© Thomas Dhanens

£¥€$ (Lies) by Ontroerend Goed – Almeida Theatre, London N1

Ontroerend Goed may be based in Belgium, but their varied and inventive work is an invaluable part of the British theatre scene. Their show £¥€$ (Lies), a hit at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe, continues the strand of their work that puts the audience in the spotlight. While not as directly confrontational as previous shows such as Audience (sexual harassment) and Fight Night (division through democracy), £¥€$ is an immersive and unsettling experience. The audience spends two hours divided into groups at a series of bespoke gambling tables (beautifully designed by Nick Mattan). Everyone hands over the money in their wallet which is exchanged for chips, and the dealing commences. Each table is managed by a cast member, in croupier-like attire, who pushes the audience to risk more in order to win more. As the dice roll and fortunes are made and lost, the options increase. Soon you can short your neighbours or yourself, buy bonds or merge resources. Everything costs, but the times are good. Credit ratings, shown on a central board, climb.

Inevitably, a crash is coming. When bond issuers default, panic sets in and the pressure is on to make big decisions quickly. The drama is orchestrated by the casino-clad cast who constantly gather data and update data on the global market, sounding a gong to make announcements. As a piece of theatre, £¥€$ is remarkably absorbing. Drawn into the increasingly complex decision-making, the evening is over before you know it. Director Alexander Devriendt and his cast pull off a miracle of coordination, in which ten separate improvised shows effectively follow their own course with a single structure.

£¥€$ is also a cleverly constructed critique of the global financial markets. Although simplified, the show explains and demonstrates obscure but important instruments that are used around us every day (for example, fractional interest trading, a technique for simply creating money). It also reveals the febrile nature of the global economy, which can collapse as soon as trust is undermined, or fall apart on the back of a baseless panic. Above all, £¥€$ allows us to see for ourselves how completely dependent we are on one another. This is, oddly, both terrifying and reassuring, leaving just a glimmer of hope that we may choose to succeed together. However, it asks troubling and important questions, including about how much we really understand the world and the systems that govern our lives.

Rhys Ifans and Adrian Scarborough © Simon Annand

Exit the King by Eugene Ionesco – National Theatre (Olivier), London

Ionesco wrote Exit the King when he thought he was dying. As it turned out, he wasn’t and lived for another thirty years. However, his brush with mortality let loose this highly allegorical play about the death of a king and a society which is as absurd as you would expect from the monarch of absurdist theatre, but also a humane account of the fear and the process of death.

The National Theatre brings a fascinating cast to the story of King Berenger, who has lived and ruled for 400 years. A despot who has committed genoicide, he is played by Rhys Ifans, a wild and unruly actor who is becoming more interesting with age. In a long, lank wig and alarming spiky crown, he sprawls and leers over the stage, in complete denial about his demise, predicted by Queen Marguerite and his doctor for the end of the play, in 140 minutes’ time. Not only is his life ending, for reasons as much theatrical as physical, but his kingdom is being conquered, his subjects vanishing, and the wall of his throne room has split in two, in Anthony Ward’s dramatic set. Each of the characters remaining in his dwindling realm is played with both verve and subtlety, a tricky balance to maintain in a play that is both allegorical and realistic and the same time.

Marguerite, a haughty and snobbish Indira Varma who eventually turns out to be the one person in control, is not the only queen. She has been usurped by a younger, dizzier model (Amy Morgan) whose dismay increases as she realises that her world is, literally, collapsing. Adrian Scarborough, who never disappoints, is a fussy doctor who appears to be also a mage, and claims to have “only been obeying orders” when his involvement in a past massacre is brought up. Debra Gillett’s general dogsbody, Juliette, steals the show whenever she appears, doing the dirty work for the King. Derek Griffiths plays a sergeant major-style guard whose public pronouncements on the King’s health (“The King is gagging”) become increasingly strange.

The play is a challenge to stage, simply a progression towards an ending we know is coming from the very start. However, Patrick Marber’s direction drives a developing narrative to the fore as the tyrannical King who names his cat “The Jew” is, remarkably, also shown as a man whose experience of death unites him with everybody else. Ifans comes into his own as he leaves behind his grotesque behaviour, casting off his status and ego to accept the end. This view of redemption is, perhaps, over-optimistic, but a fascinating way for Ionesco, as he thought, to sign off with a final message. Ward’s set collapses into the Olivier Theatre’s void and Ifans walks into the distance and out of sight, leaving the audience to contemplate a play that is much more than a curiosity – a structurally and thematically ambitious attempt to resolve the horrors of the 20th century.

The cast of Queens of the Coal Age at Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester. Photo: Keith Pattison

Queens of the Coal Age by Maxine Peake – Royal Exchange, Manchester

 

Playing at her spiritual home, the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester, Maxine Peake’s play about women and the mines is both a political corrective and a highly entertaining night out. Fresh from playing Winnie on the same stage in Beckett’s Happy Days, Peake steps off the boards and into the rehearsal room. She tells the story of a protest by four women who, in 1993 during a wave of pit closures, occupied Parkside Colliery for four nights in protest. They were members of Women Against Pit Closure, a pressure group forged in the Miner’s Strike a decade earlier, and one of their number was Anne Scargill, the wife of Arthur himself.

Peake has chosen a perfect historical moment for reexamination. The events of the Major era only remain vivid for those who have reached middle age, and the time is ripe to understand the enormous social shifts generally associated with the 1980s, but still underway in the 1990s. She focuses on a moment when the focus was, unusually, on women rather than men. As Anne points out, can you imagine what it must be like sometimes being married to man called King Arthur. Each woman has her own perspective, strengths and weaknesses, and reasons for spending four nights in the cold. Together, they keep each other going and find meaning in a protest that, on the face of it, might seem futile.

The core cast – Anne (Kate Anthony), Elaine (Eve Robertson), Lesley (Danielle Henry) and Dot (Jane Hazlegrove – play out highly convincing relationships as they veer from hilarity to despair. The four women are excellent comic actors, and the sometimes farcical nature of their protest creates genuinely funny moments. Peake also works through the wider issues surrounding mining, protest and political opposition with consummate ease. The lightness of touch in her writing means that discussions of, for example, the volatile future for ex-mining communities, with few constructive opportunities to direct the energy of young men, seems highly prescient. Bryony Shanahan’s direction makes the Royal Exchange’s in-the-round stage the natural home for a play set in a mine shaft. Peake has an exceptional ability to communicate potentially dry debate in an entirely human way. Queens of the Coal Age is the latest in a body of Manchester-based, politically progressive work that continues to grow in importance.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pigspurt’s Daughter by Daisy Campbell – Hampstead Theatre, London

Daisy Campbell, daughter of legendary theatre maverick Ken, has quite a legacy to live up to. It was equally exciting and confusing to have a father who whisked you off, aged 11, to Robert McKee’s legendarily intense, 3-day story structure seminar in Hollywood, or who took you out of school to tour the Cathar sites of Europe. In the ten years since Ken died he has been celebrated by people who find him impossible to forget, including by Terry Johnson in Ken earlier this year and last year’s Campbell extravanganza Cosmic Trigger, directed by Daisy herself. Already a writer and theatre maker of note, Daisy’s one-woman show about her father confirms her as touched by inherited genius, but with her own, exceptional ability to hold an audience in the palm of her hand.

Pigspurt’s Daughter is a wild ride, expertly written and delivered by Daisy alone over the course of two hours. It is an attempt to make sense of the storage unit full of Ken’s belongings she been unable to tackle – everything from his talismanic wooden tie to his gruesome fat suit and photographs (see above) taken to demonstrate that his nose look like a woman’s arse. Daisy is well aware of the symbolic weight of these objects, dogging her life long after Ken’s sudden death, and the need to deal with her father’s complicated legacy. The show included multiple arse metaphors as a result, Daisy trying to escape from Ken’s, while his demonic spirit manifests in her insides, as ‘Pigspurt’. She tries to separate out the ‘storyteller’ half of her brain, and understand how it directs her life, deploying neurological research and philosophy, and the Cathars keep getting involved, as do hidden mycellium networks that mirror underground culture.

The combination of antic performance and intellectual obsession is in the spirit of Ken, but the show is more than a tribute. Daisy’s conflicted feelings about her father are unflinchingly explored too, from his demanding nature (“What have you done of note?”) and lack of interest in her, to his list of goals for her that are both funny and terrifying (“Become a Chinese violinist. Supervise a breakthrough at CERN.”). As she explains, Daisy spent timein an asylum in her twenties, and her unconventional upbringing came at a price. Her portrait of a man who was both brilliant and impossible is something of a corrective to any  tendency to assign theatrical sainthood to Ken – a moving, fascinating account of a relationship with a bafflingly real person. ‘Pigspurt’s Daughter’ also features an astounding final sequence, in which Daisy lights on an unbeatable plan to tame her father’s legacy, involving exhumation, which leaves the audience gaping. Ken Campbell was entirely himself, a rare and precious quality for a performer. So is Daisy Campbell. There is no doubt that, just like her father, whatever she chooses to do next will be unclassifiable and unmissable.

Boxman by Daniel Keene – Blue Elephant Theatre, London

Daniel Keene’s new monologue, performed by Reice Weathers, belongs to a man who would be living in box, if it was big enough. Ringo, who is homeless and living on a pavement, is from an unnamed West African country that sounds very like Sierra Leone. He has a real name, but no-one in his adopted city can pronounce it. He has built a life which is driven by optimism, but stalked by his traumatic past as a child soldier and confined by his destitute circumstances. His world is a construction made of small cardboards which symbolises a space that is his own.

Both Keene’s writing and Weathers’ performance are excellent. As Ringo describes his life, details emerge of what has happened to him and how he came to be in London. The script alters to reflect details of the time (a re-enactment of England’s penalty shoot-out against Colombia) and place (he is living outside Oval tube) where it is performed. He describes his past as another time, and repeatedly talks about the many lives he has led. His descriptions of what happened to him are beautifully, sparsely written and difficult to forget, for example the image of his father being torn from his arms by soldiers rather than, as he observes is more usual, the other way around.

The dark story is lightly but searingly told, and provides deep insight into the complex experiences that lead to refugees living, stranded and homeless, in Britain. Boxman also owes its impact to Reice Weathers’ charismatic, physical performance. In a bewitching, note perfect West African accent, Weathers befriends and cajoles the audience, occupying the physical space that defines his boundaries with distinctive, inventive movement. Guided by Edwina Strobl’s focused direction, Weathers uses his body to express himself, including some expertly delivered Thriller dance moves.

Boxman is compelling, urgent and humane theatre about the trauma and terror hidden in plain sight on our streets. It is also an exceptionally high quality piece, from a confident creative team with the skills to produce work with real impact.

Louise Coulthard and Mary Rutherford (c) Alex Brenner

Paterson Joseph – image by Robert Day

Sancho: An Act of Remembrance by Paterson Joseph, Wilton’s Music Hall, London

Paterson Joseph’s play, performed by himself, is an account of the remarkable life of Charles Ignatius Sancho, butler to the Duke and Duchess of Montagu and the first black Briton known to have voted. Joseph, an actor with a fine stage CV, engages with the audience from the start as himself, author, performer, and black Briton. He explains that although his white contemporaries moved quickly into costume drama, he was never offered those parts. So he wrote one for himself, based on his discovery that the Britain of the past, where black faces are rarely shown, was in fact much blacker than he had ever realised.

A portrait of Sancho painted in 1768 by Thomas Gainsborough sits on stage throughout, a constant reminder of the social status he achieved. Joseph tells the extraordinary story of his life, from his birth on a slave ship to a mother who died in childbirth, and the suicide of his father, to his escape from the three sisters who denied him education and chance rescue by the Duke of Montagu. His adventures are fascinating, partly because they show how a black man could become respected and play a part in 18^th century high society. Joseph is also careful to show how fortunate and exceptional his success was, compared to the fate of most black people carried away by the slave trade. When Sancho comes to vote – in public, pre-secret ballots – he is forced to prove he is entitled to be there. The acceptance he has enjoyed melts away when he stops acting the compliant servant and demands the same rights as his fellows.

Joseph has chosen a powerful and illuminating theme for his play, and the audience loved his performance. Sancho was an actor for a short spell, which gives Joseph full license to portray him as a flamboyant and self-dramatising character, and an entertaining guide to black experience. However, while there is plenty of scope for playing to the audience, there is less direct engagement with the political themes than might be expected. In fact, at the start Joseph assures us that this is not a political play. When, in select moments, Joseph drops the charm, he achieves a different level of impact. His personal experiences, glimpsed at the start, are intriguing and a modern counterpoint to Sancho’s story, but we hear little about them. At the end of the play he removes the mask, telling us as both himself and as Sancho that he cannot do this anymore, that he has to stop pretending. This is a moment of real power and, while Sancho is an engaging evening, it would benefit from more of them.

 

Emily Berrington and cast in Machinal © Johan Persson

Machinal by Sophie Treadwell – Almeida Theatre, London

“Hell to be a woman”. Sophie Treadwell’s stylised, expressionist drama Machinal is a cry of rage, induced by a male-driven society that is modernised, mechanised and all the more efficient at grinding women down. The central character is ‘Young Woman’ played by Emily Berrington, who does what she is supposed to do, all the while terrified. She obediently marries her boss when he asks, but all the while the weight of society presses on her from all sides. Eventually, she kills him.

Treadwell write Machinal in 1928 after attending every day of the Ruth Snyder trial in New York, executed along with her lover for murder of her husband. James M Cain was inspired to write Double Indemnity by the same trial. Treadwell’s response is intensely personal, reflecting the position of a woman in the city. Berrington plays the Young Woman brittle, assailed on all sides – by the din of clattering typewriters in the office where she works, by the uninvited attentions of her boss, the Husband (Jonathan Livingstone, impressively smug, by his body and by childbirth. She acquieses at every turn, and is horrified by the life that results. When she finds relief  through her lover, the Man (Dwane Walcott), her and happiness is only brief, before he cooly provides the evidence that dooms her.

Natalie Abrahami’s production, designed by Miram Buether, is every effective in creating a claustrophia that builds to breaking point. From the very beginning, as the fire curtain letterboxes a writhing mass of bodies pressed around a gasping Berrington, the unstoppable processes of the mechanised world are viscerally created, carrying her on a course she never chooses. Between scenes, the audience is blinded by merciless, white neon tubes. Buether’s tilted mirror reflects the action back in helicopter view, while the expert sound design from Ben and Max Ringham is crucial. Abrahami makes the slightly risky decision to advance the time frame with each scene, beginning in the 1920s office of the play’s setting and ending with a contemporary huddle of tv reporters. This is subtly done, and a neat way to draw the play out of its context without undermining the  text.

Ultimately, it’s Sophie Treadwell’s writing that makes Machinal something special. Treadwell was a prolific writer, but almost all her other plays are far more conventional. Machinal is an experimental piece full of staccato delivery and syncopated speech, jump cuts and cross fades, and the experiment is a huge success. She uses cutting edge techniques of the time to create a work that leaps out from its era. The play is short, spare and incredibly intense, with an ending that, although it shouldn’t be revealed in a review, defies belief. The play was a great success when first performed in 1928, and was rediscovered by the National Theatre in the early 1990s. Since then, it seems to have been mislaid again, but it deserves a much higher profile. A entirely contemporary play, it presents themes that are as current on the stage now as they were in Treadwell’s time. The Almeida’s excellent production should do a great deal to give it the respect is deserves.

Conor Lovett and Stephen Dillane; Photo by Tristram Kenton

How It Is (Part 1) by Samuel Beckett – Print Room at the Coronet, London W11

The Print Room’s permanent home at the Coronet Theatre, Notting Hill, is the most atmospheric in London. In Gare St. Lazare’s astonishing staging of the first third of Samuel Beckett’s 1964 novel ‘How It Is’, the worn and flaking auditorium becomes a powerful presence. With the audience seated on the apron of the stage, looking back at the circle and the balcony seats (the stall level is now the basement bar) the theatre is turned in on itself and becomes a setting of decaying beauty.

‘How It Is (Part 1)’ is also a piece about decaying, but surviving. It was Beckett’s final novel, first published as ‘Comment C’est’ in 1961, the same year as ‘Happy Days’ and, like Winnie, features a protagonist stuck in the mud. It shares its unpunctuated streams of consciousness with the earlier novels of ‘Trilogy’. It also has three parts – ‘before Pim’, ‘with Pim’ and ‘after Pim’, and is narrated by a man crawling through mud. Putting it on stage is a huge undertaking, requiring prodigious feats of memory for the actors tasked with 105 minutes of entirely uncompromising prose. Gare St. Lazare, based in Cork, has developed a staging of the just the first part of the novel before the nameless man meets ‘Pim’. Their production is meticulous, demanding, and engrossing – a tour-de-force.

Three actors appear, each delivering Beckett’s looping, repetitive, stripped back language in waves of introspection. Conor Lovett’s Irish accent seems to match the complex rhythms of the piece. He makes Beckett sound the way we imagine he should, while Stephen Dillane’s delivery is counter-intuitively English, like a slightly annoyed schoolteacher pouring out his soul. The contrast bringing a fascinating richness of interpretation to the work. Who is this man who tells us everything, nothing in his life except a sack of tinned food and the contents of his head?

The third performer, Mel Mercier, has a smaller part as a third voice which renders the other two incomprehensible, and is also the sound designer. His work creates an unsettling setting, representing the nothingness that encloses every moment of this play with a constantly varying soundscape of white noise and interference and rumbles. Director and designer Judy Hegarty Lovett uses the full range of the circle and balcony seats, the actors appearing and disappearing concealed and revealed by smoke and lights. This  staging works conceptually, as Beckett’s narrator turns all his intention back on himself, and the audience gaze is also reversed. It also turns the spotlight, literally, on to the worn Victorian auditorium, a space heavily loaded with memory.

Gare St. Lazare has brought a treat to London, an exacting and difficult evening, but some of the highest quality theatre in Britain and Ireland at the moment. There are no compromises, and it is telling that more than fifty years on, Beckett’s work is tough enough for ten people, on the night I saw the show, to walk out. It is not an easy show to walk out of, unless you do not care about the amount of disruption you cause, but the actors did not blink. As a culture we are still trying to come to terms with Beckett’s writing, and ‘How It Is (Part One)’ is an important step in revealing the quality and depth of his work. As the nameless narrator says to excuse his obsessive accounts, “these details in preference to nothing”.