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Subs, Cock Tavern Theatre: review

Subs, by R J PurdeySubs Cock Tavern Theatre
Directed by Hamish MacDougall

“It’s the first rule of subbing: never take anyone’s word for anything. Check, check and check again.”

R J Purdey’s play, Subs, takes a microscopic look at life on the sub-editors’ desk of the fictional magazine Gentlemen Prefer…(the dots are important). Sub-editors have the responsibility of checking the grammar and accuracy of all the articles in any magazine or newspaper. And they have a reputation for being a strange breed (a result of spending too long thinking about semi-colons).

Derek, one of life’s losers, is the chief-sub. With a depressed wife, two children and empty hopes of a promotion, it is no wonder he takes it out on his deputy. Finch, the deputy sub, is obnoxious, lazy and terrified of women: so when he learns a woman will be joining the team he is more than a little flustered – with often hilarious consequences.

Hamish MacDougall’s production is fast-paced, well staged and captures the politics and in-fighting of an office. When Finch is asked to switch places with the junior sub-editor he wails ‘But the seating line is symbolic. It’s the hierarchy made flesh and furniture.’ Michael Cusick is an irrepressible Finch and, amazingly, manages to both alienate and endear himself to the audience. He may be borderline offensive and chauvinist but Cusick once or twice lets the mask of lads’ banter slip to reveal a lonely, unfulfilled character.

Cusick does rather dominate the production – and his ranting tends to overwhelm in the Tavern’s small space – but Steve Hay as Derek has a good turn as the hopeless boss and Finch’s sparring partner. But Purdey takes their bickering beyond the realms of the realistic: the arguments are so extreme that neither Finch nor Derek would last five minutes in a real office. MacDougall’s direction occasionally allows the dialogue to run away with itself, meaning that some of the funniest lines are missed by the audience and pace is favoured over timing.

Naomi Waring as the bright young thing, Anna, doesn’t have much of a role, but her scenes with Finch inject some pace and wit into the second half. Junior sub James, played by Max Krupski, is similarly underwritten. But designer Jemima Carter-Lewis deserves a nod for her super-detailed set: she minutely recreates an office, right down to the desk clutter and retro Christmas decorations.

The production gets off to a slow start but warms up in the second half. It is an enjoyable evening of banter, in-fighting and politics – well worth a trip if you’ve not already had a day of that at the office.

3 Comedy MasksFirst published in the Willesden and Brent Times

2011
01/16
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Madam Butterfly (Bangkok Butterfly) – review

King’s Head Theatre, Islington
Dir: Adam Spreadbury-Maher

Puccini’s Madam Butterfly is the latest to get OperaUpClose’s pub treatment and it by and large survives it.

In Adam Spreadbury-Maher’s production the action is transported to modern Bangkok, from Puccini’s original Japan, and the geisha Madam Butterfly becomes a Thai ladyboy. Butterfly is introduced to an American officer, Pinkerton, who is fascinated by the young ladyboy (she is supposed to be 15): ‘She is a stunner, exotic and wondrous…Heart of a boy but the soul of a woman.’ During a party someone sarcastically suggests marriage and there is a jokey ceremony. Butterfly- naïve and desperate to escape – takes Pinkerton’s vows of love at face value and waits loyally for him when he goes back to America. For Pinkerton, however, the affair is just a bit of fun.

Adam Spreadbury-Maher’s production undoubtedly has its moments: Margaret Cooper has the right mix of coquettishness and innocence for Butterfly. As she tidies the flat ready for Pinkerton’s return she is excited and poignantly childlike. Alison Dunne, as the maid Suzuki, has a beautifully rich mezzo-soprano voice: it is a pity her character doesn’t have more to sing. Mario Sofroniou is fairly detestable as Pinkerton – as he should be – and while his voice fills the small space it doesn’t overwhelm the audience. The trio between Suzuki, Pinkerton and Sharpless (brought vividly to life by Oliver Gibbs) towards the end of the opera is simply staged and is one of the highlights of the evening, as are the tender scenes between Butterfly and her maid, Suzuki.

The cast are almost without exception conservatoire graduates so inevitably the standard of singing is high – although in the role of Butterfly, Cooper’s vibrato is too wide for my taste. Musical director Elspeth Wilkes had just two other players to work with – a violinist/violist and a clarinettist – and with such limited resources Puccini’s heroic music does lose some of its force.

But I remain unconvinced about the justification for changing the setting so dramatically – not least because making Butterfly a ladyboy causes an obvious biological problem when it comes to the baby she’s supposed to have had. I’m still not sure exactly how they explained the sudden appearance of the child. While ladyboys and geishas have certain parallels, the concept felt ill-thought-out: for example, in Puccini’s original, Butterfly and all her family believe she is marrying Pinkerton for good and it is only Pinkerton who regards it as a sham. In Spreadbury-Maher’s production, the whole marriage idea is a joke: the “ceremony” is conducted by one of the other Amercian officers at the party. Everyone realises it is a sort of playground marriage – except Butterfly.

This version of the tale is not less poignant but it becomes a different tragedy: a tragedy not of betrayal but of delusion. Butterfly is so desperate to get away from her life standing ‘on bars in Patpong road’ that she puts her faith in a ghost of a marriage. What is more, Puccini’s music – written to evoke the highly stylised and constricted life of the Japanese geishas – doesn’t fit with the tacky clothes and miserable life of these lady boys. Nevertheless, the story is moving and the music beautiful, but as a fellow audience member said during the interval ‘the music would be poignant if they’d set it in a chicken factory.’

This review originally appeared on The Public Reviews

2011
01/12
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Cosi fan Tutte, Royal Academy of Music: review

Women: they’re all the same. That’s the message of Così fan Tutte, one of Mozart’s most loved and well-known operas.

An old teacher, Alfonso, delivers a lecture on the unfaithfulness of women – explaining that they can’t help being

Royal Academy of Music Cosi fan Tutte
Image by Mark Whitehouse, Royal Academy of Music

fickle as it’s in their DNA. Two young men, Guglielmo and Ferrando, protest that their girlfriends are different. The teacher laughs at their naivety and suggests a bet that the two girls, Dorabella and Fiordiligi, will betray their boyfriends within 24 hours. The two men agree, disguise themselves as strangers and test their girlfriends’ loyalty.

In this production by Royal Academy Opera, conducted by Jane Glover, director John Cox has moved the story to the modern day – there are mobile phones, laptops and the alcopop WKD probably plays more of a role than Mozart intended. The opera also becomes a giant science experiment. To emphasize the point, Gary McCann’s design has the walls coated with graph paper and a giant sculpture of the DNA helix hangs from the ceiling.

As the sisters Dorabella and Fiordiligi, Katie Bray and Ruth Jenkins are giggly, wide-eyed girls. They text their fiancés on their mobiles and kiss the screens. Bray as Dorabella is the sillier of the two: flighty, excitable and attracted, magpie-like, to pretty jewels. We know she will be the first to fall, and so it proves. The scene in which she is seduced is beautifully sung and simply staged: Charles Rice’s rich baritone and Bray’s full-toned mezzo-soprano communicate the complex emotions of the two characters and create one of the most memorable scenes of the evening.

Jenkins’ Fiodiligi puts up more of a fight, agonising over her changeable heart. The aria in which she asks her absent lover to forgive her (“per pieta”) is moving and heart-felt. As Jenkins tears out her hair, however, Bray’s Dorabella happily skips around, painting her nails and chatting about her new boyfriend.

The sisters are encouraged in their unfaithfulness by their landlady, Despina. Mary Bevan in the role is all high-heels and bling. She totters around the stage teaching the young girls to flirt and flutter their eyelashes. Her aria on the unfaithfulness of men provides some balance in the plot and Bevan manages to suggest an interesting back-story for her flibbertigibbet character.

The two men, Roberto Ortiz as Ferrando and Charles Rice as Guglielmo, are cartoonish: first in their passionate attempts to seduce the two girls, and then in their rage when they submit. Frederick Long as the puppet-master of the experiment, Alfonso, manages to undercut the lovers’ emotions throughout.

Although the first half feels strained, the singers relax in the second and begin to revel in their roles. While the staging is sometimes too static, overall, the calibre of the singing is high enough to carry Cox’s hands-off direction.

4/5

2010
12/12
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Pins and Needles, Cock Tavern Theatre: review

Not often do you see Boris Johnson, Hitler and the Biblical king of Babylon on stage in one evening, but this is precisely what’s on offer in the Cock Tavern’s Pins and Needles.

Pins and Needles CockTavernTheatre

The show is a 1930s-style musical revue made up of comic sketches, satirical songs and plenty of dancing. It was originally created in 1937 in New York by the International Ladies Garment Workers Unions. But don’t let this put you off – in this new version by Joseph Finlay and Rachel Grunwald the tunes are brilliantly hum-able, the satire biting and the performances sizzling.

Unsurprisingly, given that the musical was created by a trade union, the show’s political leaning is decidedly left-wing. Lines such as “We’re going to rob the rich of their mystery” and song titles like “Sitting on Your Status Quo” set the tone and although the piece was written 70 years ago, director Grunwald and musical director Finlay have done a good job of making it current. A certain notorious London politician with bright blonde hair and a passion for bicycles makes an appearance, for example, and Cameron’s “big society” gets short shrift. Goldman Sachs, Swiss banks and Vodafone similarly come under fire.

Each member of the cast is impressive but Elain Lloyd’s powerful, velvety voice stands out, especially in the finale, which takes aim at capitalist greed. Dictators are the butt of the joke in “Four Little Angels of Peace”, in which Chamberlain, Mussolini, Hitler and Hirohito (played hilariously by David Barnes, Laura-Kate Gordon, Adam Walker and Matthew Rutherford) wear tinsel halos and toy wings while singing about their “peaceful” policies. Josephine Kiernan is a sassy school teacher in a toe-tapping number tightly choreographed by Nicola Martin and four devils torment a distressed Elizabeth Pruett in “The Song of the Ads” by telling her her hair is too drab, her shoes are wrong, she uses the wrong de-oderant and she won’t be happy unless she uses this product. Pianist David Preston does a great job providing the live music for all this, joined by a cool Matthew Rutherford on the double bass.

If there is a criticism, then it’s that the piece’s political edge feels blunter in pieces about 1930s America – for example, about Roosevelt’s “New Deal”. But overall this is a highly enjoyable evening which will not only have you singing the songs for days afterwards but give you plenty to think about.

4/5

2010
12/09
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The Robbers, New Diorama Theatre: review

by Friedrich Schiller
Dir: Mark Leipacher

‘Man is moulded out of dirt.’ Mark Leipacher’s production of Schiller’s The Robbers at the New Diorama Theatre sets out to show the cruelty man is capable of and the terrifying vertigo of an amoral world.The Robbers, New Diorama Theatre, Schiller

As an old Count dies, his younger son schemes, plots and murders his way to his older brother’s inheritance. Franz cold-heartedly tricks his father into disinheriting Karl, who, believing his father has banished him, turns to a group of robbers. But Robin Hood’s merry men, they are not.

Richard Delaney is the best kind of villain – seductive, cunning and entirely without conscience. He stands over his dying father and, exasperated, asks ‘How long do old men live for?’ He is the Iago of the play and Delaney’s black comic timing creates a delectably detestable baddie.

As his wronged brother Karl, Michael Lindall has a more difficult task: one character describes Karl as a ‘purring nancy’ and he’s not far wrong. Lindall starts uncomfortably, more sulky than tormented, but comes into his own in the second half. As Karl despairs of returning home and earning his father’s forgiveness, he becomes a darker, more complex character: “I am my own heaven and I am my own Hell”. His moral code allows for the incidental slaughter of innocent men, women and children as he rescues a friend from the gallows, but is disgusted when one of his band throws a chubby toddler back into the flames. Lindall struggles to convey the subtleties of Karl’s character but does better with the real Sturm und Drang moments.

Jamie Champion is convincingly black-hearted as robber Spiegelberg while Jude Owusu-Achiaw manages to be the diamond in the rough as Schweizer. Karl’s steadfast but fiery fiancé, Amalia, is played by a forthright Kate Sawyer while Lana Booty’s old Count, Max, is touching and Lear-like.

Leipacher has set out to make this play accessible: it is modern dress, the updated script (by Daniel Millar and Mark Leipacher) is peppered with modern obscenities and the robbers’ banter is straight out of the twenty-first century. But The Robbers is not a modern story, with its Counts, curses, castles and highwaymen and so the modern dress tends to grate.

The stage is stripped bare and all the walls painted black, allowing the cast to use chalk to write or draw on every surface – a technique which manages to underline both the fragility of life and the weakness of the lies woven by Franz. Yet occasionally Leipacher tries too hard and there are three or four things which demand the audience’s attention at once – dialogue, someone writing in chalk, people fighting. It would do no harm to allow the story to speak for itself now and again.

At around three hours, including an interval, the evening is overly long but Leipacher’s production is a thrilling piece of drama with enthralling plot twists, ladles of dramatic irony and a brilliant villain at its heart.

 

 

This review first appeared on The Public Reviews here.

2010
11/16
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Red, Black and Ignorant, Cock Tavern Theatre: review

Edward Bond, Red, Black and Ignorant

Photo by Richard Hubert Smith

Dir: Maja Milatovic-Ovadia

The final play in the Cock Tavern’s Edward Bond season takes aim at the atrocities of war. The storyline – in so far as there is one – revolves around a character called Monster and charts, according to the flyer, “man’s decline into greed and despair”.

Maja Milatovic-Ovadia’s production is thoughtfully staged and it was nice to see a more adventurous set in the theatre, courtesy of designers Julia Berndt and Vanda Butkovic. Melanie Ramsay is arresting as a fresh-faced, wide-eyed mother caught in the fray while Andrew Lewis delivers even the most overblown lines with weight and conviction. Alex Farrow is chillingly vacant as the granite-faced soldier who shoots his own father.

These highly accomplished performances, however, struggle to make sense of a bewildering script. The action takes place in a dystopian parallel world in which sons are sold to the state to join the army and there are murders on the street. Bond’s text (re-written for this performance) is highly stylised with some memorable lines – “There’s nothing wrong with him a good post-mortem wouldn’t put right”. It’s surreal and angry but you come away unsure what it is Bond’s exactly angry about.

He has several axes to grind: about the West, world leaders and the technology and machinery of war. How it dehumanises, numbs us and strips life of any value. These are vital points but Red, Black and Ignorant is too preachy, too pleased with itself and too moralising to make them well.

3 Comedy Masks

 

 

 

This review first appeared in the Willesden and Brent Times on 11 November 2010

2010
11/11
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There Will Be More, Cock Tavern Theatre: review

This is certainly not one to take the kids to. Edward Bond’s new play, There Will Be More, had its world premiere at the Cock Tavern Theatre in Kilburn last week, directed by Adam Spreadbury-Maher. The play starts with a mother killing her children and closes with incest. And there are precious few laughs in between.

Edward Bond There Will Be More at the Cock Tavern Theatre

Dea, played by Helen Bang, is the mother who silently and chillingly murders her two babies; the rest of the play examines the aftermath of these events, 18 years later. In Bond’s world, violence breeds violence. Dea’s husband, Johnson, played by Stephen Billington, is an up-tight military captain whose violent day job bleeds into his dysfunctional family life. There are everywhere echoes of the Greek tragedies, from Oedipus who sleeps with his mother, to Medea who murders her children (hence the name “Dea”). There Will Be More is Bond’s attempt to write an ancient tragedy for the modern age.

As the “wicked” mother, Helen Bang is initially chilling, silently applying her make-up before smothering her sons. The second Act, however, sees her transformed into an entirely reasonable woman before returning to apparent madness for the third. Bond’s play is all about how we define madness but the point is an age-old one and he adds little to it. Johnson, the militant military husband is played by a staunch Stephen Billington who expresses love through violence and imprisonment. Billington admirably manages to summon up a slither of sympathy from the audience for the repulsive soldier, by blurring the lines between right and wrong, madness and insanity.

Timothy O’Hara (who also played the lead in The Pope’s Wedding as part of the Cock Tavern’s Edward Bond season) plays Dea and Johnson’s son, Oliver. He is vulnerable, innocent but stained by the events in his parents’ past.

This is truly car-crash theatre: the events are horrific but the audience cannot look away. Spreadbury-Maher’s production does not shy away from the raw violence: the set is minimal and the only soundtrack is the audience’s gasps.

Bond’s writing goes to the darkest places you can imagine and then scuttles into the shadows. This level of violence on stage is hard to justify – the original Oedipus story is no less harrowing for the worst violence taking place off stage. Very little actually happens in this play after the first 20 minutes and the play’s structure is incoherent. Bond is trying too hard to shock and ends up blunting his political pen.

2010
11/11
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Or You Could Kiss Me, National Theatre: review

Cottesloe Theatre, National Theatre
Dir: Neil Bartlett with Handspring Puppet Company

After the galloping success of War Horse, Handspring Puppet Company, headed by Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler, have turned their attention to humans. Or You Could Kiss Me, scripted and directed by Neil Bartlett, documents the final days of a long-term gay relationship. Mr B is dying. He is sent home from hospital because there is nothing more the doctors can do. At home Mr A and Mr B laboriously try to remember the very first days they spent together.

The exquisitely carved wooden puppets are spell-binding: they seem to breathe, to fidget, to sigh. As Basil Jones writes in the programme: “it’s micro movement rather than the macro movement that is of interest to us”. And these master puppeteers hone in on the small gestures brilliantly. The signing of a form, the holding up of a photograph, the settling down to sleep: these acts are given poignancy and weight through the juxtaposition of their familiarity with the lifelessness of the puppets.

As Mr B fades we are introduced to the couple when they first met, as youthful 19 and 20 year olds. These two puppets stand tall and muscular, they exult in their vitality. A set piece in which the young Mr A dives into the sea is captivating – and would be impossible with real actors. Or You Could Kiss Me is at its best in these set pieces: as the young couple play squash; as the frail Mr B flicks through photographs trying to find something – though he doesn’t know what.

But elsewhere, interventions from Adjoa Andoh (as a nurse, a house-keeper, a taxi driver and…poet) irritate and Bartlett’s decision to use microphones is misguided. We want to learn more about the central pair but clumsy props and extraneous people stand in the way, blocking empathy: not least the three people necessary to operate each puppet.

This play should be heart-breaking and yet I doubt anyone in the audience shed a tear – indeed the people next to me left after 20 minutes. The play’s strength – the alarmingly lifelike puppets – is also its greatest fault. Neil Bartlett writes in the programme that his script changed “at the dictate of the puppets”. Bartlett was stunned into silence by the craft and elegance of Kohler and Jones’ art work and the result is a fragmented and almost non-existent narrative which never reaches its emotional potential. The big picture is sacrificed at the altar of the small-scale gesture.

3/5

2010
11/01
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A Number, Menier Chocolate Factory, review

A Number, Menier Chocolate Factory
Dir: Jonathan Munby

How would you feel if you discovered you weren’t the only you? That’s the question posed by A Number, Caryl Churchill’s deeply thought-provoking and intricately woven play about human cloning.

A Number Menier Chocolate Factory

At 35, Bernard discovers that he is not an only son, as he’d always thought, but that there are perhaps twenty clones of him. His father, Salter, assures him that he is ‘the original’. But Salter is lying. Bernard is the clone of his father’s first son, (also called Bernard) who Salter treated so badly he was put into care. In effect, Bernard is Salter’s second chance.

In Jonathan Munby’s production Salter and Bernard are played by real-life father and son Timothy and Sam West. This version originally had a short run in Sheffield Theatres’ Studio in 2006 (not the Crucible as everyone seems to have assumed…) and Munby, Samuel and Timothy West have been trying to find the perfect place to re-stage it ever since.

The Menier stage has been turned into an “in-the-round” venue for A Number, creating a rawness which only this staging can provide. Paul Wills’ design is sparse in the extreme: an armchair and a table is all the furniture on stage. Look up, however, and it’s a different story. Hanging over the characters’ heads is a rack of what must be hundreds of test tubes.

Both Wests are fierce, impressive character actors and thrive on the small-scale scrutiny of this staging. Combined with the sparsity of the set, their performances feel like acting in its purest form – a conscious irony, I’m sure, given the play’s subject matter. Timothy West, as the father is tired and defensive while Samuel as three different sons creates a different kind of fragility for each. Together, their timing is super-human: they finish each others’ sentences, or leave phrases hanging, knowing the other has already understood. This is partly down to the finesse of Churchill’s writing which demands, according to Timothy West that one “re-educate oneself into how real people speak, how people can leave a sentence in the middle because it becomes perfectly clear what they’re saying”.­

A Number is that rare thing: a brilliant play, impeccably acted. Samuel West skips between the three sons with such ease that this character-switching in itself raises the question of what really defines a person. Between each scene the play’s theme is translated into a powerful image, as a blue photocopier light scans Salter from head-to-toe. A final exchange with another of the cloned sons, however, underlines how difficult it is to define what makes a person individual: “Tell me something about you.” Salter asks. A pause. “Um…I like banana milkshake.”

5/5

 

 

A number runs at the Menier Chocolate Factory until 5 November

2010
10/28
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Barber of Seville (or Salisbury), review

The Little Opera House at The King’s Head Theatre
Dir: Robin Norton-Hale

Drinks allowed in the auditorium, an unsightly squabble over seats and your standard upright piano in the corner. This is certainly not Covent Garden.

The Barber of Seville Kings Head TheatreFor the opening of London’s newest (and smallest) opera house, director Robin Norton-Hale brings us this cheeky new translation of Rossini’s classic comic opera. The Barber of Seville becomes the Barber of Salisbury and Rossini’s lothario, Count Almaviva, becomes the Marquis of Bath. Having caught a glimpse of the beautiful Rosina, the Marquis is determined to seduce her. He enlists the help of Figaro, the barber, to win her hand and defeat his rival, Rosina’s guardian Dr Bartley (originally Bartolo).

OperaUpClose lives up to its name: singers wander through the audience, advising on hair care, sharing a joke. Figaro, sung by Richard Immergluck, throws himself into the part of compere: this level of audience interaction is a world away from the big opera houses. Belinda Evans as Rosina is the best kind of Jane Austen heroine: “accomplished” but with an undeniable glint in her eye: ‘this little lamb is not so pure’ she sings in her rich soprano. Gareth Dafydd Morris as the serial seducer, the Marquis, has impressive stage presence, though his voice sometimes feels a bit much for this small space.

This production really comes into its own, however, during the ensemble scenes: Norton-Hale’s staging is excellently judged with a priceless sense for the ridiculous. The opera’s finale is tightly directed and fizzes with a tangible energy. Dickon Gough makes Bartley a wonderfully absurd, pompous lecher, complete with slicked back hair and nervous twitches. Overall, this is uproariously funny, thanks partly to Norton-Hale’s irreverent new libretto which includes such lines as “chicken soup and a cold compress” or “You’re the doctor? Dr Farty.”

This is not Covent Garden: the piano (played by Alison Luz) was not the best and some of the singing felt strained. But then opera is not easy – and up close there’s no disguising that. Volume was an issue: Dafydd Morris in particular needed to be quieter and some of Belinda Evans’ top notes were designed for a traditional auditorium. Norton-Hale’s production got off to an uncertain start but strong ensemble sections lifted the evening. This may not have been as polished as Jane Austen’s prose but it had plenty of Regency wit.

This review first appeared on ThePublicReviews.com

2010
10/16
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