LONDON CITY NIGHTS

Sunday, July 10, 2016

'Broad Shadow' at the National Theatre, 7th July 2016

Sunday, July 10, 2016 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Broad Shadow is a straightforwardly effective play that's ripe with complexity. I see an awful lot of theatre each week and lots of it is pretty goddamn terrible, but this brief n' breezy thirty minute one act piece knocks most of the rest into a cocked hat. 

And it's written by a 16 year old.

New Views is the National Theatre's annual playwriting competition for 15-19 year olds. Broad Shadow is the winner, having triumphed over more than 300 entries from over sixty-six schools across the UK. I cringe when I remember my teenage scribblings, so I have no envy for the panel of judges tasked with sorting through this stuff. I don't want to assume too much, but there must be an awful lot of embarrassingly overwrought bilge to grind through.

But I bet it's all worth it when you come across a playwright like Molly O'Gorman. She's a student of Brighton College and, drawing from her experiences of growing up in Ireland, gives us an incisive perspective into the shifting relationship between mother and daughter.

Róisín (Roxanna Nic Liam) ekes out a living working at Lidl in a small Irish town. Life isn't sunshine and roses, but neither is it completely miserable. Her prospects takes a turn for the better when she's asked if she'd assist with a new supermarket in distant Belfast. It's easy to sympathise with Bowie-fan Róisín's attraction to big city lights and the prospect of a fresh star, especially when you see what's going on at home.

Surrounded by dirty coffee cups and swaddled in a stained dressing gown, her Mum (Eileen Walsh) has surrendered. With her husband recently dead, Róisín is s the sole bread-winner and Mum has resigned herself  to a sofa-based fate of crap TV and moody resentfulness. Essentially the relationship between mother and daughter has been inverted - the child responsible and forward thinking, the mother prone to emotionally manipulative outbursts. But with Róisín making escape plans, the situation reaches boiling point.

Though there's much to praise here, most obvious is the care and subtlety with which the central relationship is written. Róisín and her mum feel like they've been bickering forever - and each knows precisely how to needle the other. Róisín is more obviously sympathetic, gritting her teeth and feigning cheeriness for as long as it takes to escape. The mum is somewhat less attractive as a character, but her morose depression is keenly and emotively conveyed. With a dead husband, daughter preparing to flee and little future prospects, why not just waste away?

This whiff of morbidity is accentuated by the play taking place on gigantic weathered stone slabs, Ikea furniture perched awkwardly on top. It creates a vast emptiness, emphasising the distance between the two, as well as evoking a loose graveyard vibe. Though never  explicitly communicated, O'Gorman's writing hints at the mother's suicidal thoughts, the living room becoming a vast grave-in-waiting. The mother seems willing to take the plunge and she'll to drag Róisín down with her. We find ourselves willing her to escape this black hole - to get the hell out of dodge.

On top of that, you've got two performances that continually feed off one another, one always reacting to the other. Nic Liam's Róisín believably bristles with frustration; angry, slightly guilty and sad, but putting an optimistic shine on things whenever she can. Her best moment comes when, for once alone, she rocks out to Oh You Pretty Things. It's a moment of escapist joy that hopefully echoes her future in Belfast. Meanwhile Walsh plays the Mum like Eeyore having a particularly shitty day. She's all Edna Krabappelish "Ha!"s and snide, spiky little jabs at Róisín, her character reeking of unattractively adolescent self-pity. She's easy to despise, yet Walsh layers in so much vulnerability that she ends up pathetically heartbreaking, rather than just plain pathetic.

I'd have praised Broad Shadow no matter who it was written by, but O'Gorman deserves serious kudos for turning out something this good at 16. It's well-staged and performs, but the obvious highlight is the confident and disciplined treatment of familial conflict and a painfully perceptive understanding of the ways in which relationships gradually shift over time. Mark my words, Molly O'Gorman is a name you're going to hear more of.

★★★★

(For the sake of full disclosure, I know Roxanna Nic Liam socially)

Saturday, October 25, 2014

'Here Lies Love' at the National Theatre, 17th October 2014

Saturday, October 25, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Surprise surprise the musical by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim is absolutely fantastic. It's not as if iconic musicians haven't come unstuck in heading towards musical theatre before, but let's face it, if anyone is going to make a goddamn amazing musical about the corrupting influence of materialism, it's David Byrne (with Fatboy Slim more than capable of supplying some cool beats).

Here Lies Love is a musical biography of Imelda Marcos, widow of Phillippine President Ferdinand Marco.  Beginning as a 'simple country girl' sleeping on boxes in the garages of Tacloban she claws her way towards opulence on the back of her rmarriage.  From its beginnings as a populist movement led by a war hero their regime gradually slides towards authoritarian tyranny, with Imelda effectively ruling the country in the 1980s. Eventually the situation becomes untenable, concluding with the peaceful 'People Power Revolution' of 1986 that forced the Marcoses to flee the country by helicopter.  Following her departure the poor of Manila ransack the palace, famously discovering her gargantuan shoe collection.

Them's the facts, so how do they work as a musical?  At the core of Byrne's vision is the idea of experiencing history in a nightclub.  The audience are everywhere; gazing down at events from high above the stage or standing around a transformable stage. The cast move in and around us, at times hugging us and incorporating us into their choreography.  This constant motion gives the show a unique energy; seducing us with the extravagance of the Marcos lifestyle.

Musically this is firmly, fiercely and religiously pop inclined.  The show has rightly been described as a 'poperetta', stuffed full of gossamer light synth beats, booty-shaking disco bass and catchy choruses that all but beg to be sung along to (and we do).  Obvious highlights are the recurring title track, Here Lies Love (which gets its title from what Imelda wants engraved on her tomb), We Are The People of the Philippines and the climactic Why Don't You Love Me?  All the songs are covered in Byrne's distinctive lyrical fingerprints - it's all too easy to hear his voice in this music, no matter who's singing them.

There's a risk that translating the life of Imelda Marcos into super fun happy disco times would trivialise her crimes against the people of Manila.  After all, underneath all the shoes, fur coats, haute couture and partying lies torture, despotism and corruption.  Here Lies Love is even broadly sympathetic to Imelda, though the triumphant climax involves her being unceremoniously booted from the country, her panicked lack of comprehension renders her more pathetic than outright evil.

Instead, Here Lies Love shows how the understandable desire to escape poverty becomes monstrous when taken to its logical conclusion.  The young Imelda is practically a Disney heroine in her misery, singing pleasant little ballads about how she's the flower in a ruined world, she's practically Cinderella.  Imelda gets her fairytale ending about a third of the way through the play, winning the heart of not only her dashing Prince Charming but of the people.  Here Lies Love is about the consequences of living out your fantasy life.

Money is the root of all evil, and once the addiction of materialism has gotten its hooks into this poor country girl she begins a metamorphosis that's the equal of anything Kafka or Cronenberg put out.  This is as much a visual transformation as it is a narrative one; after beginning the show in a simple, white peasant dress with her hair loosely around her shoulders she begins to become angular and insectoid.  Her hair tightens into a hard beehive, her outfits harden into a chitinous carapace of iridescent green with wing-like fins - even her features seem to grow harsher under the high-contrast stage lighting.  

We can almost see the humanity draining from Imelda as the show goes on, the innocent peasant systematically replaced by the legendary 'steel butterfly'.  This steady transformation is contrasted with the unchanging innocence of Estrella, her childhood friend.  The unsettling conclusion is that there's nothing unique or special about Imelda the person; rather that she threw herself into a machine that warps people into monsters.

So Here Lies Love functions as a broadside against the precise kind of fun we're having so much of.  When we jiggle our asses to Fatboy Slim's eminently danceable beats, become drunk on the elaborate stagecraft and marvel at the astonishing costumes we're proving ourselves susceptible to the same temptations that created this supreme villainess of shoes.

Of course this is very much having your cake and eating it.  Here Lies Love is one of the most joyous musical experiences I've had all year.  And therein lies a paradox.  Audiences skip and boogie out of the stage door, pumped up for more partying and humming the show's eminently hummable tunes - on their own individualistic paths to awfulness.  It's a sensation that leaves you giddy and queasy in equal measure.  

Be sure to experience it for yourself.

Here Lies Love is at the National Theatre until the 8th of January.  Tickets here.

Friday, July 13, 2012

'Re-Write' by Tosin Omosebi at the National Theatre

Friday, July 13, 2012 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

‘Re-Write’ is written by Tosin Omosebi (17) and is the winning play in the New Views playwriting competition for 15-19 year olds.  I was dreading reviewing this, and was hoping against hope that it wouldn't be awful.  If it was a stinker then the honest thing to do would be to evaluate it on the same level I would a play by anyone else, but then I don’t want to stamp on someone’s hopes and dreams.  Should I be kinder and more understanding given the author's age?  It’s a tricky dilemma. 

I shouldn’t have wasted time worrying: the play was great.  Directed by Anthony Banks and set in a psychiatric hospital it shows us the treatment of two young men, Kingsley and Tommy.  Kingsley (Oliver Gomm) is a child prodigy gone bad; a privileged upper-class snob who out of sheer boredom decided to plan the perfect murder.  Tommy (Luke Norris) is his instrument of murder, a working-class young man from a broken family who has been bounced between 13 foster families and failed by the system. He desperately seeks validation and security. Kingsley seemingly provides this security, but has manipulated Tommy into committing his “perfect murder”.

The entirety of the play takes place in the aftermath of the murder and the exact details are left to the audiences imagination.  The backstory seems to take inspiration from Leopold and Loeb, two wealthy law students who wanted to commit a “perfect crime”.  So, in 1924 they murdered Bobby Franks.  Their crime wasn't so "perfect" though, and they were caught and had a very high-profile trial.  Hitchcock’s ‘Rope’ also mines the same seam, again taking inspiration from these real life events.   

Analysing these two is Doctor #476A (Sam Crane), a young doctor eager to climb the ranks of his profession through taking on high-profile patient.  He’s egotistical, self-centred and ambitious, although not quite as smart and in control as he might think.  Throughout the play he exudes an irritating smugness in his dealings with both his patients and the chief nurse of the facility (Maggie Service).  The nurse initially seems to be cut from the same cloth as Nurse Ratched from ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’, and is repeatedly defined by the other characters as a ‘bitch’.  However, in contrast to the doctor she clearly cares about the wellbeing of the patients rather than her own career ambitions. 

This play was performed in a ‘pop-up’ (I am really coming to hate that phrase) theatre on the balcony of the National Theatre.  It’s a big, white tent with wooden boxes for the audience to sit on, and is minimalist in a way that nicely complements the play.  The set is one big white wall with a door cut through it and a desk affixed to one side.  During scene changes, stagehands dressed as nurses slowly spin the wall, the side with the desk representing the patients cells, and the other representing the outer wall of the hospital.  The stark white of the wall fits in nicely with the white tent, creating a  sterile and monochrome Kubrickian atmosphere.  The set up of the hospital feels vaguely futuristic as a result, something helped by the doctor taking his notes on an iPad and explaining to his patients that he’s experimenting with ‘new’ therapies, which is why, for example, they don’t have a bed or don't learn his name.   The fact that it was in a tent ended up contributing to the atmosphere; it was pouring with rain outside and we could hear it throughout the performance beating on the outside of the tent.  It was slightly claustrophobic, and the audience being aware of the walls surrounding them can only help immerse ourselves in the surroundings of a cell in a hospital.

Kingsley (Oliver Gomm) and Tommy (Luke Norris)

The costumes of the two patients also blend nicely with the surroundings, grey sweatshirts, sweatpants and tennis shoes.  The outfits seem aimed to suppress individuality, and the fact that the shoelaces have been removed from the shoes seems ominously portentous.  The doctor, on the other hand seems relatively young and ‘cool’.  He wouldn’t look too out of place wandering down Brick Lane in his thick  framed retro glasses, tousled hair, unshaven face and rumpled suit (worn without a tie).  Throughout the performance, it is gently underlined that he is both inexperienced and narcissistic, a dangerous combination.  It’s a nice point of contrast with the nurse, whose uniform is always spotless, her hair tied up in a neat bun, she radiates confidence and professionalism.

All of the actors turn in excellent performances, but it is Gomm and Norris as the two patients that stand out.  They each seem to embody flip sides of the human experience, two people so completely different to each other that it’s a visceral shock when we transition between the two between scenes. 

Not knowing much about the play going on, I was initially a little suspicious about the character of Kingsley.  My suspicion hinged on whether we were supposed to find him charismatic and likeable. My initial reaction to him was that he was a pretentious little prick.  Fortunately, this seems to be the attitude shared by the characters and much of the audience.  Gomm, seemingly taking influence from Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock, or to a lesser extent Hannibal Lecter injects a streak of weakness into the self-proclaimed genius.  In between his grandiose speeches that ‘prove’ his intelligence his face twitches alarmingly, occasionally stuttering over words.  Is it the drugs they’re giving him, the effects of living in a psychiatric facility or his body betraying the guilt he denies that he feels?  It’s rare to see an ‘arch-manipulator’ type of character show such vulnerability, and to an extent this humanises him.

Conversely, the character of Tommy desperately seeks approval from those around him, and the performance underlines this.  He has much more physicality than Kingsley, our first introduction to the character is his banging loudly on a desk in frustration, and he frequently walks around the stage angrily.  Strangely I never felt that he was in danger of inflicting violence upon the other characters – the audience finds his situation sympathetic more than threatening.  In terms of body language, he seems particularly changeable, slumped one minute, and then ramrod straight and full of energy the next.  One moment in particular that demonstrated the control Norris had in this performance was when he was talking about his gold chain.  He was in the middle of a speech about how he’d never take this gold chain from around his neck.  Unfortunately (and I’m just guessing this wasn’t supposed to happen), the chain came undone in the middle of the speech and slipped from around his neck!  He dealt with it this extremely well, incorporating it seamlessly into his performance, and trying to fit it back together in character as the scene changed.

Sam Crane as the doctor is also effective, but slightly less so than the central characters.  I was unsure as to whether his character was supposed to be proactive or reactive, and I thought it was a little difficult to get a sense of continuity in his actions and performance.  This is mild criticism though, his intellectual sparring with Kingston was very entertaining, particular when they were trying to one-up each other’s vocabulary.  I don’t know that he was a particularly realistic doctor, but that is more of a function of the character than the performance.  He’s a deeply flawed authority figure, and for the plot to function he needs make poorly thought-out decisions and act incompetently.  

As the strict and overbearing nurse, Maggie Service is also effective, although out of all the characters she  tends to dip into caricature the most.  This isn’t necessarily such a bad thing, Service has a great sense of comic timing and gets the majority of the laughs from the audience.  Of the four characters, she is the only one without glaring flaws (apart from drinking from a hipflask), which necessarily limits the performance a bit.  As a reactive character without any big speeches or grand actions she tends to merely speak what the audience is thinking, or serve as a mirror to highlight the doctor’s lack of professionalism.  Dramatically, you need a character like the nurse to puncture the egos of the doctor and Kingsley – the character steers the audience away from admiring them, and accentuates their flaws for us.  The nicest character bit is probably in her final scene.  Her hair is worn down for the first time in the play, and for once she doesn’t look in control of the situation.  Whereas before she was commanding and stern, now her words are ringing hollow.  Her final action is an alarmingly sudden scared glance at the audience, and Service totally sells this crucial moment.

Doctor #476A (Sam Crane) and Nurse (Maggie Service)

There is a lot going on thematically here.  The play frequently breaches the fourth wall and a remarkable amount of the dialogue can be read as both naturalistic and as metafiction.  The metafictional aspects of the play are, I think, what most audience members will remember the play for.   The most obvious example is that Tommy’s hallucinations allow him to ‘see’ the audience watching the play.  In probably the most dramatic moment in the play, he leaps into the audience and starts berating us for taking pleasure in his misery and not doing a thing to help him.  This pretty comprehensively demolished the fourth wall, and nicely implicates us in the drama.  There are subtler metafictional elements at play too, the doctor repeatedly refers to his therapy as ‘re-writing the script of your life’ and that events prior to the play have already been established and can't be changed, to prove this ‘Tommy’ gets his hands on what he believes is a copy of the play’s script.  Maybe they even overdo it a little bit - by the time they're quoting the 'all the world's a stage' soliloquy from Hamlet I felt like I was being a little bit beaten over the head with metafictional elements.

What this play seems to be aiming for is a Brechtian disconnect, the aim of which, classically, is to highlight a social or political issue rather than to emotionally involve the audience in the fiction of the play.  This does create a bit of a problem here - the play more than succeeds in making the audience aware of its artificiality, but it is not entirely clear to what end.  If I had to pick out a theme of social injustice that this play is highlighting it’d be the treatment of mental patients by uncaring, hubristic doctors, and of them unthinkingly using a ‘chemical cosh’.  The text only touches on this briefly and without examination.  If anything, the distancing effect seems to be used to highlight another metafictional device within the play itself, namely the notion of ‘re-writing’ something.   The conclusion of the play hinges on a character re-writing a doctor’s notes, and throughout the characters talk of re-writing each other, or of making revisions to personalities or events.  I suppose Kingsley and the doctor seem to jockeying for the position of author, which is admittedly  fun conceit, but taken on it's own it's 'merely' a fun idea.  Metafiiction is a rich seam of drama to mine, and this play does so very entertainingly and with thought, but I left feeling like they could have explored just a little bit further.

These are all minor criticisms though, make no mistake about it this is a shockingly good play for a 17 year old to have written.  In just 45 minutes, it manages to deliver a hell of a lot of deft characterisation and effectively communicate some big idea.  I hope Tosin Omosebi is able to use this success as a springboard to a professional career, a wider audience and that she continues to produce drama as bold and daring as this play in the future.