LONDON CITY NIGHTS

Thursday, February 4, 2016

'Swing By Around 8' at the Bread & Roses Theatre, 3rd February 2016

Thursday, February 4, 2016 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

I've got a pretty good sixth sense for impending theatrical crapitude. One man vanity productions are a classic bad omen, as are plays entirely based around tortuous metaphors and am-dram Shakespeare. The 'classic English farce' is another giant red light, a soup of cripplingly bourgeois bubble-wrapped quasi-humour that generally feels like you're watching an prime time ITV sitcom circa 1988.

So, alarm bells were blaring as I sat down for Jessica Bray's Swing By Around 8, which ominously promised "an unconventional dinner party full of innuendoes, miscommunication and wine". As anticipated, what followed was crammed with masturbatory middle-class wibbling, a cast of thinly sketched archetypes and, of course, a veritable avalanche of crappy innuendoes. 

But, crucially, mercifully and sixth sense defyingly, it was funny.

Katherine and Matt (Elizabeth Lloyd Raynes and Donncha Kearney) are having relationship problems. They're in their early 30s and, after being together for nine years, things have started to go a bit stale. To spice things up a bit they've decided to dip their toes in the murky waters of swinging. Enter (via a mutual friend) Amelia and Elliot (Laura McKee and Jonathan McGarrity).

With a dinner party all set to go and a mood-setting playlist cued up, the two couples get to know one another. Almost instantly, Katherine and Matt have a quiet crisis, their guests have brought their dog and seem oblivious to the oncoming orgy. Is it possible that they don't know? Do they think they're at a regular dinner party? How on earth do you ask and maintain a sense of polite decorum. What will the neighbours think?

Billed at an hour but coming in closer to fifty minutes, Swing By Around 8 is a brief and breezy play that's unlikely to lodge in the memory for long. Every character is sketched broadly and, while there's semblances of narrative arcs, they abruptly terminate. Theoretically we're supposed to care whether Katherine and Matt work through their problems - their desperate scrabbling to maintain the relationship is presented sincerely - but by the curtain pretty much everything is left unresolved.

It's on the strength of its jokes that the play relies, and for the most part, here it succeeds. Swing By Around 8 is hardly Oscar Wilde - the tone can best summarised by Bray's ruthless mining of every comedy atom from the word 'spatchcock'. Still, though the set-up might be creaky and the punchlines visible a mile off, they work: I laughed.

Much of this is down to a cast who all have well-developed funnybones. Kearney in particular as a nice line in aloof disbelief, getting a decent amount of mileage his well pitched deadpan reactions, Raynes provides an effectively strained eroticism and awkwardness that never fails to amuse and McGarrity has a nice line in smarmy lotharioness. 

My fave was Laura McKee, who also impressed in last December's Full Circle. She's got an nice loose-limbed physicality which adds a kinetically comedic element to her performance. The funniest bit of the play is her drunken cod-flirtiness with a policeman (Sam Blake) that she believes to be a strippergram. It's just straightforward and direct comedy - and works gangbusters.

Swing By Around 8 isn't rewriting the comedy rulebook. It's not even suggesting any edits. Were there not references to wireless speakers and the internet you could imagine this as a restaged production from the 1970s and no-one would be any the wiser.

That said, it's light, undemanding and has brevity on it's side. Most importantly it's funny. There are few things worse than an unfunny comedy, but this wrung more than a couple of genuine giggles from me. So, a success. A safe and unambitious success, but a success nonetheless.

★★★

Swing By Around is at the Bread & Roses Theatre until February 6th.

Photos by David Loveday

Friday, December 4, 2015

'Full Circle' at the Arts Theatre, 2nd December 2015

Friday, December 4, 2015 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

"Hell is other people" rings very true in Madelaine Cunningham's Full Circle. Four A-listers of Greek mythology are trapped together: Medea, Helen of Troy, Clytemnestra and Phaedra. On their slender shoulders lie a litany of crimes that range from brutal murders, paedophilia, false accusations of rape - all the typical brutalities of ancient mythology. Almost all of these women died untimely and violent deaths - some of them by their own hand.

In death they're united for the first time, their colossal egos rubbing up against one another in an battle for dominance. They converse in probing manipulations, trying to get under each other's skin and craving escape from limbo. Their interrogations get to the heart of the various gender archetypes that the characters represent; warped reflections of the daughter, the maiden, the mother, and the wife.

This emotional crucible gives each of them the framework to deal with the enormity of their actions. Each travels through the classical stages of anger, denial etc before arriving at some kind of breakthrough. But can they ever escape the crushing guilt of their self-imposed hell?

Staged beneath a dangling wall of mirrors, lit by sickly bright neon and soundtracked by a combination of thumping dubstep remixes and the wistful voice of Lana Del Ray, Full Circle may be based on classical material, but its style is resolutely modern. Indeed, there's even a tinge of the strip club when you're immersed in coloured light and your bones are tickled by booming bass drops. This combo of ancient Greek morality and modern aesthetics goes a long way towards making these characters' tangled psychologies accessible to a modern audience. 

At just over an hour long, Full Circle leaps into the deep end quickly, trusting its audience to keep up with four necessarily complex backstories. Unless you've got a surefire knowledge of Greek mythology, you're going to have difficulty keeping up. I'd consider myself pretty up on this stuff - but though I'm familiar with Helen of Troy and Medea's stories, I'm only mildly familiar with Clytemnestra and only know of Phaedra in passing.

My own ignorance isn't the best basis for criticism, but even though the audience is given a leg-up with cheat-sheet programmes that list each woman's crimes it's easy to get lost in thicket of opinions and accusations that makes up the majority of the play.

Fortunately, a set of uniformly good performances mean that even if you occasionally have trouble following the argument, you remain emotionally engaged. The four actors, Lucy Avison, Madelaine Cunningham, Laura McKee and Sarah Sorenson, each display a clear understanding of what makes each character tick, following emotional threads right up unti the conclusion.

My highlight was Laura McKee's Helen, approaching her as a woman who's made a conscious decision to stop feeling so damn sorry for herself and turn a bit femme fatale. There's a deliciously predatorial quality to her that's surprising considering she's in the company of murderers and liars.

I enjoyed Full Circle; though it didn't knock me for six. Perhaps if I'd done my homework and boned up on the various bloody sagas that fuel the play I'd have been more on board. Still, you can't argue with straight-up, no frills, professional performances like these, or with the obvious enquiring intelligence that lies behind the dialogue.

A bit of a curate's egg, but at least an interesting one.

★★★

Full Circle is at the Arts Theatre until the 5th. Tickets here.