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The Fan (Susan Elkin reviews)

The Fan

Carlo Goldoni, adapted by G Ritter and Helen Zimmern

Directed by Flavi Di Saverio

Tower Theatre, Stoke Newington

Star rating: 4

It is the job of a critic to assess the worth of a production as a show of its type. Obviously, you don’t try to compare Polka Theatre’s Ten in a Bed with Max Webster’s Macbeth or the panto at Worthing with Hamilton although they may end up with the same star rating.

Well, I can’t think of many community companies who would be brave enough to take on eighteenth century Commedia, in a sometimes creaky translation, and run with it as cheerfully as Tower Theatre does with The Fan. It is, literally, incomparable.

Apart from Richard Bean’s famous One Man, Two Guvnors which reworked The Servant of Two Masters for the National Theatre and a memorable RSC production of The Venetian Twins in 1993,  Goldoni hasn’t crossed my radar much anyway. So this production at Tower Theatre seems freshly novel and it has an unusual charm which stems, I think, from an Italian-Argentinian director working with a gloriously diverse cast of fourteen whose backgrounds range across several continents.

The titular fan is a symbol of love and intrigue which passes through several hands, gets lost, hidden and argued about in a comedy about marriage that asks lots of questions about who should be with whom. Giannina (Teo Mechetuic) should definitely be with cobbler Crespino (Iacopo Farsusi) because – a bit like Susanna and Figaro in The Marriage of Figaro – they really love each other unlike the rest of the crowd, most of whom are  jockeying for prestige and money.

This is Commedia so it’s gorgeously stylised. As the audience finds seats at the start, the entire cast is on stage (prettily lit, brick floor) frozen in a tableau engaged in an activity such as spinning, drinking coffee or sweeping. It looks like a Dutch, or maybe Italian, courtyard painting and is very effective – especially when the action starts and they set up a rhythm with their teaspoons, broom, hammer and so forth and suddenly, it’s like Stomp. It’s so interesting the way these theatrical traditions richochet, or can be made to, from one genre to another. The second half starts well too with a traditional masked dance by five actors retelling the main story. The use of Vivaldi (he was a generation ahead of Goldoni) in quick dramatic bursts alongside other music is inspired too.

Some roles are mostly naturalistic – Mechetuic and Farusi – for example, both talented actors, convince us of the genuineness of their love by communicating (mostly) without exaggerated gesture. Michael Neckham (who hails from Russia, where he did initial actor training, and is also known as Mikhail Ushakov) is, on the other hand, outstanding as Signor Evaristo who minces, tiptoes, gestures in the falsest possible way. It’s a richly commanding performance and very entertaining.

In a generally strong cast there are is also noteworthy work from Sangita Modgil as the aunt of an eligible young woman and from Stephanie Irvine who has huge fun in a character role as fragrant Giannina’s coarse brother. Several of the male parts in this production are, incidentally, played by women and of course that works perfectly.

All in all then, this show is an imaginatively original take on a tradition not likely to be very familiar to modern audiences – and it makes a quirkily jolly evening’s theatre.

 

 

Astrid is an elderly actress who hasn’t worked for decades but has played the National and the RSC in big roles. Today she lives, with a woman she usually calls Mrs Baker and three dogs, in a draughty cottage attached to a delapidated Sussex windmill. There is no money for anything much and certainly none to rectify the windmill’s disrepair. Somehow they struggle on from day to day. The evocatively sensuous writing means that you can hear the creak of the timbers, smell the dogs, see the smoke billowing out of the elderly car which can’t be trusted to go more than short distances and taste the simple food and drink which practical Mrs Baker practically conjures from scant resources. There’s eccentricity too – how about a stuffed stoat they call Tony Blair?

Now, having recently been visited by a pleasant young writer named Nina, Astrid – who hasn’t travelled for a very long time – decides, against Mrs Baker’s wishes and sensible advice, to travel to Scotland to confront her ex-husband. He’s a world famous actor now dying of cancer and we quickly realise that forty five years ago he treated Astrid very badly and wrecked her career. The details of what happened – a truly appalling incident – are skilfully and tantalisingly drip-fed before we finally learn the details.

But this novel is like a three strand plait because there are two other main narratives. First, who is Mrs Baker and what has happened to her in the past? She too has suffered at the hands of a man whose name is casually mentioned many times and an unmentionable “appalling incident” carefully put in a corner of Astrid’s brain where it can be ignored. The novel is written in the third person but the narrative point of view is mainly Astrid’s. She and Mrs Baker live in a sort of intimate, bickering, very fond and caring sorority but they are not, contrary to the opinion of villagers, a sexual couple. So how did she and Astrid become a household?

The third strand in the plait is the history of the windmill which has a personality all of its own. It was bought after the first war by a woman in defiance of her husband who has gone to America on business and prefers – ahem – male company. Astrid, who thought of writing a book but lacks the tenacity, has their letters and they form part of the narrative. Astrid, of course, identifies with Constance.

Thus there are a lot of flashbacks in this intriguing, compelling novel but Atkins handles them with immaculate clarity. It’s moving, original, full of strongly drawn characters and well worth spending a few hours with.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: We all want impossible things by Catherine Newman  

Why I Stuck A Flare Up My Arse For England

Written and performed by Alex Hill

Directed by Sean Turner

Southwark Playhouse, Borough

 Star rating: 4

First, an admission. I am not remotely interested in football or its culture. I loathe crowds and shouting. My spirits drooped when I saw how full (free drinks for invited guests) the Southwark Playhouse bar was when I arrived at Press Night – some people wearing football shirts. By the time I got into the auditorium where the audience chanted as if in a football crowd I was beginning to wonder if I could slip out and go home to listen to some Beethoven with my cat.

Which all goes to show how very wrong one can be. Once Alex Hill’s beautifully written, very funny, one-man play gets going, it’s riveting. And of course it isn’t really about football at all. That’s merely the setting for an exploration of friendship, the alluring danger of toxic masculinity and how one young man, perforce, has to do a lot of growing up.

Billy (Alex Hill) loves playing football with his friend Adam from whom he is inseparable. They go to matches and as they get older, pass through school and meet for chats in a café where Billy meets a young woman who becomes his girlfriend. Then it’s the pub and an older man known as Wine Gum, whose real name turns out to be something much more prosaic, Mass outings to matches, huge quantities of alcohol, drugs and violence, instigated by Wine Gum, gradually drive a rift between Billy and Adam.

Hill, who graduated from Arts Ed only two years ago, is an astonishingly skilled physical actor – tiptoeing round the pool table in the pub, leaping up and down in excitement at matches and at one point picking his way through the audience to a seat because he’s at the theatre with his girlfriend. So creative, and fiercely energetic is he that it’s hard to recall afterwards that we didn’t actually see Adam, Billy’s dad, Daisy and Wine Gum. He’s almost mercurial in the way he switches moods, roles and voices  I once saw Stephen Berkoff live in a one-hander and that is what Alex Hill’s performance reminds me of.

The narrative is a journey which starts and then works back to  the Wembley 2020 Euro Final. (I had to Google it, of course, to find out what actually happened: England beat Germany in the semi-final before losing to Italy in the final which triggered a lot of violence). Billy – high on drugs, booze, adrenaline – does literally do the stupid, attention-seeking thing the play’s title refers to. But at the very end there’s quiet circumspection and it’s searingly moving –  supported by Matt Cater’s rather good lighting design.

Hill looks strained and exhausted – sweat and tears, if not blood – when he takes his well deserved applause. Given the intensity of this show, I suspect it takes him a while to climb out of role.

 

Calendar Girls

Based on the Miramax Film screenplay by Juliette Towhide and Tim Firth

Directed by Sally Hughes

The Mill at Sonning

 Star rating: 3

There aren’t many stories which pack more cheesiness and feel-good factor than Calendar Girls, especially for a Mill at Sonning matinee audience who’ve just eaten a good lunch. Most of them will remember the real life story of the Knapley WI calendar breaking across local, national and international news media. Then there was a film, and a play and a musical version. And I must say it’s refreshing to see the play version (again) because not everything needs to be a musical – although these days nearly everything seems to be.

Just in case you’ve been on another planet for the last quarter of a century, Calendar Girls is about a group of WI members who created a calendar, wittily inspired by Pirelli, using cakes and so forth for “modesty”. The purpose was to create a memorial to the husband of one of the the members who had died of cancer and was much loved by everyone.

Of course we’re in Yorkshire so everyone needs a Yorkshire accent and it more or less works in this decent enough production, notwithstanding occasional shrillness.

It’s a large cast of twelve most of whom are competent deliverers of good lines – plenty of those in this play – and able to bounce  off each other. Rachel Fielding is pushy, well meaning warm and funny as Chris and Natalie Ogle is moving as the diminutive, sad but feisty as the bereaved Annie. Sarah Whitlock is fun as the older Jessie who taught them all at school.

A word of praise too for Oscar Cleaver in his first job. He plays both the nervous but skilled calendar photographer and, later, a slimy gor-blimey TV ad cameraman. Cleaver is richly (and entertainingly) believable in both roles and he talks with his eyes very convincingly.

All this is played out on the Mill’s quite large playing space which director Sally Hughes knows exactly how to get the best from. The rather neat set (Terry Parsons) creates countryside out of the Knapley Village Hall simply by closing two flaps. Graham Weymouth’s evocative sound track includes – of course – lots of snippets of Parry’s Jerusalem which is the WI’s anthem.

There is nothing – absolutely nothing – remotely cutting edge or innovative about this show. Everyone in the audience knows what to expect and gets it:  cosy, safe fare for a Saturday afternoon. Bit like Yorkshire tea really. Very pleasant but unremarkable.

Street Songs

By Brett Snelgrove

Directed by Lawrence Carmichael

Golden Goose Theatre, Camberwell

Star rating: 3

Jamie (Ollie West)  is grieving for his father who has recently died of cancer. So he takes his guitar on to the streets and attempts to busk, mostly using the song sets his father once performed. He isn’t terribly successful and it doesn’t help when Charlie (Evie Joy Wright) turns up and assertively accuses him of encroaching on her pitch. Gradually, and stormily, they start working together and he learns a lot about himself from her forthright advice and example. The grief in this show is very raw and, informed I’m sure, by the playwright’s own experience: Snelgrove’s father died in 2019. At times it’s tender almost to the point of self-indulgence.

Both cast members are accomplished actor musos. West plays – really plays – the guitar in a wide range of keys and styles and his singing is interesting. There are no radio mics in this show so we hear his voice as it is and he can do everything from gentle lyricism to shouty full belt.

Wright is a lively percussionist. All the instruments are improvised apart from a single cymbal so she plays buckets and other street litter mostly using brushes at high speed. She sings well too. Although the narrative of the play sometimes requires them to be at odds, there is a real musical rapport between the two of them as they gradually move from the older songs Jamie thinks he wants to do to the remix numbers that Charlie insists are what modern listeners want. For example, in The Sound of Silence, she winds him up from adagio all the way to presto via andante, moderato and allegro. The song is almost unrecognisable at presto but it certainly freshens it.

The play explores the nature of busking as a “job” and stresses that as a performance genre it has to be taken as seriously as any other if it is to have any chance of success. There’s information here too. Who knew that busking in the UK began with Gypsies in the eighteenth century?

It’s a play with heart and it showcases the talents of two accomplished young actors but the story telling doesn’t always cohere. We get a lot of Jamie confiding in the audience but I would have liked to have known much more about Charlie too. There’s also some rather awkward audience participation which doesn’t add a lot – especially as there were only 18 people in the audience at the performance I saw.

Corona Daze

By Alice Bragg & Lucie Capel

Capel & Bragg Productions

Hen and Chickens Theatre

Star rating: 3

“Corona daze” is a very apt term for how we all felt in March 2020 and this neat, witty play recalls it accurately in all its surreal awfulness.

Nicky (Alice Bragg) is struggling at home. As most of us were at the start, she is initially frightened and manic, gradually becoming more rational, although still stressed, as the months pass. The piece consists entirely of monologue (although we hear the voices of her two daughters and husband) as she talks to her mother via Zoom. The mother, is of course, much calmer and common sensible and has to be told off for “gins by the bins” with her neighbours. Meanwhile home schooling is not easy (pasta jewellery anyone?), her husband becomes obsessive about  planet-saving self-sufficiency, her eldest daughter has to be brought home by police and then there’s a chilling call from Nicky’s workplace.

It’s almost a docudrama reminding us how extreme – and with hindsight probably over the top – the reaction to the pandemic actually was. I can imagine this play being performed to the next generation in 20 years’ time and their being totally incredulous that people ever behaved like this. For a 2024 audience, though, it’s all so recent that we identify with every word of it. And the use of actual recordings of Johnson and Sunak being sanctimoniously bossy to break up scenes and indicate the passage of time works well. So does the inclusion of Dominic Cummings squirmingly trying to justify the Barnard Castle jaunt – which is always going to raise a laugh.

The writing is quite strong and Bragg is a good actor although she overdoes it in the early scenes and I was quite worried about the upstage left door which is meant to lead to the rest of the house. If she bangs and pulls it like that  many more times it will fall apart on stage and get a different sort of laugh. Either she needs to be gentler with it or someone had better reinforce the set.

Kevin Farrell and Steven Worbey are talented, classically trained pianists, who believe that recitals and performances don’t have to be po-faced or solemn. So it’s classical music spliced with comedy. On one occasion they played Rachmaninof’s famous D minor piano concerto in D major “to cheer it up a bit”. Their Peter and the Wolf – with verses they’ve written themselves – is hilariously quirky and their Warsaw Concerto quite something. It’s a two man act in a threesome: Farrell, Worbey and the piano. Yes, one piano. Everything is arranged for and performed on a single grand piano. They share a duet stool – often leaping on and off it, running round it and leaning over each other irreverently.

I first saw them some years ago at Brighton Dome with Brighton Philharmonic under Barry Wordswrith’s baton. Then I met them and interviewed them for a magazine feature and have seen several other performances in different venues since. And now, with Simon Aves, they’re written a book about their careers.  Worbey & Farrell (they joke that their brand name sounds like a firm of solicitors and were once introduced as Farrow and Ball) are good company on stage, in person or in print.

Both men attended Royal College of Music, one year apart. Although they knew each other and have many friends in common, it was some years later that their act began to emerge because they were accidentally locked in a friend’s flat all day, got drunk and started messing about on the piano with lots of silliness and laughter. Then they realised that perhaps there was potential here.

Their entertaining book – anecdotes, memories, conversations, reflections – has been moulded into coherence by Simon Aves whose name is in a larger font on the cover than theirs. I was glad to see this because ghost writers usually do a sterling job and rarely get the appropriate level of credit.  Aves has structured it in a series of chapters with delightful eighteenth/nineteenth century-style chapter headings. For instance: “In which we tell you about the exotic places we have visited. Steven attracts some unwelcome attention in Costa Rica and we both risk our lives in the Faroe Islands.” Then each chapter comprises short sections purporting to be written by either Steven or Kevin with bits of witty interjectory dialogue. It doesn’t, however, gain anything from the rather tiresome (and inconsistent) use of different fonts to indicate who’s speaking.

These men have travelled the world entertaining crowds on cruise ships. They’ve played theatres and concert halls all over the globe. They work very hard – and play hard. Wherever they go they also enjoy also booze, gay bars and time with friends. They are a gregarious pair, whose work succeeds because beneath all that (carefully choreographed and rehearsed) joking, joshing and apparent insouciance is a passionate respect for the music and quality of performance.

There’s another rather darker non-musical story in this engaging book. Kevin and Steven set up a gay dating website with a man they regarded as a friend. When it began to take off, said friend cut them out which eventually led to years of litigation and dreadful feelings of loss and hurt. Yes, they should have made money out of this project but the worst thing about it was being treated in this way by someone they had known well and liked.

But it’s the conversations with audience members (“I have a dog named Pansy – no offence”) and the experiences which make this book zing. At one stage, for example, against the advice and instincts of many people close to them, Kevin and Steven agreed to go on Britain’s Got Talent. As many of their friends predicted the show is a sham and should be beneath the attention of performers of their talent. But I loved Kevin’s description of it as a “Vaudevillian concentration camp” Fortunately, their stage- managed “failure” was never broadcast.

Read this book. And go to one of their concerts. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Windmill Hill by Lucy Atkins

Fantasia orchestra, Tom Fetherstonehaugh, Jess Gilliam, St Gabriel’s Church, Pimlico.

Fantasia Orchestra oozes youthful freshness. Conductor, Tom Fetherstonehaugh is still in his early twenties as are many of the fourteen players. And the upper strings play standing up which somehow frees up the sound and makes everything move more fluidly.

In the rather beautiful Victorian grandiosity of St Gabriel’s church  we began with Anna Clyne’s Stride which is a respectful but imaginative response to Beethoven’s Pathetique sonata with some rich harmonies and suspensions. The acoustic in the building allowed us to hear every part and line especially in the the mysterious rising scales in the final section.

Jess Gillam is, of course, very good value in every sense. On this concert she played three works. First came the pretty familiar On the Nature of Daylight by Max Richter. Gilliam, who seems to draw pictures in the air with her soprano saxophone and plays with her whole body, drew out all the exquisite lyricism it needs. Well done to the orchestra too because it’s a difficult, very slow orchestral line to hold down especially when the switch comes and the strings get the melody while the sax plays the continuo.

Dave Heath’s The Celtic, a concerto for soprano in three movements, was new to me. Gillam and Fetherstonehaugh gave us a fast, virtuosic opening movement with lots of eye contact, a tender anguished duet with viola in the second and a well pointed rapport with the orchestra in the final jazzy movement. Gillam’s timing is pretty remarkable and she presents as someone who us every inch an unfussy team player – in her glittery trousers, boots and big glasses. I was sitting immediately behind the composer and overheard him say enthusiastically “ Every time I hearJess play it, it’s even better than the time before”.

After the interval, still in Scotland we got James Macmillan’s Saxophone Concerto which is always fun. I liked the way Fetherstonhaugh let the cross rhythms, col legno and pizzicato sing out in the first movement and delivered the Haydnesque joke ending with a musical grin. Gillam led the contasting psalm-based middle movement with gentle warmth and the energetic finale bounced along. What a strange (versatile?) instrument the soprano sax is, though: it can sound almost painfully beautiful whereas at others it quacks like a duck or sounds like a car horn.

The concert ended with two stalwarts of the string orchestra repertoire: Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings and – the only work in the concert which wasn’t written in the 20th century – Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings. The Barber requires a  controlled mixture of passion and concentrated intensity – and got it. And the Tchaikovsky was played with sunny panache especially the Valse which pounded along as if we were in a tea salon. Fetherstonehaugh is very good at  balance, making sure every note in every section comes through within the texture. Leader, Sam Staples, is clearly a charismatic communicator too and I’m lost in admiration for his courage and confidence in reading his music from an iPad and turning his “pages” with a foot pedal – I’d be terrified the technology would fail!