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Emma (Susan Elkin reviews)

Emma – Rose Theatre, Kingston, London

Reviewer: Susan Elkin
The Reviews Hub - LondonBy Updated:No Comments3 Mins Read

Harold Pinter Theatre

(l-r) Amelia Kenworthy (Emma Woodhouse) and Kit Young (George Knightley) Image: Marc Brenner

Writer: Ava Pickett

Director: Christopher Haydon

Take tissues to mop the tears of laughter.  This show succeeds in spades as long as you take it on its own terms: Ava Pickett’s very funny comedy is loosely based on, or inspired by, an idea by Jane Austen rather than being adapted from her 1815 novel, whatever the programme claims.

Thus, we’re in a gaudy, loud, flashy stereotyped Essex where Emma (Amelia Kenworthy – terrific) has just returned from Oxford. She’s very bright but has failed her history degree because she didn’t bother to turn up for the exams. She keeps this to herself, and situation comedy swirls around because everyone assumes she’s got a First, although no one else in the room has been to university.

All the young people have been to school together, and there’s a lot of shared history and bantering. Emma’s friend Harriet (Sofia Oxenham) works in the local co-op. George Knightley (Kit Young – delightful) is a builder, and the plot is centred around the imminent, vulgar wedding of Isabella Woodhouse (Jessica Brindle – spot on) to John Knightley (Adrian Richards – good fun).

Two hours and thirty-five minutes of misunderstanding and subterfuge follow as self-deluding Emma tries to manipulate everyone with fake news and misguided plans. Eventually, of course, it all comes right, “Anyone would think we were in a period drama”, quips Lucy Benjamin as Mrs Bates, raucously towards the end.

Nigel Lindsay is a joy to watch as Mr Woodhouse. He is one of our most versatile actors, and although he can do serious (The Lehman Trilogy, for example), he really excels at these cor blimey, wheeler-dealer roles. His Mr Woodhouse owns a comfortable home, sounds like an Essex man and is making good money buying and selling dubious goods. Lindsay drops every hilarious line with panache, although there’s a warm and relatively serious scene with Kenworthy in the second half, which is surprisingly moving.

And in Ava Pickett’s crazy take on Emma, widowed Mr Woodhouse has a thing going with garrulous, gravelly Mrs Bates (Lucy Benjamin), who is a beautician. She is brassily coarse, forthright, and her drunk scene is terrific. There are misunderstandings between them, too, as Emma secretly tries to abort the house sale that would enable them to live together.

All the cast of nine do a fine job, although the shape of the Rose makes for some minor audibility problems from the side of the auditorium when an actor is facing away. A particular shout-out, though, for Sofia Oxenham, whose stage debut this show is. Her Harriet is initially gullible, tearful, immature – and she plays it perfectly. Then, eventually, she begins to grow up and takes charge of her own life, and it’s convincing. She, too, delivers the comedy with impeccable timing.

Lily Arnold’s set is a self-parodying homage to the traditional drawing room comedy. We’re in Mr Woodhouse’s main room, at the back of which is a diagonal staircase leading to a first-floor balcony. There are six doors, which means much speedy dashing in and out to further the confusion, as in a Brian Rix farce. It worked then, and it works now in this happy, slick show.

Runs until 11 October 2025:

The Reviews Hub Star Rating: 4 stars

When I was an A level geography student, our inspiring teacher, Miss Diana Raine, would talk seriously about the lives of rivers. She taught us that when they rise they’re youthful and bubbly in narrow fissures and valleys. Then they become staidly middle aged as they meander across flood plains.  When they finally slow to flow into the sea they have reached stately old age. I had long since dismissed this as a fanciful bit of personification, albeit a useful way of explaining the changing nature of rivers to young people.

Then I read Robert Macfarlane’s moving, inspiring book, published earlier this year. I now realise that Miss Raine had a point. Rivers are a life force and we kill them at our global peril as we allow heavy industry to build massive damns, pollute the water and ride roughshod over communities and habitats. They are alive. They have what Macfarlane calls “animacy” which is not, of course, the same as sentience.  Rivers are an integral part of nature.  Directly or indirectly all other life is woven into a tight web of interdependence with rivers.  And that’s why there are now movements all over the world fighting hard, and in some cases succeeding, to establish the rights of rivers (and forests and mountains). They should, indeed they must, have legally established rights – like human rights – to ensure that they are not destroyed. Macfarlane gives them pronouns to stress this. Rivers, he argues, deserve “who” rather than “which”. He calls it the grammar of animacy.

Macfarlane’s compelling book falls roughly into three sections – a trip to the cloud forests of Ecuador, another to South East India and a third to Quebec. In each he meets local people and takes part in expeditions in order to gather information. He marvels, experiences, wonders and joins the struggle against further destructive industrialisation. The stories of the people he works with are warmly fascinating. Guiliana for example (whom I’ve “met” before, courtesy of Melvyn Sheldrake’s fine book Entangled) is a mycologist whose father has just died and somehow she finds closure in the high peaks of Ecuador as she finds rare fungi through an inexplicable sixth sense. Then there’s Yuvan in South India who has come through an appalling, abusive childhood to become a knowledgeable, passionate, beloved teacher. I loved the account of Macfarlane accompanying him and his students on a school trip. Wayne whose carapace isn’t easy to penetrate,  joins the author on the hazardous kayak trip in Northern Canada (with three experts)  and he’s a bundle of complexities. And then there’s water – magical, life giving, beautiful, bubbling, calm, sunlit, turbulent or terrifying. Macfarlane compares the Canadian river he’s following to the sea with the cataract of Lodore and quotes Coleridge extensively (although it was Robert Southey who wrote the more famous poem which is in many school anthologies).

In my teens and twenties I worshipped at the shrine of Gerald Durrell for his ability to bring far-flung places to life. Re-reading The Bafut Beagles recently I found I  hated it because it now feels racist, colonialist and disrespectful of wildlife. In places though Macfarlane’s perfectly crafted prose reminds me of Durrell at his best. He describes a paw print in Ecuador on a heap of fresh dung as “cookie-cutter crisp”, the River Yamuna in India is “mintcake-white” and I love the swallows who “sit like musical notes on the staves of telephone wires.”

In between the trips Macfarlane talks about his own local river and its source near his home in Cambridge. He visits thoughtfully with his children, especially the youngest, Will, who’s only ten and already learning about nature, the environment and life’s rich complexity. The final section of the book is arguably fanciful, sentimental even, but it makes a powerful point about safeguarding nature because it will outlast us all.

While I was reading this suprisingly spiritual book I spent a happy weekend with my cousin and her husband in East Sussex where they live. We went to Cuckmere Haven and walked from the car park down to the river estuary – the only undeveloped one in the south of England. The last time I looked at it properly was, oddly enough, on a field trip with Miss Raine.  We stood for several minutes gazing at the Cuckmere who [sic] flows energetically, neatly but determinedly and full of life into the sea a few yards away where it creates whorls and cross currents. “Well?” I said to my companions whom I’d been telling about my current reading. “Is a river alive?” After a moment’s thought, still looking at the Cuckmere, they answered “Yes”. Thank you, Mr Macfarlane. Reading your book was like being given new glasses. I see the world differently now.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The Secrets of Wishtide by Kate Saunders

English Kings Killing Foreigners

Nina Bowers and Philip Arditti

Soho Theatre

 

Star rating: 3

 

Written and performed by Nina Bowers and Philip Arditti, this show is pleasingly original and has as many layers as an apple strudel although there’s nothing sweet about it. At one level it’s a critique of Henry V. At another it’s about a friendship between two actors both of whom see themselves as outsiders. It also explores immigration, colonialism and xenophobia. And it’s pretty funny. They pack a lot into 75 minutes.

Nina and Phil (they use their real names in order to shuffle the layers still further) meet outside the rehearsal room on the first day. He is to be Chorus while she is third soldier. They’re late and they can’t get in so there’s a lot of sparring and bantering. The scene in which he tries to teach her everything he learned at RADA is funny and Nina role-playing the director while Phil works on the Act 1 Chorus is well observed. Finally there’s some emergency recasting and they do the play of which we see fragments with a lot of asides.

So is Henry V a zenophobic play? Nina – mixed race and queer – argues that she does the St Crispin speech for her ancestors because they own it. Phil tries to sabotage her performance and we get a lot of contrary views about entitlement and possession. It’s effectively a deconstruction of the play for our times which manages to be both witty and thoughtful.

There’s a lot of theatrical in-house humour. The audition scene  goes down well, as does the whole daftness of some directors. This Henry V is to be set in a Kebab shop in which the counter is swathed in St George flags. It’s the sort of humour which goes down very well on press night when most of the audience have theatre connections. I’m not so sure it would work quite so well with a less attuned audience. And the warm up prologue in which they pretend to audition for the Soho Theatre audience doesn’t add much.

Vera; Or, the Nihilists – Jack Studio, London

Reviewer: Susan Elkin
The Reviews Hub - LondonBy No Comments3 Mins Read

Image: Henry Roberts

Writer: Oscar Wilde

Adaptor and director: Cecilia Thoden van Velzen

Star rating: 3.5

This play is a theatrical curiosity. It was Oscar Wilde’s first play, first staged in 1883, when it flopped. This is the first London revival.

It tells the story of Vera Sabouroff, who leads the Nihilists to the murder of the Tsar, Ivan, initially because she is incensed at the cruel imprisonment of her brother. It is loosely based on the life of Vera Zasulich (1849-1919), although the play is set earlier.

Wilde is trying to interrogate the nature of democracy in conflict with totalitarianism, which is, of course, as topical now as it was 142 years ago. And he was adamant that, political cynicism notwithstanding, this is a serious play and not a comedy, although there are some witty Wildean aphorisms in this text. And “I’d not intended to die” as the Prime Minister’s last words feels more like panto than tragedy.

The language style is peculiar too, although it’s not clear whether this is down to Wilde or to Cecilia Thoden van Velzen’s adaptation. It rattles along in modern English, interspersed with awkward Elizabethan borrowings such as “Methinks…”, “Wherein are they different from us?”, “You shall not escape vengeance” or “I loved him not”.

Ruth Varela’s simple but effective set consists of five white triangular screens moved into various positions and configurations as walls or towers. When George Airey (very good), as the new Tsar, produces a white crown and offers it to Vera (Natasha Culzac), with whom he has complicated history, the shape mirrors the set. It’s ingenious cross-referencing. All weapons are made of white paper, too.

The best thing about this show is the quality of the acting. All seven actors are strong, with especially noteworthy work from Jonathan Hansler as the autocratic Tsar who is sick, stumbling, trembling and ruthless.  Natasha Culzac brings steely determination to Vera, and Finn Samuels is a talented multi-roler. Most of the cast have to play more than one part, which is sometimes momentarily confusing, and there are minor ensemble roles, all done quite neatly.

At 85 minutes without interval, this take on Vera; Or, the Nihilists is quite gripping theatre, not least because it’s such a novelty that few audience members know where it’s going, so there’s suspense. And it just about stops short of being too wordy. It gains little, however, from a voiceover to introduce scenes and certainly doesn’t need a mini lecture about Oscar Wilde at the end.

First published by The Reviews Hub https://www.thereviewshub.com/vera-or-the-nihilists-jack-studio-london/

The Full English

Written and Performed by Melanie Branton

Barons Court Theatre

 

Star rating 2.5

 

This account of the development of the English Language is an animated lecture rather than a piece of theatre. Melanie Branton, a lively and clever poet, takes the audience on a whistle-stop tour which starts with the Celts and ends with Covid.

She’s a former English teacher and would, I think, have been inspirationally enthusiastic in the classroom but sadly her acting skills are not great. For nearly two hours we listen to her speaking too fast, often stumbling over words, nodding her head forcefully and same-ily sawing the air for emphasis. And it wears pretty thin.

The poems she incorporates are fun, though, from the opener in which she uses as many of her favourite words as she can through to the final one which works in many words and phrases which have come into common usage in the last ten years. There’s a poem rooted in Covid, making the point that some of the vocabulary has already been and gone. Remember when we were all talking about “lateral flow”? American English, she contends, was deliberately steered to be different from British English and treats us to an illustrative poem. Along the way we also get Robert Lowth who wrote the first prescriptive grammar book and William Caxton, on whom Branton tells us she has a crush, because he established the first English printing press with moveable type.

Well, I’m a former English teacher too and I used to teach a lot of this stuff so as far as I was concerned most of it it was pretty familiar territory. I didn’t know, however, that the Chinese invented printing in the 9th century and had moveable type by the 11th so they were well ahead. Moreover the Muslims had highly developed knowledge of science and mathematics which is why most of the vocabulary (zero, algebra etc) is derived form Arabic. We are also lectured about the great vowel shift, the shame of colonialism and told that the Normans were men of the North (that is Vikings) rather than French – among many other things at high speed.

I was surprised, though that Branton barely mentions Shakespeare and ignores the King James Bible, both of which had a major effect on the evolution of the English language. So, in recent years, has immigration and that doesn’t feature in this show either. Wherever people come from they bring words which find their way into the melting pot of English.

It’s mildly entertaining and faultlessly informative but I’d hesitate to call it theatre. It is, however, a commendably original idea.  The childish audience participation (shouting out when she puts on a Viking Helmet, having to answer questions and more) makes it feel like Horrible Histories  spliced with pantomime and did nothing for me.

Photo credit: Lidia Crisafulli

Hamlet

William Shakespeare

Directed by Justin Audibert

Minerva Theatre, Chichester

 

Star rating: 4

 

Chichester’s first ever production of what is, arguably, Shakespeare’s finest tragedy tells the story with commendable clarity. I have rarely heard the text spoken so accessibly and I’ve seen dozens of Hamlets, including some very famous ones, over the years.

It is the longest play in the cannon and the Hamlet speaks more lines than any other Shakespeare character so – even with plenty of judicious cuts, this production still lasts 3 hours and 30 minutes. Never at any point in all that time, though, is it anything less than focused and most of the time it’s needle-sharp. The period it’s set in is a bit vague, however – perhaps Edwardian

Giles Terera doesn’t give us a particularly youthful Hamlet or stress his adolescent hang-ups. Rather he presents a thoughtful adult grieving for his father and desperate to do what seems right, given that his mother has just married her brother-in-law who murdered her husband and is now king. He captures many moods and carries audience sympathy.

Ariyon Bakare is a fine Claudius – an imperious controller in public and a ruthless manipulator in private. Politically, he’s totally plausible.  I really liked the dignity, elegance and stillness which Sara Powell brings to Gertrude too because it is then very effective when she loses control in the closet scene – which Terera makes as uncomfortable as it can possibly be. A son telling his mother how her sex life should be managed, in colourful detail is always disturbing and Terera really brings that out.

Keir Charles’s Polonius is just an anxious father trying to keep in with the new king and a little less tiresome here than in some interpretations. And Eve Ponsonby as Ophelia ensures that the mad scene is excruciatingly painful. It is a stroke of genius to have her in a dirty white cotton dress with a  blood stain on the front of the skirt and a huge one at the back. It feels almost obscene and emphasises her total loss of self awareness. In the end a horrified Gertrude wraps a cover round her waist and helps her off stage at the end of the scene.

Lily Arnold’s design is interesting. There’s a mezzanine playing area with side steps which works perfectly for the battlements and enables Gertrude to have a cosy private sitting room for the closet scene. At one point Terera soliloquises sitting casually on the edge of it.  On the main stage below it is an all purpose rocky mound behind a large tiled open space. Characters leap on and off it and it opens to create an effective grave for Ophelia with Beatie Edney as an engaging grave digger.

The lighting (Ryan Day) is both imaginative and evocative – there are rows of glowing lights and a huge centre quasi-chandelier. It enables some very dark scenes and some very bright ones. And the production makes strong use of blackout – especially at the end of the first half when Hamlet creeps up on the praying Claudius, dagger raised. So it becomes a cliff hanger.

This production is a richly worthwhile take on a magnificent play which succeeds because it is of its time – and of our time. Spying, betrayal and lack of trust are as topical today as they have ever been.

Of course at the midweek matinee I saw there were large numbers of retired people but there was also a school party – GCSE students, I should think – and it’s encouraging to see Hamlet making an impact on people of different backgrounds and levels of experience.

 

Of course plays should be seen rather than read. It’s what I used to tell my students and it still holds true. Nonetheless if, for whatever reason, you can’t see a play then reading it is probably the next best thing. And, for the record, if I see a new play I often buy the text afterwards so that I can read it and absorb it fully after the event.

Nye, at the National Theatre, with Michael Sheen as Aneurin Bevan was so successful and admired, that it returned recently for a short-run revival. Sadly, for various reasons, I didn’t see it either time although I would have liked to. Then a doctor friend told me that she and her husband, also a GP, had been so moved by Nye that they’d cried at the end. “We’ve devoted all our lives to the NHS. All our lives, Susan! ” she said, welling up even as she spoke. “And look at it now!” That clinched it. As soon as I got home I ordered the text.

Fortunately, I see so much theatre that I’m pretty good at reading a script and staging it in my head although, obviously, it can never be the same as seeing it performed. Tim Price’s play gives us Aneurin Bevan dying in a hospital bed in 1960. It’s a framing device. The morphine he’s given takes him back to a hallucinatory re-enactment of his life through which we occasionally hear the voices of his wife Jennie Lee, their friend Archibald Lush and medical staff at his bedside.

Born in the Welsh valleys to a mining family, Nye is profoundly influenced by the death of his father to coal-triggered lung cancer. He worked as a miner himself for eight years before working for the union. The play leaps backwards and forwards in time occasionally returning to the “reality” of the hospital. He is elected MP for Ebbw Vale in 1929  and there’s a fine scene with Winston Churchill in the House of Commons tea room because he’s every inch the awkward agitator and doesn’t allow the war to dent his principles. Also nicely done is the scene in which Clement Attlee, now prime minister after a Labour landslide victory in 1945, offers him the post of Minister of Health and Housing – to Nye’s incredulity.

We hear voices, like a Greek chorus, of many people who have suffered or died because of inequitable, often unaffordable, health provision. Taking his home town of Tredegar as his model Nye comes up with the idea of nationalising the hospitals, converting doctors and other medical staff into state employees and providing free health care for everyone. The play presents his struggles with cabinet colleagues and the fierce opposition he faced from doctors via the British Medical Association. Eventually, as we all know, he triumphed against considerable odds – and the play’s take on Nye can die in some sort of peace.

The stage directions require the house lights at the end so that the cast can see the audience and audience members can see each other to make the point that every single person present has benefited from Nye Bevan’s legacy. I cried at that point too and can vividly imagine what a powerful moment this must have been in the Olivier Theatre.

Nye is well worth reading and it certainly makes you stop and think about Bevan’s original vision and the extent to which it has (perforce?) been dented in the 80 years since 1945.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Is A River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane

The Producers

Music and Lyrics by Mel Brooks

Book by Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan

Directed by Patrick Marber

Garrick Theatre, London

 

Star rating: 4

 

It’s quite a skill to be outrageous without being offensive but it’s what Mel Brooks’s masterpiece has managed to do for nearly 58 years.

A film for 24 years before it became a stage show, The Producers tells the story of two men who work out that you could make more money out of a Broadway flop than a hit so they set out to make something truly terrible. The trouble is that their gay romp, Springtime for Hitler is a huge hit.

And The Producers is very funny, not least because it sends up theatre in general and Broadway in particular, and since, on opening night, nearly everyone in the audience has industry connections, the jokes and stereotypes went down a storm. The hilarious auditions scene, for instance – with Trevor Ashley as the campest possible Roger DeBris – is only a slight exaggeration of the truth.

Andy Nyman is deliciously sleazy as Max Bialystock who routinely beds rich elderly ladies because he needs their cheques.  And Marc Antolin is a good contrast as the nerdy, nervous Leo Bloom who gradually blossoms as he finds love with Ulla (Joanna Woodward – great fun).

Lorin Latarro’s choreography ensures that the ensemble is as tight and slick as it could possibly be. The walking frame number is masterly. So is the upbeat, cheerful “Keep it Gay”.

 

And, of course, Brooks’s lyrics – all delivered here with immaculately clear diction – are always a delight. Anyone who cheerfully rhymes “true sir” with “producer”, “well aware” with “Delaware” and “elan” with “Milan” gets my vote.

Above the stage is an orchestra on a mezzanine, mostly unseen, doing a fine job especially in “We Can Do it” in which the Jewish/Klezmer rhythms are as prominent as I’ve ever heard them.

Paul Farnsworth’s costumes are quite something too – especially the absurdly excessive ones for Springtime for Hitler. And I don’t know whose idea the naked classical statue was but it’s a coup de theatre when he turns to face the audience.

The Producers is a witty show full of humour, much of it gloriously ribald, but like all the best comedies it has also has a lot of heart: the friendship between Max and Leo and Ulla and Leo’s getting together, for example. This enjoyable production never lets you forget that there’s rather  more here than laughter.

And it’s good to see yet another fine Menier Chocolate Factory show transferring into the West End.