The Promise

 

 TNT

 

 

The final year of the Donmar’s three seasons showcasing the work of its Resident Assistant Directors gets off to a fine start with Alex Sims’ production of Soviet playwright Aleksei Arbuzov’s triangular drama. Written in 1965, it follows the fortunes of three teenagers initially thrown together in a derelict apartment by the hunger, cold and desperation of the siege of Leningrad which claimed the lives of almost a third of its inhabitants between 1941 and 1944.

We first see them in 1942 (alone in the world and without family) when they form an intense bond which goes way beyond ordinary friendship but is constantly destabilised by the initially unspoken competition between the two 17 year old boys for the affections of 16 year old doctor’s daughter Lika.

Yet even in a city of corpses, as they scrape every last morsel of food, their idealistic dreams for the future remain intact.

Over time (we catch up with them again in 1946 and 1959) aspirations give way to reality in a changed country – the picture of Stalin finally taken down from the wall where it remained whilst almost everything else combustible was scavenged for firewood, the young men’s rivalry still strong.

Penelope Skinner’s well-judged version can’t hide the more awkward structural aspects of the Russian original, but Mike Britton’s detailed sets and decent performances - Joanna Vanderham (recently seen groomed to perfection in the TV series The Paradise, here grubbily bundled against the bitter cold as Lika), Max Bennett’s would-be hero Marat, and Gwilym Lee as aspiring poet Leonidik) - ensure that, though showing its age, this remains a moving and engrossing account of lives still under the shadow of the past.

Trafalgar Studios (2)
Whitehall, SW1A 2DY
Tube | Charing Cross
till 8th December
(£22)donmarwarehouse.com

Uncle Vanya

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If you’ve never seen Chekhov’s potentially heart-breaking account of lives going nowhere, then Lindsay Posner’s straightforward production makes a serviceable introduction. But slowed by interminable scene changes and a lack of directorial inspiration, it isn’t destined to be one of the more memorable versions of this often performed play.

It’s a pity as there are a couple of really strong performances fighting against this mundane interpretation of Christopher Hampton’s perfectly acceptable translation. There’s Samuel West as the vodka-swilling Doctor, a passionate environmentalist who falls under the spell of the Professor’s captivating and much younger wife, Yelena, a purposeless beauty whom Anna Friel invests with humanity and frustrated regret. And the always watchable Ken Stott’s rumpled, hopeless Vanya adds bleak comedy to the tragedy of his wasted life and hopeless infatuation.

But overall this is a production constructed by numbers, its poignancy diminished further by a shrill Sonya whose unrequited love for Astrov fails to move.

Vaudeville, Strand WC2R 0NH
Tube | Charing Cross
Until 16 February
£25 - £53.50

Constellations

 

 TNT

 

University Cosmologist Marianne meets Tower Hamlets-based beekeeper Roland – and they get together – or do they? And when do they? And what happens when they do?

Nick Payne’s poignant tease of a play (the third successful transfer in a row from the Royal Court, but this time from the intimate space upstairs) poses a host of questions and provides several answers – and much humour as well as heartache - in a brief 70 minutes. Touching on string theory, quantum mechanics, parallel universes and matters of life and death, this is, in essence, a romantic love story in which the protagonists bump and collide like random molecules, or the helium-filled balloons which hover overhead in Tom Scutt’s celestial design.
As brief scenes are played and replayed with subtle differences and various outcomes, Michael Longhurst’s expertly orchestrated production demands pitch perfect performances. And he gets them – from Sally Hawkins (needy, nervy and articulate) and Rafe Spall (gentle, blokeish, down to earth) as they negotiate the multiverse of this unmissable two-hander.

Duke of York’s, St Martin’s Lane, WC2N 4BG
Tube | Charing Cross / Leicester Square
Until 5th January
£25.00- £37.50 (plus a few £10 day seats)

The Effect

This is London

Playwright Lucy Prebble isn’t afraid of tackling complex topics and making them both accessible and entertaining. In her smash hit Enron she took on the intricacies of the financial manoeuvres which destroyed the eponymous energy giant. Now, with equal success, she’s turned her attention to even more labyrinthine subjects – love and the human brain.

The Cottesloe has been transformed by designer Miriam Buether into the reassuringly soft-seated lime and red premises of a pharmaceutical company where psychology student Connie and laidback Irish Tristan (he’s done this before, the fee is to finance his travelling) have enrolled as healthy guinea-pigs in a new anti-depressant trial conducted by precise, unsmiling clinical psychiatrist Lorna.

Locked away in the clinic for weeks, and despite the ban on sex and smoking, it’s hardly surprising that a relationship – sparked into life during a flirtatious exchange over urine samples – grows between Connie and Jonjo O’Neill’s raffish Tristan. But are the changes registering on their brain scans the neurological results of the drug, the natural euphoria of new love – or is the attraction itself merely a pharmacologically induced emotion?

Prebble has obviously done her homework, but she displays her knowledge unobtrusively, integrating information with romantic entanglements past and present, and bringing Lorna into conflict with her boss (Tom Goodman-Hill) over their differing ideas of the reality of both life and experimentation.

Rupert Goold directs with his customary flair, eliciting completely convincing performances from the four-strong cast, with Billie Piper vulnerably sincere as Connie and Anastasia Hille’s Lorna hiding her own damage behind a screen of rigorous professionalism in this tender and intelligent co-production between the National and Headlong which provides – how could it? – no easy answers.

 

Cottesloe

People

 TNT

At 78, playwright and author Alan Bennett has become almost as much of an institution as the stately homes of England, the subject of his latest play. Like his smash hit The History Boys, it bemoans the passing of old values, though without quite the same freshness and verve.

But his sense of mischief is still very much intact - the funniest scenes involve the shooting of a porn film, the director (Peter Egan) making full use of the four poster beds which the crumbling South Yorkshire pile of Lady Dorothy Stacpoole has to offer.

But there’s no money to maintain the place – hasn’t been for ages – and former 60s catwalk model Dorothy (Frances de la Tour) and her equally aged companion (Linda Bassett’s deliciously twinkly Iris) haven’t had hot water for a bath for decades.

Something has got to be done and her sister (Selina Cadell’s lesbian archdeacon) is determined to hand the building over to the National Trust – something which both Dorothy and Bennett himself find completely distasteful. In their view the heritage industry has come to mean little more than hoards of strangers traipsing through ancestral homes to inspect the historic residue of ancient chamber pots. The alternatives – flogging off the contents of the attic or selling the whole place to an elitist company with plans to relocate it to more desirable Dorset – aren’t held in much favour either.

Nicholas Hytner’s direction ensures a neatly executed transformation from dusty decay to pristine, tourist friendly sheen, Nicholas Le Prevost enthuses as the man from the National Trust, and Miles Jupp’s auctioneer convinces the old ladies that their future may hinge on the value of the cat’s bowl in Bennett’s often funny but loosely shaped satire.

Lyttelton at the National, South Bank, SE1 9PX
Tube | Waterloo
Currently in rep until at least 2nd April
£12 - £47nationaltheatre.org.uk

Daddy Long Legs

 TNT

Managing to stay just the right side of saccharine, this likeable small-scale 2009 musical arrives in London with the original American cast of two still intact. Based on Jean Webster’s century old epistolary novel of the same name, it exudes period charm, lightly spiced by heroine Jerusha Abbott’s independence of spirit.
A long-term resident at a grim orphanage, her literary talents are spotted by one of the trustees who arranges, anonymously, to pay for her further education - on condition that she writes him a monthly letter (addressed to “Mr John Smith) to which she is to expect no reply.

Of course it doesn’t take long before he becomes increasingly intrigued by his intelligent young protégée and when it transpires that she’s studying with his niece, he swiftly engineers the first of several meetings. Naturally, the course of true love never runs smooth or there’d be no musical.

So wealthy, diffident Jervis (who is in fact tall, dark, handsome and reasonably young - not the doddery octogenarian benefactor of Jerusha’s imagination) finds all sorts of excuses not to reveal his true identity – or declare his feelings - as he gets increasingly jealous of any other potential suitor for her affections.
Lovingly directed and written by John Caird, it never aspires to great dramatic heights. But Paul Gordon’s songs are neat, witty and, with Robert Adelman Hancock’s Jervis adding pleasing harmonies, beautifully delivered by the rather enchanting Megan McGinnis in a shamelessly romantic but rewarding evening.

St James, 21 Palace Street, SW1E 5JA
Tube | Victoria
Until 8th December
£30.00 - £45.00stjamestheatre.co.uk

Berenice

This is London

Josie Rourke’s decision to stage novelist Alan Hollinghurst’s blank verse rendition of Racine’s classically themed 1670 tragedy in the round seems, initially, promising as sand sifts down inexorably from above to the sandpit below. But this is a very static play – long speeches, little action – and the reconfiguration extorts too high a price. For much of the time one can see either the expressions of the person speaking or the reactions of the character addressed, but rarely both at once.

Sheathed in a seductive red gown, Anne-Marie Duff’s Berenice, Queen of Palestine, is radiant in love, joyous that the death of his father has finally left Titus, the new Emperor of Rome, free to marry her. And her anguish is palpable, too, when Stephen Campbell Moore’s Titus acknowledges that the people will never tolerate such a union with a foreign queen.

 

Cue much agonising and soul-searching as the demands of duty conflict with the desires of the heart and Antiochus (Dominic Rowan, unconvincing as a potential suitor in a stiffly formal costume) confesses his own long-standing infatuation with his friend’s royal mistress.

No blood is shed, passions are subjugated to responsibility and, ultimately, despite Duff’s convincing performance, this rather uninvolving production fails to stir the emotions.

Donmar to 24th November

This House

(This is London)

       

The Cottesloe has been transformed into a mini version of the House of Commons for James Graham’s lively and immensely enjoyable new play about the behind the scenes machinations in the world of Westminster.

Seated on opposing green leather benches, the audience is whisked back to 1974 as, to the chagrin of chief whip Humphrey Atkins (Julian Wadham) and his privately educated cronies, the Conservatives topple. Forced to exchange the plush government office for the opposition’s far shabbier accommodation, they’re doubly motivated to pull out all the stops to overturn the Labour party’s tenuous victory in a hung parliament and get back into power.

Graham depicts a cut-throat world where personal life is sacrificed to the demands of the job, MPs are summoned from hospital beds and turfed out of toilets to make up the voting numbers and ancient traditions exist side by side with modern tactics. Well researched, wittily written, and smoothly directed by Jeremy Herrin, it briefly introduces a host of unnamed MPs (most identified only by their constituencies) but keeps the focus predominantly on the efforts of the whips to secure those vital votes.

 

Philip Glenister’s Walter Harrison (a Yorkshireman with more than a few tricks up his strategic sleeve) and a sleek Charles Edwards as his Tory counterpart Bernard Weatherill particularly impress and, with the current run sold out before press night, a welldeserved transfer to the large space of the Olivier has already been scheduled for February next year.

Cottesloe Until 1st December

NSFW

 TNT

As Lucy Kirkwood reminds us right at the end of her short, witty two-pronged attack on the magazine industry, women may have got the vote but they still have a tough fight ahead of them.

NSFW (ie “not safe for work” which refers to internet content one would rather not be caught watching) takes us first into the bloke-ish offices of Doghouse, a tits-and-teeth orientated weekly mag for young men. Here, bright graduate Charlotte (grateful to be in paid employment at last) has been sleeping with older editor Aidan and, ashamed of her real role, telling her women’s group that she’s an estate agent, and Sam’s unintentionally inappropriate choice for their “Local Lovely, 2012” is about to blow up in their faces.

Then it’s a quick switch to the sleek offices of upmarket woman’s magazine Electra where immaculate Miranda (Janie Dee) is intent on erasing every female imperfection before the next issue goes to print.

Simon Godwin’s swift production is very funny indeed, with Henry Lloyd-Hughes upper-class Rupert suffering all sorts of indignities to keep his media job, Sacha Dhawan’s decent Sam trying against the odds not to compromise his moral standards, and Julian Barratt’s deviously persuasive Aidan encouraging his staff to “really live in the spaces between the boobs, yeah?” whilst pouring monetary oil on troubled waters when legal action threatens.

Royal Court Theatre
Sloane Square, SW1W 8AS
Tube | Sloane Square
Until 24th November
£10 - £28royalcourttheatre.com

All That Fall

 TNT

Originally written for radio, Samuel Beckett’s bleakly comic 1957 drama has apparently never previously been staged. So it was hardly surprising that, with a cast headed by the all too rarely seen Eileen Atkins and Michael Gambon, tickets for the initial run at the tiny Jermyn Street theatre sold out as soon as they went on sale.

Good news, then, that there’s now a chance to catch this septuagenarian duo and a fine supporting cast at the larger but still sufficiently intimate Arts.

Microphones hang from the ceiling, the red light goes on and, from chairs lined up on either side of the stage, scripts in hand and dressed in fifties clothing, the actors come forward to “record” their parts to the accompaniment of a vivid soundtrack of rural noises and passing steam trains.

Setting off to meet her husband from the station when he returns from work, Eileen Atkins’ Mrs Rooney, alert but with the dragging feet of the very old, encounters various locals on her short journey. On the way back, it’s just her and Gambon’s blind Rooney, each step difficult and confusing in a metaphor for the closing stages of life itself.

Both are immensely watchable – Gambon reluctant to tell his wife why his train was delayed, his (admittedly rather fluctuating) Irish lilt exploding into angry frustration with his diminishing powers, and Atkins quirkily observant, her face a mournful map of the past – in Trevor Nunn’s 75 minute production.

Arts Theatre
Great Newport Street, WC2H 7JB
Tube | Leicester Square
until 24th November
£20-£39.50artstheatrewestend.co.uk

Blackta

 TNT

No matter what the colour of your skin, trying to make a living as an actor isn’t easy and even glowing reviews are no guarantee of hitting the big time. But according to actor and first time playwright Nathaniel Martello-White’s new play it’s even harder if you’re Black – or (as he calls his characters) Brown or Yellow.

David Lan’s inventive production places the protagonists in a two-tier set with most of their interaction taking place in the ground floor waiting room (where Leo Wringer’s resigned Older Black still hasn’t given up hope after decades of recalls and hanging about) and the endless round of seemingly futile auditions held on the upper level, a bare, light-framed box accessed by conveyor belt and stairs.

Here they compete for the elusive green light (the ultimate ticket out of this hellish, dispiriting limbo) by performing childishly demeaning tasks – from blowing up a latex glove to frantically donning layer upon layer of clothing – and hope that this time their non-white, non “floppy head” face will fit.

There’s much to admire - the snappy banter, the energetic performances (Daniel Francis’s Black who had his chance and probably won’t get another, Anthony Welsh’s angry Brown deciding to do his own thing, Javone Prince’s habitually exaggerating Dull Brown and Howard Charles’ impressive Yellow) and the imaginative staging.Enough in fact, to make one forgive the more self-indulgent lapses (a Star Wars style interlude adds little) and a tendency to unnecessary repetition in this otherwise zappy satire.

Young Vic, The Cut, SE1 8LZ
Tube | Southwark / Waterloo
Extended to 24th November
£10.00 - £15.00youngvic.org

55 Days

 TNT

Howard Brenton’s fact-based new play looks at a crucial moment in history when, in 1648 after years of civil war, the divine right of kings came under question and the ruling monarch, Charles I, found himself on trial for high treason, facing judgement by those he believed to be his inferiors in every way.

Howard Davies’ austere production highlights the perceived difference between the accused king and his subjects, clothing them in dull grey suits in contrast to the flamboyance of Mark Gatiss’s Charles in his elevated heels, flowing locks and period finery. Even as he is moved from castle prison to castle prison, he believes until the last that he is beyond the scope of the law.

Brenton’s drama takes a while to hit its stride - and it probably helps if you’re familiar with the background history. But an imagined meeting between two men, who both believe god is on their side, (the stubbornly intransigent royal and Douglas Henshall’s conflicted Cromwell, his reservations prompting him to try his utmost to avoid the inevitable execution) proves compelling, as do the parliamentary court proceedings.

And Gatiss, with a Scottish-tinged accent and disdainful demeanour holds the traverse stage with an air of isolated superiority.

Hampstead, Eton Avenue, NW3 3EU
Tube | Swiss Cottage
Until 24th November
£22-£29hampsteadtheatre.com

The River

 TNT

It’s a “day seats only” policy for every performance so you’ll have to be quick off the mark to grab a ticket for Jez Butterworth’s follow up to his smash hit Jerusalem which stars Dominic West and frustratingly, but atmospherically, is ensconced in the smaller upstairs space.

It proves the perfect setting for this low key, often poetic and far more intimate chamber piece in which the characters are no less fascinating, the elusive story that unfolds no less gripping.

In an isolated wood cabin by the river (meticulously designed by Ultz) an unnamed Man persuades his reluctant new girlfriend (also unnamed) to go fishing with him on a pitch-black moonless night when the wild sea trout are running.

He says he loves her, but all is not as it seems and the past keeps resurfacing in unexpected ways.

It would be criminal to give any more away – the truth of this enigmatic, lovingly written production (directed by Ian Rickson) is as slippery as the fish that elude his lure, as evasive as the commitment he craves.

Beautifully acted - by West (rugged and bearded in check fisherman’s shirt, he hints at underlying emotional insecurity but guts a captured trout with practiced ease) and by down-to-earth Miranda Raison and teasing, candlelit Laura Donnelly as the women he courts - this is a short, tantalising treat.

Royal Court Theatre, Sloane Square, SW1W 8AS
Tube | Sloane Square
Until 17th November
£20, Mondays £10 royalcourttheatre.com