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Antigone (Susan Elkin reviews)

Antigone

Sophocles, translated by Ian Johnston

Director Jayne Denny

Little Homma Productions

Brockley Jack Studio

Star rating: 4

Working with the largest cast (14 perfomers) I’ve ever seen at Brockley Jack Studio, this is an ambitious piece for this space. More and more actors keep appearing. But it works and never feels crowded. It is actually a pretty stylish piece of theatre.

Antigone is familiar territory, of course, but with its themes of tyranny, abuse of women, and standing up for what you know is right, it is always topical. This version includes mentions of Gods and other Greek references but is costumed for today with the Chorus as Creon’s watchful soldiers. Ian Johnston’s text provides some fairly formal Chorus lines but the dialogue is 21st century in flavour. Very much a play for our times, then.

 

The time-honoured story presents Creon as King refusing to allow a burial for his nephew, Polyneices whom he regards as a traitor. Antigone disobeys her Uncle’s edict because she wants decency for her dead brother. And the punishment for that is death.

Mark Homer is suitably chilling and determined as Creon who – despite what everyone around him eventually advises – cannot bring himself to climb down until its too late. It’s a convincing account of man heading for tragedy. Eleanor Homer (I presume they are father and daughter) finds brave passion in Antigone but she’s also terrified and that tension is well nuanced especially when we see soldiers silently raping her. Blake Heaven is strong as Creon’s son, Haemon who’s in love with Antigone and there’s an enjoyable cameo from Eveline Reynolds-Boison (imaginatively supported by Lucy Ellis and Kirsty Yeung’s lighting design) as Tiresias the prophet.

The Chorus, which includes some actors who double in other roles, is deftly directed and the story telling as clear as it could be. There’s a fair bit of silent movement work – effectively dance drama which underpins the narrative quite effectively.

All in all, this is an arresting and relevant take on Antigone – succinct at 80 minutes without interval – and I really liked the projected statistics about  present day abuse of women by men  on the back screen at the end.

 

 

Philharmonia

Alexandre Bloch, Sunwook Kim

Royal Festival Hall

02 May 2024

It’s not easy when a conductor has to step in at the last minute as Alexandre Bloch did at this concert for the indisposed Santtu-Matias Rouvali. A lot of effort had clearly gone into making it work and, on the whole, it came off.

The high spot was Sunwook Kim playing Brahms’s Second Piano concerto and watching him play with his whole body as well as his hands. He soared through the opening movement (having negotiated that most challenging of openings with the solo horn), and brought crisp resonance to the second, often turning to make eye contact with upper strings. It was, however the andante which really moved mountains.  The exquisite cello solo (Alice Neary) with which the piano duets – Kim leaning to the right to look round the piano at Neary –  was breathtaking. He’s a wonderfully secure player. I have a special, very personal affection for this huge concerto which goes right back to my early twenties and it’s a real treat to hear it played as sensitively as this.

After it, though, Schumann’s Symphony No 3 “Rhenish” seemed a a bit of an anticlimax. It’s a pleasant enough symphony but it’s far from great and I suspect that for this concert most of the rehearsal time had been devoted to the concerto because the Schumann was ragged in places. It wasn’t together at the beginning, for example. and the coherence slipped in the final accelerando. I liked the way Bloch brought out the minor key angst and the fanfares in the fourth movement, though.

It was inspired programming  to start the concert with The Entry of the Gods into Valhalla. It means that those of us who can’t quite hack raw Wagner in its entirety can enjoy a small Wagner fix. And this familiar eight minute section (arranged by Hermann Zumpe) is as beautiful as it is grandiose.  Bloch – an expansive conductor whose feet are never still –  leaned on all that luscious brass interspersed with wistful woodwind: colourful, epic story telling in music.

One more specific word of praise:  Watching Annabelle Meare, who leads The Philharmonia’s second violins is like a mini-masterclass in ensemble playing. Her eyes are on the leader as much as they are on the conductor. She hardly seems to look at her music and her gestures are really clear for the rest of her section. I learn from her every time I see her in action.

 

 

I was given this book by a friend who’d  abandoned it  because she said she didn’t like way it “moves about all over the place”. Well I’m really glad she passed it on because I was very taken with this 2023 novel. And I can cope with flashbacks. I’m used to that sort of thing. Speaking as someone who once had to unravel Margaret Atwood’s highly impenetrable  Surfacing for an A level class, I’m not much fazed by multiple time zones in fiction.

We All Want Impossible Things is about friendship and loss and it’s profoundly moving. Edi is in the final stages of cancer and is dying in a New York hospice. Ash, who narrates, is her lifelong friend – and you’ll go a long way before you find another celebration of friendship as powerful as this.

So how did they become friends, what have they shared and who else is in their lives? That’s what Newman gradually unwinds and we meet all sorts of decent people – both as they were and as they are now as they visit the hospice and try to be supportive. Ash’s divorced husband, Honey, for example is a real treasure and beautifully presented. Why on earth did she let him go? Ash herself wonders that too. Then there’s Edi’s gorgeous husband Jude and her beloved son, Dash who’s only eight and needs to be shielded from the worst of what’s happening. Ash’s daughters are a delight too. So is Edi’s brother and the staff at the hospice including Cedar, a musician whose job is to sing to the residents.

Ash is, by her own admission, a flawed character. She tries to suppress her grief by indulging in inappropriate sex with too many people and although she is bleakly, darkly funny about this, her behaviour is, actually pitiful. And I, for one, felt a bit cross with at least one of the men who takes advantage of her vulnerability.

There’s a lot of food in this novel because it’s a comfort at times of great sadness especially when it’s shared. So there’s food taken to the hospice to tempt Edi and to nourish anyone visiting her in a party-like way. Back home there are “take out” meals and food cooked by various people to feed anyone who’s around. It’s effectively a metaphor for love.

We All Want Impossible Things is not, emphatically not, a novel about despair. Edi has accepted her situation and, of course, contrary to one of Ash’s fantasy day dreams, there is no miracle recovery. The novel takes exactly the path you know it will from page one. Acceptance is a major theme, and eventually, every character finds a way forward so there’s also a lot of optimism – along with the warmth and compassion.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy.

Marble Cake

Olivia Penhallow & Nathaniel Allen

Bridge House Theatre

Star rating 3

Co-written by the two actors who perform it, this ambitious play explores mixed race heritage, identity, male mental health and abandonment: quite a lot for a 65 minute piece

Keisha (Olivia Penhallow) had come “home” from Birmingham where she has a successful career, to visit her brother and mother in South East London. The family was abandoned by their Nigerian father when Kumi (Nathaniel Allen) was ten and their Irish mother is now ill. Gradually we learn that Keisha doesn’t often visit and there is misunderstanding and tension interspersed with sibling bonding including a rather nice dance sequence.

The play asks a lot of questions, some of which I struggle with because I’m a white woman and it’s outside my experience. Does a “white passing” person like Kumi really struggle because some regard him as not black enough and others as not white enough? Does someone like Keisha really yearn to visit her father’s village in Nigeria to find her heritage and feel resentful that no one taught her how to cook Nigerian food or to manage her hair? I’m left thinking of Scout’s observation in To Kill A Mockingbird that “Folks are just folks”, which has become my motto in life, but sadly it doesn’t hold for everyone and this play is a salutary reminder of that.

Issues of isolation and underachievement are explored too. Kumi is clearly bright but he works as a Tesco delivery driver, obviously isn’t going to finish his novel and is drinking. He’s also been in denial for months about his mother’s illness. At one point he observes that everyone in his life has deserted him: his father, his sister, his girl friend and now his mother is dying. Of course the play can offer no solutions or answers. It simply presents the issues – in a sensitive and thoughtful way.

Penhallow and Allen work deftly together. They are both strong naturalistic actors and we believe in their characters. The writing is decent too although as Penhallow tells the audience at the end, this is a play in development so it will, one hopes, continue to evolve.

Frozen

Bryony Lavery

Directed by James Haddrell

Greenwich Theatre

Star rating: 4

It is, of course, a harrowing play. The death of a child is the worst thing which can happen to any parent. The abduction, rape and murder of a child is ten times worse.

Lavery’s 1998 play is set in “the present” so that’s where we are. Nancy (Kerrie Taylor) is still struggling to come to terms with the murder of her daughter Rhona, twenty years ago. The other two sides of this triangular play give us Ralph, the murderer (James Bradshaw) and Agnetha (Indra Ové) who is an American medical academic researching the mechanics of serial killer brains.

It begins with a series of monolgues, before gradually becoming interactive, and I have rarely seen a set (Alex Milledge) more skilfully calculated to support the action. The circular revolve incorporates a diametric gauzy screen. Nancy and her world is on one side and Ralph and his on the other. Each time it swings it is almost literally like seeing the other side of a coin as, vaguely, we can still see the other person moving around behind the screen. Most of Ové’s scenes are played off the revolve, looking in from the outside, as it were.

Flashbacks  take us to various points since ten-year old Rhona’s disappearance – poignantly she has been sent to return a pair of garden shears to her grandmother a few streets away. Taylor who says this is “the longest hardest journey I’ll ever go on with a character” initially nails Nancy’s bright irrational hope. If you don’t know where she is then the child must still be alive and a parent is Nancy’s position can maintain that for decades – it isn’t hard to think of real life comparisons.  Then Ralph. despite his chillingly meticulous planning, is eventually caught and the truth comes out. We see Nancy active in an organisation for parents of murdered children, weeping silently in Rhona’s bedroom and ultimately in an extraordinary confrontation. It’s a fine performance – tragic, truthful and almost unbearably painful.

Bradshaw conveys Ralph’s mindset beautifully too. He never smiles as he rationalises his actions as casually but intensely as if were a humourless type planning a supermarket trip. And it’s especially disturbing because he shows no remorse or anything approaching a “normal” feeling or a shred of empathy. Is there a slight change of attitude at the end? That’s left to the audience to decide.

Ové’s character, meanwhile is delivering lectures and posing some very difficult but pertinent questions, based on her encounters with Ralph and others like him. “If a person’s brain is physically built differently from the norm then how much responsibility can be assigned to him or her for his actions?  Is a murder like Rhona’s a crime of evil or illness? Is the murder itself a sin or a symptom?” There are, of course, no definitive answers.

Ové is a convincing actor and a strong  dramatic contrast to both the others but I think the play’s attempt to give her a completely disparate back story of her own fails. It feels like a sideshow. And it’s a puzzling start to the play to show Agnetha standing in the auditorium (standing in for an airport) in distress. It’s just a distraction although you can’t fault the quality of Ové’s acting.

This is an intensely serious, deeply disturbing play – impeccably directed by James Haddrell. Expect to leave in sober, very thoughtful mood.

 

Philharmonia

Masaaki Suzuki, Jean-Guihen Queyras

Royal Festival Hall

28 April 2024

It’s interesting to see what a man, widely associated with and famous for, Bach and original instruments, does with a full-size symphony orchestra, modern instuments and nineteenth century repertoire. Well the answer is that without baton or histrionice, Masaaki Suzuki simply allows the music to work the magic. His Egmont Overture was packed with more incisive drama (all those heavy down bows and the percussive horn) than I’ve heard in this work for a very long time.

Forces were slightly reduced for Schumann’s cello concert. Jean-Guihen Queyras brought an attractive blend of warmth and seriousness to the opening movement with a sensitive accompaniment from the orchestra. It must feel odd, incidentally, to play a cello concerto with the cello section fanned out only inches behind you: Suzuki  had them placed them in front of the podium with second violins on his right.  The double stopping passage in the slow movement was played with delicate sensitivity and Queyras found plenty of colour and verve in the finale. These two men have never, apparently, worked together before – and this is Suzuki’s first time with the Philharmonia – but there was a palpable sense of musical rapport in this performance.

The concerto went down very well with the audience so of course there was an encore: a short folk song followed by the prelude from the Second Suite by JS Bach. Queyras – who has lots of French charm – told the audience that he’d just completed a good tour of Spain with the Philharmonia, and then played his encore with clean passion.

And so in this gloriously cosmopolitan concert we moved on, after the interval, to a work by a Czech composer conducted by a Japanese in an English concert hall played by an orchestra led by a German/Hungarian (Zsolt-Tihamer Visontay – always excellent).

Suzuki gave us lots of Bohemian brightness and balance in the opening movement of Dvorak 6 with every wind part (even the tuba) biting through the texture. Yes, he’s conjuring or damping down sound with hand gestures but he’s also (mostly) beating time which I’ve always regarded as a conductor’s main job but which seems to have gone out of fashion. It explains, I think, why almost every bar of music in this concert was so crisply together. The second movement delivered well controlled lyricism with exceptionally pleasing horn work. The folksy (it’s based on a Bohemian furiant or peasant dance) third movement was slightly ragged at the segue into the trio  but the magical piccolo sound more than compensated. And we got  an exuberantly triumphant finale to round off the evening.  I went home happily reflecting that, despite the familiarity of this symphony. Suzuki had made me notice entries and lines which aren’t usually audible.

The Other Boleyn Girl

Adapted from Philippa Gregory’s novel by Mike Poulton

Directed by Lucy Bailey

Chichester Festival Theatre

Star rating: 4

Given the compelling originality of Philippa Gregory’s 2001 novel, Mike Poulton’s track record as a playwright and Lucy Bailey’s directorial talent, I had high expectation of this show. And I wasn’t disappointed. It’s sumptuous.

The Howard/Boleyn faction is a cess pit of ruthless, self-interested schemers. So they’re delighted that they’ve managed to manoeuvre the somewhat reluctant Mary Boleyn into King Henry’s bed. When that palls, Anne manages to hook him, famously denying him sex until her position is secure. Except that, as we all know, it’s not. Failure to produce the longed-for male heir eventually leads to the most famous execution in history. The whole point of this play, and the novel it’s based on, is to heighten awareness of Mary’s having been there first and getting, against the odds, a much happier ending than her sister.

Chris Davey’s dark lighting against Joanna Parker’s set with with its shadowy upper tier on the back wall supports the atmosphere of skulduggery and fear and Parker’s in-period costumes are beautiful. Video projection (Dick Straker) doesn’t add much, however, and is – if anything – a distraction. Why do we suddenly see a huge hound?

Orland Gough’s music, performed by Chris Green on lute and Sarah Harrison on violin is very appealing, It is rooted in the 16th century but includes a lot of quirky modern spin. It’s especially effective when it’s accompanying court dancing including a lovely moment when Harrison plays a take on Sellinger’s Round and the cast dance around her. There’s also some commendably accurate choral singing  which underpins the sense of church music in the 1530s.

The piece, in all its power, is performed by a generally strong cast of eighteen with especially noteworthy work from Lucy Phelps as Mary, troubled, determined, put-upon and wanting nothing more than to be allowed to retire to Kent with her children. Kemi-Jo Jacobs finds statuesque dignity in Queen Katherine and sordid realism in the midwife who attends Anne’s abortive pregnancies,

Andrew Woodall’s irascible, controlling Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk,  commands the stage and is often funny because by 2024 standards his attitude is laughably outrageous. Alex Kingston does something similar as his sister, mother to Mary, Anne and George and apparently without any maternal feelings at all. For her it’s entirely about power and control.

One of the most interesting things about this take on events in the 1520s and 30s is that we are firmly with Anne and Mary. It’s a feminist angle. The period’s famous men – Henry VIII, Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell, for example – are very minor,

The Other Boleyn Girl is the opening show in the first season programmed by CFT’s new Artistic Director, Justin Audibert. It augurs well.

Photograph by Stepen Cummiskey

Three Queens

Rosamund Gavelle

Directed by Sharon Willems

Barons Court Theatre

 

Star rating: 3

 

It’s an oddly, but rather refreshingly, old fashioned play: no gimmicks or “edginess”. Just six actors in a small space performing to a sparse audience. We’re in the 1550s during a single night with the “ten day queen”, Lady Jane Grey who briefly succeeded Edward VI, due to be executed in the morning. Rosamund Gavelle’s 60 minute play explores the political power struggle, all rooted in religion in the mid 16th century, between Mary Tudor, now Queen and her half-sister Elizabeth who will follow her to the throne finally returning the country permanently to Protestantism.

It’s darkly lit (by Leo Bacica) to connote candlelight and when the action moves into a Catholic chapel, actors carry in trays of tealights and sing (not particularly well) which evokes the right sort of atmosphere. There’s a sound track which suggests a stormy night but it’s samey and gets monotonous especially when there’s noise from the bar upstairs and you can’t always tell which is which.

The acting is generally quite pleasing. Becky Black gives us a Mary desperately trying to assert her authority but inwardly troubled and already feeling her age. She is 38 but contemplating a dynastic marriage to Philip of Spain. Black finds a lot of depth and range in a complex role. Eliza Shea as Elizabeth is a good dramatic contrast in a light coloured dress, calm, rational, kind, perceptive, pragmatic and wary. Martha Crow’s Jane is terrified but resolute in what is effectively martyrdom. She will not convert to Catholicism to ease Mary’s predicament and she won’t adhere to Elizabeth’s suggestion that she should pretend.

In the supporting roles Les Kenny-Green makes Cardinal Pole a surprisingly kind, avuncular figure and Sushant Shekhar is charismatic as the flirtatious but scheming Dudley. Sally Sharp gives Kat Ashley, Elizabeth’s beloved companion, a maternal warmth which feels very truthful.

In short, this production is a worthwhile, quite decent effort to tell the story of a bit of Tudor history which is not particularly well known.

One caveat, though, which has nothing to do with Three Queens: Barons Court theatre is in what was probably once the pub’s cellars. And it stinks of bad drains so visiting it is never a particularly pleasant experience. Surely something could be done to rectify this?