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Showing posts with label play. Show all posts
Showing posts with label play. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 11, 2020
Tuesday, February 11, 2020
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Reviewed by David James
Rating: 
Maybe I'm just getting cynical, but the standard of fringe theatre feels like it's pretty damn low at the moment. There's a couple of gems out there, but it seems like every time I open my inbox I'm faced with a deluge of invitations to autobiographical productions about playwrights' personal struggle against various types of adversity. And if they're not that, they're some self-consciously random bullshit about unicorns or some other twee bullshit.
So thank god for Karoline Leach's Tryst, a narratively straightforward two-hander that takes place in two relatively normal locations. The play was first staged in 1997 under the title The Mysterious Mr Love, and now it's the final show in the Chiswick Playhouse's inaugural season.
Set in 1910, we follow conman George Love (Fred Perry) and milliner Adelaide Pinchin (Scarlett Brookes). Love's modus operandi is to seduce rich, desperate and unmarried women and then abscond with their money at the earliest opportunity. He introduces himself to us as a predator, dehumanising his targets by describing them as "it" and claiming that the one night of good sex he'll provide will more than help them through the misery of being conned.
Adelaide Pinchin appears to be his ideal victim. She's a depressed, dowdy woman approaching middle-age eking out a miserable existence behind the scenes of a hat shop. She also has a diamond brooch, a pearl hairpin and a large inheritance that she doesn't know what to do with. After a chance encounter, Love sniffs this out almost immediately, and the stage is set for the big con.
Though based on an easily searchable true story, I would recommend you save your internet search until after you've seen the play. Leach provides a purposeful yet winding narrative in which your assumptions about who these people are are repeatedly challenged. Though one is predator and the other prey, they are both products of the same system and ultimately cannot help but empathise with one another.
Without going into too much spoilerrific detail, the true monster of the piece proves to be the patriarchal society that underpins the era. Love has moulded himself into what he perceives as the ideal man: stylish, charming and devoid of any real emotion. But what's left of the real person under all this, and where is he ultimately going?
He doesn't realise any of this, so it's a surprise when Adelaide opens up about her home life and he begins to feel increasingly powerful twinges of empathy. And, as every good con man knows, once you start down that road the jig is up.
We cannot help but analyse the characters' predicaments through a contemporary lens. In fact, though the play was first performed in '97, contemporary audiences are probably likely to get more out of the psychology of Adelaide than the original audiences would have.
And man, it's a hell of a story, underpinned by two fantastic performances. Both communicate volumes through their body language alone. Brookes does a great job of draining Adelaide of confidence and then building her back up. She's clearly a beautiful woman in real life, but as Adelaide her drawn features and strained expressions belie decades of being ground under someone else's thumb.
Meanwhile, Perry manages an onion-like performance in which his character pretends to be someone who is pretending to be someone. That he can do that while clearly delineating each layer is an impressive feat.
On top of all that the attention to period detail in dialogue and set design is basically perfect. Everything from brewing a cup of tea, to running a bath, to outside toilets, to the jobs of ancillary characters have clearly been carefully researched. You know you're in good hands when the characters can casually reference Gibson Girls.
I had a great time, and I honestly wish there were more plays staged like this. Tryst doesn't deal in writing tricks, complex feats of staging or didactic messaging - it's just a straightforward story of two characters in opposition to one another. Those 90 minutes positively flew by for me and judging by the audiences' reaction, they will for you too.
Friday, August 9, 2019
Friday, August 9, 2019
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Rating: 
Dealing with grief is like preparing a house for a tornado. You're scurrying around, boarding up the doors and windows of your mind to create a safe haven where the horror cannot reach you. You need time in this cocoon to build the courage to face your new reality: one that will forever be absent of the person you loved.
Peter Taylor's River in the Sky puts this process on stage, showing us a couple struggling to deal with the death of their newborn baby. Played by Lindsey Cross and Howard Horner, the pair had been dealing with fertility issues and miscarriages for so long that the joy of anticipation of being a parent was replaced with grim nervousness: "what's going to go wrong this time?". Then, miracle of miracles, they have a baby boy. The world is sunshine and roses, right up until an undiagnosed genetic heart condition randomly kills him.
Sucks to be them.
The play picks up some time later, with the woman having retreated to an isolated cottage to grieve and the man returning to work in an effort to maintain a normal life. By the time we meet them they're shadows of their former selves. Their interactions are artificial, as if they're performing bad cover versions of their original personalities. These people will never be what they once were, but can they recover enough of themselves to move forward?
River in the Sky sensibly shies away from portraying grief as tearing of hair and renting of clothes. There's not even that many tears. What we get here is a bleak numbness: jokes made to a blank reception, small talk about biscuits to break the silence, and a palpable physical hollowness that comes with sleepless nights and low appetite.
Their coping mechanism for busting through this is to retreat into storytelling. Cross' character wears a Harry Potter top and is an author, with her partner apparently similarly enthusiastic about fantasy. To deal with their emotions they concoct an allegorical story in which their baby son is some kind of fantastical griffin creature who has been devoured by a slimy, black many-tentacled sea monster.
It's here that the play lost me. Using metaphor to deal with difficult subjects isn't exactly unusual, but I wanted to feel more raw emotion rather than the characters essentially tiptoeing around what they're feeling. Plus, this leads directly into an overly sentimental finale in which the parents get to talk with the ghost of their infant son, who unfortunately speaks in creepy falsetto.
But this is a wobble rather than the play completely going off the rails. The whole enterprise is anchored by Cross and Horner's nicely multi-layered performances. Though they begin the play isolated from one another we can clearly see the old conversational grooves that couples slide into when they've spent so much time together. It makes the moments where they snap at each other painful, we can tell they are hurting one another because even anger is preferable to the suffocating numbness.
River in the Sky isn't an easy watch, but anyone who's suffered loss will find much to recognise here. This can't be easy to write or perform, but successfully capturing the essential truth of these emotions is no mean feat.
River in the Sky is at The Hope Theatre until 24 August. Tickets here.
Saturday, June 29, 2019
Saturday, June 29, 2019
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Reviewed by David James
Rating:
The late 1970s and early 1980s were a golden age for British TV science fiction. Tom Baker was deep into his tenure on Doctor Who, while shows like Quatermass, Blake's 7 and Space: 1999 were cementing themselves in popular culture. What they lacked in budget they made up for with ideas, building passionate fanbases that persist to this day. But there's one show you won't have heard of: Dark Sublime.
It tells the tale of Captain Vykar and plucky crew of the space Skelder, who seek to prevent villainous interdimensional space queen Ragana from breaking through to our universe. All she needs is the Shadow Ruby and we will be doomed to slavery under her sadistic rule.
But that's not what Dark Sublime is about. Set in the present day, we follow Marianne (Marina Sirtis), who played Ragana. It's now been 35 years since Dark Sublime aired and for her, the show is a hazy memory amidst many other roles. That all changes when Oli (Kwaku Mills) enters her life.
But that's not what Dark Sublime is about. Set in the present day, we follow Marianne (Marina Sirtis), who played Ragana. It's now been 35 years since Dark Sublime aired and for her, the show is a hazy memory amidst many other roles. That all changes when Oli (Kwaku Mills) enters her life.
He's a cult TV superfan, having latched on to some grainy bootleg DVDs of the show and discovered something wonderful. He's on a campaign to bring the show back into the public eye, campaigning for a re-release and organising the inaugural Dark Sublime fan convention, at which Marianne will be the star attraction.
Though Marianne is appreciative of Oli's attention, his adulation makes her feel vaguely fraudulent. She simply cannot understand what they are seeing in a silly and dated show that was just another job for her.
Bubbling away in the background (and often in the foreground) is Marianne's relationship with Kate (Jacqueline King). The pair have previously been romantically entangled, though that has runs its course. Now they've settled into a close friendship, though there's still a lingering (and unreciprocated) desire. Anyway, Kate is now in a new relationship with Suzanne (Sophie Ward) and life has moved on.
Writer Michael Dennis (making his debut) has found a decent seam of drama in the world of cult TV fandom, conventions and actors living off their past roles. Most fan conventions any contain rows of desks populated by washed-up actors who once appeared in cult shows and a pile of glossy headshots ready to be signed. What does the man who once played Stormtrooper #14 really think of the people who turn up at his desk?
Casting Marina Sirtis as the lead makes this material fizz. She played Betazoid empath Deanna Troi on Star Trek: The Next Generation, which means she has first-hand experience with dealing with fans at conventions and knows what it's like to be best known for a role she hasn't played in years. Sirtis' experience in dealing with fans shows in her performance, it's easy to surmise that Marianne isn't a million miles away from Sirtis herself.
Dark Sublime is at its best when it's getting under Marianne's skin and exploring her lopsided friendship with Oli. Unfortunately, the play also deals with a tonne of other, much less interesting stuff. For example, there's an interminable scene in which side characters Kate and Suzanne lie on the grass outside Alexandra Palace and idly chat about their jobs.
It means that large portions of the play are, to be brutally honest, very boring. This is particularly evident in the first act, in which the characters and their relationships are established at a glacial pace. By contrast, the second act starts with an energetic bang, with Oli excitedly introducing his convention and what we can expect.
This going to sound extreme, Dark Sublime would improve by leaps and bounds if the entire first act was cut. The fan convention is where the show's themes are strongest, it's where we get to meet big personalities, it's where the funniest gags happen and where there is genuine tension between the fans and the stars. By comparison, much of the first act is people sitting around in a living room having circular, meandering conversations studded with mediocre jokes.
All that's a pity, because Dark Sublime has clearly had a lot of love poured into it. The programme cover is a beautifully designed rendition of The Dark Sublime Annual 1982, and the interior contains tie-in books featuring the cast and TV Times cover stories (all by the obviously talented Clayton Hickman). The general design of the show is also pretty spiffy too - even though I didn't think much of the show I considered buying a t-shirt just because the logo was so cool.
Plus I can't pick any holes in the cast. Sirtis is great, but Kwaku Mills sometimes seems on a one-man mission to entertain us, and pretty much every moment Oli is on stage he's doing something interesting. Also great is Simon Thorp's brief appearances as Vykar, in which he neatly skewers the Shakespearian actor 'lowering' himself to run around with a toy raygun.
It's frustrating that Dark Sublime contains all these objectively great elements, as they end up diluted by so much unnecessary material that even they get washed away in a wave of ennui.
Dark Sublime is at Trafalgar Studios until 2nd August. Tickets here.
Review is of the 27th June preview rather than the 28th June press night.
Thursday, June 27, 2019
Thursday, June 27, 2019
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Reviewed by David James
Rating:
Panic attacks suck. The common experience is an overwhelming feeling of doom and fear, that all but immobilises you. Sufferers think they're having a heart attack, or that they're being suffocated, or that they're about to vomit. Basically, it isn't fun. At all.
Tom Kelsey's Tiger Under the Skin tries to communicate what it's like living with anxiety and the fear of suffering panic attacks. Based on his personal experiences, we follow a fictionalised Tom as he struggles through an average day. We soon gather that he's in recovery after an unspecified spell at a mental health facility. He lives with his worried mother, rarely leaves the house and his closest companion is his dog, Digby.
We follow Tom as he walks Digby in the park, with even this wholesome and straightforward exercise fraught with tension. Then the day takes an unexpected twist when Tom is invited on a night out in town. Ordinarily, he'd make an excuse and cancel but today, for some reason, he accepts. His friends are as surprised as he is, but though going to a loud, busy nightclub is full of triggers for his attacks, he vows to make the trip. Maybe he's recovered enough to deal with this environment. Maybe not.
Tiger Under the Skin vividly communicates how anxiety manifests. There's a great moment early in the production where Tom's pessimism is characterised as a grumpy old Scotsman whinging away in the background: "it's pissing it down outside, you're staying in today", "you don't have friends any more", "you look terrible, and no-one is ever going to want you".
There's also a wonderful scene in which a simple tube ride becomes an odyssey of pain. Being enclosed in a cramped metal tube deep underground sets off Tom's paranoia, making him convinced a bomb is going to go off, or the tunnel will slowly flood, or that a fire will inexorably burn its way down the carriage. He feels a sudden terrifying certainty that he's going to die here. The fog of a panic attack begins to seep in at the corners, and the only thing that can stave it off is nervously drumming on the back of his hand and humming the Star Wars theme.
All this is imaginatively staged and performed, with much credit due to Kelsey and the backstage crew for synchronising the performance so well with many lighting changes and sound cues. It culminates in an ending where the Tiger Under the Skin becomes literal, in which Kelsey really gets to show off his physical performance skills.
But while the ending is visually striking, the descent into more abstract action overwhelms the small-scale personal story that's worked so well up to this point. The majority of the show feels small, personal and intricate detailed, so a finale that's full of broad strokes and dramatic twists didn't sit well. I get that there needs to be a sense of escalation, but the climactic scene felt a bit Hollywood (possibly because it ends by quoting David Fincher's Fight Club).
There was one other mild annoyance: every single word Tom utters (and sometimes each syllable) is accompanied by its own gesticulation. It makes things feel weirdly artificial: the character is supposed to be introverted and anxious, yet he slices the air with his palms like a CEO delivering a keynote speech. I get that against an empty stage in a one-man play a performer needs to ensure they're visually engaging, but I wish it this was toned down a bit.
Those criticisms don't stop Tiger Under the Skin achieving its goals. A lot of thought has gone into the best way to convey to the audience what anxiety and panic attacks are like, and by the time we're applauding it's done that a few times over.
There was one other mild annoyance: every single word Tom utters (and sometimes each syllable) is accompanied by its own gesticulation. It makes things feel weirdly artificial: the character is supposed to be introverted and anxious, yet he slices the air with his palms like a CEO delivering a keynote speech. I get that against an empty stage in a one-man play a performer needs to ensure they're visually engaging, but I wish it this was toned down a bit.
Those criticisms don't stop Tiger Under the Skin achieving its goals. A lot of thought has gone into the best way to convey to the audience what anxiety and panic attacks are like, and by the time we're applauding it's done that a few times over.
Thursday, June 13, 2019
Thursday, June 13, 2019
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She's there for me last thing at night and first thing in the morning. Throughout the day she's got my back, and ensures there's never a dull moment. She knows all my deepest secrets and darkest desires, has infinite patience to deal with the dull minutia of day-to-day life and knows the answer to every question. She even comes to the bathroom with me, where I can idly play Sonic the Hedgehog on her glistening glass face.
You've probably worked out by now that I don't have some creepy mechanical slave-woman tending to my every need: I'm talking about my phone. Much has been made of our increasing reliance to technology, and now Michael Ellis' To Drone In The Rain takes it to the creepy logical conclusion.
Set in a near future "where phones, laptops and all other technological services have become obsolete", we meet Tom (Michael Benbaruk). He's socially anxious to the point where the notion of human interaction makes him vomit into a bucket and appears to have some kind of psychosomatic condition that confines him to a wheelchair. He spends his days inside a Kubrickian monochrome studio apartment, delivering bespoke adventures to anonymous clients via a webcam.
He's taken care of by Drone Girl 9.1.13 (Nell Hardy), who is a combination of best friend, nurse, secretary, therapist and mother. We understand that this state of affairs is the norm, human beings retreating to isolation in favour of letting their android assistants interact with the world on their behalf. This extends as far as sending your Drone out to flirt with other Drones in the hope of finding love - presumably the understanding is that if two Drones get along then their owners will too.
Within this setup 9.1.13 realises that despite being programmed to care for Tom, her round-the-clock care is gradually infantilising him. He's increasingly childlike and demanding, relying on her for the simplest tasks and refusing to take responsibility for his actions. Plus there's the hunky and rebellious Drone Boy (Lino Facioli), who is offering 9.1.13 freedom from Tom and a new life where she calls the shots.
By far the most compelling part of the play is watching Tom slowly descend into helplessness as 9.1.13 struggles to work out what to do. We sense that Tom's social anxiety is a product of the insular society he lives in: he's perfectly capable of imagining detailed flights of fancy outside his apartment but utterly incapable of living them himself. And the more he's indulged by 9.1.13 the further he slides into helplessness. Michael Benbaruk plays this downward spiral very nicely, gradually minimising Tom's positive points and accentuating his flaws. This eventually leaves him as a pathetic caricature of a man - a mewling, diaper-shitting, alcoholic monster.
But the real heart of the play is Nell Hardy's 9.1.13. I've long been a fan of the laser-focused physical and psychological intensity Hardy brings to her roles and she doesn't disappoint here. The smartest decision the play makes is avoiding making this android character a sci-fi stereotype. The traditional way to write this type of character would be to focus on her grappling with strange human emotions and acting stiffly and awkwardly, like Data from Star Trek.
But, perhaps with the Tyrell Corporation slogan "More Human Than Human" in mind, 9.1.13 is totally emotionally literate and fully capable of philosophically comprehending her place in the world. Hardy plays this very nicely, threading the needle of her character realising her devotion might be poisonous. That's not to say that this character is indistinguishable from a human: Hardy moves with precision and power, striking stylised poses that reminded me of catwalk models.
But 9.1.13 being by far the interesting character in the play is the root of my problem with it. Beyond the science fiction trappings, you can understand this is the story of a man and a woman. As such, it's more than a bit regressive to see a story about a loser guy dragging down a woman concluding with the woman sacrificing herself for his benefit. By this point in the story our sympathy for Tom has evaporated - so seeing him shuffle off into the sunset wearing a cowboy hat leaves a sour taste in the mouth.
I guess the fact that I cared about these characters fates means that something is working here: though I suspect it's the strength of the performances rather than some woolly writing. To Drone In The Rain is a smart bit of science fiction and has a neat hook, but could use a bit of editing and tweaking to accentuate its positive qualities.
To Drone In The Rain is at the Tristan Bates Theatre until 15th June. Tickets here.
Wednesday, February 20, 2019
Wednesday, February 20, 2019
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"A musical about Timpson? The shoe-repairer / key-cutter / sign-maker / trophy-engraver?" I confirmed for Timpson: The Musical immediately - I had to find out what the hell this show was about. My first guess was that it was about the founding of the titular company, but a quick glance through their Wikipedia page didn't exactly suggest high drama (it was founded in 1865 by shoemaker William Timpson and his brother-in-law, apparently without incident).
What Gigglemug Theatre's show actually is is a very silly parody of Romeo + Juliet. So we have two households (the Keypulets and the Montashoes), who are both alike in dignity (as in neither of them have much of it), in fair Victorian London, where we lay our scene. The families have been feuding ever since a confrontation at the 'Invention Convention' many years ago, when Master Keypulet's (James Stirling) idea of "tiny saws" only managed an honourable mention.
But wouldn't you know it - love begins to blossom between the children of these warring households. Keeleigh (Sabrina Messer) and Monty (Maddie Gray) feel an instant connection to one another, with his key apparently destined to fit snugly into her lock. What follows is a loose-limbed and adorably scrappy love story that never takes itself remotely seriously.
Putting on an intentionally unpolished production is risky business. For one, you're reliant on the charisma and comedic skills of your actors - nothing kills a show stone-dead more than the sense that those on stage are having a great time while the audience isn't. For another, it's very easy for a show to cross the thin line between "adorably scrappy" and just plain bad.
Timpson: The Musical is never in danger of that happening. The uniformly talented cast are all insanely likeable (I particularly liked Rachael Chomer's Lady Montashoe), with some of the best moments of the night coming when they can't help but break character and feebly suppress their giggles at what the rest of the cast is up to. They're aided by an onslaught of reliably funny one-liners and running gags that don't outstay their welcome, all aided by a brief n' breezy 65-minute running time.
And then there are the songs. This show won't be winning any prizes for lyrical complexity or virtuoso vocals, but they're peppered with grin-inducing rhymes and delivered with so much personality that the occasional flat note is immediately forgiven. My favourites were the very entertaining Gotta Get Up When They Knock You Down and the even-more-hilarious-in-hindsight It's A Tingle.
If I really wanted to I could probably pick some holes in this show, but I don't. Gigglemug Theatre set out to create a very, very silly musical with its tongue firmly lodged in its cheek and they have objectively succeeded. In reviewing any comedy I apply the five laughs test: if it doesn't make me laugh out loud at least five times it's failed. Timpson: The Musical had me throatily guffawing from minute one - I may have even slapped my knee.
What more recommendation do you need?
Timpson: The Musical is at the King's Head Theatre until 27 February. Tickets here.
Tuesday, January 22, 2019
Tuesday, January 22, 2019
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Written in 1913, DH Lawrence's The Daughter-In-Law teeters on the precipice of modernity. Set in a Nottinghamshire mining town, its characters unknowingly look down the barrel of the Great War while being rooted in traditions and languages that feel as if they're hearkening back to the Iron Age.
This working-class domestic drama revolves around newlyweds Luther and Minnie (Matthew Barker and Ellie Nun), Luther's brother Joe (Matthew Biddulph) and their mother (Veronica Roberts). A handful of weeks after he's married, Luther is stunned to find out that a drunken encounter with the daughter of Mrs Purdy (Tessa Bell-Briggs) has resulted in a pregnancy.
This chucks a bomb into their ordered world, blasting right through the firmly established social fabric of the mining community. It throws up questions of proprietary in which Luther must grapple with preserving his marriage and doing right by his impending child, with his mother trying her best to navigate a path through it. Meanwhile, Minnie's expectations of what a husband should be are blown to smithereens, throwing Luther's existing flaws into stark relief.
It's a decent story and, after a slightly slow opening scene, keeps the audience engaged. But while the narrative is the engine of the piece, there's an awful lot of interesting stuff going on around it. Most interesting to me was the palpable sense of the modern world struggling to be born. Rumbling away in the background of the story is the miner's discontent, which eventually boils over into a strike. Luther and Joe both participate in this to the point of violence against scabs (or 'blacklegs'), and you sense a burgeoning political consciousness rooted in experience and a sense of injustice rather than dry theory.
Lawrence balances the men's work at the pit with the women's domestic lives at home - each portrayed as strenuous in their own ways. It's a contrast that's neatly conveyed in an early scene in which Luther returns home caked in soot and eats dinner before cleaning up. Face and hands jet black, he looks like a negative image of his wife, who shudders as he breaks bread with his filthy fingers. And yet, for a moment, the pair harmonise with one another - demonstrating an equilibrium between the professional and domestic spheres.
The harmony doesn't last for long. Luther's masculinity comes under threat and Minnie makes a sorta-feminist break for Manchester, from which she returns in an outfit that makes her look like she's arrived from a different century. From this point, the play begins to ponder what men and women truly mean to one another (albeit from a 1913 perspective). Luther and Joe's mother hits the nail on the head when she explains that her love of her sons is balanced against the pain and fear they bring.
It's a conclusion that feels universal - and despite the play being at a precise point in time and space it appears weirdly ancient. Geoff Hense's low lighting could be dim electric bulbs, gaslights or candles burning in the gloom. Louis Whitmore's set, anchored by a heavy wooden dining table, manages to be both naturalistic and suggestive of vast swathes of historical interior design at a stroke. The costume design, especially of the older women, also feels strangely archaic, with Mrs Purdy's flat leather hat looking like something that could be worn in the medieval era.
And then there's the language. The Daughter-In-Law's programme comes with a glossary helping you decipher the dense dialect. Most of it you can work out from context, but the characters often drop terms like "clunch", "flig" or "clat-fart" into conversation. In addition, they talk quickly and with a precise enunciation that requires you to pay attention to everything they're saying lest you lose the thread. I don't know how prevalent this dialect is now, but it goes a long way towards making the situation alien to a modern audience.
With all this going on it's difficult not to ponder how much the world of these characters has been obliterated. On the plus side, the rigid gender roles that the characters struggle against are now much more flexible, marriage is not a life sentence and we live in a more permissive society. And yet there's a strong sense of identity and community in The Daughter-In-Law that's now a quickly fading memory.
The characters talk of their pride in the engines of industry moving in their towns, the never-dimming light of the factories and the pride in the quality of their labour. This is just a memory now: coal mining and the communities it supported are extinct in Nottinghamshire. In their place lies a yawning void of zero-hours contracts, social deprivation and political disillusionment. I wouldn't want to live in the world of The Daughter-In-Law, but even so, I mourn its passing.
The Daughter-In-Law is at the Arcola Theatre until 2nd February 2019. Tickets here.
Friday, January 11, 2019
Friday, January 11, 2019
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I imagine that having a celebrity in your family is as much a curse as a blessing. Sure, there's someone with a bit of clout to bail you out if things get really bad and probably a couple of neat parties you get to attend, but at the same time your identity is forever in someone else's shadow and your family name is in their hands.
This is the territory covered by Liv Warden's Anomaly. Taking cues from the #MeToo revelations (and particularly the case of Harvey Weinstein), the play covers the problems of high-profile Preston family. Weinsteinian film producer and entertainment mogul Phillip Preston created 'Preston International' in the 1980s, which has risen to Oscar-winning dominance. Along the way, he fathered three daughters: business heir Piper (Natasha Cowley); A-list actor Penny (Katherine Samuelson); and the reclusive Polly (Alice Handoll) (who begins the show in rehab).
Their lives are thrown into chaos after their father is been arrested for violently attacking their mother, following which a surge of revelations about his predatory treatment of women explode into the media. The three women are torn between loyalty to their family and their own individual reputations - not to mention the growing suspicion that to some degree they were complicit in his actions.
I've always had a fascination for how people deal with their loved ones being suddenly revealed as monsters. How must it feel to be, say, the family of Kevin Spacey? For decades he's been the golden boy and his family and close friends would have basked in his shared glory. When that limelight curdles, what on earth do you do?
Anomaly makes an attempt to answer this. Various reactions include a call for family unity and a warning on making judgments before the facts are clear, a violent separation from the family via publicly disowning them and a PR led hedging of bets - trying miserably to take no position at all. On top of that Piper and Penny have careers of their own to consider and must quickly decide how this is going to affect them - if they cut and run and their father survives this it's going to make for some awkward family get-togethers.
Anomaly is at its best when picking at this knotty situation. Unfortunately, there's a whole bunch of structural flaws that prevent it being half the play it could be. First and foremost there's the very strange decision to geographically separate the characters from one another and have them interact solely by phone. It means the drama stays cold-blooded and that we never see the conflicts between the characters boil over into catharsis. It also affects the performances, denying the actors the chance to feed off each other's emotions and results in what feels like a series of stitched together monologues rather than dialogues.
Along the same lines, it's a little confusing as to what's going on with the voice-over dialogue from various media presences - who seem to have supernatural powers of insight as to what's going on. I'm all for a bit of surreal blurring of reality, but in a play that's already far from straightforward them being perpetually undefined. Plus, the play's treatment of media is just a bit off, with lines that refer to the characters being together on "international radio" sounding weirdly archaic.
Then there's the theoretically simple plot becoming bogged down with needless twists. As it transpires, Philip Preston isn't just a predatory misogynist, he's an increasing number of other awful things as well. Throwing out melodramatic revelations towards the end of the play just felt like empty drama and added nothing to the core ideas about the ripples created by a #MeToo scandal.
Anomaly is striding across some incredibly fertile dramatic land, but somewhere along the line a number of bad decisions were made about how the piece should be structured and the finished product simply doesn't engage.
Anomaly is at the Old Red Lion until 2nd February. Tickets here.
Wednesday, December 5, 2018
Wednesday, December 5, 2018
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I've got a real soft spot for science fiction theatre. It takes a certain amount of gumption to realise a believable technologically advanced world on stage, even one that's broadly adjacent to our own. Split Note Theatre's Jailbirds manages this - and it does it with a few pieces of white tape and faith in the audience's imagination.
The setting is a subterranean women's prison in a dystopic future. The most feared and notorious inmate is Heath Dane (Molly Jones). Her crimes are never precisely defined, but she's a violent serial killer with a sadistic streak a mile long with genius level intellect.
As we start the play, she has a new neighbour: the prim and apparently sheltered Moira (Stella Richt). Moira is quickly revealed to be the observer in a scientific study of Dane by Bheur (Kirsty Marie Terry) and Officer Oml (Evangelina Burton) - a psychological tool designed to get the perceptive yet egotistical killer to reveal her secrets. Overseeing this is a long-suffering prison guard (Fred Woodley Evans).
It's an interesting set-up but partially hamstrung by the fact that (at least as far as I could see) there didn't seem to be any pressing need to find out what was going on in the killer's mind. Quizzing an imprisoned serial killer immediately brings Silence of the Lambs to mind. The tension in that story comes from knowing that Buffalo Bill's victim is doomed unless Clarice Starling can convince Hannibal Lector to help. By comparison, the objectives of what the 'study' eventually proves to be in Jailbirds felt more like curiosity than an urgent need.
Another aspect that doesn't work is the Brechtian appearance of director Luke Culloty on stage. He exists outside the text, pausing a scene, rearranging the characters within it and setting them on their way. I love a bit of fourth wall breaking as much as the next person, but its use here doesn't add anything. Distancing techniques like this force the audience to consider the artifice of what they're watching, but I'm at a loss as to how doing this in Jailbirds adds to the play's message (which itself is rather fuzzy).
Fortunately, the play is buoyed up by two effective performances from Molly Jones and Stella Richt. Richt initially seems a bit flat and affectless, but as events proceed you begin to understand that this is a deliberate decision. As the play winds towards a conclusion the dramatic focus begins to shift from Heath to Moira, and Richt delivers a couple of powerful speeches that work brilliantly.
But, as in the text, all eyes are on Molly Jones for the majority of the play. Most of the time she's operating in a different league to the rest of the cast, simultaneously scheming, physically intimidating and weirdly vulnerable. Jones manages to underly her outwardly sadistic dangerous exterior with some weird vulnerability. The character is missing an eye (neatly conveyed with an opaque contact lens), and you sense that she knows her powers are gradually diminishing the longer she languishes in her cell.
So it's a mixed bag. Split Note Theatre clearly have the talent - and they also clearly have an admirable sense of narrative ambition. I suspect a couple of rewrites, a hard think on what message they want to convey and how the story could be tweaked to do that would pay off gangbusters.
Jailbirds is at the Etcetera Theatre until 8 December. Tickets here.
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