Press ESC or click the X to close this window

Angry Salmon (Susan Elkin reviews)

Show: Angry Salmon

Society: British Youth Music Theatre (BYMT)

Venue: Bridewell Theatre. 14 Bride Lane, London EC4Y 8EQ

Credits: Jordan Paul Clarke music, lyrics, co-writer, musical director. Ali James, co-writer, director

Angry Salmon

4 stars

Susan Elkin | 06 Aug 2023 23:07pm

Photo: Courtesy of BYMT

It was BYMT’s youth panel who wanted this show, which was first staged last year, to be revived and further developed. Hence this short run at the Bridewell theatre with a cast of 33 and a fine 7-strong band above the stage.

The idea is distinctly wacky but, actually, this show is a warmly thoughtful piece about family values, animal welfare, capitalism, grief,  friendship, exploitation and a lot more. A large group of salmon are being factory farmed in a tank. They believe, because that’s what the company tells them, that when they’re fished out they go to a better, happier place so there’s an oblique, critical nod to the use of religion to keep adherents where you want them. Then one young salmon becomes the lone voice of reason and leads an escape. Thereafter it becomes a quest story (to join the wild salmon) spliced with the traditional overcoming the monster narrative – in this case the company boss.

It is astonishing what inspirational directing can do with youthful energy. This is a show which pounds along with high octane exuberance. Every cast member is enjoying him or herself and they carry the audience with them one hundred per cent. And although this is primarily an ensemble piece there are some strikingly strong principals who unfortunately cannot be named here because the programme merely lists the 33 cast members without giving their roles. I especially admired the timing, presence and singing of the young woman playing the villain, Miss Musk: a cross between Miss Trunchbull and Cruella de Vil, Also outstanding is the young actor playing Spike, father to Leo and Finn both of whom are also excellent.

I liked the simplicity of the concept too. The cast are mostly in black. When they’re fish they wear a pink glove with gauzy layers. Keeping these layers moving suggests gills. A group of seals wear bowler hats. Two delightful sword fish – off Scotland – sport swords and wear a tartan sash. They are dourly determined and dance a highland fling with the visiting salmon.

It’s a well written piece with some powerful songs and a lot of humour. The fishy puns come thick and fast as the salmon have to toe the fishing line, the girl band clams give a five starfish performance and someone admits to “flipperancy”. It’s a lot more than a pantomimic romp, though, There are a lot of issues in this show. I doubt that many audience members will fancy smoked salmon for a day or two.

 

  • All Photos :Courtesy of BYMT

 First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/angry-salmon/

It’s a hard hitting story about drug addiction, parentless children who get repeatedly rejected and the horrors of fostering in 1990s/early 2000s Appalachia especially for a mixed race boy.  I was riveted, moved and disturbed from page one. I was also completely hooked. It’s a big novel but I read it in four days.

It is based on, and inspired by, David Copperfield but the fascinating thing is that if you knew nothing about Dickens and his famous semi-autobiographical novel you could simply take Demon Copperhead at face value.  And it would work brilliantly.

If you are familiar with David Copperfield, however, it’s an odd sensation because you have foreknowledge of the plot. You know who will hook up with whom, who will be ruined and who will die. And you read with a separate level of curiosity as you wonder how Kingsolver will achieve these outcomes while maintaining contextual plausibility.

She does it, very successfully, by not following her source novel too slavishly. If she needs another character she invents one.  The Peggot family, for instance live next door to Demon and his mother. They are a couple – kind, loving and decent – with an extended family who all play significant parts in the plot. Dickens simply gave us Peggoty, who eventually marries Barkis, along with her kindly brother at Great Yarmouth. Kingsolver has taken the Peggoty concept and developed it. It’s both ingenious and convincing. And Demon’s own narrative voice is richly arresting.

The novel also reinforces the point that Dickens’s character-types are timelessly true to life. We’ve all met versions of U-Haul the embezzler and Fast Forward the young man with the charisma of a god but who values no one except himself. Then there’s fragile Dori, the  first love of Demon’s life, who simply slides ever further into drug addiction and eventually fades away – her faithful dog Jip curled up on her stomach.

Dickens was not, in truth, terribly good at virtuous women. His original Agnes, like Flora Dombey and Rose Maylie, is pallid and not particularly believable. Kingsolver’s Angus is far more interesting. She’s bright, feisty, independent and perceptive. And that makes the ending – in a novel which is ultimately about redemption – arguably better than the Dickens one.

Another glorious thing about Demon Copperhead is the sheer observational exuberance of the writing. Again and again Kingsolver stopped me dead in my tracks with a phrase or  description so apt that it chimed. Consider, for instance: “Two dead wasps lay on the sill with their heads close together like a tiny murder-suicide.” Or “The moon was more egg-shaped than round, but seemed proud of itself regardless, laying out a shiny silver road across the water to our feet”. Or “Mr Peg’s people straggled in like a trail of ants carrying their casserole dishes, their sheet cakes, their green Jello rings with wrinkled Saran Wrap skin”. It’s the sort of thing which brings me out in a major attack of writer’s envy.

Demon 2

I always contend that you invariably learn facts from novels. This one packs in a lot of information about the tobacco industry because much of the action is in Virginia so that is another bonus. There’s a fair bit about American football too.

Demon Copperhead was published last year, a Pulitzer prize winner which has also won the Women’s Prize for Fiction. It is now available in paperback although I read it on Kindle. I recommend it very warmly.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey

According to Amazon I have purchased Salley Vickers’ beautiful 2001 novel three times. I really can’t think why unless I gave it as presents to two other people. If I did, then it’s a sign of how much I must have liked it.  I certainly have very fond memories of a warm, tender read so returning to it now promised to be a treat. And it was.

The titular Miss (Julia) Garnet, a retired history teacher, has recently lost her live-in companion of thirty years. No, they were not an “item” but they were close, perhaps like sisters, and Julia is feeling deeply bereaved and lonely. So she decamps to a rented flat in Venice, initially for six months. While there – long story short – she becomes fixated on the paintings by Francesco Guardi of Tobias and the Angel in the church of Angelo Raffaele, reads the Book of Tobit from The Apocrypha, makes friends for the first time in her life and finds, eventually, the sort of inner peace which has always eluded her.

It’s a book which operates on more levels and layers than any lasagne made in a Venetian restaurant. First, there’s an evocation of Venice as detailed and compelling a fine guidebook. If this novek doesn’t make you want to re/visit I don’t know what will. You can see the perfectly carved figures, smell the lagoon, taste the coffee, feel the rough texture of the statuary and hear the birds wheeling over the water.

The novel is also a richly sensitive portrait of a woman who has never known sexual love but, perhaps, even at this late stage in life would like to. Carlo is very attentive and attractive but …

Then there’s the spiritual awakening. Miss Garnet has always been an atheist communist but now, to the exasperation of her “friend” Vera, who visits from Britain, she begins to recognise that there might be more than one way of looking at things – especially angels. The character of, and her conversations with, the urbane, unconventional Monsignore are one of the novel’s many delights.

Julia is inspired to explore the Book of Tobit, a version of which Vickers threads through the narrative. It includes the earliest mention of St Raphael. The themes are echoed in what is happening to Miss Garnet now especially in the characters and backgrounds of Sarah and Toby, two young art restorers working on a chapel who become Julia’s friends and whose back story is complicated.

MissG2

It’s also a doggy novel. There is a dog in the Guardi which sets Julia thinking and Monsignore’s pug, named Marco, after St Mark, is a character in his own right. Then there are the dogs she sees and hears on the street along with various other dog references. If one were studying this book with students there would be a lot of fun to be had in creating a big flow chart of themes to work out how they interlink.

This is a novel which twists and turns with such gentle elegance that it’s hard to foresee how Vickers could possibly end it. She does it with stylish lyricism –  naturally.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

Show: Rock Follies

Society: Chichester Festival Theatre (professional)

Venue: Minerva Theatre, Chichester Theatre, Oaklands Park, Chichester PO19 6AP

Credits: Based on the television series written by Howard Schuman. Book by Chloë Moss Songs by Howard Schuman and Andy Mackay.

Rock Follies

3 stars

Photo: Johan Persson

It’s yet another feel-good show. We all love a bit of success against the odds, especially when it’s based on a true story. It’s the tradition of Kinky Boots, Calendar Girls and Made in Dagenham.

Three young out of work performers form a female rock band in 1976/7 when it was a revolutionary thing to do. Of course they face opposition and there are many rows, disagreements and tensions along the way – not least with their three partners. It was (is?) very hard to be taken seriously in such a male-dominated industry.  In the end they achieve success and many people will have fond memories of the TV series Rock Follies.

Of course such a show will not work without a really outstanding trio at the centre and casting directors Pippa Ailion and Natalie Gallacher have done a good job.  In their different ways Carly Bawden as Anna, Angela Marie Hurst as Dee and Zizi Strallen as Q all bring real talent and are convincing. The shifting dynamic between them is nicely caught too. Samuel Barnett makes Harry into a sensible decent pragmatic character who really does try to manage the group sensitively and Tamsin Carroll is suitably terrifying as the chain-smoking no-nonsense, snarling American manager, Kitty.

There is, of course, a lot of music (strong over-stage five-piece rock band led by MD Toby Higgins on keys) in this show. Some of the songs drive the narrative forward and others show us the girls in performance. Quite often a song segues suddenly from a work in progress being quietly composed to full performance and that’s directorially neat. It’s also pleasant to hear tuneful numbers rooted in an era before excessive bass destroyed melody. And once the group is out on the road it’s a simple but effective device to have the ensemble shouting Paris, Rome, Stockholm and so on every few bars to connote a big tour

In places Rock Follies is very funny. There’s an enjoyable scene, for instance, in which Stevie (Sebastien Torkia – good) struts his OTT, camp grunge and chauvinism while the girls are expected to pop cheerfully in and out of dustbins. Chloe Moss’s book provides plenty of acerbic, laugh-aloud lines too such as David (Fred Haig- pleasing) telling the sharply that they’re in the pop industry not the Socialist Workers’ Party.

Rock Follies is a CfT commission and this was its debut. I’m not sure that it’s likely to join the annals of Popular Shows although, if it’s published and the rights become available in due course, it could prove a  popular choice for amateur companies. Meanwhile it’s a perfectly decent show of its type and I – not generally a rock chick –  enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would.

 

  • Photos: Johan Persson

 First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/rock-follies/
 Subscribe 
guest

I read it when it was first published in 1988. For a long time after The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), which is a masterpiece, I read each Atwood title as it appeared – although, apart from The Handmaid’s Tale in general I prefer her “real life” work to her dystopian titles.

Cat’s Eye is narrated by Elaine Risley, a successful painter, who has returned to her native Toronto after many years elsewhere, for a retrospective exhibition of her work. And it triggers memories.

Atwood does fractured time narrative impeccably well and we shift back and forth between  Elaine’s remembered childhood and her apparently happy but inwardly bemused  life in the present.

At elementary school she was badly bullied by three other girls which has left her with life long feelings of inadequacy. Cordelia in particular treated her so appallingly that for many years Elaine blocked it out completely until the memories come flooding back when she finds her beloved cat’s eye marble in her mother’s house while clearing it decades later.

In adult life she is haunted by images of Cordelia who, it transpires, was probably far more unhappy than Elaine. She hopes, knowing at another level that it won’t happen, that Cordelia will turn up at her exhibition. She wants to ask her why she behaved as she did and to find what a counsellor would probably call “closure”.

The writing is warmly compelling – this is Margaret Atwood, after all. Elaine isn’t simply unhappy. Her memories are mixed.  She and her brother are taken each summer by her parents to camp in the north for the whole season. Her father, like Atwood’s own, is an entomologist needing to do field work  during the long university vacation. Unsurprisingly there is a ring of real authenticity here. This is a world Atwood knows well. And Elaine is relatively happy at these times.

The novel is effectively a nuanced study of how memory works especially when there are very painful experiences in the past. It is also a moving, poignant exploration of how far it is true that child is mother of the woman, as Wordsworth didn’t quite say.

And my goodness, Atwood’s powers of description are razor-sharp. One day it snows on the way home from school: “Big soft caressing flakes fall onto our skin like cold moths; the air fills with feathers”. She describes a group of street statues as “coppery-green with black smears running down them like metal blood”.

I read it a second time a couple of years after it was published and then had to study it in detail in the 1990s because it became an A level set text on the syllabus I was teaching. There is nothing like teaching/sharing a text to sharpen one’s appreciation of it. Coming back to it now after, maybe, twenty five years, I still find it a page turner and I still marvel at Atwood’s facility with words and her ability to conjure up situations which are so ordinary you could reach out and touch them. But her gift is to spin them  wittily like an intricate spider’s web.  Yet again, I struggled to put the book down

Someone wrote on Twitter recently, that he never re-reads books and asks if he should be ashamed. Well of course it’s not a matter of shame. We can all choose what to read and how many times. Every reader, obviously, reads in his or her own way too. For myself I find rereading a huge source of pleasure because some books – and Cat’s Eye is a good example – get better each time.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Miss Garnet’s Angel by Salley Vickers

Of course I’ve read Julian Barnes before. I particularly remember enjoying Arthur & George in 2005 during a week in a gîte in Normandy with the extended family. The sun shone gloriously every day and Barnes and I spent a lot of time together under the awning outside the kitchen door. Do other people associate books with the place where they read them?

Elizabeth Finch (2022) is his latest and newly out in paperback so, for once, that’s how I read it rather than via Kindle. The eponymous Elizabeth is a lecturer in culture and civilisation  in whose adult class the narrator, Neil, finds himself when he’s in his thirties. She is inscrutable but fascinating and fearsomely intelligent.  She dresses with frumpy elegance and no one knows whether there has ever been any sort of private life.

In time Neil gets into the habit of having lunch with her once a month and when she dies she leaves him her books and papers. He has, by then, two failed marriages behind him and is dubbed “the king of unfinished projects” by his children. He simply doesn’t know what he should or could do with her archive.

What he eventually does relates to Julian the Apostate (you’ll learn a lot from this novel) and forms the central section of what is effectively a sort of literary triptych. The first and third sections form a narrative  framework for Neil’s one and only finished project. He tells us about his research, getting to know Elizabeth’s brother, and contacting a couple of people who were in the original class with him. In a sense it’s like a Picasso painting because, although it’s all filtered through Neil we get glimpses of Elizabeth from several other perspectives including the time she wrote something for which she was pilloried by the Daily Mirror, a story which got out of hand.

ElizabethF2

It’s an engagingly grown up, hugely well informed novel.  And as someone who has recently published a totally different sort of book about a (real) dead person – The Alzheimer’s Diaries, 2022 – I was stopped in my tracks by this passage:

“To please the dead. Naturally we honour the dead, but in honouring them, we somehow make them even more dead. But to please the dead, this brings them to life again. Does that make sense?”

Yes, Julian/Neil, it certainly does. Thank you.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood.

 

 

Show: After All These Years

Society: London (professional shows)

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

Credits: Giles Cole. PRODUCED BY CLOSE QUARTER PRODUCTIONS LTD. AND THEATRE REVIVA! IN ASSOCIATION WITH HOLOFCENER LTD. DIRECTED BY GRAHAM POUNTNEY.

After All These Years

3 stars

Gile’s Cole’s new play, which did well at the Brighton Fringe earlier this year, is an unashamedly traditional comedy of manners with undercurrents. A simple, often funny, four hander it is completely free of gimmickry, special effects, role doubling and fancy sound tracks. Brecht, Pinter and Berkoff are not in the room. And that’s all rather refreshing. Yes, you can still have a perfectly decent, entertaining evening in the theatre without overworked, fashionable “innovation.”

Two couples – all with a background in show business – are now retired, or semi-retired, but restless. The symmetry (another thing I quite liked) of Cole’s play gives us a scene with the two men, one with the two women and ends with them all together, two years later.

The opening scene with Graham Pountney, who also directs, as Charlie and Jeffrey Holland as Alfred is beautifully written and paced.  Two old mates are in a pub, as they are daily, chatting inconsequentially. Both actors use silence beautifully and Pountney speaks volumes just by crossing and uncrossing his legs. Holland does wonderful things with his face. Gradually we learn about their marriages and the tensions between the four of them.

The second scene with the two women Joan (Judy Buxton) and Marianne (Carol Ball) feels slightly more forced and less convincingly natural as it works towards some unexpected revelations. The final scene, however, which establishes that there are going to be major changes in future is pretty lively. Ball eventually finds a tender, delicate warmth in her character and Buxton gets spark into the idea that Joan isn’t quite what she’d always seemed – her Alfred has become very tedious after all.

In many ways it’s Holland’s Alfred who stands out in this show. He forgets words all the time and then, during the two year “gap”, has a mild stroke. The resulting slight speech defect and balance issues are immaculately well observed. And we end up sympathising more with him than anyone else.

First published by Sardines https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/after-all-these-years/

Show: The Railway Children

Society: OVO

Venue: The Roman Theatre of Verulamium. Bluehouse Hill, St Albans, Hertfordshire AL3 6AE

Credits: An adaptation of the E.Nesbitt novel by Mike Kenny. Produced by OVO. Directed by Scott le Crass.

The Railway Children

3 stars

Mike Kenny’s 2010 adaptation of E Nesbit’s famous 1906 novel has rapidly become a modern classic. I’ve seen it several times in the hands of various directors and companies and – tender, realistic, nostalgic but with plenty of bite – it’s always a sure fire winner. And Scott le Crass’s version for OVO with 6 adults and six children (alternating teams) is, of course, an enjoyable evening’s theatre.

It’s an ingeniously low budget show – the unrolling of a huge train banner to suggest the near miss railway crash is a brilliant idea. And the upstage gantry – part of all this season’s OVO shows at the Roman Theatre – works perfectly as a railway bridge. Less successful is the use of trunks and suitcases as a moveable set. Yes, they evoke the whole idea of trains and travel and work well enough as, say, tables or fallen rocks but there is far too much lifting and waving them around the stage for no apparent reason. It becomes a distracting irritant.

Kenny’s script gives us the three children looking back and telling their story as adults – often disagreeing about the details. That gets round their being adults but acting like children as neatly in this production as it always does. Charlotte Ware is warm and compelling as adolescent Bobbie although I was unconvinced by the “flirtation” with the broken legged boy in the tunnel because he’s half her size and at least five years younger. Will Kirkham gets all the right boyishness, decency and vulnerability that Peter needs. Best of the three, however, is Grace Bassett as Phyllis, the youngest Railway Child. Bassett pouts, stamps her foot, puts her oar in and then smiles through it all. It’s an outstanding performance. I really believed she was every nine year old I’ve ever known.

Charlie Clee plays all the male roles with a nice range of voices and gaits. And I liked the doubling joke when he is suddenly thrown the stethoscope and told he has to be the doctor and he says “But I haven’t got any more voices!” He then finds one – obviously  Emma Wright packs gravitas, and anxiety along with love for her children and yearning for her husband into Mother and Josie Rattigan adeptly plays all the other adult female roles with lots of good Yorkshire voice where required.

I wish, though, that more time had been spent training the juvenile ensemble to use radio mics properly. One of them occasionally gets a line or two to speak and they’re hard to hear which gives the show an amateurish feel at those moments. They could have been rehearsed more fully in stage presence too although their running through the “tunnel” is a strong moment.

My other reservation is Tom Cagnoni’s music which is both clumsy and bolted on. This is not a film – familiar as we all are with a famous film of this very story. We don’t need sudden (miscued?) bursts of incongruous, loud music. Michael Bird’s sound design, though, complete with steam train noises is quite effective.

 

 First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/the-railway-children-4/