The intimacy of the Maltings Theatre, St Albans – now configured in the round – lends itself very well to this tight, tense story of troubled family relationships in which two young women are married to two brothers who have an appalling, cold, manipulative mother. We shift back and forth through time in what are usually two person scenes as the truth is very gradually revealed.

Claire Jared’s small, blonde, feisty and impassioned Georgina is married to James but it’s failing and James has met someone else even as Georgina’s second child is born. And she is fond of her widowed, troubled brother-in-law, Edward (Jonny D’Spena – finely nuanced, sensitive work). Edward, however, is haunted – physically so in the play – by his dead wife Kirsty (Georgina Bennett) who floats about the playing area with a whiff of Blythe Spirit but this is definitely not a comedy. It’s a serious love triangle which is why the play opens with some symbolic mime.

Amidst all this is Jill Priest’s Edie, one of the least attractive characters I’ve seen in a play for some time. She is icily self centred and very unkind both “now” and in the things she’s done in the past. There is, for example, a backstory about Edward’s childhood friendship with a boy called Pete from whom we eventually hear some letters (voice over by Matthew Philip Harris). Priest gives a compelling, convincing account of this deeply unpleasant – but hideously plausible – woman.

It all hangs together pretty coherently. As the man sitting next to me commented. “The good thing about theatre is that you have to engage with it and apply your own intelligence – unlike a lot of film when it’s all spelled out for you”. Nonetheless I was a bit puzzled by the play’s opening scene which doesn’t sit quite right with the rest of it.  Harry, a  smart, plummy voiced man with the beginnings of dementia  is waiting for his wife in a Mayfair café where he meets Kirsty and confuses her with his wife. Paul Manuel gives a spot-on performance as Harry. I’ve seen, and lived with dementia at very close quarters in my own family and Manuel has it perfectly. He also gives a wonderfully moving account of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 at the end which, in a sense, sums up the whole play. On balance though, I’d like to see Harry in a different play and keep The Spiral Path entirely focused on its central plot.

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

31 January 2022 would have been his eightieth birthday and this celebration should really been called “An Evening with Derek Jarman”.

The first half gave us Mark Farrelly’s one man, one act play, Jarman. I reviewed this for Sardines in November when it began its current tour at Bridge House Theatre, Penge and happily gave it four stars.  It has now bedded down well, become more assured. It presents the life story of this artist, film maker, gardener, gay rights activist and Aids victim with vivid passion – and, it seems, real accuracy. After the interval there were speeches from a group of people who had all known and worked with Jarman in real life. Several said that they felt – through Farelly’s play and acting talent – that Derek Jarman was definitely present at this, the birthday party he didn’t live to attend.

It is interesting to see Jarman a second time in a completely different sort of setting. No longer are we in a basic, sittingroom-sized black box. Now we’re in a traditional, middle-sized theatre theatre with rows of raked seating (about two thirds full – very gratifying) and the action takes place on a big thrust stage playing area. That means much more space for Farrelly to occupy – and he does, still with his simple props: one chair, a roll of brown paper, a torch and a gauzy sheet. There is scope here for the lighting to be more sophisticated too and I loved the way his figure was sometimes shadowed and huge on the back wall.

Farrelly is a remarkable actor. I’ve now seen him in action on four occasions and recently interviewed him face to face. He brings an extraordinary, glittering edge and sense of danger to everything he does. And the subtlety of his voice work is terrific. Jarman, for example, gets a resonant, middle class, public school-educated voice without being plummy. To borrow a term often used by actors, it’s utterly “truthful”.

The second half of Mr Jarman’s birthday party was uplifting and celebratory. David Mansell, writer, producer and director, whom Jarman called “Ginger Bits”, for example, remembered Jarman coming to the University of Kent to give a talk and later inviting him to Prospect Cottage which led to Mansell working with Jarman on two films and cutting his professional teeth. Almost every speaker mentioned Jarman’s generosity and kindness which sat along with his glee, impatience and polymathy. Then there was David Meyer who played Ferdinand in Jarman’s film The Tempest opposite Toyah Willcox as Miranda. He was very funny about Jarman’s insistence that he should walk naked out of the North Sea. Speaker after speaker talked of Jarman’s commitment to fighting for gay rights and for the grace with which he accepted his terminal illness. Jarman was the first national figure to admit openly that he had HIV/Aids which helped and supported thousands of others.

Peter Tatchell remembered the 1992 Outrage! March which led to Jarman’s arrest under a centuries old law which meant it was illegal to demonstrate within half a mile of the Houses of Parliament. Jarman, he told us, refused to accept a caution because that would have been an admission of guilt. Instead he told the police to do their work. In the end he was released without charge.

The whole audience sang Happy Birthday and I’m pretty sure many lumps had to be swallowed in many throats.

First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/jarman-2/

The story – such as it is – ranges episodically across several generations of one family from an RAF pilot and his wife in the 1940s through to the present. The chronology leaps about disjointedly so that one minute we’re in World War II and the next we’re thinking about pandemic restrictions. Apart from some business with an RAF jacket the role changes are done, often instantly, almost entirely through voice work. Nathaniel Christian, Rachel-Leah Hosker and Hamish Macdougall are all pretty good orally but not good enough to make the story telling clear.

It isn’t a musical but in one of her several incarnations Hosker is an aspirant singer so occasionally she breaks into a 1940s song sometimes “accompanied” by Lewis (Nathaniel Christian).  His piano miming is woefully weak – although the rest of his acting is convincing. Her singing voice is interesting. It has a slightly gravelly quality, faintly reminiscent of Edith Piaf but an octave or so lower.

Hamish Macdougall meanwhile gives us a father, an adult son, a young boy, a young husband and a brash party organiser – among other things. He’s clearly a skilled actor but we don’t see him at his best in this muddled narrative.

Paper planes are big symbolic thing here. Meant to connote the RAF link ( I think) they actually seem pointlessly silly although it’s a nice moment when Christian as a grandfather is teaching Hosker, as a very young child, how to fly.

In modern times one of Nathaniel Christian’s characters is a musician looking for a break trying to be realistic but optimistic about his future. This is a relatively gripping narrative development but seems to belong in a different play.

I liked the simplicity of the set, though, by Joshua Gadsby and Naomi Kuyck-Cohen. It uses a raised, sloped board as the playing area. Surrounding it are chairs to enable actors to get on and off and to provide a seat when one of them is on the edge of the action. Zac Gvirtzman’s music and Kieran Lucas’s sound design together provide an evocative atmosphere too.

At the heart of the modern scenes is a 1940s-themed party in a country house repeatedly described as “fucking weird”. Actually that’s a pretty good description of the whole play.

Originally published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/the-winston-machine/

Image: John Chapman (Rehearsal photo by David Sprecher).

The key thing with Beckett is timing and making silence speak. And John Chapman who shuffles, sighs, grunts and yawns very evocatively is master of both.

Krapp’s Last Tape is a solo one act play featuring an old man reflecting on his past sexual encounters. He has an ongoing taped autobiography including spool 5 in box 3 which he recorded 30 years ago. As well as listening to that, he is now trying – but mostly failing – to record his final one.

It was a treat in the performance I saw  – as Chapman worked through the opening long silent section including the famous banana sequence – to hear the audience listening intently even when no words were being spoken. There was real theatrical chemistry in the room.

Stout, dishevelled, laughing, wheezing, weeping and getting drunker, Chapman is both compelling and moving. He and his director Robert Pennant Jones are clearly a strong and sensitive team because we really feel Krapp’s regrets alongside his wistful longing and anger at his younger self. He also made me notice afresh the poetic glory and spareness of Beckett’s prose: “a bony old ghost of a whore” for example.

The attention to detail is impressive too. Chapman as Krapp sits at a desk behind an ancient, battered Grundig-type reel to reel tape recorder. At one point he rethreads it. When he hits the switch the reels are actually rotating. Then there’s his off-stage drinking. We hear corks drawn and liquid being poured into a glass (sound design by Laurence Tuerk) and each time Krapp returns his face is slightly more flushed.

Krapp’s Last Tape, which runs less than an hour, was written in 1958 and first performed as a double bill with Endgame. And it’s in this pairing that I’ve seen it presented in the past. After the interval Tower Theatre chose, instead, to offer a talk by  Robert Pennant Jones about The Tower Theatre’s Beckett productions during the last 60 years followed by a film entitled Stones which is an extract from Beckett’s 1955 novel, Molloy. A truly Beckettian evening.

First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/krapps-last-tape-2/