Eighties Nostalgia
The Wedding Singer
by Matthew Sklar, and Chad Beguelin
Hinchley Manor Operatic Society at Hampton Hill Theatre until 16th March
Review by Andrew Lawston
I was unsure what to expect from Hinchley Manor Operatic Society’s production of Matthew Sklar, Chad Beguelin and Tim Herlihy’s musical The Wedding Singer, directed by Helen Wilson. The show boasts a full slate of original songs, while the film on which it is based was full of cover versions of 70s and 80s classic tunes. The film was also very much a star-making vehicle for Adam Sandler, and I was curious to see how the adaptation would fare without his schtick.
The story of a struggling musician who has put his dreams of rock stardom on hold while he plays wedding gigs to make ends meet, and his relationship with a young waitress unhappily engaged to a yuppy, The Wedding Singer translates remarkably well to the stage.
The production has clearly chosen to focus on the music, with a full live band kept out of sight, and a plain set with a gantry running across the back, designed by Wesley Henderson-Roe and Helen Wilson. The set dressing for individual scenes rarely amounts to more than a bed in a corner or a bar and stools centre stage, leaving plenty of space for energetic performances.
With such a basic set, visual spectacle is necessarily provided by an extensive wardrobe of colourful 80s “fashion” (courtesy of the large team of Kay Colston, Bernie Davis, Sandra Mortimer, Kelly Neilson and Gill Varon), and Sarah Jackson’s choreography. The dancing, from both the leads and from the spirited ensemble of Holly Artis, Colin Bousfield, Kay Colston, Suzanne Green, Tyrone Haywood, Shannon Hearn, Matt Howes, Kelly Neilson, and Katy Simon, is energetic, furious and well-drilled, with Holly Artis shining in particular.
It’s difficult to produce a musical set in the 1980s without acknowledging Michael Jackson, but it’s worth noting that the various bits of moonwalking, some costume elements, and an all-out homage to Jackson’s famous Thriller video do seem a little problematic, given current media discourse concerning the entertainer.
The music is top notch. The 1980s setting is acknowledged through heavy guitar work from Dominic Mackie and Connor Baxter, and crashing synth choruses courtesy of Shaz Dudhia and Musical Director Debbi Lindley. Alex Hinton-Smith also provides bass, so presumably Robbie’s bandmates aren’t playing their instruments live, but Scott Topping’s Sammy in particular puts in a highly credible miming performance. With the band completed by Joe Mackley on reeds and Josh Neale supplying some tremendous percussion noise, there are nods to classic songs from the era, but the original tunes are memorable in their own right. Stuart Vaughn’s sound design deserves special credit for the full concert feel to the music.
On stage, Michael Leopold as Robbie Hart, and Hannah Vincent as Julia are strong and engaging leads with strong chemistry, crooning their way through the sentimental numbers, and leaving some of the biggest musical numbers (most notably Act One finale Saturday Night In The City) to be led by Katy Jackson in a barnstorming performance as Holly. Robbie’s most spectacular song is probably the melodramatic heartfelt Somebody Kill Me, where Michael accompanies himself on acoustic guitar while also acting as a man whose world has fallen apart. It was one of many demanding scenes for the performer, and he pulled it off with great gusto. Robbie’s self-loathing depression for much of the show is treated sensitively rather than being played for laughs, and I must confess that the anarchic chaos of Casualty of Love was much more fun than any of the more orderly wedding band scenes.
Meanwhile, Julia’s stand out song was arguably Come Out Of The Dumpster, which she performed with great comic timing. Hannah Vincent succeeded in bringing depth to a character who has few opportunities to be pro-active throughout the story.
Robbie’s bandmates Sam and George, played respectively by Scott Topping and Jacob Rose are also constantly watchable. Scott remains sympathetic throughout the play, despite his character’s occasional misogyny as he pursues his ex-girlfriend Holly. Jacob has a tough task to keep George’s highly camp character from straying too far into stereotype territory, and it’s to his enormous credit that he puts in such an engaging performance despite apparently stepping into the role with only four rehearsals under his belt.
George performs in many of the wedding band numbers, and a hilarious solo effort, but his stand out song was clearly Move That Thang as a duet with Rosie, Robbie’s grandmother (a spirited and often cheeky performance from Catherine Quinn), which was just glorious fun.
Emma Dixon’s vampy Linda provides an early highlight in A Note from Linda and later picks up the pace in Let Me Come Home. It’s a shame that the character didn’t have more of a role, as with Gill Varon’s confident performance as Julia’s mother, Angie.
Every good story needs a villain, and Zak Negri provided a wonderfully repellent Glen Guglia, Julia’s unfaithful fiancé. This Gordon Gekko character radiated quiet smugness throughout the production, making his final humiliation all the more satisfying.
The Wedding Singer moves quickly, and the cast and crew were clearly called upon to perform many swift set and costume changes. The production rocketed along at a slick pace, thanks to Stage Manager Sarah Woods and her team, and the show never felt anything less than completely professional.
The script is ambitious in that it excises most of the film’s best and most quotable lines (apart from the Van Halen t-shirt gag), but substitutes plenty of new jokes that follow the same path as the original plot. Lifted by this confident production, The Wedding Singer transcends its source material to become a hugely enjoyable night out, leaving the audience full of nostalgia for the 1980s, if such a thing is possible, and humming several of the songs into the foyer. Regardless of your opinion on the original film, Adam Sandler, and the 1980s, this production is well worth seeing.
Andrew Lawston
March 2019
Photography by Zak Negri
Now You See Her, Now You Don’t
The Lady Vanishes
by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, adapted by Anthony Lampard
Classic Thriller Theatre at Richmond Theatre until 16th March, then on tour until 9th November
Review by Mark Aspen
Now here’s another spiffing yarn, fully gung-ho and stuffed with stereotypes. The Lady Vanishes is absolutely topping!
Bill Kenwright’s The Classic Thriller Theatre Company’s stage version is adapted from Alfred Hitchcock’s mystery thriller. The film was released in 1938, before his style became heavily psychological, and was based on Ethel Lina White’s novel The Wheel Spins, written two years earlier.
The play’s setting in in Austria in late spring 1938, immediately after the Anschluß. Germany had just annexed Austria and we find ourselves in a grand railway station somewhere to the west of the country. The vaulted glazed roof is now hung with eagle and swastika banners and everyone in authority, even the railway porters, wears swastika armbands. This is a gift for designer Morgan Large to create a magnificent edifice in sepia, like a vintage travel postcard, but certainly not on postcard scale, as the roof soars up, lost in smoke and steam.
Then a clever transform into an international express train of the period. Richmond Theatre has seen quite a few clever train interiors on its stage recently, but this is the most period-precise: all tasselled lampshades, elegant grey panelling and Biedermeier Revival fittings and fixtures.
This all sounds very serious, but then director Roy Marsden populates it with the stereotypes, a frightfully nice deb, a pair of what-ho English cricket fanatics, bullet-head and bull-necked Nazis, a dapper Italian with pencil moustache, and we have all the makings of a very entertaining evening’s whodunit … and howdunit and whydunit. Amongst the action and daring-do there is humour and suspense. However, the humour is lightly touched and the suspense leavened with self-deprecating wit.
The convoluted plot revolves around well-heeled Iris Henderson, who is reluctantly returning from Nice to London to marry daddy’s choice of a fiancé, who is titled but tiresome. At this Austrian railway interchange, other travellers from different departure points come together, unfortunately delayed by an avalanche on the line out to Zurich, where they are all heading. They are a mixed bunch of wealthy wanderers, from different nationalities. We open in German (which incorporates the audience’s turn-off-mobiles injunction), but oddly very much Hochdeutsch rather than Austrian German, but the majority of the travellers are English and so we settle into public school English as the lingua franca.
Just as well, since most cricket terms are untranslatable, and the two sporty chums, Charters and Caldicott, are totally preoccupied with getting to Old Trafford for the test match. (What, one wonders, and never finds out, were they doing in Budapest, whence they have come?) Robert Duncan and Ben Nealon are priceless in these roles, pulling all the incidental comedy from these characters, who prove to have rock-solid skills (like train driving) when the push comes to the shove.
Enter mining engineer and amateur folk musicologist Max, who strikes up a love-hate relationship with Iris, following a spat with the Nazi officers in the station. This is fired by the officers’ reaction to the dancing of folk songs on the station concourse, to the music of a blind beggar, an itinerant accordion-player. The Beggar (in a charming cameo by Cara Ballingall) first enters to a haunting tune that engages the travellers, and which we later find is crucial to the plot.
Most subtly engaged by the tune, however, is an elderly lady, Miss Froy, ostensibly a just- retired governess, making her way home to England. Juliet Mills, one of Richmond’s most eminent established actresses, plays Miss Froy with a comfortable poise that is well-received by the home audience. Iris forms an acquaintance with Miss Froy and they start as travelling companions when the Zurich train arrives. However, their companionship is short lived, for Miss Froy parenthesises the plot, for she is the eponymous Lady who vanishes, and does so for most of the action.
It is Miss Froy’s disappearance on the train that results in a concatenated chain of events. It appears that nobody on the train admits to seeing Miss Froy. Could it be that the blow to the temple that Iris sustained on the concourse, due to a mishandled piece of ski luggage, has clouded her recollection? However, it is Miss Froy’s singular preference for Harriman’s Herbal Tea that provides the evidence that convinces Max that Iris is not suffering from concussion and launches the two of them on a helter-skelter investigation that, after many hair-raising adventures, drives them into each other’s arms.
As Iris, TV star Lorna Fitzgerald puts over the strong-willed determination of the character, with a bold self-assurance. Matt Barber, as the initially bemused Max, puts great energy into his role. Together as the young leads, they make an appealing and empathetic couple and, with Juliet Mills as the lead name, a strong and integrated core to the cast.
Equally strong are the villains. Actors have great fun playing villains and this cast is no exception. Joe Reisig’s powerful performance as the sinister jack-booted and leather coated Nazi is the epitome of the ruthless tough-nut. Signor Doppo is appropriately named, he is undoubtedly double-faced, affable and effusive one moment then sinister and devious the next. Mark Carlisle adds a gleeful nimbleness to this spruce man, an assistant assassin as his calling; an illusionist as the day job. In the guard’s van, his luggage includes a vanishing cabinet and a storage basket with Indian clubs and super-sharp rapiers: for natty tricks or nefarious trickery … who knows?
And then there is the arch-villain, the suave Austrian neurologist, Dr Hartz. Sophisticated, well-groomed, urbane, he appears anxious to help the disorientated Iris. Why though is a critically injured patient swathed in bandages bought on-board the train, and why the nun … the nun in high heels to whom he gives instructions for administering a Mickey-Finn? Another well-known actor, Maxwell Caulfield, Juliet Mills’ husband, clearly relishes the role of Dr Hartz, and delivers it with fun-laced aplomb.
The already tortuous plot has at a couple of sub-plots, which have the feeling of vestigial remnants of the film’s screenplay. There is Iris’s American friend Blanche, played with sparkle by Natalie Law, who multi-roles as the polyglot stewardess on the train, and the mysterious nun. Blanche is left in Austria, but a fugitive couple continues with the others on the train, Eric, a prominent barrister, with his mistress Margaret, whom he has short-changed on their secret love tryst in Venice. In spite of her fading hopes, he is not intending to divorce his wife, in case the scandal stymies his chances of becoming a high-court judge. One can see why he wants to keep his head down throughout the shenanigans on the train, but why does he carry a loaded pistol? Is he in the plot to demonstrate discretion as the better part of valour in the shoot-out, or are the couple merely a red-herring? Nevertheless, this does not detract from the exemplary acting in these roles. Ex-Corri star Philip Lowrie portrays the hurt dignity of the prickly Eric with a steely seemliness, and Elizabeth Payne’s brittle Margaret really hits the mark. Payne also doubles as the enigmatic Frau Kummer (another appropriate name as it is the German word for grief), who is seen in the carriage dressed in Miss Froy’s prim tweeds during her disappearance.
Did I mention a shoot-out? A fair-old gun battle takes place on the train when it is diverted into a siding near the Swiss border, with various baddies getting shot and with various goodies getting the token “flesh-wound”. Fight director Richard Leggett has his work cut out in this play with sword fights, clubbings and fist-fights (although some of the punches are very distinctly pulled). More atmosphere is provided by Charlie Morgan Jones’s lighting design and effective Dan Samson atmospheric sound design.
Again vying to upstage the actors, the huffing puffing set is further transmogrified in Victoria station. These stations are quite impressive, and tall enough to be partially hidden even mid-stalls, from which incidentally (and here is a niggle) some of the actors become difficult to hear when they drop into screen mode rather than give full stage projection.
Of course, our heroes arrive successfully home, and able to deliver a message to Winston Churchill (presumably in his position in defence intelligence during Chamberlain’s government), which is as esoterically coded as you can imagine.
The Lady Vanishes manages to be both an evocative period piece and an entertaining spoof. It tells a griping story with its tongue firmly pouched in its cheek. It is as German as Wienersnitzel and as English as Eton mess. A jolly fine show; what, what!
Mark Aspen
March 2019
Photography by Paul Coltas
Recognising the Future of Culture
Young Writers’ Festival 2019
Art Richmond at The Exchange, Twickenham, 10th March 2019
Review by Eleanor Lewis
It’s always a pleasure to see emerging writers receiving recognition for the work they have produced. Few things are more encouraging than the validation that comes with a prize. At the Young Writer’s Festival, there is the additional joy of seeing the work in question professionally performed, putting the skill and talent in each piece on show for all to see.
The Festival follows a set structure, which had been slightly tweaked this year to provide a break between the younger and older writers during which they could talk about their work a little, and the actors presenting it could share how they felt about each piece.
The performance of the work by three professional actors is an inspired part of this prize-giving. Tara Dowd, Emily Francis and Angus Woodward did a great job bringing out every element of the work they performed, Keith Wait’s direction being, as usual, highly efficient. The work on show was selected by three judges with a wide experience in the field of children’s writing: Anne Beach, Kavita A. Jindel and Guy Jones.
The Mayor of Richmond, with the Junior and Senior Laureates 2019
Not all children approach creative writing with enthusiasm, it’s something that can be guided, and there are certain props (an idea to work on, dictionaries, pictures,) but there are no specific instructions to follow and the whole thing really has to come out of your own head and, even more of a challenge, other readers must understand what you’re trying to say, it must communicate.
It’s a measure of the skill on show therefore that I’m left with lots of images in my head. One of these is of a little, mad dog running around as described by Rosa Bruce-Ball (Y5) in her clever poem making great use of short lines and the effect of one-syllable words followed by two or more to create the picture of the dog dashing about. Another is the beautiful, gentle African child Alora, living under the hot Serengeti sun as described by Cordelia Harber. Lighting by Dan Johnson gently enhanced the performance of this piece.
I’m drawn in, against my better judgement, by the conspiratorial tone of Hussain Ammar’s (Y4) piece Hussain’s Fabulous Fibs “If you want to be like me, come to 4J by the Y4 stairs and I will show you how to”. He’s going to show me how to tell fibs, but not without the warning that this might lead to trouble. I can’t wait! Assuming I escape trouble with Hussain, I probably shouldn’t be worrying about old age either. Megan Smith (Y4) has an impressively no-nonsense but inclusive view of it in her poem When I am Old: “I won’t be told what to do, Is that the same with you?”
Striking in his understanding of conflict resolution and making sure everyone feels valued was James Siveyer (Y3) in his short story The Ghost and the Farmer, in which a ghost, a fox (James is clear that foxes obviously cannot speak but you can speculate about what they might say), and a farmer collaborate, problem-solve and leave everyone happy, “… they soon found it could actually be very handy to have a dark shadow following you around”. This was an entertaining and perceptive piece of writing, particularly for the age of the writer and I feel that James Siveyer should probably be in government.
Amongst the older group Rhodes Abukalil (Y9) wrote a striking description of a destructive, rage-filled relationship between father and son who realise their similarities too late, and Catherine James (Y7) put forward a philosophical view of the life ahead of her and the myriad of choices to be faced. Lilla Radek’s (Y9) Long Live the King, was so vivid in her creation of a dark forest that you could hear the leaves crunching “like small bones” and feel the damp in the air. Her exploration of the concept of personal darkness: “…pure, unsaturated darkness, the searing, tearing thoughts that grip one’s own heart and thrust it into an unidentifiable but terrifying abyss…” added further depth to her writing.
There was a striking immediacy about Natasha Syed’s (Y12) poem, Number 119, about a Palestinian nurse on the front line. It was pared down to short lines using only the most essential words, so that delivery was halting and jerky – nervous like the moments it described. “Hijab drawn tightly over face … Donned in white overalls, Arms raised, fingers fanned in gummy white medical gloves”, and later “Pockets filled with ammunition of sealed bandage rolls”. Again, it evoked the heat and the dust and the fear of the nurse in the moment. It was mature, sophisticated, very impressive.
All the work on show at the Writers’ Festival was enjoyable and it would require a review of several pages to mention all 17 prize-winning pieces on display on Sunday – who, for example, knew what Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis is? Zoe Taylor (Y5) does and she wrote a poem about it. I can confidently say that the future of culture is, at least in the borough of Richmond upon Thames, bright.
Eleanor Lewis
March 2019
Photography by James Bell Photography
Grief: A Self-Help Manual
Dead End
by Kathryn Gardner
Subtle Paws at Cage, The Vaults, Waterloo, until 10th March
Part of The VAULT Festival (Week 6)
Review by Abigail Joanne
Kathryn Gardner, writer and performer of Subtle Paws Theatre Company, presents Dead End at this year’s Vault Festival. Vault has teamed up with Guys and St Thomas NHS Foundation Trust to open up conversations around death, dying and grief. “Some shows will make you laugh. Some will make you cry. All will get you thinking. Death affects us all. Let’s talk about it.”
Dead End opened at The Vaults in their space named The Cage. The graffiti tunnels and the dark underground theatre was the perfect setting for a show about to tackle what is often perceived as a grim subject.
Upon arrival into The Cage we are seated in a cosy, humid and dark room, and there are leaflets on our seats with illustrations instructing how someone can be of help to a loved one who is grieving. “Ask questions” and “Let them be sad” reminds me of a difficult reality, but one that can be navigated more efficiently and with more heart, if given the right tools.
We are facing towards a scene scattered with rubbish, and a bench with tatty work tape strewn across it has ‘PRODIGY’ scratched into its surface. Our first character is humming Breathe – a fitting homage to the sad news this week that Keith Flint passed away by taking his own life.
Caretaker Lance (Paul Collin-Thomas) talks to himself and the audience, sometimes wandering off stage, and he informs us that his tools keep mysteriously going missing, only to turn up again in a different place. His manner is somewhat simple but nevertheless light-hearted.
The next two characters come onto the stage, one carrying a spade and the other dirty with mud. Here we have Sue (Gardner) and Carol (Chloe Wigmore), who chat about what the Caretaker might be up to, and how might they feel if he disappeared?
Sue clearly finds it difficult getting in touch with her real feelings surrounding grief, and the two chat away in slang phrases which is endearing, as they are obviously avoiding getting real about their feelings on the matter.
When the plot takes us back to Lance, we see Carol looking into the distance, a worried look on her face, and we might wonder what it is that she really wants to say, but cannot?
All three characters capture a wonderfully British charisma; keeping things light-hearted yet making sure it’s still evident that they care. It certainly makes a point about British culture and our often-lacking ability to connect to this difficult topic. Yet we also see the importance of making light in challenging times, and how grief can also eventually lead to new opportunities, such as friendships.
There are many unanswered questions, each character carrying an unexplained plot of their own, such as the dead body left to rot in the sunshine along with the chicken shop bones and empty buckets, or the appearance of a dead cat who has been kept in a cool bag for two weeks after being murdered at the pub. This might be a pointer to the plays title Dead End, leaving us with more questions than answers.
There’s a lot within the plot to be missed that I think mirrors the theme of avoidance (which of course, is one of the stages of grief) and our cautiousness of entering too far into a topic that can leave us feeling all too vulnerable.
It’s an interesting play, one that is definitely worth a watch and one that is open to interpretation. For some it may fall flat but I was encouraged to look beyond the bizarre plot lines and see what was really going on for each of the characters.
I was left wondering, where is the balance between finding comfort in making light of a situation, and paying respect for what is a difficult reality we must all come to terms with and honour?
Cue Eleanor Rigby.
We are the wheelbarrow, moving forwards whether we like it or not.
Abigail Joanne
March 2019
Photography by Freya Evans
Triple Jump to the Fringe
Three Ayckbourn Plays
by Alan Ayckbourn
Barnes Community Players’ Triple Bill at OSO Arts Centre, Barnes until 10th March, then on Fringe tour until August.
A review by Vince Francis
Barnes Community Players trilogy of Alan Ayckbourn one-act plays are presented at the Old Sorting Office, this week, are in preparation for the Edinburgh festival. The selected plays are Mother Figure, A Cut in the Rates and No Knowing, with the first two being performed before the single interval. I was not familiar with any of these (I’m mainly a music and musicals bloke), so I was looking forward to having my horizons expanded.
Mother Figure features Amanda Larson as Lucy Compton, Bryony Wilman as Rosemary Oates, Rodger Hayward-Smith as Terry Oates and not forgetting Curly Bear as Mr. Poddle. Lucy is the mother of three children who are under school age and the wife of Harry, a travelling businessman whom we do not see in this production. As a result, Lucy has become wholly preoccupied with acting as single parent to the children, to the extent that she has given up answering the door or the phone and barely bothers to change out of nightclothes. Her husband, worried by the lack of response to calls, has contacted the neighbours to check she’s OK and this leads to Rosemary visiting, followed later by her oafish husband Terry.
The comedy lies in the wry observation of how the behaviour of adults reflects that of children and can be managed by good parenting. This worked well, generally, although I wondered if Lucy might be a little more preoccupied, or distracted, than angry, which the predominant response was. That may well be a matter of taste and fancy, though. Amanda’s portrayal was consistent and believable throughout. Bryony’s performance was similarly classy and the two worked well together. Sadly, I would have to say that I found Rodger’s Terry Oates less believable. I’m not sure whether it was a lack of direction, or lack of comfort in knowledge of the script, or character, or blocking, but Terry seemed to thrash around for responses on occasion and this hesitation detracted from the portrayal of a straightforward oaf, i.e. someone who doesn’t think of anyone else simply because nobody else matters. That said, this was a good piece and there were plenty of well-earned laughs.
A mention for the stage management at this point. Mother Figure employs a fair number of furnishings and props to give the impression of the chaos that is a room that has been occupied by under-fives, together with the laundry overhead that is attached. It works really well, but it is a busy set and it had to be cleared and reset for the second production. This was done efficiently and without fuss by a combination of cast and crew, but it is a bit of a big change. Given that time is a limiting factor in Edinburgh venues, I wondered whether any simplification is possible to shave off a few seconds.
The second piece, A Cut in the Rates, is another three-hander, featuring Alexa Bushel as Monica Pickhart, Nicola Doble as The Woman Upstairs and Patrick Van den Bergh as T L Ratchet. It’s difficult to summarise this one without giving the game away, but let’s just say that Miss Pickhart, a Town Hall employee, visits Mr. Ratchet, a retired illusionist, to investigate unpaid bills. During the course of the visit, she is left alone in the cellar, where the ghost of Ratchet’s stage assistant (Nicola Doble) appears. We learn that she died as a result of an accident on stage during a sawing the woman in half routine.
This was the best of the bunch for me. It was clear that all three were absolutely at ease and felt able bring the piece to life, if that’s an appropriate way to put it. Alexa Bushel’s Monica was suitably jumpy. Nicola Doble’s double-billing brings us a couple of very effective visual gags (no, I’m not going to tell you; go and see it) and some very affecting sinuous movement, whilst Patrick van den Bergh’s Ratchet is wonderfully expansive and enigmatic. Good stuff.
The final piece, No Knowing, has Trevor Hartnup as Arthur, and Marie Bushell, as Arthur’s wife, Elspeth. Steve Bannell played their son, Nigel, and Fiona Lawrie their daughter Alison.
Arthur and Elspeth have been married for forty years and it’s clear that they have drifted. He regularly disappears off to his shed, to surf the Internet, whilst she, equally regularly, meets up with her friend Janice. The seeds of suspicion are thus sown among the audience. Is he going to turn out to be some sort of pervert? Is Janice simply a cover for an extra marital affair? The answer to the first question is no, thankfully, but he is up to no good. The answer to the second question is yes, sort of, but not quite as you think.
The tension is built up as Nigel informs Arthur of local gossip regarding his mum and, later, Alison informs Elspeth of incidents that reveal Arthur’s on-line antics.
In the end, there is reconciliation and a nice observation about how we pledge ourselves to someone we hardly know. It’s a comforting resolution, but I was expecting more fireworks. Perhaps I’m just a pessimist.
A very special acknowledgement is due to Marie Bushell who read in the part of Elspeth. We were informed that she had only eight days’ notice of this and I have to say, that within minutes, it was easy forget that she had the script in front of her. A brave rescue of a tricky situation that happened to reveal a very credible and creditable performance.
This was the longest and most complex of the three pieces and, as such, most of the little niggles and nudges below apply here. These are general points. I feel it would be unfair to criticise individual performances in this piece given the potential effect that the change in personnel may have had. Let’s get those out of the way here.
Not everyone is safe on his or her lines. There was a fair amount of spluttering, a number of repeated cues or dialogue exchanges and a couple of pauses that were other than dramatic.
Movement. I was fortunate enough to see Art at Richmond Theatre on the previous evening, a production that provides a fine example of how to employ movement and stillness effectively. By contrast, there was a point in No Knowing where the shuffling of feet was reminiscent of a sand dance worthy of Wilson, Keppel and Betty.
Ad-libbing: very risky, in my humble opinion. It can act as a distraction for the performers and audience and, at worst, can quickly deteriorate into a competition of wit, or an orgy of in jokes and references.
Hit your marks. There are no follow spots and being half lit is one of the unfortunate and avoidable archetypes of amateur theatre.
Be quiet in the wings. The OSO is wholly unforgiving in this aspect, which is unsurprising, since it wasn’t designed as a performance space. Any mutterings are clearly audible in the, er, auditorium and there were plenty.
Opening nights are always fraught. It’s not unheard of for professional productions to implement last minute fixes and changes and these can be apparent, even when the cast and crew are engaged full-time on the show, so an allowance should be made for those of us in amateur world, where we may also be working full-time. In this case, as mentioned, a key cast member had dropped out at a late stage. There’s also the element of nerves building up with the first audience arriving in their seats.
Taken in that context, this was a pleasant evening with a few minor crits, which, it is hoped, will be accepted in the spirit they are offered. As a first outing for an Edinburgh project, it shows promise, but it does need a bit of sharpening up. A good script – and these are good scripts – can get you through a lot of difficulties, but do, please, beware. The home crowd will always, rightfully, be supportive and, in some instances, make allowances. An away crowd, particularly a discerning Edinburgh festival audience, may vote with their feet and that would be a genuine crying shame for this project, which, as I say, I believe has great potential.
Vince Francis
March 2019
Photography by Andrew Higgins
Milk, Muck and Memories
Lilies on the Land
by the Lions part
Teddington Theatre Club at Coward Studio, Hampton Hill Theatre until 9th March
Review by Didie Bucknall
The sun shines on a cornfield, a slim girl holding a pitchfork, dressed in spotless dungarees and a green jumper, sleeves rolled up showing her bronzed arms, her neatly curled hair loosely tied back, surveys the land – one of the enticing posters encouraging girls to join the Women’s Land Army. As an alternative to working on ‘munitions, who could resist the lure of the open countryside. Thousands joined and thousands were quickly disabused – up to the armpits in slurry, back aching from digging spuds, impossibly long hours, awful toilet arrangements and precious little food were the reality. Some girls had no idea where milk came from let alone how to milk a cow and the revelations and rude comments when putting the bull to the cow were all a shock. Some girls were well treated, others not.
A group calling themselves the Lions part were searching for a play that gave a voice to the wartime efforts of these women and hit on the idea of placing an advertisement to gather some first-hand accounts of their experiences. They were amazed at the volume of the response. The subsequent play Lilies on the Land, these were brought together in a collection of some of these memories.
The play is a collection of snippets culled from this correspondence and is performed by four women each taking multiple parts in quick fire succession as the action follows the progress of the war, helped by a few news announcements and Churchill’s “we shall never surrender” speech.
The four strong parts were taken by four strong actors, Juliette Sexton, Lily Tomlinson, Victoria Hinds and Héloïse Plumley, who seamlessly took on 28 different roles including farmer, farmer’s wife and American airman but mostly as their original characters – innocent northerner, happy go lucky, posh southerner, clear eyed and focussed girls.
In spite of the hardship there were moments of glad relief for the girls; exchanges with the Italian and German POW’s, sharing Silent Night at Christmas each in their own language, but especially when the Americans arrived and the lavish amount of food, not to mention nylons and chewing gum available was such a treat.
It was evident that everyone had developed a good rapport one with another during the production and the programme shows Jojo Leppink’s lovely photographs of the cast enjoying themselves sitting on bales in a hay barn and propping up a fence in a field at Hardwick Park Farm
It was not an easy play to stage in the restricted space of the Coward Room but director Linda Sirker and Mandy Stenhouse co-director and choreographer, moved the cast about easily and Fiona Auty’s straw-strewn staging of bales and tool shed set the scene well.
As a theatrical piece, it was obviously a bit disjointed, though held together by the underlying narrative, but the homesickness, hardship and deprivation were there. In the end however, in spite of the very hard work and harsh conditions, the thought of returning to their ordinary lives was a rather sad prospect for the girls as things could never be the same again.
Didie Bucknall
March 2019
Photography by Jojo Leppink, Handwritten Photography
The Art of Friendship
Art
by Yasmina Reza, translated by Christopher Hampton
David Pugh and Dafydd Rogers’ Old Vic Production at Richmond Theatre until 9th March, then on tour until 30th March
A review by Matthew Grierson
For a script conceived of and set in Paris it’s interesting, and especially interesting now, to see how very British Art plays. First, there are the characters’ anxieties about art, and being seen to like or have an opinion about it. Next, there is its use of characters who are not so much physically trapped as stuck by their situations and backgrounds, as in the classic British sitcom. Which of course then means there’s class … and it should go without saying this is not in short supply given Nigel Havers’ presence in the cast.
He and friends Marc (Denis Lawson) and Yvan (Stephen Tompkinson) may be constantly circling one another, but one still gets a glimpse of the classic Frost Report sketch configuration in their sharp exchanges of glance and ability to strike a characteristic pose, even though on the occasions that they are actually shoulder to shoulder – few and far between given the increasing volubility of their arguments – the hapless and, one infers, lower-middle class Yvan actually towers above his wealthier pals.
Broadly speaking, he is the common man for whose allegiances Serge and Marc contest in their views about a painting, white lines on a white canvas, for which Serge has just paid 200 grand. To say that Serge is the radical and Marc the conservative, or Serge the modernist and Marc the classicist, makes too glib a scheme of so humane a piece as Yasmina Reza’s play – it’s more three men went into a bar than a Platonic dialogue – but it’s difficult to watch the way their increasing polarisation drags Yvan after them and not to be reminded of similar conversations on social media today. In one of his last monologues, Yvan avers ‘nothing beautiful ever came from rational argument’, and a quick glance at the news will confirm the timelessness of Art in this regard.
One needn’t reach too far to describe the escalating antagonism between Serge and Marc through the analogy of an old married couple, which is clear long before they decide on having a ‘trial period’ for their friendship near the end of the play. In this set-up Yvan becomes the child in a custody battle, and Tompkinson’s performance can consequently veer one way and t’other thanks to the irresistible force of Havers and the immovable object of Lawson. So for all that the script emphasises Yvan’s passivity and neutrality we do see him become pretty exercised, whether by his friends or his impending wedding, though this anger seems spontaneous rather than dramatically earned or natural to his character.
The gear change would be less forgivable were Tompkinson not so endearing in both modes. At his most put-upon, he is the surrogate for the audience on the stage, unable to see why a painting has stirred the latent animosity of his two friends. At his angriest, though, Tompkinson turns up on Serge’s doorstep and has a meltdown about how he and his fiancée can manage to invite their respective stepmothers to their imminent nuptials. It’s a tour de force that certainly does earn the applause it receives.
While the production stages friendship as a pastiche of familial relationships, there’s no getting away from the fact that Art is a play as much about middle-aged men as it is about a painting. Yes, all the characters have, or have had, women in their lives, but these women appear solely in the men’s dialogue, more often the proxy for the men’s feelings towards one another: Serge’s takedown of Marc’s partner Paula is really an expression of his antipathy to his friend’s taste in women, much as Marc’s fury has been spiked by Serge’s taste in art, while Marc in turn predicts a horrible future for Yvan after marriage.
After this it would be quite understandable for the characters to end up going their separate ways, but it’s a joy of this performance to sense that, beneath it all, they cannot help but remain friends. How else would they have been able to say the awful things they have to one another? In the earlier scenes they’ve been unable to articulate their true feelings openly, and dialogue is shot through with asides from each of them much as the white canvas is hatched with white diagonals. But like Chekhov’s felt-tip pen, which is dropped into proceedings early on, these soliloquies prepare us for the expression of grievances in the denouement.
The movement between monologue and duologue may also be a dramatic expression of observations made about whether we come to be ourselves as a result of ourselves alone or as a function of our relationships with others. These observations have been made by Dr Finkelzohn, Yvan’s therapist, and carried around on a slip of paper by the latter, offering a gnomic comment on the action that counterpoints that of the equally inscrutable white painting.
Or perhaps the play is already commenting on itself? Each of its opening also scenes works as a dissection of the preceding one, switching characters so that two can share their concerns about a third who isn’t present. These onstage reviews could have saved me a job except that they’re done a scene at a time, and are actively shifting the comic dynamic as they take place. This keeps the piece moving at a fair old lick, but then so too does the tendency barely to pause for breath during the dialogue. This is effective when the characters are accelerating into a rant, less so in the establishing monologues when they can leave one struggling to take everything in (I’m looking at you, Lawson).
The pace is kept just this side of runaway by director Ellie Jones, and together with Mark Thompson’s effectively minimal design, in which the three men’s apartments are identical save for a revolving wall displaying their distinctive choices of conversation-piece art, gives the show an impression of classic Hollywood comedy. There’s another nice touch in that Hugh Vanstone’s lighting casts diagonals across the wall, as though through a Venetian blind, to signify Serge’s home and the painting he will eventually hang there. In the end the lighting also affirms the direction’s suggestion that we need to synthesise all three characters’ viewpoints to appreciate art – or Art – with the actors picked out respectively in the red, yellow and blue that must be blended to become white.
If art/Art is ultimately the occasion for some good-natured pontificating, then you’ll forgive me the previous thousand-odd words. But what this show does with a lick of paint remains remarkable.
Matthew Grierson
March 2019
Photography by Matt Crockett
Un Beau Soir
Jazz, Dances and Classics
by Amy Gould and David Harrod
SOS!SEN Charity Concert at United Reformed Church, Twickenham, until 2nd March
Review by Rebecca Vorley,
in association with Pearl Chang and William Ormerod
Shipwrecks and sunsets, exorcisms and mediations: this was the broad compass of Jazz, Dances and Classics, an enthralling concert by ’cellist Amy Gould and pianist David Harrod. The audience was captivated throughout the concert by the skilful performances of both musicians. The fascinating variety of pieces – from the lilting, playful La Cinquantaine by Jean Gabriel-Marie the elder and romantic jazz standard Harlem Nocturne, to the elegant Romance from The Gadfly by Shostakovich and the uplifting, carefree African Song by Abdullah Ibrahim – demonstrated the artistry of Amy and David, who complemented each other beautifully.
The programme was a harmonious mixture of the familiar and the unusual, and included several pieces of ‘programme music’ – that told a story: La Cinquantaine, literally ‘the fiftyfold’, describes the celebration of a golden wedding anniversary, with revels, dances and merry banter; the informative programme notes told how the Méditation from Massenet’s opera Thaïs represented a religious conversion from a life of depravity, and that this piece inspired Shostakovich’s Romance which followed it; The Song of the Black Swan (originally from Villa-Lobos’s 1916 tone poem Naufrágio de Kleônicos) laments the last moments of a shipwreck; Beau Soir by the teenaged Debussy describes an autumnal sunset – literal and metaphorical; the Ritual Fire Dance from Falla’s 1915 ballet El Amor Brujo at the end of the evening depicted the ever faster-whirling ritual which summons up the ghost of the dancing widow’s husband, luring it into the fire to finally exorcise it.
David displayed remarkable technical skill during the performance of Elegy op.96 by Nikolai Kapustin – a real modern discovery – and Amy showed great dexterity and skill in the excellently executed pizzicato section. The warm, melodic start to the Méditation was played with feeling, and conveyed a sense of harmony and anticipation. A listener commented that the piece was “beautiful – I was transported.”
The largely reflective and romantic first half of the concert concluded with the vibrant jazzy harmonies and dance rhythms of Ibrahim’s African Song, a soaring ’cello melody (with pizzicato interludes) over punctuated piano interjections of fascinating (dis)chords, followed by David Popper’s Tarantella, a virtuoso showstopper for both performers.
During the interval the audience was given a short introduction by Elizabeth Wright, the charity’s co-ordinator, to the work of SOS!SEN, the locally-based national charity supported by this concert – helping children with special educational needs and disabilities, and more particularly their parents and carers, to access the help available.[Note: Support for this charity seems all the more topical following the death on 20th March 2019 of a great champion of special educational provision, Baroness Mary Warnock, CH.]
The beautiful variety of pieces continued after the interval with Villa-Lobos’s The Song of the Black Swan – O canto do cysne negro (possibly a response to Saint-Saëns’s Le Cygne, published thirty years earlier) which had a lovely rippling, soft quality: a melodious legato ’cello tune floating on an ethereal piano tone – and right at the end, was that the ship’s bell tolling distantly in the piano, as Captain Kleônicos and his crew sank beneath the waves? The double-stopped section of Étude op.8 no.11 by Scriabin was most expressive. Alexandr Scriabin seems to have been endowed with the sense of synaesthesia – the association of musical sounds with optical colour, and like a few other composers (Grétry, MacDowell, Rimsky-Korsakov) he identified particular harmonic keys with different colours. On closing the eyes, this piece in B-flat minor seemed to be redolent of deep blues and browns, flecked with gold…. or was it just the influence of the interior décor of the church and its painted organ pipes?
Perhaps the most intriguing piece was the aptly named Romance Lyrique by Kodàly: key changes conveyed an underlying sense of sadness; it was delicately played with tremendous feeling. With its graceful tune over the piano’s traditional Alberti bass (in a treble register!) it was reminiscent of Gounod’s Ave Maria after Bach. Beau Soir by Debussy (another musically colour-sensitive composer) is a transcribed setting of an early poem by his older contemporary, the writer Paul Bourget, who later visited the U.S.A. and the British Isles, and was admired by Gladstone. Similarly to The Song of the Black Swan, the ’cello provided the rose-pink sunset over rippling rivulets in the piano. At the end Amy produced a deceptively easy-sounding (but fiendishly difficult) perfectly tuned coda in thumb-position as the sun set. Outside the weather in the streets was dark, cool and wet, but in here the atmosphere was of a beautiful, warm evening in the countryside. Debussy once wrote: “There is nothing more musical than a sunset.” (He also described Wagner’s music as “a beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn”).
Burlesque, op. 97 and Nearly Waltz, op. 98, two more Kapustin pieces, improvisational in style, with rhythmic challenges, were played with lively energy, and wonderful embellishments added great character: a brilliant, accomplished performance, which (yes !) nearly had us dancing in the aisles. This was followed by the virtuosic Ritual Fire Dance in which dynamic contrast provided a sense of urgency and drama. The evening concluded with an encore: Tarantella by W.H. Squire – another tuneful showpiece.
In all, today’s was an outstanding performance, received warmly by the audience, particularly following the two Tarantella pieces, which received rapturous applause. A beau soir indeed!
Rebecca Vorley
March 2019
Photography by Pat Stancliffe
Love, Jealousy, and the Price of Freedom
My Mother Said I Never Should
by Charlotte Keatley
London Classic Theatre at Richmond Theatre until 2nd March, then tour continues until 20th April
A Review by Andrew Lawston
A rubble-strewn wasteland litters Richmond Theatre’s stage. Part bombsite, part derelict factory, part suburban living room. There’s even a bare tree with a laced pair of trainers dangling from the upper branches as though JD Sports were sponsoring Waiting For Godot.
But instead of two tramps adrift in time and space, four young girls come poking through the rubble to play, in wildly disparate costumes. Charlotte Keatley’s My Mother Said I Never Should starts with intensity and never lets up in Michael Cabot’s new touring production.
The quartet of characters span several generations and most of the Twentieth Century: Doris, Margaret, Jackie, and Rosie live their lives as society’s opportunities and expectations for women evolve dramatically, while quietly demonstrating that women have always wanted more than just to get married young and have children quietly.
Judith Paris’s Doris initially seems to be a fearsome and detached matriarch when raising her reluctant pianist daughter Margaret. She seems much more comfortable twenty years or so later when looking after her granddaughter Jackie, and later she is positively complicit in great-granddaughter Rosie’s games and nascent activism, revealing an inherent non-conformist streak that had been suppressed all along. As the oldest character, Doris is arguably called upon to go on the longest journey throughout the play.
Lisa Burrows is captivating as the stoic and proud Margaret, the woman who conversely does everything society expects of her throughout her life (marriage, a daughter, later a job), and ends up worn out, mentally and, ultimately, physically.
Kathryn Ritchie reinvents the mercurial Jackie several times throughout the play. She grows from rebellious teenage hippie to desperate single mother to respected artist, and her scenes with Rebecca Birch’s Rosie are hugely poignant. Two women who are so similar in so many ways, divided by a terrible secret.
The play contains several scenes full of raw and painful emotion, but it is also often very funny. The dialogue is often reminiscent of Alan Bennett’s juxtaposition of the dramatic and the banal. Characters swap painful and shocking revelations, while sorting through curtains for an auction. Much is left unsaid between the four women, and this gives extra weight to the climactic scene between Jackie and Rosie, when the truth of their relationship is finally revealed and Jackie bares her soul in a heart-breaking desperate speech.
Occasional brief snatches of pop music evoke a given era, and quite possibly cover some of the huge number of costume changes for each of the characters, but they feel oddly out of place in a production whose bleak wasteland set, designed by Bek Palmer and lit to great effect by Andy Grange, emphasises the timeless quality of the women’s experiences. The play is nominally set in Greater Manchester and in London, and there are several local references to Hammersmith and Twickenham, as well as to Moss Side, but really the themes and situations are universal.
The production is particularly impressive in that the set, costumes, props and equipment all needed to be assembled in a matter of weeks, after a devastating fire at the production’s storage facility destroyed the originals. The furious energy that must have been deployed in order to get this touring production back on schedule seems to have infused the performances as well, resulting in a moving and powerful production that had large sections of the audience in tears on more than one occasion.
Andrew Lawston
February 2019
Photography by Sheila Burnett
Young Peeking into Old Peking
Aladdin
The Star Pantomime Group at Hampton Hill Theatre until 23rd February
A Review by Eleanor Marsh
Pantomime on a sunny spring evening (albeit in February – who says there’s no such thing as climate change?) seems a little incongruous, but the young audience waiting to see The Star Pantomime Group’s Aladdin were as full of beans and excitement as a Christmas cracker. And thus the mood was set for a traditional evening of cross-dressing, audience participation and traditional silliness.
Before I go any further – the Star Pantomime Group is run by its producer and director, Kate Turner who every year assembles a group of people together to put on a show to raise funds for a chosen charity. This year the charity is SSAFA and all credit to the actors who apparently came from as far afield as Birmingham for this week’s show that was in such a good cause.
The show opened on the streets of old Peking, with an excellent performance by the young dance troupe. Sadly there was no mention in the programme of a particular dance school, so it’s not possible to credit them, but these children were really good. In particular, their acrobatic dances were very impressive. In fact the entire show lifted whenever the chorus were on.
The principal actors were not as consistent as the chorus, however and although first night nerves may have been blamed for dropped lines there were an awful lot of them. There were also several missed technical cues, which may have gone unnoticed had the cast not drawn attention to them. The audience were slow to get going with their participation and this was not helped by Aladdin (Lewis Powysocki) saying “some more interaction would help” rather than “shall I get in the basket – shall I?”. First rule of pantomime – the audience are an additional member of the cast. Get them to work with you and you’ll have a success on your hands. Alienate them and you might as well go home in the interval. And sadly there were several moments like this, with cast members reminding others that they were in the wrong place, had forgotten lines and shouldn’t be on the stage. There was even a one to one conversation with an audience member that was nothing to do with the show and was met by deadly silence. In jokes just don’t work unless everyone is “in”.
And so the show progressed with all the traditional elements : Aladdin and Princess Jasmin looking every inch the Disney hero and heroine and singing beautifully, Evil Uncle Abanazar (Daniel Bosculescu) encouraging boos and hisses and Genies of Ring and Lamp (Chloe Besant and Rylee Hicks respectively) raising a cheer when they ran off to get married themselves. And the story of Aladdin and the Princess Jasmin (Hayley Wheeler) of course ended happily ever after.
The young audience who had been so excited at the beginning of the evening were no less upbeat at the end and they were particularly thrilled to be able to meet the stars of the show afterwards. And this evening was all about the children. From a performance perspective this was a great showcase for the stars of tomorrow – those wonderful dancers. As for the grown-ups, they are to be admired for doing what they do for charity. The stand out performance of the evening was definitely Gemma Bennett’s Widow Twankey; she was way too glamorous but saved the day on more than one occasion; we felt safe when she was on stage and in control of proceedings.
There was a certain charm to the “amateur” nature of this performance and the goodwill with which it was received, but I couldn’t help but think it would have been even more charming in a village hall rather than the polished and professional surrounds of the Hampton Hill Theatre.
Eleanor Marsh
February 2019
Mark Aspen 