Mind the Gap
The Lady Vanishes
by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, adapted by Anthony Lampard
Classic Thriller Theatre Company at the Ashcroft Theatre, Fairfield Halls, Croydon until 29th November, then on tour until 7th December
Review by Claire Alexander
Alfred Hitchcock directed over forty films, many of which are embedded in the national consciousness. Who fails to remember the horror of The Birds or the fist clenching fear of Vertigo? The Lady Vanishes came around the middle of his career and is less horror than thriller/mystery but nevertheless up there among his best and most remembered – ranked 15th on a website I looked at!
I was therefore interested to see what a stage production would make of it. It is set primarily on a train and this also creates a challenge for staging.
The Classic Thriller Theatre Company’s production adheres closely to Hitchcock’s original, based on the film script by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, and this version is adapted by Antony Lampard. The whole concept is based on Ethel Lina White’s 1936 novel, The Wheel Spins. We are introduced to an Austrian railway station in the 1930s just as Nazi Germany is coming to power. A spacious set and a backcloth depicting a grand middle European station gave the stage a good sense of depth. The trans-European train to London is delayed because of an avalanche somewhere over the Alps and a motley group of travellers are busy making alternative arrangements while they wait for the avalanche to be cleared. Charters (Denis Lil) and Caldicott (Ben Nealon) are determined to get to the test match in Manchester; Margaret (Rosie Thomson) and Eric 
(Mark Wynter) have a somewhat stormy illicit romance; Max (Nicholas Audsley) is a young engineer who also happens to have an interest in middle European folk music! Signor Doppo (Martin Carroll) is an Italian magician who also seems to have a special skill in making people disappear – a decoy perhaps? Dr Hartz (Andrew Lancel) is a German neurologist on his way to collect a mystery patient whom he needs to treat. Iris Henderson (Scarlett Archer) is a flighty young woman on her way home to get married and finally frumpy Miss Froy (Gwen Taylor) – the vanishing lady of the title – is a governess to an Austrian family on her way home to see her family. Or is she?
Suddenly (and somewhat too quickly, given we have been told to expect a long delay, which is a slight inconsistency in the script) the avalanche is cleared and we board the train. The set closes at this point to a couple of enclosed compartments, very authentic to trains of that era, and is also regularly transformed into the restaurant car. Miss Froy has befriended Iris, who (conveniently perhaps) had a bang on the head as she runs to board the train. But as Iris dozes off Miss Froy ‘disappears’ and when she wakes all the other passengers deny any knowledge of her ever existing! There is even another passenger who looks uncannily like Miss Froy sitting in her seat. As Iris becomes increasingly bewildered and then frantic about the whereabouts of her new friend the other passengers are slow to believe her. Dr Hartz diagnoses a head injury from the bang at the station! Only Max is one to help perhaps driven more by budding romance than his real belief in her story.
I don’t want to spoil the plot for those who want the surprise. Suffice to say it turns out to be an elaborate plot to kidnap Miss Froy who of course is not at all who she seems. After a brief and somewhat implausible shoot-out the English passengers get the train back on track and finally get to London. Charters and Caldicott discover the test match has been rained off and Iris’s fiancée is not there to meet her. Perhaps a good job as Max and Iris have (inevitably) fallen in love.
This production was entirely faithful to the 1930s. I liked the German welcome to station over the tannoy just before curtain up and this focussed our attention nicely. Both the train interior and the station set worked well, although the small compartments in which some of the scenes took place did obscure and limit the action rather. Perhaps that also accentuated the claustrophobia of the train however. Fortunately the restaurant car opened it up and ultimately most of the passengers and action congregated there. A soundscape of steam train added to the atmosphere. Some actors were better than others at subtly and consistently sustaining the swaying of the moving train. I would like to have seen this more as it added to the sense of place. On the whole the production was also played with that slightly heightened style which would have been of its time, but I liked Gwen Taylor’s performance as the frumpy and unflustered Miss Froy. She brought a sense of realism as she sat at the station quietly eating her supper, waiting for the train to leave. There was also some lovely banter from some of the other passengers and I thought the relaxed double act of Denis Lil and Ben Nealon as the quintessential English cricket fans added a real understated comedy to the action. If they couldn’t get to Old Trafford they’d make their own test match from sugar lumps!!
This was an accomplished and experienced cast and they worked hard with energy and commitment to bring the script to life and maintain the style but I am not sure how successfully the individual parts added up to the whole. The action was plodding at times and at points in the second half it almost felt more like farce, as people jumped in and out of train compartments looking for each other. I never really got a sense of Hitchcockian tension and the mystery was relatively easily solved. But if the Croydon audience on a damp November Monday is anything to go by The Lady Vanishes will prove popular and a reminder that there is still a place for old fashioned mystery in the theatre of 2019.
Claire Alexander
November 2019
Photography by Paul Coltas
Curious Etiquettes and the Rights of Passage
She–Merchants, Buccaneers and Gentlewomen
by Katie Hickman
Arts Richmond, Richmond Literature Festival, at Duke Street, Richmond until 20th November
Review by Eliza Hall
For the first time it is hard to discipline myself to write this review when all I want to do is read Katie Hickman’s intriguing and very accessible book! Nevertheless, hearing her talk was captivating, delightful and engaging. Katie Hickman is the easy raconteur, the careful and thorough researcher and a writer who is as easy to read as she is to listen to.
Starting off by reminding us of the birth of the East India Company in 1600, she set the context by reading a horrifying report of a story that almost entirely destroyed the small seagoing vessel that was India – bound several years later. Reading to us the description of the storm at sea, experienced by Charlotte Barry as recorded by her ‘husband’ William Hickey, our speaker gave us, the audience, a vivid picture of the dangers and horrors faced by anyone travelling to India in the seventeenth century. Charlotte died only a few months after arriving.
Perhaps many of us already knew that sailors believed that a woman aboard ship was considered to be unlucky and as our raconteur explained that for some women the hazardous journey and their lives, if they survived at sea, would have been challenging and often different to our preconceived ideas of life in India. There was no doubt, as our speaker, Katie Hickman made it clear from her research, that women were not particularly welcome on arrival in India either. In fact were blamed for the loss of their male dominance there. What we all began to realise was that the women who lived in India were changed by the lives they lived there.
In order to survive and to make a new entirely different life for themselves often depended on their individual, and as the author stated ‘rich and varied’, motives for travelling in the first place. Our writer explained her own belief that their motives were more robust than those natural wants of marriage and giving birth, fragile those these could be ‘but something more robust : the quest for a better life and a fearless spirit of adventure’ (p 19).
Some might have been looking for a husband, our own previous assumptions, perhaps, but Katie Hickman explained and retold the stories of several women in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who went to make money through trading and producing articles, others to explore and record flora and fauna or the geology. Some might have been maids in England or a woman’s companion, who rose to status denied them at home, others risked their lives to make financial gain which they took with them back to the British Isles.
Katie Hickman’s own research for She–Merchants, Buccaneers and Gentlewomen involved, as she said, digging in the British Library and explained that her research involved reading diaries, letters, memoirs. She mentioned Samuel Purchas, an English cleric, who published volumes of reports by travellers to foreign countries, including his interview with Mrs Frances Steele, the wife of Richard, who had plans to design the waterworks in Agra. Mrs Steele had been a maid and companion to another woman travelling to India, but who, when married, became rich and influential. At one point she was summoned to visit the widow of a brother of Emperor Jahangir. Our speaker then read the description of the clothes of this Indian lady. It is thought that this is possibly one of the first ever descriptions of an Englishwoman’s visit to a high ranking Indian woman in her own home.
All of our speaker’s tales were contextualised in the development of India by the colonialists, from her descriptions of the curious etiquettes and the rights of passage, including the ‘setting up’ ceremony. By the eighteenth century the East India Company had gained access and control of other parts of the country and Ms Hickman described the effect of the Evangelical Movement and the changed mental landscape that developed. English women were beginning to be accused of loss of control of parts of India. Not to say that it was due to the fact that women were intrigued by the lives of their servants and the mysteries of Indian life from which they were kept so separate. Nevertheless it was often the women who took an interest in the music, the religions, dress and cultural traditions of the country. Katie Hickman told us of Fanny Parks’ India diaries, how she travelled, learned languages, ate the local foods and played the sitar and clearly adored Indian women’s lifestyles and encouraged friendships. British interests were not reciprocated and were only understood when women began writing their letters and memoirs, which according to Katie Hickman were hard to find in the seventeenth century and did not really happen until nearly a hundred years later. Plenty of women were writing by the nineteenth century and attitudes and interests were made more transparent. The alien cultures of both prevailed.
As Ms Hickman said, both in her introduction and in answer to questions from the audience, these diaries and letters, some published, others still in manuscript form, were intended only for private readership and addressed in the most part to family members. Katie Hickman stated that the British Library contains ‘an extraordinary rich collection of female voices’. Those early adventurers probably did not see themselves as colonisers, even though in the early days of colonialisation the East India Company advertised from Leadenhall Street for specific types of women for soldiers who could prove their present ‘sober and civil lives’. Others were not so lucky and Katie Hickman cited girl orphans from Christ’s Hospital being sent, possibly as young as twelve years, who would be on board ship for eight months. One can only surmise what such an experience was like. We were told how Hickey, based in Calcutta as it was called or mispronounced by the British in the seventeenth century (now Kolkata), apparently wrote about different women, including dress makers and milliners, bakers and other trades that entrepreneurial women were able to invent or develop for themselves, as slowly the establishment of a colony emerged. Our own preconceptions on arrival at the evening’s talk were delightfully reduced. To quote Katie Hickman on p6 of her book: ‘The history of Englishwomen in India has turned out to be not at all what I was expecting it to be.’
Katie Hickman had asked the questions as to who these British women were and how had they come to be in India and what their lives like? What was their relationship to the vast country and its people? These questions she poses in her Introduction (p13), and in answering through detailed research, has produced a fascinating book that invites us to discover for ourselves, thanks to this writer’s ability to research and write and to hold our attention as a speaker, so engagingly.
A fascinating story and a fitting speaker to end the three evenings presented by Arts Richmond.
Eliza Hall
November 2019
Photography courtesy of Arts Richmond
Writer’s Block
Frankenstein
by Rona Monro, adapted from the novel by Mary Shelley
Selladoor Productions in co-production with Belgrade Theatre Coventry, Perth Theatre and Matthew Townshend Productions at Richmond Theatre until 23rd November, then on tour until 7th March
Review by Mark Aspen
The word Frankenstein has become commonplace in the English language; the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “a thing that becomes terrifying or destructive to its maker”. However, the word conjures up a wide spectrum of images, from the untidily scarred, bolt-through-the-neck flattop monster of the Boris Karloff Halloween mask, to the metaphorical creature analysed by so many philosophising academics. So what new approach can one make to revitalise this familiar monster of a story?
On press night, The Little Green outside Richmond Theatre was in the throes of the first winter frost and wreathed in mist. Inside the set for Frankenstein was heavy with Arctic “ice” and wreathed in thick fog (the smoke machine does sterling service all evening). So the atmosphere (literal and figurative) was set. Becky Minto’s set is strikingly cold and foreboding, a multileveled series of stone facades, linked by scattered birch trees, dotted with frozen bookcases. Gothic horror touches are added by Grant Anderson’s lighting, cool purple backlights punctuated by silver lightning strokes, while composer Simon Slatter adds in the sound of groaning sheet ice cracking, for true to the novel we start in the Arctic Ocean. Maybe the glassless windows represent Mary Shelley’s stacked stories (storeys of stories?), the story of Walton the captain of the polar exploration ship, the story of Victor Frankenstein, the story of The Creature himself.
So what is the new take that adaptor, Rona Munro brings to Frankenstein? Answer, a new story to add in, that of Mary Shelley herself. Shelley was a maverick, a radical atheist who delighted in kicking over the traces of the times see lived in, the earliest years of the eighteenth century. Munro sees Shelley’s story as hintingly autobiographical. Ironically, in a programme note, Munro says that she has an “aversion to analyses of a writer’s work … as if they gave [us] a clearer idea of what the writer meant to create than [the writer] could ever have had themselves”. This is precisely what Munro has done! She misses the main point of Shelley’s Frankenstein: that it is about what it means to be human. The humanity is expressed through a need of acceptance and of love, and a respect for the precious sanctity of life. All this is lost under a welter of social and political polemics. And it doesn’t work. Director Patricia Beneke, takes up Munro’s proffered cudgels with a vengeance, and indeed picks up the play’s sub-theme of vengeance, and really takes it to town. And we end up with a stuttering, spluttering fragmentation of what could have been a well-told story.
None of this is helped by some eclectic casting and eclectic accents (to say nothing of some really strange hair-dos). Yes, this is meant to be an all-time and no-time setting, but the references in the text clearly fix Frankenstein in Shelley’s own time. And, yes, the majority of the actors are Scottish, a scene towards the end of the play is set in Perth, and indeed one of the co-production companies is based in Perth. Does this, though, justify forgetting that the play’s protagonists come from Geneva in circa 1800? The credited accent and vocal coach clearly has never been to Geneva.
Eilidh Loan’s Mary Shelly is a sarky estuarine iconoclast, interfering constantly in her creations. Unsympathetic and cynical, she shows no signs of humanity. As Victor Frankenstein’s loved-ones are sequentially killed by the Monster, she screams in delight “Now that is a proper deathbed scene!” Although the concept is to reflect her own creation of Frankenstein the novel in Victor Frankenstein’s creation of the Monster, her distain for him is undisguised. “Such a great hero!” she spits out scornfully. Even the Monster does not escape her biting tongue. “I will look at you… I will understand you”, she superciliously tells him.
While the rest of the characters are trying to get on with the story, Mary Shelley seems in a different play, a piece of arch metatheatre in which she casually disregards the fourth wall. Consequently, as soon as the action gets into gear, in steps Shelley and stamps on the brake to make yet another sardonic remark. The pace of the play is lost and the action flounders. If she hates her own novel this much, why is she writing it? After ten minutes, Mary Shelley becomes unbearably irritating.
One has the impression that here is a cast of seven very good actors (including Loan) whose chance to act is constantly frustrated by the jerky progression of the play’s action.
Ben Castle Gibb’s Victor Frankenstein is a played as a weak character, always running to catch up with himself, having frenetic bursts of intellectual activity between long periods of mental breakdown. The emotional journey of the slow realisation that playing at being God and creating life is not a good idea is put over well by Castle Gibb. His character’s intellectual arrogance though does seem at odds with cowing to Shelley, his own creator. Constantly on his knees before his black leather clad mistress, he seems to be submitting willingly to some fem-dom ritual.
Michael Moreland imbues the Monster with a sense of emotive depth, but his character lacks the fright-fest factor. When we first see him, he seems like a gravel-voiced aged rock-star whose jeans have shrunk in the wash, blearily trying to shake off a hangover. And why do baddies always have Cockney accents (again one acquired in Vaud)? I speak as an affronted Londoner. But then again, is the Monster a baddy? He is created as a child of innocence, a tabula rasa, in whom abhorrence begets abhorrence and violence begets violence. In him we see the capacity to love and the desire to be loved. Moreland creates a touching moment of understanding with a blind and aged outcast gentleman (beautifully played by Greg Powrie) when finally approaching him in his mountain cottage, where the Monster has long been a stowaway observing the loving nature of the old man’s family. It is an affecting moment until again being shattered by a sarcastic interjection by Shelley.
The non-principal actors double their roles, and Powrie makes a sympathetic Father, the hapless father of Victor and adopted father of Elizabeth, who subsequently falls in love and marries Victor in a fatally short marriage. Natali McCleary creates a powerful portrait of Elizabeth, a character buoyed in the strength of love.
If Frankenstein is a parable about the corruption of innocence, then it is perhaps most sharply focussed in the episode in which the Monster kills Victor’s child brother William, a neat cameo for Thierry Mabonga (uncredited, but he also takes the roles of Captain Walton and of Henry, Victor’s friend from childhood). The Monster frames William’s nurse, Justine, a long-term member of the Frankenstein household, by planting the child’s locket in her cloak. Sarah Macgillivray is true to the role in playing the distraught and confused Justine, whose faithfulness to the family leads to her being coerced into making a false confession. Macgillivray speech at the gallows is achingly affecting as she tries to retract her confession and pleads her innocence. Here is a real person whom Macgillivray brings to life at this point … ironically she is immediately hanged.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein touches on many deeply philosophical themes, the basis of life, the ethical boundaries of scientific research, nature versus nurture, the human need for belonging, the power of love and many associated threads of thought. In this dramatisation, almost none of these are touched on, if only perfunctorily. Instead we get just tangential asides. It is rather like one of those academic treaties that have half a page of footnotes all through, which keep distracting you and you have to re-read each paragraph to get the sense. At least with a book you can cover the bottom of the page.
Munro’s adaptation has Shelley constantly haranguing men, particularly Frankenstein. He is one of “the great men”, she sneers, who “do not own the devastation that they create”. Munro seems to be interpolating feminism as the overarching sub-theme. Maybe it is, but Munro’s point would be better served by cogent arguments rather than just a rant. Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft was of course a very lucid exponent of women’s rights. She died shortly after Mary’s birth, as did the fictional Victor Frankenstein’s mother, and there are many parallels between Mary Shelley’s family life and that of her creation. Her novel was written during a week of dreary weather in Lord Byron’s villa in the hills above Geneva, where a group of friends rose to Byron’s challenge to write a horror story. The teenaged Mary may well have felt daunted competing again literary giants such as Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, her lover whom she was later to marry. But she did win the contest!
Rona Munro is a well-established as a writer whose adaptions for stage and film have gained her wide acclaim, witness her new stage version of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. So there is a sense of anti-climax to this adaptation of Frankenstein, which seems to bear out that OED definition, “a thing that becomes terrifying or destructive to its maker”.
Mark Aspen
November 2019
Photography by Tommy Ga-Ken Wan
Surviving Survivor’s Guilt
The Night Watch
by Hattie Naylor, adapted from the book by Sarah Waters
The Original Theatre Company and York Theatre Royal, at the Ashcroft Theatre, Fairfield Halls, Croydon until 23rd November
Review by Denis Valentine
For the first half especially The Night Watch offers a very intriguing look into a period of time often overlooked by the mass event that came before it. The play delves into the lives of those attempting to live on from the Second World War and raises themes not often thought about when it comes to those time periods. Each actor on stage brings with them an air of a person living with a form of survivor’s guilt, an attribute not often thought about for those who outlived the war.
There are many duologue scenes with characters in similar situations, but each trying to find their own way in struggling to develop back into the world. This is seen with Lewis MacKinnon and Sam Jenkins-Shaw in their first meeting since wartime, both playing two sides of nervousness against each other and the search for how to move forward. Phoebe Pryce as Kay and Mara Allen as Mickey, both from a war effort perspective, remind everyone that as well as fighting overseas there was very much a war effort at home and that crucial inroads for the roles of women in the workforce were being made.
Maybe the most emotional journeys of the night strongly played from Louise Coulthard, who as Viv has to deal with getting pregnant from a random encounter, having her brother in prison as a conscientious objector and in a beautiful moment return something valuable to a person that helped her make it out of the Blitz alive. Coulthard offers a strong presence on stage and the fact that by 1947 her character possibly has the most full circle journey out of anyone in the play offers the most hope.
The set and costume from David Woodhead are first class and really help to capture the spirit and reality of the times they are depicting. The music and sound effects also accentuate the action well and add to the tension of the dramatic moments.
Special mention must go to Izabella Urbanowicz who as Mrs. Leonard delivers two moments of almost narration in the show which are very powerful and could have happily been listened to for an untold amount of time.
The one real disappointing aspect of the play itself is that for the second half rather than advancing and moving forward with the threads and developments established before the interval the play spends the entire second hour going back in time thus effectively ending anything that was being put in place before it. As interesting as it is to see characters in a previous state, it adds a slightly plodding feel to proceedings as the play is spending its entire second act just to see how things fell in place for the now unfinished story threads in the first.
It’s interesting to note that one of the taglines for the show’s description is “a poignant portrait of four ordinary people caught up in the aftermath of an extraordinary time”, which for the first half of the play rings true, but rather than continuing to explore the aftermath the play spends the entire second half right back in the extraordinary time which, although interesting in itself, negates the actual premise of the play and what was being built up in the first hour. By going back in time there is essentially no payoff or conclusion to what was built up and the ending more drifts along rather than landing with any real dramatic poignancy or punch.
One thing shows will initially struggle with as this venue attempts to re-establish itself is that the stage auditorium hosts a very large amount of seats which although the numbers in attendance for most fringe venues in London would be quite sufficiently full it will take a lot more to have the same effect in The Ashcroft Playhouse.
Denis Valentine
November 2019
Photography by Mark Douet
Lovingly Created, Meticulously Executed
Pornography
by Simon Stephens
Teddington Theatre Club at the Coward Studio, Hampton Hill Theatre until 23rd November
Review by Melissa Syversen
Ah, the details. The details! The sheer level of details in this production. It makes my dramaturgs heart happy just to think about it. If you are going to see Pornography, (this reviewer think that you should) playing at the Hampton Hill Theatre this week, do arrive early. That way you will have enough time to fully enjoy the incredibly high level of care put into each element of this production. Whether it be the tannoy announcements, the whiteboard at the top of the stairs or posters on the wall, it is all meticulously executed. Just look at the set: the team behind Pornography has brilliantly created a Circle line train carriage inside the Coward Studio. I don’t know who set designers Jenna Powell and Lizzie Lattimore had to bribe at TfL but everything is there, the tube line maps, the little blue stickers with info, the logos. Even the fastening at the bottom of the yellow poles is the same!
Gushing aside though; written by Simon Stephens, the story of Pornography takes place over roughly the week between the Live 8 Charity concerts that took place on 2nd July 2005 and leading up to the London terror attacks on 7th July 2005. I won’t go into too much details regarding the plot, but there are multiple narratives. We are introduced to 
eight people: a pair of reunited siblings, a lonely widow, an angry schoolboy with a difficult home life, a former student and professor meeting for drinks, a working mum, and a man travelling into London from Manchester with a heavy rucksack. Pornography is not an easy watch. Its different stories and characters are all uncomfortable on multiple levels. I am unfamiliar with the original text by Stephens, but in the director’s notes in the programme, it says that it is written in seven blocks of text that each has a number between one and seven. There are no specifics regarding order or number of performers, it is a text that is malleable and encourages you to make it your own. As such I can only speak to the text as it has been cut and edited together in this specific production. Here the monologues and duologues each have a scene each in each act (the running time is about two hours with a twenty-minute interval) one going into the next. It flows nicely and even when characters jump around between different continuities within the scene, it rarely feels clunky. This is due to good blocking and effective use of 
light. Some storylines feel more organic than others in this edit but they are all interesting on their own. The scenes and characters are introduced with fairly little exposition. It is a testament to the skill of the cast and creatives how quickly the audience picks up on unsettling or unnerving situations and the layers within the stories. The cast is all very good, though I will give a special mention to Mandy Stenhouse as a wonderfully realised and grounded Widow and Benjamin Buckley as the angry teenager Jason. They both bring an assured and specifically nuanced performance, with pitch-perfect energy.
Despite appearances, the events of 7th July are not so much the point of the story as they are the framework around it. is a play about people and a story about London. It has heightened elements, but what it boils down to is that we know these people. We know this London and we all know the situations the people in it find themselves in, regardless of the major event that is about to take place. It is a complex piece with its many themes and mountains of possibility within the text; and all of this is exceptionally well handled, with great sensitivity, by its director Josh Clarke. The staging of the story inside a Circle Line train carriage with the audience in a traverse, the mixture of CCTV style live-feeds, video clips, simple yet effective blocking of the action, all create a precise and cohesive piece of theatre. Even at the end, notice how the actors lay down their yellow cards. As with everything else in this production, the beauty is in the details. Originally written in 2005 as a response to the attacks and premiering in Germany, Pornography didn’t have its UK premiere until 2008 at the Traverse Theatre during the Edinburgh International Theatre Festival. I could easily see Clarke and his cast take this lovingly created production back up north to Edinburgh for the Fringe festival next year.
Melissa Syversen
November 2019
Photography by Dave Shortland and Rebecca Dowbiggin
Not Engraved in Stone
Keeping Classics Alive
by Tamsin Shasha
Actors of Dionysus at the Athenæum Club, Pall Mall, 14th November
Review by Mark Aspen
What you can learn under the auspices of Actors of Dionysus is surprisingly broad: for example how to get into the Athenæum Club without a tie (succeed) or a cure for impotence (failed)! I speak not for myself about either subterfuge you understand, but I can tell you the secret of the first … you wear a dog collar and say you are a clergyman!
However the most enriching thing you can learn with Actors of Dionysus is the vibrancy and vivacity that springs from the Classics and that has made Classical drama the most fertile ground 
for the imagination of the possible and for the understanding of humanity, a ground that even after two-and-a-half millennia still bears precious fruit. AoD quotes from Pericles, “What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others”. For this is what AoD as a thriving company has striven to do over the twenty-six years of its existence, since it was formed in the summer of 1993 as the brainchild of eminent classicist and translator David Stuttard and a band of like-minded individuals, including Tamsin Shasha, the director of the current evening’s performance.
There is a strong evangelical element to AoD and it has an active educational outreach to schools and colleges, with a view to inspiring the young of the 21st century and firing them up to as much a love of the Classics as AoD itself has. It is however a highly successful producing company whose approach is to enhance the Classics with lively translations and an innovative approach. Hence its 2015 production of Medea featured aerial ballet, whereas the 2017 version of Antigone used drones flying above its austere set. If this sounds gimmicky, think again, for these approaches are beautifully relevant and inform the narrative.
Nevertheless, it is the power of the ancient texts that shines through as the guiding beacon in AoD’s work, and this was consummately exhibited in this private event at the Athenæum Club, where a specially invited audience witnessed the skills of the actors at the core of the company.
As an exemplar of AoD’s specialism in Greek drama in English translation, the performance that was offered took place within the plush, leather and oak surroundings of the Athenæum’s Smoking Room, hence without set, and also without costumes, the actors being clad in simple stage black. Consequently, the focus was on the text, the acting and voices of the performers, who included a chorus of singers from Vocal Explosion.
The pieces chosen were from two of the most archetypical of Greek tragedies, Aeschylus’ trilogy The Oresteia (Ὀρέστεια) and The Women of Troy (Τρῳάδες) of Euripides. Both these plays deal with the aftermath of the Trojan War, seen from different perspectives and from two sides of the Aegean Sea. The subject of The Women of Troy is the suffering of the noblewomen of the defeated royalty of Troy, now prisoners of war of the Greeks, and this was the centrepiece of the evening’s performance. An extract from this play was proceeded by a soliloquy from Agamemnon (Ἀγαμέμνων). Agamemnon concerns the fatal consequences of the eponymous Greek hero’s decade-long absence from his wife, Clytemnestra, the Queen of Mycenae.
In this production the traditional Greek chorus, omnisciently commenting on the action of the play, was absent and reflected instead by singing of the Vocal Explosion chorus. Its conductor and soloist is Juliet Russell, an international award-winning composer, but known at the choir’s base city of Brighton for the annual Burning the Clocks mid-winter festival. Specialising in Georgian and Corsican music, Vocal Explosion is a world music choir, but here its music edged towards the otherworldly, ethereal and haunting. Its main a cappella phrasing was from the phoneme of the sounds that form the basis of classical and European languages, dissociated from the connotations of the words themselves. A hair-raising buzz of intoned murmurs, punctuated by a staccato “ma, ma” sound introduced the entrance of Clytemnestra.
Agamemnon, the first play of Aeschylus’ The Oresteia trilogy begins with the news that, after a decade’s absence, King Agamemnon is returning home, having, with the other Greeks been victorious in the war against Troy. A watchman, seeing the signal beacons, has expressed his joy, but has indicted that all has not been well at home. Queen Clytemnestra, in a long soliloquy, describes the scene from her vantage point on the battlements of the clifftop palace. Dissembling, she expresses her elation, but disguises the resentment that she feels for Agamemnon, and that she is seeking revenge for his sacrifice of their daughter Iphigenia, but she does not let on that she has been having an adulterous affair with Aegisthus, rival to Agamemnon. Established actress and drama academic, Catherine Livesey was bitingly incisive in the role of Clytemnestra, with that edge of a woman who says one thing, thinks another; who plans to get even, and has the ruthlessness to carry out those plans.
We were indeed literally having some very nice canapés, but if Livesey’s Clytemnestra was the picante starter course for the evening’s figurative gourmandising on the classics, then the rich meaty course was the excerpt from Euripides’ The Women of Troy. Troy has fallen, and the women of the royal family lament that their city has been plundered, their husbands and sons killed, and they are to be taken away as concubines or slaves of the Greeks. The princess Cassandra has been raped (and later, as the forced concubine of Agamemnon, will be murdered by Clytemnestra) and the young princess Polyxena has been killed as a sacrifice to the Greek warrior Achilles. Generally, there is about as much mayhem as it is possible to imagine. But there is worse to come, a Greek herald arrives to tell the princess Andromache, widow of Hector, that that her baby, the Prince Astyanax, is condemned to death. The Greeks do not want to risk the boy growing up and avenging his father.
The Greek herald, Talthybius is one of Euripides’ most three-dimensional characters. Here is a man torn between his duty and his conscience. He is a soldier obeying the order to take Astyanax, but deeply troubled the prospect of having the blood of an innocent baby on his hands. Matt Barber (whom we have recently seen in the thrillers, The Frightened Lady and The Lady Vanishes) expressed the aching dichotomy of this humane man with a keen-edged incisiveness.
The last member of the Trojan royal family to hold the baby is his grandmother, the dethroned Queen Hekabe. This role was brilliantly acted by Annette Andre, the prolific and much feted television and film actress of the swinging decades, who portrayed Hekabe with heart-rending intensity. “Here lies a little boy, whom the Greeks killed because they feared him so much.” Andre in fact stepped into the role at the last minute with consummate ease, witness to her wide experience, which has ranged from ballet to musicals, including the (sort-of) classical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.
In the bitter catalogue of suffering that is The Women of Troy, the fate of Andromache is arguably the worse. Her husband, Hector has been killed by Achilles. Their baby son, Astyanax is now to be killed Neoptolemus, Achilles’ son by throwing the baby from the city walls. Neoptolemus is to take Hector’s brother, Helenus, as his slave, and the devastated Andromache is to become his concubine, effectively Neoptolemus’ perpetual sex slave in the context of the brutality of Classical warfare. Tamsin Shasha is a foremost Classical tragic actress and she is outstanding in the role of Andromache. Phrases such as “pouring out his life” flow straight form her soul, but she knows how to use brief silences to overwhelming effect.
In the hands of Actors of Dionysus, The Women of Troy is not a withering curiosity of 2,435 years ago, but a real event happening now. Both the cast and the audience were moved beyond tears at the enormity of the agonising torment of these real women.
However Actors of Dionysus are not all about tragedy, witness their acclaimed 2016 production of Lysistrata, Aristophanes’ political satire cum out-and-out sex-romp. It was in this vein that AoD showcase was rounded off by a surprise appearance of the famous stand-up comedian Joe Pasquale. Pasquale’s well-known idiosyncratic voice, which he himself described as like “Noddy with a hernia” is not suited to acting the Classics he said, but then went on to prove himself wrong. He is in fact a very versatile straight actor and writer, as well as being a sought-after comedian. (He is appearing this winter as Wishee Washee in Aladdin at the Milton Keynes Theatre.) Our invited audience of classicists and Greek theatre lovers immediately warmed to his open, self-deprecating style, which was full of wit and certainly very funny. Pasquale’s all too short performance was of snippets of Classical poetry and prose or of parodies thereof. Many revolved around the primordial god, Eros as the god of lust. Oh, and it is the greybeard Eros in his later years who is searching for the cure for impotence.
And eh! Pasquale managed to get into the Athenæum Club without a tie or a dog collar. A quick wit clearly opens doors and as just well, for without him our gourmet soiree of the Classics would not have had its dessert course.
Mark Aspen
November 2019
Photography courtesy of Actors of Dionysus, Katerina Kalogeraki and Joe Pasquale
Military Engagements: Play of Significance
Days of Significance
by Roy Williams
The Questors at The Studio, Ealing until 23rd November
Review by Viola Selby
Through Lucy Aley-Parker’s direction, Roy Williams’ Days of Significance is made even more terrifyingly raw, yet captivatingly compelling, as the lives of young and ill-prepared soldiers sent off to fight in the Iraq war are laid bare.
Starting off on a boozed-up Saturday night, the audience is straight away assaulted with shouting and screaming, constant swearing and a lot of urination and puking. A scene many of us know all too well yet not so much from a play setting, especially one which bases its inspiration from Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, helping to instantly surprise the audience and grab our attention. The actors also do not hold back, fully committing themselves to the drunk revelries and fighting scenes. Yet in a mesmerising way that also shows the superficial masks of their characters occasionally slipping to reveal the fears and vulnerabilities of these young people, a skill definitely shown by Joshua Perry and Matthew Saldanha, who play Jamie and Ben the two members of the group who go off to war. Perry and Saldanha manage to carefully convey their characters’ developments in an emotionally mature way; from being lads showing off their bravado as a front to their mates, to two young boys thrown into the heat of battle, no longer knowing what is wrong and what is right as they just try to survive.
This sudden scene change, from a fun night out in England to an active war zone in Iraq, makes the scenes that follow all the more shocking as it is not what we as viewers were expecting. The shock is also made more real by the use of just one set design used so creatively throughout the play by set designer Georgia Wilmott; a single wall that once represented the front of Lenny’s burger bar, now acts the only protection for a seriously injured officer and his three soldiers, all waiting to be rescued – a cutting scene that is professionally performed by Perry and Saldanha with Jason Lynch-Welch and Karl Knarr.
However, this section of the play is also given the most personal of scenes through the ingenious use of a projector and TV screen, made real by Gavin Jones and Terry Mummery. On the screen we are shown ‘home videos’ at the camp, made by Saldanha’s character Ben for his girlfriend Trish back home. In the first of these, the boys are messing about, jokingly humping each other and making fun of a naughty picture Ben’s girlfriend has sent him. In the other, we see a much-changed Ben, desperately clinging on to some normality and trying to make sense of what is going on. This change is extremely harrowing and is conducted in a sensitive and thought-provoking way.
Finally, we are brought back to England some months later to see the awful after-effects of the Iraq war whilst at a fun and booze filled wedding of two members of the group we met at the beginning. We find out from the two boys who went to war that one did not make it, and is now regarded as a hero by all, whilst the other faces jail time and court cases for the well-documented atrocities committed by soldiers on Iraqi prisoners. Again the drunk acting is done with such devotion and detail that it makes one question the sober levels of the actors themselves. Even through all the merriment, Roselle Hirst and Fiona Gough as Ben and Jamie’s girlfriends Trish and Hannah, are particularly sublime in their ability to show the anger, confusion and grief behind their characters’ drinking, highlighting even more just how vulnerable these young people truly are. However it is through arguments and monologues of support and experience given by such characters as Dan and Lenny, each played with such perfect passion by Bradley Peake and Julian Casey, that truly makes the audience question everything they ever thought both about what happened in Iraq and who was at fault. This is not just any old war time play, this is definitely a play of significance.
Viola Selby
November 2019
Photography by Jane Arnold-Forster
American Minimalism Meets French Surrealism
Orphée
by Philip Glass, based on the film by Jean Cocteau
English National Opera at the London Coliseum until 29th November
Review by Eugene Broad
The English National Opera at the London Coliseum revisited the underworld for a final time this season, in a precisely-paced and crisp production of Philip Glass’s Orphée, directed deliciously in an ENO debut for Netia Jones.
Glass based – or in his view, reflected – his opera on the 1950 Jean Cocteau film by the same name, the first of an operatic trilogy driven by Cocteau’s work. This idea of reflection is core to the philosophy of the production, mirrors acting as portals between the corporeal and Stygian dimensions. But there is a constant reflection on the earlier versions of the myth of Orpheus within the stagecraft, composition, and life experiences of Glass and Cocteau themselves.
Cocteau and Glass’s Orphée is a celebrated Parisian poet, who after a string of successes has become self-obsessed with his fame, but has simultaneously lost his creative muse. A drunken brawl leaves his young poet-rival, Cégeste, dead – with some implicating Orphée in his death. Cégeste’s mysterious benefactor, the Princess, instructs Orphée to help her (inter-dimensional) chauffeur, Heurtebise, to transport Cégeste’s body. Witnessing the Princess apparently bring Cégeste back to life and travel through a mirror, Orphée becomes obsessed by the Princess – who in the underworld is some kind of civil servant in the department of deaths.
Taking a shaken Orphée home, Heurtebise falls in love with Orphée’s wife, Eurydice – the mirror inverse of Orphée’s love for the Princess. After an accident orchestrated by the Princess, Eurydice dies and with Heurtebise’s instruction and guidance, Orphée is taught how to travel to the underworld.
After Orphée confesses his reciprocated love to the Princess, and Heurtebise confessing to Eurydice, a humorous Kafkaesque tribunal allow Orphée and Eurydice to return to their correct realm.
The tribunal in the underworld
The usual Orphic condition is established – Orphée may never look at Eurydice again. Orphée – here possibly intentionally – breaks the condition, both returning to the underworld. The Princess orders Heurtebise to reset Orphée’s and Eurydice’s lives, committing an act of sacrificial love, with Orphée and Eurydice having had their memories of the underworld now also wiped.
As Jones comments, “Orphée is an opera of a film of a play of a poem of an opera” and her production and direction makes this clear. All elements of the stagework, set and production hint at the film origins of Orphée. Dynamism is given by impressive moving sets and projection work, which never distract from the story or narrative as a whole. The fluidity and aesthetic of the production and set incorporate a cheerful 1950s aesthetic (in the world of the living) and a greyscale Stygian underworld – as if a black and white film. Moving projections show the underworld as bombed out ruins, as lost souls aimlessly stumble through them – going hollow with the passage of time.
Musically, Glass’s composition doesn’t shine here. There are his usual signatures – ostinato, breathless woodwind, the steady thrum of strings. There are very few moments of brilliance within the composition, with the most stirring and memorable motifs in the second act. However masterfully Geoffrey Paterson conducts ENO’s orchestra, Glass hasn’t given much to the production; although suffering loss of his own at the time of composition, his work here feels more routine rather than inspired.
That isn’t to say the composition is weak or shoddy. It’s consistent, and clearly has a direction. There are Gallic reminders that Glass studied in Paris in the mid-20th century, and references to ancient Greek pentatonic minor modal harmonies used to great effect in the Stygian scenes. But where the production is so sleek and cinematic – truly feeling more like a scored film – it’s a shame for Glass’s composition to feel almost forgettable. But perhaps that is just a testament to how tight and flowing Jones’s modern and multimedia take on Orphée is.
As to be expected from the ENO, the singers are all incredibly highly polished – surely enough to see one’s own reflection. Nicky Spence’s performance as the interdimensional chauffeur Heurtebise had a delicacy and sensitive emotionality to it, only recently dead and torn between both realms. Jennifer France, marking her ENO debut as the Princess, similarly commanded authority vocally and with her stage presence – undoubtedly on the path of becoming a solid ENO favourite. Nicholas Lester as Orphée resonantly expressed himself and generated empathy for a poet at times obsessively narcissistic, but at other times touchingly selfless. Sarah Tynan reprises Eurydice, having performed in Orpheus and Eurydice, on this occasion being spurned for the Princess but beautifully performing with a genuine tenderness and warmth for Orphée. Anthony Gregory as Cégeste gave a lyricism and warmth of timbre which complimented his role as a vivacious and brilliant rival poet to Orphée.
This ENO production joins the other excellent performances of Philip Glass’s work it has put on relatively recently – the jaw-dropping Satyagraha and the Olivier Award-winning Akhnaten. Much like those productions, Orphée is not one which should be missed.
Eugene Broad
November 2019
Photography by Catherine Ashmore
Love Is Heavy and Light
Romeo and Juliet
by William Shakespeare
Youth Action Theatre at Hampton Hill Theatre until 16th November
Review by Stephen Leslie
Youth Action Theatre last staged Romeo and Juliet at Hampton Court Theatre, over thirty five years ago, in a production which boasted the name of Rebecca Wheatley, who has gone on to enjoy a very successful career in television, radio and theatre. I feel certain that thirty five years from now we’ll be talking about the success of the amazingly talented actors in the current production.
I understand the decision to produce the show was taken back in August 2017 on the way home from a successful run at the Edinburgh Festival and during that time directors Emily Moss and Jojo Leppink seem to have methodically planned every detail of the production, providing their young cast with the perfect platform to deliver thoroughly entertaining and professional performances.
The contemporary setting was brilliantly framed by Alice Metcalf with a highly creative and original stage design. The juxtaposition of the Capulet’s car garage and the Montague’s portrait of traditional wealth, cleverly depicted the divide between the two families and in doing so provided the perfect back drop for the conflict which ensued.
Despite Shakespeare writing Romeo and Juliet circa 1594, the themes which run strongly through the story are as relevant today as they were then. Not only did we empathise with the characters, but we identified with them, helped more so by their present-day attire which included mechanic’s overalls and T-shirts displaying the names of musicians such as Bowie, Def Leppard and AC/DC. This was a master-class in bringing Shakespeare into the twenty-first century.
The conflict between the two families was highlighted almost immediately with a chaotic brawl which had been carefully choreographed by ex-YATer Id Wheatley. The brutality increased as the story unfolded, with both Capulets and Montagues being slain in convincing bloody fight scenes.
But it wasn’t all violence! The playful and love-struck Juliet was brilliantly portrayed by Esme Frazer, demonstrating a wid
e range of emotions from extreme joy, to absolute despair in the closing moments of the play. Equally impressive was her Romeo, played by Jake O’Hare, who found a good balance of bravado and sincerity as he glided effortlessly through the highs and lows of his fateful journey.
There were also fine performances from: Lucy Allan as the mischievous Nurse; Alex Farley as the straight-talking Lawrence and Oliver Hickey as the larger-than-life Capulet, who commanded the stage and brought great humour to the performance. But special praise must go to Elle Frazer, whose Mercutio bounced around the stage with boundless energy, flitting from friend to tormentor, until she came to a particularly gruesome end.
A production is only as strong as its weakest link but there were no weak links, with every actor playing their part with conviction and credibility. With so many talented performers I imagine casting the show must have been extremely difficult for all the right reasons. This was a truly ensemble piece which embodied the YAT spirit and drew on the talents of its members to create something truly great, including President Eileen Baker whose voice-over closed the play.
The programme tells us that Youth Action Theatre is dedicated to inspiring young people. I can’t lay claim to being young but I certainly left Hampton Hill Theatre feeling inspired, having been totally gripped by this outstanding production. Congratulations to all involved and I very much look forward to seeing the next show which will be The Snow Queen in April next year.
Stephen Leslie
November 2019
Photography by Jojo Leppink at Handwritten Photography
Buzzy Itchy Reality?
New Writing from Twickenham
Richmond Literary Festival at The Conservatory at The Exchange, Twickenham until 13th November.
Review by Eliza Hall
On a wet, cold evening over fifty young people, mostly undergraduates from the Creative Writing programme at St Mary’s University, along with an assortment of others, ranging from two graduates about to be published in 2020, to short course attendees and members of the public, gathered to listen and read.
It was noisy, buzzy, itchy. Some nervous about standing in public to read their private thoughts, others ready and keen to get started. It was an evening of prose, poetry and flash fiction. The lights in the Conservatory were perpetually altering in colour throughout the readings, just as the continuum of human emotions and experiences were constantly changing.
It seemed that everyone had something to say. Some writers expressed the real and the mundane whilst others conjured with the listeners’ sympathies and appreciation as they were plunged into the obscure, the magical, the humorous, the surreal. A myriad of meanings set in words, with cutting statements, some nightmarish moments, some crude and explicit, others read more delicately woven pictures of events and feelings.
Sometimes one could almost catch a glimpse of Proust through the kaleidoscope, or was it ‘Fleabag’? As the lights continued to change their colour, so there were expressions of loss, of love, reminiscences, of searching and of freedom. Cruel reality was mixed with pathos, charm and romanticism and reminiscences. The evening was a challenging mix of created images, imagined pictures, accepting loneliness, pain and life’s realities.
The evening drew to a close with two readings by two graduates whose books will be published in 2020. These were Molly Gartland’s The Girl from the Hermitage and Louise Fein’s People Like Us.
Such is the human condition and such is the power of the word. It was an evening of vibrant ideas being expressed by those who certainly had something to tell. It offered a secure platform on which to say in public what was important to the individual, as well as to showcase their course work and developing writing skills. There are promises of more evenings like this, if you want to sample, wonder or contribute!
Eliza Hall
November 2019
Mark Aspen 