review

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.

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.

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 Land of the Living

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Juliet Stevenson, Tom Wlaschiha and Artie Wilkinson Hunt. Photo: Manuel Harlan

The Land of the Living by David Lan – National Theatre: Dorfman, London

Stephen Daldry’s production of David Lan’s new play, about the moral dilemmas in the aftermath of World War II and their lifelong consequences, piles the pressure on relentlessly. Juliet Stevenson plays Ruth, now in her 70s, living in London. Someone she hasn’t seen for 50 years arrives – Thomas (Tom Wlaschiha) – and we watch the story of what happened to him unfold over the next two and a half hours. Ruth was a young woman working for the UN in Bavaria, the American sector, after the German surrender. She and her small team of women look for children stolen by the Nazis from Eastern Europe and checked for Aryan characteristics. Those who passed the tests were given to German families with new names. Those who did not were murdered. Once the children are identified, the hard part begins. Thomas is with parents who hide his real identity, but are distraught when he is removed. Ruth becomes attached to him, saving him from the fate of many children – removed en masse by the Russians or by the Americans to be rehomed. But she doesn’t send him back to Poland either, where he might have rediscovered his original family. He has flown to London from New York to reveal the consequences.

Daldry crosses the play’s two time periods over one another – literally, with Ruth and Thomas occupying either end of a long traverse stage holding Miriam Buether’s London apartment set .while the events of 1945 play out across the middle. The pacing is effective, with the flashback action erupting into the civilised lives they have both built. Stevenson is remarkable, her calm demeanour drawing the audience’s attention to the emotions shifting tectonically below the surface. Wlaschiha is blank faced, traumatised, and expressing himself through music – although it’s a shame he stands aside from the action for much of the play, providing a catalyst rather than participating. The character Thomas is a pianist, and Wlaschiha has remarkable skills too, performing live on the apartment piano as a number of other characters also do, including Stevenson. It is an ensemble performance, with strong performances from Kate Duchêne as Ruth’s mother, Marek Oravec and Cosima Shaw as Thomas’s adopted parents and Caroline Lonq as Elise in a cast that includes several European stage actors appearing at the National Theatre for the first time.

Lan has uncovered a little documented set of events from a time that is much pored over, and has constructed a rigorous, emotionally hard-hitting story. It is an excellent vehicle for the talents of its very high end cast and production team.

Cascando

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Photo by Greta Zabultye

Cascando by Samuel Beckett – Jermyn Street Theatre, London

Irish company Pan Pan’s production of Beckett’s radio play, Cascando, is a promenade piece. The audience gathers at the theatre to put on hooded black cloaks and an mp3 player with headphones. With the tech hidden under their hoods, they walk at a measured pace through the streets of, in this case, St. James’s for half an hour while the piece plays in their ears. It is both an intense experience, immersive in the true sense, and a public performance.

Audience members are directed to walk in single file, heads down, focusing on the feet of the person in front ‘as if you were slightly depressed’. The result is a quietly disruptive experience, as a procession of, apparently, monks files slowly through the central London rush hour, amusing and bemusing passers-by, stopping both them and the traffic. The experience of becoming the performance is both very simple, and exhilarating. It is a fundamental twist in the audience contract which turns everything on its head. And that’s without the play itself. Cascando was written for radio and first broadcast in 1963. There are two male voices – Opener (Daniel Reardon) and Voice (Andrew Bennett) – whose rich tones fill our heads. They tell a disjointed story in language stripped to the essentials. Opener sets the scene for Voice, who is apparently trying to finish a story about a man called Woburn, on a journey, ‘same old coat’. The journey seems to be a pilgrimage of sorts, and the Opener a God-like presence. There are also intervals of music by Jimmy Eadie.

The overall production, which premiered in 2016 and has since been performed in venues around the world, is directed by Gavin Quinn. It is quietly astonishing, bringing Beckett disconcertingly alive in a new, modern ritual. As Woburn drifts out to sea clinging to a boat, we know that there is only one way the story will end for all of us, but we measure our steps anyway, one foot in front of another, along the pavements.

Clive

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Paul Keating as Thomas. Photo by Ikin Yum.

Clive by Michael Wynne – Arcola Theatre, London

Published at Plays International

At first he seems a little fussy but in control of his life, an impression that disintegrates over the course of an hour as his obsession with cleanliness grows, his isolation increases, and rejection mounts as it becomes clear that real connection is beyond him. Even the cactus has the capacity to hurt him.  

The show, imaginatively directed by Lucy Bailey, makes great use of the Arcola’s studio theatre. Mike Britton’s wall of cupboards brings bursts of colour into the space as doors are opened, and Chris Davey’s lighting transforms the flat into “Mexico”, “Iceland”, or whatever Thomas asks Alexa.  

Keating – who worked so successfully with Bailey at the Arcola in 2016 when he starred in Mike Poulton’s play Kenny Morgan, telling the story of Terence Rattigan’s real-life inspiration for The Deep Blue Sea – is excellent. He holds the audience’s attention effortlessly and draws them into his increasingly dysfunctional world. He moves from gleeful dancing, polishing the floor with mops attached to his feet, to a full-blown crisis over the course of a well-balanced performance. His victimization as a gay man drives the psychological difficulties that begin to engulf him, retreating from a world that does not seem to want him.  

However, the script by Wynne – who won an Olivier Award for Best New Comedy for his 2009 play The Priory – falls somewhat short. The tone is uneven, with the titular cactus bringing a more whacky than gothic tone to the story, which seems at odds with the abusive and self-destructive behaviour surrounding Thomas. There is also too much telling, as Thomas explains what he is doing and why, narrating his own actions while telling us little we do not already know. Thomas also seems naïve about people in a way that does not fully convince us he is a fully realized character.  

The play was inspired by Philip Ridley’s Covid-era dramatic monologue The Poltergeist, but Clive lacks the weirdness and unremitting menace that make Ridley’s work so compelling. Clive is a well-performed and produced show, but the writing is too predictable for it to be more than the sum of its parts. 

The Estate

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Adeel Akhtar, Thusitha Jayasundera and Shelley Conn. Copyright: Helen Murray

The Estate by Shann Sahota

Shann Sahota’s new play is a family drama, tying Southall to Westminster. Adeel Akhtar’s Angad Singh is a government minister, seizing the unexpected opportunity to stand for the party leadership. It quickly gets personal, and his relationship with his two sisters, Gyan (Thusitha Jayasundera) and Malicka (Shelley Conn), and with his late father, become political collateral. Sahota’s writing is very sharp, and she explores themes somewhat outside general discourse – the equivocal position of south Asians within the British establishment, misogyny in Sikh families, and what families have to hide when society expects them to justify their existence by being better than everyone else.

The performances are excellent too. Adeel Akhtar brings his vulnerability and the underlying menace he can produced, which is all the more disturbing for being so expected. He is thoroughly compelling, although it is a little hard to believe that someone quite as self-abasing has made it up the political ladder. His sisters are equally well-played. Thusitha Jayasundera superb, as always, as the motherly older sister ground down by Angad’s refusal to share his inheritance equally with his sisters, against their domineering father’s wishes. Shelley Conn is impressively combustible as the furious, younger sibling. The spiky atmosphere of a minister’s office is amusingly embodied by advisers Petra (Helena Wilson) and Isaac (Fode Simbo). The power of establishment is represented by the towering, besuited figure of Ralph (Humphrey Ker).

Daniel Raggett’s production is thoroughly enjoyable. He stages the play as a drawing room drama on a set that could double for a Noël Coward, complete with sliding wooden panels by Chloe Lamford. The Dorfman is set out, unusually, in a proscenium configuration, playing on the expectations of traditional theatre by using a familiar form to tell stories about ‘brown’ people, as Angad puts it. The Estate is a straight show – a family drama that plays out in a linear fashion, which brings limitations too, but within her own parameters Sahota has done an excellent job.

Inter Alia

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Rosamund Pike. Photo by Manuel Harlan.

Inter Alia by Suzie Miller – National Theatre: Lyttleton, London

Judge Jessica Parks (Rosamund Pike) juggles a high profile career as one of a small number of female justices with the usual pressures of family life – trying keep an eye on her son Harry (Jasper Talbot) while assuaging the ego of her barrister husband Michael (Jamie Glover), and living an upper middle class dinner party lifestyle with their friends. She is both a pioneering, feminist judge who stands up to the patriarchy and tries to do things differently, particularly in her treatment of rape victims, and a mother whose role is to shoulder the family’s emotional burdens. Suzie Miller’s new play is a follow up to her hit Prime Facie with Jodie Comer, and is set in the same high pressure legal world in which she once worked – but Inter Alia also has the plot line of a Greek drama. It asks how far a mother would go to protect her son.

Justin Martin’s production builds the tension through a physicality, to which Rosamund Pike is beautifully suited. She deploys the pin-point timing of a farce as she pulls coats, wigs and ironing boards from cupboards in her kitchen, powering through her life without a moment to spare, entertainingly depicted through Lucy Hind’s movement direction. She also struts her stuff on the bench, addressing the prosecution with a microphone stand and backing band consisting of her husband and son. The set, by Miriam Buether, hides the domestic behind the courtroom and, behind that a dark wood filled with towering trees into which her son disappears, both as a child and as an 18-year old – not a subtle metaphor, but a satisfying scenic effect.

The writing is direct, and sometimes too obvious. The nature of the dilemma Jessica faces cannot be revealed without spoilers, but it is clear what will happen from early on. Her principles are tested in way that is cruel and believable. However, it draws the audience into the terrible moral conundrum while effectively addressing issues of online toxicity, the manosphere and the unequal justice system. There are moments of particular power, not least when Michael, perfectly pitched by Glover, collapses in tears at his inability to communicate with his son.

The show’s focus on the terrible power of blood ties is cleverly enhanced by the physical absence of almost any actors beyond the family trio. Jessica’s best friend and her dinner party guests are present on stage, but only in our imaginations. It’s an ingenious technique and, when new actors do appear they are children who drive the disturbing plot developments. Inter Alia is a high quality production of an effective if limited play. It will undoubtedly be a big success because of Pike’s triumphant performance, owning holding our attention, and the show together from start to finish.