LONDON CITY NIGHTS

Space by Luxmuralis reviewed by David James
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Central London's many churches are, quietly, one of the city's greatest features. In an urban landscape in which glass and steel skyscrapers sprout and wither in the blink of an eye, their permanence connects us to generations of Londoners who came before us.

Wander inside any random London church, and you'll find a peaceful history lesson, the walls studded with the names of long-forgotten dignitaries and each with some unique historical nugget on or in it, be it a surviving Anglo-Saxon arch, a detailed model of Old London Bridge, or (my fave) a stretch of genuine Roman pavement in a crypt.

There's only one problem. Come Sunday, nobody's in the pews. So, if these churches are no longer for worshipping God, what are they for? Well, something has to be worshipped, and Space by Luxmuralis decides humanity's ingenuity and intelligence fit the bill.

This is a light and sound show that takes place on, under, and inside St Martin-in-the-Fields church on Trafalgar Square - a building I've strolled past countless times but never been into. It's an old, old building that's been a site of worship for centuries. I mean, when was the last time this part of London was a field?

Anyhow, Luxmuralis bill themselves as one of the world's "leading exponents of fine art, light and sound installations", promising "immersive fine art experiences which combine the qualities of light and sound through contemporary media".

Space proves to be a fairly loosely defined meditation on humanity's exploration of the stars, taking us through the Apollo landings and into a psychedelic show projected over the altar. 

Judging by last night, anyone attending should prepare themselves for quite a bit of queuing to get in. The organisers are clearly fully aware of that, as much of the show is a stealthy way to keep visitors engaged as they're slowly funneled towards the interior of the church itself for the main event.

Once sat in a pew, it's worth the wait. There's clear inspiration from 2001: A Space Odyssey here, from a score that feels like it's taking cues from Strauss' Blue Danube Waltz over majestic space footage. This eventually progresses into what feels like a modernized take on the "Star Gate" sequence at the film's end, with the church transformed into a swirling kaleidoscope of colours as we're rushed through a wormhole.

It doesn't take a lot to make me happy, so sitting in a beautiful historic building watching pretty colors fly about and listening to nice music was fundamentally a good time. Is it immersive? Nah, not really. But what does that word even mean these days?

Space is abstract stuff that focuses on vibes, so don't go into this expecting to come out actually knowing anything new about space travel. In fact, the children I saw who'd been brought along by their well-meaning parents got a bit bored after ten minutes of classical music and swirling lights.

Archaeologists think St Martin-in-the-Fields was built on the site of what was once a pagan temple, which became a Roman burial ground, then a Christian church by the 11th century. Events like this underline that Christianity may also soon have to relinquish this space, just as the pagans, Anglo-Saxons, and Romans did before them. 

But hey, if we're worshipping science now, this architecture absolutely provides the appropriate level of awe for man's achievements.

Space by Luxmuralis is at St Martin-in-the-Fields until 21 February. Tickets here.

Give Me the Sun reviewed by David James
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Opening a play titled Give Me the Sun this week is like putting something out called 'Cough in My Face' at the height of COVID. It's not a great time to be sat inside a theatre, though this intriguing hour-long two-hander from Mamet Leigh and director Majid Mehdizadeh is worth a little sweat.

With a government struggling to enact an inhumane policy of deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda and a media united in stoking public hatred for anyone with an accent who dares set foot on these shores, a story in which a second-generation immigrant yearns for a land they can only imagine comes at an opportune time.

In the rush to depict immigrants as parasites living on the taxpayer's dime, it seems to be forgotten that most would almost certainly rather not completely uproot their lives and undertake a potentially fatal journey across the world to a country ruled by politicians competing to say the most monstrous things they can get away with. But if it's short-term pain versus long-term safety then I can understand rolling the dice.

Give Me the Sun offers a perspective on this I hadn't seen before. Baba (Aso Sherabayani) emigrated to the U.K. from Egypt fifteen years ago and has tried to become as English as possible. He no longer speaks Arabic, is divorced from Egyptian culture, and - as the programme explains - "has decorated their council flat with a classic English interior".

Baba is doing his best for his son Bashir (Joseph Samimi), who arrived in England with him and only has hazy memories of Egypt. Now 18, he yearns to reconnect with his roots, presses his reluctant father for details of their life in Egypt, is upset that there's a language barrier between him and his extended family, and wishes he could return to a fondly imagined homeland where he might fit in.

As the show repeats a couple of times, Bashir feels like "dirt in water" between the earth and sky, neither English nor Egyptian.

The impasse between a father who's sacrificed so much to give his son freedom vs a son who can't ever appreciate that gift makes for juicy drama. Every decision made by the pair stems is right, but their differing perspectives mean they can't ever truly empathise with each anothers' lives.

It's a point of view I haven't seen elsewhere, fuelled by emotions I've never had to experience. It's a reminder that simply being comfortable in a cultural/national identity is an invisible privilege, one that some of the most victimised people in this country don't have. 

But Give Me the Sun isn't just a thought experiment, it's also a decent piece of drama. Early on there's a technical fly in the ointment as the ventilation system making the first five minutes inaudible, but a few minutes in a member of staff mercifully switched it off and we could hear what's going on.

Both Samimi and Sherabayani have a casual familiarity with one another that makes their father/son relationship believable, which in turn cranks up the volume on the tense moments. An hour-long play isn't a lot of time to flesh out two characters, but each of them brings characterisation beyond what's already in the text.

My only real criticism is that the medical subplot comes across as a little extraneous. I don't really want to get into spoiler territory, but the characters indicating a pill bottle on the coffee table is like Chekhov making sure you absolutely notice that there's a loaded gun sat on the mantlepiece. Much of this play's power is that this is an average night in a regular house with normal people, so barreling into life and death territory feels unnecessary.

But these are quibbles. Give Me the Sun isn't some self-consciously worthy play about an 'important issue', it's a character piece that satisfyingly intersects with political and social issues. And that's very much my jam

Give Me the Sun is at the Blue Elephant Theatre until 16 July 2022. Tickets here.

Reviewed by David James
Rating: 

It's adorable looking back at the 1980s "video nasties". The idea that something like Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead was ever a danger to anyone is absurd. Even so, 1980s tabloids breathlessly assured the public that exposure to Bruce Campbell and a couple of buckets of fake blood would cause irrevocable harm to the nation's morality.

Writer/director Stuart Warwick's Moral Panic takes us inside the British Board of Film Censors on the cusp of its mid-80s transformation into the more cuddly-sounding British Board of Film Classification. 

Our viewpoint is Jack Cooper's Charles Hawthorne, a model of prissy paternalism whose god-given mission as protecting the weak-minded public from blood, boobs, and blasphemy. And as for why they're susceptible while he isn't? Well, he's blessed with a public school education. He knows better.

From minute one we know Hawthorne is heading for a fall. Notions of "obscenity"  weakened throughout the 1980s, with the BBFC slowly relaxing their standards in the face of more liberally-minded areligious audiences who didn't want their horror flicks slashed to ribbons.

Our future is personified by a young new censor Veronica Nardelli, whose permissive nature towards censorship runs counter to everything Hawthorne holds dear. But when it suddenly seems she might leapfrog over him into a promotion he covets something must be done...

Jack Cooper as Charles Hawthorne

I won't go further into what actually happens as there are twists in the tale that shouldn't be spoiled, but this hour-long single-hander wraps up with a decently dark punchline that leaves us on a high note.

The most obviously praiseworthy element is Cooper's performance, which is underlined by a fastidiously groomed moustache making him look more like hes from the 1940s than the 1980s. Hawthorne is all tightly coiled pride and nervy energy, obsessed with maintaining cold emotional detachment despite his true thoughts written all over his face.

He's also great when briefly playing other characters as and when they're needed in scenes. By necessity the other characters are broad caricatures, though there's an argument that we're seeing them through his character's unpleasant mental filter. 

But though I enjoyed Moral Panic I found myself wishing it'd connected the dots between now and then. The ebb and flow of permissiveness versus censoriousness over the decades is very politically relevant - with the BBC posting articles wondering whether Mary Whitehouse "was ahead of her time".

Moral Panic skirts the edge of this conversation but ultimately shies away from it, making a beeline towards allegory rather than revealing its political hand. For example, I'd be interested to know whether the playwright considered Charles an evolutionary precursor to "cancel culture" or if he'd trace a line from his unearned chauvinist confidence to modern right-wing commentators.

And also - and this is simply speaking as a horror fan - in a play about dark doings that references the gooiest of splatter movies I'd have liked to have seen a bit of the red stuff on stage. But hey, maybe that bloodlust is proof that video nasties really did warp our minds?

Moral Panic runs until 10 July at Riverside Studios in Hammersmith. Tickets here.

Outside reviewed by David James
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Broken people and bad times are my kinda theatre, and in Outside writer/director/actor Gabrielle MacPherson serves up a positively bulging smorgasbord of misery, violence, revenge and despair. I don’t know why I’m so attracted to stories like these, but give me something gloomy anyway over some saccharine musical.

We spend an hour in the company of Willa, a young woman apparently sorting through the detritus of her parents’ lives. She’s surrounded by cardboard boxes stuffed with documents: love letters sent by her philandering father, business receipts from her mum and, something deep inside, a document that could save her life.

As you’d expect from a play advertised with the main character’s face spattered with blood, Willa’s story isn’t all sunshine and roses. The monologue slowly gives us pieces that make up the sad jigsaw of her life: physical and mental abuse, visits from social workers, moving towns to avoid too much attention, and any thoughts of liberation squashed by being told what’s out there is worse.

It all adds up to a jagged character who tumbles between various emotions, as if she’s never learned the right social cues on how to behave. The piece is full of dark little vignettes, the creepiest of which comes when she adopts a kitten. The “spiky little thing” becomes sick and Willa casually dumps its unconscious body in the bin, so as to hide the fact she had a kitten. Her treatment of it is a subconscious echo of what we gather has been done to her and it sent shivers up my spine.

The reality of what's happening now is a mystery for most of the play (or it was to me at least), but if you’ve seen stories like this before you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out what's bubbling just under the surface.

MacPherson’s writing puts an admirable amount of trust in the audience, giving us a trail of breadcrumbs to follow through the story and having confidence that we’re able to assemble into a coherent whole. This kind of thing is harder than it looks, so it’s a testament to her skill that it all feels so natural.

It’s also performed beautifully and proved my maxim that the only place to sit in fringe theatre is in the front row. That gives you the chance to interact with the performer - and MacPherson frequently made eye contact with me, helping both raise the tension and drag me into her world.

I gather that Outside had its first performances during lockdown over live-stream. While those reviews seem to be positive the show reminded me of the importance of being present during a performance. In person there’s no getting distracted by playing with your phone, no connection issues or audience glitches, and comfort from your familiar surroundings.

But Outside really benefits from being seen in person, as being locked in with Willa was quite a ride. 

Outside is at the Rosemary Branch until 20 November. Tickets here.

Not Lady Chatterley's Lover reviewed by David James
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There's a brand of bourgeois British comedy that I find as fun as having needles jammed under my fingernails. Think Radio 4 on a Sunday afternoon, a 7pm ITV sitcom, or Carry On. Happy Idiot's Not Lady Chatterley's Lover lands squarely in this territory and about five minutes in I realized with a doom-like curl of dread the nightmare I'd signed up for.

The show parodies D.H. Lawrence's 1928 novel Lady Chatterley's Lover, more famous for the 1960 obscenity trial than its merits as a piece of literature. Lawrence's book skewers British class, centering on the intense sexual relationship between Lady Chatterley and her gamekeeper Mellors. All that comes alongside a then-progressive view of sexuality, frank descriptions of sex acts, and a gradual dismantling of the idea that fucking is something to ashamed of.

Not Lady Chatterley's Lover clearly disagrees, sticking to the British default of being incapable of talking with sex without resorting to tired innuendo and double entendres. It's 2021 for god's sake, we should be able to talk about sex without stammering out vaguely transphobic jokes about men in fishnet stockings. The inability to deal with this is eventually proven when they quote Lawrence directly, then smirk and toss the book off stage, dismissing the explicit dialogue as "weird". 

Perhaps I'm taking a goofy comedy too seriously, but it's not like we're inundated with stage adaptations of Lady Chatterley's Lover and - despite being smothered by inane gags - the skeleton of Lawrence's story is still compelling. But that factor results in constant friction between the source material and the comedy.

Most obvious are the continual gags about people with disabilities. The inciting incident for the book Lord Chatterley has been injured in World War I and is now paralysed from the waist down. This is naturally a source of continual gags at the expense of people in wheelchairs, with particular hilarity drawn from the fact that he's now also impotent. 

To be fair, this did lead to the single funniest aspect of the evening: that there was a guy from the Royal Legion selling poppies in the theatre lobby. I wonder what he'd have made of the well-to-do Greenwich crowd chortling away at the antics of the traumatised veteran and his ruined marriage.

I don't really have much more to say because the experience just made me kinda sad about what can pass for comedy. For the sake of honesty I should say that most of the audience seemed to be enjoying themselves, so this crap obviously appeals to someone. 

The most positive thing about the night was reaching the interval and discovering - to my intense relief - that my girlfriend hated it just as much as I did. Having a press ticket means I'm dutybound to stick around until the final curtain, but she got to duck out and go home early. Still, if nothing else this was a great sense of humour litmus test: if she'd been guffawing alongside the hogs in that theatre it'd have been time to reconsider the relationship.

So yeah, total shite. Avoid.

Not Lady Chatterley's Lover is now on tour. Tickets here etc etc.

iMelania reviewed by David James
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First thoughts were that a play about Melania Trump might have missed the bus. After all, with Joe Biden in the White House and a whole new set of problems tearing the world apart, who has the time for a former First Lady who was often invisible even when her husband was the leader of the free world?

But iMelania acknowledges and incorporates its subject's absence to make a smart and concise statement on identity. At the core is the paradox of Melania Trump: an immigrant married to a man defined by his anti-immigration policies. 

The show nails why she's intriguing and frustrating, with her actual pronouncements and interviews so anodyne you can't help but try and figure out what she's *really* thinking. What does the smiling vanishing from her face the nanosecond her husband turns away mean? Is she really rolling her eyes as he speaks? Why in god's holy name did she wear a coat with "I really don't care, do u" on it during a trip intended to show the opposite?

Varjack-Lowry dig through these mixed messages in a smartly produced online show that takes place over two screens. This isn't complicated: the performance consists of two streaming videos played in sync that simulate WhatsApp conversations and a laptop desktop. It's technologically straightforward but neatly simulates the way most of us consume current affairs.

The early segments recapping Melania's greatest hits are entertaining enough, especially in how they highlight the way the Trump presidency is rapidly curdling into nostalgia, but the show properly comes to life when it gets personal.

The focus on nationality and identity is refracted through Brexit, with both Varjack and Lowry ruminating on how their legal nationalities map onto their personal identities. There's a cruel precision to some of this: with the most moving part the keenly felt injustice of missing out on an Italian passport because you were born two months after the 1992 cut-off date.

The longer the show goes on the more Melania looks like a perversely good mirror for the immigrant experience, particularly the way she juggles contradictory identities. For instance, when Varjack and Lowry discuss the struggle of being legally considered something you're not it's easy to map that onto footage of Melania being praised by right-wing media as the epitome of the All-American woman.

The show ends on an anticlimax, though that's not Varjack-Lowry's fault. iMelania was supposed to have been staged in summer 2020 when it seemed all too plausible that its subject would have stayed in the limelight for another four years. But COVID got in the way, though in a strange way it's appropriate that Melania has apparently vanished off the face of the Earth since being booted out of the White House. 

Trying to nail her down is like trying to grasp onto a fistful of sand. There's no personality except for a vague cattiness and no politics except a very muted echo of her husband's fury. By the time the virtual curtain dropped I'd started to see her as a human Rorschach test, an outline to be coloured in as you see fit. Hell, maybe there never really was a Melania Trump and we all collectively imagined her into existence.

With COVID now (hopefully) receding into the distance and theatres re-opening these innovative online performances may start to vanish. But it'd be a shame if they disappeared completely as iMelania proves how powerful digital theater can be.

Bad Nights and Odd Days reviewed by David James
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As the lockdowns lift and theatres open their creaking doors, dust down their stages, and warm up the lights, it's forgivable that there's a hell of a lot of plays on the way about COVID. After all, Britain's playwrights and actors have been deprived of an audience for far too long and their job is to process the last 18 months through drama. 

But in the midst of all that soul-searching and societal psychoanalysis, there's got to be room for shows that just want to have some goofy fun. Enter Andrew Corbet Burcher's Going Ape.

Set a few hundred years after Adam and Eve (Siôn Lloyd and Melanie La Barrie) were booted out of the Garden of Eden, we find them as a bickering married couple awaiting a visit from Cain (Gabriel Vick). He arrives with his new girlfriend Lucy (Laura Tyrer) in tow, an Australopithecus with plans for personal evolution. They're soon joined by new brother Seth (Henry Collie), a budding musician canoodling with his girlfriend Genevieve (Anabel Kutay).

Siôn Lloyd and Melanie La Barrie as Adam and Eve

At times Going Ape feels like a sitcom pilot, each character is broadly drawn and nothing is taken seriously. Lloyd channels Fred Flintstone via Jim Royle for his Adam, behaving as the classic put-upon patriarch around which the drama is built, with each subsequent character slotting into extremely familiar archetypes. I also particularly enjoyed Vick's "gap yah" trust fund dope Cain and the way Tyrer pulled a reverse Flowers for Algernon as she got smarter (and bossier).

It's also very loosely plotted, with the first half of the show a series of character introductions and the second showing them putting on "the first show" to retell Genesis. But narrative isn't necessarily important for a comedy as long as it delivers jokes, and Going Ape successfully cleared my "make me actually laugh three times" bar for a successful comedy.

But though it caused ripples of giggles, I realised that comedies face an uphill battle while social distancing is on. Smaller audiences mean fewer laughs no matter how funny you are and this lessened feedback must affect the performances. Even so, I chuckled a whole bunch throughout: enjoying Adam taking his job of naming the animals seriously - especially when getting snooty about Lucy naming herself 'Australopithecus' ("what kind of name is that?!"), everyone's shared joy over discovering bananas, and the interactions with God towards the end of the play.

Gabriel Vick and Henry Collie as Cain and Seth

There are a couple of clangers. I wasn't a huge fan of Collie's obliviously dim Seth, who was too broad even for this material - and I don't understand why he was dressed as a beatnik. Perhaps this was simply to facilitate the worst moment in the show in which they make a reference to The Fast Show, a gag that feels like its fallen out of a time warp from 25 years ago and should be jettisoned immediately.

I don't want to bag on Going Ape too hard. It might not be the tightest, side-splitting, or most narratively propulsive show around, but I can't deny I had a good time. Smiling and laughing as part of an audience still feels alien (and likely will for a while yet) and honestly, it's nice to watch something that's pure silly escapism that has zero relevance to the nightmare world beyond the theatre door.

Going Ape is at the Union Theatre until 10 July 2021. Tickets here.