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Showing posts with label bruce kitchener. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bruce kitchener. Show all posts
Friday, July 28, 2017
Friday, July 28, 2017
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Whether a goose down pillow, ineffective sleeping aids or gnawing psychological problems are to blame, Dexy is at the end of his tether. And so, in his bleary-eyed state, he's visited by a three strange late night visitors. There's Leo (James Groom), a drug-fuelled, sexually omnivorous Joker lookalike; Vic (Bruce Kitchener), a night bus driver with a love of tea and board games; and Margot (Niamh Watson), a friendly nocturnal woman who spends her night walking the streets and getting picked up by a succession of "uncles".
The show takes place inside Dexy's flat and quickly smears the borders of reality. A backdrop of extreme insomnia automatically makes the audience suspicious that what we're seeing isn't the gospel truth, something quickly confirmed by the intrusion of surreal elements like half polar bear/half chimpanzee genetic monstrosities that hunt paedophiles on the Circle Line at night.
The further into the play we proceed, the more surreal things become. Elements and characters hinted at earlier scenes come to dominate proceedings and Dexy hits breaking point as he struggles to process the twisted world around him.
Playwright David Cantor, previously responsible for multiple episodes of My Family and Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps, consistently displays a decent turn of phrase, peppering the script with memorable lines like "it'd be like Brian Blessed reading Mein Kampf through a megaphone". It's the amphetamine-wired Leo that gets the best of the bunch, leading us down a barmy rabbit hole of xenophobic conspiracy theories that encompass Nigerian traffic wardens, Polish builders and a secret 'Latin alliance' between Italy and Spain.
But though Cantor has an arsenal of witty lines, the plot is severely lacking. I'm not exactly a stickler for traditional narrative structure, but while Sheep has a beginning and an end, it's lacking a middle. In its place, we get a pile-up of bizarre elements that increasingly feel like a distraction from the fact that there's actually not much going on.
Most of this is down to Dexy just not being that interesting. Granted, he's the one normal guy surrounded by a tornado of weird, but we're never given a reason to care about, sympathise or even like the guy - not helped by him spending most of the play grumpily bitching at the much more likeable supporting cast. If you reduce the play down to the skeleton, it's about Dexy facing up to his personal flaws and if we don't care whether he does or not... that's a problem.
Furthering bogging things down is that Ciaran Lonsdale's performance doesn't exactly set the world on fire. His Dexy comes across less like an insomniac on the edge and more like someone who's just missed their bus, not to mention not even attempting to convey the visible, red-eyed exhaustion of someone who hasn't slept for a couple of weeks.
It's a shame because the supporting cast really gives it some welly. Bruce Kitchener is great as the slightly dopey, slightly boring yet weirdly dignified bus driver. It's touching to hear about his plainly stated quest for developing his empathy in order to win back his wife and his enthusiasm for board games.
But by far the best element of Sheep (and pretty much the one thing that makes the whole show worthwhile) is James Groom's Leo. Whenever he's on stage it's as if the show has been hit by defibrillators, his delivery, energetic body language and charisma outright entertaining. As Groom rattles off lines like "I was being given a reacharound by the Minister for Housing at the time" I found myself wishing I was just watching a show about Leo, which I'm willing to bet would be a far more fun night out.
Groom gets the lion's share of the night's laughs and almost single-handedly wrenches the show out of the doldrums. Sheep is essentially a rather porridgy, self-consciously surreal drama that doesn't work particularly well that happens to contain one wildly successful element. Whether that's enough to splash out for a ticket is your call.
Sheep is at The White Bear Theatre until 5th August. Tickets here.
Sheep is at The White Bear Theatre until 5th August. Tickets here.
Wednesday, March 15, 2017
Wednesday, March 15, 2017
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Christine Foster's Four Thieves Vinegar is a great marriage of location and subject. The basement under the Curtain's Up is about as cramped as pub theatre gets: squeezing in a couple of rows of vintage cinema seats into a dark little room where low beams creak from the movements of the pub above.
This makes it the perfect place to recreate a claustrophobic cell in Newgate Prison. It's 1665 and London is gripped by plague. We're only five years after the Restoration of Charles II, with the joyful return of theatre, gambling, and revelry. Now it's as if God has gone all Sodom and Gomorrah, smiting London with foul pestilence. Parish bells toll with each death; the progress of the disease marked by their increasing tempo.
This makes it the perfect place to recreate a claustrophobic cell in Newgate Prison. It's 1665 and London is gripped by plague. We're only five years after the Restoration of Charles II, with the joyful return of theatre, gambling, and revelry. Now it's as if God has gone all Sodom and Gomorrah, smiting London with foul pestilence. Parish bells toll with each death; the progress of the disease marked by their increasing tempo.
Sequestered in a gloomy subterranean cell, our characters are somewhat protected from the disease. They are; unhappy alchemist Matthias (Nick Howard-Brown), a debtor who's sure that he can develop a cure for the plague if he just had the right ingredients; Jennet (Kate Huntsman), a young Christian woman sentenced to death after being inadvertently involved in a burglary; Hannah (Pip Henderson) a cynical nurse awaiting trial for peddling quack cures; and Simon (Bruce Holt), their personable jailer.
Telling the story of the plague from a limited viewpoint is a stroke of genius: allowing ample space to for expository dialogue about what's going on in the rest of London and debates on plague treatments and causes without ever seeming forced. Christine Foster has clearly done her research here, her characters talk of real plague cures, ranging from pressing chickens to their sores, smoking tobacco, consuming dried frog skins to the titular 'four thieves vinegar', a mythical concoction supposedly developed by thieves to allow them immunity while they rob the dead.
It makes Four Thieves Vinegar an effective history lesson, painting an evocative picture of what London was like when visited by an apocalyptic epidemic. As the play proceeds the world outside gradually stops as the citizens of London either flee or die. Foster writes lyrically of grass growing in the streets, abandoned houses and an ominous, pervasive silence. There's an interesting undertone of the entirety of London as a prison: one character suggests simply leaving the city for the less plague-ridden countryside (which seems like a logical plan) only to be told that countryfolk violently prevent anyone leaving the city walls for fear of spreading the infection.
But while Four Thieves Vinegar is a great way to learn about London's last great plague, it falls a little short when it comes to individual narratives. This is primarily down to a needlessly tangled knot of interpersonal relations that bogs the play down as we try to unpick them. Late revelations about secrets the characters have been concealing fall a little flat: when the historical backdrop is so compellingly drawn, it's difficult to care too much about their individual problems.
Pip Henderson's Hannah comes off best out of this - the actor having a fantastic 'period face'. This tricky-to-pin down physical quality makes an actor look like they could have plausibly walked out of the past, and this, combined with her easy delivery of Foster's impeccably researched 17th-century street slang, makes her a magnetic stage presence. The same can also be said of Bruce Kitchener's jailer, who produces a hell of a lot of pathos without actually spending much time on stage.
Howard-Brown and Huntsman are somewhat less convincing. It's nothing catastrophic, but simply that a half-crazed amateur alchemist/magician feels like an odd fit in an otherwise naturalistic drama. I don't doubt that men like him existed, but he's such an outlier that to focus so much of the play around his work detracts from the way Foster focuses on regular citizen's reactions to the plague. Huntsman, by contrast, just feels a bit waif-by-numbers, stuck in the same gear of whiny confusion through pretty much the entire play.
I love London history and Four Thieves Vinegar is very much up my street, but doesn't quite manage to marry the history lesson to the personal drama. It gets pretty damn close, but this is such an interesting moment in London history that it almost drowns out Foster's characters. Still, as far as learning and understanding the impact of the plague on ordinary citizens, it's great stuff.
Four Thieves Vinegar is at Baron's Court Theatre until 26 March.
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