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Showing posts with label daniel kendrick. Show all posts
Showing posts with label daniel kendrick. Show all posts
Friday, October 4, 2019
Friday, October 4, 2019
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The traditional pub is an endangered species. The price of alcoholic drinks are rising, meaning many prefer to take advantage of supermarket deals and drink at home. Beer Duty in the UK is one of the highest in Europe, with campaigners Long Live the Local explaining that one in every three pounds spent in a pub goes to HMRC. All that, in combination with rising rents, the prime location of many pubs and lack of building space in London mean it's no real surprise that many are torn down to make way for luxury flats.
Anna Jordan's We Anchor In Hope takes place during the final night of The Anchor, a Pimlico pub. Attending the wake are landlord Kenny (Valentine Hanson), bar staff Pearl and Bilbo (Alex Jarrett and Daniel Kendrick) and regulars Shaun and Frank (Alan Turkington and David Killick).
The wild party for the pub's closure came last night, with the pub flickering to life one last time to bedraggled party streamer festooning the floor, dirty glasses on the tables and dry taps (the one remaining beer on tap is.. ew.. Fosters). Over the course of a long boozy night, secrets are revealed and lies are exposed. It's the end of a chapter in these characters' lives, and who knows what's coming next?
Despite an energetic Madness-soundtracked opening, We Anchor In Hope starts slow. Everyone is hungover, things are wrapping up and the majority of the conversations are wistful small talk between old friends. I will admit, at least in the early stages of the play it felt directionless and banal.
But this establishment of normalcy proves crucial, providing a solid foundation for some seriously impressive characterisation. All too soon you're drawn into these people's lives, feeling their pain, fear and sense of dislocation in time. You couldn't slip a Rizla between the cast when it came to picking the best, but these are all performers on top of their game.
Throughout the play, there's a melancholy sense of time passing, with near-constant musings on past romantic regrets, the transitory nature of youth and a growing awareness of your mortality. The programme explains that Jordan wrote the play two months after her mother died - and it certainly feels like the product of someone in mourning.
We Anchor In Hope isn't a downer play. It comes from a sad place, but most of the dialogue and interactions are upbeat and the story is told through a half-jokey friendly back-and-forth established over years of shared history. These are characters who know (or feel like they know) one another - able to throw out an injoke or an insult and know how it'll be received. The flipside, of course, is that they all know each other's emotional weak points.
And so, by the second act, once everyone is locked in, properly plastered and the firewater has come out, the drama rapidly accelerates. By this point you feel a kinship with these people, making it immensely powerful and moving when they begin to turn against one another. I noted that the woman sat next to me actually had to cover her eyes during one particularly intense sequence - that's got to be a sign that a play is doing something very right.
All that takes place in an absolutely wonderful set. The Bunker has become a pub, recreated down to the smallest detail. You can even go up to the bar before the play and during the interval and buy a pint. I wouldn't be surprised if the fittings on stage come from an actual pub - if not then Zoë Hurwitz has done an unbelievably good job of giving them the scuffs and scrapes that bar furniture develops over years of use.
I'm a sucker for a detailed naturalistic set (fringe theatre understandably tends towards minimalism) and this delivers in spades. Even the tang of the pub carpet seems to have been recreated. My only small regret is that there's limited space to actually set at the pub tables: I would have loved to have seen the traditional theatre seating removed completely and pub tables and chairs put in for everyone, but I suppose there are practical considerations at play.
So yeah, We Anchor In Hope is a model piece of theatre. It looks great, is performed beautifully and is incredibly intelligent without even a smidge of pretension. My kinda show.
We Anchor In Hope is at The Bunker until 19th October. Tickets here.
Thursday, March 9, 2017
Thursday, March 9, 2017
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The boundary between comedy and horror is so thin you'd have trouble sliding a Rizla through it. Yet it's in precisely this gap that John Stanley's The Monkey sits: a play that on paper sounds like a nightmare, yet in execution is one of the sharpest black comedies I've seen in ages.
The co-winner of the Synergy Theatre Project's national prison scriptwriting competition (which aims to "harness the energy, instincts and life experiences of ex-prisoners"), The Monkey comes at you with a blizzard of London slang, a taut energy and a fat-free narrative.
We open on the ground floor of a block of Bermondsey flats. A giant middle finger spraypainted on the broken down lift doors tells us all we need to know. This is the home of Dal (Daniel Kendrick), Becks (Danielle Flett) and Thick-Al (George Whitehead). Dal and Becks are petty criminals trying their best to stay one step ahead of a smack habit, their current dealer the stingy Thick-Al (George Whitehead), who very much lives up to his nickname.
Life is complicated by the arrival of Dal and Becks' old friend Tel (Morgan Watkins). With his fitted suit, slicked back hair and shiny shoes he makes a stark contrast to the trackie wearing duo. Tel is doing good at the moment: relatively flush with cash after a bit of burglary and flogging knock-off Juicy Couture. As the three meet, we immediately sense the disconnect between them - namely that Tel appears to be stuck on fast forward while Dal and Becks are in slow motion.
Tel rattles out his verbose dialogue with self-conscious staginess, arching his back and turning his head as if posing for an imaginary photographer. His mind is going in about 12 places at once, careering between imagined slights, business ventures, a drug habit, the distant past, his libido and, ominously, £500 (the titular 'monkey') owed to him by Thick-Al.
This debt smashes the two characters together, leading to a climactic torture sequence explicitly inspired by Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs. Is it funny to watch a slightly dim man being bound to a chair and mutilated with a switchblade? Are there many yucks in seeing a mentally ill sociopath go completely off his rocker and into a strangle-frenzy? How many laughs can you reasonably get out of a man pleading for his life in front of a vicious lunatic?
As it turns out, quite a lot. I'm not sure quite how Stanley has pulled this off, but Thick-Al is so unpleasantly stupid, shortsighted and venal that his misery and torture feels thoroughly justified. A decent wodge of this is down to George Whitehead's great performance as a gormless drug dealer, who tries to wriggle out of his situation with the grace, intelligence and ferocity of an earthworm.
But it's Morgan Watkin's Tel that properly catches the attention. He's a wolf amidst sheep - his frustration with his slow-minded friends making him weirdly relatable. There's a twinge of the classic London gangster to him: his cultural and sartorial pretensions derived from teddyboys (and specifically the Krays). On top of that, he's so intrinsically a Londoner that he may as well be formed out Thames mud and breathed life into by a pearly king. It's tempting to slot him in alongside Guy Ritchie's creations, but there's something powerfully authentic about the character - someone you'd hate to meet in real life but whose presence electrifies the stage.
The Monkey's 95 minutes simply fly by: a vicious little bastard of a play that knows precisely what it wants and achieves it with scary efficiency. There are a couple of rough edges in the staging and the inter-scene heroin-themed music is too on-the-nose, but they're very small flies in very high-quality ointment. Recommended.
The Monkey is at Theatre503 until 18 March. Tickets here.
The Monkey is at Theatre503 until 18 March. Tickets here.
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