Philadelphia, Here I Come!

This is London

Premiered in 1964, Brian Friel’s acclaimed account of a young Irish lad on the eve of his departure for a new life in the United States reveals both a reluctant fondness for - and frustration with - the country of his birth.

25 year old Gar has lived in the fictional village of Ballybeg with his long-widowed father and their old housemaid Madge (excellent Valerie Lilley) since he was a baby. But instead of the close bond one might have expected between father and son, a numbing cloak of silence and predictably repetitive exchanges typify their daily exchanges both at home and at work in their dry -goods store.

Small surprise, then, that Gar converses instead to the voice inside his head – the private Gar (passionate, magnetic Rory Keenan) with his restless, uncensored thoughts. Cleverly, Friel puts both Gars on stage. It’s a rewarding device which both enlivens the proceedings and turns the outwardly restrained Gar in Public (Paul Reid) into a fully three dimensional character as he says goodbye to his drinking pals with their exaggerated tales of nights on the tiles and to the wealthy local girl he might have married if only he’d listened to Gar in Private spurring him on to ask for her hand.

James Hayes exudes a deep-seated mournfulness as his taciturn da, incapable –even during their final meal together – of expressing the paternal affection he undoubtedly feels, and Lyndsey Turner’s accomplished production, with the Gars dressed like identical twins, allows the humour as well as the sadness to shine through in this touching revival.   

Donmar to 22nd September

 

What You Will

 TNT

Genial companion though he is, it’s difficult to see whom Roger Rees’s diverting one man show is aimed at.

Is it those who remember his early theatrical career with the Royal Shakespeare Company back in the 70s and 80s when (having been a silent spear carrier alongside Ben Kingsley for several seasons) he eventually graduated to playing the title roles in both Hamlet and The Life and Times of Nicholas Nickleby?

Or a younger audience who’ll recognise him from Cheers, Grey’s Anatomy or The West Wing but knows little or nothing of his long-standing relationship with Shakespeare?

With his still full head of hair and slight frame he looks younger than his 68 years, and his impish grin begs you to like him as, dressed in head to toe grey, he walks on stage clutching a large white bust of the Bard who provides the link between the ensuing 90 minutes of extracts, memories, criticisms and anecdotes.

Strung together as haphazardly as the background stage paraphernalia, some prove more enlightening than others. Expertly delivered though they are, monologues from Hamlet and Macbeth surely don’t need yet another out-of-context airing - though Rees rings the changes by donning a baseball cap to play the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet and remind us that, when first performed, it would indeed have been “an old codger” like him who would have taken the role.

There’s a scattering of schoolboy howlers, presumably gleaned from the internet, incidents from his early days in Stratford-upon-Avon plus Thurber’s amusing analysis of Macbeth as a whodunit.

The material would, perhaps, be more suitable as an after dinner entertainment – but one can’t help but wish well the still boyish Rees (now a US resident of several decades standing) during his short visit back to the theatre where he first auditioned for the RSC in 1965.

Apollo Shaftesbury Avenue, W1D 7EZ
Tube | Piccadilly Circus
Until 6 October £15 - £37.50
what-you-will.com

The Judas Kiss

 TNT

Rupert Everett is almost unrecognisable as a flabby, waxen faced Oscar Wilde in Aussie Neil Armfield’s convincing revival of David Hare’s 1998 drama. Beautifully bathed in undulating light, it homes in on two critical moments in the life of the flamboyant Irish playwright and aesthete.
The first act finds him taking temporary refuge in the burgundy swathed luxury of the Cadogan Hotel in 1895 as his libel case against the Marquis of Queensberry (the irate father of his lover Sir Alfred Douglas) collapses. Fine wine and freshly cooked lobster are served at a moment’s notice – even as he decides whether to stay put and wait for the police to arrest him for acts of gross indecency or (as urged by Cal Macaninch’s loyal Robbie, reputedly Wilde’s first male lover) to exercise common sense and slip away on the last night train and escape to the continent.
In the second act we see a very different Wilde (now reunited with Bosie in Naples), his clothes shabby, his body broken by two years hard labour but his wit very much intact as his aristocratic beloved entertains the latest in a long line of casual pickups. Once again, with funds depleted, Wilde is forced to make a choice, and once again Freddie Fox’s petulant, arrogant Bosie reveals his own selfish instinct for self-preservation.
In a finely judged performance, Everett delivers the aphorisms and bon mots with first aplomb and later a moving understanding and resignation. And a special mention, too, for Tom Colley’s smiling, naked Neapolitan fisherman Galileo who, untroubled by English law, casually flaunts the attractions of the love that dare not speak its name.

Hampstead, Eton Avenue, NW3 3EU
Tube | Swiss Cottage
Until 13th October
£22-£29
hampsteadtheatre.com

Mademoiselle Julie

 TNT

Usually played out within the claustrophobic confines of the kitchen, Strindberg’s 1888 three-hander is opened out and brought up to date in Frédéric Fisbach’s surtitled French production.

Vast translucent panels span the stage revealing Juliette Binoche’s Julie, dressed in a glittering gold-sequined Lanvin dress, letting her hair down and going wild with her father’s servants on midsummer’s eve as the slightly muffled sound of Blondie thuds dimly out across the auditorium.

Recently jilted, she’s emotional and dangerously out of control – as the valet Jean is swift to report back to his unofficial fiancée (the cook Kristin), still hard at work as the rest of the household celebrates in the Count’s absence.

Not that that makes him immune to Julie’s advances and, as night turns to morning and the partygoers (and someone dressed as a white rabbit – why?) slip away, a tempestuous, verbally abusive power struggle ensues as they face the consequences of this forbidden mismatch between the classes.

Binoche (volatile, fragile, both repulsed by and attracted to her conquest) and Nicolas Bouchaud (ambitious, arrogant, yet still with a servant’s deferential deportment) make a rather older than usual pairing. But this matters less than the fact that the production, stripped of context (and hence the prevailing social boundaries of Strindberg’s time) removes the main reason for their post-coital crisis.

As a result, it’s Bénédicte Cerruti’s naturalistic, church-going Kristin who impresses most in this stylish but ultimately unmoving production.

Barbican, Silk Street, EC2Y 8DS
Tube | Barbican tube
Until 29th September
£16-£65.00barbican.org.uk

Love and Information

 TNT

Though many are over in not much more than the blink of an eye, the 50+ short scenes which comprise Caryl Churchill’s tantalising new play are packed with resonance and more than a hint of backstory.

In 100 minutes this still innovative playwright (she’s in her 70’s and has been writing for the Royal Court for decades) lets us eavesdrop on mainly private exchanges between a host of unnamed characters (predominantly in pairs) caught at moments of varying significance – or just hanging out together.

Some are funny, some are sad, almost all of them work.

Played out within the anonymously sterile confines of a white-tiled cube (and separated by swift blackouts accompanied by scene-setting sound effects) each is named – Torture, Dinner, God, Earthquake, Virtual, Affair for example – and split into one of 7 unnamed sections (the rationale of which still eludes me).

Just one subject, Depression in its various non-communicative forms, appears in each grouping - a man sits in the waiting room at the vet clutching a cat carrier, unable to respond to the person in the next seat; a woman sits staring blankly at the suggestion of reading a bedtime story.

Aided by the not inconsiderable input of costume designer Laura Hopkins (each contemporary outfit carefully chosen) director James MacDonald works wonders with the sparse script, fleshing out these fragmentary snippets of information to create a kaleidoscope of the modern world.

And in a strong and versatile cast of 16, Paul Jesson, Laura Elphinstone, Nikki Amuka-Bird and Rhashan Stone compete to steal the acting honours from Linda Bassett, Amanda Drew and John Heffernan.


Royal Court Theatre, Sloane Square, SW1W 8AS
Tube | Sloane Square
Until 13th October
£10 - £28royalcourttheatre.com

Jumpy

 TNT

Being 50 is no fun for long-married Hilary in April de Angelis bitingly funny comedy, a well-deserved transfer after a sell-out season at the Royal Court. Her job is under threat, her husband’s business isn’t going well, her fifteen year old daughter is in a permanent strop and there’s absolutely no way her best friend (Frances, an unsuccessful actress) is going to grow old gracefully.

Though laughter predominates in Nina Raine’s pacey production, there’s poignancy too, with the middle-aged men floundering as much as the women, and the youngsters shrugging off the impact of violent loss and motherhood far too early in their materially comfortable middleclass lives.

In a predominantly unchanged cast, Tamsin Greig is on superb form as menopausal Hilary, trying (with the aid of too many glasses of blunting wine) and failing to resurrect the Greenham Common idealism which seems to have faded along with her vanished youth. Bel Powley’s self-absorbed teenager totters around in skyscraper platforms and micro minis, a constant reminder of the decades which separate her from her mother, and Doon Mackichan’s sex mad, irrepressible Frances abandons all sense of decorum in an OTT burlesque sequence which reveals all the desperation of a woman who still wants to be noticed.

Duke of York’s, St Martin’s Lane, WC2N 4BG
Tube: Charing Cross / Leicester Square
Until 3rd November £15 - £52.50
jumpytheplay.com

Morning

 

 TNT

Simon Stephens has a very fertile imagination which sometimes takes his audience to places they’d rather not go. But, to my mind at least, this prolific playwright produces an unpredictable mixture of excellent work alternating with writing which fails to cohere or engage.

So whilst I was intrigued by his recent Three Kingdoms staged here just a few months ago and full of praise for his adaptation of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time currently running at the National Theatre, this short piece devised through a workshop involving the Lyric’s Young Company and performed by seven of its members seems just that – an underdeveloped depiction of alienated youth and an extreme act of violence.

In 60 minutes of short, disjointed scenes we see disturbed and disturbing Stephanie (a manipulative 17 year old in a misleadingly innocent white dress) watching her only friend Cat pack for university, then involving her (as a willing participant) in sadistic sex games with her besotted boyfriend Stephen and attempting to force her friendship on another classmate whilst (with her younger brother) she waits for her terminally ill mother to die.

Played out in remote, stylised fashion on a set which features a larder-size fridge, an open-topped water tank and plastic sheeting, it’s bleak, nasty and uninvolving.

Hard to believe it comes from the same pen as the far more successfully realised Punk Rock whose angst ridden characters were exactly the same age.

Until 22nd September £15
Lyric Hammersmith, King Street, W6 0QL
Tube | Hammersmith
lyric.co.uk

Kissing Sid James

 TNT

As the old saying goes, you’ve got to kiss a lot of frogs before, hopefully, you find your prince. But croupier Crystal, squeezed into her skin-tight leopard print outfit and with luggage to match, must be really desperate to persist in trying to transform stationery salesman Eddie into the man of her dreams.

Dating from 1992, Robert Farquhar’s short two-hander boasts one of the most toe-curlingly embarrassing sex scenes I’ve ever seen as still living with mum Eddie gets to work during their ill-fated dirty weekend away.

Despite all Crystal’s attempts at fantasising, it proves to be a major disappointment on all levels - the cheap seaside hotel room boasts faded floral wallpaper, Eddie won’t stop talking (reciting the names of footballers is an integral part of his severely limited sexual repertoire) and it’s only over post-coital karaoke and far too much to drink that they temporarily connect.

Farquhar draws his characters rather too broadly but, without sacrificing the comedy, Charlotte McKinney and Alan Drake invest them with a degree of poignancy to reveal two lonely, mismatched people in search of love, romance and happily ever after.

Jermyn Street Theatre, SW1Y 6ST
Tube | Piccadilly Circus
Until 29th September £18
jermynstreettheatre.co.uk

Soul Sister

 TNT

From her early days as Anna Mae Bullock leaving Nutbush Tennessee for a life in the city to the revival of her global popularity several decades later, this lively new musical charts the story of Tina Turner’s long-lived career, incorporating a host of hits delivered with panache.

You wouldn’t expect in depth detail from a biomusical – and you don’t get it – but her first meeting with Ike, their subsequent abusive marriage, her suicide attempt and her espousal of Buddhism are all touched on before the concert style finale.

A lazy script relies on historical background projections and the changing wigs of Chris Tummings’ coke-snorting Ike to mark the passage of time. But, fittingly, Emi Wokoma is an ageless powerhouse, belting out River Deep, Mountain High, Proud Mary and Simply The Best in true Tina fashion.

 Savoy, The Strand, WC2R 0ET
Tube | Charing Cross
Until 29th September
£25 - £57.50 (Premium seats £75.00)atgtickets.com/shows/soul-sister/savoy-theatre

Without You

 TNT

It’s almost two decades since Anthony Rapp first became involved with Jonathan Larson’s award winning rock-musical Rent, when he won the role of independent filmmaker Mark in its first workshop production. Based on Puccini’s La Bohème, it moved the setting from Paris to a modern multicultural New York threatened by AIDS and went on to be performed all over the world. Cruelly, on the eve of its first off Broadway performance, Larson died suddenly at the age of 35.

Hardly surprising then, that the musical and the events surrounding it still resonate with Rapp, and in part his narration, interspersed with Larson’s songs, is a tribute to the composer and lyricist. But, even more, it’s a personal account of the decline of his own mother who was terminally ill at the time of his New York success.

Backed by an on-stage band, he’s a compelling (if indulgent) performer – delivering the poignant “Without You” with heartfelt intensity. And though you never really feel you get to know him, all these years down the track, he still delivers those rock numbers with the persuasive conviction you’d expect from an opening night.

Menier Chocolate Factory
53 Southwark Street, SE1 1RU
Until 15th September
£29.50 (Meal deals £37)
Tube | London Bridge
menierchocolatefactory.com

An Incident at the Border

TNT

Only days before seeing this slight but enjoyable West End transfer from the tiny Finborough, I got caught up in my own personal battle of crossing a line. With just 59 minutes left to spend in one of my favourite haunts, I was refused entry because last admissions were an hour before closing time.

So when a romantic young couple, happily ensconced on a park bench watching the ducks, are suddenly divided by a new border being drawn between them – and forbidden to cross over by a military jobsworth - they definitely won my sympathy.

Entertaining though it is, Kieran Lynn’s short new play isn’t really much more than an over-extended comic sketch with serious undertones. But the three performances are winning - Florence Hall’s Olivia trying to keep up with the local politics which have suddenly seen her country split in two by a roll of tape, Tom Bennett’s laidback Arthur who fancies leading the easy life of a duck untroubled by important issues, and Marc Pickering as the goofy border guard in full combat gear whose intransigence - and confusion over the functioning of his stun gun - far outweigh his brainpower.

Trafalgar Studios 2
Whitehall, SW1A 2DY
Until 15th September, £20
Tube | Charing Cross
atgtickets.com/trafalgarstudios

Cornelius

TNT

Alan Cox gives an impressively nuanced performance that would sit well on any West End stage in the first revival in over 70 years of J. B Priestley’s office drama. He plays the eponymous, pinstripe-suited junior partner of Briggs and Murrison - an aluminium trading company on the verge of bankruptcy.

In a role written specifically for Ralph Richardson, Cox keeps his emotions (superficially at least) in check, conveying all the gentlemanly geniality of a bygone era – caring for his staff, attempting to fend off creditors and displaying unfailing loyalty to senior partner Murrison (Jamie Newall) who’s off travelling the country in a last ditch attempt to drum up business in a time of recession. But he’s also something of dreamer who constantly imagines a life of adventure far from Holborn and comes under the spell of the pretty, young replacement typist.

The ambitious office boy with an eye on technology and the future (David Ellis), the methodical old-timer (Col Farrell’s cashier Biddle), the cheeky cleaner (Beverley Klein) and the hopelessly devoted spinster are all here in Sam Yates’ touchingly humane and pertinent revival. And David Woodhead’s realistic set is just one more reason why this often funny and finely acted production deserves to reach a wider audience.

Finborough, Finborough Road, SW10 9ED
Tube | Earl’s Court
Until 8th September
£12-£16finboroughtheatre.co.uk

Volcano

 TNT

Unperformed during his lifetime and never before seen in a major production, Noël Coward’s 1956 drama isn’t exactly an undiscovered gem despite the flutter of homoeroticism which briefly boils to the surface.  

Written during his years as a tax exile in Jamaica, its protagonists bear more than a passing debt to his glamorous neighbours at the time – including the adulterous creator of 007, Ian Fleming.
Set in 1958 on the volcanic slopes of a fictional British Colonial island, the unstable geographical background mirrors the potentially volatile relationships of the handful of ex-pats socialising at the home of Jenny Seagrove’s cool, contained widow, Adela. Pursued by - and attracted to - predatory married neighbour Guy (a caddish, moustachioed Jason Durr who looks ready to shag anything that moves), she refuses to give in to his physical desires.Despite his protestations of his feelings for her - not to mention the arrival of his understandably waspish wife – it’s not long before he turns his attention elsewhere.
It marks an interesting change in Coward’s formerly free-wheeling attitude to sex – it’s the faithful married couple who are most content.Yet it lacks the sparkle which characterises his best known work - the dialogue is often stilted, the situations clumsily contrived.That said, I’m not sorry to have had the chance to see it – and Roy Marsden’s efficient, decently acted production merits its sensibly limited run.

Until 29th September
£20 - £47.50
Vaudeville, Strand WC2R 0NH
Tube | Charing Crosskenwright.com

Carousel

 TNT

Crammed full of memorable melodies, this Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1945 musical still stirs the heart strings – and not just because You’ll Never Walk Alone has long been appropriated by the football crowd.

Jo Davies’ production for Opera North moves the action forward a few decades to 1915, managing to be irresistibly romantic whilst giving the darker issues (from wife-beating to murder via unemployment and bullying) full weight. The inky, coastal New England sky (designer Anthony Ward) is a background reminder that an emotional storm is never far away.

Michael Todd Simpson’s womanising fairground barker, Billy Bigelow, looks like a bad boy right from the start, swiftly sweeping Katherine Manley’s impressionable but determined mill girl Julie Jordan off her feet. And, as her best friend, Sarah Tynan’s pert Carrie gives the impression that she’ll be more than a match for her fisherman intended, Enoch Snow (a nicely judged and strongly sung comic performance from Joseph Shovelton) – once she’s convinced him that nine children, no matter how well organised, are more than enough.

With lively choreography, a full orchestra and the power of operatically trained voices to deliver those irresistible melodies - from the hesitant If I Loved You to the irrepressible June is Bustin’ Out All Over - this poignant, thoughtful revival will send you home singing and cautiously optimistic, though probably not with a spring in your step.

£12.50 - £75.00
Until 15th September
Barbican, Silk Street, EC2Y 8DS
Tube | Barbican tube
barbican.org.uk