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Showing posts with label theatre 503. Show all posts
Showing posts with label theatre 503. Show all posts
Saturday, February 20, 2016
Saturday, February 20, 2016
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Long term relationships can be a tremulous beast You can be spun up in the thrill and happiness of love one minute, then glance over at your partner the next and think "Is this really the face I want to wake up next to for the rest of my life?"
On the positive side committing to a long-term monogamous relationship is a panoply of joys; the comfortable pleasure in living life knowing that you're not facing the world alone.On the negative side: there's a whole world of hotties out there whose doors are now closed. You start to realise that your chances of ever getting your end away with (as a random example) a fittie from Botswana are shrinking dramatically each day.
Fear of missing out is what powers Jake Brunger's Four Play. Rafe (Cai Brigden) and Pete (Michael Gilbert) have been together for 7 1/2 years. They met in university while both closeted and, as such, they're "never so much has brushed against another man!". They insist that their relationship is a happy one, yet each confesses a curiosity as to what the world holds.
Enter Michael (Peter Hannah), a man with "a reputation". He's in an open relationship with Andrew (Michael James), a mutual friend from university. As if making a business case, Rafe timidly and awkwardly enquires whether Michael would be interested in spending a night alone with each of them, satisfying their respective sexual curiosities in order to save their relationship.
Following this relatively simple request, things spiral into a soup of confusion, recrimination and confusion. The four men have to evaluate their relationships with each other and their opinions of monogamy, each reaching very different conclusions about what they desire from romance and sex.
Four Play is remarkably incisive about modern relationships. A gaggle of popular hook-up apps presents us with a smörgåsbord of sweaty, sticky, promiscuous flesh - all begging for your hovering finger to tap the 'message me' button. Even if you're not actively browsing some of your friends probably are, and it can be difficult to suppress the green-eyed monster as they recount their latest lascivious conquests.
Brunger uses his characters to approach this brave new world from four different angles. Michael is immersed in it, Pete wants to dive in, Rafe is uncertain and Andrew is perfectly content with monogamy. As the narrative develops each individual is put through a crucible, having to align themselves with sexual freedom or monogamous commitment.
It does all this smartly and effectively. On top of that, Four Play is totally fucking hilarious. Each of these actors has razor-sharp comic timing, mining every last atom of laughter from already funny material.
Personal highlights were Michael's sudden slide into screeching dominance of a nervously aroused Pete, all swishing whip and leaping into sudden crouches, the opening scene in which Rafe gently dances around what he's asking and Andrew's insouciant manipulation of a casual dinner party.
Last week in my review of My Son's Husband I argued that it was successful because it got a couple of chuckles from me. Four Play had me (and the rest of the audience) in convulsions of laughter, to the point where the actors had to repeat lines that were drowned out by the audience's pleasure. I'm not going to spoil any of the best gags, but seriously, be assured this is one seriously goddamn hilarious bit of playwriting.
Thing is, the play is so funny that when the narrative takes a turn for the emotionally sincere in the final act, it's a bit disappointing. There comes a definite moment where the laughter stops, and from then on we're expected to engage with the narrative with straightforward empathy.
This abrupt gear-change is clearly intentional: comedy is inherently distancing (we laugh at rather than with his characters), so it's disappearance forces us to take things seriously. It works - by this point Brunger has done the heavy-lifting in getting us to care about his characters. Still, honestly, I didn't enjoy the climactic scenes half as much as I'd enjoyed the earlier, funnier stuff.
Four Play is easy to recommend. The cast are committed, the set is strikingly pretty (thanks Cecilia Carey) and director Jonathan O'Boyle knows how to accentuate the many pleasures of Brunger's excellent script. Even so, the last act is a tonal shift too far for my taste, especially when what's come before has been so delectably delicious.
Wednesday, October 7, 2015
Wednesday, October 7, 2015
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Rarely have I seen a man look as relieved as Paul Murphy at the end of Valhalla. 48 hours prior this production had been turned on its head with the unexpected departure of the leading man. And so at very short notice Murphy, the playwright, stepped in. It sounds foolhardy - how can you substitute for someone who's spent weeks rehearsing, develop a chemistry with your co-star and act around an on-stage copy of the script? It's the theatrical equivalent of a high-wire act sans safety net.
But here we are, watching an actor fly by the seat of his pants and, remarkably, it works. Helping is that Valhalla is a very strong piece of theatre. Set in a near-future where society has begun to collapse after a devastating global epidemic, we follow a couple, known only as Man (Paul Murphy) and Woman (Carolina Main). This crisis has exacerbated fault-lines in their marriage; he's working hard on curing the disease and she's struggling to conceive. In desperation they abandon the mainland to work from a remote house in Iceland, sequestering themselves away to concentrate on his research.
Though we spend the entirety of the play inside one sterile, brightly lit room, we're conscious of the massive Icelandic environment outside. Volcanoes bubble and hiss, thousand tonne glaciers creep and crack through valleys and fierce winds whip around the buildings. Something massive and primordial is bearing down on these two scientists: the weight of mythology banging on the doors and warping their lives. Sat in an empirical tower of reason, Man ignores these psychic reverberations while Woman begins to embrace them, with disturbing consequences.
From the off, Valhalla launches into a staccato rhythm that keeps audiences on their toes. Scenes are short and end abruptly with a blackout and musical sting that marks each minor cliffhanger and emotional revelation. The effect is that we watch two people gradually becoming unspun; each time the lights go up they've imperceptibly changed in subtle ways. By the time we reach the closing scenes they've both come a long way yet maintain the personalities and desires they had when we first met them. Theatre like this requires two rock-solid performances; the play would like a badly mixed souffle if one of the leads weren't up to snuff.
Thankfully both Murphy and Main are excellent. Somewhat aided by his character being a scientist who constantly reads his research papers, for the most part he gets away with having the script on stage. Naturally it's not an ideal way to perform, but I'd much rather suspend my disbelief than have an actor forget his lines and have to be prompted. Main, opposite him, is straightforwardly excellent. There's an electric wildness to her movements, a twitchy awkwardness that feels a little bit like a caged animal. Given that she's playing 'Woman', it's appropriate that her performance runs a gamut of femininity, layering elements of maternity, eroticism, professionalism and empathy. Simply put, she's dead fun to watch.
As events progress, the themes of the play tend towards confrontation. On the narrative surface is the conflict between the two characters. Just a little deeper lie broader dichotomies; man vs woman, science vs superstition, civilisation vs nature and so on. Eventually we zero in on questions of medical ethics, with a neat thematic dovetailing of disfiguring experiments and ancient Norse punishments.
This knotty ball of meaning climaxes in an ending that's surprising, joyous and slightly scary all at once. I won't spoil it here, but with perfect timing the director shocks the audience by turning out expectations of the form of the play on its head. It's brill.
Despite suffering a backstage nightmare, Valhalla is an unreserved success. It slots neatly into Theatre 503's growing catalogue of smartly symbolic, beautifully staged and fantastically performed plays, making it an easy recommendation. But special praise must go to Paul Murphy, who singlehandedly rescued the production by bravely putting himself in front of an audience at short notice. It could have gone so, so wrong. But it didn't. He deserves his applause.
Thankfully both Murphy and Main are excellent. Somewhat aided by his character being a scientist who constantly reads his research papers, for the most part he gets away with having the script on stage. Naturally it's not an ideal way to perform, but I'd much rather suspend my disbelief than have an actor forget his lines and have to be prompted. Main, opposite him, is straightforwardly excellent. There's an electric wildness to her movements, a twitchy awkwardness that feels a little bit like a caged animal. Given that she's playing 'Woman', it's appropriate that her performance runs a gamut of femininity, layering elements of maternity, eroticism, professionalism and empathy. Simply put, she's dead fun to watch.
As events progress, the themes of the play tend towards confrontation. On the narrative surface is the conflict between the two characters. Just a little deeper lie broader dichotomies; man vs woman, science vs superstition, civilisation vs nature and so on. Eventually we zero in on questions of medical ethics, with a neat thematic dovetailing of disfiguring experiments and ancient Norse punishments.
This knotty ball of meaning climaxes in an ending that's surprising, joyous and slightly scary all at once. I won't spoil it here, but with perfect timing the director shocks the audience by turning out expectations of the form of the play on its head. It's brill.
Despite suffering a backstage nightmare, Valhalla is an unreserved success. It slots neatly into Theatre 503's growing catalogue of smartly symbolic, beautifully staged and fantastically performed plays, making it an easy recommendation. But special praise must go to Paul Murphy, who singlehandedly rescued the production by bravely putting himself in front of an audience at short notice. It could have gone so, so wrong. But it didn't. He deserves his applause.
Thursday, September 17, 2015
Thursday, September 17, 2015
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I must admit, a play about the friendship between a farmer and the local vet doesn't exactly sound like an edge-of-your-seat thrillride. But then this is Theatre 503 - they could advertise watching paint dry and it'd be a fascinating evening. So expectations were high for And Then Come The Nightjars, especially as it's the winner of the first Theatre 503 Playwriting Award, spending a month on the London fringe before a transfer to the Bristol Old Vic.
Set in rural South Devon, the play chronicles the relationship between two men over 12 years. Michael (David Fielder) is the Platonic ideal of the west country farmer. Marvellously bBearded, gruff, practical to a fault and utterly sure of this place in the world, he fits the farmland setting perfectly. Following the death of his wife Sheila, he's devoted himself to his prize-winning herd of cows, each named after members of the Royal Family. In the opening scene, one of them is calving: he looks with the nervous tension of a father-to-be in a hospital corridor.
Assisting him is Jeff (Nigel Hastings). He's a middle-class professional, more effete than the farmers he assists but respected for his veterinary skills. Michael and Jeff jokily pass the time with one another, nervously alluding to dark tidings on the horizon. This proves to be the beginnings of the Foot and Mouth epidemic that carved a bloody swathe across rural Britain, necessitating the destruction of tens of thousands of cows.
Later that year, an already traumatised Jeff has been tasked with killing all of Michael's cows. Michael is despondent, angry and desperate, scrabbling around for some get-out clause and pleading with Jeff not to murder 'his girls'. Yet it must be done, their friendship becoming poisoned by pyres of smoking bone and sizzling grease. Is it possible to forgive after this?
A contemporary rural setting is a rare sight on stage. Firstly, playwrights tend to both live in and write about cities (as, well, that's where theatres are), combined with the obvious difficulties in recreating the great British countryside in a room above a Battersea pub. But the moment you see Max Dorey's outstanding set, the thrum of metropolitan life recedes into the distance. As someone who largely grew up in the countryside, the attention to detail was stunning; from the power extension cords snaking around the breezeblock walls to the dirt marks on the wooden beams to (in a seriously brilliant touch) the dots of moss collecting in the grooves of the corrugated plastic roof; this is an deeply evocative bit of set design.
It's aided by Sally Ferguson's excellent lighting scheme that conjuries up the world beyond. Various forms of sunlight illuminate the room, slatted rays shining through the beams or the gentle orange-pink sunrise streaming in through an open door. In more dramatic moments, everything else cuts out to leave the harsh orange of flickering flames, underlined by the hiss and crackle of burning flesh.
This technical and artistic precision makes for a rock solid performative scaffolding. Both David Fielder and Nigel Hastings are outstanding in their roles, effortlessly involving us in the fears, joys and sadness of their characters. Fielder that stands out, imbuing Michael with hilariously rough-hewn sturdiness. As we progress to the point where his beloved cows are scheduled for destruction, his gruff masculinity slipping away as he pleads for their lives. It's heartbreaking - Fielder achieves emotional rawness that I genuinely straight-up cared about the welfare of these imaginary, off-stage cows. This is a scarily intense sequence, yet more restrained delights follow, culminating in a touching paean to an undisturbed, quiet rural life.
Hastings has a slightly trickier job. Nigel has to be broken down and reconstituted, with the trickiest bit playing him concussed, drunken and blood-smeared without dipping too far into slapstick. He achieves this with gusto, physically embodying every aspect of drunkenness (a highpoint being a disturbingly realistic portrayal of a guy about to puke all over himself). By the time the curtain falls the two actors have intertwined around one other, each equally supporting the other.
I'd never seen a Bea Roberts play prior to this, but by this standard she's clearly an outstanding writer. And Then Come The Nightjars is a play with scope: one moment a knockaround comedy double act, the next a traumatising psychodrama, even (for a brief moment) a soft-shoe-shuffle vaudeville number. Despite this tonal range, the core drama is solidly locked down, the shifting relationship between these two men utterly compelling.
It's this level of all-around quality that fringe theatre should aspire to; focussing on nuanced performances and intelligent staging rather than heaping ladles of razzle-dazzle. This is Theatre 503's carefully staked out territory, and as someone who sees an awful lot of fringe theatre, they've once again reminded me why they're the best in town.
And Then Come The Nightjars is quite brilliant. Whether in London or Bristol - go!
★★★★
And Then Come The Nightjars runs at Theatre 503 until 26 September, and then at the Bristol Old Vic from 6 - 17 October 2015.
Friday, December 26, 2014
Friday, December 26, 2014
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Whenever the big yearly theatre awards swing around I always a get a bit befuddled. Half the plays nominated I've never even heard of, and the winners tend to be things I thought stunk up the place. This is a symptom of living in a city with upwards of a hundred theatres, not just the big plastercast and chandelier glitz palaces of the West End, but the sweatboxes above pubs, tucked into the basements of shops and the very streets of London itself. Once again I've seen an awful lot this year, but here's my favourites:
HONOURABLE MENTIONS
'The Picture of John Gray' at the Old Red Lion Theatre, 8th August 2014
While watching The Picture of John Gray I assumed it was a revival of some unjustly forgotten classic. I was blown away when I later learned that this was the first staging of a new work by C.J. Willmann. Emulating the cut and thrust conversations of late Victorian aesthetes is a tricky prospect, much less interweaving a genuinely touching love story and interrogation of hedonism versus Christianity. That script, coupled with a confident cast and intelligent staging, made for a total triumph. Best of it, it spurred me on to learn more about the people featured within, a gaggle of people with outstanding biographies.
'King Charles III' at the Wyndham's Theatre, 13th December 2014
That a play so virulently anti-monarchy can be released to wide acclaim in 2014 warms the cockles of my heart. Merely voicing suspicions of the monarchy makes you feel like a social pariah, let alone advocating their safe, smooth but quick removal from power. Their laminated, rubbery faces peer from the front of every magazine, every new familial development greeted with hushed deference from the media. I shudder when I see the submissive masses furiously tugging their forelocks at the neverending cycle of weddings, jubilees and births.
Yet in the midst of all this Mike Bartlett's King Charles III reminds us that a) these people are morons, b) they're a medieval anachronism and c) the Royal family are a potential political catastrophe. I was all a-quiver with enjoyment from minute one until the curtain fell; a play that may as well have been made for me.
'Cans' at Theatre 503, 7th November 2014
One major advantage theatre has over other narrative forms is the intensification of emotions. Obviously it's possible to be moved by television and cinema, but when you have a living human being being put through the emotional wringer mere feet from you, their tears glistening under stage lights, it's so much more visceral. This is further magnified when a playwright chooses to probe an open wound, in Cans' case the tendency of popular radio personalities to rape and abuse their way through their fans.
Stuart Slade even takes the difficult path through this subject, examining the limits of sympathy and empathy by showing us the impact of a destroyed reputation on the DJ's family members. Both Jennifer Clement and Graham O'Mara knocked their roles out of the park. A bold play that successfully picks its way through a figurative minefield. My kinda stuff.
WINNER
'Here Lies Love' at the National Theatre, 17th October 2014
Given my twin love of both Talking Heads and chunky dance beats, it is unsurprising that I dug Here Lies Love right down to its molten core. This is a musical like few others, less a passive experience and more like you're attending the greatest party on earth. The songs are upbeat, the costumes are dynamic and the performers simply sweat charisma. The performance space roughly simulates being in a nightclub, the audience either looking down on the dancefloor or right in the midst of things being bumped by elbows and catching the eyes of the pretty person dancing next to you. It's an intoxicating vibe.
Offsetting these good times is that Here Lies Love tells the story of Imelda Marcos, an egomaniacal monster who exploited the peoples of the Philippines, living a life of luxury while the people starved. But Byrne doesn't so much show us her life as try and seduce us into it, the show roughly emulating the amphetamine rush of living within a neverending party where anything flies. It's equivalent to Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street in condemning behaviour while showing it as enjoyable - but where Scorsese just lets us watch his wild parties, Byrne lets us dance, drink and lust away with Imelda. It's ace and it's still on in the National. If you dig cool theatre you've got to check it out!
Sunday, November 9, 2014
Sunday, November 9, 2014
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Set entirely in a dingy Yorkshire garage, Cans begins with its two characters drowning trapped mice. It isn't the cheeriest opening sequence I've ever seen, but then this isn't the cheeriest play I've ever seen either. Writer Stuart Slade grasps a very painful and timely nettle; historic sexual abuse in the entertainment industry. With the cackle of Savile still ringing in our ears, this feels like theatre set firmly in 2014.
Seizing upon a wider sense of public betrayal and anger; Cans understands that examining the actual abuse is next to impossible to tastefully stage, so instead we probe the aftermath. The vehicles for this drama are Uncle Len (Graham O'Mara) and his niece Jen (Jennifer Clement), a disconsolate, slightly crushed pair who glug their way through Strongbow while hiding from the world in their garage.
Len is instantly familiar; an extroverted loudmouth who hoots and hollers in unfunny skits to conceal his own inadequacies. He's not the brightest tool in the shed and we quickly surmise that he's pissed away the best years of his life in a haze of cheap cider and nights spent glued to a barstool. For all that, we sense a glimmer of basic kindness deep down inside. Gradually we understand that his personality is a symptom of some deeper psychological wounds.
The straightman to his acting out is his niece Jen, who's more outwardly depressed. Sullen, withdrawn and hiding underneath a baggy jumper, she's volatile and defensive. We quickly realise that she's grieving, and like detectives we slowly piece together the jigsaw of what's happened. Without spoiling too much, her beloved father has died in disgrace and the play follows her through the stages of grief as she tries to come to terms with her perception of him.
Though this is a two man play there's a third, unseen character looming above. Never named, Jen's father and Len's brother haunts the play; from the junk behind the characters, to the boxes of clothes, books and anecdotes that reveal the life of the dead man. Eventually we build a mental picture of the man; an amalgam of Rolf Harris and Dave Lee Travis with a pinch of Alan Partridge for good measure. Our perceptions gradually shift throughout the play, roughly aligning with Jen's.
Cans swings its tonal pendulum between depressing and funny, the generally gloomy tone punctuated by moments of mordant black humour and odd splodge of genuine goofiness. What shines through above all else is an extreme empathy; most obviously towards Jen and Len, but stretching out to the peripheral characters we only hear about and even, boldly, towards the disgraced rapist.
The idea of 'sympathy for the rapist' is a unimaginably deadly dramatic minefield, especially when the victims are anonymous off-stage presences. Cans successfully traverses it not by justifying or defending unforgivable actions, but by analysing them as the actions of a person rather than a monster. Cleverly we demolish some false defences: that it happened so long ago that he can't be held accountable now, that the good the rapist did in his life outweighs the bad or that simply someone who was such a good father couldn't possibly have done things like this.
Slade is smart enough to allow us to identify and sympathise with his characters at precisely the same time as we recognise that they're in deep denial. This is the knot that lies at the heart of the play, layers upon layers of lies, anger and paranoia gradually being disentangled and discarded until we arrive at a cathartic acceptance that Cans has painfully earned.
Both Graham O'Mara and Jennifer Clement give beautifully complex performances. They quickly establish a mutually supportive performance style whereby one can feed from the other's performance. The sense that they're old friends bouncing off each is crucial to making the characters work, and at their best moments you can almost peer inside their heads and watch their thoughts formulate. Though both Jen and Len are occasionally exasperating and sometimes just plain wrong, the carefully pitched performances give us space to totally disagree with them and still find them basically likeable.
The entire play being set inside a concrete walled garage doesn't make for the most dynamic staging you'll ever see; but the grey walls adequately mirror the numb emotional funk that fills the play, something underlined by the detritus of a dead man that's scattered all around them. Among this naturalistic scenery there's a few expressionistic touches, between scenes the fluorescent flicker madly, sending harsh shadows across the scattered furniture. Within this there's a careful attention to detail. As we go through the dead man's possessions we can read the books he read, all of which appear to have been chosen specifically for what they say about him. It's touches like these that elevate a production above the crowd, cramming character into even the smallest part of the production.
I go to the theatre a lot, and (with some exceptions) you can usually tell within the first 10 minutes whether a play is going to suck. In Cans I realised almost straight away that it was going to be great. This is a confident, intelligent and well executed piece of drama that deserves an audience. Go check it out!
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