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Showing posts with label drama. Show all posts
Showing posts with label drama. Show all posts
Sunday, August 6, 2017
Sunday, August 6, 2017
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There are two things you need to know about the hero of Good With Maps: she's a freshwater person and she's good with maps. This is how this introspective, touching little monologue begins, with performer Jane Phegan surrounded by a fleet of tiny tinfoil boats and a stack of travel books. What follows is a show about the joy of travel and discovery, sutured to an emotional recounting of her beloved father's ordeal with Parkinson's.
It quickly proves to be a notably well-written show, ladling on evocative language: "the clouds were like giant cauliflowers", "the terrible regularity of meals" or an invalid as "an immigrant on the threshold of a dark night". It makes it easy to get drawn into the passion for adventure, easily buying into an enthusiastic paean to the Amazon river and its many delights.
The author's trip to the Amazon, including a lengthy stop off in rainforest-bound city Manaus, is romantic and inspiring - the show excited to explain interesting details of the brief rubber boom. Over about 1880-1910, this pit stop of civilisation amidst the untamed wilderness saw untrammelled wealth as the result of its global monopoly on latex. Wealthy wives would send their laundry to Paris, horses would drink champagne and cocktails rattled with diamonds instead of ice cubes (though that last one doesn't sound much fun to me).
I love a good history lesson and Good With Maps is studded with juicy nuggets of trivia I kept filing away for later use. Some of the stuff was familiar to me - I recently reviewed an art exhibition about Henry Ford's failed industrial utopia Fordlandia, and Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo is one of my favourite films of all time. So when the show talks of tramp steamers chugging down the hazy curves of the Amazon, my heart beats a little faster too.
The names of famous explorers also dot the show. There's a bit of apology for being fans of these imperialistic, starch-shirt, stiff-upper-lippers who set out to stamp Britain on the world, but you can't help but thrill to the basic idea setting out to where the map ends and seeing what's there. Good With Maps recognises that there aren't really any gaps left to fill these days, but adds the uplifting coda that there is still "more than enough discovery to go around" left in the world.
This travelogue is interspersed with the story of the author's family. Her father sounds like the perfect paternal figure - intelligent, kind and inspirational. So it's all the more tragic when he suddenly seems different on the phone and begins to suffer physical debilitation. This dovetails into a poignant and poetic musing on the tragedy of ageing and illness, concluding with a depressing litany of indignities suffered on a geriatric ward.
Thing is, I kept waiting for these disparate story strands to merge and, while they kind of do, it wasn't quite as satisfying as I'd hoped it would be. I can follow the emotional backbone of the show in showing how her father's personality has influenced the author, but the show doesn't quite tie a bow on top of the whole thing. It comes very close, but not quite.
Next up is a weirder criticism - I only realised after the show that the writer (Noëlle Janaczewska) wasn't actually performing the piece. Rather, it was performed by an actor. I accept that this is a bizarre criticism, but I was a little put out at this. I was properly emotionally invested in what Jane Phegan was saying and easily assumed she was talking about her own life, leaving me feeling a bit short-changed when I realised that every little hitch in her voice and moment of weakness was a performance.
It's perverse to criticise Jane Phegan for being entirely convincing in her delivery, but it makes me wonder whether I might have had a different reaction to the show if I'd have had time to read the programme prior to the show beginning.
Despite that little wrinkle, Good With Maps is a cut above most confessionals. There are a lot of these monologues about at the Fringe, each one bristling with trauma, pain and hard-won triumph. Most of them are mediocre and some annoying self-obsessed. But this show spoke to me and tickled my sensibilities, managing to be confessional and personal without feeling even slightly vain. A quiet and modest triumph.
Good With Maps is at C Primo, Edinburgh Aug 6-13, 15-28. Tickets here.
Good With Maps is at C Primo, Edinburgh Aug 6-13, 15-28. Tickets here.
Sunday, April 10, 2016
Sunday, April 10, 2016
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The young delinquent building a fractious/supportive friendship with an elderly person is familiar dramatic territory. From the moment the house lights dropped I sat felt pretty confident that I knew where this one was going.
My suspicions were confirmed pretty quickly when the teenager burgled the elderly woman, then returned a couple of scenes later with the stuff she couldn't fence. Then there's 'yer basic slow building of trust and heartwarming moments of connection, followed by betrayals, arguments and reconciliations. It's the kind of play in which a pistol is literally hung on the wall - Chekhov would be proud.
Evaluated in purely narrative terms, Kate Lock's Russian Dolls is constructed from prefabricated story chunks that slot together like Lego bricks. But dig a little deeper, and while the broad strokes are somewhat cliched, the granular moments that comprise them are emotive, well-researched and stupendously human.
The heart of Russian Dolls is an exploration of responsible motherhood. Teen delinquent Carmelia (Mollie Lambert) is the product of a home not so much broken as shattered. She's saddled with a smack addict Mum that doesn't give a shit about her, a coterie of abusive gangster friends and her own rock bottom self esteem. A couple of minutes after meeting her you feel like you can map her future: prison, alcoholism, drug abuse, unwanted children, an abusive partner, bitterness, depression and then the grave. Poor Camelia.
I've worked in family courts, dealing with child removals, custody and visitation rights and seen hundreds of people like her. Voluminous case bundles full of Camelias are stacked, ceiling high, in dusty county court backrooms across the country, each rubberbanded file chronicling familiar familial sagas of sexual abuse, trauma and neglect, generally all soaked in vast lakes of cheap booze.
It's depressing shit. Things get to the point where an apparently monstrous move like removing a newborn baby from its mother's care feels the only humane thing to do. In Russian Dolls this social work realpolitik is represented by Stephanie Fayerman's Hilda. Blinded, elderly and isolated, we learn that she devoted her life to fostering, her experiences building a deep resentment of the mothers whose children she cared for.
Camelia and Hilda are personifications of opposing arguments - one furiously asserting her 'blood of my blood' connection to her own mother and any prospective children of her own, the other angrily concluding that the only absolute solution to the problem is mandatory sterilisation. To the playwright's credit, Lock doesn't attempt to fudge the answer with some dippy 'maybe the truth is in the middle" bullshit, recognising instead that this situation does not have a 'right' answer'.
Throughout all this there's an unmistakable tang of truth. Hilda is introduced frankly talking about her aging body, later giving us a poetic, moving account of what it feels like to go blind. Camelia's precocious bravado is constantly undercut by deeply depressing insights into her everyday life; a dog biting her younger brother's arm; her mother's erratic behaviour on a bus; her plaintive hopes for affection; and, perhaps weirdly the most moving for me, that despite living in South London her entire life, she's never seen the Thames, Big Ben or Trafalgar Square ("that shit's for tourists"). These moments feel real - so much so that I assume they're based on real-life accounts that Lock came across while researching the play.
On top of that, both Lambert and Fayerman are straightforwardly excellent. Lambert's Camelia is never entirely likeable, but at least we grasp why she's like this, eking out sympathy from some pretty unpromising ground. Fayerman's Hilda wins over the audience rather more quickly, the actor constantly layering in fresh elements that add up to a beautifully three-dimensional performance. Also, on a simple technical level, she really sells her character's blindness, to the point where I half wondered whether Fayerman was actually blind.
In the wrong hands Russian Dolls could come across as a bit soap operatic; cliches battling for control of our heartstrings. But this production understands the passionate arguments that lie at the heart of the material; the show having a palpable, visceral 'realness' to it. It's a pretty damn great piece of fringe theatre - one I'm grateful to have experienced.
Thursday, February 18, 2016
Thursday, February 18, 2016
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It's an urban nightmare. Pimps swarm the streets, prostitutes cower in condemned tenements, bullets freely zip through the air. There's even a cannibal serial killer on the loose. Welcome to A Steady Rain's Chicago.
Navigating these murky waters are two cops on the edge, Denny (Vincent Regan) and Joey (David Schaal). The two form a classic good cop/bad cop duo: Denny is impulsive, violent and ego-driven while Joey is more thoughtful, intelligent and by the book.
Kicking off the story is Denny's altercation with a vicious pimp, who targets his family for retribution. A .44 Magnum round explodes his front window, sending shards of glass spiralling through his terrified family. His youngest, Shaun, gets it the worst, his head sliced open and arterial blood spilling across the room. Now he's in intensive care, possibly brain damaged. Denny vows revenge.
Tonally landing somewhere between The Wire, CSI and Bad Lieutenant, Keith Huff's (a former Mad Men writer) play feels like a binge through a glossy HBO cop drama. With just two actors on stage and minimal scenery, the broad dramatic conceit is that we're hearing both men's accounts of events to an Internal Affairs team. This effectively means we hear Joey's unexpurgated tales of Denny's violence, law-breaking and racism, then hear Denny casually explain things like "yeah, the guy had a gun tucked in his pants - what's a cop to do but shoot?"
From the get-go it's plain that A Steady Rain is knitted from a patchwork of cop/crime cliches. You've got the childhood friends in love with the same woman, the bent cop involved with a desperate hooker, an interfering police chief memorably named Dickerson ("The dick of dicks!"), the prying eyes of internal affairs, alcoholic loner cops, abused cop wives, gay cannibals and so on. But, crucially, it makes these cliches work.
What powers the piece is Nietzsche's famous quote: "Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.". Denny and Joey are not intrinsically bad men, yet their profession has slowly corrupted them over the years. Cool objectivity has morphed into overt racism, coupled with a belligerence grown from hard-bitten experience.
In Denny's case, we watch as his appearance comes to reflect the rot inside, his corruption manifesting itself as gangrene and smeared blood. It's a neat, pithy commentary on the state of policing in the US, with the Chicago setting deeply relevant. Cops in the US have a nasty habit of executing unarmed black men and getting away scot-free, and A Steady Rain peels back the mind-set of a violent racist monster cop and explores what makes him tick. Granted, Huff's diagnosis is nothing that hasn't already been reached by umpteen other cop dramas. But he's on the mark.
Performatively, Regan and Schaal are both unfussily excellent. In the Arcola, the audience surrounds three sides of the stage, as well as peering down from a balcony. Both actors stalk the borders of the stage, shooting glares into the audience as they deliver the punchy dialogue. Occasionally we feel like we're sitting on a jury hearing a witness give evidence, the men practically pleading with us to understand the motivations behind their actions.
As the two are pushed to (and beyond) breaking point, the pair continually plumb fresh dramatic depths. Though Regan is a monster, there's deep tragedy in the rare moments in which he breaks: his guilt suffocating him. Joey finds himself torn between loyalty and love, coming at us with barely concealed self-loathing at his actions. They're as good as anybody I've seen lately - both actors clearly relishing their meaty roles.
A Steady Rain is riddled with cliches and flirts a little too hard with familiarity. Still, it's anchored by a pair of powerhouse performances by two actors who deploy their talents with ruthless efficiency. The minimalist staging only focusses the attention on them, creating an atmosphere you can cut with a knife.
Perhaps the best observation I can make is that A Steady Rain is that rare brand of drama that gets a visceral reaction. As a particularly shocking detail was revealed, someone next to me muttered "holy fuck!" under their breath. They're on the mark.
★★★★
A Steady Rain is at the Arcola Theatre until 5th March. Tickets here.
Monday, September 14, 2015
Monday, September 14, 2015
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Somewhere up above the bombs have begun to fall. Muffled booms shake dust down from the bunker's ceiling. You're deep underground - protected from the apocalypse, the blasts of fire, the radioactive fallout - safe with your family. In comparison with the poor bastards on the surface you're doing pretty good. After all, just a couple of days, weeks or months down here and you can emerge and rebuild, right?
This is the launching point of Only Forever, an exercise in psychological post-apocalypse drama courtesy of writer Abrahan Arsis. We're locked in with a typically middle-class British family, circa sometime in the 50s. They are; can-do patrician George (Edward Pinner); loving/limping housewife Margaret (Christine Rose); arrested development adolescent Victoria (Jennie Eggleton); and nice-but-dim preteen Charles (Lewys Taylor).
At the outset they appear the model of stiff upper lip domesticity. The father is stern yet affectionate, assigning his family chores to keep the bunker shipshape. Mother Margaret provides friendly emotional support, washing sheets and fetching water from the well. The children study Shakespeare and power the lights by exercising on a bicycle hooked to a dynamo. Yet as events progress, dark secrets become exposed and fissures form within the family unit, leading to anger, depression, betrayal and all that yummy stuff that makes drama worth watching.
As the play takes place in just one location, set design and dressing is key. The Hope Theatre isn't the biggest performance space around, but the cramped stage with concrete painted walls works well in the play's favour. Sat in the front row I had the performers brushing up against my knees, often in danger of knocking my pint over. As someone who loves getting as close as possible to the performers this is all great stuff - in the dining scenes I felt as if I was sat at the table with them. Similarly, the walls and shelves are peppered with period appropriate books, boxes of recycled scraps and battered looking crockery. The lighting designer also gets decent mileage out of the flicker and pop of fluorescent bulbs as the power on.
Performance-wise the obvious standout is Jennie Eggleton's Victoria. Much of the dramatic weight of the play rests on her shoulders, combining childish mischievousness with hormonal yearnings and Christian sex guilt to marvellous effect. Lewys Taylor also impresses as a child actor - the play is broadly naturalistic and the role requires suspension of audience belief about his age, which he manages with aplomb. Edward Pinner and Christine Rose are a little less effective; with Pinner often sounding a bit Radio 4 Afternoon Drama and Rose substituting character depth in favour of having a dodgy knee.
Still, the narrative rumbles on effectively - the script constantly drops tantalising hints of dark doings within the bunker - leaving it up the audience's wild imagination what they're all hiding. The danger with this is that nothing the writer can do will live up to what the audience wants, but Only Forever avoids this by having a satisfying series of reveals and twists in the final scenes that cast shadows over everything we've seen.
But though this is an satisfying serving of genre drama, recalling everything from Neville Shute's On the Beach to the similarly bunker-set Fallout series of videogames, there's a constant sense of slightness. Frequent reference is made to Romeo and Juliet, though there's scant parallels between these stories' themes and preoccupations. Also, the Church of England religion of the family is often front and centre though aside from them being in subterranean purgatory, the absence of God from their lives is given short shrift. The closest the play comes to being 'about' something is its interrogation of gender politics, though even this never quite reaches full thematic fruition.
This leaves Only Forever as an enjoyable way to spend 75 minutes, yet not a particularly memorable one. Still, Jennie Eggleton in particular should be pleased with what they've accomplished, as should the technical crew and director Poppy Rowley, who create an evocatively claustrophobic mise en scene.
★★★
Only Forever runs until the 26th of September. Tickets here.
Friday, April 24, 2015
Friday, April 24, 2015
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Just when did the salt of the earth become the scum of the earth? That question, paraphrased from Owen Jones' excellent Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class, powers No Milk for the Foxes. It's not accurate to say that working class voices are absent from the London stage (as the excellent Trainspotting, Marching on Together and Lardo prove), but, let's face it, these are the minority.
This co-production, by new company Beats&Elements and the Camden People's Theatre kicks back against this. This is about zero hours contracts, financial insecurity, crushed ambitions, social snobbery and the death of working class dignity. Set over one night at a nondescript factory in the outer limits of London, we meet two security guards, Mark (Paul Cree) and Sparx (Conrad Murray), watching over the site. There's little of value to any would-be thieves, and so they sit in Beckettian limbo, stuck with each other.
As they count down the minutes until the shift is over they chat. We learn that this is Mark's first job in two years. He and his partner still live at his parent's house and with a child due very soon this job (crappy though it is) is a lifeline to an independent life and the start of the long road to freedom from debt.
Sparx, the younger of the two, has fewer worries. He just wants to clock off, smoke a spliff and save up for some new trainers. He's caught in a no man's land between adolescence and adulthood. Though he can't see it himself, you see that he's slowly sinking into a quicksand of mediocrity, this 'stopgap job' a dangerous tedium that will eat up decades of your life if you're not careful.
That drama is melded with beatboxing musical numbers, the two performers rapping over each other's beats and loops. It's a curious and idiosyncratic choice; naturalistic drama rubbing up against the more fantastical music. Though the two talk at length; they're not to truly express their own feelings for fear of breaking the shell of uneasy matey masculinity. In the musical numbers though, their innermost paranoias, desires and frustrations bubble to the surface.
The best bits are the moments of genuine anger. There's a particularly affecting description of a City party that Mark is invited to. He's enjoying the food, the drink and the conversation - taking pleasure in being accepted by these people as an apparent equal. Then someone makes a casually classist comment that cuts to the bone. The illusion shatters and his class status is underlined: he can fake it but will never truly belong. Later we see the vulnerability of life on a zero hours contract; the worker powerless and impotent against the whims of his boss.
This kind of exploitation was fought (and the worst instances curbed) over the course of the 20th century; workers unionising to protect their livelihood, dignity and future. But now, post Thatcher, Blair and Cameron, the power balance has once more shifted to the boss. Dancing to the tune of the free market, the worker is a pure unit of economic activity, working conditions and rights eroded on the basis that no matter how shitty a job or boss is, there'll be someone in dire enough straits to gobble it up.
It's a fine message for a play, this desperation leaching through the carefully coloured scenery and the performer's baleful gaze. But a right on message isn't the only thing you need for a piece of drama. Though there's occasional pathos, this is a touch too didactic; the two men often feeling like devices through which the writers' politics are explained - like characters from an educational film. Sparx in particular could use a bit of fleshing out, Murray replaying the same facial and physical tics over and over again.
This leads to a tangible slackness in the on stage chemistry. While their comic timing is adequate, the two don't bounce off one another as satisfyingly as you'd hope. It's hardly a show-stopping flaw, more something that should (and by all appearances can) be ironed out over the course of the run.
I liked No Milk for the Foxes, but then anything that speaks with clarity, anger and forthrightness about class issues is instantly in my good books. If it were married to a more rigorously constructed piece of theatre I'd be in hog's heaven. As it is I'll just settle for straightforward enjoyment.
★★★
No Milk For the Foxes is at the Camden People's Theatre until the 9th of May. Tickets here.
Tuesday, May 28, 2013
Tuesday, May 28, 2013
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Midway through Paradise: Love we see a man dangling a ragged hunk of meat over a crocodile pond. The reptiles hiss and snap their jaws, swarming over one another in an attempt to satisfy their hunger. This is Paradise: Love in microcosm: the voracious desire for flesh intertwined with exploited African exoticism.
Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Tuesday, April 30, 2013
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First things first: there is much to admire in Mud. But despite its considerable riches, it’s a difficult film to recommend. Mud is Jeff Nichols follow-up to the critically acclaimed Take Shelter, a film that I shamefully haven’t watched yet, despite the universal praise directed at it. In a Q&A after the film he explained that it’s a project that’s been in development for about 10 years, and it’s clearly a personal film with a hell of a lot of thought put into it.
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
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If you were to ponder who to cast as a middle-aged slightly eccentric, loveable and Welsh local theatre director, I suspect one of the top names on your list would be Rob Brydon. He sits squarely in the middle of this production of Alan Ayckbourn's multi-layered comedic jab at Little England. Brydon's character Dafydd, is a solicitor who directs the local light operatic society, a job which seems to occupy nearly all of his time and thought. He's sick of the same old light opera cliches, and wants to push the boat out a bit and put on a production of John Gay's 'The Beggar's Opera'. Unfortunately he has to contend with a swirling maelstrom of petty rivalries among his cast of amateurs. Into this tricky situation comes Guy (Nigel Harmon), a lonely, introverted widower who begins to climb up to the top of the bill, initially being cast as the one line character 'Crook Fingered Jack' but eventually becoming the lead, 'Macheath'. But while he conquers the world of the stage, he's also conquering the wives of the men in the village.
This setup allows Ayckbourn to cleverly mirror the dashing and theatrical highwaymen n' whores world of Macheath and 'The Beggar's Opera' with the dowdy, kitchen sink world of village life in England. The play begins with the climax of the play, throwing us into the deep waters of 18th century operatics with the attendant petticoats and tricorn hats. I wasn't familiar with Ayckbourn's play before this, and frankly, my heart sank a little bit when I saw this. For a moment I wondered whether I'd walked into the wrong play. The posters had Rob Brydon with a cardigan on them, and he was, apparently nowhere to be seen. But soon, he walked on stage and began making that slightly cheesy "thank-you to everyone" speech. Weirdly, structuring the play like this means that we begin the play with a big round of applause for everyone, which is at least novel.
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| Our cast |
But then the stage lights go down, and Guy is left on stage. He changes out of his glamourous scarlet costume, and into a dowdy M&S beige outfit, and time rewinds to three months earlier when Guy first walked through the door to audition for a part. This device neatly sidesteps some of the cliche inherent in a drama about a small-scale drama production. For one, we know from the beginning that it's going to be a roaring success, and that Guy will eventually play a damn good Macheath. So we're primed to ignore any on-stage tension about whether the play will go ahead or not. What generates the drama is the journey rather than the destination, the evolving interactions and relationships between this group of characters, with a focus on how they orbit around the central character of Guy.
Guy might be the protagonist, but in this production the audience's attention and affection is entirely with Rob Brydon's Dafydd. The role doesn't see Brydon stretching himself particularly far, and if I hadn't have known better I might have assumed it'd been written for him (I suspect that Brydon wanted to make a West End stage debut, and they found a play suitable for him). If there ever was a man to deliver slightly exasperated dialogue in a strong Welsh accent it'd be Brydon. The tragedy of the character is the lack of respect he has from those around him. Nominally he's in charge of this company and appears to be a perfectly competent director. The problems arise when it quickly becomes apparent that while this is a passion for him, it's far less serious for the cast, who use the production as an excuse to either relieve boredom, gossip or play mind games with each other.
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| Matthew Cottle as Ted, and Rob Brydon as Dafydd |
There is an essential sadness to Dafydd, shown through the occasional self aware flickers he has of the ridiculousness of his situation. In perhaps his most melancholy moment, he tells Guy that he spends all his time worrying about the problems of the production, which are irrelevant outside the theatre and no time worrying about the very real and serious problems that face him "out there, in the real world". This faint strain of misery hidden underneath an upbeat and friendly mask is visible in all Brydon's best dramatic work, seen most easily in 'Gavin and Stacey', and subtly but effectively in 'The Trip'.
While Brydon's characters may be masking an underlying sadness, the mask is at least a hilarious one. He's by far the funniest thing on stage here, whether he's interrupting Guy's audition to sing loudly in Welsh, fussing about with the lighting manager while unbeknownst to him his marriage disintegrates under the very spotlight he's testing or simply rolling around on the floor moaning after being kicked in the bollocks. Brydon is the selling point of the show, and all eyes are quite rightfully on him when he's on stage.
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| Nigel Harmon's Guy |
This is an ensemble piece though and Brydon is just a cog in a larger machine, one geared around Nigel Harmon's Guy. Guy is an extremely peculiarly played character, a lothario who appears to have no real interest in women or sleeping with them, yet begins screwing his way through most of the female cast. He's a softly spoken sphinx, a depressed enigma in beige slacks and inexplicably the women go crazy for him. I can only guess that the fact that these women so readily drop their knickers for him is an indictment of the boredom of small-town marriage life, and the hunger for something, anything new.
Of course, there is also the less charitable interpretation that Harmon's performance is missing the mark entirely. I'm not sure how the role is played in other productions, but it is almost impossible to sympathise or even to like Guy, who is exasperating in his naivety and nebbishness. With this black hole of a personality squatting in the centre, the structure of the play feels deformed and we're alienated from everyone on stage except Brydon.
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| Georgia Brown as Bridget |
The rest of the cast puts in some spirited performances, especially Georgia Brown as the vaguely punky, sullen stage manager Bridget. All of the other characters slot easily into this small world, happily occupying societal roles that seem decided in advance. Bridget is the only one that seems to bristle under the petty gossip and small-minded misogynistic Conservativism that flows through the town. Ashley Jensen, as Dafydd's frustrated and miserable wife Hannah would like to rebel against this life of repairing socks and general housewifery, but tragically lacks the imagination to truly break free, and settles for attaching herself, limpetlike, to the boring Guy. You find yourself wondering exactly how she sees a life with Guy as an improvement over life with Dafydd, who at least seems like a kind man.
The other characters don't have quite such a strong focus, and while everyone on stage is a competent performer there is only so much you can do characters who seem to be wandering archetypes, the same old stereotypes you'd find cropping up in every small-town English comedic drama from here to eternity.
Rob Brydon just about keeps the production's head above water, and supplies the vast majority of the laughs. Even so, this is a comedy that's ponderous and melancholy rather than fast-paced and quick witted. No-one seems to move with any kind of urgency and it's difficult to detect that anyone particularly cares about their fate. At times it feels like these characters have been sedated, that this English life has sapped them of any capacity for true passion and any we do detect is merely them going through the motions, a cast playing not very good actors who are rubbish off as well as on stage. As a cynical indictment of the vanity, pettiness, greed and mindless lust of Little England it's viciously successful. As an entertaining way to spend nearly three hours, not so much.
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