Theatre blog

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 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 and sit back to 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.

The Line of Beauty

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Photo by Johan Persson.

The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst adapted by Jack Holden – Almeida Theatre, London

Alan Hollinghurst’s much-loved novel, The Line of Beauty, won the Booker Prize in 2004. Looking back to the rise of Conservative politics in 1980s Britain, and the parallel AIDS crisis, it explored gay life and consciousness through the eyes of ingenue Nick Guest, who learns a lot in a short space of time. Now, adapted by Jack Holden and directed by Michael Grandage, it reappears two decades later on the Almeida stage.

Adapting novels as plays can be a thankless task, especially when they’re well known, but Holden does a good job in not allowing the book to kill the drama. Covering the period between the Conservative victories at the 1983 and 1987 elections, the play dramatises the collision of personal and political from the perspective of Nick, played engagingly by Jasper Talbot and his experiences in love, and while lodging with the family of a Conservative MP. Performances are universally strong, and Grandage’s production is very tightly delivered. Alistair Nwachukwu gives a standout performance as Nick’s first lover Leo, charming, clever and vulnerable. Arty Froushan, as cocaine-snorting playboy Wani, Charles Edwards as smooth, fatherly MP Gerald Fedden, Robert Portal’s menacing Badger, and Ellie Bamber as bipolar Cat Fedden are all excellent performances. Hannah Morrish channels the demeanour of Fergie in a way that is both hilarious and disturbing. Doreene Blackstock, as Leo’s mother, and Claudia Harrison as Gerald’s wife are also very strong, but their roles are rather limited – a problem with both book and play. The staging is sumptuous – sets and costumes by Christopher Oram – who has clearly delighted in recreating and subtley parodying the high society 1980s with its odd combination of frumpiness and glamour.

Some of the more literary aspects of the book get a bit lost in the dramatisation, such as the thematic significance of Henry James and of the ogee, a shape which swings both ways. What is more significant is how much of a period piece the play feels. Hollinghurst was writing about a period 20 years earlier, a time now approaching half a century from the present day. The key issues of the time – homophobia, social conservatism, privilege and the devastation wrought by AIDS should not be forgotten, but are not undiscussed. The play offers a highly professional and entirely entertaining evening, but it is unclear exactly why this novel needs to be staged at this particular moment.

Cyrano de Bergerac

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Photo by Marc Brenner.

Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond de Rostand – Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

Simon Evans’ production of Cyrano is a very convincing and enjoyable account of a play which stands up well to re-examination. Evans has also adapted the play, with Debris Stevenson, giving the language a contemporary flavour without undermining the period setting, in a fantasy 17th century France. The play is held aloft by an exceptionally strong case who bring a notable level of star wattage to the stage. Adrian Lester, as Cyrano, exudes leading man skill and control, to the extent that at times he reminds us of Derek Jacobi, who triumphed in the role at the RSC for Terry Hands in the early 1980s, and at others of Simon Russell Beale. Cyrano is a part that requires a dashing, confident, yet vulnerable performance, and Lester provides this with apparent ease. He is brash in the tavern scenes, charming with Roxanne, conflicted with love rival Christian and, in the play’s final scene, when he drops the letter he is reading, supposedly the last missive of the dead Christian, and recites it to Roxanne from memory, devastating. Up until this point the play has been hugely entertaining, but it is this culminating encounter which makes it something special. The play’s emotional weight all builds to this moment of revelation, as Roxanne realises he has loved her all along, and Cyrano realises the same. There is not a dry eye in the house.

Lester’s triumphant performance helps create the conditions for the whole cast to shine brightly. Susannah Fielding, as Roxanne, is exemplary – riding a wave of breezy, charming detachment until her emotions catch up with her. Her outrage at discovering she has been deceived by Cyrano all along unleashes a fascinating cascade of conflicting impulses. Levi Brown is excellent as a casuallly insulting Christian de Neuvillette, cocky and doomed. Scott Handy’s Comte de Guiche is very funny, appearing to belong to a parallel aristocratic world where nothing quite makes sense to him. And Greer Dale-Foulkes makes Abigail, Roxanne’s companion, a very amusing comic adjunct to the action.

Performed on Grace Smart’s sets of torn posters, worn plaster and red velvet curtains, the play fills the Swan stage as though written for it. Evan’s has conjured a hit, somewhat old-fashioned in a good way because it revives a classic for a new generation without significantly remaking the play. It’s a significant achievement, and makes for a very satisfying evening watching very good actors show us their skills.

Bog Witch

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Photo by Lucy Powell

Bog Witch by Bryony Kimmings – Soho Theatre, Walthamstow

Bryony Kimmings’s last show was in 2018, in a different era. Her disturbingly personal and raw shows made her a 2010s fringe star. Her unpredictable, apparently chaotic style proved highly influential on the style of alternative theatre performers. Now she’s back with her first show since having a son, separating from her partner (Tim Grayman, well known to audiences from their joint show, Fake it ‘til you Make it), and moving to the countryside with a man called Will. Bog Witch unpicks this experience. To some extent it is classic Kimmings. She is disconcertingly direct, about herself and the way she feels, tells rude jokes, and wears ludicrous costumes. She is a very engaging performer, always undercutting herself with double takes at her own explanations. The audience loves her, and there is a very welcoming atmosphere in the vast, gleaming, newly refurbished Walthamstow branch of the Soho Theatre.

However, Bog Witch does not deliver the energy levels of previous Kimmings work. The size of the venue does not help. Beautiful although it is, the new venue is much larger than any comparable fringe venue and there is a sense that this show would have worked better in a more intimate space, more suited to Kimmings confessional style. Working (for the first time?) with a co-director, Francesca Murray-Fuentes, Kimmings works hard to occupy the cavernous stage, using everything from a long white backcloth to an epic witch costume, rustic paraphernalia and an amusing ‘burning at the stake’ tableau. However, the work to achieve this detracts from the show, with Kimmings often engaged in moving props around.

There is also a lack of the wildness and abandon apparently promised by the title. Bog Witch is a controlled show, which threatens to flatline at a couple of points in the second half (not that there is an interval, despite the near 2-hour running time). The themes she is addressing are very grown-up – depression, miscarriage, social compromise, climate responsibility. She (her performance persona, that is) seems changed by her experiences of getting older and having to compromise more, with some of her edges rubbed away. We have to buy into her changed self to stay involved in the show. The story of redemption she has to tell lacks excitement at times, and the audience-participation finale is somewhat flat. Although watching Kimmings on stage is always a good use of time, this is not the most driven or electrifying of her shows.

The Mistake

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The Mistake by Michael Mears – Arcola Theatre, London

The Mistake, which returns to the Arcola for a short run during a global tour, is a two-person show about something that happened 80 years ago, but still reverberates through our culture: the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Michael Mears is both writer and performer, switching between multiple roles alongside Riko Nakazono. The play combines close examination of the bombing and its terrible aftermath with inventive staging that brings a topic that risk become a lecture to life with ingenuity and moments of powerful emotion.

Mears focuses key figures in the development and deployment of the first atomic bomb, who are often forgotten: atomic scientist Leo Szilard, who made the breakthrough that led to the successful testing of the first atomic reactor; and Paul Tibbets, the pilot who dropped the Hiroshima bomb, flying the Enola Gay – a plane named after his mother. Szilard was immediately aware of what he might have unleashed, and campaigned valiantly, an in vain, to prevent the bomb being dropped on a populated city. Tibbets, whose later interviews with Studs Terkel form part of the play’s source material, was unapologetic to the end about his role and said he’d do it again in a heartbeat. Mears plays both these constrasting characters and a host of others, including Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein, with great conviction.

His white, male authority figures are set against a parallel storyline about the horrific impact of the bombing itself, told through the eyes of a young Hiroshima woman played by Nakazono. Using minimal props, the pair make a big impact, staging the moment-by-moment approach of the B-29 as a normal day unfolds in the city below. The impact of the bomb is graphically evoked with nothing but a model plan and a set of metal steps, while Nakazono’s account of the terrible injuries and the mass deaths it caused is heartbreaking. Rosamunde Hutt’s direction gives the show life and energy, and Mears’ writing gives it strong purpose. It is very well-informed and researched, full of fascinating or alarming pieces of information, such as the fact that the possibility of a critical nuclear reaction came to Szilard, living in London, as he waited to cross the road on Southampton Row; or the little-know fact that the USA made preparations to bomb a third Japanese city. The Mistake – which, needless to say, refers to Szilard’s discovery of the chain reaction – is a campaigning play, seeking to prevent us forgetting what a terrible thing we once did, so we do all we can to prevent it from ever happening again.

Entertaining Mr Sloane

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Jordan Stephens, Daniel Cerqueira and Tamzin Outhwaite. Photo by Ellie Kurttz.

Entertaining Mr Sloane by Joe Orton – Young Vic, London

Joe Orton’s 1964 play is revived, 60 years on, in a production by Young Vic artistic director Nadia Fall. She stages in in the round, on a carpeted living room podium surrounded by a tidal wave of detritus, which also hangs above the stage. Orton sets the play in a house perched beside a rubbish dump, and in Peter McKintosh’s set this consists of abandoned prams, furniture, buckets – the remains of collapsed domesticity. The play is a farce gone badly wrong, highly confrontational and very controversial when first staged. Over the years, it’s meaning has changed significantly. Orton was writing the thin veneer of respectability that hid the unmentionable lives of queer people, and a swell of sexual desires that were not acknowledged. Now, these elements of the play seems less remarkable than the social assumptions that are unwittingly revealed. Passing references to sexual predation in children’s homes and scout troupes, casual racism and the staggering sexism which drives the evening’s climax are somewhat jaw dropping. There’s a distinct sense that this play is no longer what we imagined it to be.

The cast play Orton’s scabrous dialogue with a slightly strangled formality which emphasises the sense that we are spying on a very different time. Tamzin Outhwaite is compelling as Kath, equal parts calculating and naïve in her pursuit of the new, sexy lodger Sloane (Jordan Stephens). This is Stephens (Rizzle Kicks) first professional stage role and, although he is enjoyably self-satisfied he lacks the air of menace that is essential to the role. Sloane has to appear a threat, who could destroy everyone around him, but he seems more a passive object of lust for Kath and her brother Ed, played by Daniel Cerqueira with a deliciously upright campness. His failure to conceal his excitement when he first encounters Sloane, asking him “Do you wear… leather?” is very funny. Their elderly father, Kemp (Christopher Fairbank) is impressively dilapidated and seedy, like Eric Sykes if bitter experience had displaced his sense of humour.

The first act is a highly entertaining competition between brother and sister for the same man. It’s the second half when things start to fall apart. Entertaining Mr Sloane bears a resemblance to Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming, staged in 2023 at the Young Vic on a similarly furnished set. A disruptor arrives in an apparently settled household, opens up the cracks and realigns the sexual relations. However, Pinter is a much more subtle writer, implying but rarely confirming what’s going on beneath the surface. Orton makes everything very explicit, which provides diminishing returns. Pulling this off requires more comic energy than this production can muster. The final scenes, where Orton has Ed and Sloane brutally humiliate Kathy, come across as nasty rather than subversive. Although she gets her comeback, the verbal and physical violence is unpleasantly one-sided. Orton seems to be enjoying himself, which makes for very uncomfortable viewing. The audience is left with a sense that this revival reveals the flaws in the play, and that it’s time may have passed.