reviews

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.

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.

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.

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 successfully 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 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.