ajhlovestheatre

THE STRAW CHAIR

by Sue Glover

Directed by Polly Creed

Finborough Theatre – until 14 May 2022

https://finboroughtheatre.co.uk/production/the-straw-chair/

It has taken some 34 years for Sue Glover’s strange but rather wonderful treatment of the legend of Lady Rachel Grange to reach London, having premiered in Edinburgh in the late 1980s. In fact it is a tale so strange that it could only be true, although Glover filters the real woman’s story through the fictional figures of a rigidly devout priest and his spirited, questioning young wife, newly arrived on the remote Outer Hebridean island to which Lady Rachel has been unwillingly banished by her hypocritical Jacobite-sympathising husband.

With it’s historical setting and heightened language, there are times when Glover’s script feels like a rediscovered gem from much further back than the 1980s (the actual Lady Grange died in 1745), although it’s overarching themes of powerful men silencing female voices and assuming government over what women do with their own bodies could not feel more grimly relevant than it does in this of all weeks. So then, The Straw Chair is as much a howl of outrage as it is a historical drama, and, in Polly Creed’s haunting, impressively accomplished staging, suffused with ethereally lovely Gaelic folk music, it’s an uncommonly eloquent and tragic howl.

Leading the company is Siobhan Redmond as the Lady herself in a glorious humdinger of a performance. She suggests a dancing, glancing bawdy wit as well as a deep vein of loneliness and melancholy; when she talks about the brutal way she has been treated, it’s with an understandable fury and an equally understandable wash of self-pity, especially when she’s in her cups (the real Rachel had a love of the bottle and a penchant for turning up, pre-banishment, drunk and disorderly at her husband’s Royal Mile dwelling). Redmond brilliantly captures every nuance of this compelling, wayward, wronged woman, born out of her time. She’s both victim and aggressor, by turns imperious then desperate, elegant yet wild, and Redmond etches her firmly, searingly on the memory.

Equally fine is Rori Hawthorn as Isabel, the painfully inexperienced wife who undergoes something of a physical, spiritual and moral transformation in the inclement surroundings of this barely habitable island. Intense and watchful, it’s a beautifully realised, emotionally intelligent performance. If Finlay Bain initially reads as a little too young and uncomplicated opposite her, he gains gravitas and conviction as he too undergoes something of a sea change in attitude. Jenny Lee delivers lovely supporting work as Lady Rachel’s garrulous companion.

Alex Marker’s sparse set, in tandem with the atmospheric lighting and sound designs (Jonathan Chan and Anna Short respectively), do wonders in transforming the Finborough’s tiny space into the remote, sea-blasted environment of St Kilda, where there are more puffins than people. The technical elements are aided immeasurably by Glover’s knottily verbose, quasi-poetic text, and the other worldly vocals of Hawthorn who also serves as music director.

It takes the script a while to find it’s dramatic momentum, not really until deep into the second half, but it’s never less than entirely watchable. The final image – of Lady Grange standing defiant, as she reads aloud a letter requesting rescue, that she hopes will get smuggled off an island she herself will never escape – is an unsettling one that lingers long in the mind afterwards. It’s a wonderful thing that Glover, Creed and team are keeping her memory alive in this captivating production. That her story still feels so horribly relevant is less of a cause for celebration.

THE BURNT CITY

Created by Punchdrunk in collaboration with the Company

Directed by Felix Barrett and Maxine Doyle

One Cartridge Place, Woolwich, London – booking until 4 December 2022

https://onecartridgeplace.com/theburntcity/?utm_source=punchdrunk.com&utm_medium=Website&utm_campaign=TheBurntCity

You never forget your first Punchdrunk. Felix Barrett and Maxine Doyle’s epoch-making shows have transformed expectations of what immersive, site-specific theatre can achieve, in terms of scale, production values, all-encompassing design and attention to detail, and audience engagement. To experience one – you can’t just watch a Punchdrunk production, not least because you’ll be on your feet and on the move pretty much the whole time – is to go on a complete sensory journey, one where you decide which story arcs and characters to observe and follow, which of the stunningly realised sets to explore, and to be utterly transported. With The Burnt City, their biggest show to date, they take on Greek myth, although the aesthetic is anachronistic: boho chic meets old school Hollywood glamour meets monochrome starkness: there’s not a floaty tunic in sight, although there is a fair bit of blood and gore.

Part of the fun comes at the end, seeing the disorientation of audience members/participants removing their masks and readjusting to being back in the “real” world, as opposed to the elaborately curated one the Punchdrunk collective have manifested. For the uninitiated: everybody is provided with a rigid, bone-white mask for the duration, and the effect is curiously liberating while at the same time impeding peripheral vision and spatial awareness in ways that some may find discomfiting. Indeed, one of the enduring images I’ve taken away from each Punchdrunk show I’ve been to, is of distant flotillas of these pearlescent white masks moving at speed through the gloom as a host of audience members pursue their chosen character to a different part of the vast space and the next instalment of that particular plot strand.

Linear storytelling isn’t the point in a show that is much an art installation with live performers as it is a piece of theatre. Each gargantuan production tends to be a distillation of it’s source material (their last big London project, 2014’s The Drowned Man, performed across multiple transformed floors of a disused Paddington post office was inspired by Buchner’s Woyzeck, while their ongoing NYC long runner Sleep No More is a riff on Macbeth, turning a dilapidated Manhattan warehouse into an elegant but demonically possessed 1930’s hotel) rather than a straightforward adaptation. As each show is virtually wordless (the Punchdrunk language is an intoxicating combination of atmosphere, music, mime and modern dance), it may be worth doing a bit of research on the background before you set out. I certainly found myself wishing I’d boned up on Greek drama, specifically Aeschylus’s Agamemnon and Euripides’s Hecuba which are the basis for The Burnt City, the first show to be housed in Punchdrunk’s new HQ, a pair of former military arsenal buildings near the Thames.

Certain moments from the stories – Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia to appease the Gods of War, Clytemnestra’s revenge and her dalliance with Aegisthus – are fairly clear but there are times when it’s pretty impossible to work out what’s going on. Plus if you stay in one spot for too long you’ll experience the same sections more than once, as though on a loop. There’s a danger of FOMO setting in – it’s impossible to take the whole thing in on one visit – also a sense of ennui and disbelief that you’ve just spent minutes watching somebody make a cup of tea or a soldier climb a ladder in slo mo, or witnessed a plastic-clad pair cavort with what looks like offal. Whether or not that bothers you depends on the extent to which you surrender to the overall Punchdrunk vision. If it all takes itself very seriously, well, Greek Tragedy was never a barrel of laughs.

Technically, it is astounding: from Stephen Dobbie’s doomy, overwhelming score, drawing on everything from trance to Charleston to a lush Hans Zimmer-like orchestral swell, to David Israel Reynoso’s costume designs and the gorgeous, if occasionally too dim, lighting (by FragmentNine, Ben Donoghoe and Felix Barrett), everything pretty much takes the breath away. Maxine Doyle choreographs and her jagged, adrenalised creations for the humans in distress contrast tellingly with the fluid, other-worldly dynamism of the Fates, plus it’s an authentic thrill to experience dance at such close quarters. The cast are a sinewy, sexy bunch, with presence and athleticism to spare, but they rotate parts so, unless you’re a clued-up regular, you don’t know who you’re watching in which role.

Designers Felix Barrett, Livi Vaughan and Beatrice Minns have divided the vast area into two very specific worlds. Greece is austerely, chillingly magnificent: on a mezzanine, Agamemnon’s Mycenae palace combines brutality and luxury while below a wide open space suggests a battlefield and wasteland, with massive wrought iron structures scattered about like the prows of abandoned ships, and the two levels are connected by an epic staircase, the like of which hasn’t seen so much action since Sunset Boulevard. By contrast, Troy is a funky, grungy, densely packed neon-edged city, full of weird but colourful shops, bars, hotels, and a kind of desperate, apocalyptic energy. There’s even a night club, complete with fully stocked bar, where a glorious Black diva belts out a version of New Order’s ‘Blue Monday’. There is an all-pervasive sense though, in the astonishingly detailed installations and tableaux vivants, of urban lives being abandoned in a panic, and of grim resignation from the humans left behind to face an oncoming storm of the Greek invasion, and it’s hard not to contextualise this with the current events in Ukraine.

If I came away from The Burnt City impressed rather than moved, I am still, a day later, haunted by individual images: Iphigenia’s broken body splayed across the top of a gantry, a pile of bones in front of a makeshift altar, Agamemnon processing up the epic staircase in a never-ending blood red cloak, or the ghostly contortions of the nearly naked company processing oh so slowly back down it at the conclusion before exploding into a whirringly cyclonic, trance-like ritualistic circular dance as snow falls from above. Shatteringly powerful moments sit next to sections that are frustratingly elliptical. The best approach is to let it just wash over you…and wear comfy shoes. Punchdrunk are back, and it’s epic.

RABBIT HOLE

by David Lindsay-Abaire

Directed by Lawrence Carmichael

Union Theatre – until 1 May 2022

https://uniontheatre.savoysystems.co.uk/UnionTheatre.dll/TSelectItems.waSelectItemsPrompt.TcsWebMenuItem_836.TcsWebTab_837.TcsProgramme_442959

Premiered in New York in 2006 with a cast headed by Sex And The City’s Cynthia Nixon and including the estimable Tyne Daly, David Lindsay-Abaire’s robust yet delicate piece, which considers the fall out from a child’s death, is a compelling tragicomedy. Depicting the multiple ways we deal with grief, it has biting humour, wisdom, and, over and above everything else, a love of flawed humanity that elevates a witty, clear-eyed script into something with real resonance.

A movie version starring Nicole Kidman was seen in 2011 followed five years later by the Edward Hall-helmed UK staging at Hampstead Theatre featuring a heartrending Claire Skinner. Good as that iteration was, Lawrence Carmichael’s intelligent, emotionally astute new production feels more vivid and urgent. If it’s more stylised – Ethan Cheek’s striking living room/kitchen set demonstrates that from the outset, with every prop, fitting and furnishing washed a delicate white, the only flashes of colour coming from anything child-related, such as a kid’s book, the baby clothes bereaved mother so lovingly folds away, or the tumble of toys suspended above, at once a torment and a comfort to the grieving parents, and note the awkward angles the furniture’s placed at, as though a metaphor for the fractured relationships – it is also more imaginatively theatrical. This theatricality, though subtle, adds a welcome extra layer of interest to a script that, although beautifully turned and commendably unsentimental, sometimes threatens to read and sound like a low-key screenplay rather than a full-blooded stage property.

Becca and Howie lost their four year old son ten months ago, in a freak driving accident involving teenager Jason, who now reaches out to make tentative contact. Becca’s irresponsible younger sister Izzy has accidentally fallen pregnant, and their own mother Nat is on hand to offer a suitably jaundiced, wine-soaked commentary. Actually, Lindsay-Abaire’s script is richer and more complex than that shorthand description might suggest, featuring a fascinating, borderline antagonistic tension between Howie and his sister-in-law, and a subtle suggestion that Nat sometimes feels socially inferior to her fiscally successful older daughter. Emma Vansittart exquisitely suggests the conflict between maternal affection and garrulous resentment, despite having an innate elegance that seems slightly at odds with the character as written.

The acting throughout is impressive, and even if the American accents sometimes waver, the laser-sharp precision of the emotion seldom does. Julia Papp and Kim Hardy are utterly riveting as a broken couple who still love each other but are in utter turmoil, and there’s sensitive work from Max Pemberton as the kid who unwittingly engineered their tragedy and is desperate to make some sort of reparation. Ty Glaser’s wild card sister Izzy is funny, unsettling and just flat-out terrific.

Lindsay-Abaire is probably best known in this country as the book writer for the musical version of Shrek, although Good People, his coruscating examination of the gulf between urban Chicagoan haves and have-nots was a hit in it’s UK premiere starring Imelda Staunton. In all honesty, Rabbit Hole is the slightly inferior play, less robust and universal, but Carmichael’s engrossing production makes a very strong case for it here and provides a genuinely satisfying night in the theatre. Recommended.

SCANDALTOWN

By Mike Bartlett

Directed by Rachel O’Riordan

Lyric Hammersmith Theatre – until 14 May 2022

https://lyric.co.uk/shows/scandaltown/#performances

Because simultaneously having a starry revival of your early play selling out nightly in the West End (Cock featuring Jonathan Bailey) and a barnstorming neo-Shakespearean Trump fantasia wowing them at the Old Vic (The 47th) apparently isn’t enough, Mike Bartlett now gives us a contemporary riff on Restoration Comedy. And it’s quite delicious. We knew he was brilliant but with this third piece to come to a major London venue in ‘22, he displays yet another facet to his virtuosity while staking a claim to be as prolific as Alan Ayckbourn or Noël Coward at the height of their popularity.

This dazzling modern day Restoration-style romp, set in a heightened but appallingly recognisable London obsessed with image and status, proves, in Rachel O’Riordan’s crackerjack production, to be a triumphant fusion of style AND substance, each of those attributes taking it in turns to seize the upper hand. Restoration Comedy came about when theatres reopened in the 1600s following an eighteen year shut down by the Puritans, so it feels like an appropriate genre for Bartlett to remint as theatres now come back to life after being shut down by the pandemic.

Like Vanbrugh, Wycherley and Etherege before him, Bartlett holds a satirical, sometimes grotesque mirror up to the fashions and fads of the time he lives in. Scandaltown encompasses hedonism, virtue signalling, and the power of social media, but all couched in elegant, erudite language suddenly shot through with moments of almost breathtaking crudity. It’s often blissfully funny and, just occasionally, a little bit troubling.

The plot is as convoluted as one might expect from historical examples of the genre -social climbing, mistaken identity, thwarted love, shameful pasts, it’s all here- but with a refreshing, frequently delightful spin as pounding dance beats sit alongside high comedy. The shallowness of fashionable urban living, the venality of the Tories and the glorification of financial gain over almost everything else are sent up rotten but the laughter oftentimes threatens to turn bitter. Act one explodes like a firecracker and is followed by a slightly anti-climactic second half: the granular writing is still fine but the requirement to neatly tie up all the disparate plot strands means that a certain ennui kicks in. Act one is tight, where act two feels baggy.

If, on press night, some of the younger cast members weren’t fully on top of the heightened style of delivery, that will undoubtedly come as the run progresses, and even now they’re buoyed up by the effervescence of O’Riordan’s staging which so perfectly captures the energy and attitude of the milieu. Good Teeth’s set design isn’t particularly attractive but succeeds in marrying together the painted flats and drops of historical theatre with a bit of modernist flashy, while Kinnetia Isidore’s costumes are imaginative and gorgeous.

As estranged, contrasting siblings Phoebe and Jack Virtue, she high of mind and low of tolerance, he pretty much the other way round, Cecilia Appiah and Matthew Broome are entrancing. Richard Goulding is uproariously funny as Matt Eton (“the Secretary of State for Procurement”), a bisexual Tory turncoat forever looking for cheap thrills to spice up his tediously privileged existence. Thomas Josling does lovely work as an honourable innocent whose first exposure to high society goes in a very different direction from what he’d expected.

Best of all, there’s a thrilling Rachael Stirling as the gloriously monikered Lady Susan Climber, a sexually voracious diva in designer togs, desperate to stay relevant but unable to resist the lure of hard cash or indeed hard young male flesh. Seldom has Stirling looked or sounded quite so uncannily like her mother (the late, great Dame Diana Rigg) as she does here, but this is an authentic star performance all of her own. She’s screamingly camp but never at the ultimate expense of dramatic truth, and helplessly, irresistibly funny. Her merciless sniping at Henry Everett’s comically pitiful manservant (a direct descendant of One Man Two Guvnor’s ancient waiter Alfie, who was in turn a stock commedia dell’arte figure) is a source of utter, nasty joy, and her horrified/jubilant realisation that she has just mistakenly slept with a man decades her junior rather than the sweaty Tory power player she was prepared to put up with, is one of the most marvellous things on any current London stage.

Like it’s characters, Scandaltown is flawed but mainly fabulous. Also like most of them, it’s deeply endearing, often rapturously amusing, and a lot of fun to spend the night with.

SAD

by Victoria Willing

Directed by Marie McCarthy

Omnibus Theatre – until 30 April 2022

https://www.omnibus-clapham.org/sad/

The title of Victoria Willing’d fanciful state-of-the-nation tragicomedy could refer to a number of things: Gloria (Debra Baker) has Seasonal Affective Disorder and has retreated to her loft following the death of her mother, to the bewilderment of her husband Graham (Kevin N Golding), her friend Magda (Isabella Urbanowicz) is desperately lonely and is contemplating moving back to Eastern Europe following a burglary, the world at large is in a hell of a mess….Happy this play and these characters ain’t.

Willing’s script is actually sharply funny at times, finding a sort of gallows humour in the miseries and tediousness of day-to-day life, and it’s certainly never dull. For a ninety minute, interval-free piece, it is however over-stuffed with ideas and suffers from an uncertainty of tone that proves frustrating. Starting out as a black comedy, it then appears to fire off in umpteen different directions -kitchen sink drama, memory play, bedroom farce. melodramatic potboiler, and ultimately a touch of apocalyptic surrealism- but without ever fully committing to any of them.

Ideas are floated then almost immediately abandoned…nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the character of Daniel, the neighbour Gloria has casual sex with: an upwardly mobile housing officer with a predatory streak, strained family relationships and a slightly bizarre fixation on material things, one minute he is propositioning Magda when she goes to see him in connection with moving house following the break-in, and the next he is coldly dismissing her. Later he goes from conciliatory to aggressive with Graham in the blink of an eye. There is no character arc here, just a series of contrasting attitudes that barely make sense when patched together. It says much for the skill of Lucas Hare in the role that he makes this inconsistent character highly watchable, and he fully commits to the bewildering array of moods and tones Willing has laid upon him.

Baker and Golding do strong, if overly shouty, work as the miserable central couple, although their constant slanging matches as the play wears on become increasingly tedious, illuminating little about the characters and their issues, but that is an issue with the writing rather than the actors. Urbanowicz really shines as caustic, watchful Magda, the kind of woman you wouldn’t want to be on the wrong side of, but a kind and staunch friend with a certain wicked deadpan humour.

Alys Whitehead’s cluttered attic set, complete with sloping roof and skylight is a thing of ramshackle wonder and it’s beautifully lit by Alex Thomas. Marie McCarthy’s direction can’t rein in the contradictions of the text but does a creditable job of making most of the moments work in and of themselves. Ultimately though, this feels less like a coherent play and more a series of thematic non sequiturs. The idea of hibernating away from the horrors of modern living is an interesting, valid one, perhaps more so now than ever, but more clarity of vision, tone and intention would improve this piece immeasurably.

BRAM STOKER’s DRACULA

Adapted and performed by James Gaddas

Directed by Pip Minnithorpe

Richmond Theatre – seen on 27 March 2022 – also touring

https://www.draculatheplay.com/

There have been numerous screen and stage versions of the Dracula legend over the decades, including a couple of musicals ranging from the misconceived to the riotously camp, but James Gaddas’s one man play proves an original, and splendidly theatrical, take. Gaddas mines the well known tale of the blood-sucking, permanently undead Count for all it’s gothic horror but parallels it effectively with a modern sort-of detective story.

Initially it looks as though we’re going to be in for a quietly engrossing lecture as Gaddas bounds on to introduce himself, taking up position behind a lectern, all spritely energy, actorly bonhomie and gently self-deprecating humour. He makes reference to his extensive popular TV work and describes being approached to front a documentary examining the discovery of a journal by Dracula author Bram Stoker that suggests that the vampiric saga is not at all a work of fiction and was only presented as such because the reality would have been too unsettling for general consumption.

Gaddas’s own text neatly mixes the portentous, heightened language of Stoker with an engaging, matter-of-fact reportage of his visit to the Count’s Romanian castle with a research team. The switching between the two stories could be a little better delineated perhaps. The modern strand of the storytelling takes an unsettling turn as members of this team variously meet grisly ends, suggesting that there are much darker forces at play. This reaches it’s apotheosis in a spinetingling finale, the details of which I’m not going to reveal here, that marries audience complicity, some essential plot points from pretty much every Dracula adaptation, and the same sort of inventive theatricality that has kept a show like The Woman In Black running in the West End for decades. Your rational mind will tell you that this is (probably) just a preposterous tall tale, but for these brief, delicious moments, it’s hard not to feel a lurch of pure terror.

A gifted character actor and raconteur, Gaddas is a personable stage presence, his relatability a major factor in drawing the audience in. He proves impressively adept at going from chummy affability to deep distress to almost unimaginable malevolence and back again, and Pip Minnithorpe’s enjoyable, well paced production repeatedly blurs the line between real life and fanciful fiction. Actor-author and director are aided immeasurably by an uneasy, occasionally blood curdling soundscape and film score-like music courtesy of Jeremy Swift. Matthew Karmios’s lighting and John Bulleid’s illusions are simple but very effective.

All in all, this is a mostly cracking piece of storytelling and a fine addition to the often neglected genre of theatrical horror. Nice, nasty fun.

THE HUMAN VOICE

by Jean Cocteau

Adapted and directed by Ivo van Hove

Harold Pinter Theatre – until 9 April

https://thehumanvoiceplay.co.uk/

This is one tough sit.

I wonder if this production was conceived during the first lockdown. A Jean Cocteau monologue for a woman unravelling on the phone while her lover leaves her might have felt like a good idea at a time when solo shows seemed the only way forward for live theatre. Plus we were so grateful to see anything that wasn’t on a screen, let alone the work of an internationally acclaimed director and an award-winning leading actress, that the fact that the central protagonist is a privileged, humourless, self-indulgent whiner maybe didn’t seem like so much of an issue. Unfortunately, in 2022, this obscure confection looks a bit odd in an increasingly diverse theatre landscape where people have long started to talk to each other again, and we prefer our live entertainment to either provide pure escapism or connect us to a more profound understanding of the world at large. This does neither. It also whiffs unappealingly of misogyny (she can’t be with the man she wants and has so little agency that she bombards him with phone calls, then contemplates suicide).

Ruth Wilson and director Ivo van Hove worked together on the National Theatre’s 2016 Hedda Gabler so presumably have some sort of artistic simpatico plus, given their worldwide success and acclaim, have professional commitments booked up for years in advance. Therefore it’s undoubtedly something of a scheduling triumph that they are available to finally give us this three week West End season. Whether or not it’s worth their, or our, time and effort is entirely another matter. Seventy minutes has seldom passed so interminably: it feels more like three hours.

Cocteau’s text is riddled with ambiguities, at times it seems possible that the departing lover on the other end of the phone might be a figment of the woman’s imagination, and the conflicting voices that periodically come through on crossed lines are all in her head. There is little elucidation, or humour. Longtime van Hove collaborator Jan Versweyveld’s chilly perspex box set keeps us at a further remove (Wilson is mostly viewed from the knees up behind a see-through screen, when she isn’t crawling about on the floor pretending to be a dog, or, in one particularly interminable section, sprawled motionless against a wall like a broken doll, facing away from us for the entire duration of a song.)

As a study in masochistic boredom and isolated despair, the piece carries a certain conviction and at least the leading lady here manages to avoid having unidentified liquid substances dripped on her (a van Hove motif that was thrillingly effective in his mould-breaking A View From The Bridge at the Young Vic but became eye-rollingly familiar thereafter). Wilson is technically proficient throughout but cannot disguise the dreary one-notedness of what she’s required to do, her performance only catching fire in a couple of welcome moments of white hot fury.

The lighting and sound elements are impressive (there is an almost constant thrum of popular music, from Radiohead to Beyoncé, as though to exacerbate the heroine’s loneliness and misery) but the central conceit of crossed telephone lines doesn’t really work in this production’s ultra-modern milieu. The timing feels out in other ways as well: it would be hard to elicit much sympathy for this self-absorbed central character at the best of times, but at this particular point in human history, the whole experience proves barely tolerable.

This is one for Wilson fans, van Hove connoisseurs and Cocteau completists (surely there are some?) only. I came away mostly thinking, bloody hell no wonder he dumped her. The emperor’s new clothes are looking distinctly threadbare.

Written by Chris Burgess

Musical arrangements by Andy Collyer

Directed and choreographed by Cressida Carré

Upstairs At The Gatehouse – until 17 April 2022

https://upstairsatthegatehouse.ticketsolve.com/shows/1173617187/events/428417798

Any study of the history of popular music would be a very slim tome indeed without the contribution of Jewish songwriters, and that’s doubly true when it comes to considering the greatest showbusiness hits. This power-packed musical revue revels in some of Hollywood’s most beloved melodies and lyrics, while providing a potted history of the silver screen. It’s a joyful couple of hours but proves surprisingly hard-hitting as it charts the American journey west of European immigrants and the anti-Semitism they faced, then the sometimes shamefully muted response to said prejudice from within their own ranks once the millions had been made.

Chris Burgess’s nicely turned script splits the narrative between a quartet of performers and periodically segues into conventional ‘book scenes’ which reframe familiar numbers in the context of the story being told. A particularly strong example of this is the employment of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ‘Carefully Taught’ from South Pacific to illustrate the conflict between two movie moguls -one Jewish, one Gentile- over bringing a quintessentially Jewish story to the screen (unexpectedly, it is the former who is resistant).

If the opening section, where Miss Saigon’s ‘The American Dream’ gives way to Charles Strouse and Stephen Schwartz’s bouncily cynical ‘Greenhorns’ from Rags, is a bit of a headscratcher since neither musical has yet had a movie iteration, it is still winningly performed and arranged. From Sondheim to Berlin, Kander and Ebb to George M. Cohan, and Marvin Hamlisch to Mel Brooks, the panoply of Jewish talent represented here fair takes the breath away. Many of the songs are necessarily presented in truncated form, which can get a little frustrating, but at least ensures that Cressida Carré’s richly enjoyable production never outstays it’s welcome.

Closing the first half with Cabaret’s ‘Tomorrow Belongs To Me’ is a direct lift from the musical currently tearing the roof off the Playhouse in the West End nightly; if not exactly used here with any great originality, it works for the story, and is still a powerful way to send audiences out into the interval of a show that turns out to be less of a celebration and more of a critique than one might have been expecting.

At other times, the show offers some delightful abbreviated versions of film classics, including a deliciously funny affectionate parody of Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer. The Fiddler On The Roof section is another highlight – ‘Tradition’ thrills the blood, as it should, and Andy Collyer’s terrific arrangements make the small but mighty cast and band sound like the entire village of Anatevka are right there on the Gatehouse stage. Carré’s direction and choreography strikes a perfect balance between jazz hands exuberance and a still, centred gravitas. It’s really superb work.

None of this would land as well as it does without a stellar company, and casting director Jane Deitch has sourced a quartet of world class talents. In a remarkably assured professional debut, Mackenzie Mellen, resembling a young Liza Minnelli, brings gamine charm, a dancers physicality and a gorgeous, rangy voice. Opposite her, Jack Reitman provides formidable versatility, matinee idol looks and more terrific vocals.

Howard Samuels is a dream at working an audience: wildly funny but able to turn the mood on a dime, his glorious voice like cream one moment, and gravel the next. West End veteran Sue Kelvin is possibly the nearest thing to Merman that this country has ever produced: a thrilling performer with heart, unerring comic instincts and a magnificent Broadway belt, it’s almost impossible to take your eyes off her.

Amir Shoenfeld’s multi-tasking four piece band is exquisite and frequently sounds like there are many more pieces: the whole show is a feast for the ears.

All in all, this is a deeply lovable slice of music theatre. More than a nostalgia trip, and more fun than a history lesson, it is a testimony to resilience, chutzpah and sheer golden talent. Enthusiastically recommended.

BACON

by Sophie Swithinbank

Directed by Matthew Iliffe

Finborough Theatre – until 26 March 2022

https://finboroughtheatre.co.uk/production/bacon/

It may only be February, but the bar for fringe theatre sensation of 2022 has already been set astonishingly high by this firecracker of a show.

Not since the original 1993 production of Jonathan Harvey’s Beautiful Thing at the Bush (which featured a pre-stardom Jonny Lee Miller) have I seen a new play and young actors that come off with the sheer swagger and brilliance of Sophie Swithinbank’s two hander and the performances of Corey Montague-Sholay and William Robinson. This is grittier but has the same bracing charge of fresh, dynamic talent.

Montague-Sholay and Robinson play Mark and Darren, a pair of London teenagers from markedly different backgrounds – the former is decidedly middle class while the latter comes from a family whose hard scrabble lifestyle exists at the boundaries of criminality and brutality – who form, through necessity, an unexpected alliance at school. If Swithinbank’s script has a flaw it’s that perhaps one doesn’t immediately believe that these profoundly contrasting young men would ever become friends. Once you’ve bought it into it though (and you will, largely because of the extraordinary performances) strap in for the ride. And what a ride it is.

Swithinbank’s writing is muscular, street-smart, hilarious, unflinching as she refracts toxic masculinity, peer pressure, social inequality, and pent-up, unarticulated sexuality through the intense, breathless prism of youth. There is a forensic precision to her observations, but also great warmth, humanity and heartbreak. The young men play out contrasting mini-monologues simultaneously but the effect is galvanising rather than confusing.

Matthew Iliffe’s laser-sharp production helps immeasurably with this, potently demonstrating the power of simplicity and the kinetic charge of excitement that happens when rigorous  discipline and a wondrous freedom of expression are allowed to play together. There are moments here that take the breath away with their sheer invention and emotional honesty. Natalie Johnson’s exquisitely spare set (a giant seesaw sits and swings centre-stage, playful but threatening, symbolising childhood, but also shifts in power), is complimented by sparse but vivid lighting and sound contributions from Jess Tucker Boyd and Mwen respectively.

I’m not sure there are enough superlatives to shower upon actors Corey Montague-Sholay and William Robinson, except to say that it feels like watching a pair of talents poised on the brink of major stardom. Montague-Sholay invests Mark with an innate niceness and gentle intelligence that makes one completely understand why the traumatised, lonely Darren would see him as a beacon of hope. He deftly, affectingly charts the journey from comparatively untroubled teenager to soulful, damaged young adult. It’s acting of the highest order.

In the slightly showier role of allegedly bad boy Darren, careering so fast down the path to self destruction that he barely has time to slam on the brakes, William Robinson is absolutely astounding. With a face like a bruised cherub, Robinson goes from snarling confrontation to edgy sweetness to aching sadness and back again with a remarkably assured physical and vocal technique. It’s a haunting, thrilling, multi-faceted performance.

If there’s any justice, this devastating production will completely sell out, and ultimately achieve a much longer life. Don’t hang about to get tickets: you’ll have an extraordinary time in the theatre plus, in a few short years, you’ll be able to say that you experienced these world class talents at close quarters and before they became mega-famous. Tender yet in yer face, raw yet accomplished, it’s unmissable. This Bacon is salty but irresistibly tasty.

HENRY V

by William Shakespeare

Directed by Max Webster

Donmar Warehouse – until 9 April 2022

https://www.donmarwarehouse.com/

One of the many fascinating things about Shakespeare’s history play is the ambiguity of the central figure. As a principal character Henry is infinitely malleable, and depending on your point of view, can be seen as hero or villain. This thrilling Donmar revival comes at a particularly interesting time in global history, where an unchecked leader invading a neighbouring country on which he has no authentic claim (in this instance, Henry V and his army going into France) is likely to provoke a particularly vehement reaction.

By casting Kit Harington, one of those rare actors who, like James McAvoy, combines being drop dead gorgeous with an innate everyman likability yet tempered with a certain wildness, Max Webster’s visceral, modern dress, multimedia production muddies the waters to intriguing effect. This is a Henry V driven by the cult of personality: Harington’s pale, chiselled face is projected huge on the back wall of Fly Davis’s striking, monolithic set as Henry’s armies lay waste to France (movement director Benoit Swan Pouffer achieves a kind of balletic brutality).

Harington’s Henry is equally convincing coldly dismissing Falstaff (superb Steven Meo, who also doubles as a highly effective Llewelyn, formerly Fluellen in more traditional readings of the text) as he is affably chatting incognito to his dormant troops in battle camps. This King is a thrilling, populist rabble rouser (the “once more unto the breach” call to battle is delivered from a high gantry with simultaneous video coverage while the troops chomp at the bit below) who suddenly turns utterly repellent as he casually orders the slaughter of the French prisoners. Webster’s slick but dangerous staging is unflinching in it’s depiction of the atrocities of conflict (the first act ends with a particularly distressing hanging scene, carried out beneath the exact same gantry from which Henry galvanised the troops) and is perhaps the most overtly ‘anti-war’ take on any of Shakespeare’s History plays that I have ever seen. It may prove too confrontational for some people, but it is damn fine theatre.

Harington’s is a memorable, really satisfying take on the title role: he has the rare gift of making the Shakespearean language sound relatable and conversational, while still respecting it’s cadences and idiosyncrasies, and successfully binds numerous facets of this sometimes elusive character into one dynamic, charismatic whole.

The majority of the supporting cast are at a similar level of brilliance. The women in the cast are terrific, often taking on roles usually played by men in such a strongly male driven text, and it’s so superbly done that it becomes a potent testimony to gender-blind casting. I was particularly taken with Kate Duchêne’s bossy, bolshy French Constable and Melissa Johns, funny and poignant as the soldier who unwittingly mouths off about the King to Henry in disguise and is then forced to eat their words. Claire-Louise Cordwell does fine, vivid work in a couple of roles but especially as a gender-swapped Bardolph, reconceived here as a drug-dealing squeeze to Prince Hal. Millicent Wong is a haunting, insistent presence as the Chorus.

All of the sections set in the court of France are performed in French, which initially feels a bit gimmicky but pays dividends in the courtship scene between Henry and Princess Katherine (a glorious Anoushka Lucas, entrancing and fiercely intelligent). Olivier Huband is a magnificently disaffected Dauphin, and Jude Akuwudike’s King has real emotional heft and dignity.

The employment of a quartet of classical singers wandering like phantoms through the action, their beautiful, calming voices in stark juxtaposition with the brutality unfolding is extremely powerful. Lee Curran’s lighting transforms the space from acidic urban exteriors to coolly elegant interiors to the ghostly horrors of the battlefield with such dexterity that it’s almost an extra character in the play. Andrzej Goulding’s projections are used with intelligence and economy.

Anybody who reckons Shakespeare is boring and irrelevant (and yes there are still some people who think that!) should see this urgent, sometimes upsetting, consistently enthralling take: if you can possibly get a return don’t hesitate. It further consolidates Max Webster’s reputation as one of the most interesting directors of his generation and makes one impatient to see what Shakespeare lead Kit Harington will take on next. An unsettling triumph.