Into the Woods (Susan Elkin reviews)

Into the Woods

Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim

Book by James Lapine

Royal Academy Musical Theatre Company

Directed by Bruce Guthrie

 Star rating 4

I admire Stephen Sondheim’s work without necessarily enjoying it personally. Into the Woods, however, is an exception. It’s a show I like very much, and more so each time I see it.  The concept is brilliant – familiar fairy tale characters interacting in the woods, where all sorts of strange events and collisions  can, and do, happen. In that sense it owes something to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The lyrics are very witty. It’s also tuneful which is always a bonus and it’s a terrific company piece because there are lots of meaty character roles for a big cast.

In the hands of the Royal Academy Musical Theatre Company, in RAM’s splendid Susie Sainsbury Theatre  Into the Woods zips along impressively.

Of course there are no weak links in this accomplished cast but there are several performers who stand out. Anna Eckhard commands the stage as the Witch – her singing voice beautifully controlled and her appearance menacing. Zach Burns delights as The Baker, insouciant, cheerful or bereaved. And what a singer he is – he can do lyrical and patter apparently effortlessly. And like every other cast member his diction is impeccable so each word is clearly audible. And I enjoyed Kristian Thorkildsen’s absurdly camp, hammy Prince. Sebastian Diaquoi does well as the deceptively casual narrator/wolf too.

There are seventeen people in the cast with some role swapping across the four performances which, presumably, helps to widen the experience of these young actors in training.

You can always rely, obviously, on RAM to assemble a good orchestra. The fifteen players in the pit, under MD, Isaac Adni, play magnificently. It’s a far from easy score yet the music here is rich and very well balanced both within the band and with the action on stage. The Susie Sainsbury acoustics allow you to hear and enjoy every instrumental solo and from the dress circle you can see into the pit too.

And Loren Elstein who designed this show has come up trumps with, for example, an exotically multi coloured robe resembling a huge rag rug for the witch. Her main set device is neat too: a wheeled high platform to which is attached two staircases and lots of leafy bits. Moved and rotated, it can become almost anything.

An Intervention

By Mike Bartlett

Directed and produced by Vernon Thompson

Technical mananger Miran Barry

Hen and Chickens Theatre

Star rating: 3

Mike Bartlett’s 2014 two-hander is an exploration of friendship with two pretty volatile people in the equation. They disagree about an overseas war in which Britain is intervening and the conflict becomes, in a sense, a metaphor for the relationship between these two unnamed people. In the text Bartlett calls them A and B.

In Vernon Thompson’s production A is a woman in her late twenties.  B is a man about the same age and both are white. She is a teacher and he’s a university lecturer. In fact their background is irrelevant. It could just as easily be two men, two women or A male and B female and they could be of any ethnicity or age.

A (Jessica Olim) has a drink problem, is vivacious and furious with her “bestie” – they’re been close for three years –  first, for approving of the war and later for taking up with a patronising (maybe) woman called Hannah with whom he eventually has a child. Olim sustains all this with plenty of passion and forthrightness although her character is often desperately and implausibly unreasonable. This piece is meant to be a comedy but it certainly isn’t a bundle of laughs.

Andy Dixon, who took over from indisposed Jamie Woolf five hours before the opening performance earlier this week, is to be warmly congratulated.  He has the book in his hand but barely looks at it because he’s almost completely on top of the play. He gives us tolerance, kindness, anger and despair in a nicely nuanced way. And considering they’re been working together for only four days, he and Olim bounce off each other with impressive ease.

The play itself is a strange beast though. 75 minutes is a long time to sustain intense duologue even with blackout breaks of a few seconds to indicate time moving forward. It feels cumbersome in places as if Bartlett is wondering where to go next and how to contrive it. Not actually one of his best.

Prince/David

Written and directed by Yasir Senna

Razor Sharp Productions

Golden Goose Theatre

Star rating: 4

I agreed to see/review this show  because I’m a good egg who strives to support theatre in all its forms, and because I quite like the Golden Goose. I had no idea what to expect. What I got was, therefore, a delightful surprise.

Prince/David (the title is unfortunate and doesn’t do it justice) is an excellent crime drama which packs a strong message about police inadequacy, both historically and now, especially when dealing with rape, assault and murder of women. Complacency and victim shaming have too often got in the way of justice. Moreover, I read a lot of crime fiction, which is currently enjoying a huge boom, as part of my eclectic reading diet. Thus there is usually a crime story ticking away in one corner of my brain quite separate from the section which is digesting the latest show I’ve seen. Prince/David felt like a happy merger between two bits of my world.

David Nicholls, who also goes by other names, is a revoltingly smooth con man who likes to rape and murder women. At the performance I saw he was played by playwright and director, Yasir Senna, filling in for indisposed Simon Ryerson. And he did it beautifully. In the opening scene we see him in a restaurant, slimily plausible, convincing a gullible young department store assistant (Helena Heaven – good) that he can get her a modelling contract in return for a few “favours.” The contract is in his car which rings alarm bells for everyone in the audience but not for the hapless Amber Da Costa.

The play shifts across 25 years from 1999 when Amber disappears to 2024 – relevant projected images give us the dates clearly. In 2024, a very young PC Stecklen (Helen Matthews) tries to persuade her senior officer that there is evidence he should look at but is dismissed with the chilling, shocking “Get us a cup of tea, love”. Over 20 years later, now a Detective Sergeant, she gets the opportunity to revisit the case with a team. Matthews strides about and finds  passion and anger in this clear thinking woman. It’s an outstanding performance. And does she succeed? No spoilers.

There’s good work from everyone in this cast of nine among which  Natasha Vassell is strong first as a timid young constable and later as an authoritative, well dressed Commissioner. And I liked Christopher Poke’s work as two different older male officers trying to confound Stecklen’s single minded focus at different stages in the narrative.

If you like Unforgotten, you’ll enjoy this although, totally drawn in by the plot,  I was slightly frustrated by the hint at Stecklen’s personal past, the details of which are never developed. It’s a small gripe, though, about a fast paced, gripping 135 minutes of theatre.

Hamlet

William Shakespeare

Shakespeare at the George, Huntingdon

Directed by Lynne Livingstone

 Star rating: 3.5

For a community company to take Shakespeare’s longest, and arguably best, tragedy to an outdoor audience (boy racers revving up just beyond the wall) takes a certain amount of courage. Fortunately Shakespeare at the George is not short of that.  And this year we saw the company’s sheer gutsiness even more strongly because they have lost their iconic venue. After 65 years in the historic courtyard at The George in Huntingdon, next year’s show will have to be staged elsewhere because Greene King, the company which owns the pub, has ended the partnership.

One of the bonuses of the courtyard is that it comes with its own balcony and side stairs which makes an excellent space for the ghost’s first appearance, for eavesdroppers to lurk, and for off stage action to take place. I liked very much, for instance, the way director Lynne Livinsgtone sets up a visually overt relationship between Hamlet (Sam Buckenham) and Ophelia (Georgie Bickerdike) at the beginning of the play. It’s usually just something which is referred so fleetingly that it’s hardly believable that it ever happened. Before so much happens to sour it, these are definitely two young people who fancy each other and between whom marriage would be eminently suitable, despite what Ophelia’s father – actually mother in this production – tells her.

Buckenham is both credible and creditable as Hamlet (the largest role in the canon). He can do anger, cunning, despair and irresolution very well. The closet scene is as painful as it should be. It’s agonising for this young man to be torturing himself, and her, with details of his mother’s sex life. And his big soliloquies sound like naturalistic thought rather than the set pieces then can so easily become

Bickerdike’s Ophelia is a delight, one of the best I’ve seen for a long time. The wistful horror of her mad scene scene, accompanied by her sweet but manic singing,  will remain with me for a long time. And she’s very good earlier in the play too, twinkling at Hamlet, then puzzled by his change in attitude and torn by the instructions issued by her mother.

Alex Priestly as Polonia isn’t quite right though. Shakespeare’s Polonius is a bossy, tiresome, manipulative old man who loves to show off.  A woman in the role is bound to be softer. The relationship between a mother and daughter, moreover, is different from a father and daughter and we see this Polonia being maternally caring and protective which goes against the grain of the text.  I was not remotely convinced that this character would lurk behind the arras in Gertrude’s bedroom either. Caroline Molony’s, always tense, Gertrude looks fabulous (gorgeous late Elizabethan costumes by Helen Arnett and her team in this show) but somehow lacks the warmth. She has probably been having an affair with Claudius (Geoffrey Kirkness – competent), whom she has now married, for some time. So where’s the sparkle?

Horatio – Hamlet’s decent friend who loves him to the end – is not an easy role because he has to do so much observing from the sidelines but James Barwise gets it spot on. His Horatio is caring, concerned and supportive without ever stealing anyone else’s thunder.

A round of applause, too, for Reuben Milne as one of the most entertaining grave diggers I’ve ever seen. There aren’t many laughs in this play – and this production chooses not to stress the few that there are such as the pun in “country matters” – so Milne, ventriloquising the skull hilariously, is a well-judged contrast.

A cast of nineteen (oh the joy of community theatre!) and they’re all reasonable at what they do, means that you can have a full complement of “actors” to support the Player King and Fortinbras has an entourage and that all works well.

Well done, all of you. It’s a very decent and enjoyable show of its type. I look forward to applauding you in your new venue next year.

Much Ado About Nothing

William Shakespeare

Moving Parts Theatre

Director Simona Hughes

The Actors’ Church, Covent Garden

Star rating: 3

There’s a lot of it about at the moment: you could even say there’s much ado about a certain Shakespeare play. I seem to have seen it several times in the last year or two and there’s another production across the river at The Globe which I haven’t yet caught up with.

Anyway, this is decent enough production of what I’ve always thought of as a rather strange play. The most interesting thing in it is the delicious chemistry between Beatrice and Benedick and their eventual, inevitable coming together. Everyone can see that they are made for each other. It’s just a matter of manipulating them into seeing it for themselves. In a sense everything else is a side show. Yet this version doesn’t bring that out as strongly as it should  and although Joanna Nevin and Martin South work well enough together, I didn’t feel the magnetic attraction between them

This production opens with a scene which is nothing to do with Shakespeare. Instead we get Katrina Michaels (who becomes Margaret) and Will Benyon (ditto Borachio) doing a version of the traditional Soldier, Soldier Will You Marry Me? to the tune of Funiculi Funicula. And it adds nothing, apart from hinting that Margaret and Borachio might have the hots for each other but as we don’t yet know who they are, it doesn’t work. On the other hand Michaels is a fine actor muso (beautiful, very unusual wooden accordion) who projects oodles of sexy personality and Margaret is much more of a presence in this production than she would normally be. Benyon too – good guitarist – is ever present, projecting delicious insolence, and we get a strong sense of his self-interested amorality. However, their frequent arm gestures to control other characters, as Puck or Ariel might, are against the grain of the text and arguably absurd.

Lewis Jenkins, strong as Claudio, made me reflect afresh on what an unpleasant young man this character  is. He falls for Hero (Thissy Dias – good)  at first glance – probably mostly because she’s the only child of a wealthy father. Then when he’s tricked into thinking that she’s no virgin he jilts her publicly at the altar to maximise the cruelty rather than breaking off the betrothal in private. When he believes Hero is dead he readily agrees to take Beatrice instead (as presumably she will now be the beneficiary of her uncle’s estate). Then, finally, when Hero is “resurrected” he grabs her gleefully. Well, if I’d been Hero I’d have told him to take a running jump and we used to have interesting classroom discussions about this when I was teaching this play to GCSE and A level students. Jenkins does all that “eye to the main chance” stuff, patriarchal disdain and joshing with his mates very well.

Keith Hill is outstanding as Leonato. He plays him as slightly dim, deeply fond of his daughter, Hero, and full of earnestness and embarrassment. When he believes the plotters rather than his daughter, it’s genuinely painful. Hill is an exceptionally fine listener and reactor too. It’s beautifully shaped and nuanced performance.

And  Michaels, who really is very talented, is hilarious when she doubles as the Constable and spits out all those malapropisms.

The garden at The Actors’ Church is delightful but it’s a challenging space to work in because the competition from the noisy performers and crowds in the Piazza, is very loud. The playing space is, on this occasion, a very big grassy oval with audience round most of the edge, either one or two rows deep. Simona Hughes and her cast use the space  dynamically and energetically which means that the action is often very close to audience members. Moreover, these nine actors have learned to project at a volume which means, remarkably given the situation, that you can hear every word,  Full marks for that and for the clarity of the story telling.

Are there two better words, by the way, anywhere in Shakespeare than Beatrices’s “Kill Claudio”?  It’s funny (and Nevin times it beautifully) because it’s outrageous but by golly, I know where she’s coming from.

Iolanthe

WS Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan

Gardiner Memorial Hall, Burwell, Cambs

Directed by Lucas Elkin

 Star rating 4

Photography by Jet Photographic Cambridge

Cambridgeshire Light Opera Group (CLOG) is a new company which has risen from the ashes of Swaffham Bulbeck Summer Theatre which closed last year. And it’s a good example of how you can present this marvellous material in a village hall, with almost no resources, a mixed ability community cast and still carry it off –  providing you use your imagination and think laterally.

There is, for example, no set to speak of. Instead we get projected scenes on the back screen – Iolanthe’s pond, the House of Lords and so on. In fact, if you do it this way, you can change setting as often as you like and this production does. The rest of the set consists mostly of four very versatile black boxes which stand for seats, tables and the famous sentry box. It’s simple, clean and ingenious.

And Cleo Loi, MD has arranged the music for just four players. She plays keys, percussion and violin alongside a second keyboard player, a cello and a reed-instrument player. I loved the way, once it settles after the overture, she weaves the melodies and counter melodies together. The cello continuo works particularly well.

If you have no budget, then modern dress makes sense because it’s easy to improvise. Of course Peers would wear dark suits and the coloured sashes to indicate party allegiance are neat. And as for the fairies, well, these “peris” simply wear weird floaty mismatching outfits, unified by their all being in stripey tights.

There are some accomplished performers in this show too. The Lord Chancellor is usually an elderly, querulous little man. Not this time. Peter Coleman stands taller and has more gravitas than anyone else on stage which completely changes the character and that’s refreshing. Coleman sings exceptionally well and every single word is clear – as it needs to be, especially in the Nightmare Song. He has also been directed to time Gilbert’s sparkling dialogue so that he is really very funny, as events gradually conspire against his authority. His is definitely a Lord Chancellor to remember.

Caroline Dyson, a well known figure on the Cambridgeshire community musical theatre circuit, is rich and warm as the Fairy Queen. She has, for these times, an unusual voice trained into the gorgeous depths of the traditional contralto. If, like me, you’re mildly synaesthetic, it’s aubergine. And her flirting with Private Willis (Paul Murray John in battle fatigues and brewing tea – nice touch) is a delight.

Sally Goldsmith is a fine Iolanthe too – emerging from her watery exile from behind the umbrellas weilded by her fairy sisters. She sings in the mezzo range with fluent accuracy  and is convincing as an anxious mother. Of course she doesn’t look seventeen but – hey – this is community work and it doesn’t matter a jot.

Among other soloists, all of whom acquit themselves creditably, Caille Peri is wide eyed and assertive as Phyllis and Ariel Cahn sings Strephon’s part with pleasing musicality.

Chorus work is nicely managed in a small space and the production makes imaginative use of the side aisles – bring the Peers in initially from the back, for example, while they mutter “upper class twerp” stuff to each other.

When one reviews any sort of show it has be assessed as a show of its type. And this Iolanthe is an excellent show of its type: village hall opera lovingly done.

I am so glad that CLOG has almost sold out every one on its five performances and is now looking forward to its next production. I am too.