Rings of Brass
For Love or Money
by Blake Morrison adapted from Turcaret by Alain René Lesage
Northern Broadsides
at The Rose Theatre, Kingston until 4th November, then on tour until 2nd December
Review by Mark Aspen
Let’s sit down, have a nice chatter-watter, and natter about For Love or Money. Now here’s a nice tale if you like, a fun-filled farce about folks’ foibles.
Halifax has come to Kingston with Northern Broadsides’ tongue in cheek play about a concatenation of conmen, with more fiddles than the Yorkshire Symphony Orchestra. The company often works with journalist and author Blake Morrison to adapt plays from the past, ranging from Aristophanes to Kleist, into the Yorkshire vernacular. This time round the source is Turcaret by Alain René Lesage, which was first performed at the Comédie Française in 1709, and which in turn is based on Tartuffe by Lesage’s muse Molière. How does the play cope with its 220 year transplant from Paris to a Yorkshire mill town in the late 1920s ? Surprisingly well, for human vices like lust and greed, which are the peccadilloes that form the driving force of For Love or Money, are real hardy perennials.
The Great War took the colonel who lived in the grand mansion on the outskirts of the Yorkshire town. Ten years since, he never returned from the front, and his young and attractive widow Rose is finding it hard to cope financially. The furniture has been sold, as have the oil paintings, witness the shadows of the frames on the William Morris wallpaper (one of many inspired touches by designer Jessica Worrall, which include some colourful pastiches of period dress by Lucy Archbould).
The scene is set at the opening with Rose in conversation with Marlene, her housekeeper and one remaining servant. The bluff Marlene, robustly played by Jacqueline Naylor, speaks in broad Yorkshire vernacular, which the opening night audience at Kingston found almost impenetrable, but it mattered not, as her whiplash tongue said it all. Marlene is warning Rose about the predations of some of the local men, whose intentions may not be honourable. For her pains Marlene is given the sack, but Rose loses her rough-edged guardian. She doesn’t know that her husband, the late colonel, sent Marlene a letter to ask the she look after Rose as he believed her to be very vulnerable. Well, perhaps she is, but perhaps she isn’t.
Rose is wooed by two suitors, the well-heeled banker Algy Fuller, and the louche gigolo Arthur. However, Arthur is a con-man and is fleecing Rose, but Rose is taking Algy for all she can, while Algy is embezzling from his bank, and a great merry-go-round of greed tootles its merry way around the story.
The guileful but gorgeous Rose is played by the Sarah-Jane Potts who skilfully balances the demure innocent-abroad against the shrewd schemer in Rose’s psyche, coy one moment pert the next. She is the flapper par excellence, fringed hair, satin dress the colour of, well, a peach. For Rose is the focus of the action, the honeypot cum money-pot to which the men are drawn, some for the honey, some for the money. Arthur is after both; the money to feed his gambling addiction, the honey to feed his voracious sexual appetite. Neither his promiscuity nor his ego know any bounds. He describes his liaison in a back alley with an older woman as “performing an act of mercy”. Jos Vantyler has the part of Arthur to a tee, oozing debauchery from his coiffured hair to his co-respondent’s shoes; even his movements are dissolute. Now, Algy has plenty of money of his own, or is it his own? For Algy runs so much of a double life that it probably counts as a triple life. Suited and booted, smiling and moustache twirling, Algy bursts onto the scene adamant to achieve his goal of seducing Rose. His armoury includes gifts of jewellery (fraudulently acquired), verses proclaiming his love (witless doggerel) and promises to build a magnificent new house for her with orangery and haha (castles in Spain). Barrie Rutter portrays Algy as an effusive convivial man, opulent and expansive, comfortably rotund and very self-satisfied. He his lost his wife to the ‘flu epidemic, or was it the flew epidemic? Algy is wary in matters of business, particularly dodgy-business, but totally blind in his enthrallment by the alluring Rose.
Barrie Rutter is also the Founder and the prime mover of Northern Broadsides. Describing himself as a “theatrical animal”, he has grown the company to world-wide recognition, with its mission to promote the richness of the dialects of the North of England. Rutter has himself taking on the direction of For Love or Money, and has run with the vivacious dialogue and the sinewy humour, the emotional slapstick that is the engine of this play. At some points the play has a late music-hall feel, such as at the opening of the second half and the pre-curtain call which involve quite elaborate song-and-dance routines: much credit is due to Beverley Norris-Edmunds’ choreography with Conrad Nelson’s music. There is a bit of the shoulders back “I say, I say, I say” to the setting up of gags. The play is certainly stylised with every character having a distinct but exaggerated style of moving, and all the first entrances are down-stage right into a spot, with an unspoken “Dah! Dah!”. The effect of this somehow smacked in my mind of a comic strip unfolding across the stage, with the “Umphs” and “Ouchs” and “Ooos” imagined in the air. It is a distinctive style that gives the piece so much vibrancy.
Much of the comic strip reference comes from Jordan Metcalfe as Jack, with his quiff a Tin-Tin overdosed on E-numbers. With a Jack-the-lad twinkle in his eye, he energises his part to the brim. Jack is described as an odd job man, and they certainly are odd jobs. He is the general run-around for Arthur, doing all his dirty work. Then he takes up the same services for Rose, and then for Algy, but concurrently. Here is a sharp sharper who knows how to play all ends against the middle.
Jack’s girlfriend is Lisa, who is a young woman with a strapping way with words and who knows how to look after herself. She has worked as a char and as a street-walker, hence Jack’s honest introduction of her as “the best scrubber in town”. Jack insinuates her into Rose’s household, putting another tangle in the thread of farce. Kat Rose-Martin makes a gamine Lisa, pouting her scarlet lipstick. She plays the role with a warmth that makes one disregard her felonies as mere naughtiness. The audience though is itself seduced by Jack and Lisa, maybe because everyone in this play is an anti-hero, so we root for the best of a bad bunch in these characters. And we know that they will be the ones who will win out in the end.
This wild welter of nefarious plans begins to unravel when wronged parties appear. Martin, a farmer, has been tricked by Algy in his dealings with Algy’s bank, and tricked out of his late mother’s jewellery. Martin’s addiction is to booze, but he is looking for a wife to change his life. He also has some wonderful turns of phrase, including a very apt spoonerism: his riposte to Algy’s “I run a tight ship”, as “Yes, a shite tip”. Jim English delivers these lines for maximum comic impact with spot-on timing, playing Martin as a lanky sot, somewhat simple. Martin is the susceptible victim at the bottom of this food chain of deception.
Then comes Ruddles (Matthew Booth), Algy’s bank clerk, coerced into getting his hands dirty for Algy, with a list of chickens coming home to roost; and Gwen (Jacqueline Naylor doubling) an “antiques dealer”, who turns out to be Algy’s sister and proceeds to tell more than a few home truths. A bailiff, Hever, arrives to seize some of Rose’s land, but this is Jack in disguise perpetrating another fraud. All adds to the general mayhem.
Finally, Teresa, “a visitor” joins in the party. She comes as Martin’s fiancée, a “classy French” woman of a certain age. Arthur recognises her as his “act of mercy” but stays mum. But when Algy appears his recognition of her is … (to avoid a spoiler) … not welcomed. Sarah Parks is priceless as Teresa, multi-coloured and grotesque, complete with cod French, she grabs the stage by the throat. A deep Fanny Cradock contralto enhances the far from understated picture of the wronged woman. Algy is in, as Teresa puts it, the merde.
For Love or Money makes an hilarious evening’s entertainment, but underneath it is a salutary allegory to human greed. Everyone exploits everyone in a riotous Ring a Ring o’ Roses; everyone abuses everyone in a way that would make Arthur Schnitzler blush: everyone milks everyone else, but the most loveable scoundrels run off with the cream.
Oh, a “chatter-watter” is a cup of tea, so we learn proper Yorkshire too.
Mark Aspen
November 2017
Photography by Nobby Clark
The Musical That Ticks All the Boxes
Made in Dagenham
BROS Theatre Company, Hampton Hill Theatre until 4th November
Review by Eleanor Lewis
The single most frustrating thing about Richard Bean, David Arnold and Richard Thomas’ musical Made in Dagenham is that you can’t sell it to someone who’s never seen it. It’s the story of the women machinists at Ford, Dagenham and their struggle for equal pay in the late 60s and early 70s. Standard response to this as an evening’s entertainment is: “right, lovely, all for equal pay (who isn’t?) loved the film but do we really need a musical as well?” And that would be the point at which that individual’s quality of life would be a tiny but significant bit reduced.
Dagenham is that rare thing, a musical that ticks all the boxes, It’s well written, very funny, the music is memorable with grown up lyrics, and it tells a complex story efficiently and without patronising its audience, including those people who don’t do musicals – “God no! Is it a musical? You didn’t say it was a musical, I loathe musicals!” was the genuinely horrified reaction of a friend’s girlfriend, not paying full attention to what she’d been invited to. More of her later.
A strong show done by a strong company in the depths of October is going to sell out and Dagenham duly did, quite early. The production then had to live up to expectations which it also did, seamlessly. The energy and talent on show at Hampton Hill did not disappoint nor were there any visible signs that the challenges of putting on this spectacle had been too much. Dagenham is a long show – not that you notice – it covers a lot of ground and therefore requires a director who knows what he’s doing (not to be taken for granted in amateur productions). Wes Henderson Roe, as well as directing, also created a set that worked on all levels, allowing scene changes to take place efficiently with no extraneous activity and including an upstage office on a balcony accessed by a surprisingly unobtrusive, almost centre stage staircase, making use of the entire visual playing space. Clever.
Under the guidance of shop steward Connie, the show’s central character, Rita O’Grady is persuaded to lead the machinists’ protest and then the strike despite having no previous experience. The story is based on true events but Rita and her husband Eddie are fictional characters, emblematic of the Ford workers at the time. O’Grady is therefore the type of character that actors probably dread because she’s an unremarkable, ordinary, nice wife and mother. Her husband, Eddie is unremarkable, nice and ordinary too. How therefore do you make them engaging? How do you take an audience with you, make them sympathise with your character and want what they want? What do you have to work with? I have no idea, I’m only the reviewer but Dagenham is well enough written to give you plenty of clues. Lacey Creed and Martin Wilcox as Rita and Eddie evidently found the clues and succeeded not only in creating a believable family unit, with some talented younger actors as their children (Emily Pegler and Noam Sala Budgen), but also in drawing the audience into their world and making them care about them.
There were many and varied opportunities for actors to shine in this show in every kind of role and BROS Theatre Company is fortunate in being able to provide a consistently high level of performance across the show. There was the trio of shop stewards Bill, Sid and convenor Monty played respectively by John Paul Sutherland, Berni Messenger and Carl Smith, sometimes in their elevated office commenting on the action, sometimes interacting with the rest of the cast their banter authentically delivered, their characters believable. There were Rita’s workmates, notable among them the verbally challenged Clare played astutely by Aggie Holland whose job it was to sing the fabulous Wossname. Many women sing well, fewer can do comedy. Aggie Holland does both but understands how to do comedy better than a lot of people.
Where comedy is concerned it might be overdoing it to wonder wistfully whether Steve Taylor and Clair Jardella should be available on the NHS in these trying times, but for those of us old enough to remember the 70s, Harold Wilson lives, still. Steve Taylor is a talented actor but his portrayal of Wilson as a combination of eccentric, spasmodic intellectual desperation could only be described as weirdly adorable. Clair Jardella, surely not old enough to remember the force of nature that was Barbara Castle nonetheless played her entirely convincingly, her rendition of Ideal World a showstopper.
The singing in this production was outstanding, as might be expected from this company, every set piece choreographed expertly by Susi Pink, filling the stage with energy. The technical skill of Edz Barrett’s This is America and the poignancy conveyed by Martin Wilcox’s rendition of The Letter were only two of many strong individual performances.
Other gems amongst a raft of sound performances included Lizzie Brignall who was playing against type and gave a subtle and accomplished performance as Connie, the women’s shop steward a character who had battled all her life for the equality she began to see as being within Rita’s reach. Not the easiest role to play but Ms Brignall did an impressive job with it, she was totally convincing. Greg Smith, a young actor beginning what may be a promising career, played a couple of small parts very efficiently, in character all the time, at no point either over the top or self-conscious
Any issues with this production were tiny ones: Kerry McGee’s Beryl veered rather more towards caricature than it needed to. It’s true to say that if swearing were an Olympic sport, Beryl would lead the British team, but despite this the character is an authentic working class woman with more than one dimension. Lacey Creed as Rita struggled a little with pitching, an opening note sometimes eluding her and I wasn’t entirely convinced she understood the running gag about Martin Luther King, she rather threw it away a couple of times. (Whenever Rita lacks the confidence required to take the lead and wants to compromise in some way, she is reminded of King’s struggle for race equality and she responds with “you know they shot him”). These are only details and in neither case did they matter significantly, Beryl got all the laughs she should have in all the right places and Rita had the audience on side the whole time, in fact the audience reaction to this show – standing ovations both times I saw it – is probably all you need to know.
If Made in Dagenham were still on this reviewer would highly recommend it, it was a strong, highly entertaining and well executed show, but perhaps its best recommendation would be from the previously mentioned friend’s girlfriend who loathed musicals: “I loved it, absolutely loved it – did you say they were an amateur company?”
Eleanor Lewis
November 2017
Images by Handwritten Photography
Uneasy sleeps the head that wears the crown
Rodelinda
by George Frideric Handel, libretto by Nicola Francesco Haym
English National Opera at The London Coliseum until 15th November
Review by Suzanne Frost
I always find it quite amusing how the English have adopted the German Georg Frideric Handel as one of their own, a great British composer. But one could possibly describe him as a truly European artist, masterfully incorporating Italian, German and – to a lesser extent – French style and influences while authoritatively shaping English Baroque music. Richard Jones’ hugely entertaining and innovative production of Rodelinda at ENO strikes me as equally European, something you would maybe expect Barrie Kosky to do in Germany: a bold, quirky reimagining, moving the plot into a 1940s Mafiosi milieu with a distinct cinematic aesthetic, half Italian film noir half Graphic Novel, topped with a blood-heavy Tarantino-esque finale.
The story, in typical Baroque Opera style, is a confusing muddle of love triangles and Machiavellian politics, where Queen Rodelinda loves Bertarido, whom she believes dead so agrees to marry the usurper Grimualdo but only to save her son Flavio, whose life is threatened by the evil Garibaldo, secretly plotting his own ascend to the throne by manipulating the lovesick Eduige, sister of Bertarido … more tangled relationships than a season of Game of Thrones. Baroque audiences didn’t really care for coherent plot, they came for masterful virtuosity showcasing spectacular voices and musical skill – Handel’s particular field of expertise, stringing together one da capo aria after the next. It is therefore surprising, imaginative and an extraordinary achievement, how Richard Jones puts all the focus and energy of his staging into storytelling. Our character’s motivations are so central to this production, they each and all have them tattooed somewhere on their body.
Rebecca Evans as Queen Rodelinda is a fierce and fearless Italian Mama, dominating every scene and singlehandedly driving the action, manipulating the men to her needs, sometimes sensuous and flirty, sometimes furious and raging. Juan Sancho, in his ENO debut, gives a sleazy skinny rock star attitude to Grimoaldo, all sharp suits and coiffed hair.
The male lead Bertarido is a surprisingly passive character, always outside the action watching his wife’s struggles from exile. It is down to the unique stage presence and crystal clear voice of counter tenor Tim Mead, that Bertarido’s few scenes are some of the most memorable and magical. I loved him crashing in a trashy neon lit bar, singing his sorrows into a whiskey glass á la Frank Sinatra. The duet “Io t’abbraccio” with his wife Rodelinda at the end of Act II is heart wrenching, two exceptional voices blending in ethereal beauty while Jones creates the most stunning visual image with our lovers divided by a wall slowly drifting apart leaving the triumphant Grimoaldo alone on an empty stage.
But singling out two melancholic moments would undermine how hilariously funny this production is, from Garibaldo nonchalantly feeding Bertarido’s portrait into a shredder and observing Rodelinda on CCTV, to her pouring coffee onto a pristine white fur stole, an unwanted gift, all while easy- breezing through elaborate coloratura. The American countertenor Christopher Lowrey plays Bertarido’s servant Unulfo as a comic relief sidekick, a buffo countertenor, something I didn’t even know could exist. He is adorable and darkly funny, slowly and copiously bleeding, while profusely apologising to his master who stabbed him by mistake. The actor Matt Casey makes the most out of his role as Rodelinda’s mute son Flavio. Slightly psychopathic, slightly OCD, he is a looming Frankenstein’s monster presence obsessively covering every inch of the dingy cell they are kept in with pictures of his father, tattooing “vengeance” on to his hands and skilfully miming all the various ideas he has for murdering Garibaldo.
All this over the top humour might sound gimmicky, and I could understand someone holding that opinion, but for me the production at all times finds the perfect balance between overdrawn campiness and serious skill. Between all the action, the abundance of ideas and the constant movement, Jones finds beautiful moments of stillness where only the music speaks. Occasionally I would have wished for more power and energy from the orchestra (lead by baroque specialist extraordinaire Christian Curnyn) to match the exuberance of the singers on stage, such as in Grimoaldo’s aria in Act III “Fatto inferno é il mio petto” or Bertarido’s final “vivi, tiranno” where Handel suddenly has a welcome urgency, dramatically different to the many lamenting largos he admittedly does so well. A very special note to the outstanding translation by Amanda Holden, simple modern English, every phrase perfectly articulated, every word crystal clear. This is what I believe opera should be like in 2017. I want singers to act their socks off while delivering their extraordinary skills. I want directors with real imaginary vision and bold new takes on those old masterpieces. A simple but perfectly functioning set design full of atmosphere. Most of all, I want storytelling, characterisation, theatricality all on the same level as the music. This Rodelinda has it all, it is engaging, vivacious, hilarious, virtuosic and an absolute delight.
Suzanne Frost
October 2017
Pouting and spouting
Lipstick and Scones
by Paul Vitty
Venture Wolf
at Leicester Square Theatre until 26th October
Review by Melissa Syversen
It is great to see young, emerging companies produce new work. And it is always exciting to be introduced to new productions because one can go in completely blind. Anything can happen. But, as with all new thing, it can be a hit or miss. Venture Wolf’s production Lipstick and Scones, performed at the Leicester Square Theatre, is unfortunately mostly a miss. To be painfully honest, I am not sure what to choose to grapple with here.
Lipstick and Scones is the story of three very different sisters meeting up at the eldest sister’s house for a weekend to celebrate her recent engagement … her fourth one in a year. What follows is what I can only call a weekend from hell. The sisters and their respective partners tear at each other, hurling insults, family trauma and bad life choices at each other seemingly for sport. It is a weekend spent mostly tearing everything and everyone around them apart with pure, malefic cruelty.
I think I will come at this with a view from the writing. Lipstick and Scones is a one-act piece of roughly 50 minutes. The main problem here, to be fair, is a classic one. Writer Paul Vitty has just crammed way too much into the limited time available. All the plotlines and backstories of alcoholic parents, adultery and sibling rivalry have been shoehorned in between banter, speeches and frankly cruel and vicious takedowns between supposed loved-ones. I am not denying that family members can be incredibly cruel to each other, but here it is all they are and seemingly without motivation. There are monologues that feel disjointed and left field, especially a long-running monologue characterising the different British political parties. It is funny, to be sure, but with only 50 minutes to unpack an entire family saga, it feels superfluous and indulgent. You can almost hear the turn of the knob as it switches from ‘this is the voice of the character on stage’ to ‘this is the voice of the playwright’. Bursting as this play is, the result is that the story shifts in jumps and starts and changes abruptly. There are segments of exposition and character behaviour that just doesn’t make logical sense, like the scene during the night with everyone running around. It gets to the point of ridiculousness.
A secondary problem of the writing is the characters themselves. They are so two dimensional and paper-thin that if presented in profile, they would disappear. In press releases the three ladies are presented as ‘powerful female roles’. No. No, they are not. They are all walking tropes and stereotypes of the worst kind. Let me present them. We have Liz, the eldest. She is the recently engaged, free-spirited, promiscuous, wine chugging one. (“It feels so good to be naughty!”) There is the middle child Hattie: the uptight, cold-hearted snob. And Ellie, the youngest, the fumbling, naïve and fidgety one. And their spouses don’t fare much better. In respective order: Robbie, the handsome, sexy fiancé; James, the older, stiff upper lipped lord and lastly Trevor: the jittery, but well-meaning husband whose idea of experimental sex is doing it with the lights on.
None of the characters seems to have been given any other qualities. It is all about the acid they can spit at each other within these tropes which makes it very hard to like or at the very least empathise with them. When towards the end, when we get a semblance of a reason for this awful behaviour, it is too late. What human charm and dimension there is to be found I suspect comes mostly from the actors themselves, the most successful being Jessie Waterfield as Ellie. She has a natural and quirky warmth about her I found reminiscent of a young Olivia Coleman.
The one redeeming quality in all of this is that at times Lipstick and Scones are quite funny. There are some great zingers and quips that land quite well with the audience. I suspect that is the characters in this piece been given more layers and the direction (also by Paul Vitty) been clearer, even more of the humour could shine through the mess that is this play. Family dynamics are difficult to capture, but that is also what makes it so fascinating and timeless. There is a reason why Alan Ayckbourn could write not one, not two but three full length plays about the same six family members over a single weekend in the Norman Conquests (1973). A 50-minute one-act just isn’t enough time to fully play with the premise presented nor to do the characters justice. This is presumptuous of me, but I would suggest either cutting down, simplify and streamline what you have or take the leap and expand it into a full-length play. No more plot is needed, but with that added runtime, the characters can be fleshed out and given time to breathe. That way the audience could get the chance to get to know them all, and hey, perhaps even like them.
Melissa Syversen
October 2017
Abigail’s Party goes to Ambridge
The W.I. Blues
by John Peel
SMDG at Hampton Hill Theatre until 28th October
Review by Eleanor Lewis
The WI is not to be messed with. It is they, let us not forget, who slow hand-clapped Prime Minister Tony Blair for impolitely hijacking their Wembley conference with a political speech in 2000. It is they too, who raised huge amounts of money for leukaemia research with a ground-breaking, naked calendar (since copied by almost every workplace and group to be found anywhere) and gave us a new national catchphrase on the subject of buns. But in the case of WI Blues, the WI is in fact a simple plot device to bring a group of women together in a room for an evening, so we need not live in fear.
This group of five women duly gather in the living room of Grace who has just waved her husband off for the evening. First to arrive is Fiona, a simple and rather downtrodden farmer’s wife bearing homemade coleslaw. Fiona is patronised and abused by Grace (nicely played by Norma Beresford) who is equipped with gold standard qualifications in snobbery. Three other characters arrive: Gina Way as Jane, the good natured vamp; Bobbie Ennals as Pippa, a woman who appears for most of the proceedings to be an ordinary wife and mother, and Hazel who owns the local deli and is struggling with an illness which may turn out to be serious. These characters then interact with each other, largely on the subject of the men in their lives, but also giving vent to their frustrations and the ups and downs of daily life. Their reason for being there is to help Grace with a speech she’s going to make in the hope of being elected head of the local WI.
St Mary’s Drama Group is evidently blessed with a group of skilled actors, everyone in this piece was doing their best with rather weak material. Norma Beresford as Grace would deserve credit for the vast amount of lines she had to deliver but in addition to this she gave life to a caricature role that drew a lot of laughs from a receptive audience. Gina Way and Sue McMillan similarly gave it their all and got any comedy that was to be had from what they were given. I was startled to learn towards the end of the play, that the character Pippa was the child of a peer of the realm, as the children of the aristocracy generally carry themselves with more languid superiority than the rest of us but this character seemed a little underwritten anyway and also might have benefited from more directorial input.
Stand out performance of the evening was Jean Keay as Fiona. Ms Keay clearly bagged the best role and played it to great effect. She was very funny, timed her responses beautifully and overdid nothing despite a rather bizarre section in which her character got halfway drunk and forced everyone else to play pass the parcel, you need some degree of skill as an actor to carry that off – and trust me, when women get drunk together, we don’t play pass the parcel!
My issues with WI Blues are in the writing, not SMDG’s performance of it. As a play, WI Blues has certainly got potential but probably needs a rewrite. Its writer is male and it’s very much a man’s idea of “what we girls get up to” when they’re not around.
It’s a comedy, but it helps to get the detail right. The action is set in the present day but the writer asks us to believe that Grace, a woman who has devoted her suburban life to the pursuit of all things snobbish, would pronounce the “J” in Rioja. Beverley in Abigail’s Party famously rushes to put a gift of red wine in the fridge generating a huge laugh from the audience but Abigail’s Party was set 40 years ago when if you were British and had a bottle of any sort of wine in the kitchen you were either an exceptionally good cook or an alcoholic. I suspect today’s Graces of suburbia probably know how to pronounce Rioja. Similarly, it’s highly unlikely that a woman in exclusively female company would talk in terms of the operation/treatment she’s just had on her “whatnot”, she’d have no need to disguise it, she’d call it by its name. A man, on the other hand, talking about his wife/partner’s operation is more likely to use a euphemism. Only details but they raise the quality of the material and make it more believable and you need credibility for good comedy.
That said, who really cares? The opening night audience at Hampton Hill – which included a group of real WI members – laughed along with it and clearly enjoyed themselves. I commend SMDG for its efforts with this piece but would respectfully suggest they take on some stronger material next time.
Eleanor Lewis
October 2017
Photographs by Archie McMillan
Adagio furioso
Duet for One
by Tom Kempinski
Lee Dean and Daniel Schumann in association with Birmingham Repertory Theatre
at Richmond Theatre until 28th October, then on tour until 11th November
Review by Mark Aspen
“Shrinks versus nuts”, two hours in the psychiatrist’s chair: such a play seems unlikely to create dynamic theatre. But Duet for One achieves much more than the unlikely. It excels as a gripping, intensive and moving piece of theatre.
In the hands of acclaimed director Robin Lefevre, Tom Kempinski’s taut eulogy to the resilience of the human spirit totally absorbed the audience at its Richmond opening.
World-famous violinist Stephanie Abrahams is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and is desperately trying to cope with the trauma of the disease, which has taken away her ability to play and has left her largely confined to a wheel-chair. Her husband David, an equally renowned composer, arranges for her to have counselling and treatment from emigre psychiatrist Dr Feldmann, hoping that she can come to terms with her condition.
Intriguingly, there is a note in the programme by the playwright himself denying the long held view that the character of Stephanie Abrahams is based on Jacqueline du Pré, the universally acclaimed cellist whose young career was brought to an abrupt end when she contracted multiple sclerosis in 1971. Kempinski wrote the play in the late 70s for his wife Frances de la Tour, who played the leading role when it premiered at the Bush Theatre in 1980. Kempinski declares that it is a metaphor for his own life. The metaphor seems at best opaque.
Duet for One unfolds like a tense game of chess between patient and psychiatrist. As the defining psychological fulcra of Abrahams’ life are exposed by Dr Feldmann, a series of resentments develop towards her husband, then her late father, then the psychiatrist himself.
Belinda Lang is outstanding as Stephanie Abrahams, the anguished artist, bereft of her very life-force, her violin. Her performance is beautifully balanced and portrays the pitching and tossing of Abrahams’ state of mind with great understanding. Her body language is all there, from the vibration building her body as she fights to control her anger, to the locked-in frustration expressed in the exercising of her failing limbs. Lang is totally engaged with Abrahams’ roller-coaster emotional journey.
Kempinski has written Dr Feldmann as a hint of a stereotype, the Viennese sage of the mind, and indeed Abrahams in an angry mood calls him a “mid-European guru” with a “phoney German accent”. But Oliver Cotton brings out the full complexity of this role, depicting Feldmann as wise, sympathetic and supportive, but realistic, with commitment to his calling and with strong moral standing. Cotton is a master of dramatic tension and, crucial in this part, knows how to really act the silences. As the psychiatrist, there is a lot of listening. The dramatic hiatuses quiver with tension and one can almost feel the psychiatrist’s brain at work.
We first see Stephanie Abrahams, successful violinist, house in St John’s Wood, another in Tuscany, proud … but hiding that she is frightened to face a future of failing faculties. She “gets low”, but baulks at Feldmann calling it depression. “It’s creeping bloody paralysis”. However, when Feldmann asks whether she had ever contemplated suicide, she admits to “flashes”. He prescribes antidepressants, but she leaves thinking that it was rather perfunctory. On her second visit, she feels better and brighter, is trying to be positive, has taken on violin students and is training herself to be he husband’s secretary. Nevertheless, she admits that the increased energy has also manifested itself in irritability and becomes very snappy, sharp and sarcastic with Feldmann.
And so the pattern repeats with subsequent visits, although the progression is steadily downward, and we see the gradual disintegration of her spirit. But along the way, we learn of the major influences on her life, her supportive mother who died when she was six years old, her artisan chocolatier father who begrudged her violin lessons, and her musician husband with whom she had a “fairy story” romance, and married after six weeks following a passionate coup de foudre first meeting.
For Abrahams, music is a “magic” that “expresses humanity”. She believes that music is “where they got the idea of God”. The most abiding passionate love of her life is her violin. So, when she announces that she has given her violin away, Feldmann is clearly shocked. She has dismissed all her students, “I’m a performer not a teacher”, and denigrates he husband’s compositions as “pretentious polyphonic shit”.
But by now she is in a highly offensive mood, and more so on her penultimate visit, haggard and bedraggled, she declares that she is “wearing the same knickers as on the last visit”. She says she has taken an old totter as a lover, and pays him in scrap copper pipe to have sex with her: “he fucks me like a sack”. Her loss of dignity appals Feldmann and his professional inscrutability cracks. He angrily explains why she needs to help herself regain herself. “The purpose of life is life itself”.
This intense emotional see-saw can only be kept in motion by very skilful acting and Lang and Cotton deliver it with consummate skill.
This is a subtle and clever piece and the mood of the piece is astutely commented on by the design itself. Award-winning designer, Lez Brotherston has created a set that is a metaphor for the action. Feldmann’s consulting room with its tall shelves of books and music recordings speak volumes of his approach it is precise and ordered: it is the deal mind; there are library steps but the primitive sculptures are out of the way on the least accessible shelves. The room is closed and shuttered off from the world but light is let in only through the shutters. Ian Scott’s lighting design and John Leonard’s sound design follow the action through the lighting and music plot: adroitly restrained.
Although it is challenging to watch, Duet for One is a beautifully concentrated piece of emotional theatre. It is shot through with witty lines and some truly funny moments, but at heart it is a searing examination of the human spirt in extremis.
Mark Aspen
October 2017
Photography by Robert Day
An All Consuming Passion !
Little Shop of Horrors
by Alan Menken, lyrics by Howard Ashman
Hounslow Light Opera Company at Hampton Hill Theatre until 21st October
Review by Quinten Weiver
A gargantuan dionaea, or some sort of droseraceae on steroids, is living in the Hampton Hill Theatre … and it needs feeding!
Hounslow Light Opera Company dangerously brings an eclectically mixed bunch of comedy, horror, thriller, song and dance in the form of a Little Shop of Horrors, a seedy (no pun intended) 1970s New York florist’s shop, to the gentile purlieus of Hampton. Being in the poorest part of town (NY not Hampton), and on Skid Row at that, where more money is spent on gin than on gerberas, Mr Mushnik’s shop is not flourishing; witness the lack of stock (or stocks … of any sort of flora). Poor Mr M, an asthmatic Jewish florist is himself going to seed. However, Seymour, his timid but loyal shop assistant and general factotum, has a secret hobby, raising hitherto-fore unknown species of carnivorous plants; and now he is germinating an idea to make Mushnik’s floristry business blossom again.
The set, by the director Bill Compton (better known for his inspired productions with Youth Action Theatre), has created a versatile set in three dimensions and two levels, which is first seen through a gauze, iridescent like a lupin in twilight, by a lighting team headed by designer Nigel Lewis. Set and lighting hold lots of surprises … plus a five-piece band (two keyboards, two guitars and percussion) under award-winning musical director Lee Dewsnap, who sets a lively pace to Menken’s score, a mixture of jazz, Motown and rock, whilst keeping a good balance with the singers.
Mushnik’s other assistant is the young and appealing Audrey, for whom Seymour holds out a torch (and bunches of unsold floristry), but to no avail: Audrey is in thrall to another. Both are low in self-esteem: Seymour because of his lack of education (notwithstanding his self-taught botany skills and pioneering horticultural techniques); Audrey because she has only known herself to be a victim of physical abuse. And here for a while black comedy becomes black tragedy.
Enter the spiky end of the love triangle, the super-sadistic, Harley riding, misogynistic, rock-dentist, Dr Orin. Orin’s legal high is nitrous oxide, and appropriately it is laughing gas that brings black comedy to dentistry. Audrey, in spite of herself, is entranced by Orin, both captive and captivated. However when Seymour sees Orin mistreating Audrey, the worm turns. Gun-toting Seymour ends up in the dentist’s chair, but in this surgery it is the dentist not the patient who has the gas. But the gas mask gets stuck and, gasping in the giggle-gas, the dope-head dies in an overdose of dopamine and an under-dose of fresh air.
The part of Orin cannot be underplayed, and Michael Greatorex gives the role a full Harley Davidson tyre-burn. Elvis-hipped, with sadistic smiles, he works up a lather in leather. It’s songs all the way, Dentist! , at his God’s-gift entrance, to It’s Just the Gas at his bizarre demise.
The young lovers are well cast with strong vocal skills. Jack Walford hits the spot exactly as the lovelorn Seymour. Clad in striped tank-top, complete with moth-hole, he arrives as the little-boy-lost. Grow for Me is assured in its accurate singing. He tracks Seymour’s growing anxiety and helplessness as he realises he has sold his soul to the devil. A relative newcomer, Walford is one to watch. Joanna-Marie d’Oyly Chambers, who won a Swan nomination for her Yum-Yum with HLOC last season (See Georgia Renwick’s review Infectious and Delirious: The Mikado), gives a very touching performance as Audrey, beautifully portraying the character’s vulnerability. Her impossible dream, Somewhere That’s Green sung with hope at the beginning of the story and then with resignation at her sacrificial ending is lyrically delivered and differentiated in mood. As a couple, Walford and Chambers gell well, but for each there is a tendency to slip from acting into set-piece singing.
HLOC stalwart, Tony Cotterill, with a good line in Noo-Yark Yiddish, is very secure as Mushnik. When Seymour becomes celebrated (and rich) from his floral excesses, Cotterill’s facial expressions say it all about Musnik’s duplicitous intentions in suddenly wanting to adopt his goy-boy assistant.
So on to Audrey II, who stole (some) of the show, source of Seymour’s wealth, and everybody’s downfall. The back-room crossing of an exotic pseudo-flytrap plant get surreally interesting when it turns into a sentient triffid, after a drop of blood from a scratch on Seymour’s finger accidentally falls on the plant. Then it become a vampire Venus, the nightmarish source of the eponymous Horrors.
Audrey II gets a lot of good songs too, Feed Me, Coda, and Sominex Suppertime ; oh yes, a singing plant that packs some punch. More than punch too. When the desperate Seymour feeds it the dismembered body (yes, this is a family show: Titus Andronicus eat your heart out) of Dr Orin, it develops an insatiable appetite for human flesh. Oh, and some powerful, if totally unsubtle lines, “Cut the crap, bring on the meat!”. And meat the power-plant gets, next Mushnik, then even more tragically the hapless Audrey.
Audrey II makes a nice visual gag that really works, due to the efforts of the puppeteer, Shaun Lati, from the celebrated Little Angel Theatre puppet theatre in Islington, who works with tireless physicality; to John Furlong, Audrey II’s voice, a rich pitch-shifted baritone; and to the unsung prop makers, who have created such fearful floristry.
The petrifying petals and shudder-inducing stamens of this ravenous botanical monster make the fortunes of Seymour as a new-found celebrity, who attracts the rich and famous (real people of mid-20th Century America played by the ensemble), and of Mushnik, as a host of new customers flocks (phlox … giddit?) to his shop. But why did we not then see a plethora of overflowing florist’s buckets and all the flower shop accoutrements of frames and wires and ribbons and cellophane? Perhaps they sold so quickly.
A clever touch, which Ashman wrote into this show, is the Greek-chorus-like trio of Crystal (Rae White), Ronette (Lindsey Carter) and Chiffon (Kirsten Johnson), bopping away as they comment or the actions, its reality and morality. The redoubtable HLOC regulars give solid support as a well drilled ensemble who also play the minor roles.
Catch the show if you can. It is a great one to watch from behind the sofa. I came away pondering on the deeper psychological complexities behind this meeting of Dr John Faustus with Dr Sigmund Freud in John Wyndham land, but gave up. After all, this is show where no disbelief cannot be suspended. Though, it did have me reaching nervously for the Baby-Bio when I got home.
Quinten Weiver
October 2017
Photographs by Jo-Jo Leppink, Handwritten Photography
Monsters in Unchartered Waters
Little Shop of Horrors
by Alan Menken, lyrics by Howard Ashman
Hounslow Light Opera Company at Hampton Hill Theatre until 21st October
Review by Eleanor Marsh
There is in the headline to this review a dichotomy; Hounslow Light Opera Company is best known for its productions of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. They have, of course, strayed from this genre occasionally (a memorable Anything Goes and The Baker’s Wife both spring to mind), but have not, to my mind ever strayed as far from their comfort zone previously as they do this week at Hampton Hill Theatre. Little Shop of Horrors is so far removed from G&S that it is a wonder that this group attempted to produce it at all. That they do so with some success is remarkable.
As the two star crossed lovers, Seymour and Audrey; Jack Walford and Johanna-Marie D’Oyly Chambers are very well cast. Jack Walford demonstrates exactly the right level of geek, is believable and has a singing voice that is pleasant to listen to. Johanna-Marie’s singing is delightful, especially in the Somewhere That’s Green number, possibly the best-known song in the show. She works hard to portray Audrey’s vulnerability, but is very obviously a singer feeling her way through an acting role. Where there is a tune involved Audrey becomes a three -dimensional tragic heroine; where there is not she loses some depth of character.
The supporting characters fare less well in this production, mainly because of a lack of clear diction. Tony Cotterill’s Mushnik is suitably comic and the “3 Degrees/Supremes” trio of Chiffon, Ronette and Crystal sing in beautiful harmony, but often their lyrics are lost. With the pedigree of HLOC’s singers I am minded to think that this is an issue with sound design rather than the individual performers, but whatever the reason it is a shame that so much of the narrative (as provided by this most Motown of Greek choruses) is lost as the overall musical sound is so good. Michael Greatorex is obviously having a lot of fun as Orin the sadistic dentist made famous by Steve Martin in the movie of the show. A little less caricature would have made this character truly chilling. And again better diction or sound quality (whichever is to blame) at the beginning of Dentist ! would have guaranteed a belly laugh from the audience where there were only titters.
The real star of this production is the unseen – but certainly not unsung – John Furlong as the voice of Audrey II. It is always a treat to see “the voice” in the flesh and it was a real pleasure to see John receive an excellent ovation, which was richly deserved.
The perennial problem of what directors do with the wider ensemble for a show where there is little or nothing written for them was managed very well by director Bill Compton, who decided not to people the stage with unnecessary bodies but to instead bring on the “chorus” when there was need of them. And at these moments the company really came into its own demonstrating the excellent part singing and chorus work for which it is known.
Musical Director Lee Dewsnap has put together an excellent band and the show has a good period look and feel to it. This show was undoubtedly a trip into unchartered waters for HLOC and they should be pleased and satisfied that they have pulled it off and succeeded in delivering a good evening’s entertainment.
Eleanor Marsh
October 2017
Photgraphs by Jo Jo Leppinck for Handwritten Photography.
Beat the Clock!
Around the World in Eighty Days
by Jules Verne, adapted by Laura Eason
Kenny Wax Entertainment, Simon Friend and New Vic Theatre Productions
at The Rose Theatre, Kingston, until 22nd October, then on tour until 20th January
Review by Mark Aspen
As they say “go no further”. If you want to go round the world, take a train, boat or even an elephant or an ice-yacht. But not a balloon … for as we are reminded “there are no balloons in the book”. And this week you can start in Kingston.
The afternoon of the opening night, I had my l ‘flu jab. I was told that this year’s cocktail protects against Hong Kong ‘flu, Brisbane ‘flu and Michigan ‘flu. I needn’t have worried … Around the World in Eighty Days goes nowhere near Brisbane. What I should have taken precautions against however are aching ribs and tear-stained cheeks from all the laughter. Add in acrobatics, mime, martial arts, conjuring, dance, slapstick, music, busking and quick-fire wit, and the fun is frenetic and fantastical.
A ripping yarn is Around the World in Eighty Days, but if you have read Jules Verne’s adventure novel (or perhaps less so if you have seen one of many film versions) you will that along the way you learn about geography, world customs, languages, navigation, timekeeping and the engineering of all sort of modes of travel. However, in the hands of director Theresa Heskins and her multitalented performers and techies, Around the World in Eighty Days becomes a real rip-roaring ripping yarn. Add all this together, and you get a lot of theatre for your money.
Did Phineas Fogg, the hero of the story get a lot of travel for his money? The £20,000 wager with his chums at The Reform Club that set him off on his circumnavigation was a life changing experience, so damn the cost (even if it was his life’s fortune). And so off we go with him … particularly for the audience in the front row who get swept up in the frantic goings-on.
The phlegmatic Phineas Fogg is played with great aplomb by Andrew Pollard with the unflappable stiff upper lip required of the upright Victorian gentleman. Pollard strides majestically through the play with great stage presence. Pollard is Fogg, a man self-confident and self-possessed.
Fogg has one weakness…for gambling. Apart from his eponymous wager, he is obsessed with whist, to the extent of not being really engaged with the places his visits, that is until it affects the timetable of his travels. Then a mathematical precision kicks in and, aided by his Bradshaw’s timetable of trains and steamers, his confident computations set all the wheels in motion (for “anything that isn’t to be found in Bradshaw’s is not of interest”, such is Fogg’s focus.)
And the wheels are cranked by his recently appointed valet and general factotum Jean Passepartout. (The previous incumbent was summarily dismissed for served tea a tad under the stipulated 97˚F !). Although as determined and as indestructible as his master, Passepartout’s sentimentality contrasts with Fogg’s stoicism. The rubber-jointed Michael Hugo excels as Passepartout, bringing a wide portmanteau of skills, including in martial arts and acrobatics and other circus skills, to add to talented acting and an ability to captivate an audience and dissolve the fourth wall. Busking in character in the interval, he uses his improvisation skills (and cod French accent) to work the audience, which rapidly becomes his. (He somehow smacks of a supercharged Gallic version the late Norman Wisdom.)
Even this valiant and determined pair cannot take the unexpected into account, and their intrepid efforts are thrown off-course by distractions en route. Passepartout, as the name suggests, has been (almost) everywhere, but his curiosity for the more doubtful aspects of local cultures causes more than a few diversionary adventures. (You should see how he copes with the morning after a visit to a Hong Kong opium den!) Meanwhile, Phineas Fogg’s implacable imperturbability is severely challenged when he is joined on his travels by Mrs Aouda, an alluring young widow whom he rescues from ritual suttee in India. Her subtle charms eventually melt his hitherto impenetrable carapace, but that is a by-the-by in this boyish yarn. The travellers’ main impediment is a doggedly disruptive but dim-witted Scotland Yard detective, who has mistaken Fogg for a bank robber and is hot on their trail with a fistful of arrest warrants.
Dennis Herdman is a wonderful ubiquitous presence, popping up from the scenery, the shadows, the stalls, be it set in Suez or San Francisco. As equally sinuous as Passepartout, but his nemesis, Fix is the metaphorical tripwire. With his facial expressions and elastic presence, Hermann soon fixes Fix in the audience’s mind as the architype panto villain.
But Fogg is a beacon around which all scurry and no less than 125 characters are played by an indefatigable cast of eight multi-tasking performers in our frenzied romp across eight countries, on six trains, five boats, an ice yacht and an elephant. (The jumbo is transmogrified from Fogg’s greatcoat, one of many ingenious transformations, many the results of cast improvisations in rehearsals.) This is by way of four fight sequences and a circus performance, showing off their tumbling abilities. The antithesis of hand-to-hand combat, the fights have a stage width between combatants, but punches and kicks are given and received simultaneously, sometimes in filmic slo-mo, one of many triumphs by movement choreographer, Beverley Norris Edmunds. The pacing and timing is impeccable, and it has to be with many of the seemingly effortless visual effects, such as the sleight of hand conjuring as passports and banknotes flit back and forth between mimed throws and mimed catches, cued in flawlessly with James Earls-Davis sound design.
Around the World in Eighty Days is the epitome of an ensemble piece, with the cast (and stage management) working at high energy as one. Versatile acting is a must when differentiating between so many characters, and the roles are portrayed with an amazing variety of languages, accents and stances. Pushpinder Chani as the genial Mr Niadu, who accompanies the group as far as India; Joey Parsad as the ever-so-slightly mercenary elephant wallah; Matthew Ganley, ranging from hyper-competitive Col Proctor in the Reform Club, to a spittoon accurate Wild West cardsharp; Stefan Ruiz, as circus manger with gymnastic circus skills, then doubling as Captain Speedy, pressed into an all-consuming (literally as his ship is dismantled for fuel) trans-Atlantic voyage; and the circus skills of Jessica Lucia Andrade; all of these stand out as superior performances.
Then of course there is Mrs Aouda, the lady liberated from immolation on the funeral pyre, played with delicate appeal by Kirsten Foster as the woman who, all so gradually, finds a place in the heart of Phineas Fogg, finally bringing him to his knees in a proposal of marriage. This is the subtle sub-plot … well, after all travel broadens the mind, even of a confirmed Victorian bachelor.
But is Fogg’s unwonted diffidence because ostensibly he arrives back in London almost an hour beyond the allotted eighty days? But no, Fogg is a man true to his word, and to his heart. Moreover, there is a twist in the tale, due to an astronavigational chronometrology error. (These long words are by way of a spoiler alert.)
Around the World in Eighty Days is delightfully non-PC. Nationalities are impishly stereotyped: Frenchmen wear stripped jerseys and berets and carry baguettes, Egyptians fezzes and striped kaftans, Indians wear turbans and Chinese coolie hats. Mrs Aouda has a slight dig at British colonialism (“it makes all the world the same”: nowadays that observation could be levelled against the EU). All this is teasing good humour. (Although an audience member leaving after the show mumbled about offending Native Americans – no doubt a humourless Guardian reader.) But then again the English sport bowlers and brollies!
The set itself has brollies balustrades up a suitcase staircase, and Lis Evans overall design is luggage … oh, and maps, lots of them, even on waistcoats and lino. Everything is steampunk sepia (much in keeping with Monday afternoon’s Hurricane Ophelia’s sepia sky).
The fast and furious pace of the show is propelled by James Atherton’s music, especially composed for the show. Its anxious ostinato and aerobic heartbeat tempo would have the most indolent armchair traveller out in the world in a flash, Bradshaw’s clutched under the arm. For what is compelling about this show is the positive can-do attitude in our can’t-do world. It is priceless.
The beat the clock race to that makes Around the World in Eighty Days gripping theatre runs a multi levels, making this a show for all ages, eight to eighty-eight plus or minus eighty years.
Before it leaves Kingston, make sure that you don’t miss the boat (or train, or ice-yacht, or elephant). It goes at quite a pace, so hang on to your hat … and make sure it’s a bowler!
Mark Aspen
October 2017
Photography by Robert Day and Andrew Billington
Keeping the right time?
How the Other Half Loves
by Alan Ayckbourn
Bill Kenwright at Richmond Theatre until 21st October
Review by Matthew Grierson
How the Other Half Loves, playing at the Richmond Theatre until Saturday, opens with the sight of Robert Daws as Frank Foster, gamely if effortfully limbering up in a tracksuit – and I couldn’t help but wonder whether director Alan Strachan was likewise attempting to restore vigour to a jolly old form.
The whole affair is certainly carried off with the energy and agility to which Frank aspires. That agility is essential when the main conceit of the play is that two households, both alike in indignity, occupy the same space onstage while going about their distinct but linked lives. The technical feat of having two couples so physically close all the time without exhibiting any sense of one another offers a number of physical treats throughout the play: not least among these is the simultaneous search for a lost shoe and a lost screwdriver, whose joyous truth about domestic life the play elsewhere strains to achieve. Similarly, we know that Fiona Foster (Caroline Langrishe) and Bob Phillips (Leon Ockenden) are paramours, but even standing side by side on the phone to each other, they defer what would be sexual tension into dramatic tension: when will their spouses find out?
Adept as the actors are at not attending to one another, the play itself is at risk of ignoring us, the audience, by not inhabiting the same space. To say that it puts gender relations into the past tense is not to say that the play’s women lack progressive qualities – Fiona smoothly maintains both her marriage and her fancy man throughout, very much a woman in control, while Bob’s wife Teresa (Charlie Brooks) is an earnest Guardian reader, frustrated in the role of housewife and keeping files on issues of the day such as chemical warfare, about which she writes forthright letters. Even the timid Mary Featherstone – a marvellous Sara Crowe – eventually asserts authority over her husband William (Matthew Cottle) by extracting a well-deserved apology from him.
There is a darker seam to the play, though, in the threat of domestic violence that erupts in the fight between Bob and Teresa at the end of the first act, and, in the second, in the ominous way Bob snaps his belt at Mary to get her into the kitchen and the mistaken William raises his monkey wrench to his wife. The logic of the play needs these to be comic rather than shocking moments, but violence against women should never have been a laughing matter, and skews our reception of the play today. Strachan discharges these threats adroitly by showing that physical intensity is part of Bob and Teresa’s relationship, particularly at its passionate reconciliation, and having William set down his tool at the crucial moment to administer the limpest of slaps to Mary’s wrist. But it is touch and go.
Perhaps this demonstrates the distance we have come in 50 years. When Bob criticises Teresa’s “grim nostalgia” in hanging on to an old corn flakes’ packet, it resonates with the production’s own act of grim nostalgia for the less than savoury qualities of the time; at least it reminds us that the 60s wasn’t all smart design and pop hits, like those used in the production. But while episodes of domestic violence can no longer earn the laughs they may have been written to provoke, we do feel at ease laughing at the Featherstones’ awkward moments at the consecutive dinner parties they attend simultaneously; just a few years later, in contrast, we very much have to feel the embarrassment of Beverly’s soirée in Abigail’s Party. Because we aren’t invited to share the pain of Ayckbourn’s characters, his class commentary never quite lands. His idea of the working class remains an idea, one neither Ockenden nor Brooks are wholly convincing at bringing to life – certainly not when the former has to deliver lines concerning the moment “one is struck down in one’s living room”.
So if the attitudes and style of How the Other Half Loves date it, why are we watching the play now? There must be more to the revival than the fact that the avocado is a fad food once more, as in one of the dinner parties; or indeed that an aspirational woman named Teresa gets hold of the wrong end of the stick and makes repeated trouble for herself.
We watch it because, simply, it is so entertaining, and there is much pleasure to be taken in watching the cast successfully execute their roles as farceurs. Any discomfort we feel arises from the fact that the piece provoking it is so polished, so otherwise enjoyable, that we want to savour exchanges between the Fosters – bandying “darlings” like old actors who’ve forgotten one another’s names – or Matthew Cottle’s struggle with a bottle, his ability to go red-faced on demand not only a ruddy marvel but foreshadowing the anger he will later display when he thinks his wife has cheated on him. These beats show that the play moves according to its own clockwork mechanism, even though, at the time it was set, it chimed much more with its audience than it does now.
There are moments in the production that do strike us, though, and unexpectedly so. Crowe as the put-upon Mary Featherstone gives just a tiny gasp when she goes to meet the Phillipses’ offstage baby, but that tells us so much about her life and what she has missed out on. She and William are the squeezed middle of the play, the latter instantly deferential to his boss Frank. And Frank, the unlikely but undoubtedly likeable moral centre of the play, is frank inasmuch as he speaks inadvertent truths, and can only sham bluff masculinity (which Bob all too readily displays) before he attempts to reconcile the couple of other couples, lining them all up on the couch as though he were Poirot about to unmask a murderer. Yet after both physical and character comedy, he is at the centre of a truly heartbreaking moment when he clocks that Fiona is having an affair and cannot identify the man with whom she has been cuckolding him. Daws’ display is equal parts love, frustration and despair, and it’s a pity the action has to end with him seemingly misleading himself again into an improbable entanglement with Teresa, who apparently has a sideline in psychoanalysis – or some more physical kind of therapy – of which the play has hitherto said nothing.
If the not entirely satisfying conclusion of How the Other Half Loves anticipates its popular but problematic afterlife, there is much to enjoy in what has passed – so long as we remember that it was the past.
Matthew Grierson
October 2017
Photography by Pamela Raith, courtesy of Bill Kenwright Ltd
Mark Aspen 