could they be coded? He is the one who noses round while Ben lies on his bed. Only when Gus at the end answers what he thinks is a signal does he return all beaten and bruised, but by whom? What a difference these two actors and the director make in knowing the feeling, the rhythm, the delivery, the timing and suspense in Pinter’s dialogue and in being instinctively aware of its contrasts between the comic and the terror. Evans evokes a chaplin-esque pathos in his walk, talk and posturing…making a dumb waiter look even dumber. His fantasies about who is upstairs sending down these orders weave into the damaged brain of this particular gunman creating a comic relief to the menace. He grasps the specifics as well as the abstract with clear definition. The sombre stance of Ben may be in contrast to Gus that allows for the repartee between them, but it affords a proper character balance as well. Isaacs is more than just a sparing partner; he carries his weight in equal measure to Evans. Though hired killers they are still vulnerable in this brutalised totalitarian society; could it be they are victims of a merciless God who has despaired of mankind? A thoroughly theatrical experience in this 1957 one-acter of cat- and-mouse suspense. Import while it is still running.

February 22 – March 24/07

BENT by Martin Sherman

Alan Cumming makes his London comeback in this production but Daniel Kramer is too obvious on the excessive sexuality. It is another piece set in Berlin in 1934 the morning after the Night of the Long Knives, the first mass purge of homosexuals. Despite a long sexual night with an SAS guard it is soon made clear that Max, a nightclub dancer and Ruby his partner, would be on the run. In a brutal scene on the train to Dachau, after being caught, we watch Ruby’s death and how Max has to participate in it in order to survive. At Dachau he falsely pretends being Jewish rather than gay and meets another victim, a Jew named Horst. Their friendship gradually builds while changing stones. We observe how they make love via their sexual fantasies through speech in a mind blowing scene. His friend Horst is killed against the electrified fence. Having denied his gayness, Max finally gains courage and declares himself against the electric fence. Cumming in the first Act played on the campiness and humour of Max and not until Act II does it become a trenchant performance. When it was originally produced at the Royal Court, Ian McKellen brought to Max the whole dilemma of identity as manifested in being gay. His profound pain at the torture was overwhelming. Cumming does not reach such depths but the play itself still holds in its ferocious rawness. In his opening scene Max hangs on to his bruised bottom endlessly before we discover his Aryan lover naked save for his black boots and a patiently vulnerable Ruby who tolerates it. Ruby is sweetly delineated by Kevin Trainer as the domestic lover. Max is portrayed as a self centred bastard until he comes to terms with the gruesomeness of being gay under the Nazis. Chris New portrays Horst with enormous precision. Daniel Kramer is intensely violent in bringing out the unbearable with no subtlety to make the horror more tolerable. Robin Don does miracles with the set..a whoosh of steam from the floor gives us an immediate perception of a train, or the blackshirts and lamp-post playing a phallic game, or the ornate flat transformed to the railway wagon and finally the Dachau camp. The play depicts the flowering of love in defiance of all the Gestapo tortures and man’s humanity, his need for identity beyond all torment. No import or export.

October5/06-January 13/07

WOMAN IN MIND (1985) writer/director ALAN AYCKBOURN

There are times when the occasion is greater even than the production as it is with this play when Alan Ayckbourn, the author, bids farewell to administering his theatre and directing his plays and then chooses, as his farewell gesture, to direct A Woman In Mind with Janie Dee as the woman going out of her mind. We are the observers of history as well as seeing a reinterpretation of the play performed at this same theatre in 1986 starring Julia McKenzie who against the background of a garden and side of a suburban house went into her escape from an intolerably dreary and loveless life into a delirium of madness. Though originally done in Scarborough in the round, it opened in London in a proscenium arch theatre with a an actress known for her comic dimensions and for a powerful singing voice. She was fantastic…to see this woman with a capacity for joy fall into such despair. We absorbed the suburban atmosphere as it oppressed Julia McKenzie. But here in this production Ayckbourn has transferred the focus into the head of Janie Dee who falls on a mound of grass with no house in sight. We see the priggish vicar of a husband, her loveless marriage, her son installed in a offbeat religion not communicating with her. However, the revelation is in her gradual escape into an hallucinative family of loving husband, adventurous brother, and doting daughter. As she is revived from the fall in the garden by her doctor, the new family begin to appear. She conjures them up at first privately and as they intrude further and further into her life, they also become more demanding and hostile until the delirium and the reality begin to blend and she can no longer control or separate them. What Janie Dee gives us is the joy of the fantasy that turns into such profound pain when she can no longer separate the real family from the imagined one. She goes quietly, delicately mad and we mourn for this potentially loving woman. In between there is delicious humour from the awkward doctor who has always been in love with her, a beautifully naturalistic stodgy vicar, a finely drawn and acted imagined family, a chronically bad cook of a sister-in-law drawing up the spectre of her dead husband, and a carefully sympathetic portrait of a son whose generation gap sadly cannot be closed. Ayckbourn gives us a sensitively interpreted production as seen through his eyes and though it is not the usual rom-com of Ayckbourn it is an exceptionally moving study which must be seen…. an unusually special theatre experience. Thank you Bill Kenwright. Import no export…not yet.

January 29-May 31/09

PIAF by PAM GEMS

Thirty years after Pam Gem’s play starring Jane Lapoitaire and Zoe Wanamaker, followed by Elaine Page, we now have a 90-minute version with the petite Argentinean Elena Roger. This programme may have worked in the intimate space at the Donmar but all the flaws of a book so edited as to become linkage material for the songs, which is totally incomprehensible about the characters in Piaf’s life outside of her childhood friend Toine, becomes a dominant factor in a larger theatre. Not even clicking a camera-sound to affect photo shot scenes camouflages the threadbare nature of the book. It does set up her origins as a street walker singing on the streets in the 1930s in the guartier of Belleville in Paris and whisks us through to her stardom, her love affairs, her drug addiction, and her complete absorption in performing. So dismiss the book and think about Elena Roger’s rendition of Piaf. Here we then have, forgive me, a foul-mouthed Parisian kwetch with no real character development but only with the identity of her famous drab black dress. What the piece and Elena Roger do give us are the songs that she sings with such passion, such fierce energy, such deeply rooted pain. Close your eyes and just listen to those songs come to life bringing back the nostalgia of the little sparrow. Roger’s gifted use of movement belies Piaf’s stillness. However, it is dramatically effective. Only one question do I ask…Why does Marlene Dietrich sing La Vie en Rose?…the song that everyone associates with Piaf sung during and after the war that captivated the world. But the list of all the others songs are multiple with startling effect. Enjoy the concert Roger has to offer and catch a bit of atmosphere from a fantastic set of a dilapidated proscenium arch music-hall-theatre, lighting of gripping changes, super musicians, and a company of fine actors who alternate in the playing of several characters with truthful conviction. Import for those who still carry the memory of listening to the real sparrow. No export.

Oct 16/08 – Jan 24/09

THE FEMALE OF THE SPECIES by JOANNA MURRAY-SMITH

Germaine Greer had a fit over this show calling the author an insane reactionary. She needn’t have taken it so to heart. Nothing new is said in the show that hasn’t been said before, many many times. It’s a treatise about the feminist movement with the main character of the writer Margot Mason representing Germaine Greer and the effect the movement had on de-masculinising the male role. We have Margot marvellously satirised by Eileen Atkins (Greer should be thrilled with such perfection) with her throw-away sarcastic timing, a writer made famous by her book The Cerebral Vagina (Greer’s The Female Eunuch). Her many books have changed the lives of women who have followed every direction of Margot’s inconsistent writing. However, the play begins with a writer’s-blocked Margot not able to dash out the next book when there is a sudden intrusion by this strange girl upon Margot’s private life. Who is she and where did she come from? This is based on the episode of the young adoring student who took Greer hostage in her own cottage grabbing her legs and calling,’mummy, mummy.’ This stranger is an ex-student named Molly who though claiming undying belief in all of Margot’s books, then attacks with fury all her contradictions. She accuses her of causing the suicide of her rejecting mother and of her operations of sterilisation so as not to have the burdens of motherhood as prescribed by Margot. She then handcuffs Margot to her desk and pulls out a gun. We know she will not shoot her because there are more characters to come. And they do come. Tess, Margot’s daughter, arrives unannounced and unexpected having abandoned her over-demanding children and home duties plus a boring husband. She jabbers away about being so exhausted and unloved, over and over again. Her husband Brian arrives, meek and mild wanting to do anything to please, even making soup for all. Finally the taxi-driver, who never stopped talking to an almost expired Tess, has followed her to prove what women want is a caveman. Each one has a tirade about what they want in a relationship blaming each other. Margot tells them all, ’I only write books, you don’t have to do what I write.’ Add to all of this Tess’s demand to know who her father is. Margot does not know as it happened when she was so drunk at a party.  At this point, her publisher walks in to see where she’s at with the book and, lo and behold, gay as he is, he is the father. The gun goes off several times, but then if this is an intended farce, threat should be real. Sadly, it is not. It all ends quite happily with daughter finding father, Margot finding enough material for her new book, and Molly finding solace with Tess who accepts the marriage without love. The play not only misses all the fundamentals necessary for farce which the Australian author intended, but also misses being a play. Her script of  Honour was a fine drama on marriage revealing a mature husband who goes off with a younger woman and when it all falls apart tries returning home only to find his wife has liberated herself from the marriage. Each character in this work calls out his/her own needs and deeds with no dialogue to weave in and out of the characterisations. They deliver caricature enactments where farce demands straight acting with truth along with fantastic timing and outside events that overtake them. Only Eileen Atkins gives us the true essence of the comedy but the play offers no substance. It’s worth seeing Eileen Atkins in how an actress of such quality can, like Hercules, hold the world on her shoulders. Import no export.

July 10-October 4/08

THE DEEP BLUE SEA (1952) by TERENCE RATTIGAN

Rattigan wrote this play based on the suicide of a gay lover with the basic theme being the incompatibility in the expectations of a love affair between the upper and working-class. Hester Collyer is a mature upper-class woman married to a conventional judge who provided her with a secure ordinary life that left her unfulfilled sexually. She runs off with an ex-RAF pilot who is also a misfit in society and cannot find a place for himself in post-war Britain. Hester’s expectations of love are beyond him and he is shamed at her attempted suicide. It forces him to leave her and take on a job as a test pilot across the ocean. They may love each other but it’s destructive to both their lives. Is he ever to find his way seems more the question than whether Hester will find hers. In the cheap rooming house where Hester now lives, the other tenant, a mid-European ex-doctor who committed some criminal act (probably an abortion) is another lost human being who saves Hester’s life and teaches her the road to survival. Edward Hall has recreated the dark and dreary flat but has brought no new insight to the play. It is essentially a vehicle for a middle-aged actress whose depths of despair Greta Sacchi cannot always reach and therefore one is unmoved by her attempted suicide. Peggy Ashcraft broke my heart and Harriet Walter also was so distinct in being upper-class that her descent into a relationship with an ex-RAF uneducated fellow younger than herself seemed demeaning for her just to satisfy her sexual appetite. There is no real chemistry between Sacchi and Bruce-Lockhart…it just wasn’t there not for the want of trying. Dugald Bruce-Lockhart gives a very sympathetically winning performance in revealing Freddie’s vulnerability. Tim McMillan marvellously portrays the crushed ex-doctor trying to redeem himself with enormous compassion that is far more touching than the suicide. But more important is making the relationship of Hester and Freddie relevant for today. Married women have lovers, commit adultery, within a marriage without tragedy. When the fight for life is so desperate in Burma and China it is difficult to weep tears for a woman who gives such little weight to the miracle of life and the luxuries of food and shelter. I fear it’s the wrong timing for this play which will always be revived because it offers a great acting part for a mature actress of emotional power. No import or export.

April 29-July 19/08

IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST (1895) by OSCAR WILDE

This is a special play whose epigrams are so well known that it becomes difficult for actors to avoid the cliché. Though the story is about two young upper-class gentlemen John (called Earnest in London) and Algernon who play games with their identity to avoid dealing with the secret sides of their separate lives in the country and city, it is the lesser written part of Lady Bracknell who has the starring role. Whoever plays the lady sets the style of the play and overcomes the over-familiar quotations. Here in this production we have the naturalistic actress Penelope Keith who always plays Penelope Keith as the brittle sarcastic lady who whiplashes everyone with her tongue as she assumes authority because of her class. Keith is a an actress known for her precisely timed throw away lines with that trifling tone as if breathing is a privilege bestowed only upon her. So instead of the stylised Wildean manner we have a naturalistic approach to the play and no larger than life exaggerations. This approach has appealed to the English critics because the class element is lessened and the monstrous lady is not such a monster after all but rather a hard headed business woman, an arriviste, who keeps on arriving. But there is a danger when in losing the style the actor is trapped into playing the famous lines and not the character. Vocal performances become the mode as with Daisy Haggard’s Gwendolyn and Penelope Keith’s Lady Bracknell. It is then personal taste as to whom this version appeals. The fun for me is the exaggerations as the lines fit the size of the characters and so actors of outstanding quality flesh out the character with their own being bringing freshness to the famous lines. The great detail in the set allows the period to shine through. The costumes pair up characters and again its detail add to the characterisations. The direction is studied, accurate and carefully timed along with the performances in which Gill‘s concept prevails that the women rule the roost while the men follow their leader. It is also slightly implied that the ‘Bunburyism’ (secret double life as it’s called in the play) was Wilde’s own double life as a married man with his young male lover Boosie. The play still holds its centre for each generation yet to come and to discover a gold mine in language. The younger Algernon Mongrieff digs into his close friend Earnest’s life while Earnest is frustrated by him and is desperately trying to keep secret his duality. John Worthing (Earnest’s true identity) is an upper class gentleman called Earnest when leading a sophisticated life in London and very much in love with Gwendolyn a rich gentlewoman whose mother is only interested in climbing the social ladder and the income a gentleman can bring. This haughty lady, who rules the seas of destiny, was no lady to begin with and so she has every intention of rising as high as she can go on the crest of the monied waves. Earnest is not to her liking until she discovers his income and the surprise ending that he is her long lost nephew whose real name is Earnest Mongrieff. John’s double life has been to be John Worthing in the country, master of a fine estate left to him by the kind lord who became his guardian having found him in a handbag at Victoria Station. John is now guardian to the young Cecily whose tutor is Miss Prism. Part of John’s deception is to maintain a fury at the behaviour of his brother Earnest which causes him to go to London. John is staid and steady in the country but when he is Earnest in London he is the dashing young man about town in love with Gwendolyn. Algernon is curious about his friend’s country life and manages to worm his way into the country where he meets Cecily and falls in love. Gwendolyn (not to be crossed or waylaid from her determined goal, like mother, like daughter) chases to the country to sort out her engagement to Earnest. Lady Bracknell soon follows and then the mystery is solved as it is discovered that John Worthing is really Earnest Mongrieff, older brother to Algernon and nephew to Lady Bracknell so both young men are approved in marriage to Gwendolyn and Cecily whilst Miss Prism turns out to be the nanny that left Earnest in a handbag at Victoria Station by accident. Of course, this is all spoofing the hypocrisy of the upper-classes and their social snobbery. The fun is in the language and the characters but it also mocks the theatrical devise of searching for identity and its misidentities so frequently used by Shakespeare. A polished production for import.

January 31/08...

SWIMMING WITH SHARKS by GEORGE HUANG

George Huangs’s black comedy, as in his film, is about movie moguls and climbing the Hollywood ladder to success in a ‘What Makes Sammy Run’ theme which has been the base of so many films and plays. If you saw the film of Swimming With Sharks you would have seen the most subtle performance from Kevin Spacey’s Buddy as compared to the loud-mouthed aggression in a constant stream on one note from Christian Slater. The performances in the film camouflaged the plotline and its improbable ending which the play only emphasises. So what’s it all about, Alfie? Well it’s about a young man named Guy…a good decent young man who goes to work for the feisty Buddy Ackerman, THE SHARK, who to date has only made low budget horror films but wants to upgrade his position with the managing director of the film company. He finds that a young intellectual female writer/director by the name of Dawn has a script he could use to start his climb up the ladder. He persuades Guy, who is in love with Dawn, to help him produce the script. Here is Guy’s chance to climb, help the girl he loves, AND SWIM WITH THE SHARK. Dawn accedes if there are no script changes. Buddy says yes yes and then proceeds to make his changes while trying to seduce Dawn who is incorruptible. It comes to a head… Dawn tosses Guy out, feeling she has been betrayed. Guy gets his revenge by forcing Buddy into captivity, torturing him by stapling his face and then pouring vinegar on the open wounds. Dawn, meanwhile, appears having made a midnight date with Buddy to tell him off. Guy has a gun. Buddy talks his way out of it and Guy shoots…is it Dawn or Buddy? Next scene we see Buddy and Guy making Dawn’s film with their boss’s approval. But will Buddy succeed, as always, to take all the credit or will Guy outshark him? What’s the moral of the story? Guy has chosen the ladder of Hollywood success as we see a rising duplicate of Buddy and learn ‘What Makes Sammy Run’. Wilson is a bombastic director full of explosive energy and pace which keeps the action going and a sense of violence that stops at nothing. Matt Smith gives us a firm picture of the progressive change into corruption of a good man while Helen Baxendale draws all the punches in her vivid portrayal of a bright young writer with integrity. Christian Slater sustains a high manic stance timing his lines with violence, unafraid of playing the villain to the hilt, all in one key. There are good one liners and quips of wit which runs at a fast pace, but in the end who cares about the people? Import for the younger audiences who enjoy that kind of loud energy but no export. 

October 5/07...

MADAME de SADE by YUKIO MISHIMA

Never have I had to write such a sad notice about Michael Grandage whose venture into the West End with top quality productions of drama and comedy at affordable prices must not only be supported but be praised and upheld. It is therefore very difficult to criticise the choice of this play which is not a play and does not offer any sadistic sensations as one might suspect with de Sade. It is exquisitely designed in silver and green opulence for a French 18th-century salon whose scrim walls are silhouetted in videoed shadowy leaves with the passing of time and whose haunting music carries doom-laden projections. The text is philosophical talk, endless talk, about a frantic mother, Madame de Montreuil, whose daughter Renée is married to Marat de Sade and devotedly loyal to him even at his trial and imprisonment. It is when Madame de Montreuil discovers that the sexually sadistic de Sade has seduced Anne, her young daughter, in a rendezvous in Venice that she turns all her energy against him pleading with Renée to leave de Sade. The Countesse de Saint with her whip is intrigued by de Sade and the moral Baronesse de Simaiane eventually introduces Renée to the freedom of her nunnery. Renée finally refuses to see de Sade when he is freed from prison and comes calling. Why she makes that crucial decision is never clear. Once her husband is free, she feels he can fend for himself. Anne devotes herself to a fortuitously luxuriant marriage lightly thinking about her affair with de Sade while Madame de Montreuil is devastated by Renée’s wasted life. The acting of one noted, one dimensional characters is superbly carried by this company of women in high wigs and ornate costumes but cannot make up for the text that has no dramatic structure. Grandage captures mood and emotion, high drama in the music and lighting, fluidity in the perfect pacing, and all for nothing. There is such waste of so much professional skill. His next production will probably be back to his usual success. One must congratulate him for risking this famous Japanese author in the West End…it is a noble gesture. No import or export.

March 13 – May 23/09

TWELFTH NIGHT by WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

To see the classics performed in the West End so successfully is so rewarding, knowing that there is an audience eager to go at prices they can afford. It is also seeing such quality productions with a cast of superb actors on the mark and not just starry filled with television stars as directed by Michael Grandage, our Mr Magic Donmar. This is available to the public and hopefully will continue to be so. Versions of 12th Night, which contains both comedy and darker tones of melancholia, are very often focused on its humour as with this production. Grandage is usually very specific in his detail and emotional weight. But here he has done a turn about on himself which is a matter of personal taste. All I can do is point out the actions and motivations and let you judge for yourself its ups and downs. The set is somewhere in coastal Spain, once called Iberia, as Shakespeare knew, and in a storm which flashes lightning and sounds of thunder a young girl is rescued at sea, then brought to a strange land. In order to be sure of her safety she is disguised as a boy in her brother Sebastian’s clothes of military design. Onto the set of huge louvered screen-doors that fold and reshape to need, we have reached land. When the story continues to the outdoors, the screens move into the wings and a high sunny sky on a beach is revealed with mellow lighting that glows with such welcoming rays. So Viola, Victoria Hamilton, our rescued heroine from the storm, begins her new life as a page boy to the bullish Prince Orsino as played by Mark Bonnar who is frustrated by his unrequited love of Olivia. Viola now called Cesario is asked to court the severely grief-stricken Olivia whom we see with her swan like neck and décolleté in a black elegant gown as a prim Puritan who has as her steward a prim Puritan Malvolio. But upon seeing Cesario, she falls madly in love abandoning her grief and Puritanism and dives into a sexually provocative predator in a stunning white suit and broad brimmed designer’s white hat. The shift is handled with such timely grace by Indira Varma. It is Olivia who does all the wooing to a reluctant Cesario. The casting here puzzles me. Victoria Hamilton is a feminine curvaceous Viola turned into a non-credible page Cesario. Her whole characterisation is based on feeling uncomfortable in the gender change. The tall willowy Indira Varma as Olivia boyishly slim and flat seems closer to credibility as Cesario while Hamilton would be totally believable as an over emotional Olivia. But since the setting is vaguely Spanish, the costumes a mixture of 1920s and other periods with a singing Feste in a patchwork exotic robe of Islam, and delightful music of ballads new and old sometimes made Flamenco, why not say as Grandage says, it’s all fiction and fantasy so why worry about authentic detail. The sun beats down on a beach and the pint-sized Ron Cook, the drunken uncle of Olivia, Sir Toby Belch, is trying to persuade stilt-sized Guy Henry, the aristocratic dim wit Sir Andrew Aguecheek into wooing Olivia. Henry’s Sir Andrew is a man so tall you think he’s on stilts which should make a fine combination of Mutt and Jeff, a famous comic team. But I fear for me the angry tirades of Robin Cook’s Sir Toby do not work as straight man to one of the best comic actors in the theatre, Guy Henry as Sir Andrew. Samantha Spiro’s endearing and articulately-humorous Maria, the hand maid of Olivia, is after Sir Toby and joins in the conspiracy of punishing Malvolio the prudish steward who feels so superior to their station. The renowned noise making scene of singing and dancing, in which Sir Toby and Sir Andrew blast away with Maria and whom the stern Malvolio chastens, is again for me not as mad capped as for example the wonderful version by the Filter company. The redeeming moment is Guy Henry with legs so extended he crosses stage in three leaps. The trio with the intermittent songs of Feste plan their revenge on Malvolio. They falsely forge a letter in which they claim Olivia will love him if he wears cross gartered yellow stockings smiling all the while. Here is the price of admission! Derek Jacobi at first prim and proper condescendingly dealing with the riff raff is immaculate in his snobbery. And then in the ultimate scene of the play’s comedy, he appears in a sea captain’s blue hat and jacket, white shorts, and yellow stockings cross gartered. He transforms into a free wheeling sea captain and then gives us impressions of what smile to choose until he climaxes into the right one which by that time has us on the floor with laughter. That sonorous voice of Jacobi with the colouring of the rainbow and the timing of migratory birds turns comedy into a classic rendering we shall not see again in the future. Of course, Olivia is shocked and Malvolia imprisoned as the conspirators play on. Until Sebastian, Viola’s twin brother, appears and the misidentity of lovers and events turn everything upside down including Sir Andrew duelling with Sebastian instead of Viola. In the end, Malvolia is freed and condemns the lot in a moving moment accusing children playing with fire, Orsino hesitates between Viola /Cesario and Sebastian, but finds his love in Viola, Olivia walks arm in arm with Sebastian, to our surprise Maria gets her man Sir Toby, a woe-begone Sir Andrew is gone, and Feste rather than Fabian sings us a fond farewell. Enjoy what you will, but above all be grateful for a joy that is first class on a joyride in the West End for Christmas and thereafter.

Dec 15/08 – March 7/09

IVANOV by ANTON CHEKOV

There is no question that the staging and production are superb with Michael Grandage’s sense of pace, building dramatic climaxes, and his special gift of bringing out the best in an actor’s performance. All this is strongly positive but one has to question some of the casting and Stoppard’s adaptation which edited much of the subtext to a tighter flow in the plotline but cut much of the period and atmosphere. It needs more time to develop the character’s thoughts and transitions, to catch the loss and the credit crunch of Ivanov’s estate highlighted here and thus making it more modern in concept than ever. We are superficially involved with Ivanov since Brannaugh’s performance is external, more clownish, the temper short with constant anger, rather than his reaching deep into the gut where the depression overcomes him and his pain is then felt by the audience. That profound anguish is no longer there but instead laughs are substituted. Is that what brings in the sold-out houses? Or is it Kenneth Branaugh? One can’t help but remember Ralph Fiennes’ disturbed Ivanov in Jonathan Kent’s potent production. However, there is here one very emotionally taut scene when Brannaugh is offered money by Lebedev to pay the debt to his wife Zinaida where Brannaugh collapses in shame. The real acting comes from Malcolm Sinclair as the penniless count, Ivanov’s uncle, sometimes drunk but always elegant; from Ivanov’s Jewish wife Anna played with fire by a heartbroken Gina McKee; from Kevin McNally’s Lebedev who sees the truth of their lives but helpless to alter it; from the comic relief of the card player James Tucker who almost steals the show; from the sometime moving but one noted Andrea Riseborough’s love-sick Sasha. The constant shouting of Lorcan Cranitch’s Borkin plus the bland and unenergised Sylvestra Le Tousle’s Zinaida as the  money-clutching wife of Lebedev lost two strong characters both in the writing and the performance. Chekhov’s basic impact is his insight into character, the mixture of humour and tragedy, the constant search for the meaning of life, the questioning of free will, and determining the direction of one’s life against the storm of change with its unpredictability. Ivanov is a man of the aristocracy forced by the change in the times to manage his estate and finances with all the responsibilities and dependencies of his staff and family. He is not made of this cloth and is failing desperately as a businessman. His penniless uncle, a count, seeks the rich widow to enrich his life but cannot go through with it. Ivanov once loved and then married the exciting Anna, a Jewess who had such intellectual appeal. In marrying Ivanov, her family disinherited and disowned her forever. Ivanov’s depression over his economic distress in addition to his loss of his whole way of life leads him into a loveless state towards his marriage. Anna is dying of tuberculosis and asks only for time to be shared with Ivanov before she dies. But Ivanov runs away to Lebedev’s house where his penny-pinching wife still holds the social occasions for distraction with the local upper strata which her daughter Sasha detests. The only real person Sasha can relate to is Ivanov whom she loves. There is little choice in her town. Ivanov agrees to marry Sasha after Anna dies but rather than face life, he shoots himself on his wedding day. The frugal answers to their wasted lives make a hash of all their incentives. But it will change one day…that’s the hope of the play. As change permeates the air today along with the undercurrent of this play, how timely and relevant it is in catching what’s in the air and hence its enormous success. Import and export for Broadway.

Sept 12 – Nov 29/08

SHADOWLANDS by WILLIAM NICHOLSON

This beautiful delicate play about love and loss remains a national treasure… time will never mar its beauty nor obliterate its indestructible sense of doubting God at the pain of dying. It was exquisite on television and in its varied productions but never has any actor given such heart-rending emotional substance as Charles Dance’s rendering of C. S. Lewis. The evening is entirely his as he graces the stage in the most memorable performance. The play is haunting in its fingering of pain, so tangible in its wounding, that one cannot leave the theatre unscathed. Dance’s portrayal of a late fifties bachelor, who falls in love for the first time with such innocence…such purity, moves us deeply. It is the true story of the Oxford don, children’s writer, scholar, C.S.Lewis who in his late fifties discovered love through the American-Jewish poetess, Joy Davidman, played by Janie Dee. She arrived in Oxford with her son Douglas to meet this shy philosophical don with his more extraverted brother Major Lewis. In her open direct manner with a New York sense of humour she stole his heart in slow graduated steps. Lewis, a religious man, who diagnosed the power of love philosophically but never erotically, had the sunshine of life beam on him with Joy and her son. He, at first, married her in a civil ceremony to enable her stay in England, and then truly married her with religious commitment when she collapsed with cancer, recognising his love only on the brink of losing her. His lateness was paid for by enduring the pain of such loss. During her remission they cocooned themselves in a romantic honeymoon, but she soon died at the Lewis’ home. He took on her son Douglas… both broken-hearted over her death, never to recover. The shadowland on earth is no comfort nor does the shadowland of heaven ease the heartache. Lewis did believe in heaven and doubted but Douglas did not believe and grieved for his missing mother. The play is more impressionistic in its brittle approach to the development of the characters stressing the storyline rather than progression through characterisation. It may not delve into the intellectuality of Lewis or the poetry of Davidman, but it does hit hard on the Christian faith of a man so wounded by the premature death of a woman he learned to love at such a slow pace. Dance movingly portrays the shyness of the man in his stooped walk, his shuffling gait, his downward cast eyes, his understated bearing. Dee gives us the joy of an unsentimental wise-cracking New Yorker with such ease and wins all our hearts in her endearing way. Christian Lees as Douglas gives the most sensitive enactment of a distilled child. The churlish John Standing, the exacting Richard Durden, and the entire cast are all of super quality and marvellously create the atmosphere as well as the characters living an Oxford-don life. Only the overbearing set of gigantic moving bookcases reaching the flies challenges the play and intrudes upon its intimacy..the stillness interrupted by lifting and opening the bookcases for a door, or tearoom, or open countryside, or the cupboard for Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. But in the end the play and the players are the enticement. Don’t miss it. Import!! Import !! Export for Broadway.

October 3/07...

THE LETTER by SOMERSET MAUGHAN

This is a surprise package where an old fashioned play proves that when a craftsman structures a play, it is timeless and holds the suspense of discovery till the very end. Revive this piece within its period, being authentic in its dress, manners, gestures, and cliché dialogue, and you have a show that grabs the audience. Sceptical as one might be, you are soon deeply involved in this well-made unpredictable play in which the colonial English in Malaya are politely outwitted and blackmailed as if it were a standard business deal by the Chinese. What Maughn proves is that he is a gifted storyteller and there is nothing like a good story. The production is true to the material and makes no apologies for such lines as, ‘He wasn’t a man anymore. He was a savage.’ It is language of that period and that character and you go with the atmosphere created first in the Malaysian bungalow and then marvellously sensual in the Singapore den of the tradesman who deals out the blackmail. While smoking his opium pipe, the room fills with incense sifting to the back row of the stalls while the seductive red draped curtains lure you into his power. The play opens with six shots being fired and the man Hammond drops to the ground. We see Leslie Crosbie shoot to kill but it takes the whole play to discover the truth of why she did it. As a result of the murder, her husband’s best friend, Howard Joyce, comes to her defence as a lawyer, being quite certain of her acquittal because of Hammond’s attempt at rape. All is well until Howard Joyce’s Chinese clerk Ong Chi Seng in his exact English tells Joyce to ‘brook no delay’ in obtaining a letter that Leslie Crosbie wrote to Hammond urging him over the night of the murder which his Chinese mistress now holds. It is Seng’s friend, the tradesman who has made the deal on the letter for $10,000. Joyce has then to corrupt his moral stand as a lawyer for the sake of his best friend and buy the letter or Leslie will be found out. Why did she invite Hammond to the house? She claims to buy a gun for Crosbie as a birthday present. There is no compromising on the price and so Joyce goes to the den to search out the Chinese mistress for the letter and bring $10,000 which Crosbie will have to pay. The Chinese mistress is a wounded creature bereft of Hammond, never touching the money. It is only after the trial and after Leslie’s freedom that the full truth emerges ... she was the rejected mistress of Hammond and shot him over his preference for a Chinese woman rather than herself. Crosbie, the unloved husband, had hoped to free himself of being a plantation manager and with $10,000 he was planning to buy his own plantation in the eventual chance of returning home to England comfortably rich. Joyce looks at the broken man who will live his life working to the end of his days in an unloved marriage and is devastated at the compromise he made of his legal standing for a worthless woman who ruined his friend. The case was a true story and epitomised the tragedies of life in the colonies. The cast is so subtle in their characterisations that the arrogance of the English toward the Chinese is delicately balanced. Jenny Seagrove’s Leslie Crosbie is a replica of the repressed English woman in a marriage of convenience which is so unsatisfying in a hot climate with no original cultural life to absorb and only idleness to dwindle away time. She has a vulnerability that is so engaging that one is convinced by her excuses and shocked at the truth. Jenny Seagrove carries that Celia Johnson hurtful look which cries out for comfort, for love, and is punished by being denied her raison d’etre. Anthony Andrews grippingly portrays a very real person as he reasons with the law and believes in the integrity of his work. His scene at his law office with his clerk, the delightful Jason Chan, is enchanting in its wit and in the finely tuned performances. Seeing the two men in the oriental den, Andrews so uncomfortable with the exchange and Chan in his element, is a marvellous contrast in the worlds they inhabit. The whole production is smoothly paced in a intensity of mood with an artistry well worth the price of admission. Import, import, import.

May 1st/07...

SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine

This has been reviewed when playing at the Menier Chocolate Factory. The only change is Jemma Russell playing brilliantly as Dot and in the second half as Dot’s daughter. Sets have been expanded for the west end theatre and though its impact is still enormous, the intimacy of the Menier had an added dimension one loses in a large theatre. It is an enchanting show and not to be missed. It’s set for Broadway export.

May 13 – September 2/06