Theatre blog

The Legends of Them

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Sutara Gayle. Photo by Harry Elletson

The Legends of Them by Sutara Gayle AKA Lorna Gee – Royal Court Theatre, London

Published at Plays International

Sutara Gayle has had quite the life. Her one woman show expresses remarkable experiences through powerful, focused theatre. Gayle, born in Brixton, is a musician, singer, DJ and British reggae pioneer. She has lived in New York, opened for Shabba Ranks, spent time in Holloway Prison, and changed her name during a spiritual retreat in India. Her brother Mooji is a Hindu guru. Her sister Cherry’s shooting by police triggered the 1985 Brixton Riots. The Legends of Them combines music, film (projections by Tyler Forward and Daniel Batters) and a swirling array of characters, all played by Gayle, into a journey of awakening and discovery.

Gayle is also an actor, with a long career on stage and in film and television. This is the one aspect of her life she does not mention, and there is no need because it is obvious. Legends of Them is a performance tour de force. Gayle plays a long list of people she meets across eras and places – from Linton Kwesi Johnson to school friends, taxi drivers, dominoes players and policemen – who pass across the stage and through her life in sometimes dream-like fragments. She conveys each scene with minimum fuss and the maximum skill, using a vocal intonation, a tilt of the head, or a flick of the wrist. Gayle makes it look easy, but her performance is a masterclass in storytelling, from which other, far less subtle one-person shows could learn at lot.

The Legends of Them conjures up lost eras and events, knotting them loosely together as the bigger picture emerges, piece by piece. Although Gayle is the connecting presence, the show is explicitly about four legends in her life: her mother Euphemia, sister Cherry, brother Mooji, and the 17th century Jamaican freedom fighter, Nanny of the Maroons. Euphemia, who came to Brixton from Jamaica, brought up eight children, and pounded out living from her sewing machine. Cherry, who died in 2011, found herself thrust into the national news in disastrous circumstances, which she handled with great dignity. Her older brother Mooji is her guiding light, imparting Buddhist wisdom that helps Gayle see beyond tragedy and turmoil in her life. And Nanny is part of a suppressed history of resistance to empire, fighting the 17th century British occupation of Jamaica, and giving identity to those fighting the same battles today.

She threads together their stories expertly, never over-explaining but giving the audience enough to understand what is happening and why it matters. It is a high-wire act completed with supreme confidence, co-created with director Jo McInnes and dramaturg Nina Lyndon. Then there is the music. Gayle is a highly versatile writer and singer, and she sings at key moments. The set is dominated by a vast speaker stack covered in disco lights, which flash a backdrop to the action. Gayle strides on stage and immediately shows us what she’s capable of with her trademark reggae MC delivery, immediately raising excitement levels to eleven. Having established her formidable skills, she uses her full range, singing charming numbers influenced by pop and gospel, written with composer and musical director Christella Litras. She expresses herself directly and truthfully through music, which is clearly an essential part of her existence, and drives the show.

Gayle, with her collaborators, conjures an evening which is subtle, carefully woven, and at times exhilarating theatre, but it is more than that. The Legends of Them is a big success for the still-relatively-new Brixton House theatre, where it was first performed before moving the Royal Court – taking a show which is Brixton through and through into Belgravia. But it is more than a theatre production. Sutara Gayle’s life tracks the Black experience in Britain, through the terrible personal impact of racism and sexism, to personal fulfilment and self-knowledge. She is a local heroine, but her voice reaches far beyond SW9. She speaks from long, tough experience, and The Legends of Them sends a message which is proud, loud and clear.

The Importance of Being Earnest

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Photo by Marc Brenner

The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde – National Theatre: Lyttleton, London

In Max Webster’s new production intentions clear are from the opening moments. The play begins with a dance sequence. Ncuti Gatwa, playing Algernon, drapes himself over a grand piano wearing a shocking pink ballgown, split to reveal boxer shorts underneath. It sends an unambiguous message that this will not be The Importance of Being Earnest we have become familiar with, but a high camp, high glitter entertainment… and much more beside. Webster opens the play up to a much-need re-examination. One of the best known and loved – and overquoted – plays in the repertoire is reclaimed as the brutal social critique it has been all along.

For the National Theatre to stage Oscar Wilde’s best known play is a balancing act. It’s a sure audience pleaser, which is why every amateur group in the country has done it at some point, but there needs to be a reason to give it a major new production. Webster delivers this triumphantly, and his show is a revelation. The play has an excellent, highly entertainingly and disruptive cast. Gatwa is suave, shameless and very funny, with a commanding stage presence and a knack for comedy. He is matched with Hugh Skinner’s apparently more vulnerable Jack Worthing, constantly struggling to match his mental self image. The ingenue Cecily Cardew is played by Eliza Scanlen who channels Miranda Richardson to fine effect. And the excellent Ronkẹ Adékọluẹ́jọ́ is very funny as Gwendolen, teetering throughout between comic social propriety and crotch-grabbing sexual meltdown. Richard Cant and Amanda Lawrence, as Canon Chasuble and Miss Prism, deliver supporting performances of an exceptionally high calibre, while Julian Bleach has fun as two butlers: the scary Merriman and his derelict country counterpart, Lane.

However, every production of ‘…Earnest’ pivots on its Lady Bracknell. The part has become an old-fashioned star turn, somewhat divorced from the play itself. It is mystifying that Wilde has become so cosy, as though his annihilation by the society who had fêted him happened to someone else. ‘…Earnest’ is packed with bitter social recrimination fed to the audience in sugared pills. Sharon D Clarke’s Lady Bracknell undoes all that. Casting actors of colour in the key roles challenges some assumptions, and Clarke’s forbidding, stereotypical Caribbean matriarch works perfectly for the part. Wearing dramatic costumes combining western and Afro-Caribbean styles, by Rae Smith, she puts up a fierce resistance to her daughter’s wishes, but we gradually realise that this a façade relates directly to her origins. The key moments in the play are when she reveals that she had no money before she married Lord Bracknell; and when she discovers that Jack is very wealthy, and becomes suddenly supportive of his marriage to Gwendolen. She knows what it means to have nothing, and what it takes to stay afloat when you don’t belong. She can compete with any of the great Lady Bracknells, but her performance reinvents the part.

The entire play is explicitly about dissembling and façades. Nobody says what they mean, while revealing what they really think. We see clearly from Webster’s production that no-one can afford to be who they actually are. Wilde certainly couldn’t. But he devised a way to say things in a way that allowed his plays to become accepted and mainstream, all the while presenting an unequivocal condemnation of the British social order. Gatwa’s Algernon is certainly not a straightforwardly heterosexual character, but neither is anyone else. Algernon and Jack seem as interested in each other as their fiancees, and so do Celia and Gwendolen. Webster stages a spectacular pile-on in which they all seem on the brink of engaging in a foursome. On Rae Smith’s slightly psychedelic sets, reality is heightened and pushed to the brink of absurdity, which is where the truth lies. The show is as funny and entertaining as any production of the play, but it shows us what’s been lying in plain sight. Wilde deserves to be fully understood, and his work given the freedom of interpretation it could never receive at the time, and that has eluded it since. The evening ends with a masque dance, with all the characters in feathers and frills. It is a moment of joy, releasing us from the terrifying constraints of a world that forces everyone to pretend in order to survive.

Blood Show

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Blood Show by Ocean Hester Stefan Chillingworth – Battersea Arts Centre, London

Blood Show comes with a spatter warning and plastic ponchos for the audience. The set, in Battersea Arts Centre’s small Member’s Bar room, consistsnof a pristine white carpet with a chair, a plant and a drinks flask filled with stage blood. The show, performed by the writer Ocean Hester Stefan Chillingworth, with Tim Bromage and Craig Hambling, is a surreal exercise in mimed violence. Hambling and Chillingworth stage a fight, the former painted all over in white, the latter slathered from head to toe in stage blood. It is a nasty and very believable fight with kicking, biting and gouging, and it ends with Chillingworth strangled to death in an alarmingly realistic manner. The white carpet, by this time, is smeared in blood. Then they do it again, and the shock of the violence wears off a little. Then again, and again, and each time the impact is reduced while the set becomes bloodier. There is also a ghost, adding unnerving comedy in a head-to-toe sheet costume, who glides around and sometimes sings – played by Tim Bromage I assume, although we never see his face.

The idea of repetition desensitising us to violence is a good premise, but the show takes a different course. The fight scenes end and Chillingworth becomes the sole performer, enacting a series of increasingly bloody and comic effects – including slamming plastic cups full of blood into their body foley-style. The volumes of blood grow, and it emerges from props and comes on stage in buckets to be sloshed around.

Blood Show is promising, but frustrating. It perhaps references violence against the trans body, violence in film, complacency about violence in society, or all of those things – but we never really know. The show seems to lack a driving rationale, and feels more like a scratch exercise than a coherent, finished production. The performers are physically committed to an impressive extent. However, the blood is a distraction and becomes the whole point. The need to produce more and more blood derails and defocuses the evening. And it turns out that when you examine it too closely, stage blood looks like stage blood, not the real thing,

The Duchess (of Malfi)

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Jodie Whittaker as the Duchess. Photo: Marc Brenner.

The Duchess (of Malfi) by John Webster, adapted by Zinnie Harris – Trafalgar Theatre, London

Zinnie Harris has modernised John Webster’s classic revenge tragedy with a bold production that gives a new perspective on a wild, brutal story, while also stripping it of the language that has given its place in the repertoire, 400 years later. There are many good things about the production. Tom Piper’s modernist set is stripped back to concrete, with metal walkways, a suitable backdrop for slaughter. Jodie Whittaker is an appealingly defiant Duchess, a woman who will not give way to what men demand of her, however huge the price. In fact, she continues to haunt her brothers, Paul Ready’s Cardinal and Rory Fleck Byrne’s Ferdinand, after death. Ready stands out as the lascivious Cardinal, plausible but depraved, unable to resist humiliating his mistress Julia (Elizabeth Ayodele), as soon as she shows weakness. Fleck Byrne’s Ferdinand is convincingly unhinged, his sexuality tearing him apart. He appears, dramatically, wearing his sister’s red dress after ordering her murder. Fleck Byrne is generally watchable, but loses marks for tossing away the character’s most famous speech, “Cover her face. Mine eyes dazzle. She died young”, which an actor is surely contractually obliged to have fun with.

There is also a powerful performance from Jude Owusu as the murderer Bosola. Owusu’s ambiguity is subtlety delivered, keeping us guessing throughout as to who he really is. Harris’ version emphasises his role, letting him live at the denouement, unlike almost all the other characters, to regret his past and promise to look after the Duchess’ young son. She also highlights his class position as someone who cannot afford to turn down work, however grisly. In this, he is allied with the maid Cariola, who Matti Houghton plays with a great deal of character. In one of Harris’s best lines, she reveals that women wear make-up to hide their rage at the misogyny around them.

The production is an interesting and enjoyable evening, a valuable and committed experiment with a play that is usually hidden in the shadows. Harris brings it out into the light, shining an unforgiving fluorescent light on its themes like an autopsy. She makes the brutal treatment of women uncomfortably apparent, and the deep corruption that fuels the power of the few the unmissable cause of society’s ills. Unsurprisingly, it’s a play for our times. The use of music in the play, with Whittaker and Houghton delivering Webster’s songs with aplomb to the accompaniment of white-suited guitarist, contrasts nicely with the grim imagery – the bodies of the Duchess, Cariola and her young daughter left sprawled on the stage throughout the following scene. Whittaker death scene is delivered in astonishingly gruesome fashion, strangled unsuccessfully at length with a rope by incompetent goons before Bosola finishes the job himself, drowning her in a bath. However, it’s a shame about the poetry which, when it surfaces from time to time brings the show suddenly to life. For the most part it is missing, and an essential element in the play’s appeal disappears with it.

L’Addition

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Bert & Nasi. Photo by Vincent Zobler.

L’Addition by Tim Etchells / Bert & Nasi – Battersea Arts Centre, London

Published at Plays International

As part of Forced Entertainment’s continuing  40th anniversary celebration, co-founder Tim Etchells has devised a two-hander in which reality is pushed to its breaking point through the basic mechanism of a classic farce set-up. A restaurant customer sits down at a table, the waiter offers him wine, pours a little, he tastes it and nods approval, then the waiter pours him a glass – but he carries on pouring until the glass overflows across the table. There’s mild panic from customer and waiter, when he realised what he’s done, he sweeps up the tablecloth with everything on it. Then they begin again.

From the moment they walk on stage, the performers, Bert and Nasi, are a comic timebomb always threatening to go off. Bert is English, bluff, matey, confident, and usually wrong. Nasi is French, smooth, conciliatory, and also usually wrong. Together, the pair are a well-oiled machine displaying comic skills that it is a joy to behold. Much of L’Addition is very funny. The comic scenario breaks apart continually under examination, becoming more and more ludicrous and hilarious. The performers know how to hold back comic gratification so that, when it comes, it is a true release. At one point Bert as the waiter, constantly laying and relaying a tablecloth, finally loses it completely and performs a strange, wild dance with the cloth which seems to continue for several minutes as Nasi looks on, astonished. The audience are beside themselves.

However, like all classic comedy L’Addition is buoyed on a tide of existential sadness. The underlying themes in Etchells’ piece are barely stated, but it becomes apparent that the show is concerned with , existence, ritual and death. There is a moment that stops everyone in their tracks when the pair fast forward to a point 50 years in the future, when they are still performing their skit. Then it dawns on them that much of the audience will no longer be alive, at which point it sinks in with each of us too. The process of ritualising and mythologising existence is examined too, as the scene becomes something different through constant repetition, a tribute to its original self enacted by people who cannot remember the original, or why they are doing it. But they know they have to, just as we know we have to eat, sleep, repeat to exist.

L’Addition, which was originally presented in French at last year’s Festival d’Avignon, is a brilliant piece of theatre. Tim Etchells, Bert and Nasi work together with a precision that most performers can only aspire to. In the influential tradition of Forced Entertainment, the show’s power is in inverse proportion to budget, complexity or pretension. It belongs to the tradition of silent film comedy, of Samuel Beckett, and of entertainment that takes nothing seriously, but means everything. It is assured, side-splitting and unmissable.

Dr. Strangelove

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Steve Coogan and Giles Terera. Photo by Manuel Harlan.

Dr. Strangelove by Armando Ianucci and Sean Foley – Noël Coward Theatre, London

Sean Foley and Armando Ianucci have adapted Stanley Kubrick’s 1963 satire, Dr. Strangelove, for the stage, powered by the willingness of Steve Coogan to go one better than Peter Sellers, and play four parts (Sellers bailed on Major TJ Kong, who was played instead by Slim Pickens). The concept of staging the film is attention-grabbing, and the issues it satirising more current than they’ve been for decades. However, it is not ultimately clear why this story needs to be on the stage. The adaptation, , and Sean Foley’s direction, are very faithful to the film apart than the odd update such as a acknowledgment that the cast is almost entirely male, which does not change the fact it is still almost entirely male. Part of the problem is that it is less a story than a series of set-piece scenes, which work well on film and less well on stage. The film is oddly set-bound, which may have made it seem suited for theatre, but somehow the show never quite takes off.

Coogan is accomplished and highly professional in all four roles: frightfully posh English officer Captain Mandrake; US President Muffley, trying to be reasonable in the face of insanity; Major TJ Kong, perhaps his best role, the gung-ho, bomb-riding B52 pilot with a strange attitude to women; and Dr. Strangelove, wheelchair-bound not-very-ex-Nazi scientist. The play is, inevitably, mostly focussed on him – and the substitution of lookalikes with their backs to the audience while Coogan changes into another costume quickly become distracting. There is also the sense that Coogan never really lets it all out. His performances seem controlled and script-bound, and the moment when he unleashes the madness never arrives.

There is limited space for other cast members to shine, and indeed there appear to be several senior military figures who spend much of the show sitting around the War Room table, never speaking. However, John Hopkins has a lot of fun cast, slightly surprisingly, as the mad General Ripper, who launches a nuclear assault on Russia without permission. His performance has an unpredictable edge to it that is lacking elsewhere, and his conspiracy-theory fuelled spiral seems alarming current. Giles Terrera has fun as General Turgidson, cheerleader for ‘pretaliation’ against the Soviets, but he can’t animate the War Room scenes on his own.

Hildegard Bechtler’s set recreates the look of the film very well, but inevitable involves filling the stage with large immovable objects, notably the giant oval War Room table, and the cockpit of a B52. This does not aid the production’s fluidity. Nor does the fact that the large back-projection is invisible to the substantial section of the audience in the balcony, and has to be replicated on very small tv screens. In fact, the Noël Coward Theatre seems the wrong place for this show, which is too constrained on its tight proscenium stage. It would have worked much better in the Olivier.

The characters, conversations and events of Dr. Strangelove are terrifying close to real life. Much of the film is a documentary in disguise, dramatising the insane thinking of senior US military figures such as Curtis Le May and Thomas Powers, who actively encouraged a nuclear conflict in which they were quite willing, as General Turgison says, for 20 million American to die, as long as even more Russians were killed. The revived nuclear threat following the invasion of Ukraine makes this satire both timely, and as important now as it was then. It is just a shame that the stage version delivers more of a tribute show than a rebirth.

Tachwedd (November/The Slaughter)

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Cari Munn, Glyn Pritchard, Saran Morgan in Tachwedd. Photo by WoodForge Studios.

Tachwedd (November/The Slaughter) by Jon Berry – Theatre 503, London

Published at Plays International.

The title of Jon Berry’s new play is the Welsh word for November which, as well as the month, suggests a time of year when the mood darkens. In a rural context, it is also when the animals are fat enough to slaughtered. The foreboding title is a fair representation of the drama, which is ambitious, era-spanning and disturbing. Set in a single location – a farm house somewhere near Trawsfynydd in Snowdonia – it takes place in five time periods, from pre-history to the present. The stories in each are connected by the influence, generally malign, of their shared place. The show opens with the cast of four scooping up handfuls of the earth and eating them, sending the unambiguous message that the place is within them, whether they want it or not.

The play concentrates on four stories: a young man trying to escape his farming inheritance in 1758; a grim tale of power and sexual abuse in 1902; worklessness and a failing marriage in 1975; and a writer winning fame by exploiting family tragedy in 2024. The all-Welsh cast of four give appealing performances, and switch very effectively between their various roles, which are neatly indicated by small changes in costume. Saran Morgan plays a series of young women, always fighting back against expectations. The young men played by Bedwyr Bowen are trapped by society, place and expectation, in capable of getting out. Carri Munn’s characters range from self-deluding and dangerous, to furious at the restrictions of place and society . Glyn Pritchard’s older men are similarly varied, by turns predatory, self-destructive, and possessing all the power and authority. The set, by Rebecca Wood, is a crescent of tall slats which can channel blinding light towards the audience, or focus beams like a stone circle, connecting events beyond their time.

Jon Berry’s ambition is impressive, and Tachwedd is reminiscent of Alistair McDowall’s similarly time-hopping play, The Glow. The impressionistic prehistoric scenes, involving a wild boar hunt, add an exciting element of the mysterious and undefined to the social history that powers the main scenes. It is difficult to weave themes together across such large timespans, and the play’s thesis is not entirely clear. Berry’s describes the play as being like “a distintegration tape” running in a loop until it becomes “saturated” and falls apart. Events layer up in a single location across time, creating shadows that cannot be erased. However, the drama would benefit from stronger shared threads to justify the telling of these particular stories, than just the soil that connects them.

Nevertheless, Tachwedd gives us a defiantly unpretty social history of North Wales. It is a serious play that, despite its tragic events, has strong characters and humour too. Berry has fun, for example, unpicking the hypocrisies of literary agents. Well-managed by director Jac Ifan Moore, the play is an entertaining, and often powerful evening which thoroughly defies expectations. It is also a testament to Theatre 503’s crucial work developing new writing for the stage, and giving London exposure to creative artists from Wales.

King Troll (The Fawn)

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Dominic Holmes and Zainab Hasan in King Troll. Photo by Helen Murray.

King Troll (The Fawn) by Sonali Bhattacharyya – New Diorama Theatre, London

Sonali Bhattacharyya’s new play, directed by Milli Bhatia, is an indictment of the UK immigration process, designed to destroy people, but it is no mere documentary. The grinding injustice of a system that uses people rather than treating them as humans has been widely and deservedly exposed on stage in recent years. Bhattacharyya, though, takes her story in an expected and memorable direction. Two sisters, Nikita (Zainab Hasan) struggles to help her sister Riya (Safiyya Ingar), who has spent her whole life in the UK, stay ahead of deportation for want of a piece of paper from fifteeen years ago. She can’t prove that her late mother lived continuously in the UK because she worked in an undocumented job. Nikita also works at a charity, where she is powerless to help refugee and friend Tahir (Diyar Bozhurt) as his hopes of asylum are brutally dashed. But then things get very weird indeed. Her mother’s ex-colleague Mrs B (Ayesha Darkar) gives Riya an mysterious vial and a set of scribbled instructions, from which she creates a sort of golem: The Fawn (Dominic Holmes).

The arrival of The Fawn as a Frankenstein’s Monster-type character takes the show into exciting territory. Holmes gives a disturbing, electrifyingly physical performance as he learns to move, uncoiling like a spring. Soon he becomes a presentable companion and lover, who can speak the language of those who get what they want. He serves Riya’s needs, transforming into her protector, throwing their rapacious landlady (Dharkar again) off her stride and then more. Riya discovers that she can get what she wants, but at a price.

Bhattacharyya’s play is fascinating if lacking in focus, taking some time to set the scene, and ending rather abruptly, but her ideas are impressively unsettling. Bhatia draws a fine performance from Dominic Holmes in particular, who has the kind of eerie stage presence that will surely have drawn the attention of casting directors. Ayesha Dharker also stands out for her gleeful, sinister performance as Mrs B, drawing on dark powers to fight back against the country she is obliged to live in, and her contrastingly turn as the snobbish, money-grabbing landlady, Shashi. King Troll has a lot to recommend it, and the New Diorama continues to develop the new writing we need.

Anna

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Anna by Laboration Arts Company – Istrian National Theatre, Pula, Croatia

Laura Arendt and Alex Blondeau dance as a duo, in a piece that pays tribute to five forgotten German women: nuclear physicist Lise Meitner, anti-Nazi activist Sophie Schloss, racing driver Clärenore Stinnes, composer Clara Schumann, and choreographer Pina Bausch. While the concept sounds unwieldly, the dance is anything but: flowing, varied and constantly compelling. Performing in a stage ringed by light, the pair beautifully together, at one point almost becoming a single dancer. Anna packs a remarkable amount of exceptional dance into 40 minutes, and responds to the lives of the five fascinating women in a way that is never literal, but moving, funny and inventive. Contemporary dance of a very high standard,