The Winter’s Tale by William Shakespeare – Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-on-Avon
Yaël Farber’s production of The Winter’s Tale is played against the backdrop of a giant, three-dimensional moon. It glows pale white or blood red to signify the contrasting locations in the play: Sicily and Bohemia. Soutra Gilmour’s designs, both set and costumes support an interpretation which has pace and coherence, which can easily vanish with the complete shift in setting and characters that occurs between Act III and Act IV. The early scenes of jealousy, as Leontes pulls apart the lives of those around him, are staged in an almost noir context, with a barefoot king and queen in loose grey clothing. The intensity is completely gripping, in some of Shakespeare’s most driven and desparate scenes. Bertie Carvel’s Leontes is rangy and wired, his paranoia entirely convincing. John Light’s Polixenes, the object of his irrational hatred, is outwardly jovial but wary just below the surface. Madeleine Appiah’s Hermione is full of goodwill, which makes her destruction all the more unbearable. Her trial scene, where she defends herself with patches on her dress from lactation, having just given birth, is very upsetting.
Farber combines the characters of Time and Autolycus to create an rogue / thief / everyman character, played with Geordie accent by Trevor Fox, who ranges around the action, sitting on the edge of the stage smoking a cigarette and linking the two settings. His ballad singing is augmented by Farber with additions from Brecht, which do not neccessarily clarify the play’s themes. Nevertheless, the Bohemia scenes combine pagan and rave themes, and are exciting and tense, which is rarely the case. Lewis Bowes as Florizel and Leah Haile as Perdita are both young, energetic and naïve. Polixenes’ violent fury in this scene, as he exposes their planned marriage, has clear parallels with Leontes’ destructive rage. It is clear that male coercion and violence is the driving theme of the play, and Farber emphasises this by using the same actors to play a band of women around Hermione and around Perdita.
At the centre of the female resistance is Paulina, played by the excellent Aïcha Kossoko who brings power and fearlessness as she stands between Leontes and his victims, then implements 16 years of penance as he submits himself to her authority. The final statue scene, an exercise in standing still for the actor playing Hermione, is played beautifully and plucks the heart strings of everyone in the audience. Farber reveals the play as a complex fable with simple ideas of human love and kindness at its heart, the reason it still makes us weep.
A simple show, but completely absorbing. Three performers dance to rave music, with a set consisting of coloured strip lights. Yes enough to create the atmosphere of a warehouse party. The dancing is free like a rave, but choreographed, with all three moving in unison. The performers become more sweaty and exhausted as the show goes on, grabbing gulps from a table of plastic water cups. It becomes an endurance test for them. Watching people moving in a situation where you would only ever take part gives surprising perspective on an activity that is expressive, involving and strangely fascinating.
The combination of dance and Holocaust memory is unusual but effective. Roger White has recorded interviews with his grandmother, whose father was Jewish. The family left Germany in 1939, and Marianna’s memories provide a vivid account of the day-to-day persecution and the terror that one day her father wouldn’t come home. He was saved by a tearful policeman, and her recollections include more humanity than might be expected. The darkness is underlined by the dancers whose angular movement is sinister but also tender.
Valentina Tóth is a very accomplished classical pianist and singer, a child prodigy who hated performing. She reclaims performance on her own terms, with a brilliant show that ties together stories of ‘hysterical’ women. She draws on Dutch misogyny and sex abuse scandals with a set of songs that also cover her domineering Russian piano teacher (her mother in disguise), menstruation, revenge (in the persona of a Southern belle) and a song about a rape. It’s tuneful, remarkably well performed and unrelentingly dark and confrontational. She even gives us the Queen of the Night aria. She is very convincing, totally in control and remarkably good.
Ontoerend Goed are a cut above most alternative theatre companies. They strip back the assumptions an audience brings to a production, leaving a blank slate which they then fill in ways that are entirely original. Thanks For Being Here is a remarkable example of their work. The audience is shown itself – footage of everyone entering and finding their seats, and live film of everyone in the auditorium, watching themselves. There is no narrative, and no need to persuade us we are interested. The performance is the event, it’s happening live and it is us. The concept is so simple it sounds like nothing, but it is really something. Everyone is fully engaged, present and hanging on what will happen next. It’s strangely moving and profound, a real masterclass in stripping theatre back to its essence: people together in a room.
Khalid Abdalla’s one man show is about a lot of things: his family history of political activism in Egypt; his life as an actor, including playing the lead hijacker in United 93; British colonialism in the Middle East; Abdalla’s arrest on a Gaza protest in London; the death from cancer of his friend. He is a charming, charismatic presence and he holds our attention throughout, using a range of theatrical techniques in a production by Fuel. It’s often like an illustrated lecture, with clever camera and projector work. But the show really comes to life when Abdalla uses movement. As a poised, posh performer it comes as a visceral surprise when he expresses his feelings physically. Although enjoyable throughout, Nowhere tries to cover too much territory, leading to history lessons of limited value. It’s at its most engaging when Abdalla communicates his helplessness in a world he cannot change.
Two male dancers are rehearsing a piece, overseen by a rude, cherry tomato-eating director. The comic framing is silly but fun. The dancing is exceptional, with the pair combining contemporary and street dance techniques in a tight knit performance which is exciting. And they do it twice, with a second run-through: very demanding, and compelling to watch.
This show creates a fantastical scenario in which an aging actress with dementia is supported in a care home by a small team perpetuating her belief that she is rehearsing King Lear. Her son, whose relationship with her is messy, is asked to communicate with her in character, sometimes and Goneril or Regan, sometimes Cordelia. This Lear, however, has a happy ending in which Cordelia forgives her father. The actor is played for much of the show as her younger self, by an excellent Venetia Bowe. Later she’s a brilliantly handled puppet, then an older woman. The staging, directes by Colley, is very high quality but the scenario does not provide the insight needed to take this to the next level.
The Shaggs, rediscovered in the 1990s, were forced to rehearse and perform by their coercive father despite having no apparent musical talent. They became proto-punk heroes, but it didn’t do them much good, although Tom Cruise owns the biopic rights l. The three performers who are In Bed With My Brother approach their story in the style of the band – as though they’ve never seen theatre before. None of the conventions of performance are acknowledged, and the show is anarchic, bizarre and brilliant. Their roadie, who doubles as the Shaggs appalling father, is murdered by the trip multiple times and keeps coming back to life. He’s outside selling t-shirts at the end, covered in blood. He represents the patriarchy, which is the real focus of the show’s anger. The story of the Shaggs is told in captions, accompanied by pummelling music and gunfire, but Nora Alexander, Dora Lynn and Kat Cory focus their energy on the society around them, from the male music industry to the arms industry. They are chaotic, confrontational and, despite the impression they work hard to create, rigorously political.
Breaking Bach by Kim Brandstrup / Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment – Usher Hall
The unlikely combination of The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and street dance, choreographed by Kim Brandstrupz is strangely brilliant. A slimmed down version of the Orchestra plays rhythmically tight Bach, which creates a grid of sound for the troupe combining professionals and young break dancers. They perform on a reflective silver dancefloor, with the OAE perched on a platform above them. The dances are performed in different combinations to Concerto for Two Violins, Brandenburg Concerto No 3 and shorter solo cello pieces. It’s clever and thrilling.
Red Like Fruit is stripped down to two voices – a man and a woman. The woman (Michelle Monteith) is a journalist investigating a domestic violence story with political repercussions. It triggers memories of sexual abuse in her teens, both from a tour guide and her older cousin. She is taking part in group therapy in a gloomy Toronto hospital room We only know this because she has asked a man (David Patrick Flemming) to speak on her behalf. She says little, but her distress is very apparent. The man reads from a script, but at various points she asks him direct questions about what he thinks. The crux of the play is the insidious use of power that leaves women thinking, decades later, that what happened to them may have been their fault. Hannah Moscovitch’s writing is excellent – honed, insightful, lacking cliche. Combined with a simple, devastating production, it makes for some of the best theatre you’re likely to see.
Swiping Right by Sophie Anna Veelenturf – Zoo Southside
Sophie Anna is in her mid-20s. She has been dating on Bumble and, while the majority of her partners are left wingers like her, she’s had short relationships with three politically right wing men. An engaging and sophisticated performer, she tells a story very well, using verbatim performance from interviews she has conducted with ex-boyfriends and people who date across the political divide. The subject isn’t quite up to it though. Her set-up seems too artificial to carry wider meaning. She is someone to watch, and with stronger material she could be exceptional, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that the men in question don’t have well-thought-through political convictions, but are just not great partners.
Kelly’s play is firmly in the territory of the Irish kitchen table family drama, in a lineage from Martin McDonagh and Marina Carr. Four generations of women gather for a celebration but it becomes very clear that something is wrong. The play has high quality elements and is often very funny, but is also uneven. The great granddaughter, Muireann, is a bundle of clichés about over-sensitive Gen-Zers. The great grandmother Eileen (Julia Dearden) is a foul-mouthed force to be reckoned with, and Dearden’s performance is the highlight of the show. The remaining women are neither Gothic caricature, nor believable individuals, leaving the play stylistically stranded. It’s funny and dark, but it is never really clear why it needs to be written now rather than a generation ago.
THIS IS NOT ABOUT ME. by Hannah Caplan and Douglas Clarke-Wood for WoodForge – Summerhall
Hannah Caplan’s play is about an on/off relationship between Grace and Eli. It’s told in reverse, partly, in a sequence of timestamped scenes going back several years. Performances, from Amaia Naima Aguinaga and Francis Nunnery are both charming and involving, working the audience expertly in a tiny Summerhall room. They are actors to watch. The writing lacks focus, with too many themes swirling but unresolved – addiction, S&M, depression – all within the structure of a meta drama about writing and truth. It’s promising, but there’s too much for it to hang together.
Mimi Martin’s play, which she performs, is personal. She writes about the Hong Kong democracy protests from the perspective of an expat teen, looking for fun while her parents are away, but caught up in violence. Her writing and energetic performance are very effective at conjuring the terrifying atmosphere of HK as the Chinese police machine brutally crushes demonstrating schoolchildren, including her friend. With the democracy movement shunted off the UK front pages, this feels like a politically important show, but it is also atmospheric, impressive theatre by a talented young performer.
The Ego by Anemone Valcke & Verona Verbakel – Zoo Playground
Anemone and Verona are two Belgian actors with limited public recognition and, they claim, more famous friends. Their show is stripped of convention as Verona, then Anemone, present their stories. At first it seems they are telling us about the difficulty of making a living in the industry, but it becomes apparent they are really discussing sexual abuse. Both experienced exploitation as young actors, and some upsetting video footage takes us back to how they felt. It’s not often a performer shows us themselves, outside a role and completely vulnerable. Verona’s video diaries are genuinely shocking. The pair also use music to stunning effect: a version of The Winner Takes It All, playing on its dark lyrics; a wild, exposing, sex simulating dance to Marilyn Manson which is a savage satire of sexually exploitative male directors; and a highly loaded performance to Sinead O’Connor’s Phoenix From the Flames. There’s humour too, as supposedly more famous colleagues from Ontoerend Goed appear in filmed segments. The show is exceptional: uncompromising either in subject or performance style. Flemish theatremakers show us how it should be done.
Dancers Merav Israel and Claire Pençak spend much of the performance moving stones around the stage. It sounds a little beyond parody, but actually the experience is mesmerising. The two women take turns to arrange and rearrange rocks in shades of iron and chalk in spirals, circles and heaps. Then they move around them together in a mutually supportive dance. They position stones on one another’s bodies, and move around the space, at one point opening the balcony door. It’s as though they are marking the space in a long, slow ritual. There’s no explanation, and no apology – and by the time it ends, we feel as though we’ve been initiated into something special.
Emma Frankland is a trans woman strongly influenced by Kurt Cobain, and specifically Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged performance. She plays with the internet conspiracy theory that Cobain was trans. While he certainly wore dresses, the significance is more in the cultural weight he could have lent to beleaguered trans identity if it has been true. Emma plays a raw version of All Apologies, drips black candle wax over her bare torso, smashes her guitar, sets fire to the case and performs an Icarus sequence. Despite powerful ideas she spends a lot of time moving props around. It’s impossible to take issue with the heartfelt plea for trans rights, but the show lacks coherence.
The last major production of Far Away, directed by Lyndsey Turner at the Donmar Warehouse, was brought to a premature conclusion by the COVID pandemic – exactly the type of global environmental disaster that lurks in the background of Caryl Churchill terrifying masterpiece. Since its premiere, 25 years ago, the reputation of Far Away has grown slowly but surely, and playwrights like Alistair McDowell cite it as a key text. Prescient, deeply disturbing, and naggingly unforgettable, it is probably time to acknowledge it as a 21st century classic.
Rebecca McCutcheon’s production, for her company Lost Text/Found Space, is staged in the astonishing, cavernous depths of Ambika P3. The venue, a supersized concrete basement below the University of Westminster’s Marylebone Road building, is generally used as a visual arts venue. Far Away is thought to be the first theatre staged here, and McCutcheon is the ideal person to do it. Lost Text/Found Space specialise in site-specific productions of forgotten plays, principally by women. Caryl Churchill isn’t forgotten category but it could be argued that, for the country’s greatest living playwright, she is significantly underperformed. The profiles of her male contemporaries – Stoppard, Hare, Ayckbourn – are substantially higher, but she outstrips them in originality, consistency, variety and sheer, unnerving insight. The prophet, of course, cannot expect honour in her own land.
Far Away is therefore an astute choice, both in terms of its importance to the world of the 21st century, and its suitability for the venue. McCutcheon’s production is ambitious. Ambika P3 consists of a vast, windowless space, like a slightly smaller Turbine Hall, which at first glance presents huge challenges as a performance space. However, the production makes brilliant use of the venue’s qualities. The audience is guided through a roller shutter onto a balcony overlooking a dark void marked out with telegraph poles and cut through with shafts of light (part of Jack Hathaway’s excellent lighting design). The world of the play – like a starker version of our own – is set up with a short prologue section then, at a peremptory whistle from a cast member, the audience is summoned below. It turns out Ambika has a small warren of side rooms and curiously-shaped spaces, and the play is performed across several of these. The designs, by Nicola Hewitt-George, treat these spaces like a series of installations. We glimpse a miniature landscape of earth and telegraph poles, or perhaps grave markers, and watch the opening farmhouse scene through net curtains hanging in a huge space, which later fills up with mutilated furniture. The soundscape, by Lucy Ann Harrison, sampled from ambient noises in the venue, is central to the show’s atmosphere.
The settings, skilfully conjured, are unsettling and oppressive. The audience perches on chairs, or leans on pillars to watch, trying to come to terms with the absence of comfort, which also pervades the play. Far Away transpires in three scenes across different setting and times, written with a taught focus that does not waste a single word. The first scene, with a young girl, Joan (Lorna Dale) and an older woman, Harper (Lizzie Hopley) talking in the kitchen, is an astonishing exercise in stripping away the trappings of civilisation. Joan has seen something very disturbing, and Harper’s explanations change as she realises how much the girl knows, smoothly expanding normality to encompass the most brutal acts. Hopley plays Harper with a rural accent – Shropshire, perhaps – which creates a false, motherly reassurance. Dale is totally convincing as a 14-year old, doubling the role with the older Joan who appears in the later scenes.
The play then moves to hat factory, where Joane works with Todd (Samuel Gosrani) making hats for surreal competition which is gradually revealed as something spectacularly dark. At its 2000 première, this scene seemed to comment on the Balkan Wars, but its violent public spectacle has since become entrenched in culture through shows such as Hunger Games and Squid Game. Churchill’s laser-focused satire is balanced against short exchanges between Todd and Joan as they become interested in one another. Their sweet, spiky relationship is played subtly and persuasively by Dale and Gosrani. From the balcony, we return to the side room and a post apocalyptic future in which nature is siding with nations in a series of ludicrous but genuine conflicts: the elephants work with the Koreans, the cats are on the side of the French, and it is no longer acceptable to hate deer. It is filled with frenetic, climate crisis paranoia, and has one of the boldest, most confidently abrupt endings in theatre.
Far Away conjures the dystopian future its seems we are now living with a eerie foresight. McCutcheon’s production is truly immersive, plunging us into a environment where everything familiar suddenly seems strange and different, and we are confronted with ourselves. She makes the venue serve the play in a highly effective way, and her use of the huge central space, where scenes are prefigured rather than enacted, is ingenious. The show is a very high quality piece of work: important, valuable drama presented in a way that means the audience will find it very hard to forget. Churchill’s work continues to prove its worth by showing us the things we can no longer see because we have forgotten that, once, they were not normal.
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.
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.
Kjersti Horn’s production of Jon Fosse’s Einkvan, visiting The Coronet Theatre on tour, is a startlingly experimental piece of theatre. Horn is artistic director of the Det Norske Teatret in Oslo, and she is working with perhaps her country’s foremost writer in Fosse, winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize for Literature. He is unusual in being known equally for his novels and his plays, and the production provides a rare opportunity to see his work on the London stage. It does not disappoint, being both simultaneously dark and compassionate, with a staging that unpicks fundamental assumptions about the stage.
Both set and costumes are designed by Sven Haraldsson, but their main role is to obscure the action. The performers are concealed for the entire hour-long show behind an opaque plastic curtain which surrounds the stage. Only their faint dark outlines are visible as they perform the play. Instead, we see them through two large video screens hanging above the stage. The action is filmed with handheld cameras, with a single face shown in close-up on each screen. The video work, by Mads Sjøgård Pettersen, frames the audience’s perception of the entire show. The unseen camera operators are crucial performers, driving the mood with tighter, more disturbing close-ups as the tension slowly builds. Pettersen and Borgar Skjelstad, who together film the action, rightly take a bow at the end.
Einkvan is Norwegian for ‘uniqueness’. The play is performed in subtitle Norwegian by a cast of six, playing a mother, a father, a son and their apparent doppelgangers – characters who look similar although not identical but appear to live parallel lives. Only two characters ever appear at a time, one on each screen. The play consists of a series of first-hand accounts of meetings. Both the mothers and the fathers encounter the sons unexpectedly in the street, and are baffled when they refuse to reply to their enquiries about why it’s been so long since they met, or their invitations to supper.
These encounters use ritualised repetition, but are also naturalistic. Fosse strips language back to its hidden core, using no superfluous words. This directness, which seems very Norwegian to a UK audience, is also strangely moving. The failure of people to connect – parents with children, but also friends with one another and people with themselves – seems a highly apt social metaphor for the 21st century. It may be even more than that. At times it feels as though Fosse has traced the source of all our social ills, and is shining a spotlight on it.
The performers – Laila Goody and Marianne Krogh as the two mothers, Jon Bleiklie Devik and Per Schaanning as the fathers, Vetle Bergan and Preben Hodneland as the sons – are very effective at delivering performances in close-up, a technique which is undoubtedly much harder than they make it look. The performances to a camera on stage is reminiscent of Andrew Scott’s breakthrough stage appearance twenty years ago, filming himself on the Royal Court stage in ‘A Girl in a Car with a Man’, but this takes the challenge to a whole new level. Characters are constantly interacting with one another across cameras, and at one point even staging a fight in a bath. All the actors are compelling throughout. In fact, the whole play holds the audience rapt, a remarkable achievement for a show in which the actors only appear in the flesh at the curtain call. When they do, the dissonance is sharp as we emerge from what feels like a dream, suffused with sadness and loss, tenderness and a powerful endorsement of the need for humans to support and love one another.
With the pre-announcement of not one, but two future productions of Krapp’s Last Tape scheduled for the mid-2030s (when Sam West and Richard Dormer reach 69, the age of Beckett’s main character), it’s reasonable to ask what makes actors want to play this role so much. To some extent, it could be that recording the lines for younger Krapp at 39 represents a solid investment in future work. But there is also a clear sense that this is one of the big roles, a defining part, and one that suits unconventional actors better than classic leads. Stephen Rea is very much the kind of performer suited to Krapp. Actually 78, although he very much does not look it, Rea bring a hangdog comedy and a deep sadness to a role others have approached with more rage and less stillness. He also met Beckett himself, who attended rehearsals for the Royal Court’s 1976 production of ‘Endgame’ with Rea in the cast.
Vicky Featherstone’s production is designed by Jamie Vartan, who places Krapp’s desk in a square of light beyond which lies only darkness. A path of light leads from the desk to a door, beyond which lies smoke, the drink which Krapp retires periodically to consume, with a comic sloshing sound, and who knows what else. The set also aids the silent comedy at the heart of Beckett’s play, in the form of a ludicrously long desk drawer which Krapp pulls out further and further to reach his hidden bananas. Rea plays the sad clown very well, dialling down the slipping on banana skins but emphasising the shambling walk, which looks both exaggerated and weirdly familiar. The inevitable comedy of decay is inseparable from the sadness, loneliness and failure that haunts Krapp, in the form of his naive 39-year old self, still seeking and possibly expecting happiness. His writing, unlike that of Beckett, faded away despite his epiphany in a storm, which he can not longer bear to hear about.
Stephen Rea recorded the Krapp tapes in his 60s, but they sound like the work of a younger man. The weighted precision of his delivery makes very word matter a great deal, to Krapp and to Beckett as writers and to us as an audience. His performance is heartbreaking without ever needing to fully express the emotions we know he is feeling. This play, so slight, remains a work of remarkable power that can bind the entire audience of a large theatre into the unravelling existence of one man.
New York performance duo Natasha Roland and Xhloe Rice are fringe stars, winners of Edinburgh Fringe First Awards for each of their three shows: What If the Rodeo Burned Down, A Letter to Lyndon B Johnson or God, and What If They Ate the Baby. Their success has brought them to bigger audiences at the Soho Theatre, where they are currently performing the latter two shows. Their distinctive performance style combines funny, experimental writing with surreal physical techniques, and is both highly entertaining and brilliantly strange. They pick at the tropes of American, as seen in film and music, until they become something both familiar and disturbing.
Natasha and Xhloe play suburban American housewives in 1950s dresses inhabiting an unsettling neon interior. A house call to return a casserole dish is all conventional social niceties, in which everything is unsaid. The script becomes a cycle of repetition, carrying shifting meanings as the never-ending visits plays out again and again. Physical gestures are stylised to the point of absurdity, and underlying social and sexual tensions spill to the surface. The two characters want one another, and intercut scenes show them indulging their fantasies. It is also clear that what they are doing is unacceptable in the society of the time, and there are also disturbing suggestions that normal is in fact very strange. There are bodies literally under the patio, and hints at dark deeds reveal a queer rebellion that is constantly bubbling to the surface.
What If They Ate the Baby plays with different sources which have set our expectations of the, brittle post-war suburban USA. The atmosphere is David Lynch crossed with Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, as deep tensions play out between the pair as both insist everything is ok with their husbands, the neighbours and their homemaking lives. The show is very funny, and very tightly scripted and performed. The insistent repetition of actions, the meanings of which shift every time, is reminiscent of Forced Entertainment, while the combination of silliness and rigour is worthy of Sh!t Theatre. Natasha and Xhloe use music to great effect, from 1950s popular song ‘Music! Music! Music!’ to hip hop, such as ‘Punk Tactics’ by Joey Valence & Brae. Angelo Sagnelli’s work as Lighting Designer and Technical Manager is essential to creating a world with a handful of props. Finely coordinated interplay makes the show a mini-masterpiece of physical theatre. The pair are original, imaginative and highly entertaining performers, and the show is a sophisticated treat which fully justifies their growing reputation.
More Lifeby Lauren Mooney and James Yeatman – Royal Court Theatre, London
With the tech-enabled delusions of the super rich now the central driving force in global politics, there could not be a more opportune moment to examine the reality behind fantasy bundled as product. Lauren Mooney and James Yeatman, who together are Kandinsky, have devised a chilling and remarkable play for our times. ‘More Life’ imagines what it would actually be like to live forever, and the unequivocal conclusion is… absolutely terrible. Corporate scientist Victor (Marc Elliott) is working to impact the consciousness of dead people, digitally stored half a century earlier, into living bodies – bringing the dead back to life. After many failed experiments, with people ‘turned off’ when they fail to react positively to the discovery, firstly, that they have died, and then that they have been brought back to life, he succeeds with Bridget, whose new body is played by Alison Halstead. She also appears in her original form as a ghost, played by a Danusia Samal, observing her inexplicable resurrection
‘More Life’ focuses on the emotional impact on Bridget, and her husband (Tim McMullan) and his second wife (Helen Schlesinger), of meeting someone who died 50 years ago. Mooney and Yeatman’s writing teases apart the sheer horror of living in a world where you no longer have a place, and of having your life ripped from its moorings. This is not an advert for AI. A quality cast delivers focused, persuasive performances: McMullan’s blank features crumbling under pressure, Schlesinger’s amenability stretched and torn, and Halstead’s understated performance carrying an emotional heft that builds and builds. Elliott is quixotically driven, while Lewis Mackinnon’s fellow scientist is a counterweight with a conscience.
‘More Life’ is partly an updating of ‘Frankenstein’ – it is bookended with the 1802 electrification of a corpse that inspired Mary Shelley – and partly an echo of Caryl Churchill’s hyper-prescient play ‘A Number’, but very distinctly its own self. Kandinsky’s style is low-key and highly inventive, honed over the course of several productions at the New Diorama Theatre, under now-Royal Court director David Byrne. They present complete, enthralling theatre. The orange cubicles of Shankho Chaudhuri’s set conjure a distant future without cliché; lighting from Ryan Joseph Stafford, sound and music from Zac Gvirtman, and sound from Dan Balfour delineate constantly shifting time periods with complete clarity. James Yeatman’s direction takes an apparently setting and uses the cast in multiple ways, as chorus, narrators, physical presence, and participants in a way that appears seamless, and is very difficult to achieve.
There is an entirely unexpected, devastating scene in which the whole cast sings David Byrne’s ‘Glass, Concrete and Stone’ – a sly tribute to the man who brought Kandinsky to the Royal Court perhaps, and a song of social disconnection. The lyric “Everything’s possible when you’re an animal” takes new on new poignancy in the context of the directions we are choosing to take as a species, or that are being chosen for us. ‘More Life’ is an intelligent and troubling critique, with a fabulous cast – a production enthrals from start to finish. It exemplifies the role of drama as a social mirror which shows us the things we would prefer to ignore.
Tom Bolton 