LONDON CITY NIGHTS

Saturday, January 18, 2020

Review: 'Beckett Triple Bill' at the Jermyn Street Theatre, 17th January 2020

Saturday, January 18, 2020 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Reviewed by David James

Rating: 

Joan Rivers once said "There is nothing funny about ageing. It is rotten and depressing. Anyone who tells you otherwise just hasn't been paying attention." After seeing director Trevor Nunn's Samuel Beckett triple bill at the Jermyn Street Theatre I'm inclined to agree.

The trio of plays consists of Krapp's Last Tape, Eh Joe and The Old Tune, which add up to just over two hours. The three plays all see elderly men reflecting on their past, each of them haunted by memories that slip through their fingers like sand through an hourglass. Common to all are frequent haunted expressions, as if the characters are coming to a sudden crushing realisation that they've reached a dead end.

If you're not familiar with Beckett, the show throws you in at the deep end with Krapp's Last Tape. The majority of the first 15 minutes consist of the elderly Krapp wandering aimlessly around the stage, groaning at the aches of his body and eating a couple of bananas. Propulsive drama this ain't, but it serves a function. You have to become accustomed to Beckett's rhythms and, most importantly, pay close attention to the performer.

James Hayes in Krapp's Last Tape

The emotional core of these plays doesn't lie in grandiose gestures or angry exclamations, but in the flicker of an eyebrow or the quiver of a lip. These are fiercely buttoned-up characters, each of them having constructed a fortress around their feelings as they've gotten older.

Niall Buggy in Eh Joe demonstrates this most clearly. Originally written for television, this short play shows the titular Joe sitting on his bed as a sinister voiceover (Lisa Dwan) torments him with memories. Joe neither says nor does anything, simply sits on the bed and reacts to the internal monologue - the action takes place on Buggy's face. Nunn amplifies this in a pretty straightforward way - projecting a live feed of his face onto the wall behind them that gradually zooms in closer and closer. It's a simple, elegant and goddamn effective technique and as the voiceover grows ever more sinister it sent chills up my spine.

Both Krapp's Last Tape and Eh Joe are pretty grim, so ending with The Old Tune is a smart move. This is built around the simple joke of two old men (Niall Buggy and David Threlfall) reminiscing about a golden past that neither can clearly recall. As they pick through their swiss cheese memories cars rumble past - they have been left behind by a society that has no place for old men. In fact, given that the pedestrians they ask for a light ignore them, perhaps they're already dead and just haven't realised yet.

Niall Buggy & David Threlfall in The Old Tune

Whatever the case, this triple bill feels like a warts n' all appraisal of getting old. All three actors on stage are eligible for free bus passes and Trevor Nunn is now 80. This direction and these performances make the show's repeated reflections on distant youth, physical vigour and all those regrets and embarrassments that much more tangible.

The sentimental image of getting old is a Werther's Originals ad: a sun-dappled time of relaxation as you reap the benefits of your legacy. The reality is the slow chipping away of your body and mind as you look in on a world that's moved on without you. It's depressing, the chuckles are rough, but at least it's honest.

The Samuel Beckett Triple Bill is at the Jermyn Street Theatre until 8 February. Tickets here.

Wednesday, December 18, 2019

Review: 'One Million Tiny Plays About Britain', at the Jermyn Street Theatre, 17th December 2019

Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Reviewed by David James

Rating: 

After taking a month off to campaign for Labour in the General Election (for all the good it did...) I'm back at the theatre. The first play I'm seeing in this terrifying and depressing new world is One Million Tiny Plays About Britain. The material arises from Craig Taylor, who began collecting overheard conversations that were eventually published The Guardian's magazine, collected in book form and now put on stage.

The play is a mosaic formed of the lives of everyday people from across the United Kingdom, all played by actors Emma Barclay and Alec Nicholls. Among others, we spend a few minutes with a woman on the phone outside her Holborn office block, witness inter-office tensions in Edinburgh, watch two men struggling to piss in a London pub or a father and daughter sneaking into first class on the train to Wolverhampton.

The backdrop for this appears to have been imported directly from a working men's club: slightly tatty and chintzy Christmas decorations, battered pub furniture and a very old television. This fits neatly with the warm and fuzzy tone: while the play might not be explicitly Christmassy it certainly doesn't do anything to ruin your sense of goodwill to all men.

Thing is, I don't have goodwill to all men. I actually have bad will towards quite a lot of men right now. I've spent the last month engaged in futile doorstep conversation with people from all walks of life: ranging a homeless guy with "literally nothing" on the streets of Soho to a woman who peered around the door of her Kensington Mansion wearing a jewelled necklace that looked like something a Batman villain would steal. 

All that and last Thursday meant that I am sick to the back teeth of hearing what the average person on the street has to say, because recent empirical evidence indicates that the 'average person on the street' is an arsehole.

I know I can't reasonably lay that at the door of One Million Tiny Plays About Britain, but let's just say that its sentimental sweetness would have gone down a hell of a lot easier if I'd have seen it a week ago.

On top of that, the piecemeal structure means there's no thematic through-line in the play. This means it ends up as a cosy, Readers-Digest-style reflection of the way things are. While I guess there are some smiles to be found in regurgitating reality on stage with a wry smile and a woolly jumper, it feels like the kind of thing you'd see in Reader's Digest or on at mid-afternoon on a Thursday on Radio 4. The closest the play comes is conveying some universal Britishness that spans across ages, classes and geography - but even if the play inadvertently identifies this it doesn't go on to do anything with it.

As it stands, while I appreciate the talent that Barclay and Nicholls display when performing their many, many characters, and while I am generally a fan of writing about small-scale personal experiences, this play simply didn't land with me. The wrong play at the wrong time. Maybe your mileage will vary,

One Million Tiny Plays About Britain is at the Jermyn Street Theatre until 11th January 2020. Tickets here.

Wednesday, January 23, 2019

Review: 'Original Death Rabbit' at the Jermyn Street Theatre, 22nd January 2018

Wednesday, January 23, 2019 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Reviewed by David James
Rating: 

"The Internet Makes You Stupid" is the slogan of 1990s era humour site SomethingAwful.com. Back when they coined it, the idea was ridiculous. After all, the early online evangelists explained that the world wide web; would make the entirety of human knowledge accessible to everyone. This democratisation would inevitably cause society to move beyond petty ideologies and onward to a utopia of well-informed 'netizens' with a solid grasp on reality.

What the internet actually turned out to be was a fucked up mental bondage machine designed to reinforce prejudices, calcify bizarre beliefs and imprison us within echo chambers that distort the real world while mysterious algorithms try and figure out what we want to buy next. 

Rose Heiney's Original Death Rabbit gets under the skin of our dystopia, condensing the various online eras through a monologue delivered by an unnamed protagonist (played by Kimberley Nixon - who for the sake of disclosure I know personally). 

In the pre-social media 2000s, this character became a meme after inadvertently crashing a funeral while wearing a fuzzy pink bunny onesie. She explains how her photograph launched a tasteless fad of 'death rabbiting', culminating in her being doorstepped by reporters and exposed to merciless online critics who quickly deemed her an "ugly cunt". But by the time Twitter launches, her notoriety mutates into minor online celebrity and sends her spiralling down into social media addiction, anonymous trolling and a desperate need for validation.

Original Death Rabbit covers a lot of ground in 90 minutes: making time for lengthy discussion of Richard Curtis movies; whether it's possible to separate Philip Larkin's sexism and racism from his poetry; the nature of class and racial privilege; exploiting friends and family's lives for creative work; and, building up to a crescendo towards the end, the difficulties of talking about mental health.

As is repeatedly acknowledged in the play, "Mental health is a really difficult issue". It is, and Heiney treats it with empathy overlaid with a deft wit. We hear how the protagonist's father was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in his 50s, and we see in the behaviour of Nixon's character how it may be hereditary. One of my favourite things in the play is the chicken/egg conundrum between mental health and the internet: does being extremely online exacerbate (or cause) mental health problems, or do mental health problems cause people to retreat to a virtual existence?

There aren't easy answers to questions like these and Original Death Rabbit rightly doesn't attempt to provide them. What it does do is get under the skin of online life: exploring the layers of pseudonyms and characters people interact as, the endorphin rush of having a bona fide celebrity reply to you, the way that real life gently morphs into a series of potential Instagram opportunities and the rush of being able to tell someone you despise to just fucking kill yourself already jeez.

The early internet utopians never saw the Skinner box of social media and algorithm-driven content coming, but if they could have known how much future generations would be infested with brainworms I bet they'd have taken a crowbar to the ARPANET servers, Skynet-style. Or, as the play puts it,

"Thank you, Tim Berners Lee. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I bow down to you the way a dying alcoholic bows down to whoever the fuck first left grapes in a bottle too long."

So yeah, I really liked Original Death Rabbit. It's smart, funny, touching - and genuinely understands the history and culture of the internet in a way that most theatre doesn't. On top of that, Louie Whitmore's set is impressively detailed and allows you to get to know the character before she's set foot on stage. Plus, Kimberley Nixon is great - and I promise I'd say that even if didn't know her.

Watching the play you get to thinking about all the weirdo online shut-ins who spend their days endlessly shitposting. What would their lives have been like if they weren't getting their validation from numbers ticking up on a website? Did so many people hate so much before there was an online void to project their hate into? Let's face it, the internet was a mistake.

Original Death Rabbit is at the Jermyn Street Theatre until 9th February. Tickets here.

Wednesday, December 12, 2018

Review: 'Burke and Hare' at the Jermyn Street Theatre, 11th December 2018

Wednesday, December 12, 2018 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Reviewed by David James
Rating: 

Burke and Hare have slipped neatly into the British popular consciousness as a byword for graverobbers. However, they weren't sneaking around in graveyards in the thick 19th-century fog with spades and burlap sacks over their shoulders - they were cold-blooded murderers who discovered that fresh corpses were worth a lot of money and decided that if there was a demand, they would supply.

On paper it's a grim tale, though substantially enlivened by Tom Wentworth's horror/comedy adaptation. Set primarily in the grubby bowels of Mrs Hare's boarding house, the show is populated by a quietly desperate cast of characters, all played by Katy Daghorn, Alex Parry and Hayden Wood. They are almost all indebted or impoverished, their clothes ragged, nursing worrying coughs with their only salvation coming at the bottom of a bottle of whiskey.

When one of the tenants of the boarding house dies of influenza, Burke, Hare and Mrs Hare decide to flog the body to the anatomists on Surgeon's Square, who are hungry for corpses due to constrictive laws about dissection. They pay a princely sum, which gives the trio a grisly incentive to keep a close eye on the more sickly residents of the boarding house... and if they were to 'help' some of the worse off along, that'd almost be like doing them a favour, right?

Though Burke and Hare is a comedy, it also deftly sketches the economic incentives for the crimes and acts a neat Freakonomics style indictment of the free market (the shadow of Edinburgh's own Adam Smith looms large over the play). Burke and Hare (and Mrs Hare) aren't driven to murder because of some innate bloodlust, but by market forces that they feel almost duty-bound to serve. You can almost see the cogs turning in their head as they figure that someone must profit from this scarcity and it may as well be them - as their profits begin to grow they resort to ever more gruesome and murderous tactics to stay in business. 

While all this is whirring away in the background, the foreground is a nicely-paced and energetically performed tale in which the fourth wall is never far from breaking. Taking advantage of the framing device that we're watching a company retell the story, we get neat moments like the three cast members all being on stage at once and realising they have nobody left in the cast to play the corpse - an audience member is dutifully (and hilariously) recruited from the front row).

Though each of the three performers plays many roles, the play doesn't want for strong characterisation. The titular pair are nicely sketched, with Wood's Burke threading a particularly nice line between goofy and sinister. Parry also excels, particularly in an exhausting-looking scene where he's called on to play an entire family at once, with the cast tossing in new family members to torment him further. But the most curiously chameleonic is Daghorn, who somehow manages to look like a completely different person depending on which hat she's wearing - her dippily romantic Fergus is a highlight of the night.

My only minor criticism is that I'd have liked to have seen a more graphic representation of the bodies piling up. Due to the constraints of the cast, these are generally portrayed as small sacks, perhaps with a hat on top to signify who it is. It gives the play a slight feeling of bloodlessness where a more grand guignol tack might have cranked up the horror and cemented the grisly aspects of their trade. 

Still, Burke and Hare is a fine antidote for anyone that craves something with a darker edge amidst the Christmas cheer. It's stylish, entertaining, well-performed and conceived with obvious intelligence. 

Burke and Hare is at the Jermyn Street Theatre until 21 December. Tickets here.

Saturday, January 20, 2018

Review: 'Woman Before A Glass' at the Jermyn Street Theatre, 18th January 2018

Saturday, January 20, 2018 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Woman Before A Glass reviewed by David James

Rating:

There are worse ways to spend 90 minutes than in the company of Peggy Guggenheim. Born into the insanely wealthy Guggenheim family (her uncle established the famous Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan), she used her wealth and connections to build one of the most important collections of 20th-century art in the world. She also shagged her way through pretty much all of the last century's best and brightest - her appetite for paintings rivalled only by her libido.

Lanie Robertson's Woman Behind A Glass shows us Guggenheim if not in the final chapter of her life, then definitely somewhere in the third act. After living through World War II, in which she saved countless works of modern art from destruction at the hands of the Nazis, she's settled in the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni ('unfinished palazzo of the lions') in a prime position on the Grand Canal in Venice.

Here, her concerns are primarily what's to happen to the collection upon her death. Museums from around the world are schmoozing up to her, desperate to acquire the paintings that, just twenty years previous, the Louvre dismissed as "not worth saving". In the interim, she bitches about her relatives, worries about her children and reminisces about her best lays.

We meet her preparing for a visit from the Italian Prime Minister, presumably hoping to butter her up and try and convince her to leave her collection to Italy. Entering with an armful of dresses, she tosses them on a divan and tries to decide what to wear. Each item of clothes comes with a memory attached, kicking off a meandering tour through Guggenheim's greatest hits.

I worried early on that, as fun as Peggy Guggenheim is, that the show would essentially be one long exercise in name-dropping. It's true that, at about the 30-minute mark, the novelty of hearing someone animatedly chat about how they spent a working week gettin' it on with, say, Samuel Beckett wears off a little.

Fortunately, just as that routine begins to feel repetitive, the play imperceptibly switches gears and becomes less boastful and more introspective. Guggenheim muses on her place in the world, her obligations as custodian of these important works and her role in history. This is never more keenly felt than in a remarkable passage in which she tells us her childhood memory waiting at the docks in New York for the survivors of Titanic to disembark the Carpathia. Her father was on the ship and, as a first-class passenger would be expected to have survived. He was never seen again - and it's a testament to the writing that you can sense the impact of his absence in her life without it ever being explicitly explained.

Of course, all the clever writing in the world would be naught without a great delivery, and Judy Rosenblatt (who played the role in a 2011 New York revival) is never less than compelling. She's all conspiratorial winks and asides to various members of the audience, combined with an earthy, mature and casual eroticism - especially in the first part of the play which she spends in a loose-fitting white gown under which her breasts are unselfconsciously displayed. Rosenblatt straightforwardly feels natural in the part, inhabiting Peggy Guggenheim like she's putting on a worn yet comfy pair of slippers.

Rosenblatt also nicely layers in elements of tension. There's a sequence where she's fussily preparing for her daughter's art exhibition, running through an all-star list of attendees while encouraging her to get ready. Her daughter, Pegeen Vail Guggenheim, remains an off-stage presence, yet the slightly strained and panicky tone that Rosenblatt takes while calling her effectively prefigures future events.

Woman Before A Glass is a modest, theatrically unambitious production. The set is just on the right side of minimalist, the writing is straightforward and the acting is as casually naturalistic as you're likely to see. But it's precisely these elements that help the play achieve its focus and clarity - neatly mirroring the modernist philosophies behind much of the art she collected. It's a great play, a great performance and well worth checking out.

Woman Before A Glass is at the Jermyn Street Theatre until 3rd February. Tickets here.

Wednesday, August 2, 2017

Review: 'The Wasp' at the Jermyn Street Theatre, 1st August 2017

Wednesday, August 2, 2017 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

The Wasp reviewed by David James

Rating:

Carla (Lisa Gorgin) looks as she's walked off the set of Jeremy Kyle. Hair up in a high ponytail, wearing loose-fitting sportswear and a perpetually suspicious omnisneer, as if she can sense the well to do West End audience silently judging her. It's difficult not to - she's heavily pregnant and smoking heavily. Soon after enters Heather (Selina Giles), her social opposite. She's all Samantha Cameron chic, that composed kind of woman who has hit her forties and yogically retained her youthful complexion.

And yet once upon a time (twenty years ago in school to be precise), they were besties. Now Heather has asked Carla to meet for a coffee and has an interesting proposition. What follows is akin to the slow closing of a Venus Fly Trap: the history of the two women is gradually revealed, we learn what makes them tick and we find out precisely how far they'll go in pursuit of their desires. (Pretty damn far as it turns out).

I don't want to spoil the plot as watching it gradually unfurl is one of the prime joys of The Wasp. All I'll say is that the title refers to the Tarantula Hawk Wasp, which reproduces by delivering a paralysing sting to a tarantula spider and proceeds to lay an egg in its abdomen. When the larva hatches it begins to voraciously eat the spider's internal organs, keeping it alive for as long as possible until the adult wasp emerges from the hollowed out husk and flies away. Make of that what you will.

First staged in 2015 in the Hampstead Downstairs' space and Trafalgar Studios 2, this is a crisp, taut bit of playwriting that accomplishes almost all of what it sets out to do. Most obvious is a neat dissection of class: playwright Morgan Lloyd Malcolm all but daring us to unleash our inner Daily Mail reader and look down our nose at the track suited, chain-smoking Carla. Throwing her up against the prim n' proper Heather makes for some pointed moments - as when Heather begins talking about them being from 'different worlds'. 

This class awkwardness powers the dynamics, bubbling away in the early scenes where Heather pops in for a latte and Carla drinks a builder's tea, and when they're awkwardly trying to find some common ground. But it's in the second act, which takes place in Heather's tastefully Ikea'd living room where things take increasingly twisted turns. Heather is in her element, with Carla sticking out like a sore thumb - and ominously framed by a wall covered in framed, pinned and preserved butterflies. As the plot takes ever more demented, we learn that there are a couple of things that cross class boundaries: fear, pain and violence.

I'm doing my best to dance around who does what to whom and why, so you'll just have to take my word for it when I say that this is a very twisted bit of drama that left my gruesome side extremely sated.

Both Giles and Gorgin deliver top notch performances as they plumb extreme emotional depths. Over two hours we stop off at pretty much every point on the emotional spectrum, but we never ever lose sight of the core of who these women are. Even during the wildest outbursts, we can still recognise the two wounded schoolgirls that remain deep under their adult carapaces. The most chilling moment comes in a skin-crawling monologue by Heather, in which the character bares her soul. It's so well delivered I actually had a full body shiver at one point, which is pretty much the gold standard of me being properly 'into' something.

In a West End largely populated by the sentimental and saccharine, The Wasp is a focused, cruel little bullet to the head. It's engaging, chock fulla meaty thematic stuff and each scene transition leaves you dying to find out what happened next. In addition, I have rarely seen such a tense interval cliffhanger. Go check it out!

The Wasp is at the Jermyn Street Theatre until August 12th. Tickets here.

Wednesday, May 3, 2017

Review: 'All Our Children' at the Jermyn Street Theatre, 2nd May 2017

Wednesday, May 3, 2017 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

All Our Children reviewed by David James

Rating:

"An average annual removal of 700,000 to 800,000 of the weakest of a million babies means an increase in the power of the nation" so said Hitler in a 1929 speech. A perversion of Darwin's 'survival of the fittest', this philosophy of racial hygiene and a vision of a 'purified' German people was to lead to the darkest nights of the human soul. The most notorious of these was, of course, the Holocaust, in which six million Jews were incinerated in the ovens of death camps.

Somewhat less well known is Aktion T4, in which German doctors were given authorisation to select patients judged "incurably sick" and euthanise them. This programme became a way to excise disabled children from Hitler's brave new world, variously arguing that they're putting them out of their misery, that they're an economic burden to the state, and that they cannot allow 'harmful' genes to proliferate. The architects of this policy anticipated opposition to the systematic murder of children, so told the parents of disabled children that they were being cared for, covered up that they'd been gassed and burnt, and falsified death certificates.

Stephen Unwin's All Our Children dramatises the bureaucracy behind this horrible machine. It's set in 1941, and takes place entirely within the cosy, wood panelled office of Dr Victor Franz (Colin Tierney), Chief Paediatrician at the Winkelheim Clinic, near Cologne. Dr Franz has the pragmatic air of the experienced physician,  comfortable in his skin and confident of his experience. He's assisted by his maid Martha (Rebecca Johnson), with whom he has the casual back-and-forth that comes with old colleagues.

Were these normal times, Dr Franz would spend his time caring for his young patients and doing his best to ease their various discomforts. But these are not normal times. Newly arrived at the clinic is SS man Eric Schmidt (Edward Franklin) - a Nazi fanatic eager to bloodily realise Hitler's utopia. And so an unhappy Dr Franz spends his days choosing which of his patients to dispatch to the gas chambers, each signature chipping away at his soul and his perception of himself as a 'good man'. Over the course of the play, his self-deception is gradually demolished, first by an angry parent (Lucy Speed) demanding to know what's become of her son,  and then by the visit of Bishop von Galen (David Yelland), who argues for the basic sanctity of life (and you know you've screwed up when the Catholic Church is lecturing you on mistreating children).

Unwin's play largely functions as a tautly, righteously angry evisceration of the intelligent but morally weak Dr Franz. He, like many of his generation, wilfully suppressed their consciences for the sake of maintaining a steady lifestyle, which Unwin conveys through a metaphor of the literal internal decay of lung cancer mirroring his moral decay. His are feet that need to be held to the fire, and Unwin takes no small pleasure in doing so. There's more than a whiff of Hannah Arendt's analysis of the 'banality of evil' in Nazi Germany, the doctor's actions bringing to mind her famous quote: “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.” 

But All Our Children isn't just a furious condemnation of Nazi atrocities. Throughout the play Unwin returns to the concept of a citizen's financial worth to their society, with his Nazis brandishing figures that 'prove' a disabled person is a net drag on the state's funds, arguing that money allocated to them could be used to benefit the best and brightest. 

By the time the characters are talking about 'scroungers' the play becomes a none-too-subtle allegory for austerity politics, through which politicians assign blame for economic woes on those least able to defend themselves. This is why we're taught to hate and fear the desperate refugee, the disabled person claiming state benefits, or simply those temporarily without work. Meanwhile, the politicians, economists, bankers etc who're actually responsible for economic misery skate by in a cloak of invulnerability - at worst suffering a slap on the wrist.

It adds a further layer of anger onto an already furious theatrical experience. The Jermyn Street Theatre is a compact, claustrophobic place, making the audience feel hemmed in with the characters. This, coupled with the beautifully low-key realism of the staging and performances, beats out a steadily increasing rhythm that held me rapt for its 100-minute runtime. 

It's an excellent play that rarely puts a foot wrong and honestly, it's refreshing to see a straightforwardly realistic presented and mature of drama that doesn't call attention to its own artifice. I hesitate to say that All Our Children is enjoyable: I left feeling shaken and deeply uncomfortable. But then a play about the state-sponsored murder of disabled children shouldn't be enjoyable. Highly recommended.

All Our Children is at the Jermyn Street Theatre until 3rd June. Tickets here.

Saturday, June 4, 2016

'Off the King's Road' at the Jermyn Street Theatre, 3rd June 2016

Saturday, June 4, 2016 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Oh my god, it's 'the Dude'! Jeff Bridges! Okay, well, he's not actually on stage (he appears via Skype). And okay, the Skype calls are pre-recorded video, but still, Jeff Bridges! This clever bit of technological gimmickry proves to be the best thing in Neil Koenigsberg’s Off the King's Road, a mildly diverting dramedy finding its way to London after a 2013 Off Broadway run.

Set in a townhouse hotel called 'Off the King's Road', we follow Californian Matt Browne (Michael Brandon) as recovers from the death of his wife. They were happiest on holiday in London, and so he's here half to focus on their best memories and half to begin the healing process. Aided by his psychologist (Jeff Bridges), he plans a visit to the Tate Modern, pops valium, inflates a blow-up doll, takes long walks in the park and revisits Ingmar Bergman's classic Wild Strawberries.

Surrounding him is; obsequious hotel clerk (Luke Pitman); a cat lady widow in the room down the hall (Cherie Lunghi); and Sheena (Diana Dimitrovici), a Russian sex worker in whose lap Matt finds a prized moment of peace.

The individual components of Off the King's Road are all serviceable enough, but the play as a whole never quite gels. From the get-go there's an obvious rift between the sincere emotional journey of the protagonist and the somewhat Fawlty Towers-ish goings on in the hotel. That rift only widens as things develop, leaving a gaggle of underwritten comedy archetypes on one side and a naturalistic hero on the other.

Most unfortunate is Dimitrovici's entirely unconvincing sex worker, though her problems are no fault of the actor. She's written as an experienced working gal with cards in phone boxes all over town, brusquely demanding cash before the action begins and constantly tapping her watch to remind her client that 'time is money'. Yet she acts with surprised incomprehension when Matt explains that he just wants to talk, or offers her a bracelet as a present. Granted, what I know about sex work comes from TV, film and the theatre, but it just feels wrong that Sheena wouldn't have seen behaviour like this a hundred times before.

On top of that, Sheena's arrival kicks off a distracting subplot that, as far as I can see, doesn't make sense. Soon after gifting her the bracelet, Matt has it returned to him via a brick tossed through his hotel window, apparently by Sheena's angry offstage pimp/jealous boyfriend(?) Rocco. I'm not a fan of nitpicking and plot holes, but while it's later established that Rocco knows which hotel Matt is staying at, how on earth could he know which window was his? On top of that, why would a pimp be upset at a client giving Sheena a present? If Rocco is a jealous boyfriend, then why is he dating a sex worker? As Rocco remains off-stage for the duration, we never know.

Stuff like that doesn't cripple a play, but it does distract from the largely competent central narrative of a man getting over his wife's death. Matt isn't a groundbreakingly complex character but Michael Brandon makes him a generally likeable and pleasant to be around. It's easy to feel a twinge of sympathy when you contrast the private moments in which he wrestles with his personal demons and the generally upbeat persona he presents to the rest of the world, especially when he confronts his own vulnerability towards the end of the play.

But it's Jeff Bridges that really makes things spark. These actors are all competent professionals, but Bridges is a straight-up genius and it shows. The three scenes in which Matt chats to him are easily the funniest, most human and just downright enjoyable moments in the whole play. It's cheating a bit to have an entirely pre-recorded stage performance, but as the illusion that Bridges' character is live on Skype is airtight, the play gets away with it.

Perhaps Off the King's Road is worth it if just to enjoy the novelty of (sort of) seeing Jeff Bridges on the London stage for a relative pittance. Aside from that this is an amiable enough play whose negatives are just about cancelled out by its positives. 

★★★

Off the King's Road is at the Jermyn Street Theatre until 25th June. Tickets here.

Friday, September 18, 2015

'See What I Wanna See' at the Jermyn Street Theatre, 17th September 2015

Friday, September 18, 2015 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

In hindsight, perhaps the all-singing rape scene wasn't the greatest idea in theatrical history. This is just one of many problems with See What I Wanna See: a tangled mess of a musical that stumbles t from the get-go. 

Based on three short stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, the show is composed of three vignettes. The first, set in medieval Japan, tells the brief story of doomed lovers Kesa and Morito. This is conveyed by having two slightly embarrassed looking actors joylessly dry hump each other while they lyrically assure us that they're having the time of their lives. 

The second act finds us in New York, 1951, where we partake in the predatory behaviour of psychopath Jimmy Mako. He's entranced by a nightclub singer and resolves to dispatch both her and a troublesome husband. To this end he lures them into a park, ties up the husband and rapes the singer. You'd think she'd object a bit afterwards, yet instead she turns on her husband and sides with the serial killer rapist.

The final act is once more set in New York, now post 9/11. A priest has lost his faith and, bitter with the world and everyone in it, concocts a false prophecy of a miracle where Christ will arise from a lake in Central Park. His lie catches on and soon spiritually desperate New Yorkers are thronging the lake, hoping against hope for holy salvation on 'Glory Day'.

None of these stories are particularly interesting; the characters are creaky one-dimensional stereotypes, the dialogue/lyrics banal and the narrative sending me to the point of snoozedom. At it's worst it feels like someone tried to write an intentionally bad musical, especially in cringeworthy moments where a Lindsay Lohan-a-like sings: "Thank God for my dealer / And for the vodka / That mellows the coke. The coke. The coke. The coke. The coke. The coke. The coke. Yeah." Or for that matter, some of the opening lyrics: "He knifes into my body / Forcibly and proud / My love is incredibly endowed / Thicker than my husband." 

I mean... I just... it... well... ah... 

Sigh. 

 Still, credit to the cast for delivering this with a straight face. All five, Jonathan Butterell, Cassie Compton, Marc Elliott, Mark Goldthorp and Sarah Ingram, have multiple characters to play across the different time periods. They approach this task with gritted-teeth professionalism, eking out what little enjoyment is possible from reciting this guff. Even so, the night is sprinkled with bum notes from the cast, and a dully workmanlike job from the band.

This is received by an increasingly sullen audience. There's little pauses after each number where, theoretically, we should applaud but instead we sat there silently, wishing they'd just get on with it. 

Amazingly, there is one moment that enters the realm of 'good'. The number 'The Greatest Practical Joke' proves to be, by far, the best thing in the show. Delivered with gusto by Sarah Ingram, it displays a lyrical sharpness that's so at odds with everything else in the show that I have my doubts its even from the same writer. The number is met with a smattering of stunned applause, both for Ingram's performance and in surprise that something of genuine quality has poked its head up from the muck.

Were it not for this singular moment, the evening would have been a complete write-off. As it was it's just a waste of time. Having done a bit of post-show research on writer/composer Michael LaChuisa, I'm perplexed to find that he's highly regarded by musical theatre aficionados for his narrative and musical adventurousness. Now, I'll grant you that most musicals don't go in for toe-tapping rape/murder scenes, coked out priest fucking and Rashomon aping alt-narratives, but it largely comes across as a sophomoric attempt at edginess while hinting at intellectual depths that just aren't there.

See What I Wanna See? I wanna see something else.

★★

See What I Wanna See is at the Jermyn Street Theatre until 3 October. Tickets here.

Friday, September 5, 2014

'Return of the Soldier' at the Jermyn Street Theatre

Friday, September 5, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

I was a little restless by the time the interval arrived in this musical adaptation of Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier.  Events so far were a touch too Mills & Boon for my taste; a romance story revolving around curiously specific amnesia has a suspiciously cheddarish odour.  But from unpromising roots grows a pleasantly knotty bit of drama, one that if nothing else offers a largely unheard perspective on The Great War

At the centre is the fractured mind of Christopher Baldry, a Captain returning from the Western Front.  Hospitalised after suffering a head injury in a shell strike which killed his comrades, he's sent back home to convalesce.  On his return his family are delighted that he's in one piece and apparently in good spirits.  But while his body is intact his mind isn't. 

More specifically he's completely forgotten Jenny, his wife of many years and is fixated on Margaret, a past girlfriend and his first love.  She was a simple country barmaid when Christopher swept her off her feet and the two embarked on a passionate summertime romance, to be eventually separated by class divisions.  But now, with the dormant fires of love stoked to life, he falls madly back in love with her.

He's happy.  Margaret is happy.  Christopher's wife Jenny less so.  Ditto Margaret's husband William.  And so we begin unpicking his mental trauma, the material gradually transitioning into a debate between the relative merits of miserable reality and happy delusion, with the wrinkle that if Christopher regains his 'sanity' he'll be summarily tossed back into the meatgrinder of the Western Front.

The key to appreciating The Return of the Soldier is to keep it's date of publication firmly in mind.  The novel was written during the war, so isn't bound up in traditional historical narratives of what the Great War signifies.  One notable difference is that this is a story from a feminine perspective; shorn of the traditional iconography of trench warfare, mustard gas and poppies - ratherinformed by the worries, paranoia and fear of what misery is taking place a hundred or so miles over the channel.

That the material is very much of its time has its downsides too.  Freudian psychotherapy was very much en vogue, and West's book treats mental illness and trauma as if the brain is a piece of faulty plumbing with blockages that need to be cleared. The central plot device of amnesia is painfully cliché in 2014, and the eventual treatments quaintly straightforward to modern audiences.  

Regardless of the source material's qualities, it at least works well as a musical.  This is a fat-free staging, with a cast of just five, a sparsely decorated stage and keyboard led score,. By necessity this means events are tightly locked onto personal drama rather than straying into the epic.  Even within the small cast, emotional focus is zeroed in on the two women battling for Christopher's love; both of whom are at minimum three-dimensional characters with their own fears, hopes and passions.  

The production is no slouch in musical terms either.  The refrain of the title echoes throughout the songbook, varying into from triumph to sadness. The musical progression dovetails nicely with our evolving understanding of the meaning of 'the return of the soldier', whether it be the physical return of Christopher at the beginning of play or the psychiatric resurrection of a soldiering mentality.  Furthering this musical thematic development is the frequent close-harmonising of the three women , nudging the audience towards recognising the erosion of class boundaries caused by the war.

As far as individual performances, the obvious stand-out is Michael Matus' 'end of the pier' song about the joys of psychiatry; of putting men's minds back together and bundling them back off to war.  Cane in hand and straw boater on head he cuts a sinister sight as he stalks across the stage, delivering an upbeat, jaunty number.  Though leavened with ominous undertones it's a moment of levity and energy - just the ticket in a musical largely about heartache.

There's a lot to like in The Return of the Soldier and by the time the curtain fell I was surprised how much my opinion of the show had improved.  Obvious care has gone into translating West's novel into a musical form, the fruits of that labour clear to see.  Most of the flaws lie largely with the dated structure of the novel, though that it's very much a product of its time is a boon as well as a curse.  

In a centenary year replete with puffed-up politicians and mawkish displays of sentimentality it's refreshing to see a production that refuses to make grand pronouncements on the morality of the Great War.  In this regard it's largely a success. Though dated, a touch cheesy and a bit melodramatic, this is a fascinating time capsule of 1918 sensibilities.

The Return of the Soldier is at the Jermyn Street Theatre until 20 September 2014. Tickets £16 on sale here.