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Quiz (Susan Elkin reviews)

Show: Quiz

Society: Chichester Festival Theatre (professional)

Venue: Chichester Festival Theatre. Oaklands Way, Chichester PO19 6AP

Credits: By James Graham

 

Quiz

3 stars

 

So James Graham’s 2017 play is back in its birthplace – except that it has grown and now fills the main house, Chichester Festval Theatre, having originally debuted in the smaller Minerva Theatre. Since then this story of the man who nearly tricked Who Wants to be a Millionaire? (or did he?) out of a million pounds in 2001 has enjoyed a West End run and been developed by James Graham into an ITV three-part drama. After Chichester it now embarks on a nationwide, ten-venue tour until the end of November.

It’s tightly, wittily written as you’d expect from Graham and the play is a mildly interesting exploration of the national obsession with quiz and game shows. Rory Bremmer is crowd-pleasingly plausible as  quiz master Chris Tarrant and  there are a number of cameo roles instantly recognised by the audience which trigger lots of laughter – thereby neatly reinforcing Graham’s point about the British love affair with such programmes. Nearly everyone in the room knows the format and remembers the long fraud trial at Southwark Crown Court.

Another crux of the show is the intercutting of the trial – just another form ot drama? – with re-enactments of “Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?” and scenes with Charles Ingram and his wife, the show’s producers and other characters. Flashing screens and the right music evoke the atmosphere although the badly synched close ups of contestant’s faces on screens don’t add anything useful. Moreover, at the performance I saw, a chunk of dialogue was repeated for no apparent reason so I presume it was someone’s momentary mistake with lines. Issuing the whole audience with fobs so that they can vote is quite fun, though.

So did Major Charles Ingram (Lewis Reeve), his wife Diana (Charley Webb)  and his brother-in-law devise some scheme using coughs as a signal to ensure that he got the questions right? The play raises doubts although in real life, as in the play, he was found guilty but his sentence suspended. Reeve gives us a young, apparently naïve Ingram and Webb makes Diana determinedly cannier –  a bit Macbethian without the knives. She knows the answers and coaches him because as a character in the play cynically observes these game shows have to focus on the popular culture that the middle classes know nothing about: soaps, pop music and sport.

Other characters are less convincing and the doubling is often confusing.  Although Danielle Henry is strong as Sonia Woodley QC, Mark Benton’s Judge Rivlin who several times drops into Trial by Jury territory doesn’t work because it isn’t believable.

I liked the attention to detail, though. Co directors Daniel Evans and Sean Linnen give us, for example, cameramen lurking in the shadows and Robert Jones’s set includes upstage wooden seating for the trial scenes.

At the end, the $64,000 question (sorry) is did Ingram do what he was accused of or not? The audience vote at the performance I saw came out almost like Brexit – 47% guilty and 53% not guilty. We then see the figures for other recent shows and it’s always around 50/50.

I left the theatre wondering if the Ingrams have seen this show and what they think about and say as they drive home.

First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/quiz/

 

  • All photos: Johan Persson

 

 

Philharmonia_Kuusisto_Benedetti_0910_credit Camilla Greenwell

Photograph credit: Camilla Greenwell

Nicola Benedetti plays Brahms

South Bank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall

Philharmonia

Conductor: Cristian Macelaru

Sunday 01 October

The concert opener – One Line, Two Shapes by Nico Muhly – stems from Pandemic isolation and must be a very challenging piece to bring off from cold because it starts with the softest possible chorale played by two celli and two double basses. It then builds gradually before being interrupted with staccato string chords – played with commendable dramatic incisiveness. I rather enjoyed the bowed xylophone and the acoustic effect of placing a small group of lower strings behind the brass.

Then it was off to the familiar, beloved sound world of Brahms’s violin concerto – except that Nicola Benedetti, tall and elegant in her long black dress, made it seem completely fresh. Visibly and physically feeling her way into the music during the opening orchestral section, she attacked the first movement (Allegro non troppo) with warmth, energy and passion interspersed with a lot of sweetness and imaginative, dynamic colour in the cadenza. The adagio felt like a cool oasis after the heat of the allegro. The oboe solo (Timothy Rundle) was almost painfully beautiful and nicely supported by the rest of the woodwind section especially the bassoons. And from the solo violin entry there was a strong sense of conversation and rapport between Benedetti and the string section principals. Finally Macleru, clearly very much at home with Benedetti, made sure that the Allegro giocoso danced to the end of the concerto with joyful exuberance. Benedetti’s slender fingers, incidentally, are fascinating to watch as she trills effortlessly on all four fingers – surely the envy of every amateur string player in the hall?

After the interval came Rachmaninov’s third symphony with its many sections and mood changes across the unusual three movement structure. And the performance was full of things to admire – the legato string playing over the wind cross rhythms in the first movement and  impeccable solo work from leader Zsolt-Tihamer Visontay for example. In a work which changes direction so often, it’s important to find plenty of tension and Macelaru certainly did that especially in the adagio in which he stressed the detail from, for instance, harps and celeste before reaching the busier central section with its sudden, trumpet fanfares. It’s a big work (five percussionists plus timps) and here it purred along joyfully with players appearing to enjoy it as much as the rapturous audience did.

Show: Close-Up: The Twiggy Musical

Society: London (professional shows)

Venue: Menier Chocolate Factory. 53 Southwark Street, London SE1 1RU

Credits: Written & directed by Ben Elton

 

Close-Up: The Twiggy Musical

2 stars

There’s something oddly inconsequential about this show. It tells the story of Twiggy’s unlikely life and leaves us admiring her not inconsiderable achievements and versatility but beyond that one emerges thinking “So what?” because there’s no real plot to drive the narrative. Moreover the projected printed info and the real life clips make it feel too much like a hagiographic documentary. “In 1967 Twggy was the most famous woman in the world” we’re told firmly. Really? The Queen and Jackie Kennedy were pretty well known at the time. So were Sophia Loren and Audrey Hepburn.

Ben Elton has worked hard to factor in some then-and-now social commentary to make this story of the skinny girl from Neasden who became DBE in 2019 seem relevant. But it feels contrived.

All this is a pity because there’s talent in the cast. Elena Skye has nailed a direct voice for Twiggy and her singing and dancing are very charismatic.  Hannah-Jane Fox is outstanding as Twiggy’s mum, beset with mental health problems but with warm wit, although it’s a shame that the narrative sails so quickly and lightly over the electro-convulsive therapy she was subjected to – an opportunity missed. Steven Serlin, who sings well, has a splendid gift for impersonation (David Frost, Melvyn Bragg and co) and brings loads of Lancastrian warmth to Twiggy’s dad.

The energetic ensemble, from which lots of quite appealing cameo roles emerge is slick and Jacob Fearey’s spikey choreography fits the mood –  and the small space.

Stuart Morley is in charge of the music and a seven piece band sits, often visibly, on a side platform above stage right. There’s a lot of nostalgia in the music – songs which connote the era from Gracie Fields and Dinah Shore  to Petula Clark and Bernard Cribbins and a lot more. It isn’t quite a juke box musical but occasionally one wonders if the choice of song is driving the narrative rather than the other way round. Either way Morley and his orchestra make a fine sound.

Close-Up is entertaining enough in its way. Twiggy is quite an interesting character, after all. It’s just that it lacks depth. I’d be interested to know how the real-life Twiggy (“Oh and she saved Marks and Spencers” as her mother comments at the end) feels about it. Justin de Villeneuve, to whom this show is not kind, will loathe it.

 

  • First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/close-up-the-twiggy-musical/

Show: Macbeth

Society: New International Encounter Theatre

Venue: Gayhurst Community School, London E8 3EN

Credits: By William Shakespeare

 

Macbeth

3 stars

It’s always a pleasure to share a first (probably) experience of live Shakespeare with an exuberantly enthusiastic group of 10 and 11 year olds – in Hackney on this occasion.

And there is a lot to like about  NEI‘s three hander, mildly modernised,  55-minute version of the Scottish Play. It’s an inspired idea to create the characters and introduce them from a suitcase at the beginning and then to “find” the witches with a gauzy shared shawl and a bit of wafting stage smoke (designer: Rachana Jadhav).  I really liked Greg Hall’s music. He’s an accomplished cellist and his phone calls in modern “local” English to the professional assassin are a nice touch.  Segueing straight from the sleepwalking to “Out brief candle” by handing over a literal lighted candle works well too.

In short, using a text which neatly retains most of the famous original text lines but splices them together with current English and devices such as using phones for Macbeth’s letter home – another good idea – makes the story telling as clear as it could possibly be.

Abayomi Oniyde is a suitably troubled Macbeth, especially in the soliloquy scene before the murder of Duncan which is delivered as a partly adlib debate with the audience while he sits chummily amongst them on a suitcase. Valentina Creschi is manic as Lady Macbeth, confidently powerful as Macduff and gently thoughful as Banquo – she makes the distinctions very strongly. Greg Hall plays and produces sound effects almost continuously as well as morphing facially into one of the most sinister witches I’ve seen in a while.

Other characters are invited – Fleance, Malcolm and so on – from the audience as are the guests at the banquet and the English army. The actors are, though, on a learning curve with regard to young audience management which is not easy when you also need to stay in role. Given the level of excitement in the hall, the performance I saw came close several times to running out of control not least because of noise and continual incursions from nearby classrooms. This show is, however, at the beginning of its tour and this will improve. I’m sure director Michael Judge gave some useful notes afterwards.

No stage blood was used during this particular performance because there has recently been a violent death in the Gayhurst Community School community. This was carefully explained to me and apologised for. Actually convincing acting ensured that the lack of it barely noticed.

The question and answer session at the end was interesting. One perceptive girl shot straight to the crux of the play by asking: “Who really made Macbeth mad? Was it the witches or his wife?”  Well we’ve all written discursive exam answers to that question – O Level, GCSE, A Level, University etc – and of course, it’s definitively unanswerable which is the joy of Shakespeare and quite a discovery when you’re only ten. Michael Judge wisely turned the question back to the questioner.

First published by https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/macbeth-21/

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Whenever I’m in touch – and that’s quite often – with my dear old college friend who lives in Brisbane, we always swap a few book titles, just as we did almost daily when we were students together. And, as a bonus, she often mentions titles by Australian authors which have slipped beneath my radar in the UK.  Our tastes are quite similar so I usually buy her suggestions and am rarely disappointed and I certainly wasn’t with this powerful, poignant, intelligent novel.

Limberlost was published last year and is newly available in paperback. I read it on Kindle. Arnott, wrote it during his year as writer-in-residence at University of Tasmania and the island state provides the setting for his novel. I have been to Tasmania and, even today after decades of global industrialisation, it remains a remote place with more “wilderness”, as the Australians call it, than anywhere I’ve ever been. Conservation is now carefully managed and in Tasmania I saw more wildlife, casually in the wild than I’ve seen anywhere else – an echidna feeding on the roadside grass verge, a wombat near our cabin door and pandemelons cavorting in the snow for example.

And that sense of nature thrums through Limberlost which is set in the 1940s – when Tasmanian devils were still present in high numbers and you could hear them at night. Today they are affected by a rare form of cancer, unusual in that’s it’s contagious, and the only ones I saw were in a sanctuary. Ned is growing up in northern Tasmania in the 1940s, the youngest of four. His mother died when he was a baby. His father is a strange, unpredictable, distant man, His two older brothers have gone to war and his sister is the only female figure in his life apart from his best friend’s sister in the next valley. The main industry is farming – specifically orchard fruits but it’s vey hard to make a living.

Haunted by the memory of seeing, in infancy, something mysterious from a boat, Ned hankers for a boat of his own. He yearns for, and reflects on,  things he can’t understand and the boat dream represents that. Eventually he acquires one but not before he has accidentally injured a quoll and secretly nursed it back to life. The animal becomes a symbol for the inner turmoil the boy often feels and but can’t fathom. At one level he is desperately worried about his conscripted brothers but there’s much more to it than that.

It’s a double narrative. In parallel with the account of his teenage years we also see Ned married with a family and making a reasonable success of his life and there’s a hint towards the end that we are seeing the whole of his life from a present day point of view.

Arnott is good at lyrical prose without it ever feeling self-conscious. He really does evoke the sounds, smells, sights and feel of what Tasmania must once have been like and of Ned slowly experiencing the changes. When he visits his daughters at the university, for instance, one of them turns on him quite viciously and berates him about the theft of all the land in Tasmania from the indigenous people – and suddenly I’m back in The English Passengers by Matthew Kneale (2000). Yes, there’s plenty to think about here.

Limberlost is a succinct novel by 2023 standards – less than 200 pages so it can be soaked up in a day or two. Warmly recommended.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Hard Times by Charles Dickens

Every family has stories which are passed down through the generations. Typically, they are unconsciously reworked at each retelling and in the end – who knows? That is partly what Marina Warner’s rather magnificent, 1987 novel The Lost Father is about.

I first read it soon after publication, when it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and I still have the hardback copy I bought then. It’s a family saga but the narrative is anything but linear so you have to concentrate, especially at the beginning.

Anna is a London-based independent woman of the 1980s and a single mother. She works in a museum threatened with closure, where she is a collector and curator of ephemera. Her family was part of the post-war Italian diaspora and she has become so intrigued by its history that she is trying to write a book about it.

Gradually we learn that, in the first quarter of the 20th century, Maria-Filippa married Davide to whom were born four daughters and a son in a traditional, quite remote part of southern Italy. Anna’s mother was the youngest daughter so these were her Italian grandparents. Davide, a gentle soul who loved opera, died while still relatively young, apparently in a duel for honour with his brash friend Tomasso – or perhaps it wasn’t quite like that?

The flashbacks into Anna’s work-in-progress present a masterful picture of how southern Italy was and how it changed with the arrival of the fascists. There is, for instance, a desperately sad moment when the widowed Maria-Filppa is forced to give up her wedding ring for “the cause”. I remember finding this upsetting in 1987 and it moved me again this time.

The girls, as Anna imagines them, are all different – and in some cases maybe not quite as pure as convention and the Catholic church expects them to be – with ambitions and longings, even as they launder, cook and sew with their mother.  It’s very evocative and atmospheric. You can almost smell the laundry and the vegetables cooking. And of course their adult lives eventually become very different from the world of their childhood.

At the very end of the novel Anna goes to California to visit one of her – now prosperous – aunts and meets the extended and  extensive family  which now spans more generations. And at last she discovers the “truth” but we left reflecting that truth is a slippery concept especially in family and folk memory when things change but retain an inner truth of their own.

Lost Father old

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Limberlost by Robbie Arnott

Show: Infamous

Society: London (professional shows)

Venue: Jermyn Street Theatre. 16B Jermyn Street, St. James’s, London SW1Y 6ST

Credits: BY APRIL DE ANGELIS. DIRECTED BY MICHAEL OAKLEY

 

Infamous

4 stars

Jermyn Street Theatre has always punched above its weight. And now, under Stella Powell-Jones’s artistic directorship it seems to be punching harder than ever. To stage the premiere of a new April de Angelis play is quite something. To cast it with talented mother and daughter, Caroline Quentin and Rose Quentin, splendidly directed by Michael Oakley, is definitely Something Else.

Most of us know the outline of this story. Emma Hamilton (rags to riches to rags) was Horatio Nelson’s adored mistress and for a while her flag flew as high up the mast as it possibly could. Then he was killed at Trafalgar in 1805 after which her fortunes waned, partly because the British government ignored the wishes of its most famous war hero. There was a daughter, though, who was proud to be Nelson’s child but in denial about the identity of her mother.

De Angelis has created a very clever double narrative exploration of motherhood out of this. In Act 1 we see Emma (Rose Quentin – glittering)  in Naples in 1798 about to seduce Nelson, more or less with her elderly husband’s tacit agreement. Her forthright mother, who speaks like a working woman from Cheshire (Caroline Quentin – down-to-earth and funny) acts as her housekeeper. Emma has already borne, and effectively abandoned, a child back in Britian.

Then in Act 2 comes a neat coup de theatre. We’ve slid forward 17 years. Caroline Quentin is now the aging, impoverished but still sparkily flamboyant Emma, alcohol dependent and in denial. Rose Quentin, now plainly dressed, practical and angry is her teenage daughter Horatia struggling with their life in the outhouse of a farm – actually a barn – in France.

Of course it makes sense. These women  across three generations would have looked alike and their behaviour would mirror, or react against, each other. And the powerful chemistry of the dialogue between them, including the pauses, is partly down to De Angelis’s sharp writing. As in Playhouse Creatures, she brings a historical situation to life by using language which is completely current. That  sense of communication, though, also relates to the casting of a real life mother and daughter. These are two people who know one another very well at every level and it shows.

The third cast member is Riad Richie and he’s hugely enjoyable too. He plays an unlikely, pushy Italian courtier in the first act and a gently gallant French farmer’s son in the second. Richie has fun with two exaggerated contrasting accents and skips around flirting with the audience. He even makes 2023 announcements and moves the furniture in role. He’s a refreshing contrast to the two women not least because his presence changes the dynamic and adds balance.

Best not to miss this one.

 

  • Photos: Steve Gregson

First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/infamous/

This beautiful, upbeat book was published in June this year and I picked it up following a recommendation on the Good Housekeeping books page, a place where I quite often find some enjoyable reads.

It’s a story which explores friendship, bereavement, family, reconciliation, love and the redemptive power of gardening in a joyfully original way.

We’re in Stoke Newington, a place I know reasonably well because I often review shows at the Tower Theatre there. Imagine two houses which, for historical reasons share a garden. When Prem and Maya, move in to rent one of them in the 1970s, they find Alma who owns the other house very daunting but gradually things change. Interspersed with this is another story set in 2018/19 in which two gay men, Winston and Lewis are renting and an irritable single mother Bernice lives next door with her son. All of them, one way and another, become involved with the garden.

Adams slowly interweaves her stories. There is an old chair in the garden which Prem made 30 years earlier, for example. For a long time we wonder where Prem and Maya’s daughter who becomes a quasi-grandchild to Alma is now and, for that matter, where Maya went and what she did. The garden is overgrown until Winston, deeply troubled by the death of his mother with which he has never come to terms, starts to work on it assisted by Bernice’s son Sebastian. The garden is, in effect, a metaphor for creating new life and finding ways of moving on. I love the idea of Bernice buying Winston a banana tree to remind him of home and his mother, but pretending that it’s nothing because she got it in a sale.

Then there’s the community around them – Erol, the local shopkeeper whose business has been taken over by his son Sal and Sal’s wife Angela by the time Winston, Lewis and Bernice get there. Meanwhile, Bob, over the road, is a good friend who has always carried a torch for Alma. All these people are so sensitively and convincingly drawn that you could reach out and touch them. They’re all good folk, too. There are no “villains” in this novel. Yes, some of them sometimes behave badly because they’re worried, frightened, sad or whatever but they’re all likeable – even Bernice’s “difficult” ex, Simon is doing his best. And there’s something warm and life-affirming about that.

This book is not particularly “literary” and certainly wouldn’t win the Booker prize but it’s delightful, moving, poignant and thoughtful which, today, is quite enough for me. I read the final pages, while stationary in an hours long traffic jam on the Blackwall Tunnel approach and was moved to tears so it proved a wonderful escape in a pretty tiresome situation.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves:  The Lost Father by Marina Warner