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The Human Body (Susan Elkin reviews)

Show: The Human Body

Society: London (professional shows)

Venue: DONMAR Warehouse. 41 Earlham StREET, London WC2H 9LX

Credits: By Lucy Kirkwood

The Human Body

3 stars

PHOTO: Marc Brenner

The war has ended and the Welfare State, particularly the NHS is moving centre stage. Dr Iris Elcock (Keely Hawes) is so passionate about equality and justice that she is pushing hard against people who preferred the status quo. Thus she is a Labour party local councillor and inching towards standing for Parliament. Then her home life and meeting an actor names George Blythe (Jack Davenport) complicate things.

First the positives: Hawes combines wide-eyed surprise with the gentle competence of a post-war professional woman kicking against the traces and there’s a lot of rueful humour – and passion of a different sort. Davenport is every inch the dishy, charismatic outsider and when we finally meet the secret in his closet (think Jane Eyre) he brings finds real depth and anguish. The two leads work well and convincingly together. Three other actors – Tom Goodman-Hill, Pearl Mackie and Siobahn Redmond – play everything else in lots of wigs, hats and voices. Dialect coaches Penny Dyer and Hazel Holder have done an excellent job. There’s a child in the cast too. Flora Jacoby Richardson, who shares the role with Audrey Kattan, was engaging on press night and got a lot of laughs.

But the play is not just a political investigation into the birth of Welfare Britain. it is also a response to David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945) even down to the tone of Hawes’s voice. Much of the interaction between her and Davenport is filmed by black clad stage operatives and projected in black and white onto a back screen. There’s even some Rachmaninov in Ben and Max Ringham’s sound design just in case you’ve missed the point.  And all the time this is going on, the revolve – if you’ve got it, flaunt it? – is slowly moving usually with the camera man on board as well as the action. It all gets wearisome and makes the play feel bittily unsure of what it’s trying to do. It seems to be trying to fire on too many cylinders at once and would have been better for at least 30 minutes cut from its self-indulgent two and three quarter hour length.

Because all the action takes place on the revolve props – phones, clothes, walking sticks etc –  are brought by crew to the edge of it for cast members to take and that works quite neatly.

This is the second West End play I’ve seen in a week which uses drama to force a lengthy, left wing, impassioned, standalone rhetoric on its captive audience (The other was The Enemy of the People at Duke of York’s). I suppose it provides good monologue material for future drama school showcases but in context it feels very bolted on.

The Human Body is a play with potential but it needs to be much more focused on what it wants to say or do.

 

Show: The Human Body

Society: London (professional shows)

Venue: DONMAR Warehouse. 41 Earlham StREET, London WC2H 9LX

Credits: By Lucy Kirkwood

The Human Body

3 stars

PHOTO: Marc Brenner

The war has ended and the Welfare State, particularly the NHS is moving centre stage. Dr Iris Elcock (Keely Hawes) is so passionate about equality and justice that she is pushing hard against people who preferred the status quo. Thus she is a Labour party local councillor and inching towards standing for Parliament. Then her home life and meeting an actor names George Blythe (Jack Davenport) complicate things.

First the positives: Hawes combines wide-eyed surprise with the gentle competence of a post-war professional woman kicking against the traces and there’s a lot of rueful humour – and passion of a different sort. Davenport is every inch the dishy, charismatic outsider and when we finally meet the secret in his closet (think Jane Eyre) he brings finds real depth and anguish. The two leads work well and convincingly together. Three other actors – Tom Goodman-Hill, Pearl Mackie and Siobahn Redmond – play everything else in lots of wigs, hats and voices. Dialect coaches Penny Dyer and Hazel Holder have done an excellent job. There’s a child in the cast too. Flora Jacoby Richardson, who shares the role with Audrey Kattan, was engaging on press night and got a lot of laughs.

But the play is not just a political investigation into the birth of Welfare Britain. it is also a response to David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945) even down to the tone of Hawes’s voice. Much of the interaction between her and Davenport is filmed by black clad stage operatives and projected in black and white onto a back screen. There’s even some Rachmaninov in Ben and Max Ringham’s sound design just in case you’ve missed the point.  And all the time this is going on, the revolve – if you’ve got it, flaunt it? – is slowly moving usually with the camera man on board as well as the action. It all gets wearisome and makes the play feel bittily unsure of what it’s trying to do. It seems to be trying to fire on too many cylinders at once and would have been better for at least 30 minutes cut from its self-indulgent two and three quarter hour length.

 

 

Because all the action takes place on the revolve props – phones, clothes, walking sticks etc –  are brought by crew to the edge of it for cast members to take and that works quite neatly.

This is the second West End play I’ve seen in a week which uses drama to force a lengthy, left wing, impassioned, standalone rhetoric on its captive audience (The other was The Enemy of the People at Duke of York’s). I suppose it provides good monologue material for future drama school showcases but in context it feels very bolted on.

The Human Body is a play with potential but it needs to be much more focused on what it wants to say or do.

 

  • Photos: MARC brenner

It is surprising how often Radio 3’s Private Passions widens my reading. But as my own forthcoming new book (All Booked Up: A reading retrospective – 28 March, 2024 ) makes clear, everything in my life comes back to reading.

Merlin Sheldrake is a mycologist and musician. Fungi, and how they “make our worlds, change our minds and shape our futures” are his life’s work.. And, best of all, like Sir David Attenborough, he has that rare gift for communication which means he can make complex science accessible to us all. And how wonderful that his own illustrations are drawn in the ink of the black-cap mushroom. He is an infectious enthusiast.

At school in the early 1960s I was taught that fungi are plants. But the taxonomy has been changed since then. The natural world now comprises animals, plants and fungi. The key word is “network” because that’s how fungi form and mycelial networks can do some pretty remarkable things. For example, they seem to use waves of electrical activity to transmit signals round a network. Some slime moulds can find their way out of a maze.  So could this have relevance to the fast growing field of “biocomputing”?  By this time, had I been a cartoon character, my eyes would have been out on stalks.

And did you know that there’s a fungus which produces enough light – bioluminescence –   for miners to see their hands by?

Or take Ophiocordyceps and other insect manipulating fungi which have evolved a remarkable ability to cause harm to the animals they influence. It commandeers an animal body by growing inside and through it. There’s an astonishing photograph of an infected ant  in Sheldrake’s book. He reminds us, too, of all those old stories  about possession of bodies by voices and spirits – as science meets science-fiction meets folklore.  He’s interesting on the history of mushroom consumption too, especially the truffle industry and the use of mind-altering fungi, the so-called “magic mushroom”. He tries out the latter under controlled medical supervision as part of his research for this book.

Fungi have well known medicinal potential. Penicillin is, after all, a mould. They can also be grown in labs to create a very strong substitute for leather but it’s the activity most of us are unaware of which really matter. Fungi – and Sheldrake gives statistics about their extraordinary prevalence which I can’t conceptualise – are at the basis of all life. They link organisms such as trees in forests. They make roots grow. They line our bodies and ensure everything works properly. Bread and beer are discussed at some length. Symbiosis is everywhere although, interestingly the concept wasn’t recognised or the term coined until the nineteenth century.

Sheldrake has travelled the world in his pursuit of fungi and he knows hundreds of mycologists:  both the sort with research fellowships in famous universities and the “citizen mycologists” for whom he has  great respect because they too are continuously making and sharing new discoveries.

There’s an environmental message as well. Fungi are essential to life. If we destroy them with fungicides and/or by wrecking the habitats they thrive in, the cost to humankind will be huge. Fungi have been on this planet for a lot longer than mammals and, another of Sheldrake’s points is that it would be helpful to start looking at life on earth holistically rather than hierarchically because it is all inextricably entangled.

 

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Fresh Water for Flowers by Valerie Perrin

Show: Sarah Quand Même

Society: London (professional shows)

Venue: Drayton Arms Theatre. 153 Old Brompton Road, Greater, London SW5 0LJ

Credits: By Susie Lindeman. Directed by Wayne Harrison.

Sarah Quand Même

2 stars

Image: SARAH Quand Même

An exploration of the colourful, rackety but successful life of French actress, Sarah Bernhardt who died in 1923, Susie Lindeman’s play tries valiantly to find some realism in the world’s real first female superstar.

The dramatic device is a conversation between Bernhardt and her granddaughter Lysiane, who in real life wrote a memoir of her grandmother which may be more accurate than some of the more fanciful ones. Lindeman plays both parts and, at the start of the play it isn’t clear that what’s she’s doing. The “baby” voice she uses for Lysiane is gratingly high pitched and I wasn’t convinced by the laboured French accent she uses for both characters. There is also a lot of French in the script and Lindeman does not sound like a native speaker.

Gradually – it’s an energetic performance with a lot of floating round Justin Nardella’s rather nice Edwardian set  – we learn how Bernhardt trained, joined the Comedie Francaise, played many roles of both sexes, wowed audiences in London and made friends with the big names of the day. Along the way there were lovers and a son who speaks (Patrick Toomey) as a disembodied voice at the end when she’s dying.

90 minutes (not the 80 that’s advertised) is a long time to sustain a one person show and at times the pace flags. It feels drawn out too. Lindeman is, however, rather good at diva-esque gestures and using her rather lovely white clothes to heighten her larger-than-life body movement.

The title, by the way, is a French expression beloved of Bernhardt. The play alleges that it doesn’t translate into English which seems a bit odd. I’ve always translated it as “whatever happens”.  What’s the problem? The programme gives “despite all” which isn’t, I’m afraid, quite English.

 

  • SARAH Quand Même

  • SARAH Quand Même

  • SARAH Quand Même

First published by Sardines https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/sarah-quand-meme/

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Show: An Enemy of the People

Society: London (professional shows)

Venue: Duke of York’s Theatre. St Martin’s Lane, London WC2N 4BG

Credits: By Henrik Ibsen. Directed by Thomas Ostermeier

An Enemy of the People

3 stars

The word “reimagined” is overworked in theatre circles but this really is a pretty radical shakeup of Ibsen’s 1882 play about a doctor who blows the whistle on the local, lucrative spa baths when he discovers the water is dangerously contaminated. It’s a conflict between morality and economics and we’re very familiar with that.  Even in the original, it’s Ibsen at his most prescient and, adapted by director Thomas Ostermeier and Florian Borchmeyer the play becomes exceptionally hard hitting.

Matt Smith is a younger Doctor Thomas Stockman than usual. Ibsen envisaged him as old enough to have two children with speaking parts – Hugh Bonneville (who was in the audience on press night) played him as middle aged at Chichester in 2016 and Ian McKellen made him quite crusty at the National in 1997. Smith’s version is a good looking, confident young father of a new baby with youthful vigour and love of truth and it’s pretty perfect casting. The contrast with his uncharismatic older brother who’s mayor of the town (Paul Hinton) and wants it all pragmatically hushed up, works well.

In the second half there’s a public meeting in which Ostermeier moves right away from the play as beleaguered Stockman takes the microphone and rants at length about the 2024 world crisis – it’s a masterly performance complete with long Sir Humphrey-like sentences and a Rossini-esque accelerating crescendo except that there is nothing funny or frothy about it. The message is deadly serious and leads to audience comments and questions – most of them “plants”, I strongly suspect, on press night.

Jessica Brown Findlay is totally natural and plausible as Stockman’s very reasonable wife, Katharina. And there’s a fine performance from Nigel Lindsay as her gruff, self-interested father. Lindsay is exceptionally good at unattractive characters: he usually turns out to be the villain in TV dramas. Here is is flanked by an equally disdainful German Shepherd dog, ably played by Leyla. Pryanga Burford is excellent as the calm newspaper proprietor too especially when she’s managing the audience and may have to ad lib.

And yet. It opens with Brown Findlay hosting band practice at home (Ibsen had that scene as a meal). The music adds little except that it provides a coherent reason for using it to cover later scene changes. It’s also rather fun – although totally irrelevant –  to hear Matt Smith sing and to note that Zachary Hart is rather good on the guitar.

First staged in Berlin in 2012, it’s a messy show. Set flats (designed by Jan Pappelbaum)  are black with white chalking, occasionally amended by cast members. Then they obliterate it all with buckets of white paint, the point of which eluded me. And that’s before you get to the paint hurled at Smith by hecklers. By chance I sat next to one of the production carpenters who told me that he has three hours’ work immediately after the show, cleaning off the paint and restoring the set to rights for the next performance. Ever wondered why West End seats get ever more expensive?

I was, moreover, not impressed by the cynical, ambiguous ending. Stockman has lost everything – job, home and his wife has been sacked from her teaching job. Will he now give in? Surely not. His moral stance is the whole thrust of the play.

 

First published by Sardines : https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/an-enemy-of-the-people-2/

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Show: Deathtrap

Society: Mill at Sonning Theatre Ltd, The

Venue: The Mill at Sonning. Sonning Eye, Reading, Berkshire RG4 6TY

Credits: By Ira Levin. Directed by Tam Williams.

Deathtrap

3 stars

Photo: Andreas Lambis

 

I was a Deathtrap virgin until I saw this show – unlike most of the critics in the press party I went to Sonning with, who had seen in on Broadway, in the West End ten years ago and/or had fond memories of the film. It meant that I really enjoyed the unexpected twists as only a first timer can.

Sidney Bruhl (Nick Waring) has been a successful playwright but his star has waned and he needs a new play. His wife Myra (Emily Raymond)  is warmly supportive even when he gets into plagiarism mode. Then they are visited by Clifford Anderson, (George Watkins) a wannabe playwright who has met Bruhl on a course the latter was leading. Well, I’ll spare you the spoilers. Suffice it to say that nothing, but nothing, is as it seems. We’re in macabre territory, trust is thin on the ground, there’s a neat device whereby the play specifically sends itself up and it’s all very funny.

The acting is enjoyably competent and all three excel at silent communication so that irrespective of who’s speaking we are left in no doubt about what the others are thinking. Raymond’s horror is well done as are Waring’s petulant, malevolent mood changes and Watkins’s urbane reasonableness which is, of course, only a front.

Also in the mix are Issy Van Randwyck as a dotty, German woman with a talent for clairvoyance – amusing because she’s so unsmilingly serious – and Philip Childs who turns out a pleasing performance as the visiting attorney who really doesn’t know what’s going on.

Michael Holt’s set conforms to Lewin’s instructions with Bruhl’s weapon collection in cases and a nice old fashioned chimney breast all of which he has fitted it neatly into the Mill’s odd shaped playing space. The sound track designed by Graham Weymouth and Henry Horn is bit odd with some sounds so soft that once or twice I mistook the hum or ticking for extraneous noise from elsewhere in the building. The Vivaldi and Britten extracts fit the bill, nicely however.

 

 

  • Photos: Andreas Lambis

First published by Sardines https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/deathtrap-2/

Medusa’s First Kiss continues at the Little Angel Theatre Studios, London until 21 April 2024.

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

This show is an affirmation of “otherness” predicated on the natty notion that you will find a version of almost every character in Greek mythology in a 2024 comprehensive school. Of course, it’s name is Olympus High.

Medusa – I saw the show’s composer and lyricist Holly Mallett in the role (it’s a collaboration with director, librettist and lyricist P Burton-Morgan) – is definitely “different”. She has hair made of snakes for a start and, in this instance, they are small knitted tassels on her hat that chat to her and sing with her. At other moments there are larger snakes – or monsters – also knitted, and they’re pretty benign too.

The dialogue acknowledges that we’re seeing off two sorts of monsters here –  the real and the metaphorical – and the idea of “in the face of unwanted attraction we turn them to stone” is fun: literal in the original myth but meaning something about assertiveness in this context.

As various characters appear …

Read the rest of this review at Musical Theatre Reviewhttps://musicaltheatrereview.com/medusas-first-kiss-little-angel-theatre-studios/

how: Deathtrap

Society: Mill at Sonning Theatre Ltd, The

Venue: The Mill at Sonning. Sonning Eye, Reading, Berkshire RG4 6TY

Credits: By Ira Levin. Directed by Tam Williams.

Deathtrap

3 stars

Photo: Andreas Lambis

 

I was a Deathtrap virgin until I saw this show – unlike most of the critics in the press party I went to Sonning with, who had seen in on Broadway, in the West End ten years ago and/or had fond memories of the film. It meant that I really enjoyed the unexpected twists as only a first timer can.

Sidney Bruhl (Nick Waring) has been a successful playwright but his star has waned and he needs a new play. His wife Myra (Emily Raymond)  is warmly supportive even when he gets into plagiarism mode. Then they are visited by Clifford Anderson, (George Watkins) a wannabe playwright who has met Bruhl on a course the latter was leading. Well, I’ll spare you the spoilers. Suffice it to say that nothing, but nothing, is as it seems. We’re in macabre territory, trust is thin on the ground, there’s a neat device whereby the play specifically sends itself up and it’s all very funny.

The acting is enjoyably competent and all three excel at silent communication so that irrespective of who’s speaking we are left in no doubt about what the others are thinking. Raymond’s horror is well done as are Waring’s petulant, malevolent mood changes and Watkins’s urbane reasonableness which is, of course, only a front.

Also in the mix are Issy Van Randwyck as a dotty, German woman with a talent for clairvoyance – amusing because she’s so unsmilingly serious – and Philip Childs who turns out a pleasing performance as the visiting attorney who really doesn’t know what’s going on.

Michael Holt’s set conforms to Lewin’s instructions with Bruhl’s weapon collection in cases and a nice old fashioned chimney breast all of which he has fitted it neatly into the Mill’s odd shaped playing space. The sound track designed by Graham Weymouth and Henry Horn is bit odd with some sounds so soft that once or twice I mistook the hum or ticking for extraneous noise from elsewhere in the building. The Vivaldi and Britten extracts fit the bill, nicely however.