Venue: ADC Theatre, Park Street, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire CB5 8AS

Credits: Book and lyrics by Lynn Ahrens .Music by Stephen Flaherty. Directed by Matt Wilkinson. Performed by Festival Players

Lucky Stiff

4 stars

I knew nothing whatever about this show which opened off-Broadway in 1988. It’s an absurdist musical comedy which is part-farce, part-whodunnit and very funny in the hands of this accomplished cast of ten and their imaginative director, Matt Wilkinson. But it’s not just a romp. Comedy only works if it’s underpinned by emotional truth and that’s there too.

Harry (Oliver Oxley) is a shoe salesman in East Grinsted and life is pretty banal. Then an American uncle he’s never met dies in the US and leaves him $6 million – but the condition is that he take the dead man’s corpse on an adventurous holiday in Europe and elsewhere. Otherwise the money goes to a dog charity in Brooklyn. Did I mention absurdism? It’s one of those narratives which mean that by the interval one has no idea where it could possibly go apart from the growing chemistry between Harry and the dog charity rep (Catriona Clarke) who’s only ever a few steps behind him. In the event there’s an enjoyably unexpected plot twist in the second half.

The ensemble numbers are spikily slick with a lot of very neatly coordinated movement work. This is Frances Sayer’s debut as a choreographer and she has done an excellent job with a cast who are evidently very receptive.

Oxley, whose character is on a richly developmental journey, is a convincing actor and his singing is good especially in his second half, very lyrical duet in harmony with Clarke whose intense, humourless Annabel Glick is a delight. Everyone in this cast is strong and there’s a powerful sense of team work but Tony Hendon who mostly plays a corpse in a wheelchair which flops at apposite (or inapposite) moments does particularly well.

The diction in this show is outstanding. Yes, there are a lot of silly accents (Harry takes the titular “stiff”to Monte Carlo) but every one of Ahrens’s words, whether sung or spoken, is enunciated with clarity and that’s rare, even in a professional show. These people have day jobs and do this for love, so the quality of their voice work is especially impressive.

All this takes place on a simple set comprising three narrow revolving screens behind which James Harvey’s excellent five piece band sits upstage. The screens are swivelled manually by the cast who also push on and off other set items such as a hotel bed. It works seamlessly as it must if a farce is to come off.

I was seated next to the Noda rep. I hope he enjoyed and admired this show as much as I did and that it gets an appropriate commendation.

First published by Sardines https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/lucky-stiff-4/

Show: The Sex Life of Puppets

Society: London (professional shows)

Venue: Southwark Playhouse. 77-85 Newington Causeway, London SE1 6BD

Credits: Written and directed by Mark Down and Ben Keaton. Presented by Blind Summit Theatre

Type: Sardines

Author: Susan Elkin

Performance Date: 05/01/2024

The Sex Life of Puppets

Susan Elkin | 08 Jan 2024 00:21am

Photo: Nigel Bewley

Take four fine puppeteers, wonderfully evocative puppets by Russell Dean and some of the most wittily astute writing I’ve heard in a while (Mark Down and Ben Keaton) and you’re in for a bit of treat.

The backbone of this show is a series of interviews with people – sorry, puppets – sitting on he edge of a table and talking. And it’s sex they’re talking about, mostly with a well observed witty poignancy. There’s the middle class pair who are having a Wednesday affair in which everything is “fun”, a rather more gor-blimey pair of lesbians whose vaginas are like mirrors talking to one another, the elderly gay men in a care home where blow jobs are the best they’ve ever known because you can take your teeth out and the older woman who’s tired of her husband’s “pumping and pumping” on top of her on Friday nights and longs for single beds – and her vibrator. And those are just examples. There are more. The show consists of a series of scenes.

The joke, of course, is that these things – even in 2024 – tend not to be chatted casually about in ordinary conversation and all these characters talk without inhibition. Moreover they are situations we all recognise. Eventually one couple actually have se

x in full view and it’s very funny indeed especially when the puppet barks at the puppeteer “get my legs” because they’re hanging off the table.

The four puppeteers – three men and a woman – provide fabulous, versatile voice work for the puppets with beautifully judged timing. Part of the skill is to let the puppets talk through movement so there are gaps in the speech and these operators are very good at that. Of course they’re exaggerated for comic effect but every one of these characters and types is recognisable.

Less successful is a shadow puppet sequence at the end of the first half which graphically shows every possible sort of penetration. It’s ingenious but nothing like as interesting as the interviews. I’m not sure what the naked puppet orgy to Widor’s Toccata and Fugue adds at the very end either. It’s amusing because it’s manic and unlikely but it goes on too long. I can see though that you need some sort of dramatic ending to a show like this but this solution did nothing for me. Neither of these scenes detracted much from the overall effectiveness of the show, though

A few years ago, Little Angel Theatre, which specialises in puppetry and children’s shows, ran a festival of work for adults. The shows I saw then were obscure and dull and I concluded that maybe puppetry doesn’t work for adults. The Sex Life of Puppets proves that I was wrong. It can work very well.

This is a refreshingly original, very funny show.

First published by Sardines https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/the-sex-life-of-puppets/

Photos: Nigel Bewley

Michael Faber’s 2014 novel was recommended to me by a relation who is both a deeply committed Christian and an academic theologian. He is also a keen reader and he and I often talk about books. Dystopia is more his thing than mine but we have a fair amount of common ground.

I have read Michael Faber before but he is impossible to categorise. The Crimson Petal and the White (2002) and Under the Skin (2000) are very different from The Book of Strange New Things.

Peter Leigh is Christian pastor who is sent to a remote planet called Oasis with a brief to bring Christianity to the inhabitants. It means being parted from his beloved wife Bea who is also an evangelical Christian. On arrival he finds himself living in a reasonably comfortable base (think life on an oil rig or a working arctic camp except that it’s invasively humid) and spending blocks of time with the Oasans who are an hour’s drive away in a quasi reserve. They don’t actually need converting because a mysterious man named Kurtzberg has done the spadework before disappearing. Yes, we’re in Heart of Darkness territory, with a whiff, maybe, of CS Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet.

Meanwhile, despite being able to communicate via a satellite system called “the shoot” – and whole sections of ths novel are epistolary – the relationship between Peter and Bea begins to fray and then to unravel. Terrible things including natural disasters, war, political corruption and rapidly deteriorating infrastructure, are happening on earth. Peter is billions of miles away trying to build a church, learn a new language, help troubled people and, crucially, deal with his own sexual yearning. Neither is able to empathise with the other.

The Christianity in this novel is presented in such detailed accuracy that for some time I assumed that Faber must be a fervent believer. So I researched him. He is, to my surprise, a self-avowed atheist but he grew up in an evangelical Christian environment. Well yes, this is certainly a writer who fully understands the Christian mindset from the inside. Peter quotes the Bible continually and is creating an abridged version for the Oasan’s who struggle to proounce ‘s’ and ‘t’.

It’s a strong, thought provoking read although I couldn’t quite believe decent, mild-mannered Peter’s back story. Still only 33 he is a convert from a dreadful life of drugs, alcoholism and crime which doesn’t ring true to me. He hasn’t had time for all that dissolute living followed by a massive turnaround which has led to his appointment as a pastor, now with several years of experience under his belt.

The Book of Strange New Things (the title is the Oasans’ name for The Bible) is a long novel. For most of the 550 pages I wondered how on earth (or Oasis) he was going to end it. In fact Faber has clearly wondered that too because the ending is a rather disappointing, open-ended cop out.

The decision to use an invented character system (at a glance a bit like reduced Chinese) system for Oasan pronunciation and language is probably a Marmite issue. When the book was first published some critics thought this a clever idea. I simply found it irritating although it does serve to remind us that the Oasans are certainly not speaking standard English.

Nonetheless I liked it over all. There’s some fine characterisation such as Grainger, the pharmacist with horrors in her earthly background, who provides medication to all who need it and fascinates Peter, for example. Even the beloved cat Joshua, left with Bea and a mini tragedy in his own right, is delightfully depicted.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves The Widows’ Wine Club by Julia Jarman

Although it dates from 2017. I recently heard Katherine Heiny talking, and answering audience questions, about Standard Deviation on Radio 4’s The Book Programme on Radio 4 with Jim Naughtie. I was driving and, for some reason, I must have turned off my usual radio 3. Perhaps it was a Jazz programme and that doesn’t work for me.

Anyway I listened to her being witty and thoughtful about this portrait of a marriage, realised it was probably very funny and resolved to order it once I got home. And I’m glad I did because it certainly made me chuckle a lot but it’s also rueful, thoughtful and packed with insights. And, for the record, I don’t agree with the person who objected on Twitter to the inclusion of “yet another” American book. It’s a good book – who cares about the nationality of the author?

Graham and Audra have been married for twelve years and their son Matthew has Asperger’s syndrome. They live in Manhattan where they both have well paid jobs. It’s a third person narrative but presented entirely from Graham’s point of view.

He loves Audra but she’s complicated. She is flighty, unpredictable, talks incessantly and tangentially and has no inhibition brake so she frequently says outrageously inappropriate things. But it’s Graham’s mortified thoughts we hear. Just to complicate things, he has the hots for his ex-wife who’s very different. They start cooking suggestively elaborate meals together. Then disaster strikes.

Matthew, meanwhile, struggles to make friends so when he does there’s much courting of the parents in an attempt to nurture the bond between the boys. It’s usually an excruciating failure – like the set piece dinner party to which Audra invites a whole range of disfunctional people who don’t know each other, as we learn from Graham’s asides. One of them brings a gift which triggers food poisoning. Everything Audra does is crazily well meant but over-the-top – like making friends with the doorman and inviting him to live in their spare room.

Graham adores Matthew, although he’s rueful about him reaching independence until he’s 35 or so. When Matthew falls in love with origami it involves a club with three geekily obsessive adult men – another trial for the boy’s parents but they will do anything to secure calm for their son.

Yes, it’s as funny as I’d hoped but, as in all comedy, there are many serious undercurrents to provide ballast.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The Book of Strange New Things by Michael Faber

Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra

Brighton Dome, 31 December 2023

I’m not sure when New Year’s Eve got inextricably bound up with Vienna and, by extension, the Strauss family but I’m happy that it happened. And Brighton Philharmonic in the Dome may not be quite the Vienna Philharmonic at the Musikverien, but they’re pretty damn good and it was a real pleasure to see the hall ninety per cent full.

The orchestra was slightly smaller than it sometimes has to be for big works – five desks of first violins and six of seconds with six violas, five cello and four double bases – and there were splashes of glitzy colour on stage among female players to stress the celebratory nature of the event.

Of course there was plenty of Strauss in the programme of short works but it was imaginatively programmed and we began with Suppe’s overture: Morning, Noon and Night, played with imaginative dramatic contrast, a delightful cello solo (Peter Adams) and some resounding piccolo chirps at the end.

I don’t normally care for jokey, or any other sort of “introductory”, link-chat at concerts but on this occasion conductor Stephen Bell had the tone about right for an event of this sort. He’s a relaxed speaker who never overdoes it and his cracker jokes “tweeted” in by the audience during the interval were genuinely funny.

He’s a witty conductor too. We really felt the third “hiccup” beat in Tales from Vienna Woods and I liked the way he gave the string octet space to sing out. Tritsch-Tratsch polka is a merry romp but you need to hold onto the reins firmly to carry it off and Bell did, nothwithstanding some amusing and unlikely hand gestures to signal the percussion interjections. He’s good at exaggerated rallentando moments too and used them to pack the Gold and Silver Waltz with nostalgia. He employed the same technique in Vilja from The Merry Widow, After all if you’ve got a melody as good as that to play with, it would be shame not to milk it. So that’s what Bell does.

Ellie Laugharne contributed several soprano numbers starting with Adele’s “Laughing Song” from Die Fledermaus. Bell let her lead all the rubato passages but sadly it wasn’t always quite together. The other problem with this, and the others she contributed later, is that the balance was wrong – at least from my regular E37 balcony seat which is meant to be acoustically the best in the house. In her lower registers the sound was overborne by the orchestra and never did her voice soar above it as, at high points it should. Laugharne is, however, a determined actor who really managed to convince the audience of the mood – flirtatiously throwing roses into the audience during Lehar’s Meine Lippen, for example.

Of course the concert ended with The Blue Danube Waltz (although we also got the inevitable Radetsky March and and a Laugharne encore from My Fair Lady after it) and it was a pretty resounding performance. Potboiler it may be, but it’s full of pitfalls – tempo changes, exposed horn solo, much vamping that can rush – which were mostly negotiated with stylish aplomb.

Show: A Christmas Carol – As told by Jacob Marley (Deceased)

Society: London (professional shows)

Venue: White Bear Theatre. 138 Kennington Park Road, London SE11 4DJ

Credits: ADAPTED BY James Hyland from the book by Charles Dickens. Produced by Brother Wolf

A Christmas Carol – As told by Jacob Marley (Deceased)

4 stars

James Hyland is a powerfully talented actor and this is a strong and original way in to this familiar seasonal tale of redemption.

Hyland shuffles painfully in, grunting, sighing, groaning and panting. He is master both of evocative sounds and mime. He looks terrifying in dusty grey make-up ( designed by Nicki Martin-Harper) with red eyes and mouth cutting menacingly through it. Eventually he manages to shed his chains and tells us how he has came back from the dead to shake up his former business partner, Ebenezer Scrooge.

The story which follows is, inevitably, pared down and some of the detail cut because this show runs just 75 minutes. Hyland jumps (often literally) from one role to another and his voice work is splendid. He uses fortissimo partrician for Marley but gives us a whole range of others for the Cratchets, Scrooge’s nephew, the people in the pub and so on. His female voices are particularly effective.

I have seen this show before: it’s one of several interesting, worthwhile one-man shows which Hyland does through his company, Brother Wolf. Last time, however, it was on a conventional stage so that there was definite fourth wall. It works especially well in the intimacy of the White Bear theatre with seating on two sides and no member of the audience more than a few feet away. It means he can pretend that we’re all guests at Mr Fezziwig’s party and that he is sometimes speaking direct to someone on the front row.

It’s an intensely compelling performance.

First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/a-christmas-carol-as-told-by-jacob-marley-deceased/

I found this slim volume wedged unobtrusively between Somerset Maugham and Michael Morpurgo in my sitting room fiction section. And I had no idea it was there. It’s an ex-library copy in the New Windmill series 1969, reprinted in 1975. So there’s an introduction by the redoubtable Ian Seraillier. It’s stamped with the name of the Kent school I taught in from 1985-93.

Well, I’m not a book thief so how did I acquire it? As Head of English, I had overall responsibility for the library which meant that I line-managed the teacher in direct charge of it. One day we invited in the County School Library Adviser, at our Head’s suggestion because he was a friend of hers. He told us to get rid of all the old stock and found us a little grant to buy snazzy red and blue chairs. So the librarian was soon putting out lots of trays of redundant free-to-a-good-home books. And, thinking back now, that must have been how Guy de Maupassant came home with me. At the time, for the record, several of us thought that the whole library update project was an act of cultural vandalism and I was uneasy about condoning it but “updating” and “refreshing” were the buzzwords.

The eighteen stories in this volume (translated by HNP Sloman) came from three volumes published by Penguin in 1946, 1951 and 1955. In fact Maupassant (1850-1893) wrote over 300 stories in his short life. I know “The Necklace” very well because it features it lots of school anthologies and I’ve shared it with many classes but the rest were virgin territory for me until now. And the first thing that strikes me is just how gripping they are.

Maupassant was conscripted into the Franco Prussian war in 1870 and that experience informs the title story and several others. “Prisoners of War” is about a French girl who managed to trick some Prussian soldiers into imprisonment in the cellar under the family farm.

Several of the stories are about love and relationships. “The Question of Latin” for example gives us a dull teacher of Latin who, with a bit of benign skulduggery from a pupil, is joyfully manoeuvred into a passionate marriage. It’s spry and witty.

Meanness is another theme. Maupassant was born in Dieppe and tells us repeatedly that Norman people are a miserly, self-interested lot. Don’t shoot me for stereotyping. I’m simply sharing Maupassant’s oft-stated view. Madame Oreille, however, in “The Umbrella” doesn’t get the comeuppance she deserves when she tries to claim a miniscule amount on the household insurance for a damaged parapluie.

I liked “The Wreck” too in which an insurance assessor gets dangerously stuck on a wrecked ship with an English family to whose eldest daughter he takes a shine.

Maupassant is very good at denouements. Perhaps the parrot doesn’t deserve to die at the end of “The Drowned Man” but. My goodness, he makes sure you sympathise with the perpetrator. Abusive relationships, incidentally, are clearly something which interests him and it isn’t always the men who are the bullies.

Something which made me feel slightly uneasy is the casual cruelty to animals: the dog starved as a way of training it for a revenge killing, the fish cooked alive, the St Bernard locked out to die in the snow. But I tell myself that I have to make allowances for two reasons and try not to wince. First the French (remember foie gras?) have never been quite to committed to animal welfare as the British, at least, try to be. Second, these stories were written over 150 years ago and attitudes change.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Standard Deviation by Katherine Heiny

Show: The Jungle Book

Society: Chichester Festival Theatre (professional)

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

Credits: By Rudyard Kipling. Adaptation by Sonali Bhattacharyya. Original songs by Ruth Chan.

The Jungle Book

3 stars

Photo: Johan Persson

It’s a story everyone knows so a new version has to present it with some fresh topical spin which is what Bhattacharyya’s script tries to do. We’re in a world where inclusion matters a lot – and every animal matters – when Mowgli turns up. She’s played by Sarada Pillai and Thaaniya Nandakumar who alternate. I saw Sarada and she’s delightful – feisty but sensitive with lots of stage confidence.

As we work though the plot there are many big ensemble all-singing all-dancing numbers in which the young cast does pretty well. Sadly, though, Ruth Chan’s music is generally unmemorable and sometimes samey except for an invigorating, energetic disco-type party held for Mowgli by the monkeys when the whole thing lifts off. It’s well played, however, by Collin Billings and his six piece out-of-sight band.

Everyone on stage is a specific, named animal and the costumes designed by Ryan Dawson Laight are splendid. The loris has plastic glasses as big as tea plates, the mosquitoes have wings on their heads, the wolves have grey fur on their heads and shoulders and the buffalo have wonderful limbering horns. And all this is reflected in the nicely sustained movement work.

Although I don’t think this is the best Christmas show CFT youth theatre has presented in recent years, there were two unforgettable moments. First there’s Kaa, the snake, played with verve and talent by Spencer Dixon in the most glittery, sparkly costume I’ve ever seen. He writhes and purrs and it’s great fun. Second there’s a mini double act from a pair of porcupines (fabulous spiky outfits) with one making knowing post-modern comments on the other’s thoughts and it’s very funny.

A huge amount of work has gone into this show and, as ever, I find it moving and exciting to see young people achieving things. For example Jacob Isaacs, who looks very young, won a well deserved round of applause as the boy from village running away in panic from the village and screaming unflaggingly all the way up through the audience. And, at the other end of the age range, Freddie Lyons (who alterrnates with Luke Mechergui) as Shere Khan gets a good level of gravelly menace although in these days of tiger conservation, of course he doesn’t die at the end.

Another pleasing thing about a CFT Youth Theatre show is the inclusion of members of CFT Technical Youth Theatre and technical students from Chichester College as junior assistant stage managers, prop makes, costume assistants, wig, hair & make-up assistants, follow-spot operators and radio mic runners.