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Showing posts with label White Bear Theatre. Show all posts
Showing posts with label White Bear Theatre. Show all posts
Saturday, February 22, 2020
Saturday, February 22, 2020
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Titling a play House of Commons gives the audience a pretty hard nudge into reading it as a political allegory. So, with Boris Johnson set to be Prime Minister for a large chunk of the next decade and all the fun of Brexit to look forward to, what's the play about?
Set in a high-security psychiatric treatment facility, we follow a series of deeply damaged individuals who have been convicted of heinous crimes. Over the course of the play the spend a lot of time yelling at one another, detailing the horrors they're accused of and miserably laying out their lot in life. At times the only thing stopping their interactions from spilling over into gruesome violence are the electrodes implanted in their necks, which shock them if they get too far out of line.
So yeah, House of Commons it is.
This gang of patients has spent so much time together that familiarity has curdled into contempt, with everyone able to push each other's buttons whenever they please. But tonight there's something new to focus on. Lana (Sarah Collins Walters) is a new inmate, assigned to the facility for one night as she awaits the verdict of her trial. The inmates circle her like vultures, wondering whether she'll get away or become a permanent addition to their lives.
It's a decent set-up and the inquisitorial style works well in giving each character a moment in the spotlight. Throughout the play, most of the characters reveal the traumatic experiences that placed them here, which usually reveal them to be as much victim as perpetrator. Thing is, it's the ones we don't learn much about that prove to be the most intriguing.
Nomi Bailey's Peta is particularly sphinx-like. Despite not saying much she dominates the room from her wheelchair, regarding the others with predatory gazes from her glittering yet cold blue eyes. Then there's Luke Culloty's Andre, who is blind (wearing just creepy looking white contact lens), and just sits at the rear of the stage regarding the action.
But the enigmatic characters being the most interesting perhaps speaks to the play's occasionally frustrating narrative elements. These are characters who spend a lot of time talking over each other, heading down conversational cul-de-sacs and turning on emotional dimes. Consequentially, it's often tricky to figure out what's actually going on.
That feeds into an overall lack of narrative thrust. The tension in the show feels like it should be Lana's fear over her verdict and facing up to a potential future in this facility. This feels like it falls by the wayside early on in favour of exploring the other characters.
It leaves the play feeling more like a series of loosely connected sketches than a sustained narrative, which slowly drains away your engagement. In a similar vein, while I could mentally wrestle it into a basic political allegory, the show itself doesn't seem to have any interest in exploring why it's called House of Commons.
It's probably telling that I brought someone along to the play who doesn't often visit the theatre. Their reaction was "Well, it was interesting, but I couldn't work out what the story was."
House of Commons is at the White Bear Theatre until 22nd February 2020. Tickets here.
Thursday, October 17, 2019
Thursday, October 17, 2019
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Rating: 
Bee Scott's Mission Creep feels as if was germinated from a thought experiment to discover under what circumstances an asexual person would have sex. The answer is that the world would have to literally be ending and penetrative sex would be the only possible way to escape the planet.
Here's the precise situation the play sets up. Nuclear war has begun and, one by one, cities are being destroyed. So far Britain remains relatively secure, though much of society has broken down, with many abandoning their responsibilities in favour of hedonism. Faced with humanity becoming extinct, the British Government has made a deal with an alien race to send a couple into space. On an alien planet they will breed under the watchful eyes of the aliens, thus ensuring that while Earth might be destroyed the human race will at least continue.
Liam and Tess (Charlie Maguire and Emilia Stawicki) are flatmates, best friends and they want off this lousy planet. Thing is, Charlie is bisexual and has a boyfriend and Emilia is asexual - but they think they can pull the wool over eyes of their assessor Mary (Carmella Brown) and secure the spot on the rocket out of here. After all, once the world is destroyed who will care? And it's not like the aliens actually know what human sex looks like.
It's a high concept plot for an hour-long play with a set consisting of just two chairs and a couple of cardboard boxes. And yet Mission Creep manages to squeeze an awful lot into its short run-time. First and foremost this is a comedy (a funny one!) about a ludicrous situation in which two people must pretend to be something they're not. The contortions as to how the couple can wriggle out of actually having sex with one another are great, as is the farcical way events quickly spiral out of control.
There's also a serious undercurrent. The characters are caricatures, but their reactions to the world ending aren't played for laughs. We see them receive texts on which cities have been destroyed, asking the others if they knew anyone there. Scott displays a deft and economical hand with exposition, giving us just enough information about the state of the world to let us fill in the blanks.
Perhaps the more out-there stuff breaks the naturalism - but the play speeds along at such a brisk pace that it's easy enough to paper over anything that doesn't really make sense. And anyway, the characters react to it in such a matter-of-fact way that you buy into it too.
It's an entertaining hour, and it's nice to see an asexual character in a play that's not specifically about asexuality. It would be too didactic to make this situation just a direct exploration of how asexual people deal with relationships and pressure to conform to accepted models of desire and sexuality, but Mission Creep manages this without feeling like it's getting preachy. Best of all, Tess' asexuality is merely a facet of her character rather than the entirety of it.
There are a couple of rough edges though, specifically in the ending of the play. It's obvious that a micro-budgeted play like this can't actually go through with depicting the science-fiction events discussed, but the chosen ending feels too abrupt. It feels as if the story is about to head into a final act just as the curtain comes down on these characters. On top of that there's the occasional dud line and repetitive story element, and perhaps the play leans a little too hard on characters receiving text messages to drive the story forward.
But I can forgive a lot when it comes to a modest play with big ambitions. Mission Creep is concise, interesting and funny - qualities that many much more extravagant plays often lack.
Mission Creep is at the White Bear Theatre Pub until 19th October. Tickets here.
Friday, July 28, 2017
Friday, July 28, 2017
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Whether a goose down pillow, ineffective sleeping aids or gnawing psychological problems are to blame, Dexy is at the end of his tether. And so, in his bleary-eyed state, he's visited by a three strange late night visitors. There's Leo (James Groom), a drug-fuelled, sexually omnivorous Joker lookalike; Vic (Bruce Kitchener), a night bus driver with a love of tea and board games; and Margot (Niamh Watson), a friendly nocturnal woman who spends her night walking the streets and getting picked up by a succession of "uncles".
The show takes place inside Dexy's flat and quickly smears the borders of reality. A backdrop of extreme insomnia automatically makes the audience suspicious that what we're seeing isn't the gospel truth, something quickly confirmed by the intrusion of surreal elements like half polar bear/half chimpanzee genetic monstrosities that hunt paedophiles on the Circle Line at night.
The further into the play we proceed, the more surreal things become. Elements and characters hinted at earlier scenes come to dominate proceedings and Dexy hits breaking point as he struggles to process the twisted world around him.
Playwright David Cantor, previously responsible for multiple episodes of My Family and Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps, consistently displays a decent turn of phrase, peppering the script with memorable lines like "it'd be like Brian Blessed reading Mein Kampf through a megaphone". It's the amphetamine-wired Leo that gets the best of the bunch, leading us down a barmy rabbit hole of xenophobic conspiracy theories that encompass Nigerian traffic wardens, Polish builders and a secret 'Latin alliance' between Italy and Spain.
But though Cantor has an arsenal of witty lines, the plot is severely lacking. I'm not exactly a stickler for traditional narrative structure, but while Sheep has a beginning and an end, it's lacking a middle. In its place, we get a pile-up of bizarre elements that increasingly feel like a distraction from the fact that there's actually not much going on.
Most of this is down to Dexy just not being that interesting. Granted, he's the one normal guy surrounded by a tornado of weird, but we're never given a reason to care about, sympathise or even like the guy - not helped by him spending most of the play grumpily bitching at the much more likeable supporting cast. If you reduce the play down to the skeleton, it's about Dexy facing up to his personal flaws and if we don't care whether he does or not... that's a problem.
Furthering bogging things down is that Ciaran Lonsdale's performance doesn't exactly set the world on fire. His Dexy comes across less like an insomniac on the edge and more like someone who's just missed their bus, not to mention not even attempting to convey the visible, red-eyed exhaustion of someone who hasn't slept for a couple of weeks.
It's a shame because the supporting cast really gives it some welly. Bruce Kitchener is great as the slightly dopey, slightly boring yet weirdly dignified bus driver. It's touching to hear about his plainly stated quest for developing his empathy in order to win back his wife and his enthusiasm for board games.
But by far the best element of Sheep (and pretty much the one thing that makes the whole show worthwhile) is James Groom's Leo. Whenever he's on stage it's as if the show has been hit by defibrillators, his delivery, energetic body language and charisma outright entertaining. As Groom rattles off lines like "I was being given a reacharound by the Minister for Housing at the time" I found myself wishing I was just watching a show about Leo, which I'm willing to bet would be a far more fun night out.
Groom gets the lion's share of the night's laughs and almost single-handedly wrenches the show out of the doldrums. Sheep is essentially a rather porridgy, self-consciously surreal drama that doesn't work particularly well that happens to contain one wildly successful element. Whether that's enough to splash out for a ticket is your call.
Sheep is at The White Bear Theatre until 5th August. Tickets here.
Sheep is at The White Bear Theatre until 5th August. Tickets here.
Friday, April 28, 2017
Friday, April 28, 2017
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Paul Mason: award-winning journalist, best-selling author, and now the writer of a terrible play. This one hurt. Not because it's exceptionally, eye-wateringly, bad, but because I'm a big fan of Paul Mason's writing. I adored PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, an exceptionally well-written book that analyses contemporary economics with supreme clarity and confidence. I hold the guy in such high regard that when I was invited to see his foray into playwriting I leapt at the chance.
Divine Chaos of Starry Things is the story of the deportation of French anarchist Louise Michel. She was a key player in the Paris Commune, a socialist revolutionary government whose control of Paris (from 18 March to 28 May 1871), was bloodily ended by the arrival of the French Army. The captured Michel was unrepentant, daring her judges to sentence her to death, saying: "Since it seems that every heart that beats for freedom has no right to anything but a little slug of lead, I demand my share. If you let me live, I shall never cease to cry for vengeance." Badass.
Instead she was deported, along with fellow Communards, to New Caledonia a remote Melanesian island 1000 miles off the coast of Australia under French colonial control. Mason's play chronicles her time on the island as she forms a relationship with the native Kanak people and refuses to let isolation dim her revolutionary spirit.
That's the skeleton of what's on stage, though if you went into this show completely blind you'd be oblivious to most of this information. Divine Chaos of Starry Things is supremely unconcerned with establishing a narrative foundation, assuming the audience is already familiar with Louise Michel and the events of the Paris Commune. Perhaps sadly, this an assumption too far. After a brief opening scene we're unceremoniously taken to New Caledonia, where the particulars of the regime our characters have to suffer under or even their living arrangements are never clearly defined.
A mitigating caveat, the opening of the play was supposed to have scene-setting projections telling us when and where the action takes place, but technical troubles meant these didn't appear. I'm not sure what these would have said, but it's reasonable to assume they would at least have helped establish the scene. But hey, you can only write about the play you've seen.
This lack of clarity quickly undermines the characters' political zeal. It's difficult to get fired up by Michel's revolutionary ambitions if you're not really sure what system she's battling against. This isn't helped by the lack of an on stage antagonist: the cast of characters limited to four women ex-Communards and two Kanak warriors. These characters amble through scenes with the propulsive energy of a rubber duck, breaking the rule of show don't tell by describing interesting sounding events that we don't get to actually see.
Worse, Louise Michel's dialogue is declamatory and overly didactic, with little insight into her as a person rather than a cold vehicle for revolutionary rhetoric. She's frequently put in the unsympathetic position of hectoring her fellow prisoners on showing insufficient revolutionary zeal by even considering accepting pardons. It's obvious that Mason holds Louise Michel in high esteem, but his dramatic interpretation lacks basic charisma. If this was your first exposure to Michel, you'd wonder what the fuss was about.
Performances follow a similar trend, with the personalities of the characters indistinct and the dialogue stilted. It's telling that by far the best performances are delivered by Jerome Ngoadi and David Rawlins as the Kanak warriors. Once you get over their liberal-baiting costumes they're a striking on stage presence, often balefully observing from the edges of the action. It's telling that the sharpest emotion I experienced all night came courtesy of them shooting silent accusatory stares into the audience during the interval.
That brief moment of excitement aside, this is an indigestible play populated by uninteresting characters who don't do much of anything and whose conflicts take place off-stage. As the first half hour trundled by I got to experience that horrible feeling of anticipation (awesome, a play by one of my favourite journalists!) evaporating away, with the hope that things might improve shrinking by the minute.
Mason is attempting to use Michel's inspirational actions as an example to contemporary audiences that we don't need to silently put up with the shit ladled onto us, and that even in the most desperate of circumstances liberational revolutionary action is achievable. That he's absolutely right doesn't change the fact that Divine Chaos of Starry Things inspires first disappointment and then eventually just boredom.
Divine Chaos of Starry Things is at the White Bear Theatre until 20th May. Tickets here.
Divine Chaos of Starry Things is at the White Bear Theatre until 20th May. Tickets here.
Thursday, January 19, 2017
Thursday, January 19, 2017
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It's fair to say that a lot of people are pretty pissed off at the populations of Bumfuck, USA right now. Okay sure, the last thirty years of globalisation have left them with no jobs, no money, no dignity and no future, but even that's no excuse to give an obviously nuts egomaniac control of the largest nuclear arsenal on Earth.
Well anyway, they only went and did it and now we've got to deal with it. I suppose we may as well try to empathise, if only to try and work out how to stop a cock up like this happening again. And so, Keith Stevenson's Out There on Fried Meat Ridge Road takes us from leafy Kennington to West Virginia, described by the New Yorker as "the heart of Trump country". It's a farce set in a dilapidated motel populated by violent, drug-addicted weirdos and run by a man who prides himself in the breadth and depth of his racism.
Our window into this world is hapless former spork factory worker Mitch (Robert Moloney). Sacked from his job at the spork factory due to his uncontrollable palmar hyperhidrosis (very sweaty palms), dumped by his girlfriend and currently homeless and broke, Mitch is spiralling life's plughole. In desperation he scours wanted ads to find a roof over his head, which is how he meets J.D. (Keith Stevenson).
J.D. is a big friendly bear of a man: looking a bit like a young Brian Blessed, greeting people with a friendly slap on the back, calling everyone his 'brother' and always ready to offering a helping hand to those in need. He's also a slobby, booze-addled bum, occupying a shithole motel room in exchange for fishing tampons out of blocked toilets and subsisting on a diet of Lee Marvin's (a can of Mountain Dew livened up a mini bottle of vodka and tuna mayo on Wonderbread. (A note, if you don't like the smell of room temperature tuna this play may not be for you).
Mitch, expecting J.D. to have a spare room, is horrified to find he'd be expected to share a bedroom with this weirdo redneck. Things don't improve when the other tenants of the motel bust through the door; from Nam-Vet omni-racist Flip (Michael Wade), trackie n' gold chain wearing New Jersey expat Tommy (Dan Hildebrand) to Marlene (Melanie Gray), strung out on meth and prone to histrionics.
On paper this sounds like a cruel piss-take of redneck caricatures. The golden rule of comedy is that you don't punch down, and there'd be few more things more stomach-churning than a roomful of snooty metropolitan, latte sippin', turtleneck wearing, Moleskine writing in theatre critics chortling at the misery of distant poor people. But Stevenson's characters quickly surprise: J.D. knows Latin and grew up in Italy, his gangsterish neighbour is a romantic poet and the frayed Marlene is a talented painter. The gang are even enthused about the prospect of a Noam Chomsky evening: a big deal around here.
These characters are the ingredients for a charming, gentle farce that manages to be heartwarming without being schmaltzy and surreal without being unbelievable. Buoyed by a consistently high standard of performance (and, at least to my ear, pitch perfect accents), it's easy to get emotionally tangled up with these characters and, at least a little bit, to care about their various ludicrous predicaments. Stevenson, performing his own character, is particularly loveable as J.D. - it's one thing for the other characters to say that he's the nicest guy around, it's quite another for the audience to accept it so readily and obviously.
Their basic reality is shored up by a precisely detailed motel room set by Simon Scullion. Every effort has been made to turn the White Bear's shiny new performance space into a run down roach motel - from the damp seeping through the ceiling, to the stained carpet, to the trash on the floor to the way the cupboard door never quite closes properly.
So there's clever, funny writing, compelling performances and a great set - what's the flesh on those bones? It's here that the play comes a bit of a cropper, quickly feeling like the pilot episode for a sitcom. This feels like an introduction to these characters more than a fully rounded beginning, middle and end for them (borne out by the fact that the play has a couple of sequels). More specifically, the show reminded me quite of a lot of an episode of Trailer Park Boys, which has much the same balance of farce and character drama.
After 70 very funny minutes (incidentally, this passes the "five laugh" test about 10 minutes in), the play finishes on what feels like the start of the real drama. Being left hungry for more is no bad thing, but the characters are so solid that you're left craving proper dramatic resolutions for them. Oh well, let's hope White Bear stages Stevenson's sequels soon.
★★★
Out There on Fried Meat Ridge Rd is at The White Bear until 4th February. Tickets here.
Monday, June 9, 2014
Monday, June 9, 2014
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First published in 1888 as a serial in Punch magazine, The Diary of a Nobody shows us the humdrum domestic life of Charles Pooter, clerk in a non-descript, vaguely Dickensian finance firm. Orbiting him are his loving wife Carrie, his dissolute son Willie/Lupin and a gaggle of comedy grotesques. It's a farcical comedy of manners that satirises the preoccupations of the Victorian middle-classes: Pooter is man on a quest for respectability, pitting himself against a capricious fate that takes a sadistic pleasure in hurling obstacle after obstacle into his path; from a raucous and randy bride-to-be for his dim son, to an Australian spiritualist determined to conduct a seance, to the comings and goings of his friends; Mr Cummings and Mr Gowing.
It's pun-laden names like these that reveal all too quickly where The Diary of a Nobody's comedy heart lies; in the silly, the groan-worthy and in all too painfully accurate English self-deprecation. This is the kind of comedy whose natural home is on Radio 4 on a Sunday afternoon, perhaps sandwiched between I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue and Just a Minute. They're polite laughs that come from a bourgeoisie gently satirising itself, a comedy that, at worst, ends up staid, static and toothless.
Thankfully Rough Haired Pointer's style immediately assuages most of these fears. Though the setting is mannered and stiff, this production (like the actors within) is loose and gangly. a flail of limbs, wobbling scenery and action that amounts to just barely controlled chaos. It's a show that feels on the verge of collapse. As props skitter across the floor, scenery wobbles and costumes fall apart the show threatens to collapse like an overambitious souffle. It never does and this unpredictability goes no small way towards injecting life into material that has the potential for comedic arthritus.
The serial nature of the original material means that the stage adaptation becomes, essentially, sketch comedy. Carin Nakanishi, set and costume designer, seems to have grasped the sketch concept quite literally. The entire set and most of the costumes are rendered in monochrome with the details picked out in a way that echoes the original illustrations. It's an exceptionally well-realised aesthetic that's not only visually pleasing, but works beautifully in creating a Victorian setting on a (presumably) limited budget.
It's a little difficult to review the performances as we were informed at the start of the night that Shelley Lang was unable to make the show due to "an incident" (a rather ominous choice of words, I hope she's okay). The brave and admirable solution was for the rest of the cast to cover for her at short notice, playing not only their bevvy of characters but hers as well. I figure that things are jumbled up on stage when she's here, let alone when the rest of the cast is skating on thin ice.
As it turned out I only evers noticed one script on stage and it somehow worked within the ramshackle context of the rest of the play. The lack of female presence gave proceedings a Pythonesque tinge, a group of men who know precisely how best to deploy their various personalities and physiques in the service of comedy. The most obvious stand out is Jake Curran as the lead, a performance benefiting from his only having to play one character. He's got a marvellous 'period-face' - his facial hair and bone structure making him look convincingly Victorian - something which, in combination with a killer deadpan stare, makes him a compelling lynchpin of sanity upon which to hang all the calamity.
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| Would love to live in a house decorated like this. |
Jordan Mallory-Skinner is similarly excellent; playing Mrs Pooter with a waxy skinned, lizard-like demeanour. Through razor-thin lips and narrowed accusatory eyes he plays the role as a woman frantically trying to suppress her feral urges. Pleasantly, the Pooter marriage has a bedrock of genuine affection to it and the couple mostly enjoy each other's company - reminding me of a 19th century Homer and Marge Simpson.
The only problem I have is with the length of the show. I've never read the book, but it seems this adaptation takes in the whole 15 months covered in it. When first conceived this material was designed to be consumed in bite-size chunks; each day a snapshot of life. As there's no compelling narrative throughline and as things are so cartoonishly pitched it's difficult to really care about what's going to happen to these people. As I said before, this makes the show essentially a series of comedy sketches and, as funny as they are, watching this many sketches featuring the same characters left me a little comedically exhausted. Perhaps instead of a very funny two acts and an interval, the adaptation would have been better served as an extraordinarily funny, shorter one-act show.
That said, it's a minor criticism - and something 'merely' being very funny isn't really so awful. This is an insanely talented group of individuals, all of whom click together on stage like clockwork. It's fascinating to see them move around, paying close attention to how the others move and reacting to their jokes, mistakes and microscope decisions in each scene. At best, it's almost as if this 126 year old material is being improvised on the spot.
The Diary of a Nobody is at the White Bear Theatre, 138 Kennington Park Rd
SE11 4DJ - 3rd - 21st June in the evenings. Tickets available here.
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