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Showing posts with label finborough theatre. Show all posts
Showing posts with label finborough theatre. Show all posts
Saturday, January 7, 2017
Saturday, January 7, 2017
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Does the 1812 Overture have more intrinsic value than While My Guitar Gently Weeps? Questions like these fuel Tony Harrison's The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus: a propulsive, high-spirited and rather pointed experiment in lyrical theatre. Over 75 minutes we explore dusty ruins, rub shoulders with A-listers of the Greek Pantheon and watch a chorus of floppy fabric cocks rhythmically bounce.
We open in 1907 with the search for a lost Sophocles play in the rubbish dumps of the ancient Greek city of Oxyrhynchus. The long dead inhabitants of the city scribbled through miles of papyrus, etching down everything from tax returns, receipts, petitions, census material, administrative correspondence, religious observances and, all too rarely, works of great literature.
Oxford papyrologists Grenville and Hunt are poring through all this, with Grenville particularly obsessed with finding a lost play by Sophocles - the needle in the haystack. Knowing it's out there, but being unable to find it is slowly driving him to mania: “How can a person sleep/while Sophocles is rotting on an ancient rubbish heap?”.
But he's got bigger problems to worry about. Eerie noises rumble out of two millennia old trash - that only Grenville can hear. These are premonitions of the God Apollo who, indignant at spending 2000 years in a sandy shithole, proceeds to possess poor Grenville and force him to devote every atom of energy towards unearthing 'his' play. Soon, in a brilliantly exciting moment of physical theatre, a troupe of horny, floppy dicked Satyrs leap from packing crates to aid Apollo, buoyed up by his promise of riches.
The structure of the piece winds and wends; characters gradually morphing from man to God, from mythological beasts to the modern London homeless, with 5th century Mount Cyllene slowly transforming into the South Bank of the Thames. The stylistic through line is Harrison's poetry, which ducks and weaves gracefully through the piece, one moment flying high through heavenly language, the next with its nose jammed in the dirt amidst the shit and piss.
Maintaining Harrison's rhythm is a performative high-wire act, start to stumble over the words and the whole show collapses. Fortunately, Proud Haddock are experts in enunciation and outstanding orators - casually picking their way through this dense material as if they do this sort of thing every day.
A highlight is Richard Glaves as Silenus, a satyr mourning the death of his brother Marsyas. He picked and mastered the flute, discarded by the goddess Athene (she thought she looked silly playing it). When the gods were confronted by a 'lowly' beast playing beautiful music, they coaxed him into a rigged competition that ended with his skin being flayed from his flesh. Glaves weaves a grief-stricken, bitter and furious tapestry - his visceral anger its own powerful critique of the division between 'refined' Apollonian art and 'popular' Dionysian entertainment.
Also quite extraordinary is watching Tom Purbeck being torn asunder by a furious Greek god. Purbeck's sinewy physique makes him look constantly under fierce tension and his twitchy, angular body language leaves you imagining some invisible puppetmaster yanking his strings high above the stage. There's an intimidatingly real glimmer of viciousness and sadism in Purbeck's eyes when he's playing Apollo - a Bullingdon Club sneer of a being who cares not for others, so long as he fulfills his own selfish desires.
The play ends on literary apocalypse, interrogating precisely why the arts are so obsessed with searching, studying and endlessly retreading the 'classics'. Earlier in the play, reams of petitions from desperate Oxyrhyncans, pleading "me metanastes" ("don't take my home from me") were discarded as a waste of papyrus. Surely recognising the pleas and miseries of these people and applying the lessons of the past to our time is more useful than dusting off whatever adventures Sophocles had the gods going on?
Harrison leaves the question tantalisingly open. Yet The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus is no less satisfying for it. This is a timely and welcome revival that seems to expand way beyond the small interior of the Finborough Theatre, and precisely the kind of ambitious, dynamic and downright weird production I like seeing.
★★★★
The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus is at the Finborough Theatre until 28th January. Tickets here.
Friday, February 5, 2016
Friday, February 5, 2016
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Set 'somewhere in rural England', Daniel Foxsmith's Weald transports a west London audience to a remote countryside livery, crewed by two men who care for a smattering of horses. the bucolic setting quickly proves a laboratory in which to experiment with masculinity; the play prodding and poking its lab rat characters in an attempt to understand the soul of a man.
The play is centered on two men: Sam (Daniel Crellin) and Jim (Dan Parr). Jim is returning from London after six years away. He presents himself as typically cocky 25 year old whose fully acclimatised to urban life. Now he needs a job.
Enter Sam, owner of the yard, and so intrinsically rural that he probably shits fresh potatoes. He's in his 50s, constantly staring off at the horizon through squinted eyes as if trying to spot oncoming rain. He's clearly lugging round a bagful of regrets but here, at the livery, he's settled into a comfortable groove.
Both characters have hidden depths and both gradually reveal their secrets over the course of the play. These add up to a snapshot of classical masculine paranoias: from the sexual/romantic, through financial and right through to more nebulous ideas of legacy and a place in history.
Foxsmith is a careful and literate writer, carefully constructing his characters to ensure that they work as both philosophical communicators and propel the narrative. For the majority of the run-time, it's the older Sam that does much of the intellectual heavy lifting: quoting Shakespeare, Marlowe and Oliver Cromwell, giving the younger Sam lectures on the Civil War battleground their livery lies atop and attempting to impress upon him the notion that individuals should consider themselves a speck in the flow of history, or, to put it his way "you follow those who came before you".
It's a seductive argument, grounded in hundreds of years of tradition and couched in the words of England's greatest literary geniuses. Yet Jim finds it wanting, summarising his position simply with "I am my own master". Their differing outlooks create friction that eventually igniting into conflict as outside events intrude.
Underneath all that are the constant off-stage presence of the horses, presented as symbols of untamed, mysterious power that neither man can quite understand. They know the apparatus (shoes, feed, bridles, cleaning etc) like the back of their hands, but there's some surging spiritual power in the animals that unites the two.
Weald is both a complex psychologically and philosophically complex and resolves satisfyingly (if a little predictably). Crellin and Parr give it some decent dramatic welly, folding vulnerability, bravado and mordant humour into a recognisably rural mindset. Both men do a impressive job in reacting to the subtleties in each other's performance, visibly trying their hardest to empathise with one another through a thick emotional fug.
Ordinarily, this would tick all my boxes. Unfortunately for Weald, last September I saw Bea Roberts' And Then Came the Nightjars, which also explores masculinity, also takes place in a rural setting and also uses farm animals as a potent spiritual symbol. Weald suffers in comparison on almost every level, for example: Weald has an effective mise en scene, yet the wooden floor looks too fresh for an old livery and while the backdrop has a cursory splattering of mud, the costumes (except the boots) look almost new. Meanwhile, Nightjars practically manhandled its audience into a Land Rover and dropped us off in leafy Devon.
Don't get me wrong, Weald is a pretty damn good play. It's smart as hell, well-staged and features two actors who obviously hold themselves to a high performance standard. But I've seen these themes, symbology and arguments done before - and better.
Once you've had silk, cotton just isn't the same.
★★★
Weald is at the Finborough Theatre until 27 February. Tickets here.
Photos by Alex Brenner
Friday, August 28, 2015
Friday, August 28, 2015
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The first thing you notice is the floor. It's strip of shiny black PVC that pours over the performance space like an oil slick. A walkway is provided to prevent the audience from scuffing it with their shoes, hinting at an aesthetic importance. It looks like an infinite blackness - to step on it is to plunge into the abyss.
And it's into the abyss we go. My Eyes Went Dark is a fractured character study, that examines grief, madness, rage and death. Our protagonist is Nikolai Koslov (Cal MacAninch), successful Russian architect, loving husband and doting father. In an instant all this is snatched away: his family are on board a plane that collides with another aircraft. Koslov is one of the first on the scene of the crash, finding the nearly intact body of his infant daughter stuck in a tree.
Crazed with grief he takes up a lonely vigil at their grave, trying to make sense of the absolutely senseless. Refusing to accept that his life could be shattered by something as trivial as a 'mistake', he resolves to find those responsible and punish them. He eventually fixates on Thomas Olsen, the air traffic controller on duty during the accident, with tragic consequences.
My Eyes Went Dark is a complex, multi-layered narrative with an awful lot bubbling under the service. First and foremost it's a thorough psychological autopsy of a morbidly fascinating real-life story. All this actually happened: Koslov is a thinly fictionalised Vitaly Kaloyev, who suffered the exact bereavement we see on stage. His grief, eventual retribution and the consequences arising from that make for tragic reading.
From these roots spring a play about the ways loss can deform the soul. Writer Matthew Wilkinson takes multiple factors into consideration, most notably how culture informs our decisions. Prior to the incident Koslov considers himself an refined metropole, a far cry from the North Ossetian traditions of blood for blood and warfare. As he struggles to come to terms with his loss, he falls back in deep-seated cultural and religious thinking. Koslov's transformation is disquieting, raising questions about whether we can ever truly escape our upbringing.
Running underneath that is a soup of symbolic imagery. The play is a knot of Russian traditions retribution, legalistic corruption, aircraft wreckage and mangled bodies, all of which inevitably summon thoughts of Putin's Russia and the shooting down of Flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine. Though never directly named, Putin haunts proceedings in the way we slowly pick through Russian ideals of machismo and masculinity.
All this is conveyed through MacAninch's marvellously complex performance. Though studded with 'big' emotional moments; furious snarls, howls of anguish and so on, it's the smaller moments that really make the character. Micromovements of the muscles in his lips, hands clenching and unclenching, his darting, accusatory eyes and quick pauses in the dialogue give a complete picture of the man. This is powerhouse acting, though this level of skill is all but required for the play to work.
He's ably supported by Thusitha Jayasundera, playing every other role in the play. Displaying chameleonic acting skills, one scene she's a curious young child, the next a cool psychiatrist, the next a corporate lawyer. It's a credit to her performance that we're never in the slightest confusion who she's playing or what her motivations are.
Similarly buoying up MacAninch is a striking, austere set. The aforementioned PVC flooring is bordered on either end by powerful LED lights, allowing for a dynamic, expressionist design that dovetails with Koslov's state of mind. At times, the strong lighting creates scenery from beams of light, at point Koslov almost appearing as if crucified on an invisible cross.
When top class performance skills combine with a bold aesthetic and multi-layered writing, you can't go too far wrong. But perhaps the best compliment I can give My Eyes Went Dark is that it demands you approach it intellectually. Even writing this review I was determined to do it justice, though I still feel I'm scratching at the surface.
Though not one of my regular theatrical haunts, the Finborough Theatre has quickly established itself in my mind as a venue for serious, moving drama. So it's a shame that almost as soon as I discover the place I learn it's endangered by having luxury flats constructed atop it. I deeply hope it successfully fights against the planning application, any theatre willing to stage Operation Crucible and My Eyes Went Dark deserves support!
★★★★
My Eyes Went Dark is at the Finborough Theatre until 19th September. Tickets here.
Friday, July 31, 2015
Friday, July 31, 2015
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It takes a lot to impress me. Gigantic, expensive sets? Lavish costuming? Pyrotechnics? Lots of flashing lights? Pfft, whatever, any rich old sod can chuck a bunch of money onstage. What really pushes my buttons is genuine talent: theatre that requires everyone involved to be at the absolute top of their game and permits no slackness.
Operation Crucible is a perfect example: thrumming like the engine of a supercar and ticking with the precise rhythms of an atomic clock. Set in Sheffield around 12 December 1940, we experience the Blitz from the perspective of four steelworkers. They are Arthur (James Wallwork), Bob (Salvatore D'Aquilla), Tommy (playwright Kieran Knowles) and Phil (Paul Tino). All four are distinctive in their own right, their personalities running the gamut from brash confidence to social awkwardness. Yet it's as a unit that they shine, moving in mechanical synchronicity as they work lumps of red hot metal, completing each others sentences and winding around one another like birds in flight.
From the first minutes, their fierce civic pride shines brightly. These men have the grit of Sheffield stamped into their bones, they work the same industrial jobs as their fathers and see the fruits of their sweat in every inch of the city's architecture. During wartime their efforts are even more vital, creating the cogs of the Allied force that'll beat back the Nazi war machine.
But tonight it's the Nazi's turn to strike. As air raid sirens change from yellow (bombers spotted) to red (bombers bombing) the men scramble to safety. They find it in a shelter at the Marples Hotel. But with a crashing boom and a blast of hot, dusty air they find themselves in total darkness. The other people in the shelter are killed as the ceiling collapses, and the four are left buried alive, awaiting rescue or death.
This is conveyed with blank concrete walls and four stools. Everything else exists in the mind of the audience and the words of Kieran Knowles. Fortunately this language is so evocative that you practically hear the hiss of the glowing metal and taste the acrid dust hanging in the air. There's a breathless, excited quality to the delivery, as if the dialogue is tumbling unedited from the character's minds.
Achieving this speed and precision looks hard. The rat-a-tat rhythm leaves no room for mistakes, the narrative thread bouncing between all four performers at tremendous speed. Merely to recite this play would be a challenge, yet these four imbue each miniature line with character development. By the end, though the men are dressed identically, speak with one voice and have similar personalities - they're all individuals.
These are four actors at the very top of their game, all equally talented and able to draw us into their world. In the buzz of their steelwork you taste the thrill of heavy industry, workers wrenching girders and plates from raw elements. In the fragments of their home lives we feel a familial love, the men simultaneously respectful sons and loving fathers. By the time they're trapped we know them so well there's an intense dread - the low lighting and growing desperation inducing a suffocating claustrophobia as their situation worsens.
Yet they persevere, drawing strength from their unity and mutual respect. We gradually understand that the men's relationship is a microcosm of British life during the Blitz, the citizenry drawing support from one another in a situation where death can arrive at any moment.
Most strikingly of all, it gives what feels like a credible window into the past. The fingerprints of historical research are all over the dialogue, meticulous research supporting the emotional story like a scaffold. We can get a sense of what it was like to be there, to see the world through these eyes. From a contemporary perspective we also feel a sense of loss, that Thatcher's closure of Sheffield's steel industry robbed the city of identity, purpose and pride.
After premiering at this theatre in 2013, Operation Crucible has subsequently toured the nation to much acclaim, now returning to Finborough Road for a victory lap of sorts. It's well earned. Highly recommended.
★★★★
Operation Crucible is at the Finborough Theatre until 22 August. Tickets here.
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