Tag Archives: Jasper Britton

“Habeas Corpus” at the Menier Chocolate Factory

This early Alan Bennett play, revived by Patrick Marber, is an odd one. It’s a farce about sexual frustration among the middle classes. But with meta-theatrical touches that play with the genre, it’s an attempt to write this kind of comedy in a different way (the lack of a set tells you that much). Along with crudity, poetic moments focus on mortality. And there are touches of a revue, too, complete with songs. It’s novel, experimental even. But Habeas Corpus is more interesting than it is funny.

There are laughs. The sillier jokes are good and have aged best. Darker moments, leading to the cautious billing of the show as “from a less enlightened age” have immoral doctors and queasy Ortonesque moments. But Bennett is appropriately harsh about bad conduct. And, impressively, the women in the show are as sexual as the men. Yet those laugh-out-loud moments come from the cast performances rather than the script.

Our guide to proceedings, the cleaning lady Mrs Swabb, is great fun (and Ria Jones excellent in the part). Dr and Mrs Wicksteed, and son Dennis, are all looking for love and easy enough to laugh at… initially. But their desperation is double-edged, and strong performances from Jasper Britton, Catherine Russell and Dan Wolff (standing in for Thomas Josling) mean we come to care for them. Does feeling empathy make us laugh less?

It isn’t unreasonable to expect a comedy to be fun. But if that’s all you require, Habeas Corpus might leave you disappointed. Lust here is for life as much as sex, and there’s a weighty, existential, edge. There’s also an awful lot of loneliness in the play. Bennett’s mix of comedy and melancholy may keep an audience on its toes, but Habeas Corpus doesn’t allow relaxation into a really good time.

Until 27 February 2022

www.menierchocolatefactory.com

Photo by Manuel Harlan

“Race” at Hampstead Theatre

In Race, which opened last night at the Hampstead Theatre, playwright David Mamet uses the legal system as a prism through which to examine racism in America. Race centres on the case of a white man accused of raping a black woman. It’s a hard-hitting, foul-mouthed, hilarious affair with the most serious of themes.

This is a huge coup for Hampstead; artistic director Edward Hall is justifiably pleased to give the show its UK premiere. Any work by Mamet is an important event for contemporary theatre writing, and in the must-see category by virtue of his name alone.

And it’s also characteristic Mamet: brilliantly contentious, perversely confrontational, and deliberately provocative. The play is about the lies we tell each other and ourselves about race, set in a legal world whose dialectic consists solely of falsehoods.

The law often makes great theatre; here the legal team of Lawton and Brown, played expertly by Jasper Britton and Clarke Peters, are more than open to a connection with “pageantry”. Overblown certainly, you might pray they are a parody, but their bluntness – constantly mercenary and misanthropic – is a technique to tackle taboos and get howls of laughter.

The key to the play is a new addition to the law firm, Susan, an honours student whose agenda gives rise to the most testing moral questions. Nina Toussaint-White is superb in the role, revealing that in razor-sharp competitions with her elder colleagues her character isn’t at the same professional level. And Toussaint-White conveys a deep pain behind her character’s sleek façade, injecting much-needed humanity into the play.

Mamet’s cynicism is such it occasionally beggars belief. Plot points designed to make us question Susan’s character are clumsy. There’s also the issue for London audiences that, understandably, the focus is very specifically on American society. But these are caveats. Race is never less than thrilling and this production makes a trip to Hampstead essential.

Until 29 June 2013

www.hampsteadtheatre.com

Photo by Alaistair Muir

Written 30 May 2013 for The London Magazine

“Fabrication” at The Print Room

The Print Room is a new theatre for London – and that, in itself, deserves applause. Artistic directors Anda Winters and Lucy Bailey, and BBB Marketing, which owns the building, should get a standing ovation for what they have achieved.

The Print Room’s first production, Fabrication by Pier Paolo Pasolini, is directed by Bailey. She is a bold director, intelligent and inventive. Indeed, Bailey’s only shortcoming seems to be her misplaced passion for Pasolini.

A caveat – I have never enjoyed Pasolini’s work. The Print Room has the coup of premièring his plas in this country, but it is hard not to resist the flippant response that we can see now why nobody else has beaten them to it. It turns out that Pasolini has a lot to say about theatre. But then he has a lot to say about everything. Trouble is, he doesn’t say any of it very well.

Despite Jamie McKendrick’s poetic translation being frank and direct, it cannot get past Pasolini’s perversely Baroque approach, which forces so many ideas on the audience they become opaque. There is no doubt an argument in the text for this. Pasolini toys with irony and the idea of a meaningless tragedy, just as he plays with plenty of other notions. The problem is that none of his arguments is satisfactorily developed.

What makes the evening all the more frustrating is how good the acting is. Jasper Britton gives a stunning performance as a Milanese industrialist who falls in love with his son, who is played with great passion by Max Bennett. Geraldine Alexander and Letty Butler are both wonderful as the mother and girlfriend who attempt to engage with this twisted Oedipal story. Martin Turner plays Sophocles in appropriately ghostly fashion and remarkably transforms himself into a beggar for the play’s final scene. Janet Fullerlove also has a great turn as a fortune teller, giving a highly nuanced performance that manages to add genuine drama.

All perform within designer Mike Britton’s clever set – a rectangular pen in the centre of the theatre that the audience peers into. And yet we return to the problem of what they are asked to perform: Fabrication is wilfully obtuse. But everything else about this production bodes well for the future of The Print Room, and supporting the venue cannot be endorsed enough. I just can’t wait for a different play.

www.the-print-room.org

Until 4 December 2011

Written 19 November 2010 for The London Magazine