LONDON CITY NIGHTS

Sunday, March 8, 2020

Review: 'Nuclear War / Buried / Graceland' at the Old Red Lion, 5th March 2020

Sunday, March 8, 2020 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Reviewed by David James

Rating: 

I'm not a huge fan double or triple bills of short plays. It's not that it's necessarily a bad format, but it's very tricky to write about while doing justice to each individual play. That remains the case, but I walked out of The Old Red Lion's latest triple bill (described, somewhat pretentiously, as a 'triptych') in a great mood. The two-hour show consists of David Spencer's Buried, Max Saunders-Singer's Graceland and Simon Stephens' Nuclear War.

First, a quick overview of this theatrical three-course dinner. 

Buried is a 50-minute long piece about the experiences of the playwright's grandfather during World War II. Played by James Demaine, the story is told from the perspective of a soldier who's been buried alive. What follows is a chronologically tangled and poetic demonstration of the psychological impacts of war.

Graceland is a dark comedy in which Anthony Cozen's teacher settles in to teach his Form 9 class, as represented by the audience. He's obviously stressed and is behaving increasingly strangely. All too soon we discover why today is the worst day of his life.

Finally, we get Nuclear War, which is a fusion of choreography and abstract verse about the end of the world, a personal view of death, the dissolution of the self and the inevitable forces of entropy that will emotionally, physically and scientifically tear us apart. This is performed by Zoe Grain and Freya Sharp.

Buried

The three plays don't share much in common other than a somewhat nihilistic perspective on life. There's a content warning on the way up to the theatre explaining that these plays contain "trauma, PTSD, scenes of a distressing nature, suicide, grief, sexual content & strong language". While I don't want to spoil too many of the twists and turns, the promise of this sign is fulfilled a couple of times over.

There's a lot to like in each of these plays, but while Buried boasts a committed performance from Demaine, and some sparkling writing (especially in the gruesome scenes based around corpse disposal), it eventually feels a little repetitive. The jumbled chronology meant I was concentrating on piecing the story together rather than appreciating the emotions. 

On a more practical note, there are moments where Demaine stands directly in front of the audience and delivers a shouty speech under a spotlight, which allows you to see him inadvertently coating the front row with a fine layer of saliva, to the audience's obvious discomfort. Ordinarily, this would be par for the course in a small theatre, but these are, oh let's say, hygiene-focused times...

Graceland

For me, the highlights came with Graceland and Nuclear War. Anthony Cozens does a neat job semi-improvising his way through Graceland, knowing precisely when to slacken and tighten the reins on the audience. I really loved the slowly shifting tone and the way the pieces oscillate between comedy and tragedy, sometimes within the space of a few seconds. Plus, it's nice to get some genuine belly-laughs sandwiched in between the other plays. 

But the best of the three is undoubtedly Nuclear War. This has the honour of being one of the few plays I've ever wanted to watch again immediately after it finished just so I could pick up on more of the nuance. Ditching irrelevancies like characters and narrative, Nuclear War is a weirdly musical piece that doesn't actually contain any music. But it's a confrontational, clearly personal bit of writing that speaks to something absolutely vital about being human... but pinning down exactly what that is maddeningly difficult.

Nuclear War

I'm doing a terrible job at describing this, but just trust me that it's ace. Zoe Grain and Freya Sharp are also jaw-droppingly well-rehearsed. The play relies on near-perfect timing and choreography, with no room for error or stumbles. The spell it weaves is so enticing that you almost develop anxiety that one of them will forget their lines and this precious thing will shatter like a snowflake hitting the ground.

I remain on the fence about these triple bill nights. However, shorter plays like these absolutely deserve an audience. Both Graceland and Nuclear War come in at under 30 mins and neither would benefit from being any longer. Where else can you perform these to a paying audience if not during a triple bill? So, while it might be trickier to write about three plays than one, I'll keep coming if the Old Red Lion keeps putting on stuff of this quality.

Nuclear War, Graceland and Buried are at the Old Red Lion until 21 March. Tickets here.

Friday, January 10, 2020

Review: 'Lullabies for the Lost' at the Old Red Lion, 9th January 2020

Friday, January 10, 2020 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Reviewed by David James

Rating: 

We're only ten days into the new decade, a continent has ignited, we appear to be perched on the precipice of a world war and we have five years of Boris Johnson to look forward to. If there was ever a time for an anxious play, this is it.

Rosalind Blessed's Lullabies for the Lost is a collection of monologues from people living with various mental health issues. There's a skeletal narrative about these characters being trapped together in some kind of monochrome purgatory and having to earn the right to escape it. But this framework is just the cracker on which some extremely miserable cheese is served.

And man oh man, this is some absolutely brutal stuff. From the first monologue on the characters are talking about self-harm, the way their bodies are falling apart, the filth in which they live, the way their minds rebel against them and their sorrow at watching their potential trickle through their fingers like sand through an hourglass. Fat bubbles up through too-deep self-inflicted cuts, throats are slashed with broken wine glasses, vomit smears the walls.

The show hits such high notes of desperation and misery that it wasn't particularly surprising when someone fainted mid-way through and they had to pause the show to check that she was alright. For all I know this person might have had low blood sugar or something, but I assumed that the material was so visceral her brain noped out.

But though it hits those high notes, they're mercifully not sustained. There are laughs amongst the misery as the characters examine the surreal and ridiculous places their condition takes them. For example, an in early monologue about social anxiety and depression, Chris Porter's Larry tries to come up with an excuse why he can't attend a meal. He considers telling them his cat has had a stroke. There's a beat. "... Do cats have strokes?"

These moments of comedy are a double-edged sword. Laughing along with these characters cements our emotional connection with them, which only makes the pits of their despair that much more crushing.

Fringe plays about mental illness aren't exactly uncommon - at any given time there will be various confessional monologues about how miserable the writer's life is going on in a room above London pubs. But Lullabies for the Lost casts its net wider than the playwright's personal experience, showing us that there are many different ways to be in pain, all of which come loaded with their own particular horrors.

You might argue that this play is being sad for sad's sake: like Madame Tussauds' Chamber of Horrors but for mental illness. But there's a mile-wide empathic streak running right through the show, culminating in a video appearance from Hildegard Neil giving us assurance that we should stop being so neurotic and muddled up as "you're just not that important". That's not exactly a traditional pick-me-up, but realizing that no-one gives that much of a shit about what you look like, how successful you are and what you do can be an intensely liberating experience.

All this is delivered by a fantastic (and very well chosen) cast. In a play like this it's silly to pick favourites, but I've been a fan of Helen Bang for ages and she's as great as she usually is here. I also really enjoyed Kate Tydman's Nerys, who nails presenting an outwardly healthy and confident exterior while rotting away behind closed doors. But, perhaps because he gets the most nightmarish monologue of all, Duncan Wilkins' performance is the one that's going to stick in the memory longest.

This all adds up to a not exactly fun night at the theatre, but definitely a worthwhile one. I had actually been suffering from a pretty brutal cold all week and prior to the show was weighing up just staying in bed. But Lullabies for the Lost synced up perfectly with my gloomy, drowsy and stuffed up state of mind. Nothing is sugar-coated here, and the night is all the better for it.

Lullabies for the Lost is at the Old Red Lion Theatre until 31st January. Tickets here.

Images are courtesy of Adam Trigg.

Friday, October 11, 2019

Review: 'Last Orders: The Haunting of the Old Red Lion' at the Old Red Lion, 10th October 2019

Friday, October 11, 2019 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Reviewed by David James

Rating: 

The Old Red Lion in Islington is one of my favourite London pubs. It's friendly, has a good selection of beers, nice decor and has a cosy upstairs theatre at which I've seen many plays over the years. I also dig the history of the place: there's a mural in the pub explaining that it was founded in 1415 (though rebuilt in 1899) and that over the years many historical figures of note drank here. It was even featured in a 1736 Hogarth painting!

But a building doesn't get this old without some unpleasantness happening within its walls. Staff members report strange, unexplained noises, objects moving without explanation and there are even ghostly apparitions on the stairs. This is where The Knock Knock Club come in. 

The company recently teamed up with professional paranormal investigators to do a full supernatural audit of the building, spending a night in the building exploring each floor. Tonight they present their results in, Last Orders: The Haunting of the Old Red Lion.

The Knock Knock Club are true believer Reece Connolly, sceptic Christopher Keegan and undecided Caroline Buckley. After a quick poll of who in the audience believes in ghosts (at the London Horror Festival it seems silly to say no) we're off. 

The show is part storytelling, part lecture. So, we open with Connolly delivering a spooky story by candlelight about a terrifying incident that took place in the very room we're sitting in. Brrr. All three performers can spin a fantastic yarn, and the ones we hear tonight are suitably creepy. 

With a set composed simply of a hanging pub sign and frantic red scrawls (blood, knife and so on) on the walls, the show relies on darkness to provide the atmosphere. This works beautifully, especially later in the show when they cover up the green glowing fire escape sign in the corner. I love shows that plunge the audience into pitch darkness, and aside from some brief and dramatic flashes of light, it cranks up the volume of the tales they're telling.

Sadly the paranormal investigation side of the show is less engaging. I'm a sucker for local historical tidbits; so while I knew that Lenin and Stalin once drank at this pub, I didn't know there was a legend about Lenin attempting to hide in the dumb waiter to avoid police. But the thing is, the way the show is structured, I've got no idea if this is true or not.

Last Orders has a real problem here. Obviously as part of the London Horror Festival and a show being put on in the run-up to Halloween it's got to be spooky. If the show's conclusion was that there's actually nothing strange going on in this building at all and that ghosts aren't real, it'd be a big let down. So there's a theatrical incentive to bend the truth or, to put it less kindly, make shit up.

There are parts in the show when they tell you a story about something that happened in this pub, only to admit straight afterwards that it actually didn't happen like that. Full credit to them for honesty, but it means that you're constantly second-guessing whether what you're hearing is actual history, actual recordings from their night in the building or just something to spice up the show. 

I can understand why Last Orders is structured like this: it wants to both inform and entertain. But this is ultimately a piece of horror theatre and I wish they'd just leaned firmly towards the latter. 

Throughout the show we hear tales of mysterious noises from within the building and objects moving on their own - why not simulate this on stage at unexpected times to freak us out a bit? Hell, why not go all Ghostwatch on us and have the show turn into a genuine paranormal event that the audience is caught up in? I dunno, have someone get possessed on stage during the Ouiji board sequence or something.

As it is, Last Orders is too dry to be scary and too loose with the facts to be informative. The Knock Knock Club are all engaging and charismatic stage presences, but even they cannot disguise that the paranormal content of the show is very thin. And if you're going to exaggerate some parts, why not exaggerate all of it? 

Last Orders: The Haunting of the Old Red Lion runs until 26th October. Tickets here.

Wednesday, October 2, 2019

Review: 'Danelaw' at the Old Red Lion, 1st October 2019

Wednesday, October 2, 2019 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Reviewed by David James

Rating: 

The far-right are currently the fastest-growing terrorist threat in the United Kingdom. Decades of anti-immigrant stories in tabloid newspapers, Conservative policies victimising asylum seekers and online echo chambers (among many other factors) have created a fertile ground for violence. The consequences of this are atrocities like the murder of Jo Cox, the June 2017 attack on a mosque in Finsbury Park and many, many failed terror plots (which don't tend to get a huge deal of media coverage).

Things feel close to breaking point in the UK at the moment - just yesterday I saw a man who'd doused himself in petrol outside Parliament and attempted to set himself on fire. This climate means it's a good time to revive Danelaw, Peter Hamilton's 2005 satire that picks apart the political libido of the far right.

We begin in prison, where Cliff (Dan MacLane) is serving a stretch for racially aggravated assault. He's visited by Warboys (Craig Crosbie), a mysterious upper-class man who hints at a big future for Cliff. Warboys' plan is to recreate the titular Danelaw: a white nationalist separatist territory in East Anglia with Chelmsford as its capital. Cliff, a former football hooligan suffering from mental illness, is clearly the prime candidate to revive Viking Britain.

Soon he's sprung from prison, has rechristened himself Olaf and is busy assembling a motley crew consisting of his former cellmates, family on the outside and a threateningly competent gang of dutch Neo-Nazis. With a stash of explosives and weaponry at their disposal, they draw up plans to strike at a mosque in an attempt to kickstart their race war.

Though Danelaw comes with warnings about violent content and racist imagery, it's so broadly written and performed that the play is basically a cartoon. With the exception of Warboys (and perhaps the Dutch Neo-Nazis), every character is monumentally stupid and gullible. On top of that, most of them don't have any particularly strong racist convictions and have essentially been peer-pressured into fascism.

It's an interesting (and I suspect accurate) perspective. People want to be part of a community and many members of terrorist groups are sucked in because that's what their friends are doing - and once you're in, you're in. The script touches on this ideological malleability many times, characters claiming that they see fascism as a role or phase, with many only involved because they just want to fit in.

Sadly, while Danelaw has a decent amount of insight, it's not a particularly good play. The cast has clearly been directed to go big with their performances - and while Dan MacLane, Craig Crosbie and Evelyn Craven manage it while remaining believable, many members of the cast don't. For example, Will Henry's Jason is just a collection of tics and overly mannered body language - and despite getting a decent chunk of the play to himself I had no idea what the character was supposed to be about.

Then there's the flabby second half. Without wanting to spoil the plot, the play comes a natural conclusion about 15 minutes after the interval. It then proceeds to spin its tyres through a series of lengthy, meandering epilogues that kill all sense of momentum. Even besides that, there's a lot that could (and should) be cut from the play - with many of its 11-strong cast of characters just not contributing much to the overall themes.

Danelaw never quite becomes boring, but it's frustrating that the skeleton of an excellent piece of drama is so clearly present yet is mired in dramatic dead-ends. That said, I appreciated its perspective and with nationalism on the rise (encouraged by a Conservative Party accelerating rightwards) audiences should be reminded that this trajectory always ends with blood on the streets.

Danelaw is at the Old Red Lion until 5 October. Tickets here.

Friday, April 5, 2019

Review: 'The Noises' at The Old Red Lion, 4th April 2019

Friday, April 5, 2019 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Reviewed by David James
Rating: 

In retrospect, the rape scene told from the point of the view of a golden retriever was probably the low point. That's a bit of a non sequitur to begin a review with, but it's genuinely difficult to know where to begin with Jacqueline Saphra's The Noises, one of the most bafflingly ill-conceived plays I've ever seen.

The story is told entirely from the perspective of a dog, Luna (Amy McAllister). She spends almost all of the play locked inside a room while mysterious events happen in the house around her that she (and by extension us) must puzzle out. Somewhere along the way, Luna becomes aware of the presence of the audience and, uh, World War III happens. But I'll get to that in a minute.

Directed by Jacqueline's daughter Tamar, the play consists of Luna talking directly to the audience in short, chopped up monosyllabic sentences about whatever's on her mind. This could be anything from how delicious eating vomited up chicken is, what the concept of 'clean' means to a dog, her opinions of the various family members, how much she needs to take a shit and so on. During this, McAllister isn't so much miming being a dog as trying to imbue certain dog-like qualities in her performance. So, for example, when she's happy she wiggles her butt a bit.

Perhaps this might have worked as a brief dramatic sketch, maybe a twenty-minute long experiment in conveying a dog's eye view on the world. But, despite being billed at 70 minutes, The Noises actually comes in quite a bit longer than that. And trust me, you'll feel every single minute agonisingly tick by. If I hadn't been there to review the show I would have walked out - and during a quick mid-play glance across the audience I noticed that there were a couple of people who'd simply fallen asleep. Lucky bastards.

What's particularly confusing about this whole affair is reading in the programme that writer Jacqueline Saphra is a published poet, teacher and has had playwriting commissions from various notable institutions. It's a CV that simply doesn't tesselate with The Noises, which is written in the unfocused style of a group A-Level drama project.

How else to explain the sudden foray into fourth wall breaking metafiction when Luna can suddenly perceive the theatre in which she's performing and begins interrogating the audience? Did no-one think it was a problem that the actual narrative was presented through pre-recorded, difficult to hear, muffled audio? Why does Luna, hitherto presented to us as a golden retriever, put on shoes and stroll about at one point? What the actual fuck is going on with the apocalyptic World War III third act in which society begins to crumble and Luna must race through a bombed out landscape to save her mistress from... somebody? 

And then there's the aforementioned rape scene. If you're writing a rape scene of any kind you're in tricky dramatic territory and really, really need to be sure you're getting this right. And if you're writing said rape scene from the point of view of a dog? There are some things best left on the cutting room floor, especially if your play is already grossly overlong.

Amidst all this, I have a deep and abiding pity for Amy McAllister. Luna is a nightmare role that requires her to humiliate herself in front of a paying audience for the best part of the month. She is a trained, professional and no doubt skilled actor but any talents she possesses are pancaked under the mindblowingly bad script. To her credit, I don't think there's an actor on the planet that could make this work.

As the play wheezed itself through a final set of contortions I sat there miserably pondering what had become of my Thursday night. The Noises feels like a play characters in a sitcom would see to poke fun at experimental theatre. It's the kind of play that makes you seriously question the wisdom of writing about theatre if you have to spend your time digesting garbage like this. It is a bad, bad, bad play and I am baffled that it passed the quality tests of this generally excellent pub theatre.

In an ideal world, The Noises should have been subjected to a basic sanity check early in its gestation. 

"Is this a good idea for a play?" 

"No, no it is not."

The Noises is at The Old Red Lion Theatre until 20th April. Tickets here.

Wednesday, October 31, 2018

Review: 'The Tiend' at the Old Red Lion Theatre 10-30th October 2018

Wednesday, October 31, 2018 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Reviewed by David James
Rating: 

'Immersive' theatre has become a marketing buzzword that's slapped on the side of any show with the tiniest bit audience interaction in the hope of drawing in the punters. But ONEOHONE Theatre's The Tiend is truly immersive in a way I've not experienced before. Billed as an 'interactive theatrical journey', The Tiend is a three-week long interactive horror narrative told via your smartphone, social media and the internet. 

When the show begins, characters begin contacting you by WhatsApp, adding you on Twitter or speaking on the telephone as they spin an enigmatic, interconnected tale whose path depends on your choices and responses. On top of that, there's a face-to-face meeting late in the show in which you meet one of the characters you've been chatting to and prove how much you've learned.

As soon as I heard about this I snapped up a spot. I'm always on the lookout for new ideas in theatre and a show that takes place online in various forms of media sounded right up my street. It sounded to me like a more theatrical and personal 'alternate reality game', which Wikipedia defines as: "an interactive networked narrative that uses the real world as a platform and employs transmedia storytelling to deliver a story that may be altered by players' ideas or actions".

And so, come October the 10th I started receiving messages on Whatsapp. "You.. You intrigue me. Are you worthy?" or a garbled and cryptic "yOu ifoUNd you But so did the otHer one." Then I found a very strange Twitter account in which someone was growing increasingly paranoid about their five-year-old son, which led to a very strange website of a possibly psychic life coach...

The highlight of the experience was the face to face meeting. For me, this consisted of a job interview for a shadowy organisation devoted to nefarious ends. I love improvising and the woman interviewing me was insanely fun to bounce ideas off and see how she'd react to things. Interacting in this way with a fictional character is something you can only achieve in immersive theatre, and though this is a brief chat it was fun, exciting and interesting.

In fact, I learned more about what was actually going on in The Tiend in that ten minutes than I had in the previous two weeks. The show requires its audience to put in a lot more legwork than I'd first assumed, with riddles to be solved and interpersonal connections to be teased out. Perhaps this is more on me than the show, but I (and the friends I enlisted to help me out) had absolutely no idea how to solve the various puzzles the game threw my way, and even when I outright asked the characters help I didn't get much back.

For example, after a week or so of being just plain confused, I tried to engage one of the characters in conversation. What I got back as an answer was, "I am not sure whether you are worthy of my interest, or my partnership, or my hate.  Or my indifference. I am still not sure which of those burdens best suits you." to which I frustratedly replied: "cut it with the cryptic crap and tell me what's going on". I didn't receive a response.

Amongst the cast of characters you message with, I just wanted someone to have a normal conversation with who didn't speak in enigmatic spirals. The closest I got was a chat on Twitter with a woman having trouble with her child, but she felt like a character in a video game endlessly repeating variations on the same few lines.

The guide to the show claims: "It is possible to take part in The Teind without any interaction.  If you don’t want to talk back to the characters, you don’t have to – the story will still unfold in its own time, and you will still be invited to the final meeting". I don't think this is true, if you didn't interact with it at all the experience would consist of a handful of head-scratching context-free text messages and a pretty bizarre one-to-one meeting.

I found The Tiend a neat experiment, but not one which ever really interested, gripped or scared me. More than most theatre, this show lives and dies on the strength of its audience, so perhaps I'm the weak link in the chain here. Either way, at least as far as I'm concerned, I appreciated the concept far more than the execution. 

Apparently, ONEOHONE has plans to stage something like this again - I'd love to see how it develops after they've smoothed out a couple of the rough edges.

Friday, May 18, 2018

Review: 'In The Shadow Of The Mountain' at the Old Red Lion, 17th May 2018

Friday, May 18, 2018 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Reviewed by David James
Rating: 

I have two ambitions for this review. I want to be humane and I want to be efficient. In The Shadow Of The Mountain was created with the best of intentions: to address the stigma and misconceptions surrounding Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). It fails to do this. More prosaically, it is not a very good play.

The plot concerns the relationship between Ellie (Felicity Huxley-Miners, also writing) and Rob (David Shears). They 'meet-cute' on a train platform when Ellie hurls herself at Rob after she suspects that he's suicidal. Though Rob is annoyed and confused, he follows her home after she offers him casual sex. Ellie's behaviour grows more bizarre once we're at her flat, with a very confused Rob spending the rest of the 70-minute play dealing with her rapid mood swings, impulsive behaviour and emotional manipulation. 

There are multiple reasons why In The Shadow Of The Mountain fails to achieve what it wants to do. To be precise, in the words of the playwright, the goal was to kick back against "...portraying women with BPD as difficult and deliberately manipulating ... All of this contributes to the harmful, negative portrayal and is so damaging to both those affected and those with little personal experience."

If this was the aim then the play has catastrophically failed. Ellie is written, played and directed as the villain of the piece, objectively shown to be deliberately manipulative to Rob. It's bizarre that the play claims it is pushing back against harmful stereotypes of mental illness at the exact same time it is leaning into them as hard as possible. The tone of the piece is so skewiff that after the ominous first couple of scenes I assumed we were heading into outright horror territory, and that Rob would soon find himself shoved into a sack and dismembered, Audition-style.

This happens because the audience only sees Ellie via Rob. We get to know her as he does, and his lack of comprehension of her mental situation means that we're forever on the outside looking in. If the aim of the play is to show empathy with someone with BPD we need to understand her internal processes and see the situation from her perspective, which this play cannot achieve by virtue of its structure.

Granted, In The Shadow Of The Mountain would be a much more difficult play to write if it were told from Ellie's perspective, but it's not impossible. For example, Rachel Bloom's CW sitcom Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is about the protagonist's BPD, and that manages to present the illness accurately and humanely while delivering a series of toe-tappin' musical numbers (read more in this excellent Elle article).

Compounding all of this are two unconvincing performances. Huxley-Miner's Ellie spends large swathes of the play acting like a textbook Manic Pixie Dream Girl ("MPDGs are usually static characters who have eccentric personality quirks and are unabashedly girlish. They invariably serve as the romantic interest for a (most often brooding or depressed) male protagonist.") while David Shears' Rob is barely a character and more a collection of perplexed stares. Then there's the lacklustre set and...

Y'know what I just feel bad now. It's one thing to stick the boot into a production ruined by ego or stupidity, it's another to do it to a play obviously written with good intentions that has gone completely awry. I wish I had nicer things to say about In The Shadow Of The Mountain - but, well, I don't.

In The Shadow Of The Mountain is at the Old Red Lion until 2nd June. Tickets here.

Friday, September 1, 2017

Review: 'Talk Radio' at the Old Red Lion, 31st August 2017

Friday, September 1, 2017 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Talk Radio reviewed by David James

Rating:

"When you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you." This is Barry Champlain's life in a nutshell. Fuelled by nicotine, cocaine and whiskey, he's a late night talk radio host who dishes out constant verbal pummellings to his listeners. First, they're ridiculed, then they're lectured, and finally a slap on a big red 'end call' button consigns them back to the anonymity from whence they came.

Champlain's callers either hate or worship him, running the gamut from Nazis that accuse him of being part of a global Zionist conspiracy funded by Israel to the batty old ladies who just want to talk about their pets. Gradually we understand his callers as a kind of hydra, each caller a different head on a Reagan-era gestalt, bristling with racism, sexism, paranoia, mental illness, perversion and masochism. 

Each night he wrestles this beast, his unbridled fury bolstering his listening figures as the public tunes in to hear what the hell the wild man of radio is going say next. They know him as a disembodied voice, we in the audience see him as something more feral - a wolf in a zoo pacing a soundproofed cage, his eyes gradually hollowing out as he slowly comprehends the barbarity and banality of the general public.

Eric Bogosian's Talk Radio is now 30 years old, and this revival is set to the background of a completely transformed media landscape. American Talk Radio is now the stomping ground of grumpy old conservatives like Rush Limbaugh, with the real pulse of society now throbbing away on Twitter where each person makes their own contribution to the global consciousness, 140 characters at a time. 

Viewing Champlain through a contemporary lens leads to some uncomfortable conclusions. Back in the 80s, the shock jock was kicking back against a sanitised mass media that embodied Nancy Reagan's good old fashioned American values. This world is now dead, sacrificed in the name of the self-worship and narcissism that has reached its zenith in President Donald J. Trump. It's now easy to see Champlain's shock jock as a harbinger of Trump himself. It's sad, but all-too-easy to imagine Champlain approaching his sixties with a red MAGA cap firmly jammed down upon his now thinning head.

Talk Radio almost entirely relies on the talents of whoever's playing Champlain and Matthew Jure more than delivers. He's scarily committed to the role, embodying the character as much with his furious ranting as when he's frustratedly searching for a cigarette in the studio. Frankly, it's nice to see an actor come at a role as hard as Jure does here, playing him without a trace of irony, parody or satire. When the most unconvincing part of the performance is a dodgy wig, you're doing something right.

Bolstering all this is one of the finest sets I've seen all year, courtesy of Max Dorey (whose work I've admired in many prior productions). It's an exhaustively detailed recreation of a period era radio set, everything from the analogue broadcasting equipment right through to the Reagan/Bush bumper stickers at the rear of the stage and the Cleveland Indians 'Chief Wahoo' sticker on the wall of the studio. Even if the play weren't much cop, audiences would probably get their money's worth poring over the exquisite care with which this place has been constructed.

Perhaps the only real downside is a lack of narrative propulsion. Bogosian teases us with promises of melodrama, before quickly snatching it away and poking fun at our naivety for believing in it. Even the overarching plot that tonight is Champlain's one shot at national syndication eventually sputters out and is largely forgotten. 

What we're left with are a man and a microphone, and when this man is as compellingly written and expertly performed, that's all you need.

Talk Radio is at the Old Red Lion until 23rd September. Tickets and details here.

Saturday, December 10, 2016

Review: 'Benighted' at the Old Red Lion Theatre, 8th December 2016

Saturday, December 10, 2016 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

With Stephen Daldry's revival of JB Priestley's An Inspector Calls making waves in the West End, what better time to explore one of his lesser-known works? Benighted was originally published as a novel in 1927 and subsequently adapted in 1932 for the screen by Frankenstein director James Whale as The Old Dark House. In 2016 it stands as a rather neglected piece of work, this adaptation by Duncan Gates the first time it's ever been staged.

The Old Red Lion is developing a knack for theatrical necromancy, resurrecting one of Arthur Miller's earliest works last year: No Villain. Obscure and little-performed works by iconic dramatists tend to fall into one of two categories. Either they're genuinely 'lost' (as was the case with No Villain, eventually discovered in a dusty pile of manuscripts) or they're superseded by later, more successful works by the author. 

Benighted, Priestley's second published work, falls into the latter category. Its themes presage his later work (specifically An Inspector Calls) as if he knew what he wanted to write about but hadn't worked out how.

It's the 1920s and prissy young marrieds Philip and Margaret Waverton (Tom Machell & Harrie Hayes) are trapped in an apocalyptic rainstorm. As mudslides wash the road away and water beats on the roof of their car they unhappily bicker about what to do next. They're soon joined by caddish gadabout Penderel (Matt Maltby), who emerges from a chest in the rear. The trio must seek shelter and, with no other options, make for an eerie house upon a nearby hill

This place proves to be inhabited by a family who're half Hammer Horror and half Monty Python: Horace Femm (Michael Sadler), a deflated old queen unhappily mired in his family's wreckage, his deranged sister who will not shut up about unsettling, creepy stuff and ominous knockings from a mad relative trapped in the attic - apparently having been in unquenchable murderous rage since he returned from World War I. 

On the plus side, it is dry...

This motley crew are soon joined by another couple escaping the storm. Northern textile mogul William Porterhouse (Ross Forder) and chirpy flapper Gladys Du Cane (Jessica Bay). All the five have to do is wait out the storm and avoid the disturbed denizens of this strange house, a simple task that soon proves exceedingly tricky.

At it's most basic level, Benighted is a camp horror comedy. The performances are dialled up to scenery chewing 11, the lightning arrives with pinpoint comedy timing and the mannered, stuffy dialogue is cheesy in all the right ways. The show is peppered with giggles from the audience as its characters (particularly the amusingly blithe Wavertons) bumble their way through with the night with not much more than a stiff upper lip and sense of English propriety. In fact, at its best, Benighted bears a pleasing tonal resemblance to the stage version of The 39 Steps. 

Unfortunately, the comedic tone is repeatedly punctured by some clumsy segues into straight drama. There's a Very Serious Message about the psychological damage inflicted on soldiers during the Great War that, while accurate in its sentiments, feels like it's been stapled into the script from another play. Additionally, for all the delicate writing about men bottling up their trauma and buckling under its weight, it attempts to conclude the argument via a towering, grunting, gas mask wearing B-movie monster man. It doesn't work.

By the time the curtain falls, Benighted feels like it's composed of about ten separate dramatic ideas and character sketches that have been awkwardly stitched together. None of the mini-plots resolve satisfyingly, leaving the play feeling a bit like the contents of Priestley's scratch pad. Tantalisingly, you can spot bits of An Inspector Calls in these sketches - most notably when the Birling-esque Mr Porterhouse casually explains how he ruined one of his worker's lives for no reason.

But, though it never really gels, this definitely isn't a chore. Gregor Donnelly's dark wooden set works gangbusters at creating an Addams Family atmosphere not to mention accentuating the claustrophobic nature of the Old Red Lion's theatre space. On top of that the performances are uniformly ace (I quickly developed a soft spot for Harrie Hayes), the jokes all hit home and the sound design is top notch. You can tell why Benighted has largely been forgotten, but it isn't without its charms.

★★★

Benighted is at the Old Red Lion Theatre until 7th January. Tickets here.