It’s a love triangle – of sorts. Two men Jules (Samuel Collins) who’s German and Jim (Alex Mugnaioni), a Frenchman, meet in Paris, become close friends and share their girlfriends in pursuit of establishing some basic truths about feeling and love. Then, as the action darts around Europe spanning 20 years into the 1930s, Kath (Patricia Allison) comes along.

Wertenbaker’s dialogue is lively and often funny but jokes such as “I’m French. We invented freedom” wear thin after a while. Three fine actors, however, do their best with it. Patricia Allison, in particular, as the charismatic, free-thinking, feisty Kath, finds an attractive translucent purity in the character.

During a play which runs 90 minutes, I spent the first half hour noticing that Stella Powell-Jones, Jermyn Street’s new artistic director and director of this show, is clearly not afraid of stillness. Then it began to feel too static. There are a lot of quite long speeches spoken by characters addressing each other across a space without movement. Sometimes they’re meant to be letters or narrative interjections and that’s fine but when it’s dialogue it’s not. Maybe this awkwardness accounts for the several nervous stumbles in the delivery of the lines on press night.

Mugnaioni is well cast because he looks imposing which is what his role needs. As the tension between the three of them deepens and twists he becomes convincingly anguished. Collins’s character, in contrast, remains more dispassionate. He’s an academic translator and pretty focused on work but he’s Jewish and plausibly ignoring the threats around him as time moves on. It’s a strong performance.

There’s a running theme in this play about water and drowning. Isabella Van Braekel’s set, which comprises impressionistic blue swirls daubed on off-white “paper”, supports that although I was initially puzzled and then irritated by the two opaque screens, suspended on quasi curtain track continually moved back and forth across the stage. Her costume designs, however, particularly for Allison are stunningly elegant.  Also delightful is Chris McDonnell’s evocative lighting and the special effect which suggested an underwater scene of Allison swimming.

Part of a Larger ‘Professional’ Tour… and this performance was part of ‘Shoreham Wordfest’

This lively, five hander reduction of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is attractively staged. The Shoreham Centre’s large first floor Council Chamber is festooned in flowers (who made the papier-mache vegetation-filled swans at the entrance?) and lit is soft lilacy pinks and turquoisey blues. There is no blackout so we watch dusk fall though the trees outside the long side window and feel as if we are outdoors but without the rain and cold. There’s no raked seating but sight lines more or less work.

A highly talented cast of five have the simplest possible ‘tiring house’ – just a small space behind a screen in front of which is small rostra-built playing area. In the event, of course, they use the space in front of the ‘stage’ and the whole auditorium to good effect especially for the chases.

Of course Bowler Crab isn’t the only company to present Shakespeare with a bijoux cast but founder director Stephen John (who plays Egeus and Bottom) has some impressively original ideas. Hippolyta is mentioned but never present in body. Theseus becomes a female duke played with a highly plausible louche ennui with occasional spurts of decisiveness by Jessamy James. James (whom I have seen before, when she was training at Cygnet Theatre) then becomes a bespectacled, anguished Helena, a feisty Titania and a hilarious Snug, wearing a woolly hat and being a gloriously unconvincing Lion. She is a multi-talented actor.

Other good ideas include representing the fairies as puppeted, gauzy twittering insects and the funniest fight between Lysander and Demetrius (Keiran Kerswell and Jack Cameron respectively – both good) while the girls are quarrelling, that I have ever seen at this point in the play.

The multi-roling is nicely managed with a lot of outstanding voice work. Emma Kemp, for example, plays Hermia – all twittery teenage infatuation – in RP but doubles as a very charismatic Scots Puck holding the audience in the palm of her hand every time she appears. Bottom should, of course, be a stage stealer and he is. Stephen John knows how to coax every possible nuance out of this role and he’s hilarious – especially as Pyramus once we arrive at Shakespeare’s timeless version of The Play That Went Wrong. We then, very neatly, segue straight from it into Puck’s last speech and that works well. I always think the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as Shakespeare wrote it is clumsy – like the last bars of a symphony with a lot of dominant seventh chords uncertain of how to reach a resolution. John’s decisive version is better.

Inevitably there are a lot of costume changes, which can’t be easy behind that small screen, and sometimes they take a few moments so other characters amuse the audience. There’s a really silly but very amusing dance to a xylophone tune while a couple of characters move props. And at what would normally be the beginning of Act 5 John, in role as Bottom, does a bit of stand-up with puns, joking about hoping that the cast will hurry up and that’s fun. The whole text, meanwhile, is studded with asides in 21^st century colloquial English. This is a fashion in Shakespeare productions at the moment but none the worse for that. It makes the comedy even funnier.

This year Bowler Crab is celebrating 10 years of presenting Shakespeare (five different shows)  in a range of venues and is available for appearance at events and for work in schools.

www.bowler-crab.com

First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/a-midsummer-nights-dream-11/

Photo: Helen Murray

Produced by Actors Touring Company and Belgrade Theatre Coventry in association with Brixton House.

There is some convincing acting in this play which brims over with ideas. It is, moreover, imaginatively staged with haunting music (Francesca Amewudah-Rivers) and an intriguing set (big symbolic tree which lights up) by Simon Kenny.

The trouble is that it’s so overambitious for a one act, 95-minute play that you get dizzy trying to keep up with it all. Basically its message is that yes, black lives really do matter. Of course they do. In order to say that forcibly the play ricochets over more than a century and tries to pack in colonialism, slavery, non-consensual surgery, historical vaccine trials, Doreen Lawrence. George Floyd, the dependence of the NHS on black staff, the vulnerability of black people to Covid and a whole lot more. It’s like being on a carousel whose brakes have failed.

Henrietta Lacks (Aminta Francis – good) died of cervical cancer in 1951. Cells were taken from her body, apparently without permission, and used to develop treatments which have since saved thousands of (white, by implication) lives. Frances opens this play with a long monologue in verse. It’s a thoughtful, occasionally witty, pleasingly lyrical piece with rap rhythms although puzzling if you don’t happen to know the history of Henrietta Lacks. Thereafter we meet three women (Mofetoluwa Akande, Keziah Joseph and Aimee Powell) – first as NHS professionals chatting though a tea break and then as long skirted, elderly, shuffling plantation workers. All three are strong actors and Akande does fury at such speed and intensity that she’s actually funny. In each case there’s a lot of anger, frustration and reiteration of their plight. The word “stolen” is frequently used instead of “enslaved” with puts a chillingly truthful slant on what happened in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the background lurks a white man (Alistair Hall) who smokes and silently gazes for no apparent reason, sometimes wearing a cowboy hat. If he’s a symbol of white oppression he doesn’t seem very oppressive.

Just to add to the complexity the central conceit is that everyone is dead so we’re in some sort of amorphous afterlife looking back on, for example, surgery without anaesthetic, serving the sexual needs of slave owners, dying from Covid and more. Eventually the smoking man is taken ill and they feel obliged to help him. He dies (so presumably not already dead?) and they bury him on stage. No … I don’t know why either.

It isn’t a play without humour despite the weighty subject matter. I had no idea, for example, that it’s acceptably trendy to be of Nigerian descent but to have Ghana in your family tree is an “uncool” turn off. There was a ripple of knowing laughter at this point. It was one of the many moments in this show when I felt very much an outsider. Perhaps that was the idea.

Photo: Helen Murray

First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/family-tree/

A musical about chiropody and pigs sounds unlikely but sometimes it’s the wackiest things which work best. Based on a 1994 film by Alan Bennett (Maggie Smith and Michael Palin) and then developed as a successful musical by Cameron Mackintosh in 2011 (Sarah Lancashire and Reece Shearsmith), Betty Blue Eyes now sits remarkably well in the bijoux Union Theatre. Somehow it accommodates a talented ensemble cast of nineteen and a three piece band without ever feeling cramped.

We’re in 1947 ( a rather good year for your reviewer but I won’t labour that) when rationing and austerity dominated everyone’s thinking. However, the imminent wedding of Princess Elizabeth to Philip Mountbatten might just cheer everyone up and provide an excuse to party, at least for some. It’s a Yorkshire village with a strong sense of community. That inimitable Bennett-ian Yorkshire insouciance has survived into this production.

Sam Kipling (strong actor), familiar from Sasha Regan’s Gilbert and Sullivan shows, is a peripatetic chiropodist desperately wanting his own premises. There’s a very funny number “Magic Fingers” in which chiropody becomes erotic when he services the feet of four women. Bespectacled, nervous and daunted he can’t cope with the double entendres especially when he gets to the butcher’s sexy wife Mrs Allardyce (Laurel Dougall).

It can’t be easy to follow Maggie Smith and Sarah Lancashire but Amelia Atherton has a commendable crack at making the role of Joyce Chilvers entirely her own. Her character is an aspirant social riser and even just a tilt of her head or rippling of her fingers tells a whole story as she tries, in a faintly Lady Macbeth-ian way to stir Gilbert to action, teach piano or manage her difficult mother (Jayne Ashley, good). She sings beautifully – wistful passion –  and inhabits her character entirely. Atherton is only three years out of drama school. I hope we’ll see a lot more of her very soon.

Meanwhile the whole community is hungry – both for food and normal life. David Pendlebury has fun playing Inspector Wormold, the man from the Ministry of Food who suspects (rightly) that illegal pig farming is going on, as an over-the-top Miss Trunchbull type. And the ghastly local council members led by Stuart Simons as Dr Swaby are good value because they are, of course, cheating for their own benefit. It works particularly well in 2023 because the idea of petti-fogging rules dominating everyday life and being enforced by bossy jobsworths feels very topical. So does the concept of the people who make and enforce the rules, breaking them when it suits them.

The blue-eyed pig puppet is sentimentally appealing and, of course, having been vegetarian for 45 years, I’m as pleased as anyone else when nobody manages to kill it for roast pork and bacon. There’s a lot of feel-good stuff in this up-beat show. Members of the press were each given a bag of fudge (referred to longingly in the show because everything was still tightly rationed in 1947) presumably in the hope that the sugar rush would put us all in a good mood. It worked for me and I’m really glad they didn’t give us pork scratchings.

Stiles and Drewe can always be relied upon to come up with good tunes and ear worms and this show is no exception. The out of sight  band, led by MD Aaron Clingham on piano does an excellent job with the score which nips cheerfully along.  Work by Becky Hughes on winds (flute, clarinet, alto & baritone sax) is especially memorable.