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Cock (Susan Elkin reviews)

Cock

Mike Bartlett

Tower Theatre

 

Star rating 3.5

 

Mike Bartlett’s 2009 play requires its audience to listen as the Latin derivation of the word implies (auditory, audiology, audio etc). There are no props or scenery. The entire piece is played on a small square platform with us listeners seated around it on all four sides. It consists of four people talking, shouting, whispering in different combinations so it’s all down to skilful acting and, directed by Nick Edwards, this quartet makes a pretty good fist of it.

John (Harry Apps) is gay and has been all his life – or is he? In a long term relationship with controlling M (Micky Gibbons) which is now showing cracks, he meets a woman W (Meher Baluch). He quite likes what he has and does with her but … Then M’s father, F (Dave Wainwright) turns up to shove in an unhelpful oar.

Apps is outstanding as John. He has a terrific way of speaking with every muscle in his body, including a face tremor when he’s especially distressed. This is a man who is torn, pulled in every direction who really doesn’t know who he is and Apps nails that perfectly. Also excellent is Meher Baluch, whose stage debut – astonishingly – this is. She finds a very charismatic, sexy stillness in articulate W. And the graphic sex scene they do together in blackout, so we – a true audience – simply hear them rather than seeing them, is unexpectedly effective theatre.

Mickey Gibbons probably has the most challenging role because his character is calm and collected and, in a sense, cold even when he’s hurt. His self control mirrors the control he tries to force on John. The verbal tussle between him and W is like a cock-fight which relates to the title. It also refers, obviously, to male anatomy and possibly at times the old expression for lying: cock and bull. The play often questions who is lying to whom. Gibbons gets it right most of the time although his gestures tend to be a bit hand-wavingly samey and at times I didn’t quite believe in him.

Dave Wainwright’s is really only a support role,  appearing in the final quarter of the play but he’s convincing as the father who loves his son and is willing to stand up for him come what may.

There is a lot of humour in this play which often unpicks itself as it goes along. Someone will say something laden with subtext only for someone else to throw it back at them in unequivocally graphic  English which can be very funny. There were, however, people in the audience I saw it with providing the over enthusiastic  “supportive laughter” which often graces non-pro shows and can be irritating. Although obviously the company rightly wants people to enjoy it in their own way, at its heart this is a beautifully paced, serious play, not a comic romp, and should surely be recognised as such?

Blood Sweat and Vaginas

Written and performed by Paula David

Jack Studio Theatre

 

Star rating: 3.5

 

This is a brave, frank and intimate one woman play about rediscovering oneself in midlife.

Paula David’s character Carolann is depicted falling out of a 20 year marriage, feeling inadequate, marginalised and brain-fogged. Then there are three sexual encounters which gradually, with a lot of insight and humour, bring her to more confident mindset.

She is adept at stepping in and out of other characters with good voice switches as we meet her anxious daughter Tanya, the boorish, soon-to-be-divorced Simon and the people she gets close to. Sometimes she expresses her emotions by singing and David is a fine singer although the songs don’t add much to the narrative. Moreover, the recorded soundtrack is sometimes too loud.

The moods and mood switches are enhanced by Edward Tuke’s dramatic lighting which uses a lot of pulsing red to underpin interludes of spinning mental turmoil.

This quite thoughtful play about a subject which doesn’t get aired very much in theatre or anywhere else, includes one of the funniest sex scenes I’ve seen in ages. David (nicely directed by Olusola Oyeleye) has an entertaining way of embarking energetically on whatever it is while throwing hilariously incongruous asides at the audience.

The other very funny, and actually quite daring, moment is the huge vulva unmistakably constructed from red and silk satin with a pink ping pong ball secreted in its upper folds. We learned at the Q&A which followed without break (so we were captive) that she’s called Violet. Design by Phil Newman also included a hat stand with garments hanging from it and a box which stood for just about everything David needed to bring Carolann multi-dimensionally to life.

I read this book when it was shortlisted for the (then) Man Booker prize back in 2012. A friend recently mentioned that she’d just read it and found it “beautiful” so that inspired me to go back to it.

My friend is right. It is indeed beautiful because it presents art (garden design, painting and more)  as a symbol of reconciliation in a world where unspeakably cruel – evil –  things have happened quite recently but where loyalties and judgements are not always black and white.

It’s a first person narrative, set in Malaya (now Malaysia) which darts back and forth in time. In the present (early 1990s) Yun Ling, with a successful career in law and as a judge behind her, returns to the Cameron Highlands after 40 years away, She is ill (aphasia) and her memory is fading so she wants to record her past.

Her past was, we learn, bound up with a world famous Japanese garden designer named Aritomo, She seems to have inherited his house and now neglected garden at Yugiri. She has two fingers missing and is carrying another unlikely secret on her body which isn’t revealed until the last few chapters of the novel.

The narrative recalls her visit to the area in the early 1950s when she wants to ask Aritomo to design a memorial garden for her sister Yun Hong – this despite a profound loathing for all Japanese. Eventually she reveals exactly what happened to her and her sister when she were incarcerated in a Japanese prison camp during the war. And it’s quite hard to read.  It is possible that Yun Ling’s present illness is a result of what happened to her 40 years before. Her doctor tells her that no one is yet quite sure.

Now, to digress: My father-in-law, George, then just a boy of 20, was in Malaya as a young conscript in 1945. He saw some of those those camps as they were opened at the end of the war. He never told any of us the details but his eyes would glaze if anyone mentioned Japan or the Japanese and for decades, until it became almost impossible to avoid, he refused to buy, or give house room to, anything made in Japan. So I have long been aware of the appalling, literally unspeakable, things which happened in Japanese-occupied countries. Tan Twan Eng, himself a Malaysian, spells it out via his narrator.

Second, and much more trivially, I have been, as a tourist, to the Cameron Highlands, an area in the west of Malaysia roughly midway between Kuala Lumpur and Penang. We spent several days in this now peaceful place  where we walked round, and ate several meals in,  the village of Tanah Rata (which features a lot in The Garden of Evening Mists), visited a Buddhist temple and drank tea overlooking a tea plantation which means that I can, in a small way, visualise the ambience of the setting.

In the nineteen fifties Malaya, still under British rule, was a country of conflicts and emergency with a lot of brutal terrorism. Yun Ling has to face this when she goes to Yugiri where she becomes Aritomo’s garden apprentice. Eventually, a pretty complicated relationship develops between them including the ultimate (and rather unexpected) act of trust. Do you know what a horimono is? If not you will after you’ve read this powerful, disturbing – and yes, beautiful – novel.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The Man I Think I Know by Mike Gayle

 

 

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