Rollicking in the Rowlocks
Fisherman’s Friends – The Musical
by Amanda Whittington, music arranged by Fisherman’s Friends
Royo at Richmond Theatre, then on tour until 20th May
Review by Mark Aspen
If your lunchtime stroll took you along the chilly riverside at Richmond at the very end of February you may have had the heart-warming experience of chancing across a lively crew of Cornish fishermen vigorously singing sea shanties. You can’t keep an old salt away from water and boats (and seagulls) it seems.
True Cornish types have a love of home, but also a love of the wild outdoors, on a moor or out at sea. It is a strange soulful mix of agoraphobia and claustrophobia, perhaps exemplified by tin mines and fishing ports, both now alas in decline.
Read more…Darkness Brought to Light
Oklahoma!
by Richard Rodgers, Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II
The Bard Summerscape at Wyndham’s Theatre until 2nd September
Review by Mark Aspen
All the best known and brightest numbers from Oklahoma! come right at the beginning. But, in Daniel Fish’s fresh new take on Rodgers and Hammerstein’s first musical, they are not as their devotees would know these numbers. Here is a version of Oklahoma! that examines the darker sides of this much-loved musical.
Bright and dark are quite an appropriate adjectives, as the inventive lighting design features as much as does the energetic music, brilliant singing, and incisive acting.
Read more…Compressed Tension
Hedda Gabler
by Harriet Madeley, after Henrik Ibsen
A Girl Called Stephen at the Reading Rep Theatre, Reading until 11th March
Review by Sam Martin
Written by Harriet Madeley and directed by Annie Kershaw, this contemporary adaptation of a classic Ibsen play highlights Hedda’s claustrophobia in her brand-new marriage and explores the tensions between old passions and current duties. Kershaw’s direction draws on the pressures of conformity and casts the feeling of societal entrapment in a fresh light as the protagonist grapples with the traditions and ideals of her upbringing against her desire to embrace her past relationship with Isla. This refreshing variation brings a well renowned story into the modern era.
Read more…Pixie Perfect
The Light Burns Blue
by Silva Semerciyan
The Questors Youth Theatre at the Judi Dench Playhouse, Ealing until 4th March
Review by Andrew Lawston
“Photography is truth. And cinema is truth twenty-four times a second.” So said Jean-Luc Godard in his 1960 film Le Petit Soldat. But in 1917 a group of English girls demonstrated that Godard was working from a faulty premise, in a story which captured the imagination of a nation buckling under the burden of the First World War, and even succeeded in duping the father of modern detective fiction, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
The Light Burns Blue tells the story of some of the personalities involved in the “Cottingley Fairies” photographs, performed with gusto by Questors Youth Theatre. The floor of Alex Marker and Katarzyna Kryńska’s deceptively simple set is covered with giant photo frames, and an empty frame forms a proscenium arch through which further frames can be seen. This simple effect gives the set a false sense of depth through forced perspective, and sets up the idea of photographic trickery from the outset.
Read more…Coming and Conquering
Giulio Cesare
by George Frederick Handel, libretto by Nicola Haym
English Touring Opera at the Hackney Empire until 25th February, then on nation tour until 25th May
Review by Patrick Shorrock
This staging of one of Handel’s finest operas was a musical triumph for English Touring Opera in partnership with The Old Street Band. Lovers of Handel’s operas should definitely seek it out. It depicts how Julius Caesar’s plans to subjugate Egypt – where Cleopatra and her brother Ptolemy are fighting over which one of them should take the throne – are violently disrupted by erotic attraction between Cleopatra and Caesar, even if there is a feeling that the political outcome was inevitable anyway and the disruption is only temporary. That erotic disruption is brought to life in a range of some of the most musically intense arias Handel ever wrote, which are superbly delivered here.
Read more…Child of the Raj
A Doll’s House
by Tanika Gupta after Henrik Ibsen
The Questors Theatre at Questors Studio, Ealing until 4th March
Review by Brent Muirhouse
Tamika Gupta’s reimagining of Henrik Ibsen’s play, A Doll’s House, set in 1879 Calcutta, India, is a thought-provoking and engaging production that successfully reinterprets the classic text for a contemporary audience. Calcutta (today Kolkata) was the capital of British India at the height of empire, and British presence in the region was significant and deeply ingrained in the city’s social, economic and political structures. As Indian nationalist resistance and anti-colonial sentiment gained momentum around the time of the play’s setting, the play retains the central themes and motifs of Ibsen’s original but introduces a new political context that creates a powerful dilemma of identity for the central character, Niru (Nora in Ibsen’s original script).
Read more…Golden Delicious
The Rhinegold
by Richard Wagner
English National Opera at the London Coliseum until 10th March
Review by Mark Aspen
Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle (Der Ring des Nibelungen) is, of opera’s many monumental works, the most momentous. It is not, however, without subtlety and wit, both in its music and its narrative, which leaven its philosophical ponderings. However, director Richard Jones’ delicious new production of The Rhinegold, the prelude within the tetralogy that is the Ring, takes on the Wagnerian purists, to lighten it further with frippery and, dare one say … fun (try capturing a splenic toad in a Bierstein!).
Wagner intended his interpretation of Nordic mythology to hold allegorical insights of philosophic and indeed spiritual truths; but also it was to be a co-operation of all the arts (a Gesamtkunstwerk to use his term) that can be enjoyed on many levels. ENO has added in a few more levels to widen its appeal as spectacle or musical mastery, as a work of art, as story-telling or simple entertainment. And for the most part it succeeds splendidly.
Read more…California Screamin’re
California Suite
by Neil Simon
OnBook Theatricals at the OSO Arts Centre, Barnes until 25th February
Review by Heather Moulson
The glamourous Beverly Hills Hotel is the go-to for well-heeled visitors from all over the world. In our visit we were greeted by a very busy late-seventies set. Our hotel suite was a standard background for four vignettes of hotel guests sharing their lives and their traumas at different times in that same suite, the eponymous California Suite. We knew to expect poignant and zippy humour from the master of wit, Neil Simon, so the bright campiness of the room only heightened the expectation.
Read more…Fast Tracksides
Blood Brothers
by Willy Russell
Bill Kenwright Productions at Richmond Theatre until 25th February, then on tour until 29th April
Review by Brent Muirhouse
The iconic Blood Brothers has been performed in so many guises since its first performance in October 1981, that it would be easy to wonder if it still seems relevant and engrossing for audiences as musical theatre almost 42 years later. Yet this production, directed by Bob Tomson and Bill Kenwright at Richmond Theatre is a stunning showcase of the power of theatre in both displaying both story and melody, in an inseparable tandem much like the play’s eponymous siblings.
Read more…Spelling Test
Bell, Book and Candle
by John Van Druten
Alces Productions and Take Note Theatre at The Tabard Theatre, Chiswick until 11th March
Review by Lottie Walker
Nostalgia is big news at the moment. We seem to be seeking comfort in the less complicated, in a past that we view through rose tinted spectacles; so this trip back to the mid-20th century promised a real treat of escapism. However, the concern with a play such as Bell Book and Candle, written in 1950, is that it is not quite old enough to be a period drama, but is possibly so old it can appear dated. This co-production of Alces Productions and the Tabard’s own Take Note Theatre falls into the trap of not being able to make its mind up whether it is a parody or straight revival. It has been directed as a semi-pastiche. If only director Mark Giesser had had the courage of his convictions and gone for a full on parody, we might be looking at the next big thing to transfer to the West End. As it is we are left in a twilight world of semi-stylised performances that serve to accentuate how dated the play actually is, rather than sending themselves up.
Read more…
Mark Aspen 