Photo: Taken at The Jack Studio Theatre

A companion piece to Ross McGreggor’s Holst: The Music in the Spheres  to which I awarded five stars in February, Payne is another delight – even though I am not quite as comfortable with physics and astronomy as I am with classical music.

Cecilia Payne (Laurel Marks) was a student of Gustav Holst at St Paul’s Girls’ School. From there she went to Cambridge and from thence to work as a researcher at Harvard. She was a pioneer who broke a great deal of new ground in her field although as the play makes clear she didn’t initially always get the credit for it. Among other things she worked out that stars are made predominantly of hydrogen and helium thereby refuting three thousand years of scientific theory – as Henry Russell (Toby Wynn-Davies) acidly and patronisingly points out to her.

The play is a detailed, intelligent exposition of the routine discrimination against women a century ago and a taut account of one woman’s struggles. Marks is an outstanding actor. She gives us a lumpy, awkward woman with the distorted vowel sounds of her period and class but indefatigably focused on her work. She is very good indeed at evincing the pain and hurt she feels when her character’s work is marginalised and yet her rare smiles light up the stage.

The five other cast members are generally strong and, as before. I was totally convinced by Wynn-Davies as Holst two scenes with whom effectively frame the play. American accents are, however, a bit iffy and although amusing, Alex Stevens makes Harlow Shapley simply too excessive and irritating to be taken seriously as head of department.

Nineteen twenties music links the scenes so that we never forget where we are. Lucy Ioannou as Adelaide Ames helps with that too. At first she seems a fairly frivolous flapper and a stark contrast with Cecilia but she gradually develops into something much deeper and we begin to see her as a serious scientist – with a healthy life/work balance. There is a very beautiful physical theatre/dance scene with her at its centre to symbolise her untimely death and the reactions of her friends and colleagues.

McGreggor, as director, does imaginative things with the gauzy backcloth providied by Odin Corie’s set. Some scenes, evocatively lit, take place beyond it to suggest outdoors or something otherworldly and it acts as screen for occasional projection.

THE TAXIDERMIST’S DAUGHTER – PRODUCTION PHOTOS BY ELLIE KURTTZ

This is a weird show in every sense of the word. In the traditional sense it’s about demonic behaviour and in the modern sense it’s strangely incoherent with some very odd directorial decisions. Sinead Diskin’s gloomy, disturbing music and sound dominates everything. There’s an awful lot of angry/anguished/frightened shouting over it which gets wearisome because there isn’t enough ordinary life to balance it. It often feels overacted and overblown.

It’s 1912 and we’re mostly in Fishbourne and Chichester where Kate Mosse, who has adapted this play from her own novel of the same name, grew up. Taxidermy is fashionable and there’s a local museum dedicated to the art. Strange things happen at the church on St Mark’s Eve (24 April so it’s topical as well as local). Birds are everywhere, dead and alive, and it’s sinister. After all a play which, in an early scene, provides you with a detailed account of how to remove the eye of a dead bird with a scalpel and then eviscerate it ready for mounting is probably signalling that nasties are in the pipeline.

Graylingwell was the asylum, later psychiatric hospital, in Chichester which finally closed in 2001. I know that because I was at college in the city for three years in the 1960s when it was still fully operational but it would have taken me a long time to infer it from this often incomprehensible play. Perhaps the local audience is simply expected to know.

Two women have escaped from Graylingwell and various characters are very worried about what they might now do. It’s a convoluted plot but Cassie Pine (Pearl Chanda) incarcerated for ten years, has every reason to be bitterly, determinedly vengeful which is why the local “establishment” men are worried. Before the show I met and was chatting to a colleague who asked me if, as he had, I had read the book. I hadn’t and by the interval I could see why he asked because I hadn’t got a clue what was going on – none of the scenes hang together or make sense. The story telling is a little clearer in the second half but still puzzling in places. The bright sunlight traditional happy ending, for instance, is  unconvincing and seems to belong in a different play.

Some of the acting feels laboured although Daisy Prosper pleases as the eponymous daughter who’s quietly doing the work because her father (Forbes Masson) is literally out of his mind and Akai Osei is good value as the chirpy servant Davey, although he says he’s from Portsmouth but sounds like a London barrow boy. Taheen Modak is warmly appealing as the refreshingly decent Harry Woolston and Pearl Chanda is strong in her cunning psychosis – moving from horror to everyday chat in an instant.

Andrzej Goulding’s video designs and Prema Mehta’s lighting work very well to create a grey, menacing atmosphere. The weather is dreadful through most of the play. We get magnificent rain, thunder and lightning and a terrifyingly rough sea. In many ways these are the best bits.

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

This very decent account of a show about decency makes good use of the delights of the splendid Bob Hope Theatre. Director Sarah Chapman ensures that every inch of the large stage is used (this show was originally intended for the larger Churchill Theatre Bromley, pre-Pandemic) and that the action spills engagingly onto the side steps and the gap between the pit and the front row. Steve Trill, meanwhile, and his nine piece band in said pit gives us a lot of pleasing sound.

Shrek the Musical is a celebration of otherness. One of its best lines is “Beautiful ain’t always pretty” in this piece in which the “monster” gets the princess without turning into a prince and that’s very 2022. It’s also a fine choice for an enthusiastic amateur company because it features a big cast with lots of tasty cameo roles among all those feisty fairy tale characters who form the main ensemble. No wonder there are so many productions of it about at present.

Ellie Mulhern is outstanding as Princess Fiona. She dances with verve, sings with passion and twinkles attractively as well as being believably naturalistic. Michael Flanagan finds a lot of witty physicality in the persistence of Donkey and he, too, has strong stage presence. Jamie Fillery excels as the appalling Lord Farquaad and Laura Whittingham is very successful as Dragon and Wicked Witch – what a voice!

Shrek is a difficult part to play because this ogre is meant to be quiet and self-effacing in contrast with almost everyone else on stage. Ian Chapman begins so mildly that you hardly notice him but he grows as the show goes on. By the time he gets to falling in love with Fiona we are very much on his side.

The ensemble numbers – including the post curtain “I’m a Believer” are lively and entertaining, imaginatively choreographed by William and Jenni Rye. And both the dragon and the plastic horse are very show stoppers.

A cast this size ensures an audience brimming over with supportive enthusiasm so that the atmosphere feels like a family party and that’s good to see and hear after so long. I hope, however, that someone sorts out the sound system for the rest of the run. There was a great deal of crackle and incidents of radio mics cutting out at the performance I saw.

First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/shrek-the-musical-6/

Maria Theresia von Paradis (1759-1824), roughly contemporary with Beethoven, was an Austrian musician. Highly acclaimed in her day as a pianist and composer, almost all her music is now lost  She was blind and, at the behest of her parents, underwent several appalling surgical attempts to restore her sight. She may have had affairs with both Mozart and Salieri – there are hints in letters.  This is the story told by Errollyn Wallen’s new one-act opera with libretto by Nicola Werenowska.

But there’s much more to it than that. This is a Graeae production so the emphasis in on the cultivation and championing of the best in deaf, disabled and neurodivergent talent. The Paradis Files is Graeae’s first opera and is the most inclusive show I’ve ever seen.

It starts with cast and band members introducing themselves or each other orally. Everything they say is signed integrally by someone on stage. They wittily describe their clothes, body size and the set.  Each band member plays a demo flourish or a couple of bars on his or her instrument before melting into the upstage band area. Conductor, Andrea Brown says a few words too. Her podium is downstage right so that both band and cast can see her – or one of the on-stand monitor screens at the side of the stage. Once the show starts there’s an over-stage screen for captions which are artistically presented in a timely font, getting larger to stress, for instance, incredulity.

A cast of six works with two performance interpreters whose presence brings another dimension. Max Marchewicz, for example, who identifies in a programme biography as “a queer, disabled, chronically ill and disabled person” signs with moving, balletic sensitivity and I loved the blue hair.  Meanwhile Chandrika Gopalakrishnan lithely makes every nuance clear, sometimes climbing inside the upstage piano which is part of the set. Both are fine actors whose reactions to what is going on help to drive the narrative forward.

Every inch an opera – there is no spoken dialogue – The Paradis Files,  exploits lots of styles. In England Paradis was known as “The Blind Enchantress” and there’s a lovely Mozartian riff on those words. And we end in Rossini-esque mode because it’s an upbeat story

Bethan Langford, who cheerfully tells the audience at the beginning “I’m visually impaired” brings warmth and depth to Paradis. Other actors lead her unobtrusively round the rather busy set and she sits at the piano stool in several scenes. Langford has a rich mezzo voice with some beautiful navy blue notes in the lower register. It blends particularly well with Maureen Braithwaite’s soprano. Braithwaite plays Paradis’s difficult, determined, troubled mother – a complex character. Ella Taylor finds lots of saucy kindness in Gerda the kind, gritty, feisty, trans maid who has an attractive soprano voice.

Wallen’s score makes a great play with the “gossips”. In any other art form we’d call them the “ensemble” with minor characters emerging from their ranks. Here they come somewhere between an operatic and a Greek chorus – commenting on the action and furthering the narrative. And, of course, this isn’t really an eighteenth century opera  so Wallen has  occasional fun with cross rhythms, jazz and rock borrowings so that sometimes the gossips dance incongruously as they sing. It’s great fun.

The Paradis Files is directed by Jenny Sealey, Graeae’s artistic director and she knows, really knows, how to create stunning theatre. This piece is stonkingly good: intelligent, funny, moving, beautifully sung and skilfully staged.

The Paradis Files opened at Curve Leciester before coming to the South Bank. It now tours until 12 May to Milton Keynes, Colchester, Hull, Perth, Cardiff and Sheffield. All details at www.graeae.org.

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

All photos: Miles Elliott:

This is a play which links choral singing, Alzheimer’s and hedge funds. So you can’t fault its originality. As someone who sang in a choral society for thirty years and nursed a spouse through Alzheimer’s I recognised and identified with the truth much of it although it’s clumsily didactic when it gets to the hedge funds. I don’t go to the theatre for lengthy lectures about share dealing.

Nancy (Janet Behan) and Adam (Peter Saracen) have been married for a long time. Their hobby and social life is the local choral society. It’s an interesting idea to have a small choir present with their accompanist. They stand, dressed in black on stage as if at a concert, and sing fragments of Messiah. It would have been easy to do this with recordings (and there’s some of that in the production too) and it’s interesting decision to do it live. They’re not always in tune or on time but that may be deliberate – they are meant to be an amateur group, after all.

Grandson Simon (James Fletcher) comes to one of their concerts and meets Jack (Dan Wolff) a tenor in the choir with whom he goes on to have a relationship. There’s a very beautiful scene in which they make love to the sound of Zadok the Priest (recorded not sung live). Meanwhile Gerald (Jonathan Hansler) rarely supports his son or parents because he’s too busy making money out of hedge funds and getting through serial marriages – until it all goes wrong.

The catalyst is Adam developing Alzheimer’s – at first losing his way in sentences but, of course, remembering every word and note of “Messiah”. Gradually he develops the all too familiar vacant look which Saracen gets very well. And I was warmly aware that Roques really does understand what Alzheimer’s involves and that’s rare. We see, for example Saracen get shaky on his feet and at one point Simon has to help him in the lavatory because there’s been an “accident” and they’re at a concert so Nancy can’t go into the gents to sort him out. Very accurately portrayed – as I know all too well.

Janet Behan gives a fine performance as a loving wife initially in denial – shouting Simon and Jack down when they try to get her to admit something is wrong. Then she morphs (the action of the play covers six years) into a stoical coper – another position I indentify with, especially when she breaks down in exhaustion and, crying, tells Simon and Jack that she can’t manage alone except that she does – determined to keep her husband at home.

Underneath all this is a plot twist involving Gerald and something his mother tells him which changes everything but no spoilers here.

It’s an enjoyable and moving play with much to admire but it should be 15 minutes shorter with all the attempts to explain the mechanics of hedge funds to Nancy cut back substantially. And why does the choir keep singing the same few bars of Worthy is the Lamb? Is it to suggest the repetitiveness of what’s happening in Adam’s head? If so it’s over subtle.

First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/short-memory/