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At Least I’m Not Bald (Susan Elkin reviews)

REVIEW: AT LEAST I’M NOT BALD by Valery Reva, SEFest at Bridge House Theatre 12-13 Sept 2024

 

‘A moving and original one woman show about cancer’ ★★★★

 

A moving and original one-woman show about cancer, this 60 minute, very physical, performance uses dance, song, and light to arresting effect.

 

Ukrainian Valery Reva, who has written this piece as well as performing it, is compelling to watch as she jumps between moods telling, and enacting, a poignantly and powerful story. Her character, who lives with a boyfriend in London, goes home to Ukraine for thyroid cancer surgery which takes place in a war-afflicted hospital. There, while sheltering in the basement during an air-raid she distracts a very sick child (using, ingeniously, her own knee as a puppet) with a symbolic story about seeing off a monster.

 

She does all this with a range of voices. Speaking is one thing. Few people can find different singing voices to suit the character or mood in the way Reva does. And she uses her long thick hair as a prop, throwing it over her face, shaking it, plaiting it and pinning it back. It’s intriguingly charismatic. Her character talks at the start about her sexy hair and her refusal to shave it off for a role when she was eighteen. Now she avoids chemotherapy and retains her hair (hence the play’s title) making, in character, some thoughtful remarks about the importance of hair in different cultures and religions.

 

Gabe Gilmour’s design provides a thoughtfully atmospheric gauzy white curtain, behind which Reva  dives and performs through. It stands for dreams, mysteries and the fearful unknown. At one point if becomes a mirror which is, at least for the sick child, a metaphor for death.

 

It’s an engaging piece of theatre, well worth seeing and I was sorry to be one of only seven people in the audience at the performance I saw.

SEFest https://thebridgehousetheatre.co.uk/se-fest/

This review was first published by London Pub Theatres Magazine: https://www.londonpubtheatres.com/review-at-least-im-not-bald-by-valery-reva-sefest-at-bridge-house-theatre-12-13-sept-2024

 

Prom 72

Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment

Antonello Manacorda

 

It’s a treat  to hear Mozart’s first symphony, written in London –  possibly on a day when the 8 year old Mozart was bored – played with all the respect and delicacy it deserves so that we hear every note and nuance of all that Mozartian promise.  And of course, it sits particularly well on the contemporary instruments as Mozart would have imagined/heard it. You could feel the love with which Manacorda, batonless, shared it with the orchestra, which was reduced in size for this work.

Just as much of a treat – for me anyway – was Louise Farrenc’s third symphony. I suspect I was one of the few people on the hall who had any experience if it: we played it in the community orchestra I belong to earlier this year and it’s a fine piece. For this performance, more orchestra members arrived and Manacorda found a baton probably because this is a more complex and less familiar work than the Mozart so there was a little more conventional beating of time. The gut string sound was nicely balanced in the first movement with terrific timp work – and, obviously, these timps have to be carefully hand-tuned, often between movements. The very delicate dynamics and the horn and clarinet solos in the adagio made for warm beauty and I admired the crisp perfection of the scherzo which has to go like the wind. There were some pleasing rhythmic moments in the finale too.

All that, however, was really just a warm up for Beethoven’s Eroica symphony as you’ve never heard it before: edge-of-your-seat stuff. Manacorda, without score so there was no physical barrier between him and the orchestra, painted the music with his hands as well as dancing and singing (silently) a piece which I know like the back of my hand but which here seemed completely fresh. Yes, we all know that by the time Beethoven reached his third symphony he was actively smashing the classical mould but we’re so used to hearing it that it sometimes feels ordinary – not in this performance, it didn’t.  Manacorda really made you sit up and notice those dramatic off-beat dischords at unexpected moments in the first movement. Sometimes he gets the effect he wants simply by stepping forward. We felt the lush poignancy of the funeral march which came in a movement full of exaggerated louds and softs – the dramatic control Manacorda coaxes from the orchestra is extraordinary. The finale, lifted attacca from the end of the scherzo danced away at impeccably crisp, breathtaking speed, The grandiloquence of the brass statements was arresting as was the depth of Manacorda’s contrasting pianissimos and it will be a long time before I forget the glory of that OAE timp sound,

This concert was the penultimate in this year’s season and, sad as it is that we now have to wait another ten months for more, was a glitteringly fine climax. No wonder the audience went wild at the end.

Our Country’s Good

Timberlake Wertenbaker adapted from Thomas Keneally’s novel, The Playmaker

Directed by Rachel O’Riordan

Lyric Hammersmith

 Star rating: 5

Photo credit: Marc Brenner

Our Country’s Good is an exceptionally good play, probably one of the best written in the last fifty years. Each time I see it I’m struck afresh by the skilful, powerful, poignant way Wertenbaker blends huge themes such as redemption, forgiveness and innate human goodness while sending up theatre at the same time as she sings a joyful hymn to the strength of drama and shared endeavour. And in Rachel O’Riordan’s directorial hands this is a stonkingly good production.

Usually this story of a group of troubled, damaged, deported convicts in a late eighteenth century penal colony at what was soon to become Sydney, is overlooked from a distance by a remote aboriginal. This time, Wertenbaker, with cultural consultant Ian Michael, has reworked and developed that character. Naarah, herself an Idigenous Australian, often saunters front stage as Killara to tell the audience what she and her people are experiencing as the British steal their fish and destroy their land. It works chillingly, partly because it’s done with blend of insouciance and passion. Meanwhile, of course, the convicts are, often reluctantly, working under Second Lieutenant Ralph Clarke’s direction on a production of George Farquar’s The Recruitung Office to the derision of several of the other officers. It’s meant to seem incongruous until the climactic last scene, which in every production I’ve seen, has sent me away from the theatre in tears of  happiness. And this one was no exception.

At the heart of this show is Simon Manyonda as Clarke, the young officer who is keen on drama and believes that working together on a play would be better than repeated brutal punishment. Manyonda finds all the earnestness and patience that a director working with non-pros needs and he’s often funny – as well as lonely, desperately missing his wife until he finds solace elsewhere. It’s a fine performance. He is one of the few actors who doesn’t double in this production which uses an economical cast of eleven, sliding smoothly into red officer jackets over their convict clothes and changing body language with switch-flicking ease.

Ruby Bentall, for example, gives us a funny, prissy Reverend Johnson and a nice cameo as “shitty” Meg Long but really excels as Mary Brenham, the terrified young convict who gradually grows in confidence to such an extent that you can see her eyes gleaming with happiness and enthusiasm. Finbar Lynch, always good value, is repugnantly strong as the flog-em and hang-em Major Robbie Ross, and gently kind as Ketch Freeman.

Gary McCann’s set is a masterpiece of ingenuity and subtext. It comprises raked dry brown desert, studded with tropical trees sloping quite steeply upstage. British flags dominate the back wall. It provides places for characters to lurk when they’re not actually in the action although they leave the stage as well. By the beginning of the second act, the trees have been cut to stumps as a symbol of the devastation caused by these colonisers.

Our Country’s Good is both topical and timeless. The fight for the redemptive power of drama continues – in education, for example. Moreover, we still don’t understand the role of imprisonment in society: is it merely to punish or should it be rehabilitative? Troubled people continue to be alienated rather than nurtured. That is why McCann has gone for the anachronistic look in designing what he calls “costumes which mix contemporary clothing with items of historical military uniform.” Thus Catrin Aaron (good – like everyone else in this cast) wears a track suit as Liz Morden and Nicola Stephenson who plays Dabby Bryant, wears a denim dress. It’s another fascinating idea which enhances this fabulous play.

 

The Hound of the Baskervilles

Arthur Conan Doyle, adapted by Oliver Gray

Illyria

Actors’ Church. Covent Garden

 

Star rating: 3.5

 

Now close to the end of its tour, this Illyria show is adeptly bedded in and it’s a showcase for the accomplishments of of four talented – and versatile – actors and their imaginative director, Oliver Gray. It’s a wittily affectionate send-up of an old favourite.

However, because it is now mid September , the show was staged inside the Actors’ Church rather than in the garden and, although it was good not to get wet and cold, it made for problems.  Illyria is an outdoor theatre company and these actors are so used to working against traffic, aircraft, scampering children and other background noise that they are over-projecting here. Their voices are pitched too loud for an indoor space and that means that quite a lot of the dialogue is lost in the echo-y acoustic of St Paul’s Church, Covent Garden, especially in the higher registers. Margot Navellou (generally good)  is, for example, almost incomprehensible as the very Canadian Sir Henry Baskerville.

This issue apart though, this is a very slick and funny take on one of the most famous detective/ghost stories in English. The plot takes Holmes (Julian Brett) and Watson (Stuart Tavendale) to Dartmoor at the behest of Dr Mortimer (Rob Keeves). Their job (which for a long time, Watson thinks he is doing alone as a quasi Holmes apprentice) is to investigate the death of Sir Charles Baskerville, who is supposed to have died of heart problems but, on the other hand, may have fallen victim to the ghost of the huge, savage canine which has haunted the moor for centuries.

It is a wonderful idea to cast a trans actor as Holmes because it somehow makes him forcefully sexless in all his single-minded, decisive pronouncements.  Julian Brett finds all the right humorous gravitas and  puts Holmes down repeatedly. A talented multi-roler like everyone in this cast, Brett also gives a delightful performance as the black bearded family retainer and has a superb knack of using silence, often looking at the audience and using eloquent eye-speak.  It’s comic timing to perfection.

The other three actors slot in and out of other roles at top speed especially in Holmes’s final debriefing in which they keep appearing as different characters in his narrative and it’s both fast and funny.

When anyone in an Oliver Gray adaptation rides in a carriage – as they frequently do  in pre 20th stories – he uses a pair of coconuts and rhythmic movement to evoke it. And it gets an admiring chuckle from the audience every single time. You don’t, evidently, always have to be original to be successful.

There’s some amusing puppetry in this show too, not least at the moment of climax with much barking, manic music from Ben Wiles’s sound track and a glimpse of a hound/ cur/dog/ canine which may or may not be a flesh-and-blood animal …?

Illyria is announcing its 2025 season later this week.

I have a nonagenarian friend who worked for a mere sixty years or so behind the scenes in theatre. She seems to have, or to have had, connections with just about everyone in the arts you can think of, so conversations with her tend to be arrestingly surreal. Luke Jennings’s name came up the other day because he’s married to a close friend of her daughter.  My friend claims to have been there when he got the initial call about adapting his novel Codename Villanelle for TV and the rest, to coin a cliché – is history.

Now, I didn’t actually like Killing Eve because I thought it made light of death so I stopped watching it after the first three episodes. This conversation, however, triggered my curiosity about what else Jennings might have written. His early novels seem to be mostly out of print but I easily sourced  a secondhand  copy of Atlantic (1995) and read it.

It’s 1951. Cato Parkes, aged 16, from whose point of view this third person narrative is written, is crossing the Atlantic on a luxury liner with his widowed father, Reginald. Cato has a serious heart condition and the purpose of the journey is for him to undergo major, last ditch, surgery which is not available in Britain. The operation is dangerous. There is a fifty per cent chance that he won’t survive. Naturally he’s frightened and dreams a lot about his mother who died three years earlier in an appalling road accident.

On board are a whole raft of colourful characters including a beautiful but oddly wistful actress, several liars and con men of various sorts and a group of stewards who run a sleezy below-decks drag queen club in their time off. All the men, including Reginald, are obsessed with the war and the part they played (or didn’t play) in it which is probably a pretty accurate observation of how things would have been in 1951. only six years after the cessation of hostilities. Even the ship they’re on still bears discernible signs of its temporary career as a requisitioned troop ship.  Never a dull moment for Cato, who meets a king cobra, nearly drowns and does quite a lot of drinking and smoking as well as spending time with various unlikely people from whom he learns a lot. Most of them, of course, recognise that he’s ill.  Eventually he reaches New York with some experience under his belt (literally) and with the calm maturity to face what lies ahead.

It’s effectively a coming of age story with a whiff of both JD Salinger and Patrick Hamilton. Moreover Jennings is a fine writer who comes up with evocative phrases such as “the smoking room’s oaken and refectorial gloom” or “the piano’s minor key wanderings”. He is also an unabashed user (occasionally) of quite unusual vocabulary. Can you, for example, define “ruvid” or “debouched”?

In short, I quite enjoyed it.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The Garden of  Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng

 

REVIEW: THAT WITCH HELEN at Bridge House Theatre and Jack Studio 3 – 5 September

Susan Elkin • Sep 06, 2024

‘At its heart this is a feminist play which poses some serious questions about the nature of heroism’ ★★★★

 

Helen of Troy’s is a story which has been fascinating people for centuries but until recently – as in Offenbach’s tuneful romp, La Belle Helene or in Tennyson’s poems it’s all been pretty male orientated. After all she was a sexy prize awarded by three goddesses to Paris, the prince disguised as a shepherd, wasn’t she?

Not in Catie Ridewood’s version, she isn’t. The playwright, who also plays Helen gives us a real flesh and blood woman who falls in love with the charismatic Paris – so much more fun than her ghastly husband Menelaus –  at a diplomatic dinner and goes off with him willingly to Troy. Ridewood, who hatches with her twin Clytemnestra, from a gauze egg rather neatly, tells her story from the moment she settles down as Queen of Sparta to the horror of the ten year besieging of Troy by angry Greeks. She is passionate, caring, frightened and brave and it’s all pretty convincing as she weaves in and out of lines which are almost Iliad translations, to verse of her own and to everyday speech which sometimes makes for humour. Telling her awful mother-in-law to “fuck off” is a good moment for example as is praying to Zeus and addressing him as “Dad”.

It’s a three handed play with two strong actors in a whole range of support roles. Lorraine Yu is very funny as the gruff, balls-scratching Menelaus and does a fine turn as a charismatic story teller, among other things. Sophia Mastrosavaki is sexy as Paris and both these actors are hilarious in their brief cameos of a series of Greek heroes – posturing with fake scrotum stuffed into their shorts. They’re both vocally skilled too, giving their various characters distinctive voices. The play’s opening, however, in which they play a pair of stylised muses scattering feathers, falls a bit flat.

At its heart this is a feminist play which poses some serious questions about the nature of heroism. In a situation in which women are supposed to be secondary as the men fight it out on the windy plains and everyone demonises Helen (there’s a bitterly fierce monologue in this play which stresses that) we are made to think, and think hard, about the women and the hell they are going through – as women have done, at the behest of men down the ages for different reasons. The end of That Witch Helen with its chorus of “Cleopatra, we hear you. Joan, we hear you. Anne, we hear you, Diana, we hear you …” (and more) takes one by surprise and is richly moving.

That Witch Helen

Writer: Catie Ridewood

Director: Janette Eddisford

Running time: 75 mins without interval

This show is part of the SE Fest 2024 at Bridge House Theatre and Jack Studio which runs until 14 September

Susan Elkin, journalist, author and former education editor at The Stage has been reviewing plays for 30 years.

This review first appeared in London Pub Theatre Magazine https://www.londonpubtheatres.com/review-that-witch-helen-at-bridge-house-theatre-and-jack-studio-3-5-september?fbclid=IwY2xjawFHvdNleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHSi7bSDf6CfxfSAqIwRJQPg0zKAPhXjhHT004ncud0unticfofZQVVlF6g_aem_8va131k0d5hxmdJD1vhzfA

Prom 65

Messiah

George Frideric Handel, arranged by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Academy of St Martins in the Fields

Phiharmonia Chorus, Bath Minerva Choir, The Fourth Choir, Jason Max Ferdinand Singers, London Youth Chamber Choir, Voices of the River’s Edge.

Conductor: John Butt

Royal Albert Hall

 

Perhaps the flexibility of Messiah  partly accounts for its   popularity for nearly three  centuries . . .  and counting.  You can do it with a dozen singers and a one-to-a-part orchestra or just a keyboard. Or you can assemble a chorus of hundreds with a sizeable orchestra and/or organ and it still works perfectly. This performance was a large scale one, with six choirs raising the Albert Hall’s very noble roof, but under John Butt’s baton, it, still managed to feel light and even, at times, intimate.

In many ways it was a glorious performance. The beauty of Benjamin Hulett’s smiling, opening Comfort Ye with its immaculately controlled crescendos and diminuendos on the long notes moved me to tears. Helen Charlston’s He Was Despised  was sung with a powerful blend of passion and sensitivity and her decorated recap was exquisite (lovely bassoon work in the accompaniment too).  Nardus Williams, perhaps a tad understated at times, really rose to the warm joy of I Know that My Redeemer Liveth and Ashley Riches’s powerful bass baritone singing of  But Who May Abide carried all the terror that it should.

The choir sound was excellent, some numbers being sung by the main choir standing behind the orchestra with the rest of the singers in the choir seats joining them at terrific moments such as the exciting subito forte in For unto Us a Child is born when the volume doubled and timpanist came in with his hard sticks. This is a fine achievement in more than one way. I once sang Beethoven 9 (community effort with Kent County Youth Orchestra) in Royal Albert Hall and I know that from the very top row of the choir you feel as if you’re on a different planet from the conductor with a huge time lag between you. So hats off to all concerned with the singing here because apart from a bit of muddiness in Let Us Break their Bonds asunder, which was taken too fast for the acoustic, it sounded rich, clear and vibrant.

Of course there are some great moments in Mozart’s arrangement of Handel’s masterpiece – that bassoon and then the flute in He Was Despised, for example and the solo cello punctuating some of the recitative. I do wish though – not for the first time – that he had allowed us a trumpet in The Trumpet Shall Sound. I know valved horns were the new kid on the orchestral block. They were novel and Mozart loved exploiting them. But rescoring this number for a pair of horns saps all the drama out of it.

This Messiah was the climax of the BBC Proms Choral Day and it was billed as offering scope for the audience to join in. As the organ kicked in and the orchestra struck up the introduction to Hallelujah John Butt turned round and signalled that the audience should stand which I suppose at least gets round the usual shall I /shan’t I distraction. It was a moment of grand musical solidarity and might have been all right had I not been next to a loudly enthusiastic, young Florence Foster Jenkins. It’s actually quite a feat to bellow your way through the whole of Allelujah without hitting a single right note and it prevented me from hearing anything else in the hall.  Then, at the very end, we were invited to join in the final Amen which was a mess and completely negated the soprano top A, nine bars before the end which is arguably the most sublime moment in the whole piece. On balance I much prefer my Messiah without audience participation although it was a worthy attempt at “inclusiveness”.

 

The Band Back Together

Barney Norris

Arcola Theatre

 Star rating: 3

Three people used to play in a band together when they were teenagers. Both men have history with Ellie. Now they’re reuniting in their thirties to play a charity concert in aid of Novochoc – the clumsiness of that is a joke. They mean, obviously, in support of the people who were affected by Novchok – the poison which was used in 2018 in a botched assassination attack on a Russian double agent in Salisbury. So the play is set in post-pandemic Salisbury, the playwright’s home city.

The characters are meant to be in a recording studio on two consecutive days and the brick walled, tight space of Arcola’s Studio 2 works neatly for that.

Norris has a gift for naturalistic dialogue and these actors, whom he has also directed, certainly catch the awkwardness. The silences are nicely done. The play is about growing up. They can’t relate as they did as teenagers. They find themselves resorting to the things grown ups talk about such as traffic, work and parents –  until the past kicks in.

All three are troubled. Laura Evelyn’s twitchy Ellie is, she claims, happy with a partner and an urge to “pop out a sprog” before too long but of course she has memories, anxieties and uncertainties which are gradually revealed. Joe (James Westphal), who has never left Salisbury and has organised this reunion, is deeply unhappy, edgy and unfulfilled. Ross (Royce Cronin) has a successful career as a professional guitarist but he too is ill at ease. It’s almost a subtle study in group dynamics with some intelligently added body language.

Of course there also has to be music because that’s what they’re there for. Evelyn (who wrote the songs in collaboration with music supervisor, Tom Cook) sings extremely well, Cronin is a fine guitarist , who has to saunter in and set up as part of the action, and Westphal is pretty good on drums. On the other hand there’s bit too much of this in what is meant to be a play, rather than a concert. Moreover, interesting as the play is, it doesn’t go anywhere much which feels oddly unsatisfying at the end.