Category Archives: 2014

2014

“The Commitments” at the Palace Theatre

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The Commitments isn’t the kind of show that recommends itself to reviewers – I can’t think of a more lamentable coupling than a jukebox musical riding on the tails on a popular film. But the critics have been kind. And the public has already voted with its feet. The Commitments is now booking until September this year.

Roddy Doyle’s book (the film came in 1991) is set on a council estate in Dublin well before any talk of Celtic Tigers. A group of locals form a band and, well, that’s it, really. There’s plenty of class-consciousness and the generally inspiring idea is that music changes lives, but very little else.

It’s no small achievement that director Jamie Lloyd manages to mask how thin the whole thing is and make it entertaining. Working at a terrific pace, he brings out plenty of humour and utilises Soutra Gilmour’s stunning set so that the whole thing has a slick West End feel.

And the performances will win you over. Denis Grindel has great stage presence as the band’s instigator and manager – you really believe he could get this thing going. Killian Donnelly gives a tremendous performance as Deco, the most naturally accomplished performer, with the arrogance to match. Joined by a host of talented others, including Sarah O’Connor, Stephanie McKeon and Jessica Cervi, who all sound great, and the band’s skinhead bouncer (Joe Woolmer), who gets the biggest laughs. It’s an achievement for such a large cast to individuate themselves.

As billed, The Commitments is hard working and there’s plenty of noise and action, with lots of crude gags that are more hit than miss, even if the ratio is a close call. Quickly into the second half any idea of a story is abandoned in favour of a concert. It seems an honest move that could have saved everyone a lot of trouble if adopted from the start. From hereon in, if soul music is your thing, you are bound to join in the fun.

Booking until 19 April 2015

http://thecommitments.london

Written 23 February 2014 for The London Magazine

2014

“A Taste of Honey” at the National Theatre

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Having started the year with a fantastic production of King Lear, the National Theatre has a second must-see show in as many months. The revival of Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey is the finest work from director Bijan Sheibani that I’ve seen. This important and influential play, as much about dreams and aspirations as any grim-up-north reality, is given its due in a deft production that subtly injects moments of fancy, revealing the rich inner lives of its poverty-stricken characters. Sheibani indicates, rather than shouts, how shocking Delaney’s 1958 play must have been when first shown.

The performances are superb. Kate O’Flynn takes the role of Jo, surely one of the most fascinating parts for a young actress (and famously written when Delaney herself was only 19). She brings out the ‘ill-starred’ schoolgirl’s mercurial quality; spotlighting her innocence, and the worldly wisdom that comes with her upbringing. While dealing with her mother’s fancy man, her own brief affair with a black sailor and then homemaking, while pregnant, with gay friend Geoffrey, O’Flynn is captivating. Meanwhile, the male supporting cast – Dean Lennox Kelly, Eric Kofi Abrefa and Harry Hepple – convince while avoiding sensationalism.

But it’s Lesley Sharp’s performance as Jo’s mother Helen that steals the show. The role is presented as hugely overblown – exaggerated; outrageous; camp in its truest meaning – and the result is remarkably rich. With eyes and hips rolling like Mae West, Sharp makes Helen sexy (something Dora Bryan, for all her skill, didn’t attempt in the 1961 film). Seen as a virile middle-aged woman, her selfishness makes more sense. And she’s funny – ferociously so. The original Broadway cast of the show had Angela Lansbury in the role, and it would be lovely if she could catch Sharp’s performance while in rehearsals for Blythe Spirit (and even better to know what she thinks of it).

Delaney’s text still startles. Poetic and provocative after all these years, it now appears more direct, and more focused, than those by her equally angry contemporaries. Delaney wrote her ground breaking ‘minority’ characters with striking maturity, and her political aims remain inspiring. While you might admire works by Arnold Wesker and John Osborne from a similar era, you fall in love with A Taste of Honey and Delaney. She should take the final bow.

Until 11 May 2014

www.nationaltheatre.org.uk

Photo by Marc Brenner

Written 20 February 2014 for The London Magazine

2014

“The Final Revelation of Sherlock Holmes” at the Pleasance Theatre

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The world’s most famous Londoner has yet another incarnation in Tim Norton’s The Final Revelation of Sherlock Holmes, which opened at the Pleasance Theatre last night. A murder mystery, especially one connecting itself with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is surely a safe bet for a good night out and this one should help satisfy the insatiable appetites of Sherlockologists.

The action takes place in 1930 – Holmes is often a happy time traveller – and the characters are depicted with a familiarity that will please an audience in the know. Holmes and Watson are an odd couple, after all, and this old marriage-of-sorts is a ripe topic for gentle humour. It’s all done with a lot of affection and, if you suspect the script could do with some trimming, this is hardly a major crime – time spent with old friends is never wasted. The first twist: Holmes and Watson are in debt, deserted by Mrs Hudson and troubled by the prestige of their own reputations.

Holmes’ drug addiction is out of control and Watson has to scrape around the caseload history to interest The Strand in a story. A touch predictable, even in its ironic manner, but the show is carried off in style by its two performers. Nico Lennon takes the lead, undaunted by the heritage of Holmes (or, indeed, the Cumberbatch reincarnation), bringing an accomplished physicality to the role. James McGregor’s Watson is too much in the Nigel Bruce mould for my taste – but this is the stuff of after-show discussions – he’s an amiable stage presence who carries some laboured lines.

As for the mystery… that final revelation… from the greatest detective ever… the finest mind solving the perfect crime so long speculated over: well Norton knows that the build-up is the big thing. With some satisfied chuckles from the audience as the rather post-modern penny drops, you can tell he’s hit home. There’s a clue for aficionados in this review by the way. And if that gets you thinking, you’ll want to go and join in the game.

Until 2 March 2014
www.pleasance.co.uk
Photo by Daniel Swerdlow
Written 13 February 2014 for The London Magazine
2014

“Oh What A Lovely War” at the Theatre Royal Stratford East

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The hundredth anniversary of the beginning of World War One is being embraced by the cultural community in many ways. Of all the projects planned the production of Oh What A Lovely War, which opened last night, is the one that should excite theatregoers most. Also marking the show’s fiftieth birthday, the legendary Joan Littlewood’s ‘musical entertainment’ returns to its first home, the Theatre Royal Stratford East, with a respectful new version directed by Terry Johnson.

I vividly remember every history student at my school being trooped off to our local cinema for a specially arranged showing of the 1969 film. All credit to my far-sighted teachers, even if Michael Gove would have disapproved (and well done for getting a mention of him in last night, guys). The concept – telling the story of the awful events of 1914-1918 through the words and music of the time, and adamantly focusing on the average soldier, rather than his officers – is both informative and inspirational. This theatrical method tells you more than any history lesson could and its power has not diminished.

Commitment to the show is clear from the excellent ensemble. The variety of roles, as well as accents, that they take on is remarkable. Both the singing and the choreography by Lynne Page are strong. It seems a little unfair to single anyone out but Shaun Prendergast is superb as the lead narrator, as well as a perfect Sergeant Major. And Caroline Quentin is great value; as a vaudeville star who will “make a man” of anyone joining up, and an impassioned peace protestor. Her Sister Susie’s Sewing Shirts is a real highlight – join in if you can.

Incredible as they seem, the events presented are facts, and make the evening a humbling experience. Johnson and his designer Lez Brotherston use technical advances developed since the show first appeared subtly, with a dot matrix sign displaying casualty figures and photographs projected on a grand scale. Both are given due reverence at key moments. There’s rich, vicious satire here, a shocking humour born from tragic events that still surprises. And there’s no room for timidity when dealing with this subject matter – credit that none is shown.

Until 15 March 2014

www.stratfordeast.com

Photo by Nobby Clark

Written 12 February 2014 for The London Magazine

2014

“A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the Barbican

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Justly world famous for its work on War Horse, the Handspring Puppet Company has joined forces again with director Tom Morris for a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that visits the Barbican this week. But what to do with a play that contains a donkey instead of a horse? Handspring’s solution is so audacious it caused audible gasps from a school party in the audience. Joey the noble stallion, this ass ain’t. And, without spoiling the surprise, the ingenious and mischievous approach sums up the spirit of this superb production.

A transformed Bottom, performed superbly by Miltos Yerolemou, leads workmen looking a little like East End hipsters, who are the funniest I’ve seen. Fast and loose with the text, these joyous “hempen homespuns” are the flashiest point in a thoughtful show that reworks the play from the ground up with the puppetry provoking depth and insight. One note, this is a production that benefits from a close knowledge of the play – although the rewards are too numerous to make any excuse for this warning.

The puppeteer actors are tremendous. Of particular note are a hilarious Hermia (Akiya Henry) and the stunning Saskia Portway who takes on the roles of Hippolyta and Titania. But this is a true ensemble piece, with most of the cast on stage most of the time, and Morris ensures that the puppetry infuses rather then overpowers the show.

And yet the puppetry is revelatory. Simple materials belie Handspring’s ambition, a challenge to the audience, to see how minimal they can be. Puck is an assortment of objects, engendered by no fewer than three performers. Planks of wood are given life by the whole cast, like some giant Cornelia Parker sculpture, to form the forest outside Athens, making it a living character in the piece.

Introducing a sense of animism is the show’s master strategy. The idea that spirits inhabit all kinds of objects makes this fairy world more vivid than we are used to: a dangerous, serious place that is magical and mysteriously real. Fly to get a ticket.

Until 15 February 2014

www.barbican.org

Written 11 February 2014 for The London Magazine

2014

“The White Carnation” at the Jermyn Street Theatre

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After a sell out run at the Finborough Theatre, The White Carnation finds a new home at the Jermyn Street Theatre and started a short run last night. R.C. Sherriff’s story of a successful stockbroker’s life, which takes a supernatural twist when he returns as a ghost seven years after the war, has waited sixty years for its first revival and this skilled production serves it well.

In the lead role of self-made man John Greenwood, Michael Praed is a touch too urbane, but he deals with the incredible situation stylishly and is full of charisma. Praed delivers the play’s thoughtful moments well, including a burgeoning romance with a librarian; it’s not his fault this aspect of the writing feels like an underdeveloped J.B. Priestly play. Greenwood seems oddly tranquil with his predicament. The reckoning this ghost needs to settle is with his wife, but Sherriff adds atonement – as a kind of fable – too late.

The majority of the play deals humorously with the implications of Greenwood’s spectral status. Firstly, with the town councillor, played by a delightfully outraged Robert Benfield, who hopes to solve housing problems by tearing down the property he now finds haunted (he deals with matters in a far more civilised fashion than I imagine Eric Pickles would). Then with a nice gentleman from the Home Office, managed in appropriate style by Philip York, hoping this inconvenient ectoplasm will emigrate. The local vicar, Benjamin Whitrow, truly stealing his scene, trumps both.

Ridicule of the establishment in The White Carnation is effective, but gentle. Surely it all seemed a touch tame back in 1953 as well? Even Blythe Spirit has more bite. Now the whole affair is gloriously steeped in nostalgia, a fact that director Knight Mantell and his cast seem cleverly aware of. This quality affair is too sweet for sure, but it’s also a treat.

Until 22 February 2014

www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk

Photo by Mitzi De Margary

Written 7 February 2014 for The London Magazine

2014

“Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” at the Vault Festival

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The latest incarnation of arty happenings underneath Waterloo station has started this week. The Vault Festival offers an inspiring array of theatre, comedy and club nights headed by productions of Ian McEwan’s The Cement Garden and Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The latter opened last night, with drug-addled gonzo journalism from the casino capital, adapted and directed reverentially by Lou Stein and sure to please the book’s many fans.

The production has plenty of invention; the cars driven and hotel beds debauched on are cleverly evoked and a sure highlight is the use made of Ralph Steadman’s magnificent artwork. It’s the real star here. The show includes never before seen works and embellishes Steadman’s vision with projection and animation. His drawings are an elaboration of the drug-induced mania Thompson’s alias Raoul Duke and his factotum Dr.Gonzo experience while reporting on the Mint 400 drag race and the District Attorney’s Narcotics Conference.

Strongly caricatured, pretentious commentators and aspiring prophets, the leading roles are thankless tasks for actors Ed Hughes and Rob Crouch. Hughes’ Duke is cleverly stilted, but the edginess that’s the result of all those drugs becomes, predictably, tiresome and while Crouch’s Gonzo is performed with great physicality the role itself is two dimensional. Various innocents, casualties to encountering Duke and Gonzo, are performed by an ensemble who work hard to be surreal and gurn plenty, but the outcome is too tame.

Thankfully, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, is held together by John Chancer, who plays the role of narrator. Taking on Thompson’s authorial voice, Chancer is commanding and has grasped both the despair that gives the work some depth and the dead-pan quality of Thompson’s humour. Unfortunately, when he isn’t speaking there isn’t enough to take your mind off the make shift venue’s dreadfully uncomfortable seating or terrible sightlines.

The whole production should be more of an assault on the senses than it is and hopefully this can still be changed. It might be an idea to listen to Dr. Gonzo’s demand for “Volume! Clarity! Bass! We must have bass!”. There are moments in the second half when the projections become more immersive and it makes a big difference. But by then the mood is more thoughtful and we’re brought down before we’ve reached a high.

Until 8 March 2014

www.thevaultfestival.com

Photo by Nobby Clark

Written 31 January 2014 for The London Magazine

2014

“King Lear” at the National Theatre

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The National Theatre has rolled out the big guns to start 2014 – Simon Russell Beale as King Lear directed by Sam Mendes. It doesn’t matter what the weather is doing, or what your budget is like, make a resolution to see this one.

It’s a grand production in many ways. Star director Mendes was widely rumored for the top job at the National Theatre (it went to Rufus Norris), and is clearly at home here. Behind Anthony Ward’s deceptively simple design, the Olivier auditorium is used for all it’s worth. The sense of space is appropriately magisterial and the endlessly revolving stage reflects the play’s conceit of a wheel of fortune. Lear’s kingdom is a noirish nightmare inhabited by gangsters, militia and Blackshirts.

It isn’t just the superb spectacle that makes this Lear memorable. Simon Russell Beale gives the first unmissable performance of the year. His physical transformation is striking – he seems to shrink into the role in a degeneration that accelerates before your eyes. Always an intelligent performer, Russell Beale’s frequent work with Mendes shows how well he interprets the director’s powerful vision. This Lear is scary, a potent psychopath and giving up his throne is acknowledged as inexplicable. It’s a strategy that makes sense of his rages and fills the stage with fear. In a bold move, Lear kills Adrian Scarborough’s thought-provoking fool (in this production he’s even occasionally funny) in an agony of anger.

Matching him in menace, Lear’s daughters are clearly from the same mould. Fantastic casting is made the most of with Kate Fleetwood’s Goneril and Anna Maxwell-Martin’s Regan stealing many of the scenes they are in. Vampish and vicious, they are full of manoeuvres. Olivia Vinall’s Cordelia is also defiantly active, donning army fatigues as she leads an invading force to rescue her father. This Lear is action packed throughout. The plot fuels the tragedy in a way that emphasises that justice isn’t abstract, or the twisted sport of a divinity, but the work of man. From this, the end is even more tragic than usual, with a near unbearably moving performance by Russell Beale.

Until 25 March 2014

www.nationaltheatre.org.uk

Photo by Mark Douet

Written 27 January 2014 for The London Magazine

2014

“Rapture, Blister, Burn” at Hampstead Theatre

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Exciting American talent comes to the Hampstead Theatre with Gina Gionfriddo’s play Rapture, Blister, Burn, a clever take on the state of feminism that’s filled with insight and fun.

It’s based around middle-aged, successful “sexy scholar” Catherine, a demanding role for the spirited Emilia Fox, who returns to her home town to look after her mother. Catherine reconnects with old friends from Grad School, Gwen and Don, who married and settled down when she left town, and their narrow academic social world serves well to raise bigger questions. Adding Catherine’s mother (Polly Adam) and a young student, Avery, provides plenty of satisfying intergenerational content.

To be sure, it’s all highly contrived. Gionfriddo is unabashed by this. Catherine teaches a class to just Avery and Gwen, which becomes more like a confessional. As lectures about feminism go, I can’t imagine them getting much sprightlier, with plenty of humour provided by the arrogance of youth, the dissatisfaction of middle age and excellent one-liners. Emma Fielding handles the role of Gwen well, but Shannon Tarbet as Avery has the funnier lines.

Gionfriddo’s frequent collaborator Peter Dubois directs, and picks up the pace in the second half for the better. The characters don’t always convince, although Don, the flawed male of the piece (performed with style by Adam James), is carefully drawn and perhaps the most thought provoking.

It’s predictable that Catherine starts an affair, but this is the point at which Gionfriddo really gets to work. The twists and turns of a marital breakdown, observed again by both the elderly and the young, is dealt with bluntly and irreverently. The sense of humour is wicked and overpowers much studied thinking, but this stylish piece is sure to provoke debate.

Until 22 February 2014

www.hampsteadtheatre.com

Written 23 January 2014 for The London Magazine

2014

“The Weir” at Wyndham’s Theatre

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With queues for Josie Rourke’s Coriolanus starting crazily early, adding to her string of hits as artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse, she now has a West End transfer to boast about with The Weir, which opened at Wyndham’s Theatre last night.

This much admired and awarded play dates from 1997 and sees various ghost stories told by its misfit characters in a small rural pub. Fortifying this tried and tested concept are Conor McPherson’s beautiful writing and mythic undertones: suggesting our longstanding psychological connections to storytelling and the supernatural.

Rourke’s production is spookily precise. Like one of the play’s characters, Finbar, she clearly has “an eye for the gap” – pauses are perfectly measured for both comedy and tragedy and space is created for the captivating stories. The pace is wonderfully controlled, and the banter in between, the majority of which is very funny indeed, fills out the characters, adding further layers to the play.


Ardal O’Hanlon

Each of the roles is interesting and exceptionally well acted. Risteárd Cooper and Peter McDonald give fine performances as a local entrepreneur and the landlord of the pub. Their different ambitions are just one example of a cleverly injected sense of community, covering the petty differences of life in the country and a network of personal histories. Crowd-pleasing Ardal O’Hanlon joins them as Jim, a bashful handyman who still lives with his mother.

Upsetting the group’s equilibrium is Valerie, a new arrival or “blow in”, who soaks up local folklore then reveals her own ghost story. In the role, Dervla Kirwan delivers the most moving moment of the evening, bringing home the pain and loneliness all feel and fight against. But it’s Brian Cox – as the finest storyteller and bar room wit – that you can’t take your eyes off. Playing an ordinary man with a quiet sadness slowly revealed with great skill, Cox heads a high-powered cast that’s sure to really pack them in. And deservedly so.

Until 19 April 2013

Photos by Helen Warner

Written 22 January 2014 for The London Magazine