London theatre reviews

William Everettwilliamgileseverett@gmail.com

REVIEW_Eclipsed

VENUE_Gate Theatre

DATES_23 April – 16 May

Helena and Bessie are best friends and sex slaves in a Liberian rebel camp. They joke and dance and braid each other’s hair, and when the Commanding Officer wants them, they leave their hut to do their miserable duty. Into the camp comes a new slave who can read. Known simply as ‘number four’—the CO has numbers not names for his ‘wives’—the girl hopes to be a doctor or politician one day, but wife number three has darker ideas.

This story could be told from any number of warzones through the ages, and that universal quality gives the play its resonance. The odd historical marker brings us to civil war in Liberia in 2003, but all the conflict here happens on stage, between women whose passion and plight are shared by women the world over. Without male characters in the flesh, we only feel men as a menace, and that draws us closer to the sisterhood.

Inviting us into the circle is a very talented cast, who breathe life and soul into well-written characters. The ensemble acting is great to watch, as the girls relish all the fun, fear and rivalry in Danai Gurira’s script. We adjust to the dialect, and ride along to the rhythm of the words. Michelle Asante’s Helena carries her authority in the group with bundles of charm. Joan Iyiola plays impish Bessie beautifully, her wide eyes and mega-watt smile winning big laughs. Wife number four has the most compelling journey in the play, and Letitia Wright captures this with grace and heart. Faith Alabi is a lightning bolt as rapacious soldier Maima, while T’nia Miller’s Rita is an effective voice of reason.

Each actor brings her own flair, but the magic here is the interaction that turns a shoebox of a stage into a genie’s lamp.

REVIEW_Sense of an Ending

VENUE_Theatre 503

DATES_12 May – 6 June 2015

Charles, a disgraced New York Times journalist, comes to Rwanda to interview two Hutu nuns charged with assisting the 1994 genocide. This troubling premise has you intrigued from the word go, but the production doesn't quite live up to the intrigue.

The hundred-day slaughter of up to 1 million Tutsis by Hutus is recounted in Charles’ interviews with the nuns, and the stories of two surviving Tutsi men. Charles tries to honour the journalistic integrity espoused by his late mentor, but he is convinced of the nuns’ innocence before he even clicks on the dictaphone. As clues begin to incriminate the women, Charles faces a dilemma. Does he defend them, condemn them, or risk his career by going home empty handed?

Ben Onwukwe plays a convincing reporter, interrogating his subjects with mellifluous charm. His commanding energy balances the seeming fragility of the nuns, played cleverly by Lynette Clarke and Akiya Henry. Abubakar Salim brings a welcome light touch as Tutsi Paul, who laughs at life to stop himself crying.

The character who best suggests the horror of genocide is Kevin Golding’s Dusabi, whose wife fell victim to Hutu machetes. He shows physical and emotional scars in a way other characters do not. He is the most honest character, and the one that suffers most -a sad reflection on human nature perhaps.

They all have their own shocking stories from the massacre, but as an audience, reported events can never grab us like events that happen in front of us. We don’t need to see a massacre on stage, but we do need enough conflict and connection between characters to hold our interest. The essence of theatre is live. Ken Urban’s play, though intelligent, relies too much on the past.

REVIEW_The One Day of the Year

VENUE_Finborough Theatre

DATES_19 May - 13 June 2015

I recently took issue with a colleague who was scoffing at the commemoration of the First World War. He claimed the war was simply “imperial powers swinging their dicks”, so treating the event with reverence was absurd. I argued that whatever the political context, a lot of people lost sons, husbands and fathers, and that is something we should acknowledge.

A similar clash of views runs through Alan Seymour’s The One Day of the Year, the most controversial play in Australia when it was first staged in 1960. The action revolves around Anzac Day, the annual commemoration of Australians and New Zealanders killed in Gallipoli and conflicts since. The protagonist Alf (Mark Little) is a proud working class Australian who served in the Second World War and marches on Anzac Day every year with a chest puffed as big as his beer gut. 

His son Hughie used to join him, but not this year. Hughie, the first of his family at university, has developed a contempt for Anzac Day, fashionable among students at

the time. He sees the tradition as mob patriotism, which jars with the multicultural Australia he is growing up in. When Hughie brings home his new middle-class girlfriend Jan, the rifts between generations and social classes become chasms.

Mark Little plays Alf with all the bluster and mischief the part demands. He barks and belches and airs his views, and when Hughie tries to contradict him, he retorts: “You know I don’t like to argue”. He is perfectly awkward around the refined Jan, and as we laugh at the misunderstandings, we see our own class system laid bare before us.

As a floundering patriarch, Alf brings to mind Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman. Both men are losing their grip on the family, and their sanity, while they cling to their idols. For Alf, the idol is the one day of the year when he feels like a hero. Maybe this speaks to man’s need to wage war in the first place. It has certainly given Seymour's play a lasting punch.

REVIEW_Mrs Roosevelt Flies to London

VENUE_King’s Head

DATES_ April 14 to May 9

President Truman once described Eleanor Roosevelt as “First Lady of the world”, and just a few facts make a good case. His predecessor’s wife helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, fought fiercely for the rights of women and African Americans, and often campaigned in her husband’s place when Franklin was crippled with polio. Yet she was lonely as a child and suffered years of jealousy as Franklin’s affections went elsewhere.

All this is the stuff of Pulitzer-winning tomes, yet here, writer and performer Alison Skilbeck gives a taut one-woman show. We follow Eleanor on her wartime tour of Britain, where she addresses US troops, meets the Women’s Voluntary Service and eats Brussels sprouts with royalty. While the first two are the source of pride and pathos, the last makes for some great, mischievous role play.

Skilbeck’s energy is infectious, much as Eleanor’s might have been. She hops between characters with glee—here a cockney urchin, there a cigar-chomping Churchill—and we follow her gladly. A hat goes on, a hat comes off; a leather trunk serves as plane seat, train seat, a chair at Number 10. Skilbeck excels at these fleeting moments, yet knows when to ease the pace to indulge a quiet reflection. When she does indulge, Eleanor’s famous passion fades to sadness. She recalls losing both parents at a young age, and a brother to drink. She finds a pile of love letters to Franklin from his mistress, and “the bottom falls out of her world”. She longs for the love she only felt in a forbidden form from journalist Lorena Hickok.

Despite these woes, the show depicts a woman who pulls herself up by the bootstraps, and fights on simply because “there is so much to be done”. If Hillary Clinton becomes the first female president of the United States, she will find this formidable First Lady has set the bar high.

REVIEW_Radiance: The Passion of Marie Curie

VENUE_Tabard Theatre

DATES_4th – 28th February 2015

Great scientists have always captured our imagination, perhaps more than the great science they have given us. Radiance taps into our fascination with the people behind the potions, showing Marie Curie as a brilliant scientist but a thwarted lover.

In 1903, Curie became the first woman to win a Nobel prize, but her affair with a married man in 1910 threatened her iconic status. Exposed by a jealous wife and vindictive press—plus ça change—the affair shocked France, and the immigrant Curie was branded a “Polish whore”, and, erroneously, a Jew. Throughout her career, Curie had steered publicity towards “the work, not the person”, yet no new element—she discovered radium and polonium—could distract the public from a juicy piece of gossip.

The humiliation Curie must have felt is conveyed well by Cathy Tyson, who convinces as a great intellect but tortured soul. Her compelling annunciation has a soft authority that betrays a deep seam of melancholy. As her mathematician friend Émile Borel puts it, she “excels at suffering”. When Curie claims, “I haven't smiled for years”, she implies her own pleasure is a poor substitute for the “pursuit of truth”. Even when Curie is falling in love with physicist Paul Langevin, she seems ill-suited to happiness, awkwardly laughing over goats’ cheese.

Curie’s husband Pierre (Clive Moore), brings a welcome effervescence, and Zoë Teverson is suitably acidic as Langevin’s estranged wife. The whole cast is blessed with a sharp script by Alan Alda, the multi-award-winning actor and screenwriter known to some as Hawkeye Pierce in M*A*S*H, to others as Arnold in The West Wing. Alda’s love of science shines through witty dialogue,

As public attention goes to yet another male scientist in The Theory of Everything, Radiance gives rightful glow to a remarkable woman.

REVIEW_ Hurling Rubble at the Sun

VENUE_Park Theatre

DATES_14 May - 6 Jun 2015

Just metres from the mosque where Abu Hamza spouted poisonous sermons, Park Theatre is staging a chilling play about the July 7th bus bomber. Opening in a makeshift laboratory in Leeds, teenage British-Pakistani ‘T’ concocts a bomb while rapping to hiphop and leaving doting voice messages for his girlfriend. When he receives instructions for the next day, we know the boy and the bomb are destined for London.

We follow T (Ragevan Vasan) not to a den of fellow jihadists, but to mum’s house for dinner. Mum Amma (Bharti Patel) has cooked a traditional Pakistani meal, and we envy mother and son as they tuck into this steaming feast. T tries to make this last supper special, urging Amma to talk instead of watching TV, but she doesn’t know what we do.

Vasan portrays T as a deeply vulnerable boy, who hangs on to the apron strings a little too tightly. When he asks Amma to feed him with her hand like she used to, we see a child not yet ready for the adult world, and certainly not ready to die. But he has fallen prey to a radical preacher, whose words he incants with horrible compulsion. The western world is peopled by ‘hypocrites’ says T, a conviction he questions even in his final moments. Is the woman on the seat beside him a hypocrite? He asks her directly, because he didn’t expect to have such a nice chat with this stranger, Mary, with her holiday snaps and tales of her children.

The curt Amma urges her son to focus less on the war in Iraq, and more on his own community. He should find purpose by maintaining the local mosque his grandfather built against the odds. “Everything starts on these streets,” she claims, hinting we should connect with people around us, instead of dividing the world into two warring camps. That was a kernel of hope we cradled as we left the theatre in shock.

REVIEW_Blush of Dogs

VENUE_Tabard Theatre

DATES_Tue 7 – Sat 25 April 2015

In a storm of blood, baby guts and orange peel, Fragen Theatre Company retells the Greek myth of Thyestes and Atreus, brothers competing for the love of Aerope. She is married to Atreus but lusts after the wrong brother. Atreus clings to the throne of Mycenae and asserts some semblance of order in a land ravaged by civil war. As Atreus puffs himself up and barks orders, Thyestes struts like a dog on heat and violates Aerope as the mood takes him. Racked with guilt, Aerope slits her own throat and Atreus takes revenge with the kind of hideous flair that gives grown men the heebie-jeebies.

Mike Corsale (Thyestes) and Ben Alderton (Atreus) successfully portray men who are better at war than peace. No amount of wrestling, boasting and chanting can sate their need for bloodshed, making the gruesome finale seem orgasmic. Anna Procter is the consummate Greek heroine as Aerope, bold and explosive, yet crushed between the tectonic plates of feuding brothers.

Almeida Theatre boss and Greek drama buff Rupert Goold recently wrote that theatre should express the whole universe in all its blood and stardust. Blush of Dogs supplies blood by the gallon. There is room for a little more stardust.

REVIEW_Flames

VENUE_Waterloo East Theatre

DATES_May 12-31

Tucked under a railway arch by one of London’s busiest rail hubs, Waterloo East Theatre is one of those venues hidden in plain sight. While the Old and Young Vics steal the limelight in this neighbourhood, Waterloo East attracted a good crowd for press night of Stephen Dolginoff’s Flames.

Billed as a musical thriller, Flames is certainly a musical. The story unfolds in a graveyard on a stormy night, complete with spooky blue lighting, dry ice and claps of thunder. The set evokes a Woolworths window display at Halloween. Woman in Black it aint. Enter Eric and Meredith to visit the grave of their best friend/fiancé Edmond, who died in a fire of his own doing. Having grieved for a year, Eric now hopes to win Meredith’s affections himself, but who should step in to object but Edmond, back from the dead.

Here we disappear down a rabbit hole of farfetched plot twists, expressed in the rousing medium of song. We gradually find out what led to the fire, and then find out something completely different. This is a classic case of over-writing, which might have been a riot if it was played for laughs but it’s all played as earnest as a Danish crime drama. Fortunately, the silly plot and stilted acting are offset by competent singing. And it’s all over in about an hour.