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After Life (Susan Elkin reviews)

After Life

Tower Theatre until 08 March

Star rating: 3

 

You have to hand it to the Tower Theatre Company. The range of what they produce is impressive – probably the most varied, diverse and eclectic programming of any theatre in London. After Life by Hirokazu Kore-edo, adapted by Jack Thorne and directed by Alexander Kampmann is firmly in the tradition of their doing something pretty different rather competently.

The premise is that we’re in what the Catholics used to call “limbo”: a place where the dead go immediately after death for sorting. But this is not about God, religion or judgement – other than each individual’s own about his/her future. Instead each person has to choose a single memory to be reconstructed and re-enacted by the resident “staff” and then it, and only it, will be carried into permanence by the person who owns it. The ambience is clearly Japanese with a huge transparent, red full moon (set design by Angelika Michitsch) with lots of autumn leaves and cherry blossom.

It’s poignantly autumnal and fairly thoughtful even though it’s theatrically well off-centre. Moreover. there are several fine performances amongst this cast of eleven. The five staff have an air of melancholy about them because, businesslike and kindly as they are, they have each failed to find an appropriate memory so they are stuck where they are. Then Romain Mereau’s character discovers he has a connection with one of the newly dead and it gives him the lift he needs – it’s sensitive, intelligent, imaginative acting. And Jess Shiner, whose character (a young death) is ebullient and inappropriate provides lots of enjoyable dramatic contrast.  James Taverner is moving as Hirokazu, desperately missing his wife, and Katie Smith is strong as the stereotypical staff member who strides about bossily.

After Life is a wordy play and won’t be everyone’s cup of tea but it  has its moments. There’s humour there too because Jack Thorne has these people speaking as casually as if they were in an office and the incongruity of that is quite fun in places.

When I arrived at Bishop Otter College, Chichester to train as a teacher in 1965 all I knew about Ibsen was Grieg’s Peer Gynt music. I hadn’t done English A Level either. That’s a long story – all explained in my 2024 book, All Booked Up (Amazon and via bookshops if you’re interested). But back in 1965 I opted to do main course English which is what led to my becoming an English teacher. At Bishop Otter “English” meant literature in English, including translation. Thanks Miss Marjorie Hiller for opening the Ibsen door for me: You were truly inspirational.

Thus I first read Hedda Gabler – and saw a production not long after – in a classroom at Bishop Otter and I still have my old Una Ellis-Fermor, Penguin Classics translation, annotated as we went along. This I’ve just reread alongside the Patrick Marber version which the National Theatre commissioned and staged in 2016 with Ruth Jones in the title role – a production I saw and reviewed. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen Hedda Gabler. It must be at least six.

Hedda, the daughter of the famous General Gabler, has married Jorgen, an enthusiastic but run-of-the-mill academic and they’ve just returned to their new home in Oslo (called Kristiania in 1890 when Ibsen wrote the play) after a six month honeymoon/research trip. She has married for status rather than love and clearly isn’t happy. She is reluctantly, but not openly, pregnant, detests Jorgen’s beloved aunt, despises her “school friend,” has history with two male visitors and treats the family retainer with patrician contempt. The obsession with her father’s pistols signals, almost from the beginning, that this can’t possibly end happily.

Rereading the text now, after a long absence from it, I’m struck by Ibsen’s long elaborate stage directions which Ellis-Fermor gives us at length and, I presume, in full although I can’t read the original in Dano-Norwegian to check. He is effectively both directing and designing the play in great detail. He must have been both a man of his time and a control freak. Marber, of course, like other writers of more recent versions (including Cordelia Lynn’s 2019 take on it, Hedda Tesman, for Chichester Festival Theatre) strips all that away and leaves the director and designer some space. He loosens the setting too. We’re in a “A city in Europe” in the present. The trouble with that is the inevitable anachronisms. You can’t have characters debating whether to use first names one minute – which seems about 50 years out of date – and commiserating with parking problems the next.

Plays, however, as I used to remind my students in almost every lesson, are meant to be seen not read. The text is dead until actors bring it to life. Nonetheless it is worth studying the text of any worthwhile play in order to consider the nuances and, if it’s something which has to be translated (Cf Chekhov and Strindberg) then it’s illuminating and sensible to read more than one translation.

And I never read a play text without thinking of Sylvia Young, she of Sylvia Young Theatre School fame. She once told me in an interview that, as a voracious child reader, she had soon read all the novels in the junior library but was regarded as too young to be allowed access to adult ones. So she read plays because they were the nearest thing she could get to novels and nobody noticed the “unsuitable” content.  And that was where her interest in theatre began.

So read a play or two for an occasional change. It’s quite rewarding.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The Mother Goose Mysteries by Tim Devlin 

Mao Fujita plays Mozart part 1

Royal Festival Hall, 02 March 2025

It is a privilege to hear such an assured performance of Mozart’s final piano concerto (no 27 K595), probably written just months before the composer’s death in 1791.

Mao Fujita, still only 25, has an exceptionally sensitive technique and took a delicate approach to the first movement especially in the expansive cadenza. He then gave us an expressive larghetto with lots of nicely done musical dialogue especially from the cellos who were seated next to first violins, with double basses immediately behind them for this concert. The allegro came with an unusual, charismatic blend of intensity and insouciance particularly in the passages where the piano is counterpointed with the wind and in the impressive cadenza  which I’ve rarely heard played with quite so much rubato.

With Giedre Slekyte on the podium for her first concert with the Philharmonia the afternoon began with Kodaly’s Dances of Galanta and ended with Brahms’s Symphony No I both of which require larger forces and neither of which was quite as successful as the Mozart.

She has a bold conducting technique using lots of circular left hand movement and wide armed gestures as well as signalling with her fingers. The start of the Kodaly – which is not an obvious concert opener anyway – was awkward and although it soon settled with lovely string sound  in the Andante maestoso and lots of gypsy excitement, the tempo changes and the joins between dances were not always seamless.

Slekyte – expansive conducting and plenty of colour –  leaned heavily on the dynamics in the first movement of the Brahms which packed it with more tension than it often gets but the tempo change was ragged. The beautiful oboe melody (Timothy Rundle in fine form) in the Andante was neatly controlled and movingly picked up by Philharmonia leader, Zolt-Tihamer Visontay who, incidentally, seemed to be even more alert than usual in this concert. The orchestra was playing together very well by the Adagio which got a poised opening, incisive horn and flute solos along with plenty of Brahmsian grandiosity with some pleasingly judged contrasts.

I had an unusual experience at this concert in that I took with me, as my plus one, a septuagenarian friend who had never before been to an orchestral concert and knew none of this music. She enjoyed it a lot and that means that the performance was a great success in every way that matters, a few flaws notwithstanding. It is essential, given the parlous state of classical music in this country, that we attract and please new audiences and, QED, it can be done without dumbing down.

 

REVIEW: THE SCORE by Oliver Cotton at Theatre Royal Haymarket 20 February – 26 April 2025

Susan Elkin • 28 February 2025
Photography: Manuel Harlan

‘Bitty play beautifully acted’ ★★★

In May 1747, the elderly JS Bach travelled from Leipzig to Potsdam at the invitation of Frederick the Great. It resulted in a composition of a set of pieces called The Musical Offering and allowed “the most famous composer in Europe” to catch up with his son CPE (Carl Philipp Emanuel) Bach who worked at Frederick’s court for 27 years. It’s an interesting starting point for a play.

The trouble is that it tries to fire on too many cylinders at once and seems unable to decide what it’s trying to do. Is it about personal conflict between two very strong men? Is it about music and the compositional process? Is it about three lesser known, sycophantic composers comically creating the great JS Bach with an “unfugable” theme and gambling on the outcome? Is it about the obscenity of land-grabbing war? Is is about the strength of religious conviction butting against Enlightenment atheism? Or are we meant to draw topical parallels? It had never struck me before that if you substitute Ukraine for Silesia, Putin is simply Frederick the Great without his flute although the play doesn’t stress this point. It simply muddles on for two hours and forty minutes including interval.

At the heart of this play is a magnificent performance from Brian Cox as JS Bach which almost redeems it. He blends irascibility with tenderness and fury about the earlier Prussian raid on Leipzig. His fearless berating of Stephen Hagan’s Frederick is fine theatre and we feel all the frustration of a sick old man when he finally gets home. The first and last scenes affectionately present him with his second wife Anna, played by Cox’s real-life wife Nicole Ansari-Cox. JS Bach, the cantor who had to serve up a new cantata every week, was a deeply religious man and it underpins everything Cotton’s version of him does and says – all convincingly nailed by Cox.

Hagan’s Frederick is variously chatty, urbane, imperious and ruthless. He glitters dangerously but makes everything he says sound reasonable until he gets angry and launches into nationalistic rhetoric. It’s another fine performance and a strong dramatic contrast to Cox’s Bach. There’s pleasing work too from Juliet Garrick as Emilia the servant and from Jamie Wilkes as CPE Bach.

Robert Jones’s set and costumes star in their own right although the occasional use of the revolve is a bit pointless. Flown in scenery includes a plain wall with Christian cross in the Bach family home which contrasts with rather lovely carved doors and a pair of ionic columns with lots of oil paintings at Potsdam. And he’s had fun with authentic late eighteenth century long velvet jackets and the inevitable wigs. It’s a nice touch that JS Bach’s comfy wig looks like a homely grey bonnet and we learn that he can’t be bothered to have it “dressed”. The harpsichords are pretty too.

Because this is, at least in part, a play about music, we hear snatches of great Bach works which shine through and one is left wishing for more. Sound designer and additional composer Sophie Cotton certainly knows what she’s doing.

It isn’t Oliver Cotton’s fault that when Peter de Jersey arrives as a hammed up Voltaire, I am immediately put in mind of an appalling OU programme which was part of my 1980s degree course – not one of the, usually excellent, OU’s finer moments. It created an imaginary dinner party at Potsdam in which every Enlightenment figure expressed a view which was meant to help us learn who thought what. In fact it was the most laughably bad acting I’ve ever seen. I still giggle to think about it. Of course The Score is a hundred times better than that.

THE SCORE at Theatre Royal 20 February – 26 April 2025

BOX OFFICE

A new play by Oliver Cotton

Starring Brian Cox and Nicole Ansari-Cox

Directed by Trevor Nunn

Theatre Royal Bath Productions

Ensemble: Peter De Jersey as Voltaire, Juliet Garricks as Emilia, Stephen Hagan as Frederick, Jamie Wilkes as Carl, Christopher Staines as Quantz, Toby Webster as Benda, Matthew Romain as Graun and James Gladdon as Helstein, with Geoffrey Towers, Jordan Kilshaw and Rebecca Thornhill. 

Review first published by LPTM https://www.londonpubtheatres.com/review-the-score-by-oliver-cotton-at-theatre-royal-20-february-26-april-2025

The Magic Flute

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Charles Court Opera

Wilton’s Music Hall

 Star rating: 4

Photograph credit: Bill Knight

I had high hopes of this show and every one of them was fulfilled. This is Mozart as you’ve never seen it before. The Charles Court version is meticulously fresh, beautifully sung and very funny. Director John Savournin is himself an accomplished singer and actor so he knows exactly how to make this material work in a way which trusts the material but isn’t afraid of originality. The gloriously witty translation and Eaton’s musical direction from the keyboard ensures that the whole experience is a pleasure.

Matthew Kellet is outstanding as Papageno, played as a mercurial, down-to-earth man of the people who manages the leafy, jungly garden of Sarastro’s temple, including of course, the birds. Kellet hops about (often in rhythm)  engages with the audience and gets our sympathy. He is master of comic physicality and his diction is the clearest I’ve ever heard in this role.

Martins Smaukstelis gives us an earnest Tamino, an explorer with satchel (we’re loosely in the early 20th century) having first been freed from netting by the three ladies – conflating him with the monster that they’re usually dealing with in the opening scene which is an ingenious idea. He too, like everyone else in this fine cast of nine, is a compelling singer.

Peter Lidbetter’s Sarastro packs all the gravitas you could wish for – a well articulated contrast to Kellet’s Papageno – singing all those very low bass notes with precision. Of course The Queen of the Night is a challenging role because her two big numbers are very well known indeed and the audience awaits them expectantly. Eleri Gwylym, looking terrifying with a scarlet band of makeup across her face, long grey hair and lots of lace, rises to that challenge, hits every high note with aplomb and exudes malice.

This is a revival production with new work from revival director, James Hurley and revival designer Lucy Fowler (original design by Simon Bejer) and it sits happily in the space at Wlitons with its central steps leading downstage. The ultra-violet lit puppet snakes are a bit of a show stopper.

As you’d expect from Charles Court this is a bijoux take on The Magic Flute running just two hours plus interval. Cast size means that there is doubling of some roles but it’s done adeptly and it makes for some very clear singing of ensemble numbers. Die-hard traditionalists might object to the cuts but it flows and the story telling is much clearer than usual. The plot is bonkers but this version makes it almost coherent.

Charles Court Opera is celebrating its 20th year in 2025. Here’s to the next twenty and I’m looking forward to Patience at Wilton’s in September already.

REVIEW: BACKSTROKE by Anna Mackmin at Donmar Warehouse until 12 April 2025

Susan Elkin • 23 February 2025

Image: Celia Imrie (photographer Johan Persson)

‘pleasingly crafted domestic drama’ ★★★ ½

Anna Mackmin’s pleasingly crafted new play is about mothers, motherhood, matriarchy and matrescence. As such it tries, in places, to be slightly too clever and to include too many issues. Nonetheless, there’s much to admire – and my case strongly identify with – here.

Beth (Celia Imrie) has a stroke and is taken to hospital where she lies inertly. We see the hospitalisation scene with paramedics twice for no particular reason. Thereafter her life and complicated relationship with her daughter Bo (Tamsin Grieg) is gradually unpicked in a series of flashbacks.

Imrie is, of course, very good indeed as this colourful, outrageous, irrational, difficult, irritating and capricious woman, vacillating between affectionate support and cruel put downs. She flounces, grins, shouts. says things mothers shouldn’t say to daughters and we wince. And she’s sliding into dementia in an impeccably observed and cruelly recognisable way.

It is, however, Grieg’s outstanding performance that one leaves the theatre thinking about. She wears a simple T shirt, Levis and boots with only a cardigan and a scarf to indicate occasional mood shifts. We see her aged 6, 13, 18, 21, 30, 50 and 51 and she nails it with total conviction every time. And she has an extraordinary way of revealing her thoughts as she turns away from her mother in fury, frustration, disbelief exhaustion and more – because, like almost every woman in her position – she has a demanding life of her own mainly focused on, Skylar, a troubled child she has adopted, an aspect of the plot which is not fully developed.

Among the remaining all-female cast, Lucy Briars is strong as a dour but well meaning nurse with Anita Reynolds contrasting as cuddly kind one, Georgina Rich, meanwhile, gives us a very plausible, play-it-by-the-book doctor who doesn’t listen much, along with a gentle but businesslike funeral director.

Lex Brotherston’s set puts the play on three levels with most of the action downstage at stalls audience level, the hospital room in the middle and some distant scenes – including a rather effective one at a swimming pool – on a platform above. It works pretty well.

Then there’s the film aspect of the production. Sudden flashes – visual and aural – indicate the time shifts in Beth’s head and, maybe Bo’s memory and we get grainy film of past incidents This is, I presume, meant to connote home movies but it doesn’t add a great deal.

Backstroke is a domestic drama which will resonate with anyone who has had to manage the tragedy of worsening dementia in a loved one and/or had to deal with a beloved but impossible parent. And I’ve done both so it touched me quite deeply, despite its flaws.

BACKSTROKE  Written and directed by Anna Mackmin

Donmar Warehouse

24 February – 12 April 2025

Box Office

First published by London Pub Theatres Magazine: https://www.londonpubtheatres.com/review-backstroke-by-anna-mackmin-at-donmar-warehouse-until-12-april-2025

Trestle – Jack Studio Theatre, London

Reviewer: Susan Elkin

Photo of The Reviews Hub - LondonThe Reviews Hub – LondonFebruary 21, 2025

0 2 minutes read
Trestle JS
 Image: Ross Kernahan.

Writer: Stewart Pringle

Director: Matthew Parker

Stewart Pringle’s 2017 play debuted at Southwark Playhouse and won that year’s Papatango Award and was last seen as a live stream via YouTube in 2021 and a short run at Jack Studio. So it’s good to see it back now on stage with a receptive audience.

On the surface, it’s about two people and a table in a Yorkshire village hall. Actually, it’s about friendship, finding pathways through life and considering might-have-beens.

Harry (Timothy Harker) is chairman of the Village Improvements Committee. He’s a bit pompous, fussy, inhibited, unsure of himself and set in his ways as a widower. Denise (Jilly Bond) is an energetic 63-year-old who teaches a Zumba class which runs in the hall after Harry’s meetings. She’s warm and comfortable in her own body although not, we eventually learn, all that happy with her life situation in general.

At first, there’s a lot of awkwardness between them. Gradually over several months, they thaw and – with a lot of misunderstanding and some comedy – eventually establish a friendship of sorts. Most of the dialogue is deceptively banal but laden with subtext.

He, for example, is clearly attracted to her but held back by diffidence and very upset to learn that she’s married. She sits in on one of his meetings and discovers that it’s just a load of nimby-ish hot air. That means political tension between them and the second half is darker after a very funny scene at the end of the first half when she teaches him Zumba and he visibly relaxes and improves.

Both actors are convincing with an especially fine performance from Bond who has played this role before – with smiles, grimaces, elasticity and some evocative expressions when she looks away from Harry and reveals what she’s really feeling.

Andy Graham’s soundtrack is effective: lots of loud pop for the Zumba, obviously, because as Denise says “You can’t do this to Brahms” but Graham subtly pops in a few bars of Brahms later in the piece as the mood changes. Also imaginative is the lighting by Laurel Marks, especially in the final few moments when for the only time in the play, the action leaves the village hall and shifts to a garden.

Trestle is a tad too long for its subject matter and the continuous putting up and down of the Gopak table gets to seem tediously irritating but the piece is clearly determined to live up to its title. On the whole, though, it’s an entertaining piece.

Runs until 8 March 2025

The Reviews Hub Score: 3.5

Simple but savvy

First published by The Reviews Hub: https://www.thereviewshub.com/trestle-jack-studio-london/

Hangmen – Tower Theatre, London

Reviewer: Susan Elkin

Photo of The Reviews Hub - LondonThe Reviews Hub – LondonFebruary 20, 2025

0 1 minute read
002 Hangmen
 Image:Jason Harris

Writer: Martin McDonagh

Director: Liam Stewart

Originally staged at the Royal Court, Martin McDonagh’s 2015 play is a good choice for a community theatre company because it’s studded with meaty roles and, without doubling, a cast of twelve.

The death penalty ended in the UK in 1965 and the play is set in the aftermath of the announcement, mostly in the Oldham pub owned by Harry (Ed Reeve), formerly the country’s second best hangman. Down the road, running his own pub is Albert Pierrepoint, famed as the last in the family business: hanging for the state. The drama – and it’s pretty taut – revolves around discussion about capital punishment, a journalist, a police inspector, a sinister stranger and the disappearance of Harry’s teenage daughter, Shirley. There are twists and turns, a dark denouement and it’s all spliced together with – literal – gallows humour.

Reeve is terrific as Harry who is anything but likeable. He brutalises his “victims” whose ends are for him, evidently not sacrosanct, despite what he hypocritically declares. Reeve makes him capricious, short-tempered and very impatient with his daughter. It’s a fine performance.

In a cast which is generally strong, Helen McGill as Reeve’s wife, Alice, finds all the cheerful landlady firmness the character needs and is then movingly convincing as she shows us the desperately anxious mother. Eloise McCreedy is perfect too as the “mopey”, gullible teenage daughter. Liam Brown finds plenty of urbanity in Mooney – but who is he and what does he want? The tension is spot on.

This production stands out for the chemistry between the cast and the quality of the attentive listening – the men who frequent the bar are immaculately observed and nicely played. And that, like the main action, results from skilled and imaginative direction by Liam Stewart.

Also noteworthy is Philip Ley’s ingenious set that starts with a prison cell and a glimpse of Harry, brutally in action in 1963. It then becomes the pub – with bar, pumps, bottles, stools and three doors superimposed on which are other scenes, such as one in a café.

This production of Hangmen is a gripping two and a half hours of theatre and well worth catching.

Runs until 22 February 2025

The Reviews Hub Score: 4 stars

Hanging issues and gallows humour

First published by The Reviews Hub https://www.thereviewshub.com/hangmen-tower-theatre-london/