Timberlake Wertenbaker’s 1988 play is probably her best and it’s certainly my favourite because, of course, it’s a play about theatre and a huge clarion call for the redemptive power of the arts. So it’s always been topical and never more so than now.

Adapted from Thomas Keneally’s 1897 novel The Playmaker, the play takes us to the early days of the penal colony in New South Wales.  Everyone is there for the “good”  of the motherland – or  for “our country’s good”. The governor of NSW Captain Arthur Phillip (Georgia Koronka) wants to move away from the hanging and flogging culture. He is ridiculed by some of his die-hard staff for wanting to “civilise” the convicts through drama (sounds like the situation in many a 21st Century inner city comprehensive school). Eventually he gets Second Lieutenant Ralph Clark (Jonathan Wober – good) to direct a production of George Farquar’s The Recruiting Officer and as rehearsals progress and repeatedly stall we watch the change and development of his motley cast. Our Country’s Good is indeed a fine and powerful  play.

Peta Barker’s imaginative direction places all the cast on stage sitting around the edge of the playing space in the dark beneath an awning visibly managing their costume changes.. Thus they are, in every sense, a company of actors able to chorus the chapter/scene headings effectively. Their seating is a row of small crates which are brought on stage to suggest various things such as a rowing boat or chairs at a meeting.

I admired the role doubling and enjoyed a shared chuckle when the play itself comments that an actor playing more than one part would confuse the audience. Koronka is especially good as the governor, using gently heightened RP and presenting plenty of authority and then, in complete contrast,  as Wisehammer the intelligent, sensitive Jewish convict who wants to write plays.

Casting is cheerfully gender blind too. Rebecca Allan is totally convincing as Midshipman Harry Brewer, deeply in love with his live-in convict Duckling Smith (Georgina Carey who is also excellent as the sneering Captain Jeremy Campbell). Allan brings lots of pushiness and attitude to Dabby Bryant too. And we are all “ “paying attention” as the play instructs us that theatre goers should, so nobody is in the least confused.

This is a commendable production of a play which is warmly familiar. Most of the cast are strong and it has been made to sit very happily in the Tower’s triangular playing space. As ever I had to swallow a lump in my throat at the end. Let’s hope some of  those people – in government and elsewhere – wont to beliitle the power of the arts in education and elsewhere know the way to Stoke Newington.

So how do you make sense of a patriarchal Elizabethan play for an Instagram-obsessed world? Set it as a production of Love Island, of course. You can always rely on National Youth Theatre to come up with an interesting and original slant, but this time it has really excelled itself with this whackily, clever take on a play written over 400 years ago in 1598.

Nothing Island is a TV programme in which five young men and five young women are lined up to pair off. The producer sits at the side with a screen while her head-phoned minions scamper about with i-Pads. Over-stage screens comment on what’s happening with social media comments – a lot of fun has evidently been had in making these up.  We see the characters both in action and at times when they’re meant to be off-duty but they’re continuously observed. The production is the king to which everything must defer.

Most of the language is Shakespeare with occasional asides, interjections or comments in modern English and liberal word substitution to make it all hang together. Debris Stevenson has also had fun slipping in the odd line from other plays which makes a few people in the audience chuckle. I love the rap dance performed by Beatrice (Isolde Fenton) and Benedick (Daniel Crawley) the first time we see them together. It’s a perfect match to Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter as they fence verbally and in dance with each other.

I also admire the decision for each actor to play in his or her own accent because these young people come from all over the country and it means we get a gloriously diverse aural mix. Fenton, for example, is Irish while Crawley is Scottish.

The cast – the  sixteen actors who form the 2023 NYT rep company – are all strong and there’s some pleasing ensemble work. Both gulling scenes are beautifully directed (Josie Dexter) and very funny. A female Don Jon and Verges as a dappy therapist are among the play’s many good ideas.

Thuliswa Magwaza’s Hero is giggly, girlish and convincingly in love and she does the anguish when she’s wrongfully accused with conviction. Fenton is warm and witty as Beatrice and manages to make the eventual capitulation to Benedick feel natural. And I liked the way Crawley really stressed the innate decency in his character underneath the banter and joshing.

Zoe Hurwitz’s set is terrific. She gives us a window which swivels to become lots of other things including an absurdly excessive floral wall for Hero and Claudio’s wedding. At the end of the play, the production is over and the cast clears the set off the stage – another neat touch.

I’ve seen many way-out attempts to modernise Shakespeare in my time. I have rarely seen one as intelligent as this. It works a treat and never feels forced. Keep ‘em coming, NYT. The Rep Company project is celebrating its first ten years in 2023. Here’s to the next decade and beyond.

First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/much-ado-about-nothing-12/

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  Photos: Helen Murray

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Photo by: Max Hamilton-Mackenzie

This is a show which exudes heart. It is also very funny and beautifully observed.

Back in 2008, journalist Jasper Rees wrote a book about how, at a time when his life was troubled, he rediscovered the French Horn he’d played decades before at school but abandoned. Setting himself the challenge of playing the third Mozart concerto to an audience at the end of the year he then took lessons, studied, practised and consulted top horn players worldwide. I read this with fascination at the time because I know from my own experience,  the frustration, wonder and joy which comes from returning to a musical instrument after a long absence.

Jonathan Guy Lewis worked with Rees and his book to develop a one man stage show a few years later and this White Bear Theatre production ably directed by Harry Burton is a welcome revival. The casting, of course, is perfect because Lewis, like Rees, played the horn as a boy, gave it up for a long time but is still a competent player.

The play opens with Lewis as Rees turning out the attic in the house he has had to leave for his wife and son after divorce. Then he finds the horn which delightfully, has a personality and speaks to Jasper in a Czech accent because that’s where it was made. Lewis is very good indeed at morphing into different characters. Along the way, among others, we get the sulky son, Daniel (all troubled grunts and shrugs), an eccentric music teacher at Jasper’s school, a Yorkshire horn player who becomes a mentor, and several differently accented Americans when he attends Horn Camp in New Hampshire. The characterisation is often hilarious but the accuracy of portrayal is sharp edged.

And of course we hear lots of music as Jasper talks to different people and thinks about different aspects of horn playing – frequently tempted to give up completely and permanently. Finally, of course, having heard only derisory wrong notes for over an hour we know that somehow he’s going to crack it and I walked back to the Elephant and Castle happily humming the slow movement of K447.

It isn’t, though, just a play about music and learning to play an instrument. It’s also about human relationships and finding new ways of being happy. The reconciliation at the very end of the play is understated but warmly powerful.

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  Photo: Harry Burton

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  Photo: Alex Marker

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  Photo: Alex Marker

First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/i-found-my-horn/

Jill Hyem’s ten year old play is gently harmless, undemanding and quite funny in places.

Nancy (Elizabeth Elvin) who lives happily in a flat in Paris is expecting a visit from her recently widowed old school friend, Anna (Natalie Ogle). Another old school friend Raquel (Debbie Arnold) lives nearby. All three are pally, or become so, with an out of work French actor (Richard Keep) who does odd jobs when he’s resting. And there’s a ghastly landlady named Madame Boiuissiron (Basienka Blake).

The big flaw in this play is that my summary more or less says it all.  It doesn’t really go anywhere. At times it almost feels like a series of sketches – the scene in which the three women play French Monopoly, for example, is standalone funny but adds nothing to the play’s flimsy trajectory. Sometimes it feels as if competent actors are fighting the thinness of the material. Arnold, for instance, works very hard to make the stereotypical older, man-eating woman she’s playing believable but in the end it’s overdone.

The most interesting character is Anna because she changes and develops as she gradually discovers freedom from the long-term sick and now dead  husband who turns out have been a bully. Ogle, clearly a strong actor, makes her convincing and someone we feel real sympathy with and for – unlike any of the other four characters.

We hear some recordings of French songs – all those insouciant, clear words, before the show and at the end of scenes and that’s attractive. But the song sung live with guitar by Richard Keep “Les Dames Anglaise” is anything but. We are supposed to believe that he has just returned from a successful professional singing gig. Well I’m afraid it he sang and played at that standard most of his audience would probably have slunk away. When he’s not singing Keep gives a pleasing performance as the clever, witty but kind Frenchman who flirts with his English friends and plays a good word game in which they exchange idiomatic euphemisms to improve his English – fun but there’s probably a bit too much of it.  I enjoyed learning the French word for a stop cock though – robinet d’arrette.

However, despite my misgivings, you have to hand it to director Sally Hughes. She evidently knows her audience at The Mill at Sonning very well. The theatre was almost full and most people seemed to be lapping it up. There was a lot of enthusiastic applause and laughter for this light – very light – comedy. If it works, go for it.

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  Debbie Arnold (Left) Elizabeth Elvin (Centre) Natalie Ogle (Right). Photo: Andrea Lambis

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  Debbie Arnold. Photo: Andrea Lambis

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  Richard Keep (Left) and Natalie Ogle (Right). Photo: Andrea Lambis

With the possible exception of A Christmas Carol, Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is probably one of the most frequently adapted prose texts of all time. I’ve lost count of the number of stage versions I’ve seen over the years. Moreover this isn’t the first time I’ve seen it as a one man show – James Hyland and his Brother Wolf Company did it that way a few years ago. The novella is widely studied in schools too, often for GCSE, so that makes it a popular choice for theatre because teachers and parents will bring teenagers.

In Mark Stratford’s highly accomplished hands, though, it manages to feel freshly minted and that’s quite an achievement given that this is a tale everyone knows something about even if they haven’t read it. He uses Inspector Newcomen, investigating the death of Sir Danvers Carew as a framing device – gruff, rough and mopping his brow. Then he becomes the rather quiet, anxious, trustworthy, decent Mr Utterson the lawyer, who speaks in a soft voice with gentle RP vowels. Then there’s the Harley Street doctor friend whose accent is Scots. The story telling is as clear as it could possibly be.

Of course the reason it works so well with a single actor is because it investigates two extreme sides of the same personality. Stratford is initially urbane as Jekyll and pretty terrifying as the staring eyed, growling menacing Hyde – crouching to suggest a shorter man. “As Edward Hyde I was free to pursue all the activities denied tom me as Dr Jekyll” he observes in Jekyll mode, mentioning “undignified pleasure and precarious depravity”. We see him commit a gruesome murder, so convincingly mimed that we’re all wincing and we hear the screams of the terrified child he knocks over in the street. Other horrors are merely hinted at – after all Stevenson was fettered by Victorian censorship laws and Stratford’s adaptation is pretty faithful to the words the author used.

Stratford is a very talented actor. In the last few minutes, when the transforming drug is failing, he has to ricochet involuntarily between Jekyll and Hyde at speed and it’s dramatically exciting to watch. And I really admired his death scene complete with poison-induced involuntary twitches before he quietly gets up and resumes the Inspector Newcomen role to round off the narrative. Bravo, Mr Stratford.

The atmosphere is enhanced with some sinister sound effects and some evocative lighting. Both help to ratchet up the sinister mystery and struggle which lies at the heart of the piece.

This show is touring until June and is definitely one to catch if you possibly can.

First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/the-strange-case-of-dr-jekyll-and-mr-hyde-2/

Photo by Francesco Codardo

Edward Bond’s visceral, aggressive one act play may be 23 years old but it has lost none of its forceful oddness.

We’re in a dystopian 2077 whose bleakness makes Orwell’s 1984 seem quite cosy by comparison. Families, memories and photographs are illegal. Mass suicides are an everyday occurrence and the old cities are in ruins so depersonalised people are re-housed in regimented suburbs.  Furniture is reduced to a government issue table and the right number of chairs which, incidentally, makes this play pretty simple to stage.

The Golden Goose is configured more of less in the round (seating on three sides) for this production and director Lewis Frost makes neat use of the space so that all the action feels pretty immediate although sight lines aren’t perfect from where I was sitting.

Sara (Abigail Stone) and Jams (Brad Leigh) are miserably, angrily, violently married and at the opening of the play she sits alone at the table plagued by knocking at the door which may or may not be real. Then her appalling husband, who works for the security service, arrives home and soon shows his true colours as a shouty bully while she screams back at him. They fight over things such who has sat on whose chair and who left the tap on – the absurdity is often funny.

Then the dynamic shifts at the arrival of the relatively insouciant Grit (Paul Brayward) who claims to be Sara’s brother and to have walked the length of the country to find her. Visitors are definitely off limits so that’s a cue for a lot more fury and distrust.

Stone is good at mood shifts:  gleaming with unfettered rage in contrast to silent, glassy anxiety, for instance. Her dream scene is good too. She wears a blue robe to which rattly spoons are stitched. Then she reverses it to reveal bones sewn onto black fabric.  Someone must have had fun creating that.

Leigh – who has played Grit in this play before – stresses the gritty nastiness but manages to temper it with a shred of vulnerability and fear so that the character is just about plausible. Brayward’s performance is distinguished by the quality of his active listening, especially when the other two are shouting at each other over his head.

Yes, Bond is a great original but there are echoes in this play. The knocking reminds me very much of the Porter in Macbeth and the misfired poisoning at the end is almost straight out of Hamlet.

Have I None is an interesting piece of drama but it’s relentless and I wasn’t sorry it runs 50 minutes rather than, say, a couple of hours.

First published by Sardines https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/have-i-none/