ajhlovestheatre

PIPPIN

Music and Lyrics by Stephen Schwartz

Book by Roger O. Hirson

Directed by Steven Dexter

Charing Cross Theatre – until 14 August

https://charingcrosstheatre.co.uk/theatre/pippin

Thanks to Broadway master showman Bob Fosse who directed and choreographed the legendary original production, Pippin was perceived for decades as a deathly commedia dell’arte carnival: a troupe of sinister but sexy players bring to anachronistic life the mythical story of Pépin, the wayward, questioning son of medieval emperor Charlemagne amidst flamboyant production numbers, lyrical ballads, clever patter songs and culminating in a bittersweet, unsettling finale.

Although there have been other takes on it, none of them really stuck until Diane (Waitress, Jagged Little Pill) Paulus’s rapturous 2013 New York revisal which turned the whole thing into a spectacular, slightly alarming circus. For this version, based on a smaller scale outdoor mid-pandemic mounting from last year, director Steven Dexter has gone right back to the show’s 1967 hippie roots (before Fosse got his splayed, angular hands on it) and the result is a couple of hours of whimsy and delight, albeit still with a certain amount of kick, that may surprise people who think they have a handle on Stephen Schwartz and Roger O. Hirson’s endlessly malleable show.

Wandering into Charing Cross Theatre’s traverse auditorium one could be forgiven for thinking we were about to be treated to an immersive revival of Hair when confronted with David Shields’s attractively chaotic set, and it’s fug of incense, rainbow tie-dyed sheets, hanging dream-catchers and abundance of dangling fairy lights. It’s like being at an outdoor festival during the Summer Of Love, yet ironically feels way more airy and atmospheric than when the earlier incarnation of this staging actually WAS outdoors, admittedly having to compete against the roaring traffic and street sounds of Vauxhall. There’s also real magic derived from Aaron J Dootson’s transformative lighting design.

Stephen Schwartz is the composer and lyricist of Wicked but Pippin is a more exciting and consistently melodic score. From the sparkle of the enchanting opening number ‘Magic To Do’ which introduces the players and the principal themes (“illusion, fantasy to study / battles, barbarous and bloody / romance, sex presented pastorally”) through an appetising, lilting mix of numbers esoteric and poppy (Pippin’s melodic cri de cœur ‘Corner Of The Sky’ was even a Jackson 5 hit in the 70s), this score is a gem. The lyrics have wit and, at times, surprising depth.

If Hirson’s book is less clear -who are these players that alternately cajole, torment or seduce the emotionally and spiritually lost hero? does Pippin really assassinate his warmongering father or is that just in his unsound mind?- it has heart and genuinely works as a sort of portentous but affable Flower Power romp.

Ryan Anderson makes a wondrously athletic Pippin, and is likeable enough that the characters’s self-absorption isn’t a turn-off, and he negotiates the rangy demands of Schwartz’s wonderful but technically tricky songs with considerable panache. The Leading Player is the killer role though (in more ways than one) and has been performed by men and women. Here Ian Carlyle brings a breezy charm that curdles into something more troubling as the evening progresses. He moves like compressed liquid and sings up a storm, although the darker elements of the role could do with being amped up several notches: this Leading Player ends up feeling like a bully, but to really drive the piece he should be truly terrifying.

The three women in the company are flat-out stunning: Natalie McQueen brings a quirky manic energy but innate goodness to Catherine, the young widow Pippin takes up with, and makes something genuinely moving out of her exquisitely sung closing solo. Gabrielle Lewis-Dodson is a knockout as the hero’s ambitious, morally bankrupt step-mother, all flash, sass but dead-eyed stare. Genevieve Nicole, a thrilling, peerless Leading Player in Jonathan O’Boyle’s acclaimed Hope Mill and Southwark Playhouse version a few years back, comes close to stopping this show as Pippin’s rapacious-for-life grandmother, with the joyous but regret-tinged singalong number ‘No Time At All’. This role, like most of the others in the show, is open to a number of interpretations, but here Nicole conceives her as a sort of Park Avenue Grande Dame transplanted to rural hippiedom and living her best life, and the result is breathtakingly funny.

As Pippin’s father, step-brother and step-son respectively, Dan Krikler, Alex James-Hatton and Jaydon Vijn may have less to work with but prove terrific triple threats. Nick Winston’s choreography, unusually for a production of Pippin, feels more reminiscent of the long-limbed elegance of Gillian Lynne’s jazz-ballet fusions than Fosse’s more jagged work, but it’s consistently exhilarating.

The juxtaposition of showbiz razzle dazzle with existential despair that makes Pippin such a unique and compelling addition to the musical theatre canon is given shorter shrift than in other version I’ve seen but maybe after the sixteen months we’ve all had, this sunnier, sweeter interpretation is all we can cope with right now. It’s a shame also that the transformation at the end (no spoilers, go see it) isn’t more extreme. Still, even if it’s not as emotionally satisfying as it could be, this Pippin is still cracking entertainment.

BE MORE CHILL

Music and lyrics by Joe Iconis

Book by Joe Tracz

Based on the novel by Ned Vizzini

Directed by Stephen Brackett

Shaftesbury Theatre – until 5 September

https://www.bemorechillmusical.com/?gclid=CjwKCAjw_o-HBhAsEiwANqYhp34Cj6fcTNItFoRGd86XPch4DCOIG3YT57GP3jxSuKdbWQFyzrAnKBoC440QAvD_BwE

Young Adult fiction is a beloved and lucrative literary genre. If there were an acknowledged theatrical equivalent – and if such a thing existed, it would have to include such crowd pleasers as Heathers, Loserville, Bare: A Rock Opera even possibly Six– then surely Be More Chill would be It’s apotheosis. Inspired by the late Ned Vizzini’s cleverly wrought maelstrom of teen angst and sci-fi, this cultish musical was something of a phenomenon during it’s initial off-Broadway runs where tickets were rarer than hens teeth, but then saw it’s reputation stall somewhat when it transferred unsuccessfully to the main stem, possibly as a result of the core late teen audience being unwilling, or unable, to pay Broadway prices.

The London production is a replica of the NYC original and had it’s season at The Other Palace cut short by the pandemic. Now it’s back for a summer run at the Shaftesbury where it fits snugly, striking exactly the right balance between anarchy and sincerity. More staid audience members may initially find themselves a bit bewildered by the neon-etched, hyper-kinetic blast of colour and snark that characterises this quirky slice of Americana, but look closer and Be More Chill is a surprisingly well made musical.

Joe Iconis’s tuneful, eclectic score, witty and bombastic, kicks off with a genuinely accomplished opening number, introducing hero, teen misfit Jeremy (played with charm but commendable lack of cuteness by Scott Folan), his equally off-beat best mate (Blake Patrick Anderson, delightfully nerdy), his widowed Dad, in too much despair to ever get fully dressed (lovely work by Christopher Fry), plus the whole milieu of small town American High School, and the various eccentrics who inhabit it. The music may be pop, but the storytelling is classic Broadway musical comedy. Setting the tone so vividly makes it easier to swallow the tall tale that follows in Joe Tracz’s peppy book: Jeremy discovers a tiny pill-sized computer called the Squip that, when ingested, makes it’s owner invincible. However, like Little Shop of Horror’s Audrey Two but without the viridity and indeed the eating of people, the Squip turns out to be hell bent on world domination.

Along the way, Iconis’s songs throw up some real gems, including a rollicking anthem ‘The Pitiful Children’ for the Squip reminiscent of the sinister joy of Glam Rock, a roof raising cellphone gossip number that is a modern homage to Bye Bye Birdie’s classic ‘Telephone Hour’ number, and a bona fide showstopper in ‘Michael In The Bathroom’, a glorious lament for socially anxious teens everywhere, delivered flawlessly by Anderson. Perhaps most surprising is the lyrical, haunting, almost Country & Western inflected finale ‘Voices In My Head’ which acquires authentic poignancy when one realises it is partly inspired by the fate of the original novel’s author Joe Vizzini, who took his own life in 2013.

The casting is terrific: Stewart Clarke makes a magnificent Squip, both magnetic and chilling, with a stunning voice and an irresistible malevolent energy, never more so than when leading the company in Chase Brock’s dynamic, angular choreography, the detached smirk permanently etched across his handsome face. Melody Chance hilariously imbues school drama queen Christine with an almost alarming intensity tempered with real sweetness and Millie O’Connell is deliciously funny as a top Mean Girl type. As her sidekicks, Renée Lamb and Eloise Davies even impressively find some vulnerability and depth under all the belting and attitude.

Performed entirely in Beowulf Borritt’s giant computer set, Stephen Brackett’s production is deceptively clever: for all the preposterousness and chaos, it is swift and clear, making intelligent use of Alex Basco Koch’s exhilarating old-school computerised images and Bobby Frederick Tilley’s agreeably outlandish costumes, while Brock’s dances feel fresh and original. Audibility can sometimes be an issue in rock and pop musicals but here Ryan Rumery’s sound design hits the theatrical sweet spot whereby the music is sufficiently loud as to to be truly rousing, but we catch every lyric.

Despite being very enjoyable, the frequently derivative script isn’t really top drawer – at it’s funniest it’s a bit like watching Avenue Q without the puppets – but the treatment of it most certainly is. Plus the second act, which contains the lions share of good songs, is rather stronger than the first, perhaps because this is where the show deviates most significantly from it’s source material and allows the musical to become it’s own beast. Ultimately though, it feels like a summer hit.

STAIRCASE

by Charles Dyer

directed by Tricia Thorns for Two’s Company

Southwark Playhouse – until 17 July

https://www.southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/show-whats-on/staircase/

If you haven’t done your research, you might think that “gay plays” generally fall into two camps (no pun intended): either heartwarming, spiky but ultimately feel-good tales like Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song, Jonathan Harvey’s Beautiful Thing and Robert Madge’s glorious, current My Son’s A Queer But What Can You Do, or hard-hitting recent-history AIDS dramas like the epics Angels In America and The Inheritance, and Larry Kramer’s searing The Normal Heart, soon to be revived at the National. All the more reason then to applaud this revival of Charles Dyer’s mid-‘60s piece first seen at the RSC, which presents something quite different.

Part tragicomedy, part oddball thriller, and with a touch of melodrama, Staircase feels like something a Queer Harold Pinter might have come up with. Written and set before the decriminalisation of homosexuality in the UK, it’s about a gay couple who run a barber shop and one of whom is awaiting criminal proceedings having been caught in drag sitting on another man’s knee. Or is it? With tantalising ambiguity, Dyer suggests that all may not be as it seems with these two men, which would therefore mean that one of them -the playwright’s namesake, and played with preening panache by John Sackville- is even more of a troubled narcissist than we already imagine. It’s probably not fair to say any more than that for fear of spoilers for potential ticket buyers.

And buy a ticket you should as this is a genuine rediscovery. While the attitude that gay men are fundamentally compromised loners is (mercifully) an antiquated one, it is part of gay history, and Dyer expresses it with cracking, expressive, sometimes brutal dialogue, shot through with flashes of campy humour used as armour rather than real mirth. The sense of “otherness” and being a constant outsider that these men talk about rings very true, even as it unwittingly points up how far we’ve come. There’s also an eerie prescience when they talk about gay people having children of their own.

Tricia Thorns’s meticulous production also features a poignant, funny, strangely haunting performance from the always-superb Paul Rider as Harry, the gentle but acerbic proprietor of the tonsorial parlour (exquisitely realised in Alex Marker’s detailed, authentic set, complete with checkerboard floor, black and white headshots of bygone film stars, and hair-cuttings underfoot).

If not quite a lost classic, Staircase emerges, more than 55 years after it’s premiere, as a genuinely engaging, troubling period piece. Not sure when we’ll see it again, or indeed done as well as this, so therefore I would say hasten along.

SEVEN METHODS OF KILLING KYLIE JENNER

by Jasmine Lee-Jones

directed by Milli Bhatia

Royal Court Theatre – until 27July

https://royalcourttheatre.com/whats-on/sevenmethods/

Channelling your white hot rage into a work of art is an incredibly powerful act, and it feels like that is exactly what Jasmine Lee-Jones has done in this ambitious, dynamic piece. Ostensibly, it’s the story of a somewhat complicated female friendship: mixed race, gay Kara has little respect for Black, straight Cleo’s romantic choices, and still holds a degree of resentment over Cleo’s misjudged handling of Kara’s coming out. Set against the overwhelming maelstrom of social media, it also covers gender identity, the dehumanisation online relationships can result in, and the fetishism of Black bodies, both in the present day and throughout history.

It’s A LOT: an abrasive, dazzlingly original text peppered with modern cultural references, home truths and uncomfortable historical information. It’s not hard to see why this was such a sensation when it premiered at the smaller Upstairs theatre in 2019 and has now been brought back for a Main House run, where it still packs a hell of a punch.

It’s also often extremely funny. Lee-Jones has created salty, splendid dialogue for these two women, the kind of things that only people who truly know each other can say, often shocking, frequently wounding and sometimes suffused with the most wonderful affection. She also gets great comic mileage out of juxtaposing Cleo’s politically astute, incendiary ranting with sudden moments of relatable deflation: one moment she’s, with good reason, berating men, the next she’s baldly announcing “I’m craving dick”.

Ingeniously, Lee-Jones -and Leanne Henlon, the superb actress playing Cleo- creates a character who feels fully credible expressing both of those things…she always seems like a real person, not just a mouthpiece. At one point Kara (Tia Bannon, beautifully realising the combination of sweetness and street-tough in this tremendously likeable young woman) says to Cleo “just speak English….not dissertation” and the wonderful thing about this script is that it has it both ways: yes Cleo does do that, but you buy every moment of it.

You also buy every moment of Cleo’s online cataloguing the seven ways she envisions murdering Kylie Jenner, and it’s pretty unpleasant ….until a powerful speech near the conclusion where it becomes clear that what she’s describing is no worse than the fate of South African abductee Sarah Baartman, paraded around Europe in the late 18th Century as some sort of human curiosity before dying mysteriously at the age of twenty six.

There are also tender moments, gently handled, and there is something very moving hearing an audience of predominantly Black women responding audibly to Cleo’s speech about her Grandmother rubbing her nose not, as she initially thought, out of affection but in a vain attempt to make it smaller so that young Cleo would have an easier time of it if she could only conform to more conventional, i.e. white, perceptions of physical beauty.

Milli Bhatia’s production, played out under an immense stringed canopy by Rajha Shakiry like an art-installation representing all the strands of the internet but also the mental and physical bondage of Black women down the centuries as it bears down and closes in on Cleo when the play gathers pace, comes at us with a ferocious energy. I wish there was more clarity in the cacophonous sections where innumerable online voices crowd in to comment, mock, abuse or approbate, and the muddied, deafening sound design doesn’t help. The production, exciting as it is, doesn’t fully represent the published script, much of which is ‘written’ as a collage of gifs, memes and internet slang. Maybe a screen would help? I admired the piece as I was watching it but I understood it better reading it on the tube on the way home.

Jasmine Lee-Jones is a hell of a writer though, and seven methods of killing kylie jenner is a work of rare originality and intellect.

BACH & SONS

by Nina Raine

directed by Nicholas Hytner

Bridge Theatre – until 11 September

https://bridgetheatre.co.uk/whats-on/bach-and-sons/

Music is a potent life force, a non-verbal language capable of cutting right to the heart of an emotion or memory. Nina Raine’s richly engrossing new play also suggests that music can be weaponised, especially by those in thrall to, or in control of, its transcendent power while blithely unaware of the effect of their own behaviour on apparently lesser mortals, even when those mortals are in fact their closest family members.

What makes Simon Russell Beale’s blunt-headed, plain-speaking Johann Sebastian Bach such compelling company, beyond the unquestionable magnetism of the actor himself of course, is the disconnect between the man’s delicately beautiful creations (there is a lot of music in this production, it’s almost like an extra character) and the casual, if frequently oblivious, cruelties meted out to his nearest and dearest, and the brutal (but hilarious) way he dismisses musical artists he deems inferior. It’s a superb portrayal, often fascinatingly restrained where a lesser actor might be tempted to go for broke, and the physical deterioration depicted as Bach ages is meticulously done.

The play centres on Bach’s contrasting relationships with his two elder sons, both of whom are also musically gifted. First there’s Samuel Blenkin’s Carl, eager to please, slight and neurotic. Carl’s a grafter, desperate to earn his father’s approval yet not possessing the divine spark of artistic inspiration that would ignite the bonfire of paternal approbation. Then there’s the favoured son, Douggie McMeekin’s charming wastrel Wilhelm, a sentimental man-boy with all the talent but none of the drive, happy to drink his life and talent away, while being constantly financially bailed out by Daddy. It’s an interesting dynamic, made more complex by the fact that the two brothers clearly adore each other.

Throw into the mix a long suffering but adored wife (Pandora Colin, magnificent), an illicit affair with a beloved soprano (a luminous Racheal Ofori) who becomes the next wife, and an all-seeing, emotionally stunted sister-in-law, hauntingly rendered by Ruth Lass, who carries an endless torch for the composer, and you have something as compulsive as an upmarket soap opera, but in beautiful period frocks.

Raine’s text gleefully mixes anachronistic language with the period setting, and in Pradesh Rana’s quirky, hilarious Frederick The Great, flamboyantly sardonic but irreparably damaged by the unfeelingness with which his forbidden (and only true) love was cut adrift by his late father, throws up one genuinely unexpected and fascinating character.

The production values in Nicholas Hytner’s immaculate, if slightly long-winded, staging are ravishing: elegant set by Vicki Mortimer, costumes by Khadija Raza and wonderfully moody lighting by Jon Clark. Indeed, this is very much the sort of thing one would have expected to see on one of the main stages at the National during Hytner’s tenure as artistic director there. It’s Rolls Royce theatre although it may be lacking in edge for some people. It actually made me go home and listen to Bach. I wasn’t expecting that!

by Yasmin Joseph

Directed by Rebekah Murrell as part of the Re:Emerge season

Harold Pinter Theatre – until 3 July

https://sfp-reemergeseason.com/the-plays/jouvert/jouvert-ticket-calendar/#/

Part celebration, part social document, part history lesson, total triumph, Yasmin Joseph’s gorgeous piece, in Rebekah Murrell’s rambunctious production, tears up the rule book for playwriting in much the same way that Sonia Friedman’s Re:Emerge season -of which this is the second glorious offering- changes up the rules on producing new writing in the West End. Exciting new voices given handsome productions in major playhouses…. this probably wouldn’t have happened pre-pandemic, but what a wonderful thing it is.

And what a wonderful thing J’Ouvert is: a full-throated, big-hearted, potty-mouthed bellow of joy that turns into a scream of pain before changing back again. We need more Black voices telling Black stories on major stages, and when the result is as uplifting and accomplished as this, it’s an enriching jolt of fresh blood and excitement to the art form.

Set during the Notting Hill Carnival of 2017, in the wake of the Grenfell Tower disaster, it features a live DJ (Zuyane Russell, also a tartly funny actress), an irresistible array of characters (there are only three other actresses but it feels like there are way more), a veritable flotilla of feathered costumes, enough sequins and ticker tape to choke a cart-horse, an abundance of music and dance, the spirit of the Carnival founder Claudia Jones, and some pithy, wise observations on cultural appropriation, sexual politics and embracing ones heritage.

Played out on Sandra Falase and Chloe Lamford’s rising circular set, like the bowl of a giant speaker, under an eye-catching hanging garden of Carnival-esque paraphernalia including street signs, traffic cones and yet more technicolour plumage, it’s a warm, vital collage of a script; messy yes but joyously so, as any play about something as chaotic but uplifting as Carnival has every right to be. Leading an all-female production team, director Rebekah Murrell’s masterfully nails the contrasting tones between the exhilaration and freedom of the dance (superb movement direction by Shelley Maxwell), the simmering undercurrent then explosion of violence when two frustrated young men perceive themselves disrespected, the heartwarming, superbly observed comedy of a pair of Notting Hill old timers who have seen it all, and the fantastical sequences that take place in the heroine’s head. There’s a lot going on here, and most of it is absolutely terrific.

None of this would probably coalesce without performers of the quality of Gabrielle Brooks as fierce dancing queen Nadine and Sapphire Joy as her even fiercer, politically aware sidekick Jade. Seldom off stage, working at full throttle throughout and each playing a plethora of characters -female and male- these magnetic, thrillingly talented women are shape-shifting knockouts. Annice Boparai is also a delight as well meaning, right-on Nisha, daughter of a phenomenally wealthy Spanish-Indian couple and slumming it from nearby Holland Park. Joseph’s writing is so good though that although Nisha starts out as the inevitable comic foil -her squeaky poshness forever at odds with her mates’s streetwise attitude- the character goes on a real journey into something credible and touching.

This is an ambitious work of infinite richness…. poetic, energised, essential, with wings on its feet and fire in its belly. J’Ouvert is ultimately about female friendships as much as it’s about a gigantic celebration, and it sends audiences out on a high but also with full hearts. I absolutely adored it.

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Written and directed by Eugene O’Hare

Omnibus Theatre until 4 July 2021

https://www.omnibus-clapham.org/the-human-connection/

Eugene O’Hare is truly an actor’s writer, in that he creates richly textured, multi-layered characters that give his casts something to really get their thespian gnashers into: see Miriam Margolyes’s venomously nasty yet oddly haunting old lady in Sydney And The Old Girl or the desperate, damaged, Orton-esque losers that populated his human trafficking tragi-comedy The Weatherman (both of these premiered up at the Park Theatre before the pandemic). These are not people one would necessarily want to spend any time with in real life but they undeniably make compelling theatrical company.

His creations for this double bill of short plays, a monologue for a father and a duet for mother and son, sharing a common theme of dislocation and parental guilt, are more low-key than in his full length work but they still pierce the heart and trouble the mind. His capacity for finding the lyricism in everyday speech reminds a source of real pleasure and wonder.

The first playlet Larry Devlin Wants To Talk To You About Something is a mini-masterpiece of bleak perfection. Stephen Kennedy (to be replaced by Ed Hogg from 30 June) as Larry is delivering a confession: as a late middle aged man, he is still plagued by guilt from a time when he struck his own child. He goes on to relate how this same child now has an adult life of his own, the pair have a friendship of sorts, and yet still Larry frets. Why?

What follows is not even an especially original plot point (which I am not about to reveal, by the way) but what lifts it into something fine and extraordinary is the gritty, detailed melancholy of the writing, and a performance of such delicacy, precision and pathos by Kennedy that it’s almost unbearable to watch. The misery seeps out of every pore, and it’s there in the slouchy, hands-in-pockets stance, the querulous semi-smile under haunted, hopeless eyes: here is a man who has long forgotten what it’s like to be happy. It’s beautiful, detailed work….O’Hare himself directs, and he and his leading actor are alive to every nuance. This is spellbinding stuff, and Kennedy is nothing short of magnificent.

Child 786, the second piece, is arguably more ambitious, being a response to the pandemic, and specifically the UK’s response to it on both popular and political levels, refracted through an almost Pinter-esque prism as a mother (Ishia Bennison, hugely impressive) welcomes her grown-up son Lennox home from what might be some sort of recovery facility. In the meantime, Covid has happened and we watch both of them struggle with a changed world, her retreating into banal musings and buzzwords, he alternating between passivity and frustration, superbly handled by Joshua Williams who is astonishing at simultaneously projecting vulnerability and aggression.

The real dramatic meat of Child 786 lies in Lennox’s conviction that as a young child he was sent by his mother to be part of an unspecified, but highly sinister, vaccination programme. So convincing are both actors, and so unerring is the dialogue O’Hare gives them (apart from a slight tendency to have Lennox spout facts and figures at length, which gets a little wearisome) that it is never clear which, if either of them, is telling the truth. Or is it just a question of perception? The ambiguity is tantalising, and if it lacks the intensity and focus of its predecessor, Child 786 nevertheless succeeds in being an engaging, thought provoking meditation on the unreliability of memory, and a darkly humorous juxtaposition of the humdrum with something potentially much more alarming.

These plays, whose impact is felt long after their short running times are over, were originally scheduled to be part of the Barbican Centre’s Ghost Light festival, which ended up being shelved due to the pandemic, and it is a considerable coup for the delightful Omnibus Theatre to get to premiere them. A brief but satisfying evening.

Written and performed by Amanda Wilkin

Directed by Elayce Ismail

Soho Theatre until 17 July

https://sohotheatre.com/shows/shedding-a-skin/

At a time when Black voices are joyously, if belatedly and still insufficiently, resounding throughout the theatrical community, it is befitting that this powerhouse of new writing reopens with Amanda Wilkin’s spiky but beguiling monologue, winner of the 2020 Verity Bargate Award, and with a press night during the week of the 73rd anniversary of the Windrush migration. The tale of Myah, a young mixed race woman rudderless in the big city after quitting a job and a relationship in quick succession, only to find herself forming an unexpected bond with the feisty, mysterious, older Black lady she lodges with, it’s a rather lovely piece that preaches the importance of never judging a book by its cover, and also of never underestimating or writing off ones elders.

Wilkin is a born storyteller, masterfully evoking vivid locations and situations with a command of language that is at once comic, relatable and concise. As a performer she combines a likeable stage presence, a clown’s goofy physicality and the lithe malleability of a dancer. The wired, coltish energy she brings to Myah is in striking contrast to the watchful stillness with which she invests the saturnine Mildred, who increasingly becomes the central figure as the play draws on, and more of her fascinating back story is revealed.

Running in counterpoint to the central story, and punctuating it at regular intervals, is a succession of snapshots of other, apparently unrelated lives transforming themselves -shedding skins, as it were- starting off nearly six hundred miles away but getting ever closer with each fragment, adding a soothing but urgent universality to Wilkin’s script. Rosanna Vize’s set provides another satisfying metaphor for the play’s title and principal theme, transforming from a soulless, roller blinded box to an organic, light-filled eyrie by the end of Elayce Ismail’s nicely judged, if occasionally over-busy staging.

If Shedding A Skin sometimes feels more like a dramatic storytelling rather than a true drama, only fully coming to powerful theatrical life in a sequence where a frustrated Myah rages at Mildred, it is a wonderfully engaging one, full of heart and humanity. The ending brought a real lump to my throat. This is vital, Black woman-centric writing, but it is absolutely for everybody. Enthusiastically recommended.

Photograph of Amanda Wilkin by Helen Murray

REASONS YOU SHOULD(N’T) LOVE ME

Written and performed by Amy Trigg

Directed by Charlotte Bennett

Kiln Theatre – until 12 June

https://kilntheatre.com/whats-on/reasons-you-shouldnt-love-me/#

Amy Trigg has already won the 2020 Women’s Prize for Playwrighting for this sparky, bracingly honest monologue (which she also performs, brilliantly), and I wouldn’t be remotely surprised if she garners a couple more. This is a captivating script, full of wit and pithy observations, sublimely directed by Charlotte Bennett.

Trigg plays Juno, a sassy, likeable Essex girl with a wicked sense of fun, not to mention a decent circle of mates, wonderfully supportive parents, if not actually a boyfriend then certainly a “friend with benefits” (even if it’s abundantly clear that she could do better), her own flat ….and a wheelchair, owing to the fact that she was born with spina bifida. Trigg’s script covers in some detail the surgeries and scars that Juno bears, and the practical challenges she regularly faces, but the real meat of the writing lies in the compelling, and occasionally very moving, depiction of the gulf between this young woman’s outward confidence and the inner fragility of a person who, through no fault of her own, has been marked out as ‘different’ from birth.

Not for a second does any of this become mawkish, indeed much of it is laugh-out-loud hilarious, but both writing and performance are deceptively clever. With her scarlet trouser suit, mass of curls knotted above a cherubic face, and some formidable comedy timing, Trigg presents a sunny, funny woman that is so easy to immediately warm to and root for. As a result, when she confides that she tried to hurl herself out of a window when she was eight, or she intimates how lonely she sometimes gets, the effect is pretty devastating…. the darkness very much throws the humour into stark relief, and words like “deformed” and “broken” drop like verbal hand grenades. Trigg’s ability to turn on a dime from wryly cheeky to utter despair is seriously impressive.

Juno’s journey as she searches for love and self acceptance, by way of uncomfortable hospital visits, some fairly mortifying sexual encounters, a couple of embarrassing drunken stories, a tribe of faith healers, and seventeen visits to the musical Cats (!), is one that it is emphatically worth going on with her. Ms Trigg is a talent to watch and rejoice in: there are SO many reasons to love both her and this thoroughly engaging piece of theatre.

WALDEN

by Amy Berryman

Directed by Ian Rickson as part of the Re:Emerge season

Harold Pinter Theatre – until 12 June

https://sfp-reemergeseason.com/the-plays/walden/walden-ticket-calendar/#/

Gotta hand it to Sonia Friedman, she doesn’t mess about. As the theatre industry slowly, carefully makes it’s way back into the light, one could completely understand producers playing it safe post-pandemic and only programming sure-fire hits and the sort of “timeless classics” that will have the moneyed classes reaching for their credit cards. Not so Ms Friedman however… Gawd bless her, she is presenting a trio of brand new plays by neophyte writers right in the West End. Frankly, if the other two are even half as good as Amy Berryman’s engrossing Walden, then we are in for a blazing theatrical summer.

High quality, challenging new drama was once a regular part of the West End landscape, but in recent decades the few instances that made it into the gilded playhouses of Shaftesbury Avenue were typically sold out transfers from critically approved powerhouses such as the Young Vic, the Royal Court or the Almeida. Many of these –The Inheritance, Jerusalem, The Ferryman, for example- were also Friedman productions. A notable and honourable anomaly is Jack Holden’s astonishing monologue-on-amphetamines Cruise, but that is the exception rather than the rule.

All the more joyous and remarkable then to welcome this quietly ambitious debut, and in a first class production by Ian Rickson with a trio of flawless performances to boot. It’s the sort of play, staging and casting that haunts you long after it’s 100 minute running time is over.

The play’s title comes from the 1854 memoir of transcendentalist writer Thoreau, chronicling his meditative two year spell living like a hermit amongst nature in a remote lakeside cabin in the woodland wilds of Massachusetts. Berryman places her heart-catching text in a similar such cabin, but this is some time in the future, although the environmental horrors and global unrest described by way of scene setting suggests that this is a year disturbingly close to our own. The overall feel is both bucolic and ominous.

The cabin -exquisitely realised by designer Rae Smith- is inhabited by nervy, fragile Stella (Gemma Arterton, never better) and her big-hearted, apparently more straightforward partner Bryan (an equally magnificent Fehinti Balogun) who is a leading light of an environmental group called Earth Advocates. They bicker amiably if uneasily as they prepare for the arrival of Stella’s estranged sister Cassie (“short for Cassiopeia – a queen” as Stella tartly observes), an astronaut just returned from a space mission. Cassie and Stella’s late father, a brutal task master, was also an astronaut as it turns out.

In a performance of outstanding delicacy and detail (note the way she subtly recoils when Bryan points out that she underwent voluntary sterilisation to qualify for the space programme) Lydia Wilson fascinatingly, painstakingly suggests that Cassie is a brilliantly clever young woman stricken with the creeping realisation that the life she has carved out for herself may not be worth the sacrifices she has made. It turns out that Arterton’s distressed Stella is every bit as brilliant as her twin, having been an architect for NASA before walking away from it all, and the rivalry between the sisters is rivetingly conveyed both in the writing and the performances.

Some of the intellectual excitement of the play -and there is plenty- comes from Berryman pitting Bryan’s über-Green ideology against Cassie’s pragmatic, more dynamic approach to nature and the planet, and then confounding our expectations. I was reminded slightly of Pinter’s haunting, elliptical Old Times, where a female interloper goes into spiritual battle with a male adversary over another woman who they both have shared history with, but the emotional charge here is much stronger. If there is a weakness, it’s in the somewhat predictable suggestion of an attraction between Bryan and his beloved’s identical twin, but even there the resolution to that, insofar as there is one, isn’t necessarily what one would expect.

Nonetheless, this is a bewitching, tremendously rich piece, simultaneously as organic and earthy as the woods where the action plays out, and as ethereal and transporting as the heavens which so fascinate and vitiate the warring sisters. It’s very funny and even joyful at times, as the twins connect fitfully over shared memories, while an amusedly excluded Bryan looks on. I won’t spoil the final scene but suffice it to say that it is deeply moving -grief stricken even, although nobody has died, quite the opposite- and provokes a recalibration of the sisters relationship, and forces one to reconsider which is the more selfish of the two.

Emma Laxton’s moody, menacing soundscape runs in counterpoint to Berryman’s satisfying, accomplished script throughout, evocative but never distracting, and Azusa Ono’s shape-shifting lighting design adds another layer of excellence to this seriously fine production.

Even under normal circumstances, a debut play as strong and thought-provoking as this one would be something to applaud but at a time when every theatrical opening -well, alright, ALMOST every opening- feels like a little miracle, Walden is even more of a cause for celebration. Roll on both Ms Berryman’s next play and the rest of the Re:Emerge season: the bar has been set very very high.