Louise's Theatre Reviews: April 2009

Saturday, 25 April 2009

Country Magic *** TNT

Friday 24 April 2009

Though more than a touch melodramatic - and considerably overwritten for modern tastes - this romantic fable from the hand of Edwardian playwright Arthur Wing Pinero has a heart-warming core which offers hope and comfort for damaged souls in search of happiness as it warns about the cruelty of judging by appearance.

Premiered as The Enchanted Cottage in 1921, it hit a chord with a post- war audience, was filmed a couple of years later and again in 1945. Director Phil Willmott’s adaptation, aided by Robin Don’s deceptively simple, partly translucent design, wisely remains true to the original period.

It brings together an emotionally and physically crippled upper-class ex soldier, Bashforth, and an exceptionally plain country girl who shows him kindness. Isolated (by choice) in a remote cottage, with just a mysterious widowed housekeeper for company, Bashforth can’t come to terms with all that his First World War wounds have deprived him of - his looks, his stability, his carefree social past. But when a marriage of convenience turns into true love, is it witchcraft, delusion or something else which makes the ugly beautiful?

There’s little subtlety in this play – Bashforth’s interfering relatives and the awkward rector with his heavily pregnant wife are broadly drawn, rather unsympathetic, comic characters, and much is made of the disfiguring growth on his sister’s nose. But Jamie Hinde brings dignity to the role of fellow ex-serviceman, Hillgrove, blinded in battle yet able to see more clearly than the others of his class, and, with its touching message, it’s hard to dislike this sentimental and somewhat dated piece of whimsy.

Finborough, Finborough Road, SW10 9ED. Earl’s Court Tube (0844 847 1652) www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk till 9th May (£9 - £13)

Alphabetical Order *** TNT

Friday 24 April 2009

The Hampstead theatre continues its 50th birthday celebrations with a moderately enjoyable revival of Michael Frayn’s hit comedy which started life at this address in 1975, then went on to win an Evening Standard award when it transferred to the West End. Human nature hasn’t changed much over the intervening years, but the setting in which his characters find themselves – the cuttings library of a provincial newspaper – now has the historic whiff of a bygone era. Nowadays, background information can be gleaned with the click of the mouse, but, when Frayn was a reporter, the articles clipped manually from publications on a daily basis were a vital resource.

The trouble with Lucy’s library, though, is that the idiosyncratic filing system she inherited is in total chaos – even the alphabet seems to have taken on its own crazy logic – and staff are as likely to pop in for coffee as for information. Help arrives in the form of immaculate young Lesley, a humourless second-jobber with a compulsive desire to create order and a disagreeable habit of putting her new colleagues into neat little categories, too.

Frayn’s characters are all recognisable stereotypes – Jonathan Guy Lewis’s indecisive academic turned leader writer who sees so many sides to everything that he can never commit; the widowed features editor with her sights set on Gawn Grainger’s alcoholically monosyllabic hack; the chatty messenger nearing retirement. And the intended humour of the first act is far too forced.

But thing’s improve after the interval when the frantically ingratiating pace slows and reality bites, and Imogen Stubbs is perfectly cast as much-loved but scatty Lucy, with her £5 fur coat from Oxfam and a messed up social life to match her disorganised library.

Hampstead, Eton Avenue, NW3 3EU (020 7722 9301) until 16th May (£15-£25 -under 26’s £10)

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf **** TNT

Friday 24 April 2009 16:45

There’s no escaping the vitriol of Edward Albee’s 1962 drama – not for new biology professor Nick and his wife, nor for the audience when they share a post-party nightcap with long-married couple Martha and George.
The intimate staging sucks you right into the living room of their New England home, a battlefield for their booze-fuelled slanging matches.

Hopelessly out of their depth, Mark Farrelly’s ambitious Nick and Louise Kempton’s naïve Honey are pawns in games of ‘Hump The Hostess’ and ‘Humiliate The Host’, ruthlessly played by Tracey Childs’ Martha and her spouse. And, as failed academic George, Matthew Kelly oozes a cruel, crumpled inadequacy fostered by the destructive co-dependency of a barren, hate-filled marriage.

Trafalgar Studios 2, SW1A 2DY Charing Cross (0870 060 6632). Until May 9. £27.50

Friday, 24 April 2009

Dimetos (Donmar) - This is London

It's difficult to imagine two more different enterprises than Douglas Hodge's most recent ventures. Having handed over the role of transvestite Albin in the stillrunning La Cage aux Folles (for which he won an Olivier award), he's now turned his hand to directing one of Athol Fugard's more obscure plays (written in 1975), a highly allegorical work set in a nameless country and, on the surface at least, devoid of the South African playwright's usual political concerns.

Disillusioned by life in the city, Dimetos, a brilliant engineer, has exiled himself from the city where he made his reputation and, with his faithful housekeeper Sophia and pubescent niece Lydia, retreated to a remote village, convincing himself he can be of as much use to the local people as he was to the townsfolk. The arrival of an eager young man intent on luring him back to solve their problems upsets the equilibrium of their semi-isolated existence and brings tothe fore emotions which, until then, had simmered, unacknowledged.

Hints of Dimetos's covert passion are there right from the start, as Holliday Grainger's glowing Lydia is lowered, stripped to her undergarments, to rescue a trapped horse. And it is apparent, too (though not to the selfishly preoccupied Dimetos) that Sophia (a fine, restrained Anne Reid) has followed him out of more than just a sense of duty.

It's a frustratingly symbolic piece, lending itself to various interpretations, yet never really convincing. But Hodge's atmospheric production, Bunny Christie's design of rough wooden walkways, planks and knotted ropes, and, most of all, Jonathan Pryce's portrayal of the desperate, grizzled Dimetos overcome the irritation of some indulgent chunks of dialogue. Plagued by demons and rarely at rest, the manifestations of his inner torment and frustrated creativity exert an irresistibly powerful hold.

Tuesday, 21 April 2009

The Fever *** TNT

Tuesday 21 April 2009 14:11 GMT

Here’s an odd one - the Royal Court‘s Wallace Shawn season kicks off with arevival of his 1990 monologue which aims, among other more far-reaching concerns, to make you feel guilty about going to the theatre. A programme note states that it was originally intended to be performed in private apartments by a single person of either sex and of flexible age.

This time round it’s the turn of award-winning actress Clare Higgins to address the audience – but not, as one might expect, in the more austere intimacy of theTheatre Upstairs but on a rehearsal room style set in the comfortable main house.

Taken ill in an unnamed, war-torn and impoverished country, the narrator (Higgins in blue jeans and crisp white blouse) recounts how she wakes in the night, flushed and feverish, with new and recurring thoughts of the inequity of life. Lying on the bathroom floor, she recalls her enjoyment of fine food and restaurants, the pleasure of visits to the theatre, and all the benefits that her privileged New York upbringing has led her to believe are hers by right. But although she is more than willing to give a needy beggar a handout, the prospect of giving away all her money - of sacrificing her lifestyle to alleviate the suffering of the poor - is one to which she, guiltily, cannot subscribe.

Higgins is a highly skilled and watchable communicator and delivers what proves to be a temporarily convincing argument, but although it prods the conscience, this 90-minute analysis of what Shawn ultimately calls the corruption of liberal, middle-class existence doesn’t completely stand up to closer scrutiny.

Royal Court Theatre, Sloane Sq, SW1 (020 7565 5000). Until May 2. £10-£25

Plague over England *** (uncut)

Theatre critics don’t often write plays – they’re far too busy picking holes in work that others have poured their life and soul into in the hope of a favourable notice. In almost two decades of reviewing for the Evening Standard, Nicholas de Jongh has made more than his fair share of bitchy comments, but, after a sell-out season at the tiny Finborough last year, his play about Sir John Gielgud’s brush with the law has made it into the West End.

The famous thespian was accused of importuning for immoral purposes when he was caught cottaging in 1953, not long after he’d been knighted. De Jongh surrounds this real event (and the emotional impact it had on the usually discreetly homosexual Gielgud) with various fictional characters including the enticing “pretty policeman” who arrests him in a public lavatory, the judge’s son who witnesses the event and is equally seduced, and a civil servant considering electrical aversion therapy as a means of changing his forbidden sexual preferences.

Michael Feast, looking spookily like Gielgud and capturing his mellow tones, brings both gravitas and vulnerability to the pivotal role, John Warnaby doubles effectively as a camp critic and an intolerant Home Secretary, and, although the writing is competent rather than inspired (some of the jokes are decidedly laboured), overall De Jongh offers an interesting and entertaining account of a not so distant era when even private acts of gay sex could result in criminal prosecution.

Duchess, Catherine Street, WC2 ( 0844 579 1973)
Until 16^th May (£46-£26)

Plague over England *** TNT

Tuesday 21 April 2009 14:00 GMT

Theatre critics don’t often write plays, but Evening Standard reviewer Nicholas de Jongh’s play about Sir John Gielgud’s brush with the law (he was caught cottaging in 1953) has made it to the West End. While the writing is competent rather than inspired, De Jongh offers an interesting account of an era when even private acts of gay sex could result in criminal prosecution.

Duchess Theatre, Catherine St, WC2B 5LA Covent Garden (0844 579 1973). Until May 2. From £26

Friday, 10 April 2009

The Murder Game ** TNT

Thursday 09 April 2009 14:47 GMT

In a lengthy programme note, American writer James Farwell thanks a long list of friends and helpers for their input and support. It’s a pity they weren’t more stringent with their criticism as the result of his “long-time dream” is a heavy-handed attempt at a screwball comedy which rarely hits its mark.

Things aren’t going too well for glamorous New Orleans Judge Katherine Kelly (Josefina Gabrielle) – she’s on the hit-list of a convicted criminal, her husband, district attorney Randall Kelly (bland Michael Praed) wants a divorce because he’s impregnated his paralegal, and their mutual friend Melvin (an ultra camp Patrick Clancy) is using her office phone to place losing bets on the horses. But at least her smarmy new beau, a Brazilian ex-footballer (Ben Jones) is paying her lots of attention.

Credulity is stretched ludicrously past breaking point, though, when both Kellys decide not only to hire a contract killer (Matt Healy) to rid each of the other, but also end up inviting him to dinner.

Farwell (an attorney and political consultant – this is his first play) sensibly sticks to an environment he’s familiar with and manages to tie up all the flailing ends, but the hardworking cast has its work cut out trying to breathe life into paper-thin characterisation, embarrassingly laboured jokes and an irredeemably ridiculous plot.

Kings Head Theatre, Upper Street, NI (0844 412 2953) till 19th April (£18- £23, concessions available)

Tusk Tusk **** TNT

Thursday 09 April 2009 14:54 GMT

I’m getting really worried about 22 year old Polly Stenham. She first hit the headlines a couple of years ago with her coruscating drama of dysfunctional middle-class family life, That Face. Written when she was still a teenager, it won her a clutch of awards and a West End transfer, but it also suggested intimate knowledge of an affluent but far from happy upbringing.

Her new play revisits much of the same territory – absent father (this time through cancer rather than lifestyle choice), a mother whose prescription drug and drink habit has rendered her essentially unfit for purpose, and articulate teenage children home alone trying to cope against the odds. One can only hope that the disturbing scenarios she so skilfully depicts aren’t too rooted in autobiography.

Maggie, Eliot and seven-year-old Finn have just moved to London, but their mother has walked out the door and they haven’t seen her since. With unopened packing cases still littering the flat, Maggie senses that this time it’s different and she’s not coming back, whilst Eliot refuses to believe that she won’t return for his 16th birthday just a few days away.

Stenham’s dialogue fizzes with energy and mounting panic, with black humour as well as pain, and her young cast gives absolutely knockout performances - little Finn Bennett’s cheeky Finn, tutored in evasive lies, Toby Regbo’s Eliot, forced by default into the role of head of the household and desperate to keep their fragmenting family together, and Bel Powley’s 14 year old Maggie, a child growing up far too fast and already weary of the unasked for responsibilities foisted on her by their habitually A.W.O.L. mother.

Royal Court Theatre, Sloane Square, SW1 (020 7565 5000) until 2nd May (£15- £10)

Friday, 3 April 2009

New Boy *** TNT

Thursday 02 April 2009 14:07 GMT

Skins star Nicholas Hoult takes to the stage as a sex-obsessed schoolboy in Russell Labey’s adaptation of William Sutcliffe’s 1996 novel. He plays 17 year old Mark, an academically gifted but socially unaccepted sixth former who, in a decidedly confused way, falls for good-looking newcomer Barry without even realising it in this diverting, if slight, tale of adolescent angst and irrepressible hormones.
Through Barry, he realises his sexual fantasies – matching him up first with a succession of local schoolgirls, then with the married French teacher (a gem of comic acting from Mel Giedroyc), before trying to sabotage the relationship when he feels sidelined.

Labey’s swift production – and Hoult’s gangling performance - capture the embarrassed self-consciousness of pubescent insecurities as Mark’s fumbling attempts to get laid finally pay off. Some of the gags fall flat – and would even the geekiest teenager really be driven to practice with a milk bottle filled with chicken livers? But there’s more than enough humour and underlying truth here to make this short, undemanding show well worth catching.
Trafalgar Studios (2), Whitehall, SW1 (0870 060 6632 till 11th April (£25.00 – £20.00 Mondays)

Trying **** TNT

Thursday 02 April 2009 12:41 GMT

The familiar territory of eager young newcomer winning over curmudgeonly old-timer is given an autobiographical twist in Joanna McClelland Glass’s 2004 dramatised reinvention of her time spent as personal secretary to Judge Francis Beverley Biddle in the late 60’s.

In his heyday, Biddle (who was born in 1886) served as Solicitor General, then Attorney General of the United States and subsequently was appointed a judge at the Nuremberg Trials in the mid 40’s. By the time 25 year old Sarah from Saskatchewan comes to work for him, he’s into his eighties, frail and ailing, but with a mind that (though subject to occasional lapses of memory) is often as sharp and incisive as that of a man many years his junior. Harvard educated and a stickler for routine and grammatical correctness, the irascible old man isn’t impressed with the new employee selected by his wife, but his initial doubts are gradually replaced by an increasing dependence and respect as she sorts out the accumulated chaos on his desk and encourages him to finish his memoirs.

There’s only one possible ending to this two-hander, but Derek Bond’s jewel of a production (lovingly designed by James Perkins) makes their relationship a very human one, amusing and touching by turns. Meghan Popiel’s down-to-earth Sarah exudes earnest determination, and Michael Craig (himself an octogenarian) is in impressively fine, nuanced fettle.

Their journey together is predictable, but the acting is first rate.

Finborough, Finborough Road, SW10 (0844 847 1652) to 11th April (£13 - £9)

Thursday, 2 April 2009

Mrs Affleck - This is London

Samuel Adamson’s new version of Little Eyolf transports the Allmers family from the fjords of Norway in 1894 to the Kent Coast in 1955, renaming them Affleck en route but staying true to Ibsen’s basic themes. Other characters’ identities are also changed and a couple more are added to this emotionally charged adaptation in which the guiltridden relationship between a husbandand wife (Alfred and Rita – the only ones to retain their original names) is ripped even further by the death of their crippled young son.

Back from a stay in the Highlands, Angus Wright’s distant, tortured Alfred has abandoned the book he was writing and vowed to concentrate on the education of their son, Ollie. Meanwhile Claire Skinner’s immaculate Rita, posed elegantly in her pristine grey kitchen (designed by Bunny Christie) looks as perfect – and as untouchable – as a 50’s advert. But her soignée exterior belies a desperately possessive and unhappy woman, physically rejected by her husband and shamefully resentful of the child who’s damaged, recriminatory presence – and, later, absence – stands like a barrier between them.

Marianne Elliott’s production reveals all the painfully tormented disquiet of the near incestuous intimacy between Alfred and his half-sister Audrey (Naomi Frederick) but, well acted though it is, Adamson’s sometimes awkward script neither improves nor illuminates the original.

Cottesloe

Stovepipe This is London

The new Westfield mall in Shepherds Bush may look tempting with its shiny shops and restaurants, but there are more substantial riches to be found beneath the older West 12 shopping centre just across the road. In collaboration with the National and BushTheatres, HighTide has taken over a basement space beneath a supermarket, transforming it into a post-war landscape full of conflict and contrasts.

Written by former journalist Adam Brace and given a striking, fluid, promenade production by Michael Longhurst, this involving, tense and well-researched new play looks at the world of the mercenary, the ex-soldiers who, via private military companies, sell their services – and perhaps their lives – for $600 a day.

A succession of drapes is stripped away to reveal location after location – from smart ‘Rebuild Iraq’ conference hall to the airport run where Eddie (Niall MacGregor) and ex-para Alan (Shaun Dooley) see their mate burnt to a crisp in an armoured vehicle, and from the subdued calm of a Welsh chapel to the swanky Amman hotel where Eddie picks up a Russian prostitute before disappearing without trace.

Unobtrusively ushered from scene to scene, the audience serves sometimes as extras populating the stages of Alan's search for his missing friend, sometimes more conventionally as mere onlookers.

The remaining four actors (including Eleanor Matsuura as a ball-busting entrepreneur and Sargon Yelda, equally impressive as her Iraqi interpreter) seamlessly swap accents and costumes to play an international cast of characters and, although the structure occasionally confuses, the dialogue, staging, performances and atmospheremake this subterranean journey well worth catching.

West 12, The Broadway, Shepherds Bush until 26th April

ngsley

Wednesday, 1 April 2009

Berlin Hanover Express *** TNT

Wednesday 01 April 2009

Ian Kennedy Martin’s new play starts promisingly enough with a couple of officials closeted away in the office of the neutral Irish legation in Berlin in late 1942. Mallin has his nose buried deep in the files, hunting for evidence that one of their former colleagues was a spy, whilst the younger diplomat O’Kane is far more interested in trying to tell him yet another joke he really doesn’t want to hear.

The interaction between this ill-matched pair yields some entertainment, but the playwright has more serious issues to address. His main intention is to question Ireland’s neutrality at a time of war by putting the loyalties – as well as the integrity - of both men to the test when Nazi officer Kollvitz delves into the background of their German housekeeper Christe. It’s potentially fertile ground, but this pedestrian, predictable drama rarely rings true despite Kennedy Martin’s longstanding TV credentials.

Sean Campion is excellent as the resolutely blinkered Mallin, turning a blind eye to the reality of the death camps further down the railway line, and contrasts effectively with Owen McDonnell’s chipper O’Kane. But, despite the intensity of one deeply uncomfortable, voyeuristic scene which highlights the cruel authority exerted by the Nazis, these actors really deserve something meatier to work with.
Hampstead, Eton Avenue, NW3 (020 7722 9301) until 4th April £25-£15 (under 26’s £10)

Louise's Theatre Reviews