Desert Island Disclosures
The Tempest
by William Shakespeare
Globe Ensemble at The Globe Theatre, Southwark until 22nd October
Review by Gill Martin
The striking theatre programme offers a clue. An upside down image of a sun-bathing brunette wearing nothing but a scarlet sweetheart costume, matching lipstick, designer shades and a worried expression. Introducing The Tempest … but not as you’ve known it. This is heavy on comedy, lighter on drama.
Shakespeare’s tumultuous tale of vengeance, retribution and redemption is set on an enchanted island, in this new production directed by Sean Holmes. Marooned there are the banished Prospero, Duke of Milan (Ferdy Roberts), his teenage daughter Miranda (Nadi Kemp-Sayfi) and his sorely abused slave Caliban (Ciarán O’Brien), the son of a witch.
If enchanted means spellbinding this inventive production has the audience in its thrall. It is energetic, playful and at times confusing. But always engaging.
Read more…View of Your Dreams
Ordinary Days
by Adam Gwon
BB Theatre Productions at Studio One, South Hill Park Arts Centre, Bracknell until 31st July then at the Edinburgh Fringe until 28th August
Review by Nick Swyft
‘Never let tall buildings obscure the view of your dreams’ or ‘real lives make the best movies’. These and other words of life advice are distributed to an uninterested New York population by Warren (Niven Willet). Warren is a penniless failed assistant to a failed artist, whose vision is nevertheless clear. He picks things up from the street, pieces of people’s lives, seeing the beauty of those lives in everything he collects. If such people end up in shop doorways, frying their brains on meths, perhaps it’s worth seeing them in a different light, and picking up the pieces of their lives.
One of the things he picks up is a book containing notes that Debs (Georgia Parsons) has lost. These are vital for her dissertation on Virginia Woolf, but fortunately the notes include her e-mail address which Warren uses to make contact with her.
Read more…Little of What You Fancy
Sin, the Musical
by John-Michael Mahoney
Dmii Productions at The Arcola Theatre until 25th August. World Première
Review by Vince Francis
To east London, Dalston, to be precise, on a warm Thursday evening to look in on a new piece of writing at a venue I haven’t visited before; the Arcola Theatre, in Ashwin Street. The building itself is a converted fabrics factory and has retained the atmosphere of naked brick and ironwork industry, which makes it a suitable venue for this production.
A very pleasant welcome and time for a swift ale before seating in the auditorium, laid out with the audience on three sides of the playing space and having the band on a scaffold platform above and tucked in one corner.
Sin, set in 1920s New York, is a musical written, scored, arranged and directed by John-Michael Mahoney, who also plays the role of Michael in the show. The plot centres around a power struggle within a group of friends led by the key character, Jack, who has inherited a considerable amount of money, which he has invested in a speakeasy. Early on, Jack’s leadership is tested, and factions start to form. The violent nature of the times and the competition for supplies and custom inevitably results in clashes both within the group and externally and results in the tragic loss of one of the group. To say more than that would probably start to give the game away and I don’t want to do that. There are several plot twists that are nicely executed among the strands that lead you to believe you know where this is going. The script is reasonably well turned, with believable dialogue and well-drawn characters.
Read more…Uneasy Rests the Head
L’Incoronazione Di Poppea
by Claudio Monteverdi, libretto by Giovanni Francesco Busenello
Ensemble OrQuesta at Arcola Theatre, Dalston until 30th July
Review by Patrick Shorrock
The wonderful Grimeborn Opera Festival celebrates its fifteenth season at the Arcola Theatre, Dalston, with a musically fine performance of Monteverdi’s most ambivalent opera, The Coronation of Poppea in Italian with surtitles. By throwing off the constraints of big opera house performance, Grimeborn has been able to develop an innovative approach that not only covers the standard repertoire but puts on neglected pieces that nobody else would dare risk. It seems to be acquiring an increasing musical confidence in doing this.
Poppea – not quite standard repertoire – is a strange piece in many ways, not least by having the emperor Nero as its (anti)hero. There is an awful lot of recitative, but also possibly the most ravishing closing duet in all baroque opera (maybe not even by Monteverdi, just to add to the ambivalence). Nero and Poppea rejoice together at her being crowned as his new empress, and time seems to stand still at their mutual musical rapture. And yet they have had to dispose of a number of people opposing this marriage (including his tutor Seneca, and current wife Ottavia) which we have seen them do with no hint of conscience or regret. Helen May – sweetly voiced but neurotically anxious as Poppea – and Julia Portela Piňőn’s dark toned Nero blended beautifully, although Piňőn was not remotely convincing as a psychopathic tyrant. I’m really not sure what the point of giving the role to a mezzo is when there are so many good countertenors around.
Read more…Let’s Tryst Again
Le Nozze di Figaro
by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte, after Pierre Beaumarchais
West Green House Opera, Hartley Wintney until 24th July
Review by Mark Aspen
As a hush descends on the pavilions around the Theatre on the Lake, a lively wind blows across the gardens of West Green House, bringing with it the perfume of flowers, and setting the vast canvas roof feathering with a loud crack. It is the perfect cue to Mozart’s breezy overture to his commedia per musica, Le Nozze di Figaro, surely his best known, and often regarded as his greatest overture.
Le Nozze di Figaro is based on La Folle Journée (the crazy day), the second play of Beaumarchais’ Figaro trilogy. The first play is Le Barbier de Séville, the source for Rossini’s opera Il Barbiere di Siviglia.
Read more…Bengal Fire
Chasing Hares
by Sonali Bhattacharyya
Young Vic and Theatre Uncut at the Young Vic, Waterloo until 13th August
Review by Heather Moulson
Poverty, desperation, vast unemployment and an exploitive situation; these were the issues explored in Sonali Bhattacharyya’s new play Chasing Hares. Set in West Bengal, the stark open set had a floor of loose sand and a revolving square, leaving the actors to work hard to create the scenes. The simplicity of this design worked well, with employee’s shoes left outside a factory sign … the sign that indicated an exploitative factory.
Read more…Shooting Pains
Assassins
music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, book by John Weidman
BB Theatre Productions at Oakwood Centre, Woodley until 24th July
Review by John Davies
Performing Sondheim is a challenge for any company; conveying the complexity of emotions across a multitude of characters in Assassins doubly so; then making the disparate stories work as a seamless whole – triple whammy! BB Theatre Productions’ recent show, at the Oakwood Centre in Woodley, rose magnificently to those challenges with cast, production team and musicians combining expertly to deliver an enthralling evening.
Read more…Gentle Murm’ring Stream
Acis and Galatea – The Sixteen in Concert
by George Frideric Handel, libretto by John Gay
West Green House Opera at the Theatre on the Lake, Hartley Wintney until 22nd July
Review by Mark Aspen
“Lovers and madmen have such seething brains … that apprehend more than cool reason ever comprehends”. Thus says Duke Theseus, just before he also implicates the poet in one of A Midsummer Night’s Dream ’s many well-known epigrams, “the lunatic, the lover and the poet …”
He could well be talking about the love-besotted shepherd, Acis, and the raging giant cyclops, Polyphemus, whose brains seethe in their very differing pursuits of the beautiful water nymph, Galatea … whose romanticism is certainly poetic.
Here we have the perilous love-triangle described in Book xiii of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the root source of John Gay’s libretto for Handel’s Acis and Galatea. This particular one of Ovid’s collection of transformation stories was very popular with baroque period composers and their librettists. Indeed Handel had already used the tale in his serenata, Aci, Galatea e Polifemo, which was commissioned by the Duchess Aurora Sanseverino for the celebrations in Naples of the wedding her niece, just over a decade earlier.
Handel’s Acis and Galatea is a tale of two halves. Act One is a carefree idyll of joy and happiness, Act Two, with the intervention of Polyphemus, takes a threatening, and ultimately (or rather penultimately) tragic, turn.
Read more…Gilbert and George
Homage to George Grossmith
by Tim Shaw and J.J.Leppink
Blue Fire Theatre Company at the Mary Wallace Theatre, Twickenham, then at The Space on the Mile, Edinburgh Fringe until 27th August
Review by Andrew Lawston
Blue Fire Productions is presenting two of its Edinburgh Fringe Festival shows – Diary of a Nobody and Gilbert and Sullivan’s Nightmare as a double bill entitled Homage to George Grossmith. This is a reference both to the co-author of George and Weedon Grossmith’s 1892 book Diary of a Nobody, adapted by Tim Shaw, and to the fact that George Grossmith was a principal performer in the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, originating many of the baritone roles in Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operas. Producer Lottie Walker gives a brief introduction before the first show, and we begin without further ado.
Read more…Polished Performances
Two Cleaners
by Chiara Arrigoni
Festival of New Theatre, at Questors Studio, Ealing until 23rd July
Review by Heather Moulson
Concluding the innovative Festival of New Theatre at the wonderful Questors, we saw a fitting and strong production. After an impressive week of plays and workshops, Two Cleaners was an apt climax. The starkness of the studio in which the barren setting of this two-hander took place was an appropriate one. The writer Chiara Arrigoni was said to be inspired by Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter, and had paid a justifiable homage to that iconic play. The layers were stripped away at a slick pace.
Read more…
Mark Aspen 