This tight, visceral four hander is a debut play and a remarkable achievement for Deborah Frances-White. It is also a relatively unusual theatrical treat to see four highly accomplished actors playing off, and listening to, each other with this level of focused intelligence.

We’re in the Masada Restaurant in East London run by Jacq (Alex Roach) and her partner Kas (Amit Shah). The pandemic has left them facing bankruptcy, news which they now have to break to their wealthy friends, married couple Tobin (Greg Wise) and Adaego (Susan Wokoma) who financed the enterprise. All four were at university together.

That’s the exposition. What happens after that is a sharp, shocking and sometimes funny exploration of sexual, racial and gender politics. I was totally convinced by it all until a few minutes before the end when suddenly we’re in a Mozart Opera or a Shakespeare comedy with unlikely deals being made by two women out to fool the men.

Greg Wise is terrific as the only white male and a successful/wealthy one so he has a lot of power or thinks he has. It’s the drunken game of Never Have I Ever in which players force unexpected truths out of each other which throws up something he can’t deal with. Then we see hurt, anger, cool logic and incisiveness all done with the sort of timing you only get from a highly experienced actor.

Wokoma’s character is meant to be impressive and magnificent and she rises splendidly to the challenge. This is a woman you’d want on your side rather than anyone else’s and of course the script gives her plenty to say about the experience of being a black woman.

Roach presents a thoughtful, feisty, bi-sexual woman in Jacq with a huge talent as a chef but she’s troubled too and we see her three dimensionally especially in her scenes with Wokoma. Frankie Bradshaw’s set configures the whole playing area as a restaurant but the space in front, very close to the audience, represents the wine cellar and imaginative use is made of that for some two-person scenes.

Shah, of course, plays a brown man so he too has “otherness” issues but wears them lightly – often seeming the simplest and most straightforward of the four until he finally loses his cool in the second act and launches into and impassioned account of  his true feelings. It’s an arresting few minutes.

This production makes interesting use of stillness. All four actors are on stage, almost continuously. If two have a scene together then the others are usually silent, shadowy, stationary figures elsewhere on the set. Also fun is the use of loud music, strobe lighting and some neat choreography (movement director, Chi-San Howard) as the four of them get drunk in act one although it felt as if it belonged in a different play.

I am still pondering on the observation that you have to keep your head down to keep it above water.

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  Photos: Helen Murray

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This play, which premiered in 2005 at Soho Theatre, is new to me. And I’m forcibly struck by its total lack of theatrical pretentiousness. It is simply a well written four hander presenting four members of a family facing an imminent death.

Myra (Laura Fitzpatrick) has bone cancer and a few months to live. She is trying to be much more upfront and direct about this than her daughters and husband feel able to be and she wants a “green” woodland funeral. The play is set over six months in the family living room and in various possible burial venues.

I liked the paciness of Wade’s dialogue and very much admired Emma Riches’s beautifully nuanced work as the younger daughter, Harriet. She is one of those actors who can communicate volumes with a tilt of her chin or an eye movement and she finds a huge range of moods during the course of the play.

Also enjoyable was the sub plot about the broken boiler. Michael Tuffnell as Alec finally comes into his own with a wonderful telephone conversation with the boiler company. I’m not sure it actually adds much to the play but it is a fine five minutes of nicely paced comedy.

The set is ingenious in its simplicity. A few items of sitting room furniture are upended, rearranged and covered with cloths to represent different burial grounds, appropriately lit by Matthew Karmios as we progress through the winter to spring.  The music which covers the scene changes is pleasing too. Alec is a classical music buff so we get at various times, Mozart, Verdi, Vivaldi, Brahms and some evocatively remixed Purcell.

I’m doubtful, though, about the cardboard coffin. I attended a funeral recently which featured one and it was the traditional navicular shape. It certainly didn’t look like a coffee table.

Colder Than Here is not especially cutting edge but this production is decent work. Moreover, it’s a thoughtful piece of theatre and it’s always good to be made to think about the need to confront death and loss rather than deny it.

First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/colder-than-here-2/

Photo: Elliott Franks

This is the first open air production of The Threepenny Opera that the Kurt Weill Foundation has given permission for so I suppose there was a lot of pressure to make it special. That might explain the over direction, busy-ness and an apparent  lack of trust in the material which isn’t really allowed to speak for itself until well into the second half.

Famously, it’s a response to John Gay’s The Beggars’ Opera, set in the corrupt, murky underworld of 1920s Berlin as a radical, no-holds-barred political comment. It’s timeless and I like the translation by Jeremy Sams and David MacDonald very much.

The production’s greatest strength is Peter Watts as Macheath. He has commanding stage presence, a terrifying sneer, heaps of charisma and a powerful voice. He’s also deliciously “Brechtian” stepping into the audience at one point to “steal” a phone from an audience member and he brings intense physicality to the part. Of course, when he’s in role and within the fourth wall we’re meant to see him as an unscrupulous villain but Watts also manages to factor some vulnerability and even tenderness into this serpentine character. He is well matched by Emily Panes who sings beautifully  as Polly Peachum, whom neither we nor Macheath can ever quite trust. She’s convincingly – and by turns –  sassy, coy, persuasive and ruthless.

Otherwise there’s a lot of miscasting. Although some of the 15 performers sing well, others don’t and in places the weak intonation is embarrassing. Most of the cast are actor-musicians and normally I’m full of praise for that. In this case, though, everyone seems overstretched as they shift in and out of the three shelters which (sort of) sometimes house the band to take quite big roles. It feels oddly random. And as for musical director Lada Valesova, who hops about and sometimes dances round set and the actors, conducting from all sorts of strange angles – the music would have been much more accurate, rather than woolly and not together as if often is, if all players had been able to see her.

Simon Nicholas’s set comprises a centre stage gasometer (or is it meant to be a bandstand?) which becomes the various unlikely things such as the abatoir where Macheath “marries” Polly. It also obscures sightlines so that musicians can’t see the MD and, worse, so that many of the audience can’t see the action on the balcony or in corners of the main stage. Yes, I know Brecht defied every convention and, in many ways, redefined theatre and the audience won’t be expecting Puccini. But they are still entitled to be able to see what’s going on – and they would probably rather not go home wondering what on earth Mattis Larsen’s apparently random lighting design was meant to contribute.

The applause, at the end of the performance I saw was polite but far from rapturous. It’s a pity because every one of these fifteen performers is talented and has much to offer but they are sold short by this messy production.

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  Phtos: Elliott Franks

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Directed by Conor Cook

If you’ve read, seen, taught, studied and written about a play as much as I have A Midsummer Night’s Dream every line is as familiar as your own fingers. It’s a delightful surprise, therefore, to see a production which has actors speaking the text in freshly nuanced ways and features some interesting directorial ingenuity. It also made me giggle throughout, often in places I’d never found especially funny before.

Six talented actors have to do a great deal of doubling but they are so good at it that it barely notices. Distinctive accent work – another strength – helps to make it work. Sadie Pepperrell, for instance is just a frightened girl in love as Hermia. She then gives us a Starveling who is so terrified of being in a play that s/he shakes continually, his/her mouth working. As First Fairy she is sexy, knowing and otherwordly with a London vernacular voice. I also really liked Jack Jacob’s performance as Peter Quince, fussing about and, a totally incompetent director, trying to get his actors to toe the line and keep them happy.  As a stereotype it’s only just exaggerated. He also brings a cocky, insolence to Lysander which I’ve never seen stressed before but it sits well with the text and situation.

Yvette Bruin and Elizabeth Prideaux play both the Theseus and Hippolyta and Oberon and Titania pairings  as lesbian relationships with Bruin being bossily, gruffly mannish in both roles. Prideaux is wonderfully plausible at the beginning as a Hippolyta who wants nothing to do with it and is clearly repelled by this political marriage she has to undertake. She also delights as angry misunderstood Helena and as bored Snout who has a drink problem.

Nicholas Southcott, who also plays Demetrius, is terrific as Bottom – interfering and arguing, dominating every conversation and very funny when he manages to produce donkey brays which sound like sexual arousal.  His acting is so intelligently detailed that even when he’s asleep in Titania’s arms he twitches his face as a donkey probably would. He loads “I could munch your dried oats” with delicious innuendo too.

The attractive costumes, designed by Heather Simpkin are more or less Grecian and quite complicated. So there are many costume changes which are neatly accommodated by giving some of the speeches to different characters. For instance Sally Sharp as Egea, who also does a lovely northern Puck, gets “My hounds are bred out a Spartan kind” as a soliloquy with a rather good mime of playing with a dog which gives other characters time  to get into their Mechanicals costumes. She then slips in to join them as Snug, almost unnoticed a few minutes into the next scene.

I’ve always understood that when Shakespeare uses continuous rhyming couplets it’s a signal not to take what’s happening too seriously. There’s a lot of that in the central three acts of A Midsummer Night’s Dream while the action is in the wood and this production leans on it which heightens the comedy. There are however some rather odd pronunciation decisions such as “ere” to rhyme with “here” and putting the stress on the second syllable in “promontory”.

This is a very funny, pacey (2 hours with interval) Dream in which the meaning of every word is clear even though it’s very true to the original text. The asides in modern English occur mostly in the Mechanicals scenes where they really add to the humour. I’m not sure we really need the rather banal songs at the beginning, end and before the interval though. They don’t add anything worthwhile.

Photo: Konrad Bartelski

It fizzes with youthful exuberance and talent but Katherine Hare’s imaginative direction and Julia Cave’s sharp choreography ensure that this production of Merrily We Roll Along never lurches out of control. The level of professionalism is richly impressive.

Sondheim’s 1981 musical tells the story of a successful musical theatre composer, Franklin Shepard, from 1955 to 1980. We start with him hosting a glitzy show biz party and then wind back in a series of “transitions” so that eventually we see Franklin as a teenager – watching Sputnik on the roof of a “rooming house” where he meets his future lyricist, Charley Kringas and his soon-to-become life-long friend, Mary Flynn. George Furth’s book is strong and compelling – there’s a lot of angst and heartbreak in this story. And I was struck more than ever this time by the way the reverse narrative highlights the poignancy. Because we know what happens in the future, the hopeful teenage enthusiasm at the end is tempered with rueful sadness.

There are no weak links in this cast and the show is characterised – as anything by Sondheim needs to be – with excellent ensemble work from which lots of minor roles emerge, thus making this a good choice for a youth theatre with a company of 28.

Amongst the outstanding team of principals, Thomas Oxley as Charley, sings a fabulous patter song in the first act, sings lyrical numbers with warm musicality and has a good line in rueful looks. Madeleine Morgan excels as the troubled, eventually alcohol-dependent, tactless Mary Flynn and her wide-range singing voice allows her to cover complex moods. Matilda Shapland’s Beth is petite, pretty and joyfully supportive as the idealistic young first wife with beautiful silvery soprano voice.

Toby Owers finds plenty of nuance in Franklin who wants to compose more than anything else but is, inevitably, tainted by commercialism. And Sophie Lagden commands the stage whenever she’s on it as the over-acting, self-interested ruthless Gussie who becomes Franlin’s second wife but it isn’t going to last. Her powerful singing voice is perfect for the role.

All this is accompanied by an 11-strong youth band visible at either end of a balcony above the stage. They play with precision and passion under Leigh Thompson’s musical direction and I was delighted to see them all out of the shadows for applause at curtain call,

South Playhouse’s new Elephant venue provides a wide, inclusive playing space with audience on three sides and this production uses every inch of it including the two side aisles through the audience. The balcony between the two sections of the band is integrated into the action too.

In short, it’s a treat to see so many young people finding and exploring their (considerable) potential in a show of this quality.

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  Photos: Konrad Bartelski

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