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The House Party (Susan Elkin reviews)

The House Party

By Laura Lomas, an adaptation of Miss Julie by August Strindberg

Directed by Holly Race Roughan

Chichester Festival Theatre in co-production with Headlong in association with Frantic Assembly

Star rating: 3

Photograph by Ellie Kurtz

We’re in the present, in a spaciously luxurious home where a teenage party is about to kick off. Loren Elstein’s shiny set connotes that well and makes imaginative use of the Minerva space. There’s a large kitchen island centre stage. When the party bursts in, the island becomes a mini platform for dancing. And much later it morphs into a very different sort of small kitchen with clothes airer, cereal packet and small old fashioned sink unit.

Because there’s a party for eighteen-year-olds in the background Giles Thomas’s sound design gives us short bursts of music so loud the building shakes – which feels authentic, and it’s interspersed with dramatic blackouts. The ensemble of party goers are cast from Chichester Festival Youth Theatre and Frantic Assembly’s Ignition programme. Choreographed by Frantic’s Scot Graham, their work is spikily arresting.

At heart though, Strindberg’s 1888 play is a three hander, and I’d argue that Lomas’s play is inspired by Miss Julie rather than adapted from it because it’s a very long way from the original in many respects.  Before I saw it I received a cryptic note from the press office asking me to be aware that the play does not end where you’d expect it to if you know Miss Julie. Indeed – does Julie really go off to commit suicide and if not, or if she fails, where would these three people be in ten years’ time? Lomas gives us a rather odd epilogue or postscript to explore that point and it seriously upsets the balance of the play because the first half is nearly an hour and a half and the second less than 20 minutes. At the interval, puzzled people all round me were asking each other “Is it finished?”

Lomas has enhanced the role of Christine (Rachelle Diedricks) who comes from a working-class background but is very bright and hoping to go to Cambridge. She is a close friend of Julie (Nadia Parkes) whose wealthy absent father owns the house. Christine’s boyfriend Jon (Josh Finan) is the son of woman who does the cleaning in the house. Thus, ways have been contrived of making the play’s central, troubled relationships more or less plausible for 2024 although the characters are very different from Strindberg’s. Jon, for example, is much more decent and less self-interested than Jean in the original, his one big mistake notwithstanding.

Diedricks as Christine is warm, bubbly and later intense and troubled before eventually finding a calm maturity and a sense of stillness – it’s a strong performance. Parkes’s Julie is engagingly volatile as she gives us a deeply flawed and troubled personality – affected by the fatal combination of privilege and neglect in which she has grown up. And Parkes nails that. Finan, who uses his native Merseyside accent, finds innate commonsensible decency and homeliness in Jon and it’s pretty convincing. Lomas says in her programme interview that she hopes that, at the end of the play, the audience will feel compassion for each of these three characters – and she certainly achieves that despite the play feeling a bit like a jigsaw whose pieces don’t quite lock together.

 

 

Twelfth Night

William Shakespeare

Directed by Owen Horsley

Music composed and supervised by Sam Kenyon

Open Air Theatre, Regents Park

Star rating: 4

We’re in a louche 1990s-ish café near the sea – call it Illyria or “What You Will” –  where a four piece band is playing plaintively. And that’s one of many quite neat contrivances in this engaging version of Shakespeare’s gender fluid comedy about grief. There’s a lot of music in the play and here it is on stage where several accomplished actor-musos play the minor roles such as Curio and Fabian.

Director, Owen Horsley tackles head-on the blurring of sexuality in the play. The relationship between Sebastian (Andro Cowperthwaite) and Antonio (Nicholas Karimi) is there in the text in plain sight. Horsley makes it overt. This Sebastian is definitely not going to settle down to marriage with Olivia. Meanwhile Sir Toby Belch (Michael Matus – excellent) is a drag queen. And Orsino (Raphael Bushay – lots of gravitas) is uncomfortably puzzled about his feelings towards this faintly androgynous person who has joined his household.

The acting and direction is this show is glitteringly good. The text has been altered very little but this cast knows how to squeeze a nuance, innuendo or laugh out of almost every phrase. There’s none of the fashionable gabbling to make it sound chatty either. They make sure that you hear and respond to every word. Enunciation is the rule but it’s never – obviously – declamatory.

Anna Francolini’s Olivia (excessively and hilariously swathed in black lace at her first entrance – costumes by Ryan Dawson Laight) is richly compelling. She delivers every line with wit and verve, hamming it up a bit but also finding pathos and that silvery sadness the play demands. Moreover I’ve rarely seen an actor make better use of perfectly timed looks and pauses.

Evelyn Miller as Viola  is warm, charming but feisty – even as she deals with her own grief and hurt. One of the play’s synergies is that both women have lost a brother. Yes, you can understand why Olivia falls for her but equally you share Viola’s horror when she realises what’s happening. It’s exquisitely nuanced.

And so to Richard Cant’s Malvolio. Now I’ve seen many pretty good Malvolios over the years with Desmond Barrit for the RSC being one of the most memorable. Cant surpasses them all. He gets the tiresome, fussy humourless officiousness perfectly but when we see him alone in the letter scene (with the listeners behind imaginatively directed in a series of freeze tableaux) Cant shows us the character’s vulnerability and it’s painful. And then there’s the horror of the scene in which he’s confined as mad and his final exit – in which we feel real shame. So the moment of reconciliation at the very end (inspired idea) comes as a welcome and warm surprise. It is an outstanding performance.

Less successful is Julie Legrand as Feste. The conceit is that she’s the singer in the café and she sings well enough but she’s more like a cynical, weary school teacher trying to be clever than anything resembling the joker the play really needs.

Overall though, this is a refreshing, thoughtful and warmly entertaining take on an old favourite and an excellent opener for Open Air Theatre’s 2024 season. Moreover, the weather gods were smiling on press night which was a delicious “darling buds of May” sort of evening. And there’s no better venue when the weather’s right.

Ten in a Bed

By Steve Tasane

Directed by Chris Elwell

A Half Moon Theatre production

Polka Theatre and touring nationwide

Star rating: 4

For a “simple” two hander show for 3-8 year olds this powerful, insightful, moving play is pretty complex. Developed as part of Half Moon’s 2021 “Narrative of Empathy and Resilience”, at one level we see two brothers Iggy (Hayden Mampasi) and Kaz (Hari Kang) playing and singing in the night because they can’t sleep. And it’s funny. Young audiences love to see adults pretending to be children and doing silly things. At another level this is a refugee story of two children who’ve arrived safely – the lucky ones or at least “luckier than before” – and are being held in a facility on Britian’s south coast. They are lonely, frightened and haunted by what they’ve been through but they are also mischievous, playful and imaginative – because they’re children.

The concept is clever. The cushions on the bed represent the other eight of the titular ten. Each has a name.  They are the boys’ friends. The traditional “There were ten in the bed” song is sung several times but the words are changed to “Roll over and there was room for everyone” which is a pretty pertinent political message – which palpably gave the large Year 2 group I saw it with something to think about.

The play’s message –  subtly presented and never over-egged – is underpinned by symbolism. One of the games the boys play, regularly harassed and threatened by an adult English voice telling them to be quiet, is to imagine they’re on a boat. The sea is rough and there are sharks circling. Should they lighten the load and throw one of the cushions overboard and if so which one? Iggy is constantly hungry and the jelly baby (ten of them in a bed of icing) cake he keeps remembering symbolises what he has left and lost. Eventually he and Kaz find a way of reconciling their old and new lives but the coloured jumpers strung like washing across the back screen quietly tell their own tragic story. Where are their wearers?

Both actors are good and they work pleasingly together under Chris Elwell’s very experienced direction. Sorcha Corcoran’s design, which includes a stage left quasi-building made of therapy boxes, is simple enough to go into all the different spaces this fine show’s big forthcoming tour will require. Mark Newnham gives us fairly gentle folksy music which might be from, say, Syria and which plays continuously shifting from major to minor according to the mood of the moment and accompanying the boys’ singing.

Of course, as an amateur violinist, I’ve always been interested in violin repertoire and have known – at least as a listener – Beethoven’s 1803 “Kreutzer” sonata since I was a teenager. It was dedicated to violinist Rudolphe Kreutzer who said it was too difficult to play. In recent years I have also developed a fond respect for Leos Janàĉek’s first string quartet (1923) which he called “After The Kreutzer Sonata” although it’s way beyond my abilities as a player.

Written 120 years apart, these two works are hooked together by a longish Tolstoy short story which was published in 1889. The sonata features in the story and Janàĉek’s  piece is inspired by Tolstoy’s novella. It occurred to me recently that I knew this history but had never read the missing link so now I’ve put that right. And it was quite a revelation.

We’re on a train embarked on a long Russian journey. Goodness, how Tolstoy loved trains. They symbolise all sorts of horrors in Anna Karenina and he even managed to die (1910) in a railway station. The narrator, Trukhachevsky describes the other passengers and then gradually it thins out to leave him alone with a disconcertingly forthcoming and haunted looking man named Pozdnyshev who expresses forthright views about sex and marriage before settling down to recount his own experience. Yes, this is one of those works in which the main story teller is not the framework narrator – in the tradition of The Ancient Mariner, Heart of Darkness or even Wuthering Heights.

 Pozdnyshev, clamining it’s standard behaviour, for a man of his nobleman class, led a “debauched” (brothels etc) youth before somewhat reluctantly embarking on a more-or-less arranged marriage. He bitterly regards marriage as a form of licensed prostitution and seems to view his wife, who is never graced with a name, with a cynical blend of revulsion and obsessive jealousy. They quarrel and then use sex (“love”) as a reconciliatory tool over and over again. She produces five children most of whom she breast feeds as her husband thinks she should. His contention is that love – in the sense of sustained, affectionate commitment – seems to work for peasants who live simple lives but doesn’t exist among the privileged classes. Unsurprisingly The Kreutzer Sonata was banned for obscenity by the Russian authorities as soon as it was published.

Eventually Pozdnyshev’s marriage plunges into Othello territory with a hint of Browning’s My Last Duchess which doesn’t come as a surprise because he begins his story by announcing that he killed his wife. The catalyst for his final outburst of violent revenge is music. A talented violinist arrives in their social circle and Pozdnyshev’s wife welcomes him as someone she, a pianist, can play duets with and they do some soirees together. No prizes for guessing what, among other things they play: Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata, of course.  Pozdnyshev convinces himself that there’s more between them than music. And as a female reader in 2024 I find myself looking past Pozdnyshev and empathising with his poor wife. He must have been appalling to live with.

It wasn’t only the Russian authorities who condemned Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata. It caused tensions between him and his own wife. Sonia. Theirs was not the happiest of unions and she was convinced – probably rightly –  that there were a lot of autobiographical elements and opinions in the narrative.

And as for Janàĉek, well he wasn’t happily married either and seems to have poured much of his angst into his first string quartet – hence the name he chose for it. Interestingly, though, it was written late in life when the composer was 67 years old.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Old Babes in the Wood by Margaret Atwood

Chet Baker: Let’s Get Lost

Tim Connery

Directed Finlay Glen

Bridge House Theatre

Star rating: 2

Chet Baker was a talented 1950s jazz trumpeter – “the King of Cool” –  who got  into drugs and failed to fulfil his potential. Tim Connery’s short play attempts to give us a glimpse of Baker’s mindset before things went fatally wrong. Thus we see a young man (Alfredo Mudie Smart) who is ill at ease and loathes being pushed in every direction by people trying to make money out of him. “I’m a jazz man. I play and I sing” he says repeatedly, stressing that he doesn’t want to go to Hollywood and be committed to “some studio”. We are required  to imagine that he’s in an empty rehearsal venue confiding his inner thoughts to an imaginary audience.

Smart is a competent trumpeter with a sweetly mellifluous singing voice. He’s also a fairly convincing actor and has got the Oklohoma accent sorted along with the Western drawl of some of the people his character is addressed by. The final few moments of the play are moving too.

Sadly, though, none of that is enough. This play is skeletally thin. It runs just 45 minutes – short, often repetitive, monologues interspersed with Smart singing far too many ballads of the period, each including a trumpet interlude. It’s a samey format  which doesn’t add to the story telling. I wanted to know how Baker came to play the trumpet in childhood before his two army stints. Suddenly he mentions a wife – sorry? He swigs from a bottle he keeps in his brief case. When and how did that start?

This play feels very much like work in progress – a starting point. As a critic, of course, I didn’t pay for my ticket. If had done so I would have felt short-changed by the slightness of the production.

 

 

Antigone

Sophocles, translated by Ian Johnston

Director Jayne Denny

Little Homma Productions

Brockley Jack Studio

Star rating: 4

Working with the largest cast (14 perfomers) I’ve ever seen at Brockley Jack Studio, this is an ambitious piece for this space. More and more actors keep appearing. But it works and never feels crowded. It is actually a pretty stylish piece of theatre.

Antigone is familiar territory, of course, but with its themes of tyranny, abuse of women, and standing up for what you know is right, it is always topical. This version includes mentions of Gods and other Greek references but is costumed for today with the Chorus as Creon’s watchful soldiers. Ian Johnston’s text provides some fairly formal Chorus lines but the dialogue is 21st century in flavour. Very much a play for our times, then.

 

The time-honoured story presents Creon as King refusing to allow a burial for his nephew, Polyneices whom he regards as a traitor. Antigone disobeys her Uncle’s edict because she wants decency for her dead brother. And the punishment for that is death.

Mark Homer is suitably chilling and determined as Creon who – despite what everyone around him eventually advises – cannot bring himself to climb down until its too late. It’s a convincing account of man heading for tragedy. Eleanor Homer (I presume they are father and daughter) finds brave passion in Antigone but she’s also terrified and that tension is well nuanced especially when we see soldiers silently raping her. Blake Heaven is strong as Creon’s son, Haemon who’s in love with Antigone and there’s an enjoyable cameo from Eveline Reynolds-Boison (imaginatively supported by Lucy Ellis and Kirsty Yeung’s lighting design) as Tiresias the prophet.

The Chorus, which includes some actors who double in other roles, is deftly directed and the story telling as clear as it could be. There’s a fair bit of silent movement work – effectively dance drama which underpins the narrative quite effectively.

All in all, this is an arresting and relevant take on Antigone – succinct at 80 minutes without interval – and I really liked the projected statistics about  present day abuse of women by men  on the back screen at the end.

 

 

Philharmonia

Alexandre Bloch, Sunwook Kim

Royal Festival Hall

02 May 2024

It’s not easy when a conductor has to step in at the last minute as Alexandre Bloch did at this concert for the indisposed Santtu-Matias Rouvali. A lot of effort had clearly gone into making it work and, on the whole, it came off.

The high spot was Sunwook Kim playing Brahms’s Second Piano concerto and watching him play with his whole body as well as his hands. He soared through the opening movement (having negotiated that most challenging of openings with the solo horn), and brought crisp resonance to the second, often turning to make eye contact with upper strings. It was, however the andante which really moved mountains.  The exquisite cello solo (Alice Neary) with which the piano duets – Kim leaning to the right to look round the piano at Neary –  was breathtaking. He’s a wonderfully secure player. I have a special, very personal affection for this huge concerto which goes right back to my early twenties and it’s a real treat to hear it played as sensitively as this.

After it, though, Schumann’s Symphony No 3 “Rhenish” seemed a a bit of an anticlimax. It’s a pleasant enough symphony but it’s far from great and I suspect that for this concert most of the rehearsal time had been devoted to the concerto because the Schumann was ragged in places. It wasn’t together at the beginning, for example. and the coherence slipped in the final accelerando. I liked the way Bloch brought out the minor key angst and the fanfares in the fourth movement, though.

It was inspired programming  to start the concert with The Entry of the Gods into Valhalla. It means that those of us who can’t quite hack raw Wagner in its entirety can enjoy a small Wagner fix. And this familiar eight minute section (arranged by Hermann Zumpe) is as beautiful as it is grandiose.  Bloch – an expansive conductor whose feet are never still –  leaned on all that luscious brass interspersed with wistful woodwind: colourful, epic story telling in music.

One more specific word of praise:  Watching Annabelle Meare, who leads The Philharmonia’s second violins is like a mini-masterclass in ensemble playing. Her eyes are on the leader as much as they are on the conductor. She hardly seems to look at her music and her gestures are really clear for the rest of her section. I learn from her every time I see her in action.

 

 

I was given this book by a friend who’d  abandoned it  because she said she didn’t like way it “moves about all over the place”. Well I’m really glad she passed it on because I was very taken with this 2023 novel. And I can cope with flashbacks. I’m used to that sort of thing. Speaking as someone who once had to unravel Margaret Atwood’s highly impenetrable  Surfacing for an A level class, I’m not much fazed by multiple time zones in fiction.

We All Want Impossible Things is about friendship and loss and it’s profoundly moving. Edi is in the final stages of cancer and is dying in a New York hospice. Ash, who narrates, is her lifelong friend – and you’ll go a long way before you find another celebration of friendship as powerful as this.

So how did they become friends, what have they shared and who else is in their lives? That’s what Newman gradually unwinds and we meet all sorts of decent people – both as they were and as they are now as they visit the hospice and try to be supportive. Ash’s divorced husband, Honey, for example is a real treasure and beautifully presented. Why on earth did she let him go? Ash herself wonders that too. Then there’s Edi’s gorgeous husband Jude and her beloved son, Dash who’s only eight and needs to be shielded from the worst of what’s happening. Ash’s daughters are a delight too. So is Edi’s brother and the staff at the hospice including Cedar, a musician whose job is to sing to the residents.

Ash is, by her own admission, a flawed character. She tries to suppress her grief by indulging in inappropriate sex with too many people and although she is bleakly, darkly funny about this, her behaviour is, actually pitiful. And I, for one, felt a bit cross with at least one of the men who takes advantage of her vulnerability.

There’s a lot of food in this novel because it’s a comfort at times of great sadness especially when it’s shared. So there’s food taken to the hospice to tempt Edi and to nourish anyone visiting her in a party-like way. Back home there are “take out” meals and food cooked by various people to feed anyone who’s around. It’s effectively a metaphor for love.

We All Want Impossible Things is not, emphatically not, a novel about despair. Edi has accepted her situation and, of course, contrary to one of Ash’s fantasy day dreams, there is no miracle recovery. The novel takes exactly the path you know it will from page one. Acceptance is a major theme, and eventually, every character finds a way forward so there’s also a lot of optimism – along with the warmth and compassion.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy.