Exit, Norwegian Style
Rosmersholm
by Henrik Ibsen, in a version by Paul Collins
The Questors at Questors Studio, Ealing until 2nd March
A review by Matthew Grierson
It’s easy to see what makes Rosmersholm a tempting proposition for a contemporary production: mental health, sexual politics, the influence of the press and, most significantly, a sudden polarisation of conservatives and liberals; all make for topical concerns. But the play maps modernity onto the late 19th century as awkwardly as the portraits of ‘the clan of Rosmer’ across the back of the set are Photoshopped to show the face of Paul James as Johannes, the last of the line.
Elsewhere, design and lighting manage not to draw so much attention to themselves, placing us in the present day without going for the obvious Ikea and low-angled sunshine one might expect. However, the version of Ibsen’s text by Paul Collins, who directs, seems not to have been translated into English so much as cliché, such is the abundance of hackneyed phrases. If he’d wanted to be as daring as the political context allows, the dialogue could have been livelier than this; as it is, the cast are lumbered with such clunkers as ‘That fact is inescapable and I can never escape it.’
Indeed, it’s with such killer lines as ‘Ours is a friendship without passion’ and ‘I won’t go through life with a corpse on my back’ that Rosmer attempts to woo cohabitee Rebecca West (Veronika Smit), although it’s not clear whether these are expressions of the former pastor’s emotional tone-deafness or simply ham-fisted transpositions into English. One wouldn’t blame a woman for turning him down on the strength of this. But when Rosmer does propose, Rebecca’s glee is immediately evident – and then abruptly rescinded, in a technically accomplished expression of some questionable direction. The plot both helps and hinders in navigating the sexual dynamics of the pair. Whatever shame would have attached to their domestic arrangements 130 years ago is entirely lost in the production’s modernised setting. However, the relationship is – fortuitously – recontextualised with the revelation that Rebecca is haunted by the suicide of Beata, Rosmer’s previous wife, and this restores some comprehensibility to their anguish.
Exchanges between the pair feel among the truest of the evening, with James and especially Smit conveying strength and depth of feeling, and the concluding scene has a crackle that the rest of the play largely lacks. Sadly these heartfelt moments are fleeting, lightning out of a clear sky that is just as suddenly gone and, having hit emotional paydirt, Rosmer and Rebecca leave the stage to their own deaths as stiffly as robots. The peculiar decision to introduce a voiceover of maid Therese (Catherine Day)’s thoughts at this point – characters have spoken their brains directly throughout the preceding two long hours – makes the climax still more muted.
Turns on an emotional sixpence (that’s about 0.3 krone) are so typical of the performance that it’s difficult to tell whether this is a function of the unmodulated dialogue or whether, as one suspects in a few cases, the acting is just stilted. So often are characters stood facing off against each other with their arms clamped to their sides that one expects them – longs for them – to break into Riverdance. Instead, each sustains one note until such time as they are called on to do otherwise, the resultant effect not unlike a wrenching, Eurovision-style key change. When someone opines ‘Now I’ve lost the power to act’, one is inclined to agree.
What contributes to the production’s absence of affect is that nothing is as telling about the characters than what we are told. Then told once more. Then told again. Act 1 scene 1 in fact is so lumbered with exposition – signalled by that cringeworthy tag ‘as you know’ – one wonders whether a more daring director might not resorted to a ‘Previously, on Rosmersholm …’ to make the piece a truly present-day Scandi-noir. Occasionally, the mannered quality can be exploited to effect, as when glances between Rosmer and Rebecca counterpoint their polite dialogue to show what they really feel about the presence of Ulric Brendel (Iain Reid). But the play can still largely be described as people standing awkwardly, trolling each other’s politics and throwing shade – like Twitter, only more protracted.
To be fair, the modern parallels are entirely without merit. Derek Stoddart as prudish principal Magnus Kroll and Martin Halvey as hack Peter Mortensgaard are never more believable than when they’re conniving to spin Rosmer’s private life or radical inclinations for their own gain. But in order to accept this messaging, we have to live both in the present of social media – at the start of act 2 Rosmer is on his laptop as if to say ‘Look! It’s 2019!’ – and in the glory days of the press, with so much hinging on which of two local papers finds the former pastor in favour.
The physical appearance of one of these rags as a prop prompts similar cognitive dissonance, as, like the portraits, it represents painstaking design work on computer. Likewise, a jarring reference to ‘DNA’ is thrown in at one point, but is simply used as a 21st century shorthand for the play’s preoccupation with inheritance – all those meaningful looks at the ancestral wall – when it could have been an opportunity to interrogate the significance of both concepts.
The problem is that the production keeps insisting on its significance while rarely making one feel it. The only thing one can be thankful for is that the political allegory is not as laboured as the rest of the production. Goodness knows, it would have had plenty to go on right now.
Matthew Grierson
February 2019
Photography by Jane Arnold-Forster
Complex Comment, Powerful Impact
Punk Rock and Bassett
by Simon Stephens and James Graham
Richmond Shakespeare Society Young Actors Company at The Mary Wallace Theatre, Twickenham until 24th February 2019, then on tour to Malta in July.
Review by Ian Nethersell
Adolescence is a difficult time. We struggle to know who we are and to find our place in the world. There are so many things to understand and think about whilst being influenced by peer groups, looking up to those we idolise, wanting to fit in and being constrained and controlled by the state. Indoctrination and manipulation can be a subtle and passive process as well as ‘in your face’.
James Graham explores this in his play, Bassett, set in the classroom of a modern comprehensive in the town of Wootton Bassett, through the eyes of a Year 11 class who have been locked in during lunch break for ridiculing and teasing the teacher. Needless to say, this theatrical device is a strong metaphor and allows a microcosm of society to be explored in its contrivance.
The themes of this play, which although billed second in the programme’s title was actually performed first for reasons which became apparent later on, are as relevant today as in 2011 when it was first performed as part of The National Theatre’s Connections Festival. It also explores more universal themes of love, hate, ‘who am I?’ and ‘what do I believe?’
We meet the young characters as very developed and believable individuals, a real credit to the skills of the director and the work put in by the cast. The plot is driven by the character of Leo, whose anguish at not being able to attend the repatriation of a young soldier who went to the school a few years before, comes out through anger and conflict with the other teenagers. Adam Green was able to maintain the level of emotion and kept a good pace throughout. We also meet Kelly who claims that she had a relationship with the soldier, and we are never sure if this is real or a phantasy; Honor Paul managed to project both a girl wearing the façade of a precocious and sexually confident teenager and youthful vulnerability at the same time.
The ensemble gave us characterisations from a wide range of characters and backgrounds, including Amid, sensitively played by Aaron Thakar, whose Muslim faith is ridiculed by Leo; Lucy (Maria Melanaphy) who says nothing until we realise that she is on a sponsored silence and who is driven to break it by her need to show her anger at the situations happening around her; and Graeme, played by Luigi Jones, whose technical expertise leads him to try and help the situation by getting the televised repatriation up on the teacher’s computer.
It was also refreshing to see that many of the girls played strong characters, especially Daisy Haslam as Rachel, who takes the lead when she is asked to demonstrate a military march and Ella Jarvis as Spencer a girl who at first seems to be extremely passive and only able to do as she is told by the teacher, but who we then realise later is actually a very intelligent and self-minded person, destined to achieve. As the lunch bell tolls, we hear the key in the lock which brings to mind the sound of a jail being opened, in yet another layer coming through to the audience.
Punk Rock by Simon Stephens was first performed at the Lyric, Hammersmith, in early 2009. In this (almost) continuation of Bassett we now see A-level students in a fee-paying grammar school, and whilst coming from different backgrounds, there are similarities with the previous school. This play explores relationships, individualism and uniqueness. Opening with Another Brick in the Wall by Pink Floyd, we were again presented with fully-developed characterisations, wholly believable in their delivery. William, dancing with his headphones on, is engrossed in his own world. The extent to which he lives in his own world whilst interacting with everyone else is developed through to stark conclusion with a superb performance by Johnnie Clark of a young man suffering borderline personality disorder and psychosis. This could have so easily been caricatured but through strong direction and character research it remained believable rather than stereotypical. New girl Lilly, was strongly played by Edie Moles as a confident young woman who attracts the attentions of William. The pressures to achieve still remain and are seen clearly through the character of Cissy, played by Anna Watson, a straight-A student completely able, yet racked with insecurity, whose relationship with the bullying and domineering Bennett, portrayed by Dominic Upton, demonstrates the human desire and need for acceptance. When Bennett orders her to kiss Chadwick, she complies and as Bennett tries to make Chadwick his plaything, he breaks loose. Again the parts of Cissy and Bennett were believable and very well acted, as was Chadwick (Kieran Judd) whose characterisation came across as someone who was truly confident in himself and unlike the others, was not projecting a façade.
Things start to unravel in individual worlds when Cissy gets a B and therefore has not lived up to everyone’s expectations. As the lights dim and I Don’t Like Mondays by the Boomtown Rats begins to play, William enters, carrying an automatic machine gun, and the situation begins to escalate. Cassie Woodhouse played the supporting role of Tanya particularly well here.
The final scene of this uncompromising play finds the now adult Spencer as seen in Bassett, as a qualified doctor interviewing William. Therefore these two plays, individually written, became inextricably linked through the vision of the director, Katie Abbott and her assistant director Laura-May Hassan.
The sets were designed and built to give the audience all they need without cluttering the space for the performers – special credits to Jo Moles as designer for achieving a great deal within a small space and Geoff Warren for realising the vision. In the first play we are in a Year 11 classroom and in the second, the set is a library of a fee-paying grammar school, portrayed by bookshelves and sofas. I particularly liked that the classroom was still visible though not lit behind the library scene, in what is now a portrayal of youth moving forward into another stage of their lives, representing that the past is always present, wherever the future is.
With sound designed by Martin Pope and sensitively operated by Jake Neill-Knight, there was good use of music at the start of the show which was interspersed throughout both plays and was very well chosen, as was the incidental sound which all added to the furthering of the piece both in character development and emotional content for the audience. The lighting design by Simon Bickerstaffe again added to the intensity and the emotion of the characters and allowed the audience a chance to enter their inner worlds.
Ultimately this was a complex and powerful political comment and its impact on the lives of young people today.
There is another chance to see these talented young performers as they take this bill to The Blue Box Theatre in Malta in July.
Ian Nethersell
February 2019
Photography courtesy of the RSS Young Actors Company
Newton’s Cradle and Interconnecting Relationships
Closer
by Patrick Marber
Putney Theatre Company, at Putney Arts Theatre until 23rd February
A Review by Celia Bard
First successfully performed at the Royal National Theatre in May 1997 the play Closer continues to play to receptive audiences, bearing out the idiom by Woody Allen that “Sex without love is an empty experience, but as empty experiences go it’s one of the best!” The four characters in this play, Alice and Anna and Dan and Larry, in their pursuit of love lead each other a merry dance of sex and infidelity, but their quest is founded on deception and lies which ultimately leads to pain and disillusionment. The theme is as old as the hills but in the hands of Patrick Marber it remains as fresh and pertinent as ever.
The play consists of twelve scenes where events play out over hours, days, months, years. Innovative use of video images, including shots of The London Aquarium, an Art Gallery, Postman’s Park, and some carefully selected pieces of furniture provide easily recognisable settings. The audience is never left in doubt as to where the action is taking place, leaving audience members free to focus on the cleverly constructed dialogue, which is both witty and poignant, and on the characters’ brutal and tense relationships. An ingenuous prop is the use of a Newton’s Cradle. The continuous backwards and forwards force of the swinging spheres symbolise the dramatic tension between the characters, wonderfully realised by both director and actors.
The first scene opens in a hospital waiting room. Alice, a club stripper, nursing a minor injury meets Dan, a newspaper obituarist and would be novelist, whom he helps and quite soon afterwards goes to bed with. The other two characters in the play are Larry, a dermatologist, who meets Anna, a photographer, in The London Aquarium. They too go to bed. Dan then meets Anna when he is having his portrait taking for his new book. Sexually drawn to her, he eventually succeeds in persuading her too to go to bed with him. Larry finds out about the affair and goes to bed with Alice whom he meets in a strip cub. This merry go round of sexual encounters and splitting up exacerbate emotional wounds. The title of the play, Closer, becomes irony as the scenes we see and don’t see make it clear that the couples do not become closer, even at their most intimate moments. Although each of them embarks on a quest for true love, their search is fruitless. The men cannot commit, and the women want something that their partners as lovers cannot provide.
Grace Cullen brilliantly portrays the character of Alice, needy, vulnerable, sexually alluring, and feisty. Her vulnerability shows through in her facial expression during a photographic session with Anna when she instinctively realises that Dan is going to stray. This actor is able to exactly replicate her character’s wistful facial expression in the photograph later on display at Anna’s photographic exhibition. The scene with Larry in the striptease club is wonderfully played out. Grace’s physicality is impressive. Her movement is sexy, but not seedy nor offensive: throughout she manages to convey an innocence and vulnerability, which maintains audience sympathy. Her character’s façade disappears in the final scene when Dan who, on having learned the truth about the question mark etched on her leg, questions her about it. Rather than face up to the brutal truth of her insecurity and destroying the fiction of the persona she so carefully maintains, she sharply ends her relationship with Dan. Alice is a complex character and Grace Cullen exploits this to the full.
In contrast Anna, skilfully played by Olivia Nita is a very different character. Sexually attractive, older, sophisticated, a talented photographer, appears not to be needy, but she has an Achilles’ heel. She practises deception, which she cannot maintain when challenged, she cannot lie. In many ways Anna is a victim of her own sexuality and she is easily manipulated. She feels guilt about betraying the three other characters, but her feelings of guilt do not override any moral consideration. The beautifully directed scene in the restaurant when the audience sees her in different time zones with both Dan and Larry highlights the extraordinary and painful situation in which she frequently finds herself. This scene requires careful timing which this actor handles expertly.
The two men, Dan and Larry, superbly acted by Tim Duthrane and Jerome Joseph Kennedy do not display the same sensibilities. They appear to be driven by certain Alpha Male negative characteristics, displaying confidence and dominance in pursuit of women and being possessive and jealous. Dan, as realised by Tim Duthrane, is manipulative and mischievous as revealed in the computer chat room. He of all the characters swings the most, backwards and forwards, in his quest for sexual desire. In Larry’s office, Dan appears wearing glasses. Although this indicates failing eyesight the spectacles also symbolise his lack of insight regarding women: his relationships with women are only skin deep. Larry on the other hand is driven by feelings of revenge. This same encounter with Dan in his office, earlier in the strip club scene with Alice, and then in the restaurant, acutely reveals this trait of personality. He is not going to forgive Dan for robbing him and sleeping with Anna, he sleeps with Alice as revenge and he forces Anna to have sex with him again before signing the divorce certificate. The male characters in Closer are not depicted sympathetically by the writer. Both actors, however, play their parts with such a lightness of touch, incredible believability, and an ability to hold and engage the audience by varying the way they portray their characters on stage that you never become bored or irritated by them.
For all four characters love, friendship and genitals are explosive ingredients of items that go to make up affairs of the heart, which as Larry puts it is “wrapped in a bloody fist.” This brutal, hard-hitting, interesting, and thought-provoking play, cleverly directed by Jeff Graves, superbly acted by the four actors, and supported by an imaginative and skilful technical design team make this a memorable production, one that is not easily forgotten.
Celia Bard
February 2019
Photography by Rich Evans
Laughter or Treason?
Trial by Laughter
by Ian Hislop and Nick Newman
Trademark Touring and Watermill Theatre at Richmond Theatre until 23rd February, then on tour until 9th March
Review by Mark Aspen
Huzzah, huzzah! Hislop and Newman’s latest historical docu-drama,Trial by Laughter has all the robust rumbustiousness that we have come to accept as the quintessence of the Regency period. Indeed, it is a fitting caricature of a highly caricaturible period and centres around the famous caricaturist George Cruikshank, or more specifically his promoter and collaborator William Hone. Who? I hear you say. Hone, a writer, satirist and Fleet Street bookseller, is undeservedly much less well known than Cruikshank. Hone is often described as “the greatest champion of press freedom”, for his court battles against censorship, where he was victorious in defending freedom of speech against the powerful interests of the day.
In fact there were three court cases on three consecutive days just before Christmas 1817, three separate trials, which took place in The Guildhall before special juries, and in all of which he was found not guilty and acquitted. Unfortunately, in Trial by Laughter, we are put on trial by having the same play three times over. The writing of the play does not stir the same empathy for the protagonists, nor have the gentle humour, of Hislop and Newman’s earlier historical piece, Wipers’ Times.
Notwithstanding a somewhat weaker script, the cast of Trial by Laughter attack the drama with huge dynamism and such palpable glee that it sweeps these misgivings aside. It is carried vigorously away by a score by Nick Green whose Baroque style draws on Thomas Attwood, who was a chamber composer for the Prince Regent. Indeed, Trial by Laughter is leavened by musical interludes sung by the cast, in the style of Regency “glees and catches”, ribald rounds loaded with double entendres (not that the text is in any way short of double entendres). For instance, the catch The Tree of Life straddles biblical allusion and suggestive satire: your imagination can unravel the entendre.
Herein lies the basis for Hone’s prosecution. He had published political parodies in the Reformists’ Register, which were illustrated by Cruikshank. These squibs not only exposed the corruption in the establishment of the day, but also ridiculed their scandalous “private” lives, including the sexual incontinence of the Prince Regent. Hone’s biggest mistake was to use the then familiar patterns the Bible, the Prayer Book and the liturgy of the church as the template for his satires. This gave a very sharp hook on which the prosecution could hang its case, and he was charged both with seditious libel and with blasphemy.
Designer Dora Schweitzer’s set has the calculated proportions and precision of Regency cabinetwork, in a sedate “solid mahogany” street façade, complete with a practical town clock, which adds to the state of urgency. It is a metaphor for the society. Behind those doors all is far from sedate, including in the royal court. Jeremy Lloyd portrays the Prince Regent as a shallow indecorous fop. The part is played big in many senses, for Prinny is surrounded by his mistresses, in a pneumatic ménage à trois with Lady Hertford and Lady Conyngham, played by Helena Antoniou and Eva Scott respectively. This is caricature writ big and all three have great fun in a continued scatological and sexual romp. Even children’s games are voluptuously hijacked into use as sexual horseplay by this plush trio.
Through the long-suffering courtiers and palace staff stride Baron Ellenborough, the Lord Chief Justice, and Viscount Sidmouth, the Home Secretary. They are intent on using the Prince Regent’s vanity to lever up the charges against Hone and use the courts to silence his criticisms. Sidmouth had already suspended the right of Habeas Corpus, hence securing a trail and two retrials of Hone on three successive days was a straightforward matter. Dan Mersh’s Ellenborough is a bluff character, a hard man, ruthless in getting his way, whereas Phillip Edwards plays Sidmouth as a manipulator, insinuating his own way, but equally effective.
The court of law is convened in The Guildhall, where we, the audience, in a nod to the metatheatrical, are included in the noisy crowds inside the court (if not in the mob of thousands outside), enhanced by some clever stereophonic effects by sound designer, Steve Mayo, which plant virtual hecklers in our midst. The court is depicted as, to say the least, biased. Most bigoted is the judge himself, Mr Justice Abbott, a wickedly gimlet-browed Nicholas Murchie. Dirty tricks even extend into the gaol, where a lithe seductress, Mary Oliver, is sent to compromise Hone, in a delicious cameo for newcomer Rosa Hesmondhalgh.
The open matter-of-factness of William Hone, which borders on the naïve, is energetically depicted by Joseph Prowen, as a passionate and earnest young man, a David bold (and foolish) enough to take on the Goliath of the state machine. Hone has the self-belief, and lack of cash, to mount his own defence. He is spurred on by the devil-may-care Cruickshank, played with verve by Peter Losasso, who embodies the relentless energy of the caricaturist who incites Hone to keep going, despite his exhaustion to give six or eight hour long defence speeches. The increasingly ill Hone uses a good natured humour to win over the jury on each occasion, in spite of being counselled by the much more grounded William Hazlitt to be wary of using jokes in a court of law, “Wit is the salt of conversation, not the meat”.
Jeremy Lloyd doubles as Hazlitt, well differentiating the urbane literary critic with Ellenborough, the head-on Cumbrian. Other effective doubling comes from Nicholas Murchie, who returns as an exasperated Frederick, Duke of York, and Eva Scott who plays the pivotal role of Sarah, Hone’s loyal and very resourceful wife. Sarah is very much the rock-solid foundation of the ever increasing Hone household. Initially with little sympathy for his, as she sees it, self-imposed incarceration, it is she who eventually gathers the evidence that leads to his third acquittal.
Prosecuting council, Weatherill, played with tenacity by Lewis Bruniges, plugs away at the blasphemy angle. Hone argues that he is using the sacred texts as models in style because they are familiar, and that he is parodying that style in his satires, without any intention of being disrespectful to the name of God. It cuts little ice with the lawyers. However, in the third trial Lord Ellenborough himself takes the judge’s bench, and Hone is able to bring out evidence, uncovered by Sarah, that Ellenborough’s own father, Edmund Law, had used a similar literary device … when he was Bishop of Carlisle.
There is a nice comment, pointed at our modern world, from Hazlitt when a youth gets Cruickshank to sketch him with Hone, as a sort-of early nineteenth century selfie, “ah, well there is unlooked-for fame”. Director Caroline Leslie’s boisterous high-octane knock-about makes for entertaining fun in twenty-first century Britain, but one should feel some sympathy for the “villains” of the piece when one reflects that in 1817 that the bloody aftermath of a bloody revolution across the Channel continued, that a revolution had lost us a valuable colony in America and that a British Prime Minister had been assassinated five years before. Revolution was in the air. There was an edginess with the instability of politics that perhaps chimes two centuries later. In an age of belief, blasphemy was an unspeakable offence against the Almighty, whereas it is actively encouraged in politics today. It is ironic that Richmond Council has just voted to prevent people peacefully praying in silence outside of an abortion clinic within half a mile of Richmond Theatre. Freedom of speech and freedom of religion are just as under threat as they were 202 years ago.
Blasphemy may be old-hat here and now … but try that out in Raqqa! A sobering thought even for the less than temperate protagonists in Trial by Laughter. Hislop and Newman’s new play makes an entertaining and fun evening, but gives much food for thought, a Prince Regent’s banquet load of food for thought. Huzzah, huzzah!
Mark Aspen
February 2019
Photography by Philip Tull
Infinite and Expansive
Ondule
by Rouet and Martinez
Resolution at The Place, Euston, 12th February,
The Festival of New Choreography continues until 23rd February
A reflection by Abigail Joanne
Ondule by Laura Rouzet and Alejandro Martinez is a performance showcased as part of Resolution 2019 at The Place. Part of a Resolution triple bill in-between Hazel Lam’s Lighthouse and Mara Viva’s time/less, Ondule entices the audience into its mysterious dimension. Informed by contemporary, popping, voguing, and dancehall, Ondule is a ‘point of intersection where otherness emerges’.
Ondule, from the French, means ‘undulate, swirl, swing, sway’: the dancers have captured this beautifully and invite the audience to relax into their organic display.
Choreographed and performed by Rouzet and Martinez, with music produced by Monica Mia in collaboration with Rouzet, Ondule is a duet which explores genderless movement.
In the beginning we see two figures joined in motion, foreheads touching to create a loving and intimate composition. Sparkles dance from nude tones and masks with edgings, twinkling to the curling movements, the figures are like cells under a microscope, merging, then moving away. I am reminded of the power of ten; the miniscule and the massive are as one, infinite and expansive.
We see each dancer become more independent while the other gently continues undulating in the background, behind a shimmer of silver curtain strips. The physical expressions become stronger and wider. The music picks up and an irresistible beat takes you into the night where the covert becomes liberated.
I wonder what ‘otherness’ they describe in their bio is? Is it something different, separate, and unknown? Or is it, in fact the very core essence of us all? The inevitable evolution of nature?
It is possible to expand beyond our preconceptions of gender, and to challenge our own identifications within ourselves and towards others. We can connect and move into this space to find celebration in our sovereignty and togetherness in our independence.
I really hope Rouzet and Martinez continue to collaborate; I would be interested to see their ideas develop further.
Abigail Joanne
February 2019
Read more at The Place’s Resolution Review
Photography by Laura Rouet
Discovery: Home, Heart or Hostility?
Birthright
by Bram Davidovich
Kryptonite Theatre Company at The Vaults, Waterloo until 16th February
Part of the Vault Festival
London’s own fringe, The Vault Festival 2019, is staged in eclectic venues in and around Waterloo.
A Review by Georgia Renwick
In this unorthodox tale of a pilgrimage (of sorts) to Israel by two young, Jewish twenty-somethings, questions of faith, identity and the nature of religion exchange blows. Like faith itself, in Birthright the conviction is there… but in practice, the execution is messy.
Joshua and Becca are two young Jews out on ‘the trip of a lifetime’, their ‘Birthright’ trip to Israel. This very real organisation (You can look it up!) sponsors trips for young adults of Jewish heritage to their ancestral homeland, and these two have come for very different but inadvertently connected reasons. Joshua is keen to escape the nagging of his Orthodox Jewish family, who are hell-bent on ruining his life of video games and online pornography with suggestions like getting a job or going to university, but what direction should he take, and will his religious upbringing play a part? Becca resents her parents on the other hand for neglecting their heritage and raising her in a secular home. She feels drawn to taglit – Hebrew for discovery. In learning her history and the Hebrew, can she discover more about herself? Both young people join the tour to find out, but discover far more off the beaten track when they become lost, than they do on the group’s bus tour.
A promising premise descends rapidly into a muddled farce of Jews behaving badly. There are Jewish in-jokes and other funny moments (I was tickled by Becca’s likening of Joshua to a young King Solomon) but you can feel the writer heading purposefully towards the edge of what you might call ‘insensitive’ humour and pressing hard up against it. Blunt exchanges of arguments surrounding the nature of faith have little poetry to them. Some of the ideas they put forward are interesting: does being a Jew have to equate to a belief in God, for example, or can it just be about respect for and an understanding of the history and heritage? But it’s hard to pick these thoughtful moments out under the continuous swearing, Joshua’s frankly uncomfortable sexual propositioning and Becca’s exasperating heavy sighs.
To pay credit to the actors, the performances themselves are energetic, playful and overflowing with conviction. They have some fun creating the array of strange characters they encounter on their trip. Aimee Bevan’s tour guide has an instantly recognisable insistent ‘pay attention’ quality to his demeanour and a slightly disconcerting but well observed fixed grin. David Samson’s dancing makes several appearances in his characters, each of which is a comedic delight.
It was a curious ‘visit’ to Israel that offered some food for thought, heavily veiled in impish humour.
Georgia Renwick
February 2019
Photography by Team Kryptonite
Absorbing Water
Resolution 2019 (Triple Bill 18)
Lighthouse Ondule time/less
by Hazel Lam by Rouet and Martinez by Maria Vivas
Resolution at The Place, Euston, 12th February,
The Festival of New Choreography continues until 23rd February
A review by Mark Aspen
Resolution goes to sea! The eighteenth of the triple bills of Resolution 2019 evokes an eerie marine world as more emerging choreographers find watery settings to be an expressionist metaphor for human perception.
Lighthouse shows us the way. A violet square of light-rope delineates a world outside a safe emotional harbour. In this piece of object theatre, two protagonist straddle this boundary, one a solo dancer, choreographer Hazel Lam, the other a writhing mass of translucent tubing like the tentacles of an unseen cephalopod. In silence, she approaches apprehensively, quizzical, then probes this alien form, sounding the whip-like feelers, and allows herself in a trance to become enveloped and embraced … then aggressively draws back. But she has crossed a boundary, both emotionally and in the vision of this work. For it is a performance of two halves, for as she releases herself to the sensuality of this relationship, the piece becomes a graceful aerial ballet. The cartilaginous elasticity of the tubing imbues it with a zoological quality while Bert van Dijck and Margot Jensens’s lighting design subtly enhances this feel. The aerial ballet is accompanied by original music by Max Morris, which hints at Nyman in lyrical mode. Lam’s athletic agility amalgamates varied art-forms, all of which require considerable skill. Lighthouse illuminates an effective exploration of strength in femininity, how the tender can overcome the terrifying.
The senses are inundated in Ondule (from ondulé, rippling). Laura Rouzet’s expressionist Laban approach combines full-on video and music into a mesmerising dance-form that remains aquatic in its palpitating, pulsating, pounding fluidity. Rouzet dances with fellow choreographer, Alejandro Martinez, and their performance is dynamic, driven by the cardiac music of Monika Mia, with a bold lighting design by Alejandro Martinez. The sinuous synchronicity of the dancers’ undulating moves are organic. They seem to merge into a single life-form from two twin organisms, girdled and veiled in articulated pink. They become hyperactive decapods, which throb to a heartbeat sound as, in the depths behind them, the cyclorama swirls with hydrodynamic globules. The promise of popping and voguing suggested a more angular and assertive style, but Ondule takes the technique to a much more fluent form, as hypnotically watchable as it is overwhelming.
The mood is much different in Mara Vivas’s time/less, a contemplative study of the nature of time. We are in Another Place redolent of Crosby Beach, where cinnamon statues stare motionless out to sea. The superficial rusting on Antony Gormley’s steel men is replicated in the long cinnamon shifts worn by the performers, Lynn Dichon and Tara Silverthorn, two women who stand in silence. There is a palpable tension between the two. One traces figures of eight with a toe, the other raises and lowers her heels. Gradually, by almost imperceptible degrees, they engage with each other and drift together, mirroring each other in the taut exposure of their naked feet. Vivas states that her work references the Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli, who has developed a theory of physics without time. However, for me it began to feel like a choreographed Waiting for Godot. You see, I’m an impatient sort of chap, and ached for action. The, with the inching in of an anxious musical accompaniment, an original soundscape by Portuguese composer Filipe Sousa, action came as slo-mo miming of life’s experiences, perhaps a hint of a things shared. Here is a reflection of time that focusses on human mortality. The background set, which had appeared to be an abandoned breakwater, was top-lit to reveal a random myriad of fine glass jars, which the dancers manipulated to sound of a glass armonica. There is a resolution of the thesis of the piece in this representation of the celestial spheres that gave it an elegiac quality. It is thought that I shall ponder … time/lessly.
Mark Aspen
January 2019
Read more at The Place’s Resolution Review
Photography by Geert Roels, Rouet and Martinez, and Nicole Guarino
Missed Connection
The Girl on the Train
by Paula Hawkins, adapted by Rachel Wagstaff and Duncan Abel
Simon Friend in association with Amblin Entertainment at Richmond Theatre until 16th February, then tour continues until 23rd November
A review by Matthew Grierson
For a thriller, The Girl on the Train is rarely thrilling. In fact, it seems to have decided it is a comedy, so successful it is in generating laughs from the Richmond Theatre audience. There is scarcely a situation in the play that does not merit a titter, from the awkward encounters between Rachel, ex-husband Tom, new wife Anna and neighbour Scott, to Rachel’s repeated, blatant denial of her alcoholism. Rather than ratcheting up the tension or offering a bleak comment on it, humour remains the predominant mode of a play whose plot nonetheless hinges on the disappearance (spoiler: murder) of Scott’s wife Megan.
This makes it all the more difficult to tell a serious, affecting story, and so the production largely does not choose to do so. Instead, it makes a virtue of staging it, never resorting to performance and direction when it can mount a stage effect. We can tell Rachel’s unfortunate condition because her kitchen is littered with a neat row of empties and artfully arranged bin-bags, as though set designer James Cotterill had been given the note ‘alcoholic’ and responded artfully but with little reference to reality. So genteel is the squalor that the number of references to Waitrose made me wonder whether the supermarket was actually paying the production to take away carrier bags rather than charging for them.
As a consequence of the production-led storytelling, neither star Samantha Womack as Rachel nor most of the supporting cast are called upon to give convincing performances, simply do what is necessary to advance the plot. We are to believe that Rachel has not only been a regular commuter, but that she has persisted in her daily journey simply to observe Scott and Megan through the window of the train as it stops at a signal. Certainly, the presentation of this is very effective – a combination of projection and live action – but in order to establish that it has been Rachel’s routine she needs to explain as much in the dialogue. Show and tell may work in the classroom, but on stage? Please.
The narrative depends on a sense of routine that, however it is established in prose (I confess I’ve not read Paula Hawkins’ novel, on which this is based), is not easily dramatised. Likewise, whatever the rationale for Rachel fantasising that Scott and Megan are actually called ‘Jason’ and ‘Jess’ in the book, it’s just an unnecessary complication on stage, particularly as we are introduced to them by their real names before those that the first Mrs Watson imagines.
Further stage effects are all we get to cement any sense of Rachel being an alcoholic, too. Womack’s performance never convinces in this respect; indeed, she never convinces as a character, because no insight is offered into why she chooses to involve herself in the mystery. Rather than Megan, it is she who is the absence from this play, a black hole around which the action orbits. If we’re in danger of missing the heavy hint of this given in Megan’s painting, Rachel’s alcoholism is most tellingly conveyed by the scene in which she returns home and traces the motif from the artwork on her window. Impressively, this spirals out into an audio-visual effect that giddies both her and the audience. She passes out in the floor and then it is the next day, as helpfully flagged by the Sherlock-style caption ‘Wednesday’ on the wall above her sink. Under the spell of sexy modern TV shows, the action hastens along.
I feel I’m always banging on about the rhythm of a piece in my reviews (what can I say, I’m a trained poet and that training has to come in use somewhere), and if anything director Anthony Banks gets that rhythm exactly right. It observes a timetable in a manner that South Western Railways could only envy; but in being so punctual, we the audience are left unaffected because the production becomes more concerned with hitting its beats rather than hinting at character. There is more choreography than chemistry, for instance, in the love scene that suddenly begins between Rachel and Scott (Oliver Farnworth, who himself seems overly keen to get his dialogue spoken and done with), or in the upstage scene in which Megan exchanges possible paramours in flashback.
The play is committed to such a perfunctory tone. Pushed another way, it could become an arch, traditional thriller that simply happens to be set in the present day, spiced up with judicious use of the f-word; but even being generous to this piece one could not call it overacted. Or, it could have been a taut psychological study, in which even at the close we are never certain of Rachel’s story. Is she an alcoholic or a fantasist? Or both? As it is we do end up finding out, but crucially we don’t care – this is a fast service, content on letting us board but barely stopping till the terminus.
How welcome, then, is John Dougall as Inspector Gaskill for pitching his performance perfectly for all eventualities. The dour Scottish copper is the most sympathetic person in the piece, either a pastiche of a careworn copper, or a policeman playing up to a pastiche knowing that this is what is expected of him. He also seems to be the only professional in the play worthy of the epithet. Naeem Hayat’s therapist Kamal is by contrast all detachment and questions until the script wants us to suspect him, at which he becomes sarky and judgemental about Rachel’s habits and clams up about his relationship with Megan. I’d have him struck off, save that one of the show’s only true human moments occurs when Megan tells him, and the audience, her backstory – kudos to Kirsty Oswald for managing to inject a genuine moment of tragic drama into proceedings.
So what might at first seem a passable evening’s entertainment, rattling past at the speed of a 125, in retrospect unravels as quickly as Tom (Adam Jackson-Smith)’s volte-face and the subsequently rushed trackside denouement. At the end, we are left with a pat epilogue in which two of the principals offer the equivalent of the conclusion to a school essay, summarising the preceding two hours without convincing us that they feel anything new as a result. The Girl on the Train? I think I’ll take the bus.
Matthew Grierson
February 2019
Photography by Manuel Harlan
Furious Realism
Fury
by Phoebe Eclair-Powell
Nicole Charles and Company, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Milton Court Theatre, Barbican until 16th February
Review by Isobel Rogers
Fury is a contemporary tale by Phoebe Eclair-Powell (winner of the Soho Theatre Young Writer’s Award) based on Euripides’ Medea. Director Nicole Charles’ production is boldly 2019. Three narrators tell the story of Samantha: a stressed single mum living on a Peckham council estate. She’s a powerless figure in a vest top, hair scrunchie and spray-on jeans, inhabiting a city which is increasingly moneyed and unforgiving. She’s weighed down by the modern female prison sentence of two children and a cleaning job she can barely hold on to.
Lydia Fleming as Sam is arresting, but the character is so archetypal that she’s almost blank: she could be any one of countless unlucky women, ‘anywhere between 17 and 35’. She meets Tom, a comparatively-privileged Masters student with gelled hair and a preppy polo shirt. His intentions for Sam head increasingly wayward and sadistic. He pays her to do his chores and more. Joseph Potter’s eyes sparkle as Tom realises his upper hand in their uneven relationship. She needs him to pay her in cash.
The night they meet, they dance together on the top of designer Charlie Cridlan’s silver framed set. Its starkness represents this harsh, unbending city: a place full of skyscrapers. The structure needs to be half a metre larger in scale to avoid play-acting connotations. Sam’s place in this world is signalled with yellow marigolds pinned onto the frame.
Our narrators manipulate three heavy grey blocks to create Sam’s landscape as it morphs into the seaside and back again. Tom and Sam are intent on adventures away from their city sprawl. They kiss at Nunhead Reservoir. The interplay between them is sorrowfully fascinating: a believable downward spiral of cruel manipulation, acted with skill.
Sam’s children are two shining balls of fairy lights, disembodied but always there. A large handheld spotlight is employed in tender moments of exposition, bringing the seriousness of Sam’s fate to our attention.
The narrators (Brandon Ashford, Isabella Brownson and Kristina Tonteri-Young) are slick and omniscient, uniting as a batch of orderly social workers come to check up on Sam’s violent outbursts. They become lofty commentators on her downfall – singing angelically in harmony – instead of her allies, as I think the script intends. Confident and seemingly a class above the story, they are removed from the plot; their cameos as real friends in Sam’s life are difficult to relate to and stunt the storytelling.
A short time before the end, the performance is curtailed by a stage manager: Fleming is streaming blood from her face. She has hit her head on the silver frame during a tussle (I heard a sharp clunk). I hope that Sam finds enough fury to fight back her oppressors: a triumphant ending is needed.
Isobel Rogers
February 2019
Photography courtesy of Guildhall School of Music and Drama
Master of Northern Melodramas
Rutherford and Son
by Githa Sowerby
Questors Theatre at the Judi Dench Playhouse, Ealing until 16th February
Review by Viola Selby
Through Sowerby’s unsentimental writing of Rutherford and Son, made real by the excellent direction of Simon Roberts and the period perfect costumes designed by Nichola Thomas, the audience is plunged through time to an industrialised Northern English family living room, where the whole play takes place. This living room has been creatively designed by Bron Blake and lighting designer Chris Newall to appear and feel wonderfully warm and welcoming, with the continued hanging smoke of an industrial town.
However, once into the story, having everything happen in this small space heightens the feeling of claustrophobia which each family member feels whilst under their father’s rule. And what control the father has! David Sellar is not only master of the house but also master of the stage as he manages to brilliantly depict a man whose sole focus is his business and family name, no matter the cost. Through tense silences, fervent debates, groans and moans made hilarious by the brilliant Despina Sellar as Rutherford’s ever-complaining sister Anne, and malicious monologues, passionately performed by an extremely creative cast, the audience are sent on an emotional rollercoaster of dramas, all of which are made even more realistic and relatable due to the personal approach each actor has taken in understanding their character.
Rutherford’s main issue, as the title hints, is one of his sons. John and Dick Rutherford want to create futures for themselves, both of which go against their father’s views and wishes for them and his company. Kai Hogenacker (John) and William Newsome (Dick) represent their characters’ struggles in such a sensitive and realistic way that the audience can truly understand and empathise with the characters.
Whilst a less obvious issue, which arises once a secret affair is brought to Rutherford’s attention, is the oppression of Rutherford’s daughter Janet and John’s wife Mary. Both women are subject to the men’s commands and constant criticism and, although they seem to have peacefully succumb to this subjugation, it is through the explosive acting abilities of Dani Beckett (Janet) and Evelina Plonyte (Mary) that it becomes obvious that these women are not to be messed with.
Nevertheless, through various events, it also becomes clear how Rutherford’s control reaches far beyond his family, as his focus on success impacts the lives of his neighbours and work force. In particular Martin, portrayed by Julian Casey, and Mrs Henderson, skilfully represented by Alex McDevitt as a poor working-class mother who comes begging for Rutherford to reinstate her son after Rutherford has fired him, but who threatens Rutherford the very second he threatens to take her son to the magistrate. Whilst Casey exquisitely encapsulates his character’s moral dilemma, as Martin has to decide whether to stay true to his beliefs or to go against a friend as his boss, whom he greatly respects and has worked for many years, wishes. Yet no matter his decision, it is a secret revealed to Rutherford by Dick and Janet that ends up being Martin’s undoing, again showing the power and control Rutherford has.
Rutherford and Son was originally meant to be called The Master and from Robert’s interpretation it is clear to see why. This is the master of all Northern melodramas.
Viola Selby
February 2019
Photography by Robert Vass and Lewis Hine
Mark Aspen 