Blood Show

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

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

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

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

The Duchess (of Malfi)

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Jodie Whittaker as the Duchess. Photo: Marc Brenner.

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

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

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

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

L’Addition

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Bert & Nasi. Photo by Vincent Zobler.

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

Published at Plays International

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

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

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

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

Dr. Strangelove

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Steve Coogan and Giles Terera. Photo by Manuel Harlan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tachwedd (November/The Slaughter)

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

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

Published at Plays International.

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

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

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

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

King Troll (The Fawn)

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

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

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

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

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

Anna

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

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

Coriolanus

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Photo by Misan Harriman.

Coriolanus by William Shakespeare – National Theatre (Olivier), London

Lyndsey Turner’s production of Coriolanus begins not in the street, but in a high-end museum of antiquities where a reception is being held for wealthy dignitaries. The revolting citizens spray graffiti on a Roman wolf statue and confront a suited figure with a glass of champagne: David Oyelowo at Coriolanus. His initial appearance is more mild-mannered than the traditional portrayal, but it is a clever piece of direction. Clearly one of the patricians from the start, Oyelowo is an operator who fits in with the system, but soon begins too lose his cool. His transformation into a demagogue, bringing down everyone with him as he heads towards ultimate disaster, is a brilliant performance.

It is a long-overdue return to the British stage for Oyelowo who, having played Henry VI in the RSC’s early 2000s histories cycle and a breakthrough in Spooks, left for the US where it was much easier for a black actor to find work. The fact he is back is cheering, and Coriolanus shows how much we have missed his skills. He finds ways to make one of Shakespeare’s least likeable characters sympathetic, and also increasingly disturbing. Patricia Nomvete, as his mother Volumnia, is a cold and self-interested character, more interested in the theory of war and heroism than her son, and ultimately motivated to save herself. It seems that Coriolanus is seeking a father, who Shakespeare does not mention. His love/hate relationship with mortal enemy Aufidius – Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, who seems to know Coriolanus will be the death of him – is often played as sexual attraction, but it could be that he is seeking a father figure to validate his reckless behaviour.

There are consistent ensemble performances all round from a play that is always about the reaction of the crowd. Peter Forbes plays a helplessly torn Menenius, who cannot fill the gulf in Coriolanus’ life depsite his best efforts, and Kemi-Bo Jacobs brings cold fury to the rather thankless part of his ignored wife, Virgilia. Es Devlin’s stunning set is also a star. She has created brutalist a concrete frame, mirroring the National Theatre, which hovers above the stage to create a chic, yet looming, gallery, or lowers to the ground to become a hidden labyrinth of claustrophobic chambers. Turner’s staging of the play’s final moments, with a Christ-like image of the dead Coriolanus projected onto the sheer concrete wall of the set, boldly advance the play from its grim final scene. Oyelowo, stabbed to death by a mob second before, is immediately transformed in death into a hero. A statue of him appears in the museum of classical antiquities, and a 21st century child stops to stare. It is not what happened that matters: it is how the story is presented.

The Band Back Together

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Royce Cronin, James Westphal and Laura Evelyn. Photo by Kate Hockenhull.

The Band Back Together by Barney Norris – Arcola Theatre, London

Published at Plays International.

In the basement studio at the Arcola Theatre, instruments are set up for a band rehearsal. Joe (James Westphal) is playing a song to himself on the keyboards, when Ellie (Laura Evelyn) walks in. We soon realise they’ve not seen each other for many years, and Joe has invited his former bandmates back to Salisbury for a reunion gig. When Ross (Royce Cronin) eventually shows up, no-one seems sure they want to be there. Can a group of friends recapture the hope and excitement of being young, or is it a terrible idea?

Barney Norris’ new play, which he also directs, combines conventional drama with songs, performed live by a group of actors who have some impressive musical skills. They combine covers with original songs devised by the cast. Each band member has their moment. Joe’s song reveals his loneliness since the band (we never learn their name, except that they didn’t like it) broke up. Ellie, at a personal crossroads, delivers an excellent version of Tom Waits’ ‘Take It With Me’, a beautiful song about legacies. Ross, the only one with a professional music career, sings The Cure’s ‘In Between Days’, which seems to be about his brief, unresolved relationship with Ellie. But Ellie and Joe were together too, and as the band members talk a hidden story emerges, and we discover that a corrosive secret has been lurking over the years since they last met.

‘The Band Back Together’ has strong elements, but a problem with its structure. The play is two hours long with an interval, but the first half, dominated by the awkwardness of people who don’t know how to talk to one another any more, drifts. When the second half arrives, the play gains momentum and emotional charge, to the extent that the first half seems redundant. The music and themes work together, injecting energy. It feels as though a tighter work is struggling to get out.

Norris also identifies intriguing themes, but they feel underdeveloped. The gig is supposedly a Novichok benefit gig, harking back to the 2018 Salisbury poisonings. The characters treat this as a joke, but the question of what happened to Salisbury when the world’s cameras left deserves exploration. So does the concept of the city as the place that, as Ross puts it, “everyone imagines they come from”.

The rootlessness of people from a small English town, and their struggles to forge an identity for themselves, seem like important themes, but would benefit from greater examination. The trio of protagonists, tied together by the past and dark personal secrets, echoes the structure of Brian Friel’s masterpiece ‘Faith Healer’. Friel’s characters were pushed to the physical margins, the forgotten towns of the far north. That the equivalent could now be Salisbury, a damaged place at the heart of England’s dreaming, is an intriguing concept.

Cronin, Evelyn and Westphal give engaging performances, and bring out the hollowness that hangs over these 30-somethings. Very few can make a living from music in the 21st century, and even Ross has been forced to exchange creativity for hack work. The characters are forced to face the probability that their late teens really were the best time in their lives. The Band Back Together’ is an entertaining, but flawed evening, in which the characters express themselves most eloquently through other people’s music.