Tag Archives: Neet Mohan

“Handbagged” at the Vaudeville Theatre

Moira Buffini’s Handbagged, which after a hit run at the Tricycle Theatre had its West End premiere last night, tells the story of Margaret Thatcher’s reign as Prime Minister by imagining her private audiences with the Queen. The characters Liz and Mags reenact their 1980s meetings and are watched over by Q and T – the same figures in later life, who are portrayed as staging the show and provide an acerbic additional commentary on the action. For every joke there’s an equally amusing interjection, so you get two laughs for the price of one – brilliant.

Now, playwrights are not generally Thatcher’s natural constituency, so it is no surprise that the highlights picked out by Buffini are predictably low points. The Miners’ strike, the Falklands, South Africa and the Poll Tax: there are plenty of targets for satire. But Handbagged isn’t just funny, it’s intelligent as well. The history lesson here is cleverly told and not as biased as you might fear. As well as the notion that the ultimate establishment figure is to the left of Mrs T, the Queen’s devotion to the Commonwealth is given its due. And Thatcher is allowed to answer back – well, it would beggar belief to think she would give a playwright an easy time.

Acknowledging the evening as a theatrical production full of “artifice and sham” adds an honesty to the piece. Those meetings were private after all, speculation about their relationship just that, and Buffini wisely never presents her work as the final word. It’s fun: not only do we get discussion about whether there should be an interval – carry on through or enjoy your ice cream? – but the real anger at some of Thatcher’s decisions is given a magically light touch.

In their capacity as the show’s ‘producers’, Q and T recruit two jobbing actors to play a huge variety of roles, and they end up trying to take over the show. Jeff Rawle’s repertoire of accents is astounding and Neet Mohan is superb as he endures the “stroke of casting genius” that sees him dragged up as Nancy Reagan.

Handbagged is superbly performed. Under Indhu Rubasingham’s skillful direction, all four leading ladies excel. These are reinventions rather than simple impersonations (although Marion Bailey’s top lip deserves an award of its own). More credit then to Bailey, Stella Gonet, Lucy Robinson and Fenella Woolgar for injecting real heart into the roles. There is gravitas, when it comes to key speeches the women gave, and emotion at traumatic events. Staying just the right side of parody, Woolgar in particular never takes her eye off this fine balance. Politics has seldom been presented so originally or with such great laughs.

Until 2 August 2014

Photo by Tristram Kenton

Written 11 April 2014 for The London Magazine

“The Fastest Clock in the Universe” at the Hampstead Theatre

Part of Hampstead Theatre’s 50-year celebration series, the revival of Philip Ridley’s The Fastest Clock in the Universe hopes to rekindle the play’s success from its original run in 1992. Given that Ridley is concerned with pretty much all the basic human vices, this disturbing work has retained its power to haunt.

The scenario is distasteful enough. Cougar Glass (Alec Newman) lives off an adoring older man called Captain Took. Easily debilitated by the very mention of his age, each year Cougar celebrates his “19th” birthday by seducing a young schoolboy.

Cougar’s every action is arrogant, his only occupation to preserve his appearance. Fittingly, he spends half of the play in his underwear. Finbar Lynch is terrifying as the clearly unbalanced Took, old before his time and crippled with insecurity about his own appearance. Took dotes on Cougar as mother and housewife, rewarded by a brief hug as long as he agrees to wear rubber gloves.

So far, so strange. Ridley’s master stroke in the telling of this repulsive story is to create a bizarre world that is removed enough from our own to allow us to watch, but which, while exaggerating human nature, makes us recognise characters motivations and faults with great clarity. While references and inspirations from other playwrights are numerous, the spirit is predominately Dickensian. All these strangely named characters inhabit a dilapidated and corrupt East London and display their all too obvious flaws.

A Gothic sense of impending doom comes from the cruel game Cougar plays with his potential victim; he tells the young boy, Foxtrot Darling, that they share a recent bereavement.  As the deception increases and even Captain Took remonstrates with Cougar, we are introduced to our final character – Foxtrot’s unexpected pregnant fiancée Sherbert Gravel has invited herself along to the party as well.

Sherbert, played wonderfully by Jaime Winstone, is the highlight of the play. She brings out the black comedy in the work, alongside the potential for violence that she is finally (and shockingly) a victim to. Yet her barbed asides to Cougar do little to hide her own motivation – her protection of Foxtrot is more about saving herself than the dreary boy whose life she is planning to dominate.

While Winstone’s movement about the stage alone is something to behold – teetering on high heels that might be the death of her or that she might come to use as a weapon – the object of everyone’s affection does little to hold the audience’s attention. Neet Mohan as Darling may have the looks for the part but his vulnerability seems unconvincing. He bounds around the stage and stands on furniture in a manner that doesn’t match Foxtrot’s situation.

And yet the quality of the writing saves the evening.  The dialogue is rich, complex and direct. It is not pleasant but it fascinates. Revelling in his perversity, Cougar describes his guests as fellow cannibals and welcomes us all to the abattoir.

Until 17 October 2009

www.hampsteadtheatre.com

Photo by Manuel Harlan

Written 27 September 2009 for The London Magazine