Louise's Theatre Reviews: May 2009

Sunday, 31 May 2009

Painting a Wall *** TNT

Friday 29 May 2009 15:44 GMT

Here’s a play that certainly lives up to what it says on the tin.

The wall in question starts off bare and ends up the colour of pistachio ice-cream. It should have been white, but the four “Cape Coloured” workmen have been given the wrong paint and, as Samson sees it, they’re just obeying orders so they might as well carry out the pointless job, then get paid all over again for putting things right.

South African born, London-based David Lan’s first play (written when he was 22 and first performed in 1974) lasts just over an hour and in that time succeeds in revealing something of the frustration felt by this quartet of various ages under the shamefully repressive laws of apartheid.

Middle-aged Henry doggedly turns up to work even though his daughter died that morning; taciturn young Peter is only allowed to stir and pour, and Samson, mindful of the family he has to support, buries his anger and gets on with the job until, pushed just that bit too far by bolshie workmate Willy, he uncharacteristically vents his rage on the wrong person.

Though more an extended sketch than a complete play, it proves far more rewarding than watching the proverbial paint dry. True, the production occasionally lacks pace (and the wall, limited in size by the tiny playing area, could be finished in half the time).

But the futility of their work, and the restrictions imposed upon them by lack of education and opportunity are convincingly conveyed by a strong cast in which Howard Charles particularly impresses as the defiant Willy.

Finborough, Finborough Road, SW10 9ED. Earl’s Court Tube (0844 847 1652) till 6th June (£9 - £13)

Saturday, 23 May 2009

Ordinary Dreams ** TNT

Friday 22 May 2009 15:34 GMT

The neighbours are noisy, the pavements are littered with rubbish, and thirty something middleclass father-to-be Miles is getting increasingly anxious as wife Penny goes into labour. Their baby’s arrival sends him into a freefall of short-tempered outbursts as he frets about the messed up world into which his child has been born.

Meanwhile their university friend, working class Dan, is cleaning up his act after being persuaded to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings by Penny (herself a recovering dipso) and has taken up with a cheery younger American artist, Layla, who’s into dream interpretation and all things New Age.

So far, so promising, but having introduced his quartet of characters and their relationships, playwright Marcus Markou doesn’t really know what to do with them. Miles goes on the attack with a heavy-duty candlestick. Then, in depressed hypochondriac mode, he takes to the wheelchair bought on e-bay and daydreams about being the next PM and having an affair. Meanwhile Dan (Adrian Bowers) and Penny are tempted to rekindle their brief attraction from way back. But none of it really engages.

The production boasts a meagre scattering of strong funny lines, but it’s clumsily structured, the fantasy sequences prove ineptly tedious and, without depth or development, it’s impossible to care about any of the characters involved or where Miles’s self-destructive disaffection might lead him.

Trafalgar Studios (2), Whitehall, SW1A 2DY Charing Cross tube (0870 060 6632) www.ambassadortickets.com/trafalgarstudios till 6th June ( £22.50, £16 Mondays)

The Contingency Plan - On the Beach and Resilience **** TNT

Friday 22 May 2009 15:44 GMT

Interest rates may be dropping, but the level of the world’s oceans is going the other way – and fast – in this excellent pair of climate change plays set in the near future and penned by the aptly named Steve Waters. Though the action they describe takes place almost simultaneously (the second acts of both overlap precisely) each play stands alone whilst complementing the other.

On the Beach takes the more personal approach, with Antarctic glaciologist Will returning to the reclaimed Norfolk marsh where his parents Robin (in whose career footsteps he’s followed) and Jenny, have made their home since before his birth. Here Robin has retreated from academic life following a nervous breakdown brought on by the rejection of his own scientific observations almost four decades earlier.

Set in a Whitehall cabinet room, with a Conservative government in power and the threat of a tidal flood looming, Resilience is more overtly political. But once again the conflict between what science predicts and self-serving expediency dictates is at the core of the growing tension between the protagonists.

Well researched and constructed with a wit and fluency which marks Waters out as a playwright to be watched, both plays are as strongly acted as they’re written. The performances are first rate throughout - Geoffrey Streatfeild makes a passionate, slightly unworldly Will; Robin Soans and Susan Brown double effectively as his devoted parents and, respectively, Robin’s former back-stabbing colleague turned government scientific advisor and the tough Minister for Resilience, Tessa. David Bark-Jones’ incoming Minster for Climate Change (newly appointed thanks to the old boy network) makes an unexpectedly effective adversary despite his primary concern for his holiday cottage, and Stephanie Street’s senior Civil Servant wraps steely determination in a loving, sensuous cocoon to push boyfriend Will into the political sphere.

The result is gripping, topical drama and a double bill that shouldn’t be missed.

Bush Theatre, Shepherds Bush Green, W12 8QD (Shepherds Bush tube) (020 8743 5050) till 6th June (£15 each play)

England *** TNT

Friday 22 May 2009 15:30 GMT

Against the backdrop of Isa Genzken’s stark sculptures in the Whitechapel Gallery, Tim Crouch and his co-performer recount, with uncomfortable pauses, the progress of a crippling cardiac disease.

Only when the pair meet the widow of the man whose heart now beats in another’s body does the production really grip, as the value of art – in different cultures, to different lives, and in different situations – comes under scrutiny.

Whitechapel Art Gallery, Whitechapel High St, E1 7QX Aldgate East (020 7452 3000). Until Jun 16, £15

Tuesday, 19 May 2009

Pictures from an Exhibition **** TNT

Tuesday 19 May 2009 16:14 GMT

Theatre, dance and classical music come together in the Young Vic’s first co-production with Sadler’s Wells – a vividly nightmarish account of the life of Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky who drank himself to death in 1881. His famous piano suite (written in response to the equally premature demise of his close friend, architect and painter Victor Hartmann) forms the musical backdrop to surreal fragments co-choreographed by director Daniel Kramer and performed by red-haired Edward Hogg, seven dancers and an on-stage pianist.

Richard Hudson’s gorgeously lit Alice in Wonderland design flanks the stage with doors of all shapes and sizes – but there’s no escape from the torment inside Modest’s brain as often lurid, sometimes beautiful, scenes chart his troubled progress from nursery to grave, from wealthy childhood to destitute alcoholism. Infants sport giant genitalia made of babies’ feeding bottles, his bohemian drinking companions disappear into the gaping maw of a drinks machine which doles out bottles of vodka and dispenses a pair of dancing bears, a bare-breasted bogey woman haunts his dreams, and epileptic seizures are marked by a discordant score and frantic movement.

It may not stand up to too rigorous analysis, but it’s a brave, fascinating enterprise which blends startling visual images and aural pleasures into a powerfully persuasive, visceral mix.

Young Vic, The Cut, SE1 8LZ tube Southwark / Waterloo (0207 922 2922) www.youngvic.org till 23 May (£22.50, under 26’s £10)

Rookery Nook **** TNT

Tuesday 19 May 2009

Things can be pretty miserable in these credit crunch times, but Ben Travers’ 1926 farce is such pure old-fashioned fantasy that it will make you forget your worries for much of its slightly overstretched 2 hours + running time.

The plot is paper thin, so most of the pleasure comes from watching newlywed Gerald Popkiss and his cad of a cousin Clive trying to out-manoeuvre his sister in-law (Sarah Woodward’s grimly disapproving Gertrude Twine) when a nubile young neighbour seeks refuge from her German stepfather - in her pyjamas.

There isn’t a shred of credibility in the whole affair, but the cast gives it all they’ve got and their efforts pay off - with Lynda Baron’s huffy mountain of a housekeeper distinctly unimpressed by the snooty new arrivals at the country cottage and Mark Hadfield nervously munching his hat as Gertrude’s apology of a husband, Harold. Best of all are Neil Stuke’s flustered man about town Gerald (who ends up with a golf club stuck down his trouser leg whilst trying to resist his attraction to the uninvited, scantily clad guest) and South African actor Edward Baker-Duly’s playboy Clive (as English as cucumber sandwiches and as slippery as an upper-class snake when it comes to a dalliance with a pretty young girl).

Ridiculously silly it may be – and very much a period piece - but, once again, it looks as though this enterprising venue has a hit on its hands.

Menier Chocolate Factory , 53 Southwark Street, SE1 1RU ( 020 7907 7060) tube London Bridge. Until 20th June

Monday, 18 May 2009

Waiting for Godot *** (unedited)

X-Men veterans Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen make an impressive double act in this music-hall influenced revival of Beckett’s existentialist tragi-comedy in which, as someone famously quipped, “nothing happens, twice.” Their smelly-footed Estragon and weak-bladdered Vladimir are a pair of down-and-out vaudevillians whose interdependency has evolved through half a century of friendship. Whilst they pass the time waiting for the ever absent Godot, they munch carrots, contemplate suicide, and cross paths with Simon Callow’s bombastic Pozzo and Ronald Pickup’s Lucky, a human packhorse with a rope round his neck. Director Sean Mathias has added comic sound effects and a crumbling theatre set, but it’s McKellen’s poignant performance as a doddery, bewildered Estragon which provides the bleak humanity at the core of this 1950’s classic.

Louise Kingsley

Waiting for Godot *** TNT

Saturday 16 May 2009

Film veterans Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen make an impressive double act in this music-hall influenced revival of Beckett’s existentialist tragi-comedy in which, as someone famously quipped, “nothing happens, twice”.

Director Sean Mathias has added comic sound effects and a crumbling theatre set, but it’s McKellen’s poignant performance as a doddery, bewildered Estragon which provides the bleak humanity at the core of this 1950s classic.

Theatre Royal Haymarket, Haymarket, SW1Y 4HT, Piccadilly Circus (0845 481 1870). Until Jul 26. £10-£47.50

Monday, 11 May 2009

Stop Messing About *** TNT

Monday 11 May 2009 09:50

Subtitled “A Kenneth Williams Extravaganza” this nostalgic show conjures up the atmosphere of the 1970 BBC recording studio where Williams and his fellow radio artists pushed the boundaries of innuendo and saucy suggestion with some decidedly smutty results. With his distinctive strangulated whine and nasal sneer, Williams’ voice was immediately recognisable, and Robin Sebastian does a fine job of reproducing not only his vocal quirks but also the camp mannerisms and scornful facial expressions which became familiar to a huge audience courtesy of two decades of Carry On films.

Comedy writers Brian Cooke and Johnnie Mortimer (whose successful Round the Horne ... Revisited used the same format a few years ago) have plundered the original sketches to create what is, in effect, nothing more than two back-to-back radio shows. The four performers (Williams is joined by Emma Atkins’ Joan Sims, Nigel Harrison’s Hugh Paddick and Charles Armstrong as straight man Douglas Smith) approach the old-fashioned microphones, scripts in hand, as the upstage sound effects man is kept busy twiddling his knobs and 'Applause' signs light up overhead.

With spoof renditions of Gone With The Wind and 'The Dirty Half Dozen' (aka 'The Smutty Six') and comic characters such as 90-year-old Hanging Judge Sir Inigo Parchmutter, how much you’ll enjoy the show depends on what tickles your funny bone. But the jokes – and double entendres – come tumbling at such relentless speed that, by the end of the evening, you’re almost certain to have had at least a few laughs.

Leicester Square Theatre, Leicester Pl, WC2H 7BX (0844 847 2475; stopmessingabout.com) Tube: Leicester Square. Until 24 May. £15-£35

The Last Cigarette **** TNT

Monday 11 May 2009 09:35 GMT

Author, diarist and playwright Simon Gray is no longer with us, but there’s a trio of identically clad reincarnations of him to be seen in this smoke-free adaptation (co-written with his long-term friend and fellow dramatist Hugh Whitemore) of the journals he kept whilst smoking himself into the grave.

There's considerable sadness underlying the humour - his beloved younger brother drank himself to a premature death at the age of 49 and too many of his contemporaries have found out from bitter experience the ravages that a diagnosis of cancer can precede. But the overriding impression is of the wit and self-knowledge of a man who couldn’t be persuaded to give up the 60-a-day habit he’d indulged in for half a century.

Dressed in white vests, loose blue shirts and chinos, the three actors share Gray’s words between them, as well as slipping briefly into the other characters who populate his memoirs – Felicity Kendall as his supportive second wife Victoria, Nicholas Le Prevost as a toothy chipmunk of a specialist who tells them the news they don't want to hear as well as some that they do, and Jasper Britton as close friend Harold Pinter.

The spectre of the "grim man holding a knife" and waiting to murder him in his own home hangs over the proceedings, but Richard Eyre’s fluid production ends on an upbeat note – ironically, it wasn't the spreading cancer that eventually got him but an aneurysm. And, though lacking the spleen of his most acerbic, earlier writing, this affectionate rendition of his reminiscences, transfers surprisingly well to the stage.

Trafalgar Studios, Whitehall, SW1A 2DY (0870 060 6632; ambassadortickets.com). Until Aug 1. £25-£55

Saturday, 9 May 2009

Calendar Girls *** TNT

Friday 01 May 2009 17:46

Another stage version of a hit film reaches the West End as a branch of the Women’s Institute swaps jam-making for fund-raising when member Annie’s husband dies of cancer.

The story of their carefully posed nude calendar is so familiar, box office success is guaranteed. There’s a handful of likeable performances, but nothing quite matches the fun of the first act finale when the assorted-sized ladies finally get their kit off.

Noel Coward Theatre, St Martin’s Ln, WC2N 4AU Tube: Leicester Square (0844 482 5140). Until Sep 19. £12-£44

Friday, 8 May 2009

DIDO, QUEEN OF CARTHAGE This is London

After a comic start, James Macdonald's production of Christopher Marlowe's rarely revived tragedy (dating probably from the 1580's) builds in power to reach an unexpectedly poignant yet simply staged climax. From the opening scene with a louche Jupiter lounging on high with a semi-naked youth, it becomes progressively more earthbound. The gods are never far away, though, always ready to meddle with the mortals' desires.

Siobhan Redmond's sashaying, shape-shifting, Venus manipulates the love life of her son, Aeneas (Mark Bonnar), pushing him into the arms of the Carthaginian queen who is captivated by his movingly delivered account of the terrible sacking of Troy. Anastasia Hille plays Dido as a girlish creature, hungry for his affection as she proudly shows him her gallery of rejected suitors and dismisses the attentions of the King of Gaetulia for whom, in turn, her sister nurses an unrequited passion.

With its uneven mixture of tone and tempo, this youthful work (which owes much to Virgil's Aeneid) proves most compelling in its stillest, candlelit moments. Here, the emotional intensity of the war-damaged soldier's memories, and, later, the desperation of the love-struck queen whom he fatally abandons to set sail for Italy, reach out to the audience unadorned and the effect is riveting.

Cottesloe Theatre

Wednesday, 6 May 2009

Calendar Girls ***

Yet another stage version of a successful film reaches the West End as a Yorkshire branch of the Women’s Institute exchanges jam making for fundraising when member Annie’s husband dies of cancer. The fact-based story of their carefully posed nude calendar’s unprecedented success is so familiar that a box office hit is guaranteed.

A pity, then, that the plot development isn’t stronger, the quips funnier, and the staging more sophisticated. Luckily, there’s a handful of likeable performances to compensate, but nothing quite matches the fun of the first act finale when the mainly middle-aged, assorted-sized ladies of the W.I. grab iced buns, oranges and teapots and finally get their kit off - without (as Sian Phillips’ rebellious, retired teacher puts it) a single “front bottom” or naughty nipple in sight.

Noel Coward, St. Martin’s Lane, WC2N 4AU, Leicester Square Tube (0844 482 5140) www.seecalendargirls.com till 19th September (£12.00- £44.00)

Panic ** TNT

Wednesday 06 May 2009 12:26 GMT

Do you really want to know about the physical ailments of a middle-aged man with a flat overflowing with self-help books and a penchant for addressing the audience clad in nothing but black underpants? Does the prospect of the same paunchy male sporting a 6ft wicker phallus and indulging in a quick bit of chair-humping fill you with excitement? If not, there’s a fair chunk of Improbable’s latest devised, disjointed and superficial examination of the mythical Greek god Pan which will leave you cold.

On the plus side, there’s a videoed dreamlike sequence of rampant shadow puppets frolicking with abandon, a former aerialist swinging seductively over performer and co-founder Phelim McDermott’s supine form, and huge, sad paper tears dropping from a projected face. But the gentle effect of that particular image is spoilt by a final liquid squirt and, ultimately, the inventiveness is overpowered by the rough-and-ready feel of self-indulgence and a jumble of personal confessions (true, false, or partly fabricated?) delivered by McDermott and his three nymphs.

Some of it works, but this is a very hit and miss affair which delights and irritates in unequal measure.

Pit at the Barbican, Silk St, EC2Y 8DS (020 7638 8891;barbican.org.uk/theatre) Tube: Barbican. Until 16th May. £15

Nocturnal *** TNT

Tuesday 05 May 2009 13:48 GMT

The precarious existence of illegal immigrants comes under scrutiny in Spanish playwright Juan Mayorga’s uncomfortable account of one man’s controlling obsession with the man who lives in the apartment below.

Developed from a shorter piece ironically entitled The Good Neighbour, it shows the increasing power that the never named Short Man upstairs comes to exert over the equally anonymous, but far better educated, Tall Man downstairs. Short Man has calculated that his fellow resident’s nocturnal job and small flat signify someone without papers, and confronts him in the local café. His blackmailing is fairly low key – all he seems to want is a friendship to supplement the companionship he fails to get from his insomniac wife (Short Woman). But it’s coercion, all the same, and Tall Woman, too, feels threatened by the growing intrusion into her husband’s life.

Matthew Walker and Hannah Clark’s boxed-in design encloses the four protagonists in a stifling psychological dance, whilst using clever projected animations to take them from flat to zoo (the nocturnal house, naturally) to park bench. But, despite the creepy, night-time feel, the play itself is hardly the satire it claims to be.

Gate, Pembridge Road W11 3HQ (020 7229 0706; gatetheatre.co.uk) Tube: Notting Hill Gate. Until 16th May. £16

Louise's Theatre Reviews