Theatre blog

The Shitheads

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Jacoba Williams and Jonny Khan.

The Shitheads by Jack Nicholls – Royal Court Theatre, London

For starters, Jack Nicholls’ play The Shitheads is set in the Stone Age – specifically, the end of the Stone Age. I can only think of one other play with Stone Age scenes – Alistair McDowall’s The Glow, also staged at the Royal Court. It’s a bold and decisive approach from a writer who sent his work to the Royal Court on spec: they are staging submitted plays as part of their 70th anniversary season. Anna Reid has turned one end of the the Upstairs theatre into the interior of a cave with rock walls that are pretty convincing. It’s hard to make stage rocks that look real. But that’s only part of the setting. The play also uses puppets by Finn Caldwell, beginning with an elk hunting scene. The elk, real size, is operated War Horse style by two people, under puppetry captain Scarlet Wilderink. But this is definitely not War Horse. Nicholls creates a strange and thoroughly disturbing parable about inward-looking societies, fear of outsiders, resistance to change and violence which is entirely current.

The cast are all very watchable and convincing, at ease in their strange, compelling roles. The protagonist Clare is played by Jacoba Williams, a young woman venturing outside the cave where her father Adrian, played by Peter Clements, dictates the world view. Her sister Lisa, played by Annabel Smith, seems innocent but is capable of upending everything. Then a strange arrives – first a hunter, Greg (Jonny Khan), then his wife Danielle (Ami Tredera) who comes looking for him with their baby. The latter is the play’s other puppet, and possibly the most sinister thing in the whole evening. There’s competition for this: the cave is decorated with flesh and bones and the cave dwellers’ deceased mother is in a pit, along with discarded animal carcasses. Cannibalism features. Clare, asked why she lives in a cave, says “Because we’re very lucky” – but things are changing. The people they described as ‘Shitheads’ roam from place to place for better food and climate, and they’re leaving for good as the weather changes. The cave dwellers are doomed, but that may not convince them to change.

Directed by David Byrne, The Shitheads is a riot. The play, written in deliberately contemporary language, is very funny in a Martin MacDonagh, black comedy style. The idea of Stone Age characters called Adrian or Danielle is, in itself, very funny. The scenario also carries echoes of Enda Walsh – plays such as Walworth Road, where a closeted family group creates bizarre rituals to keep the outside world away. Nicholls is a clever and exciting writer, and this collaboration with a Royal Court on a high has all the excitement of the dramas that originally made the theatre’s name. It shows us ourselves in totally unexpected, entirely recognisabel ways, and providing gripping , unclassifiable entertainment while doing so.

Lost Atoms

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Anna Sinclair Robinson and Joe Layton. Photo by Tristram Kenton

Lost Atoms by Anna Jordan – Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith

Published at Plays International

Lost Atoms, written by Anna Jordan, is the 30th anniversary production for Frantic Assembly, who are a staple of the UK’s 21st century touring scene. Led throughout by Scott Graham, the company is known for making movement the core of their expression, and devising their own method entwining the text and the physical. The Frantic Method has been very influential, shaping a performance style that is very distinctively of our time. Frantic have achieved a great deal, applying their approach to classic text and new writing with equal success. It is all the more impressive that their world is smaller touring venues rather than the big commercial or subsidised theatres, where experimental work that challenges audiences is needed most. It is entirely appropriate that Lost Atoms is a co-production between the Lyric Hammersmith, the Curve in Leicester and the Mayflower, Southampton.

For their anniversary tour they have chosen a new play by Jordan who, since her last play in 2018, has been working on television series such as One Day for Netflix. Lost Atoms is about ordinary living, and what that really entails. A couple meet, get together and go through experiences related to pregnancy which are both common, and unforgettably traumatic. There is a cast of just two: Joe Layton plays Robbie, and Anna Sinclair Robinson plays Jess. Their meeting involves coffee shop wifi, and they get together through a series of chances, gradually working out how much they like each other. They encounter each other’s families, and all they bring – cleverly staged through one-sided conversations. Then Jess gets pregnant. It is impossible to discuss the plot without giving too much away, but what follows tests their relationship to the limits.

There are remarkable similarities with Luke Norris’ play Guess How Much I Love You?, currently playing at the Royal Court, which also has a cast of two, and concerns a relationship beset by pregnancy trauma. However, under Scott Graham’s direction the style of Lost Atoms is very different. Layton and Sinclair Robinson use Andrezj Goulding’s set – a bank of filing cabinets – like a climbing wall. Drawers pull out to become seats, steps, even a toilet, but they also act as drawers, containing props but also memories. A massive slab, looking disturbingly like the door to an ancient tomb, flips up to form a bed, angling the couple towards the audience in mid-air. The physicality of the performers is, at times, mesmerising. They are frequently performing while horizontal, or suspended at gravity-defying angles. They move in relation to one another throughout, expressing the closeness and distance of an intimate relationship through their bodies as much as their words.

The story is told in flashback, as Jess and Robbie explain what happened to them for the benefit, it seems, of the audience. It takes time to get going and the first half, which shows us their developing relationship, tells us less than the second. The performers become more convincing as the stress mounts, and they move away from the sometimes exaggerated naivety of their initial personas. Lost Atoms truly draws the audience in when it starts to explore what happens to people behind closed doors, in cold NHS consulting rooms and tiny flats. We think we know what life is about, but human drama is at its most extreme in everyday settings, just out of sight. Frantic Assembly’s production showcases the strengths of their work, with complete physical commitment to storytelling. Actors do things you may never have seen on a stage before, but which seem strangely natural. Conventional theatre can seem static in comparison.

Guess How Much I Love You?

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Rosie Sheehy and Robert Aramayo. Photo by Johan Persson.

Guess How Much I Love You? by Luke Norris – Royal Court Theatre

The first show in the Royal Court’s much-anticipated 70th anniversary season sets high standards. Luke Norris’s new play is a two-hander, with a brief appearance by a third performer, set in cramped interior spaces, but it fills the main stage effortlessly. It concerns a couple, played by Rosie Sheehy and Robert Aramayo, going through the emotional pressures that come with trying to have a baby. It is difficult to write about the plot of ‘Guess How Much I Love You?’ without giving key events away, but it is fair to say that things do not go as they had planned. The play has an intensity to it with is rarely seen on stage. Played in the corners of a series of rooms – their flat, a hospital room, a doctor’s examination room – there is both a claustrophobia and an ordinariness to their experiences, especially as Grace Smart’s sets make these corners just a little tighter than ninety degrees. The walls are closing in on them.

The pair, unnamed, are ordinary too, but Norris’s writing pulls apart what ordinary means. The initial tensions in their relationship – for example over whether porn is exploitative or not – hint at Sheehy’s resentment of the role she is already playing, as she waits, pregnant, mid-ultrasound. As events spiral, the pair are faced with impossible moral choices and the way they treat each other becomes brutal in a deeply uncomfortable way. There is more than a hint of ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf’ about the deep levels of love/hate played out on stage in scenes which seem too private for us to be watching. However, there is more emotional truth in the play than in Edward Albee. Although they say the most appalling things, it is entirely believable that people in their situation would react the way they do. The horror of living has rarely been exposed so honestly.

Jeremy Herrin’s direction brings out two very powerful pieces acting from Aramayo and Sheehy. He is patient, defensive, desperate and unable to cope. She is a ball of grief and pure anger. Rosie Sheehy will surely be in the running for awards for her performance, which is simply extraordinary. She is incredibly vulnerable in her deep distress, and there are a couple of moments when she completely lets go, with speeches that are difficult to hear and impossible to turn away from. Her commitment is total.

‘Guess How Much I Love You?’ is a lean and brilliant play, with an unwavering focus on the nature of love, what happens when it goes wrong, and how people really behave in a crisis. Norris also weaves in themes of religion and gender roles in a way that feels natural. There is a particular moment in the play that makes the audience’s hearts drop as though they were an express lift, but the entire evening is an unrelentingly intense experience. A play which pushes the capacity of theatre to communicate to its limits is the perfect start to the year for the Royal Court.

The Dead

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Photo by Kathleen Holman.

The Dead by James Joyce, presented by the Fourth Choir – Wilton’s Music Hall, London

The combination of Justine Mitchell, reading an abridged version of James Joyce’s peerless story ‘The Dead’, and the Fourth Choir singing pieces interspersed into the text, is a remarkable success. This is partly because the singers are exceptionally good. Led by James Powe, they are a queer choir consisting partly of trained singers, partly amateurs. They must be as good as a choir with an amateur element can get. With around thirty singers performing in the intimate Wilton’s Music Hall – which is perfect for the piece – there is absolutely nowhere to hide, and they are flawless.

The singing is beautiful, and successfully connected to Joyce’s writing. ‘The Dead’ is underpinned by music, including discussions of choir politics and of the folk song ‘The Lass of Aughrim’, one of the pieces performed, and one of several arranged by Powe. These also include ‘Bid Adieu’, the only song written by Joyce – both words and tune. Christmas pieces are included, ‘The Dead’ being set at a Twelfth Night party. Justine Mitchell does an excellent job as the narrator, wearing a dark green period dress and looking thoroughly Edwardian.

However, the evening only works because its elements are so expertly stitched together by the director, Séamus Rea, who has also adapted the text. He creates small but effective interactions between the choir and Mitchell. They hand her the pages she reads from, and form an attentive party crowd. They occupy the stage in shifting patterns that create visual interest, and even their phone-lit entrance has a surprising impact. The whole evening, being concerned with continuing presence of the dead in the lives of the living, is unsurprisingly moving – and performed to a very high standard. As Mitchell and the choir cast their pages into the air, to fall like the snow that is general across Ireland, few dry eyes are left dry.

Playboy of the Western World

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Playboy of the Western World by J.M. Synge – National Theatre: Lyttleton

Caitríona McLoughlin’s production J.M. Synge’s masterpiece seems to be the first at the National Theatre since 1976, which is extraordinary. The play, once a staple of amateur dramatics, has perhaps become a little forgotten in the UK, although not in Ireland. McLoughlin is the artistic director of the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, and brings an all-Irish cast to London to familiarise new audiences with a play that once caused riots.

Synge’s writing is remarkable – both deeply lyrical, with a powerful ear for speech patterns in the west of Ireland, and blackly comic. Both must have been revelatory for 1907, when the play premiered in Dublin. The play is populated entirely with people of no social consequence living in a poor, even despised part of the country, but Synge makes their language a thing of beauty. It’s set in a pub, where characters talk in a way they might not elsewhere. At the same time, he punctuates the play with the kind of comic violence – Old Mahon, who just won’t die – which seems remarkably modern. Playboy could be seen as the origin play for the subsequent century of Irish drama, from Friel and to McPherson to McDonagh.

McLoughlin, on a widescreen set by Katie Davenport, gives the production life and movement, if not always consistency. The cast is fascinating, but offers a range of peformance styles that do not always gel. At one end of the scale is Siobhán McSweeney’s urbane Widow Quin, giving it her all when trying her luck with Christy Mahon, but experienced enough to let it go and change tack too. At the other end is Lorcan Cranitch’s Michael Flaherty. Cranitch gives a performance that threatens to steal the entire play. In a very thick Mayo accent, he builds up to a dramatically drunken entrance on his return from a wake where “You’d never see the match of it for flows of drink.” He plays an entire scene while in a highly unbalanced state, constantly threatening to topple over, and the audience cannot look away. It is a complete tour de force. However, the contrasting performances do illustrate the production’s inconsistent tone.

Elsewhere, Éanna Hardwicke is extremely unnerving as Christy, gurning and almost slithering around the set. He leaves the audience unsure whether he’s a fool or a cunning chancer, or whether he’s sincere. Nicola Coughlan is fierce and charming as Pegeen Mike, but perhaps lacks the presence the part demands, to dominate a barroom full of people. However, her final scene, howling on her knees as Christy departs, is chilling. Marty Rea’s Shawn Keogh exudes weakness from his apologetic frame, while Declan Conlon is excellent as a domineering, physically threatening Old Mahon. The supporting cast are strong, especially the gaggle of local girls led by Marty Breen as Sara Tansey and Fionnuala Gygax as Honor Blake.

Despite some reservations, however, the play is fascinating and entertaining and very much reconfirming its classic status. The themes around easy celebrity and fickle popular opinion seem extremely current, while Pegeen Mike’s sexual independence, and the unashamed interest of women in sex, which triggered the 1907 riots, is refreshing and seems well ahead of its time. And Synge’s language remains a thing of wonder. Its dense wordplay makes no compromise whatsoever for the watching, listening public and, as a result, draws them deep into a parallel world. Playboy remains thrilling after all these years.

Twelfth Night

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Michael Grady-Hall, Gwyneth Keyworth and Samuel West. Photos by Helen Murray.

Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare – Barbican Theatre, London

Prasanna Puwanarajah’s production of Twelfth Night is a fascinating combination of genuinely funny comedy, and the underlying darkness that hangs over the play. There’s greater emphasis on the comedy though than in many productions, driven by the central figure of Feste, played with great presence by Michael Grady-Hall. He opens the evening, descending on a wire playing a guitar and singing, and takes a prominent role as intermediary between the stage and the audience. His post-interval audience interaction – an extended game of catch – goes on much longer than most performers could get away with, but no-one resents it. Dressed like a bumble bee in one of James Cotterill’s entertaining costumes, he performs a number of impressive physical turns but also spans the melancholy elements of the play, bringing tears to the eye with his performance of the play’s songs.

The production has a strong cast, offering distinctive interpretations. Gwyneth Keyworth’s Viola is no-nonsense, but rapidly flustered at the idea of dressing as a boy. Daniel Monks brings a certain incel quality to an Orsino with an edge. Joplin Sibtain’s Toby Belch is a tragic figure destroyed by alcohol, tall and lurching like a 1970s French House drunk. Danielle Henry makes Maria the character in the play you would actually want to spend time with, sharp and human. Freema Agyeman was off the night I saw the play and, annoyingly, her excellent understudy as Olivia was not identified, either in the theatre or through my subsequent enquiry to the RSC press office.

Sam West’s masterful Malvolio adds complete assurance to the production. He is one of those performers whose presence makes the audience relax, ready to sit back and enjoy his skills. He takes the character from chippy to hilarious – a ludicrous cross-gartered scene – to alarmingly vengeful, as though it was a natural character arc. Played against James Cotterill’s surreal giant church organ set, Puwanarajah delivers a show that fully understands of the humour and complexity of this strange but irresistible play.

Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo

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Arinzé Kene and Kathryn Hunter. Photos by Ellie Kurttz .

Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo by Rajiv Joseph – Young Vic, London

Published at Plays International

Rajiv Joseph’s play, which premiered in Los Angeles in 2009, is revived by Young Vic artistic director Nadia Fall as part of her first season. It deals with a world at war, physically and culturally, but the context is the US invasion of Iraq, now more than 20 years ago. It is obvious why Fall, and director Omar Elerian, think ‘A Bengal Tiger at Baghdad Zoo’’ may have something to tell us, nearly a generation on, helping us reflect on how little we seem to have learned from the mistakes of the past.

The show opens in the ruins of Baghdad Zoo, illuminated by the scope torches of two US soldiers, Tom (Patrick Gibson) and Kev (Arinzé Kene), as they discover a tiger still prowling its concrete enclosure. The tiger, played by Kathryn Hunter, has a better perspective on humans and war than any soldier, or indeed the lions of whose intelligence she takes a very dim view. Soon, Kev has shot her dead after she takes off Tom’s hand, and she begins an afterlife, inhabiting the play as a ghost. ‘A Bengal Tiger…’ is a reflection on war and conflict, with hefty doses of both brutality and absurdity. In some ways it is an old-fashioned play, reminiscent of non-naturalistic post-war dramas such as John Arden’s ‘Sergeant Musgrave’s Dance’. Its characters are types, rather than individuals, representing different aspects of a conflict which, deeply controversial at the time, has come to seem less forgivable with each passing year.

The two soldiers are at the heart of the play. Patrick Gibson plays Tom with obnoxious conviction as shallow, aggressive and avaricious, coveting a gold gun and a gold toilet seat looted from the palace of Uday Hussain, Saddam’s son. Arinzé Kene has the better part as Kev, who is staggeringly naïve and child-like, and he inhabits the role in a way that seems almost eerie at times. The play is very episodic, moving between set pieces. Uday himself makes several appearances as a ghost, having been gunned down by US troops, and is played with triumphant glee by Sayid Akki, whose stage presence is remarkable for an actor with only two previous credits in his CV. Ama Haj Ahmad, as Uday’s gardener Moussa, now working as translator for the US military, brings humour and despair to his role in equal measure.

The titular tiger was to have been played by David Threlfall, who had to temporarily withdraw with illness. Kathryn Hunter stepped in at the very last moment, to the extent her lines are provided on monitors in the auditorium, but you would never know it. In a cast that is uniformly excellent, her charisma stands out in a way that captivates the audience. She uses her physicality with apparent ease to embody a tiger, casually twitching her tail, while conducting an annoying existential debate with the audience about moral responsibility. She has real star power.

While the cast give their all, and director Omar Elerian powers the play along, it is nevertheless flawed. Some grim scenes that illustrate the horrifying impact of the conflict, and the brutal Hussain regime, on everyone from teenage girls to soldiers, leave us in no doubt about the war. Joseph is scathing about the arrogance and venality of the US troops, and the sinister love of torture exhibited by Uday. However, the philosophical commentary offered by the tiger, and the metaphysical elements of the play seem overblown and lacking in depth, while the episodic nature of the narrative reduces it to a set of show pieces. Hunter’s late casting is fortunate, because the play would otherwise feature just two women in bit parts, as a sex worker (Sara Masry) and a mysterious leper (Hala Omran). The appearance of the latter, singing an atmospheric but untranslated Arabic lament, seems like superficial cultural exoticism.

Rajha Shakiry’s broken concrete set and Jackie Shemesh’s lighting, with night scopes and ceiling fan shadows, are imaginative and effective. The Young Vic has given ‘A Bengal Tiger…’ an excellent production, but it does not make a convincing case that this is a play that stands up to scrutiny many years on, or tells us anything new about a time we risk forgetting.

End

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Saskia Reeves and Clive Owen. Photo by Marc Brenner.

End by David Eldridge – National Theatre: Dorfman

End is the final instalment of David Eldridge’s trilogy about a couple at different life stages, which began with Beginning in 2017, then Middle in 2022. It brings Saskia Reeves and Clive Owen together, recalling their 1991 incest film drama Close My Eyes. Gary McCann’s set is full of details which make it clear that Alfie and Julie are a 90’s couple – CDs, DVDs, a hi-fi. Alfie is a DJ who, in the opening lines of the play, is diagnoses with terminal cancer. Owen and Reeves create a fully convincing married relationship, still close despite a history that, as the play unfolds, is revealed to be less than smooth. Eldridge’s writing takes a straightforwardly narrative approach, documenting the pair as they wrestle with the decision about whether to continue with chemotherapy. Their daughter, who is coming round that night but never arrives, is the focus of their dilemma – whether to buy more time at the cost of a reduced quality of life.

Rachel O’Riordan’s direction gives dynamism to what is essentially a long conversation between the pair. Clive Owen conveys the sense of a man used to people, including his partner, deferring to him – even in the context of his funeral playlist. Saskia Reeves, a writer, comes into her own as her power in the relationship is gradually revealed, and her ability to interpret what is happening to her through fiction, becomes apparent. The play is not revelatory – there is little in here that is not familiar – but the experience of Generation X characters facing death is, in itself, new. Eldridge also uses very specific London geography well – the annoyance of having to change between Forest Gate and Wanstead Park to reach the cemetery for example – to convey the sense of real relationship, happening in real time.

Porn Play

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Ambika Mod and Lizzy Connolly. Photo by Helen Murray.

Porn Play by Sophie Chetin-Leuner – Royal Court Upstairs, London

Published at Plays International

Yimei Zhao, the designer for Porn Play, has upholstered the entire Royal Court Upstairs space in soft beige furnishings which spread from the stage out over the audience benches. It is simultaneously cosy and oddly creepy, especially when characters start reaching down into the cracks between cushions to pull out props – laptops, phones, pillows, even the giant paper towels that cover GP’s examination tables. The image of a cocoon that is not as cosy as it seems fits the subject matter of Sophia Chetin-Leuner’s play perfectly. Her drama deals with a young woman’s addiction to pornography: specifically porn based on violence to women.

The central character Ani, played by Ambika Mod, is a rising academic star who has just won a prestigious prize for her new book, on Milton’s Paradise Lost. On the surface everything is going brilliantly for her, but almost immediately her private obsessions get in the way of her happiness. Her inability to relate sexually to her boyfriend Leo (Will Close) without watching videos of women being humiliated drives him away from her. At the same time, the gender power balance seems to lie behind her increasingly self-destructive urges. The passive aggressive suggestions that she has it easy, and that her achievements are not on the same level as the men begin with Leo, and escalate throughout the play.

Chetin-Leuner has chosen a fascinating, and wildly uncomfortable theme for her Royal Court debut. The prevalence of pornography in society is a major contemporary concern, but the debate generally sees men and boys as users, and women and girls as victims. Porn Play turns this on its head by examining female sexuality through pornography, including the revealing information that women are much more likely to search for violent porn. Ani reacts angrily when challenged, refusing to let anyone else shame her for her sexual preferences, but it becomes increasingly clear that she is not in control of her choices, as her life and mental health disintegrate around her. How has this happened? Is it tied in some way to the normalisation of sexual violence in the male authors she teaches? One of her students confronts her in her office to complain that she is enabling John Milton in glamourising rape. Or is it connected to her mother’s death when she was a teenager?

Josie Rourke’s production brings the best out of a highly versatile and entertaining cast who play numerous parts, and give the show a lot of energy. The performers move well together in a small space, with Wayne McGregor, no less, the show’s choreographer. Lizzy Connolly is excellent, switching constantly between roles and playing a sort of fantasy muse who manages scene changes in between. She is very funny as Ani’s sleepover friend, who is all “It’ll be ok, babes, you’re overthinking it”, before Ani’s masturbation forces her to sleep on the couch. She is equally funny parodying a GP talking in NHS style, who becomes a sexual predator as Ani tunes out of reality and into fantasy. Will Close is similarly versatile, needy and passive aggressive as Leo, and entirely different as a cocky student who gets worrying into the idea of tying Ani up and humiliating her. Asif Khan is awkward and clumsy in a ‘dad’ way as Ani’s father, and very moving as a result. He is also horribly hilarious as a misogynist academic.

Ambika Mod is the only performer to play a single part, and is on stage throughout as Ani. It is essential that we believe her, and she does a very convincing job of making her porn addiction seem credible. She also plays some of the most excruciating scenes imaginable, from frequent masturbation to a GP examination, and a scene with her father towards the end which redefines embarrassment. She brings a fine balance of confidence and vulnerability to the role, pulling the audience along with her to places they really do not want to go.

Porn Play is a fascinating piece because it looks at female experience from an entirely unexpected perspective. There are complex questions for society to address around what we are doing to women. The porn boom is era-defining, potentially shaping the expectations men have of women, and their future personal and social relations, but we do not know as much about what it is doing to women. Does it liberate or constrain? Is it reprogramming women’s expectations of themselves? Perhaps porn is just another tool men use to put women in their place, like the academic gender hierarchy, and the literary canon of abusive male authors.

All these issues are raised, although there can be no definite conclusions, and the play is as much about addiction as gender politics. It does trail off a little, as Ani enters the trajectory of an addict, pushing away everyone around them – a story that seems much more familiar than what has come before. This is where the relationship with her father becomes central, and the scenes in which he tries desperately to connect with her are very moving. Porn Play is a timely and involving show, with a fine young cast, and an author with fresh, compelling perspectives to offer.