Photos: Steve Gregson

Socrates was a Greek philosopher at the turn of the Fourth Century BC. He questioned everything, was found guilty of atheism and died in prison of hemlock poisoning in his seventies – forced suicide as a form of execution – having resisted attempts to help him escape. Howard Brenton’s quite concise (two short acts) play uses these facts to create a witty, incisive commentary on 21st Century democracy, freedom to think and the function of art, among other things. And it’s rich theatre.

A four-hander directed by Tom Littler (who will be much missed at Jermyn Street when he moves to Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond later this year) it purrs along thoughtfully. It is also very funny because Brenton’s dialogue is second to none and we chuckle at mildly incongruous modern expressions, references to the plague and cynical lines such as “witch hunting and pulling down the old truths,” or “The young think it’s their right not to be upset.”

In a strong cast, Robert Mountford is outstanding as Euthyphro and then as the gaoler. He has very expressive eyes and talks with them. His Euthyphro quizzes Socrates (Jonathan Hyde) and is clearly irritated with him as well as trying to make him see sense about the management of his trial. He is variously persuasive, supportive and self-interested. When he morphs into the gaoler in the second act – coarse, forthright but gruffly sympathetic and using the strident voice of an uneducated man – we hardly recognise him. It’s masterly acting.

Hyde, using a deliciously refined voice.  finds all the right tiresome persistence in Socrates. He’s a decent enough chap but like his friend Euthyphro most of us would cross the street to avoid a long conversation with him. Hannah Morrish brings anger, passion, anxiety and dignity to Xanthippe, Socrates’s young wife and later as a rather creepy masked representation of the demon which possesses him. Sophie Ward’s account of Aspasia, an intelligent, articulate woman and former mistress, trying to help Socrates, is convincing as she manipulates the dynamic between the others. These four actors are an evidently well bonded team – different pairings occupy various scenes and they all play off each other effectively with much attentive listening.

It’s quite a treat to see a new play which manages to be both entertaingly accessible and intelligently exploratory.

First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/cancelling-socrates/

Photos by Pamela Raith

An intelligent, moving, original, tangential response to Romeo and Juliet, Starcrossed  feels, in many ways, like traditional Shakespeare. The three actors are in Elizabethan dress. And I was constantly impressed by the language. Rachel Garnet’s text weaves Shakespeare’s  familiar verse and her own so neatly together that it’s seamless fusion. Most of the play is in iambic pentameter, complete with occasional rhyming couplets and contemporary usage such as “Art thou” and “Go forth”. It’s clever stuff which pounds along with great clarity.

The narrative conceit is that, at the same time as Juliet and Romeo  meet and fall for each other in the background, Tybalt (Tommy Sim’aan) and Mercutio (Connor Delves) realise they are in love. Tybalt tries very hard to resist it but eventually succumbs. The scene in which they wake up after spending the night together, uses Shakespeare’s beautiful lark/nightingale dialogue. Thereafter – when they’re almost caught together – we get a hilarious traditional bedroom farce with much hiding under the bedclothes and quick fire on stage misdirection. It’s a very well paced play.

Gethin Alderman plays almost all the parts except Tybalt and Mercuitio and he is a magnificent, often very funny, actor, Among other incarnations he finds a lofty, gobbled voice for Capulet, a light soppy one for Romeo and a rough bellow for Salvatori, a character not in Shakespeare’s play but essential to the plot here. Alderman exploits his towering height too.

Delves makes Mercutio mercurial and very seductive and Sim;ann brings serious gravitas tempered with warmth to Tybalt. And the  three cast members are finely attuned to each other.

The piece is peppered with wistful folk songs and Elizabethan ballads – mostly in minor keys led by Delves on small guitar, They feel atmospherically appropriate.

Many Shakepeare spin offs – and Juliet or Matthew Bourne’s Romeo and Juliet ballet for instance move a very long way from the source material. Starcrossed is refreshing and enjoyable because, despite its plot twist, it actually celebrates Shakespeare’s play. When Mercutio dies, for instance, we’re straight back to the lines we’re all familiar with. Of course there’s room for both approaches.

First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/starcrossed/

Photos: Pamela Raith Photography

This warmly engaging show is a one-man, song-based autobiographical piece. First aired in 2014, it was originally produced at Manhattan Theatre Club and toured all over the US with the author/composer performing it himself. The 2022 revival features the very talented Max Alexander-Taylor as Ben.

Ben’s life story is eventful. The son of an American father and British mother, he grew up in New York. When he was 14,  his father died suddenly after which his mother returned to the UK with his two younger brothers and Ben who was sent to an English boarding school. As soon as he could he returned to New York, established himself as a musician, had a long relationship with a girl (“freckled face and eager mind”) and, before he was 30, survived Stage 4 Hodgkin’s Lymphoma – a very serious form of blood and bone cancer.

We start with Ben as a child playing a home-made toy guitar with his musically accomplished, mathematician father who eventually gets the boy a proper guitar and shows him one chord from which the rest develops. The relationship with his father is troubled because Ben fails to live up to expectations and Scheuer senior is very short tempered. He and Ben were locked in an unresolved  quarrel at the time of his death so the boy is wracked with guilt and feelings he doesn’t understand. And those feelings are later threaded through the love for Julia and the cancer as we watch, and listen to, Ben unpicking his emotions.

Effectively a musical monologue, this show has some very beautiful songs especially the loving one about how Julia makes him laugh. Alexander-Taylor is perfectly cast. He is an accomplished guitarist (the five instruments on stands behind him are the only props). We are way beyond anything like strumming and the “three chord trick”. He uses plectrum and/or plucks the strings like a harpist to create some complex rhythms and riffs. He plays a lot of melody – often in chords as a pianist would. His high tenor voice does wistful sweetness well and his diction is very clear. He uses an English accent except when he is voicing an American such as his father. It’s a very balanced and impressively sustained 75 minute performance.

He’s also unflappable. Because Lion is performed on a small, intimate thrust stage it makes some use of aisles and the audience is very close. When a  front-row audience member was taken ill on press night, Alexander-Taylor – thrusting his guitar into the hands of a front of house person – was the first to reach him. Once the man had been helped out, Alexander-Taylor simply took back the guitar and continued from where he had stopped, almost without missing a beat. What a pro!

First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/the-lion/

Photos by Suzi Corker

You can rely on Little Angel Theatre to produce oodles of charm and I Want My Hat Back delivers it. Personally I am more charmed by work staged in the exquisite main house than in the rather banal studios, but under fives don’t notice and I’m sure there are good practical reasons for using a building with more space and fewer constraints.

The show – only 35 minutes in total – dramatises a trilogy of tiny stories by Jon Klassen. The first is a quest for a hat by a bear who has lost it. The second is a blue-lit underwater, rather moral, tale of a little fish who steals a hat from a whale and meets an appropriate end. Lastly we meet a pair of desert tortoises who have found a hat which they both want.

Of course the puppets, mostly framed by a mini proscenium standing on a big wooden table with drawers, have to look like the drawings in the books the children are already familiar with. And they do: flat, two dimensional creations operated by two black-clad puppeteers who voice them and slide/whizz them round the space. Eyes, presumably operated by lever from behind are particularly effective.

There are literally dozens of puppets in this show – they come in a whole range of sizes and guises with the bear, his rotating legs flying round as he chases a naughty rabbit,  being my definite favourite. The slick stage management of all these changes is quite a feat.

Simon Lyshon has a very unflappable demeanour and a splendid range of funny noises – the underwater glooping being particularly good. Imogen Khan’s voice work is fine too – she gives every animal a different accent or voice. And the two work seamlessly together.

So all in all, a delightful, engaging show for preschoolers. The little girl (4?) next to me  gleefully shrieked “O my God!” thus making the audience laugh when she saw the sperm whale’s teeth. The show clearly works.

It’s a real pleasure to find a non-professional company still staging an annual show mostly G&S (twelve out of twenty this century) as they have been doing since 1973 – and doing it pleasingly.

Director Leon Berger takes us to the land of make-believe with this production. Frederick is, after all, reckoning by his “natal day” just a “little boy of five”. So with 21st birthday balloons aloft, we’re in a colourful nursery classroom in which pirates with scarves round their waists play with wooden swords and there are lots of wind-up dolls and policemen. But it’s a gentle conceit. Beyond that it’s a pretty straight account of Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1879 piece.

Someone at Ferrier Opera Company understands that the important thing about making G&S work in the 21 century is to respect the music and have faith in it. And Gilbert’s words are as funny and clever as ever. For the most part they don’t need tinkering with.

I was thrilled, therefore, to hear Hail Poetry – the lovely four line anthem which Sullivan pokes in apropos of nothing in particular – beautifully sung by a totally still cast, lights dimmed and an illuminated photograph of Sir Arthur at the back. Later I was also delighted to hear another anthem To Queen Victoria’s Name sung with the same respect and precision in the second half – this is an unusual inclusion because there are three versions of the Pirates of Penzance owing to “cock-ups” relating to first performances, copyright issues and the first production in New York.

Of course some cast members are a lot stronger than others but Andy Lee excels as Frederick. His tenor voice is delightfully resonant (nothing as crass as radio mics in this production) and he convinces completely as the dutiful young man who falls passionately in love with Mabel (Rebecca Foster). She matches him perfectly with her piercing soprano voice. Yes, she has great fun with her show piece top notes but also duets very sensitively with Lee. Every note and every word is placed with accurate warmth. Both are accomplished actors too.

Other cast members doing a fine job include Jackie Mitchell as Ruth the “piratical maid of all work” whom Frederick loves as his nursemaid but rejects as his bride. She has some good low contralto notes. Nice 2022 touch to have her team up with another woman at the finale so she gets a happy ending like everyone else.

Andy Noakes is a pretty competent Major General – making his first entrance in 19 Century striped bathers, flippers and bearing an inflatable unicorn because he’s come straight from swimming in the sea. Much is made of pretending he can’t manage the rhymes and needing cast help in his famous song. He’s also a strong lyrical baritone as well as a watchable actor. I also enjoyed  Nathan Killen’s deliciously Irish Samuel – he sings well too.

Musical Director, David Stephens gets a nice sound from his bijoux 12-piece band – working from the proper, if cramped, pit offered by the Bob Hope Theatre.  And three cheers for the decision to play the overture and let us listen to it without stagey distraction. The enthusiastic chorus escaped from him several times during the performance I saw but each time he managed to get them back on track after a few bars. I suspect some cast members are not very good at keeping a discreet eye on the conductor.

It’s a decent show, though, and I’m really thrilled that Ferrier Opera Company is doing this sort of thing. Princess Ida next year!

First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/the-pirates-of-penzance-9/