Wool Over the Eyes
Three Bags Full
by Jerome Chodorov, based on a farce by Claude Magnier
Q2 Players at the National Archives, Kew, until 24th November
Review by Didie Bucknall
Quite properly, we have had plenty of sober theatrical offerings lately due to the commemoration of the end of WW1, so it is a joy to be presented with a rip roaring farce energetically performed by the Q2 Players.
The venue is a new one for Q2. The massive National Archives building has a smallish comfortable performance space. The scenery has to be mobile for easy removal as the space needs to be used for other purposes. In this instance, it enhanced the atmosphere of the play; the mobile flats painted in elegant Art Deco style delicately formed the backdrop to an elaborate Hampstead Heath house.
Three Bags Full has nothing to do with sheep but plenty of wool surrounds the possibility of distinguishing the very different contents of three identical black holdall bags. The director’s notes liken the play to be somewhat in the vein of a Whitehall farce with larger-than-life characters pursuing perfectly plausible agendas, which seem completely reasonable to themselves but totally incomprehensible to each other. Chaos ensues as one might expect.
Farce needs to be played with balance and good timing, seemingly so easy, but in fact very difficult to achieve. The cast were more than equal to the task.
The action takes place 1925 in the luxurious home of Bascom Barlow the successful entrepreneurial owner of the sports firm of Barlows, played by Hugh Cox. His long serving clerk, Richard Foyle (Neelaksh Sadhoo) arrives in great excitement and out of control on roller skates. He has spent £300 of the firm’s money on ordering more pairs of skates. He thinks Barlow will be delighted at his initiative. Barlow is furious. Unbeknownst to Foyle, Barlow has been granted a bank loan and is getting into serious debt. But all is well, according to Foyle, for over the years he has been stashing away small sums of money taken from the firm so he can hand back a considerable sum to his boss. But there is a proviso, first Barlow must give Foyle permission for him to marry his daughter. Barlow is livid and dismisses him on the spot. But he needs the money. The money is divided into diamonds and cash, each contained in two identical black holdall bags. The seemingly curious attitude of the downstairs maid so jaunty with her feather duster, played by Judy Ramjeet, becomes clearer as it emerges that she is secretly engaged to a rich banker’s eligible son. She too has been dismissed and has packed her belongings in, yes, you’ve guessed it, an identical black holdall bag.
The plots muddle up. People are not who other people think they are. Lynne Harrison and Cat Lamin as mother and daughter, exotic in stunning period costumes, Dominic Upton as Boris the chauffeur a failed army recruit. At one stage he picks Foyle up and bodily throws him around. The unexpected arrival of Jeanette (Camilla Danson) and later, Charlotte Muir as her mother add to the confusion. The banker, Malcolm McAlister slipping on a discarded roller skate is put out of sorts and calls in his bank loan while his son, Paul Huggins drives his Aston Martin to and fro obligingly exchanging holdalls.
The laconic butler Jenkins (Christopher Hodges) trudging wearily back and forth to answer the front door engages the audience with a shrug as if to say, I know I am living in a mad house, but that’s all part of the job.
This is a very strong cast, well-rehearsed and well directed by Tony Cotterill. If this was his first attempt at directing, let us hope that it will not be his last. There are some good performances and it would be invidious to pick any one out, and this includes backstage staff as the lighting, sound, set construction and costumes were excellent. It was a thoroughly enjoyable evening.
Didie Bucknall
November 2018
Photography by Rishi Rai Photography
Haunting, Harrowing, Horrifying
The Trial
by Stephen Berkoff, adapted from Franz Kafka
Youth Action Theatre at the Hampton Hill Theatre, until 24th November
Review by John O’Brien
Franz Kafka’s The Trial, written in 1925, is one of the most important literary works of the twentieth Century. Indeed Kafkaesque has entered the language as a byword for byzantine bureaucratic obfuscation and frustration. Youth Action Theatre is currently reviving Stephen Berkoff’s 1971 adaptation. Directed by Rowan D ‘Albert it is showing all this week at Hampton Hill Theatre.
The set is suitable minimalist. Think of a contestant on Mastermind as she sits in that chair in the dark, add eerie music by Philip Glass, and a rope that hangs menacingly from the gantry and you have some idea of the show’s visual and aural presentation. This chiaroscuro contrast gives the set the feel of a German expressionist classic, such as Metropolis by Fritz Lang (1927).
Joseph K (Benjamin Buckley) is a young man who works as a clerk in a Bank and lives as a lodger in the house of Mrs Grubach (Ella Barnett). One morning he is arrested by two guards (Meagan Baxter and Joe Evans) on charges which are never made explicit. Joseph K. now enters a nightmarish Alice in Wonderland horror world of bureaucracy, law and unaccountable arbitrary power. The labyrinthine nature of this world is wonderfully realised by the use of six copper frames which do double duty as doors but also as mirrors. As he walks through and around these doors cum mirrors so Joseph becomes trapped in a series of absurd and menacing encounters. Famously this has become widely known through the notion of The Trial. But what’s very well demonstrated by this production is that The Trial is a metaphor for the whole of society as it impinges on the individual. One’s whole life is a trial so to speak. So we see Joseph being tormented by his landlady Mrs Grubach, his Father who recommends a terrible lawyer, Huld the Lawyer (Mary Rycroft), The Bank Manager (Cameron Christie), The Inspector (Josh Clarke), The Artist Titorelli (Josh Clarke), the Priest (Joe Evans) and various unpleasant women Miss Burstner (Georgia Griffiths) , Leni (Zofia Komoroska), the Laundress (Mary Rycroft) . All these different aspects of society, the law, finance, art, religion, the family, women are shown to confine, confuse and control Joseph in their own unique way. But what they all have in common is power. They symbolise the power of institutions over which Joseph has little if any control. He is a victim. Moreover he is alone. More than that the people he encounters are unreliable. So he becomes confused and paranoid.
What makes The Trial so haunting, so harrowing, so horrifying is the notion that you are on your own, the people you encounter have mendacious designs on you and that there is no way out. This is a deeply pessimistic and terrifying vision. But only fifteen years after he wrote it, the holocaust was under way and Kafka’s vision was all too real. It was happening. And in Germany the most civilised country in Europe, the home of Beethoven, Goethe and Einstein.
Walter Benjamin who committed suicide in 1940 as the Nazis closed in on him famously remarked that “every document of civilisation is simultaneously a document of barbarism”. The Trial is one of the most prescient, pessimistic and profound demonstrations of the truth of that aphorism. If you don’t know The Trial then this is a very good place to acquaint yourself with it. If you do then this intriguingly beguiling production will add fresh layers of meaning.
John O’Brien
November 2018
Photography courtesy of YAT
Joyful, Painful, Honest
Things I Know to Be True
by Andrew Bovell
Wild Duck Theatre at OSO Arts Centre, Barnes until 24th November
Review by Georgia Renwick
Has there, or can there ever be such a thing as a ‘normal’, quiet family life? Andrew Bovell’s 2016 Australian-British play tears right to the heart of the family unit in this suburban drama brought to life by the Wild Duck company, in searing, tear-jerking style.
The play opens with Rosie, the youngest of four children, returning with a broken heart from her gap-year travels in Europe. Mum, Fran, quickly assembles her brood of grown-up children to welcome her home, but before Dad, Bob, has even handed round the cups of tea, the bickering has already started and the excuses pour out. “Oh, I can’t stay…”, “Just popping in…”, “That’s my cue to go…”. One by one they return to their lives and Bob and Fran are left with just one little bird in her nest. It’s an incomplete family picture; where are the Sunday afternoon BBQs they imagined? The weddings? The grand-kids? They’ve raised their children to believe they could have anything they wanted, and now they’ve gone out and taken it, what happens when they’re left behind? The fractures only widen, the further away they get.
Set in the suburbs of Adelaide, Australia but conceived with the Adelaide State Theatre alongside Frantic Assembly, a British company renowned for their physical theatre work, Wild Duck has brought to the OSO stage a topical, relevant naturalistic drama peppered with sections of choreographed movement, devised by the company. As a young breakaway company themselves (Director Susan Conte has 6+ previous years’ experience directing) Wild Duck is deservedly garnering a reputation for presenting bold, intelligent, contemporary work. Having appeared at the Lyric, Hammersmith only this year, Things I Know to be True is hot off the press.
Bovell has crafted a play of such startling honesty it is by turns joyful and painfully uncomfortable watch; at once heart-achingly tender, and biting. The ongoing battle of generational difference is fought over the big stuff: gender roles, love, money and social class, comically punctuated with instantly recognisable family micro-dramas, such as where all that Tupperware gets to, or whether it’s high time your 24 year old son should be ironing his own shirts. Whether you are a parent yourself or not, you were once a child, and perhaps felt too the pressure on your generation to make things better than the last. If this play were set in a British back garden you can be sure Brexit would be on the cards, but nonetheless every generational obstacle they face in suburban Australia is relatable. There are multiple generations in the audience tonight, and where the laughs come from is telling!
The material plays to the strengths of Wild Duck, whose young talents, Ben Dimmock and and Berenike Kahane have both shone in recent Wild Duck productions The Distance and Picnic at Hanging Rock respectively. Kahane brings a sensitive fragility to Rosie, who at 18 is precariously balanced on the daunting cusp of adulthood. Dimmock lends a buoyant but frantic energy to early-20s son Ben, who is caught up in the flow of life by forces he soon finds are beyond his control.
As the threads of the family start to unravel towards crisis point at an alarming pace, by Act Two Bovell’s tightly wound structure begins to read like a series of worse case scenarios. It reaches a point where I feel it would be beyond the realms of possibility to expect anyone to cope, without at least a nervous breakdown, but the resilience of the Wild Duck cast to the demands of the material is a truly impressive achievement.
Dorothy Duffy’s Fran Price is a true matriarchal battle-axe. As a nurse, she frequently reminds us, she has seen it all before. Duffy’s fierceness does not ask for sympathy, and yet … Meanwhile, some challenging questions surrounding our expectations of ‘masculinity’ are raised by James Lloyd Pegg’s understated portrayal of Bob, her husband. His quietness speaks volumes.
The set design (Marc Pearce) and technical elements in this production also have a lot to say. A life-size bow of a tree sweeps over the top of the stage, unruly and untamed, and struck by the most deliciously warm and nostalgic light, the magical quality of light that captures the golden hour of a summer’s evening in a childhood memory. Borrell’s writing, enraptured by the cyclical nature of things, is also realised in the cool blues and crisp whites of the seasons as they pass. Exceptionally gorgeous work from lighting designer Katie Nicholl.
The physical theatre elements succeed in communicating a lot, without a word, set to the contemporary sounds of Joe Evans. Simple acts such as touching a hand, or buttoning up a shirt, are brought into clearer focus. How they connect in with the more naturalistic elements of the play, is left to our own imagining. They add another dimension, but visually do not linger in the mind as long as the emotions that surface.
No family looks exactly like we imagine. It is an organic thing shifting and changing and growing like the bow of the tree that sweeps across the stage. But if there’s one thing this family know to be true, there’s nowhere like the familiar chaos of family in a crisis.
Georgia Renwick
November 2018
Photography by Marc Pearce Photos
Spirit, Spiritually and Splash
The Queen Symphony and Symphony of Psalms
By Tolga Kashif and Igor Stravinsky
UK Premiere
Kew Wind Orchestra and Choirs at St John’s Smith Square, Westminster, 18th November
Review by Eugene Broad
“Let’s do it, darling” is supposedly what Freddie Mercury said, before downing a shot of vodka and singing the vocals to The Show Must Go On in a single recording, shortly before his death. That vim and vigour was harnessed wonderfully by the immensely talented performers of Kew Wind Orchestra, the Hampton Choral Society, and The Hythe Singers in Tolga Kashif’s The Queen Symphony.
Just as eclectic and individual as Freddie Mercury was the musical choice presented to us, with the other selected works being Percy Grainger’s A Marching Song of Democracy and Igor Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms.
Grainger, as a composer and person, very much went his own way in life. This spirit was present throughout A Marching Song of Democracy, a lyrical series of waves building and washing over the listener, to the point of almost becoming blurry, before reorganising and rebuilding, with a central current of a theme pushing through the flotsam and jetsam around it. Intended to be performed to the rhythmic marching of feet as a chorus whistled and sung-along, the hypnotic drive of the piece came through without the need of this accompaniment.
Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms was almost painfully intense, given the power of the choir, the dexterity of the orchestra, and the atmosphere of St John Smith’s Square. A symphony split into three movements, each tackles a different Biblical psalm – 38, 39 and 150 respectively. Stravinsky was commissioned to compose the piece for $6,000 by Koussevitzky – his publisher, and the conductor of the Boston Symphony. This was supposedly somewhat a symbiotic relationship, with Koussevitzky loving Stravinsky’s music, and Stravinsky loving Koussevitzky’s money.
The first movement starts with a sudden jolt, a burst of E minor chords, which cascaded into a tempestuous piano (adroitly played throughout by Leo Nicholson), bass and cellos rumble, before bassoons circle in octatonic flight like hungry sea vultures waiting to swoop down and peck at the choir lamenting their fate. The effect is immediate – this has the desperation of drowning, deep in the ocean, in the midst of a storm. This is spiritual music designed to make the listener uncomfortably reflect on their mortality, as the choral voices plead with uncontrollable forces to “be no more”.
Compared to this movement (and likewise the third movement), the second movement is almost pedestrian by comparison. Evoking an uneasy Bach, the second movement begins with orchestral exposition, wonderfully morose oboes picking out a fugue, later joined by fluttery soft flutes and stronger-winged piccolos – reminiscent, perhaps, of the hungry sea vultures now being content, stomachs full of drowned choir, calling to each other on a becalmed sea. Kew Wind Orchestra handled this part especially marvellously, with the orchestra answering and calling to each-other, until the choir re-emerges from the morning stillness – slowly building and structuring their own answers and calls to their counterparts. This dialogue was excellently controlled and maintained by orchestra and choirs alike. This gentleness lulls into a false sense of security; all at once, the choir bursts into life again.
The third, final movement, is almost a mix of the two which come before it. It has a heavy tension within it, echoing the contrapuntal nature of the second movement. Mixed in is the same visceral force of nature which is so dominant in the first movement. Increasingly gentle cries of “hallelujah”, accompanied by the soft heaving breathing of the woodwind orchestra; no longer a fierce organ-beast, but its own voice distinct again. Adeptly handled by both orchestra and choir, this was evocative spiritual contemplation of a type that only someone from the fold of Russian Orthodoxy could produce, much like Rachmaninov’s far more traditionalist Vespers. The surprising difference between the two, however, is that Stravinsky infamously refused to endorse that music creates feeling. This particular work – not to mention a dozen others – begs to differ.
But the absolute highlight of the evening had to be Kashif’s The Queen Symphony, at which point the conductor, Matthew Willis, Kew Wind Orchestra, Hampton Choral Society, and the Hythe Singers clearly shared “one vision”. The symphony, split into six movements arranged by mood, drew from the feel and inspiration of Queen’s songs. Even so, clear motifs, patterns, and themes were recognisable as Queen’s – solely adding to the appeal and fun of the piece in listening and finding their famous riffs and rhythms echoed or masked in orchestral form.
Perhaps best considered (very) literally as a popular classical piece, it was never fully pop nor fully classical. Rather, it was an absolute “Bohemian rhapsody” (or well, rather, symphony) – with the motif of Who Wants to Live Forever re-emerging through it to add consistency and flavour. Despite being composed with Queen in mind, it could hold its own as a stand-alone symphony which even someone without a soft spot for Queen would comfortably enjoy.
Whilst all three of the soloists were superlative in their performances (with Rachel Barnes on violin, Gillian O’Dempsey on ‘cello, and Leo Nicholson on piano), the orchestra and choirs, marvellously marshalled by Matthew Willis were “the champions” of the night. I truly hope that this particular piece is one kept close for frequent future recitals, and it is equally one to keep a keen eye out for – it’ll rock you, make you gaga and want the show to keep going on.
Eugene Broad
November 2018
Photographs courtesy of Kew Wind Orchestra
Twisted Icon of an Entire Era
/ Sylvia \
by Ja?, adapted from a play by Stéphane Ghislain Roussel
Ja? Theatre Company at The Etcetera Theatre until 18th November
Voila Europe Festival
Review by Lola McKeith
The resemblance is striking. You enter the space and there it is: the cropped hair, the monocle, the shapeless plaid dress with the high collar repressing all notions of femininity, the champagne flute, the carefully arranged cigarette case, but most of all the uncanny angular pose, the pointy shoulders, interlocked legs, the twisted torso and peculiarly placed hands all artfully arranged in their awkwardness. The Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia Von Harden by Otto Dix, if not as shocking as in 1926 then arguably still as intriguing, is one of the most instantly recognisable images of the twentieth century because it did, exactly as intended by the artist, come to represent an entire era.
Dix was a German painter well-known for his brutal portrayal of debauched dilapidated Weimar society, all whores and cripples, murderers, beggars, street urchins, cabaret dancers and circus freaks, ghoulish and grotesque, often exaggerated in their ugliness to resemble comic-book-like caricatures. Legend has it that he spotted Sylvia, a fixed member of the intellectual glitterati in 1920s Berlin, at the Romanisches Café and exclaimed: “I have to paint you!” He saw in her the personification of the New Woman, the boyish, flapper dressed, bob-haired new ideal of modernity. Sylvia agreed to sit for him, an hour every day for weeks on end, a process she found tiresome and which resulted in a painting she thought “strange” at first but grew to be immensely proud of, posing next to it in old age at the Centre Pompidou.
We meet Sylvia as she sits for the painter, twitching, bored, unable to switch off her never resting inquisitive mind. She shares her trail of thoughts with us, the audience, standing in for the painter, observing her, “scrutinizing” her body, her features, her clothes. Sylvia isn’t entirely comfortable being watched like this, it seems, but defiantly pushes on and something about the attention seems to flatter her.
Performer Joseph Morgen Schofield, who uses pronouns they or them, is an utterly charming Sylvia, witty, observant, gossipy, pensive, with a commanding stage presence most notable in the long silences deliciously savoured to the last almost unbearable second. Where Dix saw in von Harden a question about femininity and the binary expectations enforced on women, Monocle, Portrait de S. von Harden by the Luxembourgish artist Stéphane Ghislain Roussel written for a non-binary performer explores modern day notions of gender fluidity and gender performance. In its translation from French and German into English, Ja? Theatre Company aims to give the figure of Sylvia a more international, universal appeal, still peppering her monologue with the odd French expression or German remark. A white screen as background serves both to frame the little scene and open up a multimedia window into the future where a modern day Sylvia (Caroline Tyka) explores her own nowadays urban environment. While initially the videos of city lights and noise add a layer of restless urban atmosphere, as Sylvia tells us of the “sequined nights” of Weimar Berlin, it is not entirely clear what the second actor, interrupting with shorter and shorter snippets of German text, adds to the play. Maybe it’s to disrupt the feeling of nostalgia that easily spreads when Schofield sings, with the breaking, fragile voice of a Cabaret diseuse, a song about Berlin to the crackling playback of an old shellac record. A moment of magic is promptly broken by a self-deprecating remark, Sylvia’s readiness to laugh at herself first before anyone else can.
The fragility of the supposedly “ugly” or unconventional woman is painfully obvious, in the way she longingly describes the opulent flesh of the cabaret dancer Martha or the luscious red curls of Anita Berber, another era-defining woman whose beauty apparently turned men into poets. Would Felix, her current beau, kill herself for her, as a suitor did for Martha? Would she herself become a vision of Berber-esque red curls and beauty at the hands of Otto Dix? What we witness most of all is a fiercely intelligent woman who in the face of physical attention longs to be sensual, desirable, even a bit ditzy, imitating the reckless, devil-may-care glamour of a Sally Bowles. Vices were the epitome of chic in Weimar Germany and the chain-smoking Sylvia is as fascinated by gossip, tabloid scandal, lose morals and raunchiness as the entire era. It’s all a pose though. A performance. It’s a type that represented the era, not any one person, the New Woman is a construct as hollow as the plaid dress that is left on the chair like the shell of a ghost.
It’s an interesting hour spend in the company of the immensely watchable Joseph Morgen Schonfield. While Otto Dix was notorious for his merciless, flaw enhancing “evil eye”, /Sylvia\ celebrates with empathy and kindness the beauty of not quite fitting in.
Lola McKeith
November 2018
Photography by Christina Bulford
Half the Seed of Europe
War Requiem
by Benjamin Britten
English National Opera, London Coliseum until 7th December
Review by Mark Aspen
Last summer, when staying a few days in Alsace, that most Germanic part of France, I visited the Musée Unterlinden in Colmar. Although it was quite quiet in the museum, there was, as always, a small crowd around its crowning glory, Mathis Grünewald’s moving masterpiece, the Isenheim Altar. Benjamin Britten suggested this as an illustration of his War Requiem at its first performance at the consecration of the re-built Coventry Cathedral, destroyed early in the Second World War. Four and a half centuries separate their creation, but what they have in common is sacrifice. Britten’s 1962 monumental work speaks of the sacrifice, in the First World War, of “half the seed of Europe”; whereas the sacrifice of Christ for the sins of all mankind is the subject of Grünewald’s vivid depiction of suffering in his 1512 altarpiece, with Christ’s body on the Cross twisted in agony.
Britten is a composer greatly associated with the English National Opera, so it is fitting that the first fully-staged UK performance of his War Requiem should be presented by ENO, a company acclaimed for staging oratorio and similar works, most notably Deborah Warner’s Messiah nearly a decade ago. The scale is similar, the incomparable ENO chorus being augmented by the contrasting style of the ensemble from ENO’s recent Porgy and Bess and further complemented by forty members of the Finchley Children’s Music Group. Equally a chamber orchestra extends the full force of ENO’s orchestra.
A self-proclaimed pacifist, Britten absconded to the United States just before the beginning of the Second World War, as an “artistic ambassador”, only returning towards the end of hostilities to apply for exemption from military services as a conscientious objector. Consequently, some found it distasteful that he should write a requiem for the war dead; however, his requiem is cast wider to encompass all who suffer in war. The larger part of the requiem is given over to grief formal and anguish informal of non-combatants, represented by one soprano soloist, but with the full weight of the choruses. The emphasis is not on the glory of war, but on the pity of war.
The universality of total war (a term coined by General Ludendorff in his First World War memoires) is embodied in War Requiem by the juxtaposition of two disparate texts, the Latin Missa pro Defunctis (Mass for the Dead) with Wilfred Owen’s war poetry. The Missa reflects on the spiritual and emotional losses in war, against Owen’s articulations of the physical and psychological damage. The human level of the war poetry is expressed by two men soloists, accompanied largely by the chamber orchestra. This contrasts with the mass, in all senses, of the Missa where the monumental momentum of the chorus, ensemble and full orchestra, accentuated by the soprano solo, proclaims an overawing magnificence. Yet there is an estranged ethereal presence of the voices of the children singers, with their own suppliant musical accompaniment. Hence War Requiem runs on three levels concurrently, as it contrasts the sublime with the horrific.
Horror is the starting theme for the stage set, which features huge photographs from the post-First World War shock-tactic album of conscientious objector Ernst Friedrich’s Krieg dem Krieges, including inter alia pictures of the badly mutilated faces of injured soldiers. However, one is left wondering whether the images of naked torn bodies of the battlefield to illustrate the opening chorous, “Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine”, disrespectfully disturbs eternal rest that the Lord is asked to grant.
The designer, German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, is one of today’s best-known artists in the photographic field, having the distinction of being both the first foreign winner of the Turner Prize, and the first photographer to do so. War Requiem is his debut in operatic design. He has eschewed a three-dimensional set, to a photographic design, which indeed plays to his strengths by creating an installation. Enhanced by Charles Balfour’s lighting, the diverse images used include riots, Coventry Cathedral, mosses, wind-torn tree limbs and slaughtered sheep. Eventually however, they becoming increasingly lyrical with brilliant flowers, awe-inspiring cloudscapes and snow. They are projected onto the cyclorama, or interspersed flats, or in one case across the whole front of the auditorium, filling the theatre with purple light and bold images of blue pulsatilla anemones. A fly-drop of concrete rubble transmogrifies from an inverted mushroom-cloud into a beautiful falling snowscape, but the one nod to a three-dimensional set is baffling, something resembling a gigantic ginger root that the children climb over.
How do you go about staging an oratorio? This is the controversial question that the director, ENO’s own Daniel Kramer, seeks to again answer in this production. There is a need for balance in trying to enhance the work rather than distract from it. Tillmans’ grand images are magnificent, and the disturbing ones harrowing, but there is a danger that these do sometimes steer away from what the music is trying to say.
Much of the visual imagery is created by the swirling crowds of humanity on stage. The three choruses are there most of the time and are supplemented by eight child actors from the Sylvia Young Theatre School. They are constantly in motion, always abject, sombre, cowed. Sometimes the movements are militaristic, sometimes like prisoners, sometimes like mourners. All the costumes are variants of muted grey-blues. In one vignette, the circling lines of bodies are reminiscent of Vincent van Gogh’s 1890 painting, Prisoners Exercising, although often the tableaux seem removed from the words. Ann Yee’s chorography is exemplary in keeping all the fluency in the movement. There are poignant episodes. In the Offertorium, Owen inverts the episode in Genesis when Abraham is told by God to sacrifice his son Isaac, in that no angel comes to substitute the ram: “ but the old man would not so, but slew his son, – and half the seed of Europe, one by one”.
Britten’s music underlines the ironies of the often contradictory nature of the conflicting words of Owen’s war poetry and the Missa, with sudden turns from the soaringly lyrical to the edgily dissonant. The score makes a wide use of tritone, the interval that early music theorists called Diabolous in Musica, the devil in the music, to jar the listener and to point up the themes of conflict versus resolution, or reality versus glorification. Conductor, Martyn Brabbins specialises in twentieth century music and it shows in his magnificent interpretation of the power and intricacies of War Requiem and the control and co-ordination of his varied array of musicians and singers.
Emma Bell brings a strong and expressive voice to the soprano solo, a soul lost in the sea of humanity, hair shock stiff. Is she a grieving mother, a protective matron or an angel of death? All are amalgamated in her words and body language. Her “lacrimosa dies illa” (this day full of tears) has beauty, pathos and richness. The two men soloists are the combatants, the tenor one of “our boys”, the baritone, the enemy soldier, although the distinction blurs as the piece goes on. David Butt Philip, the tenor, brings full-on power to a soaring expression of the sentiment of the piece. Award-winning baritone, Roderick Williams’ rich and gentle approach is full of empathy and pathos. In the resolving moment of the requiem, the two are together. As the tenor sings “It seems that out of battle I escaped”, we realise it is in death that opposing soldiers meet with honour. “I am the enemy you killed, my friend”, the baritone replies in recognition, in a moment of heart-wrenching anguish.
There is a quote in the Agnus Dei from Owen’s At a Calvary near the Ancre, in which soldiers pass at a crossroads a damaged monument to the crucified Christ, and there is a recognition their hearts. The poem is dense with symbolism, which was not picked up in Kramer’s symbol-laden War Requiem, but it piercingly summarises the message of the piece as a whole, “But they who love the greater love lay down their life; they do not hate”.
Let us not pass by.
Mark Aspen
November 2018
Photography by Richard Hubert Smith
Poignant Gems
Echoes of the War
by J.M.Barrie
Teddington Theatre Club at Coward Studio, Hampton Hill Theatre until 17th November
Review by Didie Bucknall
Echoes of the War is the banner title for four one-act plays by baronet, author and playwright J.M.Barrie. As is well known, Barrie left the proceeds of his Peter Pan to Great Ormond Street Hospital but other works are less well known today. He was rich and moved in aristocratic circles so it is surprising that the first of the two plays being performed by the Teddington Theatre Club at the Hampton Hill Theatre was about charladies, as in those First World War days the social classes were more defined and he would have had little experience how the other half lived.
In The Old Lady Shows Her Medals, three strong experienced actors Sue Bell as Mrs Dowie, Liz Salaman as Mrs Tully and Mandy Stenhouse as Mrs Haggerty are having a trifle over- the-top competition as to which of their sons was the bravest and most dutiful. They all agree that anyone not having a boy at the front did not deserve a mention, they were to be despised and ostracised. Mrs Dowie brings out a small bundle of precious pencilled letters from her son, enquiring whether the other two also had had pencilled letters and were they addressed to ‘Dear Mother’? When they agreed that they had, she caps them all by stating that her letters were to “Dearest Mother”.
The Reverend Wilkinson (Andy Hewitt) arrives in a flurry of excitement, Mrs Dowie’s son has arrived back on five days leave and he is on the way to fetch him home. The ladies leave Mrs Dowie to greet her son in private not noticing that she is far from anxious to see her son – a tense and deeply revealing performance by Sue Bell. All is explained when the equally reluctant son, beautifully played by Charlie Higgs, arrives.
This little gem of a play begins with smiles and laughter, but ends with sadness and the audience leave for the interval with lumps in their throats.
Spiritualism was much practiced and brought comfort to many people during the war. The programme notes tell us that it was governed by the supposition that the dead cannot depart until they have returned to comfort the living; until that happened, the living would not have permission to move on with their lives.
In the second play, A Well Remembered Voice, Mandy Stenhouse as Grace Don, a grieving bereaved mother, is desperately trying to communicate with her dead son by means of a séance. She is joined by Liz Salaman as Mary Rogers and Amy Addison-Dunne as Laura, the deeply saddened girlfriend of the dead soldier. A short circuiting lightbulb overhead seems to spell out answers to Grace’s anxious questions – well timed action by lighting operator John Hart – and she is reassured when it appears to spell out that he loves them. She does not ask whether the father is loved because she has convinced herself that he is heartless and uncaring about their loss. The lightbulb spells out a strange message which doesn’t make much sense to the ladies. They retire and Robert Don played by Andy Hewitt is left alone. We do not yet see that he has cast off his painter’s smock, hung up his fishing rods and put away his pipe in quiet sorrow. The strange message however calls Dick fresh faced in his cricket whites from the ‘other side of the veil’. He can only be seen by one person and the person he has chosen is his father. They have a very tender exchange with Dick constantly urging his father to put on a happy face as they get points ‘up there’ for happiness ‘down there’. A lovely performance by both men.
To set the scene and add to the atmosphere, a large collection of songs originally performed and recorded during the 52 month period of the war were played before and after both performances.
A little poem by Eva Jones penned in May 1916 included in the programme gives a poignant reminder of the tragic end of so many young men and the agonising sadness of those who had so proudly waved their loved ones off to fight for King and Country. The two plays chosen by director Sally Halsey are a fitting tribute towards marking the centenary of the ending of World War One.
Didie Bucknall
November 2018
Photography by Sarah J Carter
Small Island, Big Heart
Star of Strait Street
by Philip Glassborow
Morning Star at OSO Arts Centre, Barnes until 14th November
Review by Eleanor Lewis
To reach Strait Street in Valetta on the island of Malta, you cross Palace Square where the plaque quoting George VI’s letter awarding the George Cross to the island can be seen on the side of the Grandmaster’s Palace. It attracts tourists who naturally admire it but probably have little concept of the personal sacrifices made by so many individuals that together made Malta’s resistance to the German onslaught of World War Two as strong as it was. The Star of Strait Street is the story of one woman’s contribution to Malta’s glorious war effort.
Strait Street today is home to some of the less touristy cafes, jewellery workshops and shops selling the other thing the island is famous for, beautifully worked filigree silver. Back in the forties, service personnel and civilians made their way to the Morning Star nightclub there, where the singing and dancing skills of Christina Ratcliffe and her concert party, the Whizz Bangs, took their minds off war for a while.
Based on the true story of the entertainer Christina Ratcliffe and the love of her life, Adrian ‘Six Medals’ Warburton, the RAF’s most decorated photo-reconnaissance pilot, Star of Strait Street is a new musical play. At just about an hour’s length, like Malta it’s small but striking in the atmosphere it creates. There is little scenery, a couple of standing boards with photographs and posters of the era, a piano and a chair but writer Philip Glassborow, uses Ratcliffe’s cheerful, unsentimental voice to bring to life a vivid picture of Europe as it was from the late ‘30s into the war years.
Polly March and Larissa Bonaci play Christina: March as she was in the ‘70s and Bonaci as her younger self, March playing a smattering of other characters too. March has one of those well-rounded ‘been everywhere, seen everything, shocked by nothing’ voices, it is a mix of Mary Poppins and Fenella Fielding, both authoritative and comforting and March gives a measured performance of total confidence and great wit, easily working an audience and taking them with her wherever she wants to, as she tells the story of this remarkable woman’s life.
Christina Ratcliffe’s story is interesting in itself. Brought up in the Cheshire countryside, she began her dancing career in London but progressed into Europe touring various exotic locations, landing in Spain on the opening day of the Civil War and ultimately in Malta in 1940. Alongside performing at the Morning Star (which she and her troupe turned in to one of the post popular clubs in the Mediterranean), she worked as a volunteer plotter in the Lascaris RAF HQ underneath Valetta for six months (and was herself decorated for gallantry) while Malta was relentlessly pounded by Luftwaffe bombing and the island pushed to the edge of starvation. All of which Christina refers to pragmatically, there is no regret, no sentiment and reference to the privations and difficulties she and the islanders experienced is made briefly and viewed as something to be dealt with rather than dwelt on. Clever writing is matched with understated performance.
Larissa Bonaci plays the younger Ratcliffe as a cheerful, positive woman who rose to address a period of time in which every stable and reliable feature of life was thrown up in the air, to come down who knew where. She has a clear and sweet singing voice suited to the ‘cheer up’ songs of wartime and her brisk demeanour as Christina brings a credibility to her performance despite a slight non-UK accent. The two performers were accompanied by pianist and MD Geoffrey Thomas, occasionally adding his voice when required for small interjections from other characters.
The tiny but indefatigable island of Malta received its George Cross “For acts of the greatest heroism or of the most conspicuous courage in circumstances of extreme danger.” The course of Ratcliffe and Warburton’s love story is probably predictable and certainly familiar to anyone who fell in love in wartime, but their personal dignity, bravery and their achievements form a small part of the huge picture that is the collective heroism of Malta.
The Star of Strait Street is a gem of a musical, it takes you right into the warm heart of Malta in the midst of war and makes you love it.
Recommended.
Eleanor Lewis
November 2018
Photography by E-P
Tradition and the Irreverent Talent
The Case of the Frightened Lady
by Edgar Wallace
The Classic Thriller Theatre Company at Richmond Theatre until 17th November
Review by Matthew Grierson
Pitched carefully and capably between the comic and the dramatic, tonight’s revival of an interwar thriller knows just how far to take the laughs before it treads back into darkness. Far from sending up the genre, the humour is staged in such a way as to help the audience connect with the characters, humanising them rather than letting them lapse into the stereotypes they could so easily have become.
The scene is the early 1930s – but you’d be forgiven for thinking it were much earlier, given that the curtain rises on a cast tumbling across the splendidly realised hallway of Marks Priory in a boisterous pageant of medieval costume. So it is apparent even before she speaks a word that Lady Lebanon (Deborah Grant in formidable form) is preoccupied by heritage, heraldry and hierarchy. Her Ladyship’s concern to perpetuate the family line is itself the through-line of the play, although not always in the ways we would expect. It is at least the main reason that her several times removed cousin Isla (Scarlett Archer), the titular frightened lady, remains in this tremulous state throughout: Lady Lebanon intends that the young woman will marry her jaunty, Bertie Woosterish son, in the person of the tremendous Matt Barber, who embodies William in a close resemblance of his current regal namesake. Barber is a hoot, swanking about the place with riding crop or billiard cue, at one point even using the latter to mime a shot behind a departing servant as though potting him offstage.
He’s not the only character to treat Lady L’s cherished tradition with irreverence. Robert Duncan gives a well-oiled turn as the caddish Dr Amersham, oozing between slimy insinuation and veiled threats, and is one of a number of participants in the opening round of flirtations and connivances between family, friends and staff that set out various possible motivations for murder. The whirligig of entrances, exits, couplings and uncouplings into which these are choreographed also gives an indication of energy with which this production will continue to speed through its revelations and red herrings, keeping things pacey enough for this period piece to feel sprightly instead of antiquated. Roy Marsden, himself no stranger to the exposition of murder, directs in a way that surefootedly wrongfoots us, giving a comic beat hot on the heels of some fresh terror, or producing new scares that jolt us out of laughter.
An index of this blend of comedy and chills are the repeated moments when certain characters (hush now, no spoilers) will suddenly stop mid-dialogue and look out over the stalls and whisper, hauntedly, ‘Someone’s listening!’ Then the sinister footmen slip into view and the audience laughs, a little relieved. But the moment, teetering on the brink of breaking the fourth wall, remains unnerving each time. Barber proves particularly effective in making these volte-faces from buffoonery to terror and back, much to the play’s benefit, while as Isla, Archer gives us a Lady Macbeth without the homicidal intent. Or does she … ? Her screams, like the thunderclaps that punctuate the play, prove that the production is equally adept at using stock sound simply but effectively to terrorise the audience.
Someone who must have missed the memo to keep things lively and lifelike, however, is John Partridge in the role of Superintendent Tanner. Superintendent Mannered would be more on the mark, such is his arch delivery – viz. his reference to the ‘Lord Lou Tenant’ rather than ‘Lord Lieutenant’ – and proclivity for standing stock still then prowling the stage with no seeming purpose. Perhaps a hangover from his role in Cats?
As Tanner’s sergeant, Totti, Matt Lacey is much more agreeable, exhibiting the people skills necessary to police work in his unassuming interviews with suspects and his low-key flirtation with Isla. But while the relationship between the two policemen is written to be that of surrogate father and son, Tanner having worked with the late Totti Sr, the two actors are too close in age to sell this set-up, losing any residual authority the script may furnish the super’ with.
Given the tone of this production, it’s difficult to know quite how seriously a 1931 audience would have taken the original staging; but with characters called ‘Studd’ and ‘Totti’ there is a hint that Wallace had his tongue in his cheek even then, and this means the evening has a flavour of Carry On Christie. With the family also calling off repeatedly for ‘Gilder’, I was half-expecting a Rita Hayworth-alike to join them onstage. Sadly, the character thus named is a footman, so Scarlett Archer as Isla monopolises the fabulous frocks.
It is also intriguing to speculate how far the modern sensibilities of the piece are Wallace’s own and how far they are part of Antony Lampard’s adaptation. Certainly Lady L’s preoccupation with the dynasty is presented as an outmoded way of thinking even for its time, despite support from her reliable retainer Kelver (Philip Lowrie); so her son scores with the audience by professing himself ‘a bit of a democrat’ at point. Nevertheless, Grant’s performance as the matriarch is as a force to be reckoned with, and, of the below-stairs contingent, Rosie Thomson as Mrs Tilling also gives as good as she gets. One gets the sense of a rounded character willing to stand by her ill-tempered husband, the bluff gamekeeper (Gwynfor Jones), without actually loving him.
In another respect, though, this adaptation has missed a trick; without giving too much away, the story draws on the shared military background of several characters on the subcontinent, but there is not an Indian character among them. In a play that already has numerous character dynamics to explore, this may have been considered one too many. As it is, with the varied ingredients he has Marsden almost manages to keep the pot boiling right to the very end. The denouement when it comes is sudden and surprising, but at this point the direction bubbles over somewhat: no sooner is the culprit revealed than the policemen are reading them the litany of their rights and the curtain falls, giving us little time to savour what has up till then been a lip-smacking evening.
Matthew Grierson
November 2018
Photography by Pamela Raith
‘At the Going Down of the Sun’
A Commemoration of the Armistice Centenary of the Great War 1914–1918
Arts Richmond at the Coach House, Orleans House Gallery, Twickenham, 11th November
Review by Matthew Grierson
What impresses about today’s commemoration is the variety of the programme, diligently put together by Anne Warrington and John Crook. With the verse of the First World War so much part of the national imagination, the readings could easily have comprised widely anthologised poems, those that have become standards. But the organisers have chosen an array of interesting texts to offer fresh views and voices, alongside those we might expect.
The afternoon is structured into a number of themed strands, taking us from the romance and jingoism with which the outbreak of war was greeted, through the horrors and bleak humour of the trenches, to the memorialising and reflections that followed the Armistice. Each section is given an introduction by one of the readers, and while these can be insightful, bearing a pleasant resemblance to sermons, some can be a little overwritten, telling us much of what we will soon glean from hearing the poems themselves. Nevertheless, the readings are performed clearly and engagingly by a mixture of local writers and actors, including screen stars Madeline Smith and Robert Gillespie, and their tones range from the sombre and reverential to the grimly cheeky, according to the varying moods of the pieces.
The quality of readings means that poems as familiar as Owen’s Anthem for Doomed Youth and Sassoon’s The General retain their bite and bitterness after all this time; so much so, in fact that it is difficult to listen to Brooke in their company. But the selection ranges much more widely than that. Highlights include Wilf Hastwell’s A Phantasy, which lists a paratactic assortment of objects and body parts, as though the war had broken down any framework of sense or meaning, and John Crook’s rapid, machinegun-like delivery expresses the sensory bombardment of this experience. Similarly unexpected is the ribald frankness of humourist A.P.Herbert’s The General Inspecting the Trenches, in which the title character finds himself literally in the shit, and Gillespie’s reading revels plummily in the repeated ‘sh’ sound strung through the poem.
Another distinguishing feature of the afternoon is the conscious effort to accommodate different perspectives on the conflict. In two of a number of poems by women about their experiences, Madeline Smith gamely takes on the voices of munitions workers, who touch on the danger, delight and empowerment of their jobs. This is picked up later in the afternoon by To My Unknown Solider, penned and read by Greg Freeman, based on the affecting conceit of such a woman slipping a letter for a frontline soldier into a crate of ammunition. Freeman then inverts Rupert Brooke in a subsequent poem, A Foreign Wood, about a graveyard in Woking where Muslim volunteer soldiers were buried, and which has since been converted into a peace garden.
Women’s wider role in the war is also picked up in a pair of pieces written during the war by Jessie Pope, which are both jauntier and more patriotic in tone. These lead into a run of recruiting songs that help recreate the experience of the home front. Linda Sirker and Lottie Walker do their best with Your King and Country Need You and I’ll Make a Man of You, but there is limited room in the Coach House for song and dance. Given the occasion the audience also seem rather subdued and, without lyrics to all of the numbers, only join in tentatively with those choruses they know.
As is pointed out several times by different readers, attitudes to the war changed very quickly as its scale and horror became apparent, so the sentiment of the music hall, for instance, can seem alien to us now. Some thought has therefore been put into the event to make connections across the hundred years. This can be touching, as when Crook reads from the reflections of Vernon Lee – really, Violet Paget Lee – on hearing Bach at Christmas Eve in 1914. She realises that German audiences would be listening to the same music and finds herself musing, as the late Jo Cox did, that there is more that unites than divides us. In other moments, the effort to find contemporary resonance feels more forced, as when Bob Sheed recounts a tale of his grandfather’s that means he himself is now able to acquire an Irish passport. It is, I have to say, a bold strategy to put these poems by local writers against those that have stood the test of time, particularly when the more recent pieces strain to work in forms that the war itself forced poets to rethink, as we hear in Hastwell. But the new writing lends at least a personal touch to the event, in contrast to the more celebrated public verses.
Already quite moodily lit by oranges and reds behind the readers, the room is properly darkened by the time of the going down of the sun. Heather Mountford’s Painting for the Botanist brings a little colour into the Coach House, then, as its talk of finding the proper hues for the poppy gradually develops into a piece of quiet memorial. And, aptly, the evening concludes with Robert Laurence Binyon’s For the Fallen, with its blend of wistful patriotism and grief for the dead making a bouquet from the different moods of the preceding readings.
We have remembered them.
Matthew Grierson
November 2018
Photography by Pam Frazer
Mark Aspen 