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The Washing Line (Susan Elkin reviews)

The Washing Line – Chickenshed, London

Reviewer: Susan Elkin

Photo of The Reviews Hub - LondonThe Reviews Hub – LondonMarch 15, 2025

0 2 minutes read
The Washing Line 12.03.25 CD 129
 Image: Caz Dyer

Devisers and creators: Michael Bossisse, Dave Carey and Bethany Hamlin

This powerful and disturbing show tells the horrifying story of the mass suicide of over 900 people in a 1970s religious cult, based in Guyana. And as cast members agree, talking over real-life footage at the end, it is extraordinary to be able to take events as grim as these and create art from them – but Michael Bossisse, Dave Carey and Bethany Hamlin and their huge, richly inclusive, young cast carry it off with thoughtful professionalism and enormous energy.

The Rayne Theatre, configured with a huge traverse playing area for this production, is strewn with dozens of dead bodies as the audience finds seats and music plays softly. Then the appalled first responders, handkerchiefs to their noses, arrive in temperatures of over 80 degrees F. Flies buzz on the soundtrack. Thereafter, with the aid of large screens the story is unfolded in a series of clear flashbacks and flashforwards as we gradually learn how the Jonestown cult began, the history of Rev Jimmy Jones, the members who spotted danger and fled, the assassination of US Congressman Leo Ryan who tried to investigate, and the response in the years since the events, now categorised as mass murder.

The main narrative medium is dance drama with compelling choreography (also by Bossisse and Hamlin) while MD Dave Carey provides evocative, pulsating music in late 1970s style. Cast members speak with their lithe bodies, engage in leaps and lifts and there’s one very beautiful sequence with a circus-style wheel.

And it’s all seamlessly hooked together with dialogue and song including a big choral number at the beginning of the second act. It is clearly heading towards mass death – bodies like washing on a line – from the moment the lights go down and yet this cast also conveys that there was peace, happiness and fulfilment at Jonestown which is why most of them stayed including young people, couples with families and mothers with new babies.

The cast is Chickenshed’s usual, gloriously diverse mix of young members (teenagers rather than children in this case) and adult staffers, most of whom have a long history with the organisation. Jonny Morton is charismatically sinister as Jimmy Jones and makes it perfectly plausible that so many people trust him unquestioningly. We also see him, in youth, killing a cat because it would be “happier dead than alive” and the number of women he keeps close as well as his wife (Sarah Driver – good) sets alarm bells ringing. Ashley Driver is strong as the detective in charge of the initial investigation and Alex Brennan is good as the commonsensible young man who wants to get out.

The Washing Line began life in 2017 as a Chickenshed Foundation Degree final year production entitled What’s Wrong With Jim? It was then developed into a full-blown show and staged in spring 2022. It has been adapted, deepened and expanded for this revival.

This is one of those rare shows at the end of which the audience is so shocked and moved that applause somehow seems trivial. There is no curtain call and it’s unusually quiet as people file out.

Runs until 5 April 2025

Star rating: 4.5

This review was first published by The Reviews Hub: https://www.thereviewshub.com/the-washing-line-chickenshed-london/

 

Zauberflöte

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Royal Academy Opera

Susie Sainsbury Theatre, Royal Academy of Music

 Faced with such an incomprehensible narrative as Zauberflöte every director has to find a way of making some sort of sense of it. Jamie Morton and his design team set it in a hospital and why not? The whole thing is conceived as Tamino’s drugged dreams and nightmares as he lies in intensive care, ventilated and sedated. Thus, the three ladies become sinister nurses, Papageno and Papagena are cleaners, Pamina is his anxious bedside girlfriend and Sarastro a benign authoritarian consultant. It isn’t quite clear where The Queen of the Night and Monostatos fit into this conceit but never mind. Lots of ensemble tableaux (Royal Academy Opera Chorus), with drip stands, wheelchairs, crutches and the like, help to nail the ambience. I’m not sure that Mozart or his librettist,  Emmanuel Schikaneder, would have recognised it but  hey, this is 2025 so that’s fine.

All the principals role-share across the four performances. On 18th March, which was Press Night, I saw a strong cast amongst whom Conrad Chatterton is outstanding as Papageno – rueful, pragmatic and with a gift for making those familiar numbers sound as if you’ve never heard them before. He uses his physicality well too as he towers above almost everyone else on stage. Monostatos is probably the hardest role to bring off because it’s difficult to fathom who or what he’s actually meant to be. Clad in Wizard-like robes, an intriguing headdress and doing a lot of writhing, Owen Lucas makes him feel enjoyably sinister. Grace Hope-Gill finds all the puzzled wistfulness Pamina needs and as her mother, Binny Supin Yang, dressed in shiny PVC,  hits all those show-stopping top notes with menacing enthusiasm.

My biggest issue with this production is lighting, designed by Charlie Morgan-Jones. Of course, it’s meant to be hazy – we’re inside one man’s hallucinations but 2 hours and 35 minutes is a long time to watch something so relentlessly dark, with more stage smoke than I’ve seen in ages, that one was soon longing for a scene or two in which one could actually see what was going on. Second, the main lighting/stage design device is a quasi canopy of glowing tubes to connote institutional strip lights. These pointlessly change colour, re-angle and rise up and down continuously until it becomes a distracting irritant.

That’s a minor gripe, though. It’s a treat to see emerging singers delivering a generally pleasing production. I admire the decision to play this in the original German which must have been a challenge for some cast members but they rise to it with aplomb. Moreover, as always, Royal Academy Sinfonia, conducted this time by Olivia Clarke, are well balanced and supportive. Clarke is adept at allowing the audience to hear the musical detail – especially in the magical moment with flute (Sofia Patterson-Gutierrz) and timp (Anna Fyi).

I bought this book on autopilot because I’m an enthusiastic Elly Griffiths fan. I love her nonchalant present tense style, her wit and her engaging characters including cats. And I have fond memories of interviewing her in a Brighton café for Ink Pellet a few years ago. However, apart from noticing that this new book was the first in a new crime series, I had no idea what it was about.

And it was a shock. This is crime fiction spliced with sci-fi and hey, I don’t “do” fantasy of any sort so at 5% in (I was reading it on Kindle) I considered throwing it crossly aside. I didn’t want to read about time travel, thanks very much. But, because this is TGEG (The Great Elly Griffiths) and because I’d paid for it, I read on –  sceptically. And thank goodness I did. I should have trusted her. She can make anything compelling and by the time I’d got to 15% I was completely hooked.

Ali Dawson is a police officer in her fifties with a long history of failed marriages and an adult son, Finn, whom she adores. She now works for a special unit engaged on cold cases – very cold because the current one dates back to 1850. Think His Dark Materials, Alice in Wonderland, Narnia and even Enid Blyton’s The Magic Faraway Tree because Ali actually visits the period and place in question. And the reason it works fictionally is that she and her colleagues daren’t tell anyone what they’re doing because the reaction, obviously, would be cynical disbelief and suspicion of laughable irrationality. And a feet-on-the-ground reader like me identifies very much with that. Moreover Griffiths is very hot on the day-to-day details – food, clothing, sanitation and so on – at both ends which make it convincing. And there’s wry humour in that Ali has her 2023 brain and experience with her even in 1850 so there are some delicious anachronisms and characters she meets find her speech mode very strange. She explains by saying she comes from Hastings.

Finn is a special adviser to a Tory cabinet minister and the intricate, quasi gothic plot links his boss with the events in 1850 as we, like Dawson and Griffiths ponder metaphysical questions about how the past affects the present and vice-versa. If you move back in time can you change events? And could Ali have been murdered, or painted in 1850? Could someone from 1850 have come “through the gate” (an experience which causes terrible vertigo, by the way) to commit crimes in 2023?

When all is said and done, this novel is a whodunit. And I didn’t see the answer coming – yet another Griffiths strength. She’s very adept at keeping you guessing and springing surprises.

The Frozen People is great fun and very entertaining – as Griffiths always is. I’m now very intrigued to see where she takes this next because it is very clearly presented as the start of a series. I don’t think she’s likely to convert me to fantasy in general but she has certainly taught me a lesson about managing my prejudices and preferences.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Rule Britannia by Daphne du Maurier

REVIEW: HAVISHAM by Heather Alexander at Jack Studio Theatre 11 – 15 March 2025

Susan Elkin • 11 March 2025

‘Excellence marred by inappropriate music’ ★★★ ½

This one woman show is a fine piece of writing and Heather Alexander’s acting is sensitively nuanced.

We first meet Miss Havisham, familiar as the deranged, jilted bride in Great Expectations (1861) as a child of four, motherless, frightened and fragile. Alexander then depicts her being beaten for wetting herself in church, growing up (the onset of menstruation is a bit hammy) and spending too much time alone. And there are experiences in her life which Dickens probably never dreamed of. It’s imaginative work. Ultimately she’s a very vulnerable young woman whose father shows her no love but leaves her the Satis estate in Kent on the marshes of the Hoo Peninsula when he dies. She blossoms and becomes more confident in London living with her aunt but then she meets James Compeyson and we all know where it’s going. 

Alexander is a talented actor, as convincing as a young child as she is as a suave conman. She communicates expressively with her face and fingers. And Havisham is a compelling piece of theatre in two short acts. The set is neat too – lots of white lace, stage smoke and it’s amazing what you can do with two orange boxes and a piece of sheeting.

The sound effects are strong but adding other voices feels like a cop out in a one person drama. Moreover the music is very odd. The folk songs are anachronistic because most people didn’t know them until they were discovered and popularised by Cecil Sharp and co in the early 20th century. A brass band would not have performed Seventeen Come Sunday in the 1860s. And why the repeated use of a Baroque concerto? The piece – presumably Hot Gossip because that’s where Alexander’s background lies – which accompanies tragic Miss Havisham’s final descent into disaster doesn’t add much either. If these choices are meant to make the piece feel timeless then they fall sadly flat.

Havisham is worth seeing, though, for at least two additional reasons. First, any one woman show is a welcome antidote to the large number of one man shows on offer and deserves to be supported. Second, back stories to familiar characters from well known literature are a fertile and very interesting concept.

Photographer: Peter Mould

HAVISHAM by Heather Alexander at Jack Studio Theatre 11 – 15 March 2025, presented by Emul8 Theatre

BOX OFFICE https://brockleyjack.co.uk/

This review was first published by London Pub Theatres: https://www.londonpubtheatres.com/review-havisham-by-heather-alexander-at-jack-studio-theatre-11-15-march-2025

Vienna Tonkunstler Orchestra

Conductor: Yutaka Sado

Pianist: Yeol Eum Son

Cadogan Hall, Zurich International Orchestra Series 2024-5

 

There are several things to note about this enjoyable concert before we even get to the music. First, a splendid Austrian orchestra, conducted by a Japanese and working with a South Korean soloist is a fine demonstration of the inclusive internationalism of classical music. Second, it’s a joy to see an orchestra of this calibre led with energetic panache by someone so young. Jacob Meining is only 29. Third, even in 2025, it is still unusual to see, and hear, a female timpanist so bravo Margit Schoberleitner. You did a grand job.

Because Sibelius’s Symphony No 7 is “through-written” – that is without breaks between movements – and relatively short, it makes an satisfactory, if unusual, overture-like concert opener. Yutaka Sado leaned on Sibelius’s trademark big brass tunes and ensured we heard lots of crisp, incisive, distinctly Austrian string sound especially in the long slurred runs. An ascending scale is not, I have to say and always think, the most inspiring of recurrent motifs but this performance made it sound pretty fresh and arresting.

If you’re Austrian, as most members of this orchestra are, Mozart is in your blood and his Piano Concerto No 21 was accompanied here with charm and lightness. And Yeol Eum Son delights. She has an attractive feathery touch and blends her sound perfectly with the orchestra’s. She found plenty of elegant drama in the first movement’s cadenza and I really liked the flute and bassoon work in this movement. We then got an affectionately elegant account of Mozart’s most famous andante and a resounding allegro. She followed the concerto with a witty little encore, which I was unable to identify, in which her fingers moved so fast they disappeared.

After the interval the full orchestra returned for a warm and imaginative account of Brahms Symphony No 1. Sado rarely consults the score and often turns his baton into his sleeve in order to get deep and personal with his fingers. Sometimes he barely conducts at all. He simply sets them off and they play. He exaggerates tempi – especially in the opening of the concluding adagio which was very slow and played at the softest possible dynamic to allow for exciting crescendo and accelerando passages. Arguably, when he got to the big melody with trombones and muted violins it was a bit self-indulgent but it pleased the crowd by this point in the evening. Other highlights included nicely balanced horn interjections in the first movement and poignant string work in the andante with the leader’s solo at the end as moving as I’ve ever heard it.

Then there was an encore. Of course there was. Brahms’s Hungarian Rhapsody No 5 was a perfect choice with its almost absurd alternating swoops and fast string passages topped with lots of exciting wind parts. Fun to listen to and fun to play.

Journalist Tim Devlin is once more on an investigative trail of nursery rhymes and, as ever, the depth of his research is very impressive. He goes all over the country, interviews descendants of families who may be featured in the rhymes and spends many hours in The British Library, The Bodleian and elsewhere. This new book which examines another fourteen rhymes is a welcome sequel to Cracking Humpty Dumpty, and is again rather beautifully and informatively illustrated by Katarina Dragoslavic.

Of course Devlin is by no means the first person to have done this and he now has a honed technique. He examines all the other explanations for each rhyme – in a pleasingly business-like but accessible style – debunks, the fanciful or impossible and finally comes to a tentative conclusion of his own.

Who or what, for example, were those four and twenty blackbirds? Well for a start, huge pastry containers out of which dwarves, animals or birds would burst as entertainment  at courtly dinners were a Tudor commonplace so the hapless “birds” hadn’t been baked at all. Were the birds the 24 letters of the Tudor alphabet in celebration of the first printing of the English Bible in 1535? Were they an allegory for the number of hours in a full day? Was the rhyme poking fun at Henry James Pye, appointed poet Laureate in 1790, whose verse was full of lines such as “vocal groves and feathered choirs”? Some versions feature “naughty boys” rather than blackbirds. Pirates? Probably not. As so often, it turns out that the dates are wrong. But, bearing in mind that the first sixpence was minted in 1551, Devlin wonders whether the rhyme could have been written in celebration of Edward VI’s birthday in 1553. He has studied the hapless young king’s “chronicle” (diary) in the British Library via microfiche and discovered a keen personal interest in the coinage. Fascinating stuff.

And what about that “cock-horse” so familiar to anyone who, in childhood, has ever been jogged on the leg of a strong male relation? Is it literally a mythical creature which is half-cock and half-horse as depicted on an Etruscan vase? Aristophanes used the hybrid in The Birds to characterise a “cocky” character. There’s a pub in Kent on the Pilgrim’s Way near the bottom of Detling Hill, called The Cock Horse. According to a recent issue of Dover Kent Archives: “The name is derived from the need to supply a cock [ie extra] to get stagecoaches and heavy wagons up a steep hill”/ Then there  are traditional hobby horses as children’s toys – a stick with a horse’s head at one end – which dates back, delightfully, at least to Sparta in the fourth century BC. And so Devlin goes on gleefully and filling me with glee too as we unpick Mother Goose, Pop Goes the Weasel, London Bridge, Little Miss Muffet and more.

In his epilogue, Devlin proposes the setting up of a National Centre for Nursery Rhymes because he is concerned (as am I) that they are rapidly disappearing from our culture. And he has some inspiring ideas about what this might include and how it might work. But it needs support and sponsorship. Contact him via  www.crackingnurseryrhymes.co.uk if you’re interested.

This book, ISBN 9781399985734, is published by Susak Press and available from www.crackingnurseryrhymes.co.uk 

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The Frozen People by Elly Griffiths

Philharmonia

Conductor: Ryan Bancroft

Pianist: Michelle Cann

Royal Festival Hall

07 March 2025

 

It’s hard to think of a trickier concert opener than Charles Ives’s otherworldy The Unanswered Question which – shades of Bruckner 7 – starts almost imperceptibly, relies on pianissimo strings , gently shifting harmonies and must require exceptional levels of concentration. Ryan Bancroft, conducting without baton for the whole of this concert, brought out the best in the Philharmonia and created a compelling sound world, especially given the trumpet interjections with the trumpeter (Jason Evans) in a box elsewhere in the auditorium.

Thence to the much more familiar territory of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 4 and an arresting performance by American pianist Michelle Cann, wearing a wonderfully glittery dress with inbuilt cloak and working with Philharmonia for the first time. She set a gentle tempo with her initial piano statement and we got mellifluous orchestra playing with lots of loving detail in the rest of the movement. It is, however, the ground breaking (for 1806) andante which really distinguishes this concerto and Cann played it with masses of colour and exaggerated elasticity which added to the integral intimacy, while the accompanying string work was pleasingly incisive. Then came a cheerfully insouciant account of the Rondo with some pretty stunning left hand work in the cadenza. There is something faintly incongruous about using natural trumpets and timps alongside a Steinway concert grand but the piano tone was pretty bright and it worked.

I have long since come to the conclusion that the best way to take Also sprach Zarathustra is to “read” it as a fine symphonic work rather than getting too hung up on the Nietzschian philosophy which inspired it. With that in mind I enjoyed the Philharmonia’s take on the famous opening statement which becomes the theme for the rest of the work – delivered with as many fs as possible and exactly the sort of full-blooded live performance I hankered to hear during Lockdown when I couldn’t have it. And the orchestra then gave a magnificent and moving account of all those individualised string parts, often building from the back. My “plus one” at this concert observed that Also sprach Zarathustra, written when Strauss was only 32, is Brahms meets Stravinsky and that’s exactly the quality which Bancroft brought out in this rendering. The performance of the whole piece was eloquent, controlled and dramatic with excellent work from timpanist, Antoine Sigure. And Scott Dickinson’s viola solos added a richly plaintive element.

REVIEW: One Day When We Were Young by Nick Payne at Park Theatre 26 Feb – 22 Mar 2025

Susan Elkin • 4 March 2025

Photography: Danny Kaan

‘Well directed, elegant poignancy’ ★★★★

Violet (Cassie Bradley) and Leonard (Barney White) are spending the night in a Bath hotel during a 1940s bombing raid, He is about to leave for the Far East as a conscript and is terrified. Fast forward to the 1960s, when they meet in a park and we learn that they didn’t have a happy ending together (no spoilers). Then we join them in their eighties when she visits him in his bachelor Luton home. The title fits this poignant play perfectly.

The Day When We Were Young, which dates from 2011, runs for just 85 minutes and is, in its way as elegant as a Mozart concerto with its three “movements”, solo lines and tempo changes.

Both actors catch the awkwardness and hesitancy of these taut interchanges and they are very good at strained silence and at one nice moment near the beginning when they jump up and down in the bed in sheer joy. Director James Haddrell knows exactly how to develop the required chemistry in a simple but powerful two hander.

In the final scene they have convincingly aged 60 years. They move with well observed, careful slowness. Barney White’s Leonard painfully repeats himself a lot and clearly has the beginnings of dementia as well as declining physical health. As Violet, Cassie Bradley – who, unlike solitary Leonard has enjoyed a successful, happy life – struggles to open a packet of Jaffacakes and to text to her daughter on her Nokia phone. Even their voices are modulated differently. It is fine, moving acting.

Pollyanna Elston’s design delights too. The window shatters during the air raid and it’s achieved in a low-tech but effective way as are the two scene shifts, managed by the actors, which convert the bed into a park bench and then into Leonard’s sofa. And Aidan Good has done well with the sound – from escalating, whining explosions to the distant sound of children playing in the 1960s to the gentle patter of relentless rain, every inch the “pathetic fallacy”, in the final scene.

This is impressive, compelling theatre and well worth catching. It is good moreover to see Greenwich Theatre getting out and about. This is the first show to be staged anywhere other than at its home venue.

One Day When We Were Young by Nick Payne at Park Theatre

26 Feb – 22 Mar 2025

Produced by Greenwich Theatre

BOX OFFICE https://parktheatre.co.uk/event/one-day-when-we-were-young/

Cast

VIOLET | CASSIE BRADLEY

LEONARD | BARNEY WHITE

Creative Team

WRITER | NICK PAYNE

DIRECTOR | JAMES HADDRELL

DESIGNER | POLLYANNA ELSTON

LIGHTING DESIGNER | HENRY SLATER

SOUND DESIGNER | AIDAN GOOD

STAGE MANAGER | CORA PARKINSON

PRE-PRODUCTION PHOTOGRAPHY | SIMON HILDREW

PRODUCTION PHOTOGRAPHY | DANNY KAAN

VIDEOGRAPHY | ADAM NIGHTINGALE

GRAPHIC DESIGN | TOM MANN (GHOSTLIGHT

Review first published by LPTM: https://www.londonpubtheatres.com/review-the-day-when-we-were-young-by-nick-payne-at-park-theatre-26-feb-22-mar-2025