Fiesta - The Sun Also Rises

 TNT

Director and adaptor Alex Helfrecht has cut characters and added an evocatively moody jazz score (played live by Trio Farouche) for this effective stage adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s first novel, completed in 1926 and inspired by his trips to Pamplona and the expatriate post-war set with whom he mingled.

At the centre is war veteran Jake (Gideon Turner), an American journalist whose invisible wounds render him incapable of satisfying the sexual appetites of Lady Brett Ashley, the disruptively promiscuous young woman who has determinedly tracked him down to Paris, then follows him to Spain, seducing both his Jewish novelist friend, Jye Frasca’s Robert (who’s on the verge of marriage) and the teenage matador Pedro Romero in the process.

Full glasses (white wine for Paris, blood red for Spain) hang overhead, fuelling the louche pleasure-seeking existence of a lost generation bent on blocking out the mundane with indulgent excess and the dangerous thrill of the bull run, in a production atmospherically laden with symbolism.

Trafalgar Studios (2)
Whitehall, SW1A 2DYTube
Charing Cross
till 2nd March (£15- £30)
atgtickets.co.uk
FiestaWestEnd.com

Great Expectations

 TNT

 

Though drastically cut to just over two hours actual playing time by adaptor Jo Clifford, this stage version of Charles Dickens’ lengthy 1860’s novel still takes an awfully long time to generate dramatic momentum.

Robin Peoples’ cobweb-draped, Gothic set - dominated by a huge mirror through which scenes from the past briefly become visible and with a decaying wedding cake centre stage - perfectly evokes the neglected gloom of Satis House where Miss Havisham (Paula Wilcox in tattered bridal gown) first summons young orphan Pip to play with her adopted daughter Estella.

But atmospheric though it is, the single set can’t encompass the breadth of Dickens’ world - Pip’s graveyard encounter with escaped criminal Magwitch wouldn’t scare a kitten, and Herbert Pocket prancing about on the mantelpiece as he instructs Pip on gentlemanly deportment is definitely a mistake.

With characters, white-faced and ghostly, emerging from the shadows and poking through the furniture, much of the acting is too broad to make you care as Adult Pip (as onlooker) remembers his past.

Apparently it’s the first time the novel has been staged in the West End, but, although it delivers the bare bones of the narrative, only rarely is there the sense of real people with real lives and emotions in Graham McLaren’s workmanlike production.

 

Vaudeville, Strand WC2R 0NH
Tube | Charing Cross
Until 1st June
£25 - £55.00
greatexpectationstheplay.com

Midnight Tango

 TNT

If you’re suffering from “Strictly Come Dancing” withdrawal, there’s no need to wait till the next series to see those super-toned bodies execute those impossibly intricate steps.

A trio of Strictly stars hit the West End next month in Burn the Floor but first up it’s Flavia Cacace (she of the super-shiny bob) and her long-term partner Vincent Simone in a return of their slick programme of almost non-stop tango.

Cuddly Russell Grant puts in an appearance too - but worry not. Although he gets his (rather subdued) moment in the limelight to prove he hasn’t yet forgotten everything he learnt during his weeks on the TV show, the main focus of this dialogue-free show is on the masters of kicks, flicks and fast-paced footwork as a dark stranger attempts to lure the vivaciously expressive Cacace away from Simone in a Buenos Aires bar.

Accompanied by on-stage band Tango Siempre and unobtrusive vocalist Miguel Angel, and surrounded by a swirling, ten-strong ensemble (the women in hip-hugging skirts, the men in suits) these dazzling dance champions show just how it should be done - whilst wisely realising that 2 hours is just about as much tango as such an insubstantial story line can sustain.

Phoenix Charing Cross Road, WC2H 0JP
Tube | Leicester Square
Until 2nd March
£20.00- £55.00
midnighttango.co.uk

Old Times

 TNT

Rufus Sewell is quite extraordinary in this classy revival of the late Harold Pinter’s richly ambiguous 1971 memory play, a triangular power struggle which is as nebulous and mutable as swirling fog.

As forty-something filmmaker Deeley, he shares the stage with Kristin Scott Thomas and Lia Williams – one of whom plays his wife Kate, the other Anna (her former flatmate and only friend from her days as a secretary in bohemian London) whom she hasn’t seen for 20 years.

Which actress plays which varies from night to night – mainly according to a schedule but, on some occasions, the decision is made by the flip of a coin.

Anna (Scott Thomas at the performance I saw) is a still flirtatious, confident blonde, whilst Williams’ Kate is quiet, mousy, unreadable. Sewell’s initial indulgent amusement at the prospect of Anna’s visit changes to angry insecurity as he finds himself in a battle of memories - with Kate, and their past, as the prize.

There are suggestions that one – or more – characters are already dead, or, perhaps, that Anna and Kate (with their once-shared underwear) are different aspects of the same woman.

Pinter isn’t telling – but Ian Rickson’s enigmatic 80 minute production keeps you hooked whilst defying a definitive interpretation…. and I’ll be returning (under my own steam) to discover what insights the alternative casting might yield.

Harold Pinter, Panton Street, SW1Y 4DN
Tube | Piccadilly Circus
Until 6th April
£10.00 -£49.50
oldtimestheplay.com

Our Country's Good

 TNT

After 25 years director Max Stafford-Clark revisits Timberlake Wertenbaker’s award winning play, based on Thomas Keneally’s 1988 novel The Playmaker and inspired by historical events.

First time round he paired it with Farquhar’s 1706 “The Recruiting Officer” - the restoration comedy which the rather proper Second Lieutenant Ralph Clark is rehearsing with a motley cast of convicts - but it stands perfectly adequately alone.

Set in the penal colony at Sydney Cove, New South Wales in 1789, it features a cast of felons of various degrees of criminality and the naval officers in charge of them.

Convinced of the redemptive power of art (and despite strong opposition from some of his fellow officers) the enlightened governor Captain Philip encourages Clark’s production and, in so doing, builds both solidarity and commitment among the initially unwilling transportees.

Neatly doubling roles, the cast play characters on both sides of the law, with both humorous and touching results. And, even when the threat of the hangman’s noose hovers close, the transformative power of the theatre helps the prisoners to find an unexpected resilience and a united voice in this modern classic in which even the title has a double resonance.

St James, 21 Palace Street, SW1E 5JA
Tube | Victoria
Extended to 23rd March
£35.00 - £42.50 (premium seats £50)stjamestheatre.co.uk

Playing Cards 1 - Spades

 TNT

I was really hoping that this latest offering from the brilliantly innovative Quebecois auteur Robert Lepage would be one of the theatrical highlights of 2013, but although its 2 ½ hours (no interval) were never boring, the words “Emperor” and “New Clothes” ultimately sprang to mind.

Planned as part of a series of four plays shaped around the suits of a deck of cards, it has perhaps suffered by taking collaborative writing too far, with the separate strands of the loosely interconnecting narrative proving insufficiently developed.

Staged in the round on a metre high platform with a rotating outer ring and a plethora of trapdoors, Spades conjures a diverse handful of visitors to the gambling mecca of Las Vegas in 2003 where (like the ill-matched, expectant Canadian couple) you can be married by an Elvis Presley impersonator and lose (or win) a fortune in moments. It touches, too, on the lives of some of those who work there and on the coalition forces training in the Nevada desert on their way to Iraq.

The commendably versatile multinational cast, just half a dozen strong, brings a host of characters to life, some only briefly, while others - Tony Guilfoyle’s compulsive gambler attending a television sales convention in what is possibly the worst location in the world for him, Nuria Garcia’s efficient Mexican chambermaid whose health problems threaten to expose her illegal status – stay around long enough for us to become involved with their stories.

Though clever (and no doubt logistically challenging) the 360º staging isn’t yet as smooth as it could be and, as hotel bedroom gives way to a casino, a swimming pool or a bar, Lepage’s customary magic is too rarely in evidence.

Still, his work rarely stays static, so hopefully, by the time he’s completed the proposed tetralogy, this first section will have evolved into something which can stand alongside the innovative ambition and depth of his previous richly satisfying productions.

Roundhouse
Chalk Farm Road NW1 8EH
Chalk Farm tubeUntil Sat March 2(£15 - £45)
roundhouse.org.uk/cards

Gay's The Word

 TNT

Although there’s a theatre named after him in the Strand, the musicals of singer, actor and composer Ivor Novello are hardly ever seen these days. So credit to the tiny Jermyn Street theatre for bringing his last work (which premiered in 1951, shortly before his sudden death) to the West End, complete with an enthusiastic singing, dancing cast of 19, plus pianist.

The plot is as shaky as they come. After a disastrous flop, musical star Gay Daventry battles to salvage both her career and her seaside acting school, a couple of smugglers with ridiculous accents make a brief appearance (as does an elegant old gentleman sporting a white carnation) and the juvenile leads end up happily betrothed.

But it’s really little more than a vehicle for feisty leading lady Gay (winningly played by Sophie-Louise Dann with the no-nonsense gusto of a slightly naughty if imperious head mistress) and an excuse to bring together some mock operetta-style warbling and a selection of lively and often witty songs (lyrics by Alan Melville), some of which parody Novello’s own earlier successes.

All totally daft – but the revue-style Teaching, recounting how their hopelessly untalented pupils met a variety of nasty ends, is delivered with irresistibly malevolent glee by the spinster quartet of superannuated, unpaid staff, failed performers all.

Jermyn Street Theatre, SW1Y 6ST
Tube | Piccadilly Circus
Until 2nd March
£20
jermynstreettheatre.co.uk

Quartermaine's Terms

 TNT

It’s all smiles and bonhomie in the staffroom after the half term break at a Cambridge school of English for foreigners in the late Simon Gray’s bleakly funny, socially observant play.

Written in 1981, but set a couple of decades earlier, it unwraps, bit by bit, the unhappiness beneath the superficial smiles which ensure that, in very British fashion, the teachers never pry too deeply into the lives of the colleagues they work with every day. In the course of five scenes covering a handful of years, health declines, marriages break up – and are patched together - a hated elderly parent dies and children become increasingly problematic. And through it all sits Rowan Atkinson’s St John Quartermaine, a solitary figure in his usual chair, not only incompetent as a teacher but pretty inept as a human being as well.

Atkinson has a face built for comedy but, under Richard Eyre’s assured direction, sensibly tones down the mannerisms to reveal the pathos of his character – a lonely, aging bachelor, useful as a baby sitter but otherwise avoided outside school hours. The rest of a very strong cast are equally effective as their lives evolve around him - Conleth Hill’s jovially blustering family man with an increasingly unstable daughter, Will Keen’s accident prone newcomer from Hull who turns up on his first day with a rip in his trousers, Felicity Montagu’s torch-carrying spinster, Matthew Cottle’s would-be novelist who pays more attention to his literary baby than his spouse, and Louise Ford’s serially betrayed young wife - all in the employ of Malcolm Sinclair’s detached, implicitly gay co-principal.
 Wyndhams,
Charing Cross Road WC2H 0DA
Tube | Leicester Square
Until 13th April
£25.00 - £58.50
delfontmackintosh.co.uk
quartermainesterms.com

Lift

 TNT

The writers’ own programme note sounds a cautionary warning that it’s “a challenge trying to explain what Lift is about”.  Though promising, this short new musical by Craig Adams (music and lyrics) and Ian Watson (book) really could do with some more work.

The basic conceit is that a love-struck busker imagines the lives of his fellow passengers crammed together into the lift making the brief ascent at Coven Garden tube station.

Julie Atherton’s gay, left in the lurch French Teacher (characters are defined rather than named) attempts to forge a tenuous connection with Cynthia Erivo’s Lap Dancer. There’s a lovesick Secretary and a rather side-lined character called Tall, Dark and Handsome who has little more to do than look the part. Most amusing is the blatantly promiscuous gay Ballet Dancer (Jonny Fines) in search of sex in on-line chat rooms or anywhere else the opportunity arises.

It’s all a bit muddly, earnest and, at times, overblown though, and, despite a talented cast, the songs are forgettable.

Ironically, it’s the succinct final tableaux, just as the lift reaches ground level, which most effectively suggest just what’s going on in the minds of these commuters briefly thrust into such intimate proximity.

Soho Theatre, Dean Street, W1D 3NE
Tube Tottenham Court Road
Until 24th February
£19.50- £29.50 (£10 standing)
sohotheatre.com

Feast

 TNT

There are some startlingly effective moments in this ambitious Young Vic and Royal Court co-production. But, with five playwrights from as many different countries involved, it’s perhaps hardly surprising that the result – though often visually stunning - is both episodic and variable.
Part of World Stages London and loosely tracing the spread of aspects of the Yoruba belief system from its Nigerian origins via the slave ships to Cuba, Brazil, the USA and England, its epic aspirations are whittled down to several shortish scenes.
Three bickering sisters in early 18th century Nigeria squabble over which path to take, a slave in Brazil in the late 1880’s doesn’t know how she’ll cope when the white man she nursed through his childhood sets her free, a white American seeks out a prostitute in Cuba (though it’s not sex he’s after) and in the streets of Olympic London a black athlete’s relationship to her white trainer is aggressively challenged.
Bracketed by a series of shape-shifting transformations achieved with a flash of light and a moving screen, the dialogue (through no fault of the actors) proves limitedly informative.
But George Cespedes’ sinuous, cat-like choreography, Katrina Lindsay’s shimmering design and Lysander Ashton’s projections provide more than compensatory sensual highlights in a production made memorable by director Rufus Norris’s staging, the vivacious warmth of the performances - and the presence of a live chicken.

Young Vic, The Cut, SE1 8LZ
Tube: Southwark / Waterloo
Until 23rd February £10.00 - £30.00
youngvic.org

Julius Caesar

This is London

Director Phyllida Lloyd takes a few liberties to cram her all-female production of Shakespeare’s study of power and politics into a cheerless women’s prison where lesbian relationships flourish and Frances Barber’s thug of a Caesar rules over the prisoners with a rough brutality.

It couldn’t be more different from Gregory Doran’s recent all-black, vibrantly sun-kissed production for the Royal Shakespeare Company which was set in a modern African state. Here the focus is primarily on the internal, with Harriet Walter’s troubled Brutus struggling with her conscience as she’s egged on by an alert, impassioned Cassius (excellent Jenny Jules). The feeling of enforced containment generates a dangerous sense of shifting allegiances and secret plots in a subculture where the normal rules don’t always apply and the Soothsayer gleans her information from the astrology pages of Heat magazine.

In Bunny Christie grim, grey design, the auditorium’s usual red padded benches have been replaced by austere plastic chairs, and the inmates putting on the production before lock-up are stripped of individuality by their shapeless grey tracksuits. Prison wardens patrol the walkways, water pistols serve as guns, and Caesar is not only violently knifed but force-fed bleach from a plastic bottle.

And although women barely get a look-in in the original, the actors’ gender swiftly becomes irrelevant – with Harriet Walter (her hair slicked down, her appearance androgynous) particularly impressive, finding the whole experience almost unbearably intense both as Brutus and as the incarcerated perpetrator of unrevealed crimes

Donmar to 9th February

Gruesome Playground Injuries

 

 TNT

 

In American playwright Rajiv Joseph’s short new play, Doug and Kayleen first come across each other as 8 year old kids in the nurse’s office at school. She’s a reserved, rather prim little miss with a “sensitive” stomach which makes her queasy. He’s already an ungainly walking car-crash – not so much accident prone as eagerly courting physical disaster. Riding his bike off the rooftop wasn’t exactly a sensible idea.

It’s the start of a long-lasting friendship between two needy people which teeters constantly on the brink of a full blown relationship. He comes to believe her touch can heal him; despite herself, she comes running to his hospital bedside after yet another mishap. Both, when it comes down to it, self-harm.

Although it starts at the beginning and ends at the end, in between the scenes moves back and forwards in time to no particular purpose.And the territory of sporadic meetings over long periods is familiar. Yet Justin Audibert’s eloquent production (played out on an unsettling, clinically white diagonal which cuts through the audience) proves compulsive as Mariah Gale’s Kayleen and Felix Scott’s Doug (both first rate) strip to their white underwear at each scene change, selecting different outer garments for each meeting whilst underneath their basic selves remain unchanged over three decades in this bleakly amusing and touching two-hander.

Gate, Pembridge Road W11 3HQ
Tube | Notting Hill Gategatetheatre.co.uk
Until 16th February
(£20, matinees £10)

Di and Viv and Rose

 TNT

There’s something special about friends made when you first leave home. No matter how different from you they may be, share a house for a year or two and they’re likely to become a substitute family. So although the trio of students in Amelia Bullmore’s delightful and poignant three-hander (largely recast and receiving a well-deserved transfer from the smaller space downstairs) comes from varied backgrounds, the friendship forged when they move in together in 1983 is one destined to last a lifetime.

Openhearted, upper middleclass Rose (Anna Maxwell Martin) who relishes her new sexual freedom far more than her art history course, Tamzin Outhwaite’s sporty, down-to-earth, lesbian Di (a business studies student whose mum has no idea her daughter is gay) and Gina McKee’s frumpy, guarded, academically intense Viv (who completely disowns her parents) bond and bicker over laundry, romantic crises and a vicious attack. Time brings geographical separation and divergent paths, but this enduring friendship based on shared history remains a fluctuating constant whenever they manage to meet.

Bullmore (who’s also an actress) has written some cracking dialogue in a play spanning almost three decades. It barely matters that the excellent cast is considerably older than the university-based first act demands. The years just disappear when they let their hair down in a chaotically uninhibited dance round the living room - and a West End transfer surely beckons for Anna Mackmin’s compassionate, truthful and often very funny production.

Hampstead,
Eton Avenue, NW3 3EU
Tube | Swiss Cottage
Until 23rd February
£22-£29hampsteadtheatre.com