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The River (Susan Elkin reviews)

REVIEW: THE RIVER by Jez Butterworth at Greenwich Theatre 1 – 27 October 2024

Susan Elkin • Oct 04, 2024

Photo credit: Danny with a Camera

‘Baffling, clunky  play on a good set’ ★★

When this play debuted at the Royal Court in 2012,  Michael Billington described it as “slightly unfathomable”. That is an understatement. It is totally incomprehensible. About two thirds of the way in it becomes clear, to this reviewer’s relief, that we’re not actually meant to know what’s going on. That may be an interesting and clever dramatic trope but it hardly makes for engaging theatre. Subtlety can be just too subtle and nuance too nuanced.

Let’s start with the good bits. Emily Bestow’s set is splendid. We’re meant to be in a remote cabin (no idea where) belonging to the unnamed Man’s family. He goes there for sea trout fishing, often taking a woman with him. Bestow creates a plausible cabin on two levels with old fashioned fridge, gas cooker and sink in a kitchen above a downstage living area. It is semi-encased in wooden timbers. And because the cabin is on a big river, sound designer Julian Starr provides powerful watery noises and we get a good sense of the weather and power of nature outside from Henry Slater’s flickery lighting.

Also noteworthy is the quality of Paul McGann’s acting as the rather wooden central character in whom he finds a lot of understated, troubled stillness. He works well too with both Kerri Maclean and Amanda Ryan as the two women at the hut with him – or are they just in his memory? Maybe they’re ghosts?  These seem to be interchangeable and some of the scenes repeat. There’s a third woman at the very end too. And a framing device involving a child … no, I have no idea either. There is an audibility issue with all this too. The dialogue is directed (James Haddrell) to flow very naturalistically and, from row G, I missed quite a bit of it.

It is, moreover, clumsy  for large chunks of a play to consist of two characters telling each other what they’ve said and done off stage when they both know because they were there. It makes for very clunky dialogue contrived presumably just to inform the audience.

I go to the theatre to be entertained, challenged, moved, amused and shocked, among other things. I don’t go to be baffled.  Even on press night when there were large numbers of cognoscenti in the house the applause, at the end of this 80 minute piece, was polite but palpably puzzled.

The River runs until 27 October. https://greenwichtheatre.org.uk/whats-on/

THIS REVIEW WAS FIRST PUBLISHED BY LONDON PUB THEATRES MAGAZINE https://www.londonpubtheatres.com/review-the-river-by-jez-butterworth-at-greenwich-theatre-1-27-october-2024

 

The Whistling

Adapted by Rachel Wagstaff & Duncan Abel from novel by Rebecca Netley

The Mill at Sonning

 Star rating 3

Of course fiction simply circles round the same handful of  base stories. We all know that. But alas, Rebecca Netley’s novel – at least as it is adapted here – feels, pretty unoriginal. It’s Jane Eyre/Rebecca spliced with a hefty dose of Macbeth, appropriately perhaps, as we’re in Scotland. And of course, as in Jane Eyre and Rebecca there’s a fire (off-stage) and we get a pretty dramatic incantation scene as in the Scottish play.

It’s the 1860s when troubled, bereaved Elspeth (Rebecca Forsyth – strong performance) arrives on a remote island to be nanny to a traumatised little girl Mary (Saffron Haynes at the press performance I saw) who has become an elective mute. In what is a rather uneasy cross between a ghost story and a whodunnit Elspeth meets some sinister and some apparently kind people as she tries to work out what  happened to Mary’s twin brother and to the previous nanny. She suspects skulduggery and, of course, she’s right although there’s a twist at the end.

The weak narrative is redeemed to a considerable extent by the quality of the acting and the imaginative way in which the cast of eight is directed by Joseph Pitcher on Diego Pitarch’s dark set which really does look like a very grey 19th century house on a Scottish island. All cast members not involved specifically in the action at any given moment form a hooded, silent chorus moving set items on and off, using physicality to evoke scenes and sometimes singing eerie Scottish ballads. The effect is quite disturbing, especially given Richard G Jones’s lighting which casts an atmospherically murky gloom, while always allowing us to see enough to know what’s going on.

And over all this is an excellent sound design by composer Simon Arrowsmith. It’s creepy: the bumps, whistles, humming in the house and the birds screaming on the beach along with musical snatches which connote mystery and, maybe something supernatural. He quite often makes the audience jump.

It’s an enjoyable piece of theatre which shows what a really competent director can achieve with an accomplished cast and inspired creatives. I shan’t be rushing out to buy the novel, though.

 

REVIEW: LUCKY DOG by Tim Connery at Bridge House Theatre 1 – 12 October 2024

Susan Elkin • Oct 02, 2024

‘Nail-biting look at the horror of compulsive gambling’ ★★★★

Tim Connery’s new play is richly compelling. It takes us to the heart of compulsive gambling as well as intelligently exploring the psychology, philosophy and mathematics of chance. And in the hands of three strong actors it zings along.

Joseph Lindoe presents an unnamed protagonist who rents a tiny room in a south coast town so that he can access the casino. He has to gamble, just as much as the dog he eventually adopts with Jenny (Kate Loustau) who becomes his wife, has to run. And it’s an outstanding performance with a wide range of introspection and different levels of naturalistic dialogue. He addresses the audience making it clear that he knows his faults only too well. In conversation with Jenny he is pleasant and loveable and we see an affection in his relationship with the dog especially when he depicts a near miss as the dog charges away across a main road. Moreover he’s increasingly lost in his dealings with an utterly revolting loan shark played with terrifying conviction by Kurt Lucas who several times made me jump with his volatile, bellowed invective. The character Lindoe creates is rounded and alarmingly believable.

Of course his worsening spiral of debt and the obscene interest rate he’s facing puts pressure on his relationship with the ever patient Jenny whom Loustau makes sweet and loving but strong – and almost plausible. She has knowingly married a man with a dreadful weakness and I did wonder a woman in her position would be quite so accepting and uncritical. She is slightly too saintly but it doesn’t affect the overall impact of the play.

Director Alex Donald knows how to rack up the tension. There’s one scene in which the roulette wheel is spinning – reflected on the ceiling – and the sound is escalating while Kurt Lucas, as the croupier, mutters numbers sotto voce and we are all on the edge of our seats. And I don’t suppose I was the only audience member having to cling on tight to prevent myself from shouting “Please, please please don’t go to the casino” at Lindhoe’s character as he gets deeper and deeper into trouble. In a sense it’s a horror story and as such it’s nail-biting theatre.

Box Office https://thebridgehousetheatre.co.uk/shows/lucky-dog/

 

CAST

Joseph Lindoe, Kate Loustau, Kurt Lucas

ARTISTIC TEAM

Director Alexander Donald

Writer Tim Connery

Producer JLA Productions & Stage D’Or

Lighting Designer JLA Productions

Sound Designer Luke Adamson

THIS REVIEW FIRST PUBLISHED BY LONDON PUB THEATRES MAGAZINE https://www.londonpubtheatres.com/review-lucky-dog-by-tim-connery-at-bridge-house-theatre-1-12-october-2024

Redlands

Charlotte Jones

Chichester Festival Theatre

 

Star rating 4

 

Photograph by Ikin Yum

Charlotte Jones’s beautifully written new play takes as its central lynch pin the drugs raid at Keith Richards’s West Wittering home in 1967. The trial took place in Chichester so there’s plenty of local interest to make the audience chuckle. This is not, however, a play about the Rolling Stones as such.  Rather it’s a reflection on the importance of being allowed to find yourself when you’re young. Thus Jones splices together the experience of young Nigel Havers (Louis Landau – nice performance) whose father Michael Havers was defence lawyer on the case, with that of Jaggers and Richards. All are rejecting what the older people around them want in order to plough a new and original furrow of their own.  As Landau says at the beginning of the play. “One day I’m going to be a famous actor but at the moment I’m still at school.” Jagger and Richards are sticking two fingers up at the old guard through everything they say and do, and especially through their sexually provocative music of which we see a fair bit. And it causes authoritarian, maybe jealous, resentment in, for example, the police who conduct the raid which was probably a set up by a News of the World journalist.

As Jagger, Jasper Talbot gets exactly the right insouciant, adpoted “mockney” manner and his body work during the music interludes is finely observed. Good casting too because he actually looks like Jagger. Brenock O’Connor has clearly studied Keith Richards’s work very closely too because he’s richly, rudely convincing. I wonder how long he had to practise that Chuck Berry duck walk? Meawhile Emer McDaid gives us a multi-dimensional take on Marianne Faithfull who was Jagger’s girlfriend at the time of the raid. Here she is flirty, of course, but  she’s also vulnerable.

Anthony Calf nails a suitably patrician, lawyerly manner for Michael Havers although the play builds in scope to develop and soften it gradually. Eventually there’s a rather moving reconciliation scene with his son and a very funny one when, once they’re freed, he invites Jagger and Richards to the Garrick Club which I gather actually happened in real life because Havers genuinely came to like them. Theatrically it’s a quite neat comedy of manners,  enhanced by excellent work from Clive Francis as Michael Havers’s father, a retired judge famous for presiding over the Ruth Ellis case. All the Havers clan are lawyers except Nigel and his very decent mother Carol (Olivia Poulet). There are lots of minor roles in this play which uses an accomplished  cast of seventeen many of whom have to do some nifty doubling or trebling.

Redlands is a vibrant piece of theatre with high powered, ramped up music provided by a seven piece, often on-stage, band led from keys by Alan Berry. And Joanna Scotcher’s effective set puts the  word “Redlands”, writ large in neon lights, round the back wall so that we can be one minute in a concert hall with revolve, or downstage in a domestic setting the next.

Director Justin Audibert makes imaginative and inclusive use of the space too with two satellite mini stages in front of the main playing space and, inclusively, there are several occasions when actors are in the heart of the audience.

 

Daniel Deronda (1876) came four years after Middlemarch and was George Eliot’s last novel. She died in 1880, aged 61. I hadn’t read it for many years and was fascinated to get back to this engaging study of what it means to be Jewish, as topical now as it was 148 years ago.

The plot hangs on the mystery of Deronda’s parentage. He has been adopted and brought up by the kindly Sir Hugo Mallinger (we could all do with a man as decent as Sir Hugo in our lives) but has never been told anything about his birth and origin. He has attractive dark curly hair, an olive complexion and Mordechai, a man he first meets in a bookshop. assumes that he is Jewish. Etonian, wise, thoughtful Deronda, of course, says he isn’t. Nonetheless he becomes close to the cerebral, but dying, Mordechai and begins to study Hebrew with him.

Meanwhile, the other half of the plot is about the fascinatingly complex Gwendolen Harleth. Initially irreverently jokey and independent, she cares for nothing much except the impoverished plight of her mother. She reluctantly marries wealthy Henleigh Grandcourt (with a name like that he surely has to be bad news?) who has a past which haunts her, almost literally, and treats her with icy control once he has her. I wonder, though, whether Eliot is trying to tell us something in making Gwendolen childless although I can’t believe that Grandcourt wouldn’t have coldly taken his dues in the bedroom as everywhere else. Is she a secret user of sponges, douches or whatever?

The link is that Grandcourt is Sir Hugo’s nephew.  Deronda and Gwendolen meet first, by chance, in a casino in Germany where she is in rebellious flight from Grandcourt’s wooing and she’s gambling profligately. Then we get a hundred pages about her before we meet Deronda again and learn, at some length, who he is. She respects Daniel and comes to regard him as quasi mentor to whom she turns for advice. Of course both her husband and the reader can see that maybe, at heart, it’s more than wisdom she wants. Incidentally, Deronda’s unerring, benign, mature good sense is pretty hard to take in such a young man. Where on earth did he learn it? Surely not in the Eton of the 1850s?

Mirah, rescued from suicide in the Thames by Deronda and placed with delightful friends, turns out to be Mordechai’s sister, a development which the reader sees coming a mile off.  Deronda gradually falls in love with her but knows that it would be impossible for her to accept a gentile. The contrast between pious, pretty, conscientious Mirah and haughty, glamorous, ambivalent Gwendolen is one of the driving forces in this novel.  Both women have  been abused, in different ways, by men and have more in common than is initially obvious. Eliot ensures moreover that we feel desperately sorry for Gwendolen in her eventual, conscience-torn breakdown.

Eliot researched this novel scrupulously and the result is a pretty detailed study of Judaism and its tenets. She certainly finds gentleness and decency there which is often lacking amongst professed Christians and I like that. It works better, though. when she shows it in  action, via, for example, the humble, hardworking cheerful Cohen family.  Otherwise there is too much detail in the novel and some of the conversations between Daniel and Mordechai seem turgidly didactic, almost as if having discovered it  the author feels obliged to share it all. Fair enough, but a novel is arguably not the right place.

While I was rereading this novel, I was frequently reminded of John Sutherland’s sparky essay “ Is Daniel Deronda circumcised?” (1977) so I revisited that too.  A highly respected academic, now aged 85, Sutherland wrote several books of essays which wittily explore puzzling plot holes in Victorian fiction including  “Is Heathcliff a muderer?” and “Where does Fanny Hill keep her contraceptives?”.

Well is he? If he had been he would surely have been aware of his Jewish origins although even in the 1860s non-Jewish boys were sometimes circumcised for other reasons. Would Eliot, as a Victorian woman, have understood this issue?  Sutherland points out that she was always interested in, snd well informed about, science and medicine and would almost certainly have been fully au fait with the details of circumcision.  Besides, her long term partner, George Lewes had studied medicine and would have explained if necessary.  When Daniel eventually meets the mother who gave him away when he was two,  he learns that she hates all things Jewish so it is possible and probable that she prevented her baby boy from undergoing this routine ritual. Sutherland, who explores the issue carefully, therefore concludes that Deronda is uncircumcised. Does he, I wonder, submit to it as an adult, once he embraces his Jewishness fully? Ouch.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The Secret River by Kate Grenville

The opening concert in the Philharmonia’s Nordic Soundscapes season gave us an brave blend of the very familiar and the very unfamiliar.

We started with Maria Huld Markan Sigfusdottir’s Oceans (2018) which builds from silvery harmonies and glissandi to the majesty of the sea with rich cello sound and a fitting tuba solo before dying away to almost nothing – as it began. I doubt that this is in any way easy to bring off but Santu-Matias Rouvali really knows his orchestra and it sounded as though they’d been playing this piece for years.

Then came the comforting glory of Greig’s Piano concerto with the ever reliable, charismatic Sir Stephen Hough at the piano. He may have been playing this piece for decades but still manages to make it sound fresh with a strong sense of his being part of the orchestra rather than a bolt-on. High spots included the bassoon solo in the first movement and Hough’s fluidly sensitive rendering of the cadenza. In the adagio the lyrical string sound was well balanced against the melodious warmth of the piano and I admired the crispness of the maracato section. The Philharmonia is very good indeed at cohesive pizzicato across all its string sections. Finally Sir Stephen, saying that he thought we should stick to the Nordic theme delighted the audience with Sinding’s Rustle of Spring as his encore.

After the interval we were in much darker, more portentous territory. Sibelius’s Kullervo, written when he was only 27 is rarely performed and having heard it, I can’t pretend to be surprised. It’s a nationalistic, five movement, large scale symphonic work which re-invents itself as a quasi-opera from the third movement with male voice choir and two soloists. Based on a Finnish national epic, It tells the story of a man who unintentionally rapes his sister and then dies. And it lasts an hour and a quarter.

Well I was grateful for the surtitles because my Finnish isn’t up to much. The YL choir, singing mostly in unison bring a neutral tone to the text and their sound is good. I  quite liked the lullaby, with escalating menace in the second movement  and there’s lots of musical drama when the anti-hero realises, in horror, the identity of the woman has has just ravished. And tucked into the texture are lots of brass chords and recognisable harmonies which signal where Sibelius would be heading a few years later.

It goes almost without saying that the Philharmonia rose skilfully to the challenges of this marathon. Personally, though, although it was interesting to experience it once, I shan’t be rushing out to hear it again.

Photograph: Philharmonia Orchestra/Mark Allan  

La Traviata

Guiseppe Verdi

Barefoot Opera

Arcola Theatre, part of Grimeborne Festival

If Verdi had thought of scoring his most popular opera for a cast of seven with music arranged for piano, double bass, clarinet and accordion he might even have done it because the result – in the hands of this fine company – is delightful. The plangent accordion, picks up most of the wind, brass and string parts and is just about perfect in a small venue.

Musical Director, Laurence Panter, who conducts incisively from the piano is seated behind most of the action and visible to the cast on two tiny black and white monitor screens. It works. He shows up because he’s wearing a bright, white shirt and almost all the singing coheres.

Beren Fidan gives us a very attractive Violetta, every inch a party loving courtesan in the first act but also exquisite and fragrant. She uses her body and face to convey nuance and her soprano voice is both sweet and powerful – it could break glasses at full tilt when she comes to convey anguish or passion.

Tylor Lamani (tenor) eventually matches her as Alfredo although he was a bit gravelly and wooden at the beginning of the performance I saw.  The simplicity of their death bed duet in poignant 3|4, the texture gradually thickening as the ensemble picks it up, is a dramatic masterstroke in any production. Here there was a profoundly moving intimacy and a lot of eye dabbing in the audience.

Also top notch was Mike Dewis (bass)  as Alfredo’s father. He arrives, of course, to persuade Violetta that she should drop Alfredo in order to save family honour, particularly his daughter’s marriage prospects. He is a always a strange, rather ambivalent character, but Dewis – tall and imposing – makes it work with every note delivered like a drop of gravy and diction so clear that I could almost have managed with the surtitles and I am not an Italian speaker.

The ensemble of four, from which the minor roles emerge, sing the choruses as quartets and you can – at least in the acoustic of the Arcola’s Studio 1 – hear every harmony, even when all seven cast members are singing.

Directors Michael Spenceley and Alfie Chesney have made strikingly imaginative use of the space – bringing characters in from all five possible entrances, including the main steps and the curtain under the stairs behind the musicians. The set is neat too, comprising a set of illuminated boxes and a table which becomes a platform and, in the last act, a bed.

I enjoyed this production very much but as always with La Traviata I was irritatied (mildly) by the plot hole in this opera version (1853) of the play Alexander Dumas fils created from his 1848 novel La Dame aux Camélias. Violetta dies of galloping consumption – just possibly a euphemism for syphilis in this context. She would have died anyway. Her death does not depend on estrangement from Alfredo or the manoeuvrings of his father, although of course all of that heightens the agony. And that pain is beautifully captured in Barefoot Opera’s interpretation.

I have fallen in love with the novels of Mike Gayle. I find them totally compelling to the extent that once I start, I just have to read on. I devoured The Man I Think I Know (2018) in just over twenty four hours. My father, who wasn’t fond of fiction, used to tell me I lack all self control. Actually, I think it’s a huge testament to Gayle’s writing. There’s nothing “literary” or remotely pretentious about it. He simply tells a story about people, usually troubled in some way, whom you quickly come to care a lot about. His characters are people you know, or very much like them. Moreover, Mr Gayle is a black man (presumably the son of immigrant parents) and some of his fictional creations  are probably black but he rarely bothers to tell you because it doesn’t matter. He writes about people not races and I really like that.

The Man I Think I know presents two men who were at school together but not close friends. It was a top notch success-guaranteed independent boarding school with Buildings and History. Imagine Eton relocated to the Midlands. James is from a privileged background. Danny, who is a super bright,  full scholarship winner, is not. Now in their mid their mid thirties both are damaged  and unable to function normally for different reasons.  All this is revealed by alternating first person chapters so we’re inside both their heads where shall I probably remain for a while because Gayle knows exactly how to get under your skin.

Danny dropped out of Cambridge after the death of his younger sister for which he blames himself. He has cut himself off from his parents and thinks he is unable to work. James, who has been a property developer and had just been elected as an MP, is the victim of a devastating assault which has left him permanently brain damaged. The circumstances under which they meet – and eventually recognise each other  – are neatly contrived. Then, very gradually, a friendship forms. Neither man is gay – they are each hoping to meet the right girl having both lost live-in girlfriends because of their troubles – and yet the warmth of their growing affection and respect for each other is tantamount to a lasting love affair. We know that this friendship will endure. By the end of the novel, and after lots of anxious moments they have effectively rescued each other so that their futures look positive but obviously I’m not going to spoil it for you here.

All the characterisation is rich. Any reader will identify with James’s parents who are trying desperately hard to support and protect him but so often get it wrong. Then there’s his sister, Martha who acts as a go-between with love and intelligence. When Danny eventually gets in touch with his ex, Simone, you could almost reach out and touch her she’s so natural and realistic. Even the barman who upsets James by assuming that he can’t produce the money for a round of drinks and so addresses Danny is beautifully observed.

I think what I like most about Mike Gayle’s work (and this is the third one I’ve read) is that they’re totally even handed and unjudgemental. There’s never anyone evil although some people make mistakes.  Everyone is simply trying to live life as best they can and deal with what it throws at them. And quite often that includes  helping others so the novels frequently celebrate kindness and decency and, goodness knows, we could do all with plenty of that.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Daniel Deronda by George Eliot