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Time and Time Again (Susan Elkin reviews)

Time And Time Again – Seven Dials Playhouse, London

Reviewer: Susan Elkin

Photo of The Reviews Hub - London The Reviews Hub – LondonJuly 21, 2025

0 1 minute read

Director and Deviser: Ioana Pitic

An ambitious 55-minute piece, destined for Edinburgh, Time and Time Again depicts friendship between two women, taking in issues such as migration and separation.

Becca (YY Yong) and Zoe (Stephanie Renae Law) meet at primary school in China and become friends who promise to support each other. Inevitably, as they grow up, their lives take different paths. Becca goes to university in London and settles with a successful career in the UK. Zoe stays put, and after much rather confusing shilly-shallying, marries.

Both actors are competent, although Law is marginally more convincing. Their lithe physicality is quite impressive.  And there’s a great deal of neat miming against a background of Inez Ruiz’s slick sound design, which includes the ticking of a clock to indicate the passage of time. The set comprises six upright chairs with empty backs which are imaginatively used to become an exercise bike, a bath, public lavatories, beds, screens for Zoom meetings and more.

The storytelling, however, is fuzzy. The narrative moves backwards and forwards, possibly to suggest alternative outcomes and paths. Despite the old-fashioned radio dial projected on the back wall to indicate which year we’re in, the chronology is muddled.

It’s an interesting idea for a play, but it is trying to do too much at once and therefore lacks focus. And why is it so darkly lit?

Reviewed on 20 July 2025 and then plays at Edinburgh Fringe 

The Reviews Hub Score 2.5

Watchable but weak

         

Pretty Witty Nell

Written and directed by Ryan JW Smith

Rogue Theatre

Barons Court Theatre

 

Star rating: 3.5

 

Modern plays written in iambic pentameter are always refreshing and Mike Bartlett does not have a monopoly. This autobiographical, one woman take on Nell Gwynne includes a lot of end rhyme too, usually on alternate lines. And it certainly flows.

Clarissa Adele is on stage, in role, bantering and flirting with the audience as they arrive.  Gwynne was, after all, one of the first generation of women to perform on British stages once the monarchy had been restored in 1660 and Puritan privations swept away. So her holding court in a theatre is an effective conceit.

We then get a 55 minute monologue telling the story of her birth in a brothel, career as an orange-selling prostitute before becoming an actress and catching the eye of the “Merry Monarch” who elevated her and the two children she bore him to wealth and respectability of sorts.

Adele is an accomplished performer and very good at saucy double-entendres and a range of voices – as she imitiates Charles II, Cromwell, Queen Katharine and others. Sometimes however her gestures become a bit samey and in places the text is a rather gabbled. The piece could afford to slow down a little. Five minutes on the length wouldn’t hurt.

This play would be a good history lesson for anyone new to the cataclysmic events of the seventeenth century although you have to make allowances for dramatic licence. For example. there were 59 signatures on Charles I’s death warrant of which Cromwell was just one. He was not solely responsible for the regicide as this play suggests. Nonetheless Gwynne’s account of the exhumation and desecration of his body is nicely depicted through Adele doing simple but ingenious things with a wig she holds in front of her. It’s powerful story telling.

Don’t Rock the Boat

By Robin Hawdon

Directed by Sally Hughes

The Mill at Sonning

 

Star rating: 3

 

One of the most harmless little plays I’ve seen in a while, Don’t Rock the Boat isn’t likely to cause many ripples on the Thames where the titular boat is moored – or anywhere else.  Nonetheless it’s quite funny, amuses its target audience and isn’t a bad way to spend a couple of hours. It is billed as a comedy and more or less does what it says on the tin.

Two parallel families meet for a mid-90s weekend on a boat which belongs to the Bullheads. Each couple has a daughter and the girls are at school together. Arthur Bullhead (Steven Pinder) is a successful speculative builder hoping to coax favours from John Combes (Harry Gostelow) who is a solicitor in what becomes an ambiguous tussle between the former’s self interest and the latter’s hypocrisy. Along the way there are revelations about the past and fury/embarassment when the girls go off and meet two local lads with whom one thing inevitably leads to another. The dialogue is fast paced and convincing.  Then it all peters out at the end as Hawdon apparently runs out of ideas.

All six actors do a reasonable job and are directed well so that they make good use of comic timing and nuance.  Pinder excels as the querulous, irritable, smarmy Arthur in a part which could have been written for Nigel Lindsay, but as far as I know wasn’t. And I liked Melanie Gutteridge’s take on his long suffering wife. The social contrasts between the two families are pointed up nicely too.

The real star of this show, though is Jackie Hutson’s set which creates a near full size barge, The Bunty, on The Mill at Sonning’s capacious playing space. It’s attractively detailed with a galley, blinds on the windows, a table which becomes bunk beds, lots of cupboards and even a bird feeder near the door. It’s surrounded by grass to represent the bank and there’s some proper water at the front.

It’s all quite fun but it’s slight.

It’s a novel I’ve always strenuously avoided for personal reasons. I am ichthyophobic in general and galeophobic in particular. (I also own a good dictionary).  In short I don’t like – really don’t like –  anything alive bigger than my thumb moving darkly in water. I have no idea where this fear came from but it means, for example, that I couldn’t go into an aquarium or on a whale watching trip. I have to be careful about TV nature programmes too. Therefore, knowing that the titular Moby Dick is a white sperm whale has aways kept me well away from Herman Melville’s 1851 novel.

Then, earlier this month, I was invited to review a dramatisation of  Moby Dick (the jury seems to be out on whether he needs a hyphen so I’m omitting it) at Tower Theatre in Stoke Newington. Surely, I reasoned, they can’t do anything to distress me in a small triangular, fairly low-tech space?  So, I took courage in both hands and went. And it was a very pleasant, educative surprise. A richly imaginative piece of physical theatre, the adaptation by Paul Graves and director Angharad Ormond taught me that Moby Dick is not “about” whales. Rather it is a study of one man’s obsession and what we would now call “mental health issues”.

I enjoyed it as theatre, wasn’t remotely freaked out and, on the bus home, ordered a copy of the novel to read. Never let it be said that reading isn’t a lifelong journey or that my reading range isn’t eclectic.

Reading Moby Dick, though, is a pretty mixed experience. “Call me Ishmael” is one of those famous opening lines which everyone knows (cf Anna Karenina, Pride and Prejudice and Nineteen Eighty Four). I wonder why the narrator says it at all. Is it not his real name?

The opening chapters are quite promising as Ishmael meets the charismatic Queequeg who becomes his close friend and they sign up as crew on a Nantucket whaling ship. It’s owned by an entertaining pair of businessmen, captained by one Ahab and managed on a daily basis by a trio of “Mates” each of them nicely characterised. The tone is quite wittily sardonic in a Dickensian kind of way and once or twice I could feel the young Mark Twain reading this and, maybe, soaking up some of its wit.

Then, sadly, the rot sets in and it becomes ever more self-indulgently prolix. Melville finds literary name dropping irresistible and far too often wanders off into verbose backwaters. We really do not need, for example, a whole waffly chapter about the taxonomy of whales or a lengthy essay about the symbolism of whiteness in religion, culture, nature. Then there’s a digression into whales in art, a separate one on whales in literature, a whole chapter about rope making and so it goes on – and on. It runs for 684 pages. One waggish friend, a former university teacher of literature, said – when I told him what I was reading –  that it’s a novel which works (a bit) only if you read alternate chapters. No wonder it achieved very little success in Melville’s lifetime.

At one third in, I was on the point of giving up but then I had a long train journey to occupy so I ploughed determinedly on because it has plugged a gap in my literary experience and, as such, is quirkily interesting.

The casually “racist” language is jarring for a 21st century reader although Melville is simply using the standard vocabulary of his day when he has Ishmael refer to the diverse crew members as, for example “negro”, “savage”, “pagan”, “cannibal” and such like. In fact Ishmael shows a lot of respect for the skills of his fellow crew members and the sentiments are pretty even handed. And that’s noteworthy considering that this book was published the year before Harriet Beech Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (a novel I’m now minded to reread) and over a decade before Abraham Lincoln’s Proclamation of Emancipation.

Moby Dick is a colourful travelogue. Ishmael and the Pequod sail all over the world. Moreover, Melville had experience of whaling boats so the depiction of life aboard such a ship feels very authentic. And he’s good on what it would actually have been like to be lowered in a small rowing boat in hostile seas. Then, at about the half-way point, there’s an utterly revolting, and presumably accurate, description of the killing of a sperm whale which made me deeply thankful that we no longer rely on these noble beasts for lamp oil, corsets, animal food and all the rest of it.

I remain puzzled though about why Melville’s 19th century sailors speak to each other in Elizabethan English saying things like: “thou wilt hold thy peace” and “if thou hast none of thine own”. And why, in a novel, does he give us stage directions in some chapters as if he were writing a play? It creaks as much as the Pequod does when there’s a storm in the offing.

Moby Dick is a quest story in the time-honoured tradition. In the end, Captain Ahab does find the white sperm whale he blames for the loss of his leg and there’s a dramatic confrontation.

My conclusion is that, unusually, this made a far better stage play than it is a novel because the dramatisation I enjoyed was able to evoke atmosphere, tell a story and (almost literally) cut to the chase without all that digressive verbiage.

In short, it’s not a novel I would actually recommend, other than as a curiosity, although I’m quite glad I have read it.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Liza of Lambeth by W.Somerset Maugham

 

I pounced on this in my local indie bookshop, Beckenham Books. Penguin have apparently launched an archive series of seventy titles. And whether it’s intentional or not, it harks back to Alan Lane’s original plan when he launched Penguin Books. They were meant to be small format editions which you could carry about. And Odour of Chrysanthemums fits easily into any of my handbag pockets. And as someone who never leaves the house without a book, that neatness is a bonus.

So why did I pick this one? Well of course I already have it in other books but I was attracted by the format.  Odour of Chrysanthemums is one of my favourite Lawrence short stories. It features in school anthologies (or it used to) so I’ve often studied it with students and therefore know it well. Elizabeth Bates, collier’s wife and mother of two, is anxious when her husband doesn’t come back from work although he’s a heavy drinker and may just be loitering in the pub.

Actually, of course, there has been an accident and Lawrence builds the tension until eventually fellow miners carry their workmate’s body home. I’ve read it many time but am still struck afresh by the way in which Lawrence presents the totality of the Bates marriage which wasn’t bringing either of them any satisfaction. The evocative language often arrests me so  that I have to reread and marvel at sentences such as “The pit-bank loomed up beyond the pond, flames like red sores licking up its ashy sides in the afternoon’s stagnant light” or, of Walter’s dead body, “Life with its smoky burning gone from him, had left him apart and utterly alien to her.” And in contrast to all of this is Elizabeth’s father, who drives the pit train past her cottage and stops to speak to her at the beginning of the story and her mother-in-law who helps to wash the body and is already coming to terms with Walter’s death in a way Elizabeth never will.  It’s masterly.

Also in this nice little book are three other stories. I thought I had read all of Lawrence’s short stories at some point or other but I have no memory of England My England or Things but enjoyed both here. The former is another story about marital disillusionment – a well-worn Laurentian theme. It presents a woman whose marriage is rooted in idealism rather than work so the family has to be propped up by her father. Then comes 1914 and he husband reluctantly signs up with inevitable consequences and the death of idealism. Things, in a way, covers similar ground as an American couple move to Europe, collect antiques and come to be dominated by them at the cost of all else.

The fourth story, The Rocking Horse Winner, is another dear old favourite. Paul is an anxious, sensitive child who senses his mother’s profligate spending habits and is haunted by voices in the house whispering “There must be more money”. In what is almost a ghost story – or certainly fiction suffused with surrealism – Paul finds an unlikely way of making a lot of money. But it’s a morality tale too. The more his mother has the more she “needs” and Paul’s voices get ever louder with, ultimately, tragic results.

Eclectic reading is what these blogs are all about and it’s a pleasure to dip into old favourites like these. I bet there are other Lawrence stories I’ve forgotten so it’s probably time to make rediscovering them into a project.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Moby Dick by Herman Melville

REVIEW: THE UNKILLABLE MIKE MALLOY by Luke Adamson at Bridge House Theatre, Penge 8 – 26 July 2025

Susan Elkin • 10 July 2025

‘Well acted but lacks spark’ ★★★

Based on a true story. this unlikely romp takes us to the Bronx during prohibition and the Depression. A group of very hard up people decide to kill a larger-than-life Irish drunk upon whom they have taken out insurance policies. The trouble is he won’t die. They try alcohol poisoning through excess whisky, methanol, contaminated oysters, exposure and hit and run – among other things but he goes on bouncing back. Of course eventually they get caught and the piece is framed by two of them writing their confession in a prison cell in the hope that honesty might get them clemency.

It’s a three hander and all three actors, two of whom do a lot of witty doubling, are strong. There is particularly pleasing work from Stefani Ariza who plays the boss of the speakeasy where most of the action happens – and many other roles. She is impressively versatile. Bryan Pilkington gives a colourful performance as Malloy – mostly drunk and singing Irish folk songs – and morphs into other characters convincingly. Will Croft as Francis Pasqua is the anchor man who speaks direct to the audience and is a satisfactory foil to the other two.

Dan Bottomley’s sound design creates atmosphere and the basic set device – a sort of counter which becomes a bench and car, among other things, is neatly contrived.

It’s a lighthearted piece which Adamson has clearly had fun writing. And it’s a commendably quirky idea for a play. The trouble is that it’s meant to be a comedy and, although it’s mildly entertaining, it really isn’t very funny. Moreover at 90 minutes straight through it’s too long for its subject matter.

Photography: Cam Harle

THE UNKILLABLE MIKE MALLOY

Written and directed by Luke Adamson

Bridge House Theatre, Penge 8 – 26 July 2025

BOX OFFICE

Cast

Will Croft

Stefani Ariza

Bryan Pilkington

Artistic Team

Director

Luke Adamson

Writer

Luke Adamson

Producer

The Bridge House Theatre. Executive Producers: Simon Jeal, John Handscombe, Ju Owens, David Owens, Ellie Ward, Graham Telford, Tim Connery

Lighting Designer

Luke Adamson

Sound Designer

Dan Bottomley

This review was first published by London Pub Theatres Magazine: https://www.londonpubtheatres.com/review-the-unkillable-mike-malloy-by-luke-adamson-at-bridge-house-theatre-penge-8-26-july-2025

REVIEW: NOUGHTS AND CROSSES at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre 28 June – 26 July 2025

Susan Elkin • 9 July 2025

‘Passionate and gripping but over-egged’ ★★★

Malorie Blackman’s passionate young adult novel, Noughts and Crosses (2001) presents a what-if world in which white people (Noughts) are marginalised in a casually black supremacist environment, ruled by the Crosses. Within that framework she presents a version of the Romeo and Juliet story. It’s desperately uncomfortable reading for a white person as it forces you to reverse your preconceptions in almost every line because you constantly have to remind yourself who these people are and which “side” they’re on. It’s a novel which bravely tackles the fundamentals of racism.

The problem with dramatising it is that it’s visually obvious who is black and who is white so three quarters of the work is done for you and that lessens the impact and the work the “receiver” has to do. I thought this when I first saw this Dominic Cooke version when the RSC staged it in Stratford in 2007 before touring it in 2008. The same applied to the 2020 BBC TV serial. And it remains true for this open air theatre staging.

The other issue is that this was originally targeted at young people around 12-16 and that’s fine, obviously. As an English teacher, I discussed it with many classes and the students found it intensely powerful.  It means, though, that the message is so didactically rammed home on stage that it feels a bit clunky and shallow for an adult audience.  Painful jokes such as the word “whitemail” (rather than blackmail) and the poor white girl who can only get a black sticking plaster when her forehead is cut by the thrown stone, seem laboured.

Nonetheless there’s plenty to admire in this production which mostly grips although  the second half is too long. Corrina Brown as Sephy, the chirpy Cross daughter of the authoritarian deputy prime minister is attractively childlike at the start and develops her character convincingly to a mature, decisive 20 year old beset by tragedy but with very tangible hope for the future (no spoilers). Noah Valentine, who has very little stage experience, brings pleasing freshness to the troubled, marginalised, hurt and ultimately angry Callum – a Nought with complex torn loyalties who eventually becomes a member of a political terrorist movement. Behind them, as in Shakespeare, are two families with many problems and a firm reminder that wealth and privilege do not equate to happiness. Among the supporting cast there’s a fine performance from  Kate Kordel as Callum’s anguished mother, Meggie, and Jessica Layde gets Sephy’s dismissive but ultimately caring sister Minerva nicely.

Director Tinuke Craig makes imaginative use of Colin Richmond’s set – all concrete walkways and lurking places on three levels. The bomb in the shopping centre is pretty effective: cue for an awful lot of smelly stage smoke. And there’s an immaculately directed, “tasteful” sex scene – I presume school parties are expected and even the most prudish teacher or parent would find nothing to object to here.

NOUGHTS AND CROSSES Based on the novel by Malorie Blackman, Adapted by Dominic Cooke

Directed by Tinuke Craig

Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre

28 June – 26 July 2025

This review was first published by London Pub Theatres Magazine https://www.londonpubtheatres.com/review-noughts-and-crosses-at-regents-park-open-air-theatre-28-june-26-july-2025

Sarah Vine married a fellow journalist, Michael Gove. Then he became a politician and she was plunged into a role which she had certainly not signed up for. She did her utmost to be a loyal political wife but tells us in her witty, self-deprecating way that she had no talent for it. The couple are now divorced. Her candour is heart warming

It goes almost without saying that the book is a beautifully written memoir. Vine is, after all, a lifelong journalist and a Daily Mail star columnist. She knows how to hold her reader. She says herself that writing is the only thing she’s ever been any good at although she also comes across as a wonderful mother, friend and time juggler.

Brought up in Italy by rackety British parents and a father who put her down ruthlessly and constantly, Vine met Gove when she was in her early thirties and they were both working at The Times. Having been adopted in babyhood by an Aberdeen fisherman and his wife, Gove does not have an “entitled” background any more than she does. She is ever conscious of this even as they become close friends with “Dave” and “Sam” Cameron who come from a very different social sphere. Gove gets a safe seat and the Conservatives are elected.

The fly in the ointment – as the brilliantly clever Gove becomes ever more tied up in his Education secretary role and then becomes Justice Secretary –  is the referendum and Brexit. Gove has always been anti-European and, aligns himself prominently with the Leavers.  Vine is very interesting about how, for a long time, this was almost a casual, intellectual, amicable, hypothetical difference of opinion. At dinner parties there were often people of all persuasions amiably chatting together without acrimony. Then in June 2016, to everyone’s astonishment Leave beat Remain by a substantial majority. Suddenly everything was toxic.

Vine believes that Cameron scuppered the future of Brexit by resigning although she doesn’t say much about how how deliberate she thinks this was this. What would have happened, she speculates, if he had calmly summoned Gove and Johnson and said: “You won. Didn’t see that coming. Now what’s the plan?” That, she implies, would have been the grown up, rational thing to do. Instead we got Theresa May, failing dismally to “get Brexit done” with all the fall-out that caused and is still causing.

However, this is not a political memoir. It’s a rueful, sometimes sad, very personal account of one women who was stuck in the middle of it all despite not really wanting to be there. She is still grieving for the loss of what she thought was a lifelong friendship with Samantha Cameron. She is godmother to Florence Cameron from whom she is now estranged. She was sure that the bond between the two families, whose children grew up together, was stronger than disagreements about trade deals. Alas, as she comments sadly, there is no such thing as friendship in politics.

Throughout this account, Vine discusses their memories with her children, Bea and Will who are now young adults. She also talks to Gove. I know several divorced couples who’ve established a post-divorce rapport and say that they have better conversations now than they ever did when they were married – which is what Vine says too. She also says ruefully, more than once, that Brexit destroyed her marriage – and a number of other marriages. And of course, since she grew up in Italy and has a brother in Spain, her own personal views about the EU  are – she now admits – much less cut and dried than her ex-husbands were/are,

Probably the most horrifying thing is this book are revelations about the difficulties of being a family in the limelight when you’re cast as pariahs. Appalling incidents include a hateful encounter in New York when a holidaying British couple spotted the Gove family in the street and hurled abuse and foul language at them. And how dare teachers (I used to be one so I feel strongly about this) tease or pester pupils about the actions of their parents? But some of them did. At one point her son Will is bottling so much pent-up fury that he loses his temper with a computer game and has an argument with a plate glass door which leads to serious cuts, A&E and many stitches.

And throughout all this, Vine, by her own account just wants to go to work and do what she likes doing – despite health issues (thyroid) which she makes light of.

You don’t need to be aligned to any particular political party or to admire Michael Gove’s decisions and standpoints, or for that matter to like Vine’s Daily Mail columns, to be moved by this blisteringly honest, and very compelling, book.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Odour of Crysanthemums by DH Lawrence