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/

Image: Anya Murphy, Carlie Diamond In the Net. WoLab. Photo: Steve Gregson

Misha Levkov’s new play takes us to London in 2025. Drought is a serious issue affecting every household, prices of everything are rising continuously and there’s a new mantra: “When the water goes the refugees come”. In the midst of all this two half sisters and the Syrian woman who is staying with them come to believe that things will be better if they create an “eruv” – an area which symbolically extends Jewish territory and permits Jewish people to disregard their own rules. In practice this means building a complex cats cradle of string across the stage, visually intensified by Jonathan Chan’s lighting and Daniel Denton’s projection. Meanwhile their decent father is bemused and local council furious.

The symbolism in all this is abstruse to put it mildly and the wordiness of the action-light play does nothing to clarify it. The play makes some pertinent political points about refugees and climate change but eruf is not a successful device in this context and we don’t understand it anymore than the council committee meeting does.

The other problem with this play is that it is trying to do far too much at once. Laura (Carley Diamond – good) is grieving for her mother who has just died but the theme is never developed. Hala (Suzanne Ahmet – powerful) has arrived in Britain on a refugee boat and that’s a story in itself. The best scenes in In the Net are between her and the very versatile Tony Bell who is outstanding as a sinister immigration officer.  Finally there’s a drought so serious that households are rationed and when someone deliberately pours the water away it’s devastating. I’d quite like to see a play focused on that.

All this is a great pity because five accomplished actors, who have clearly worked very hard on this show, are let down by the material they’re working with. It’s meant (I think) to be a play about struggle but the tension shouldn’t be between the actors and the text.

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  All ohotos: Steve Gregson

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It’s always encouraging to see a talented young actor performing her or his own work. India Wilson, who comes from Bermuda, graduated from Mountview with an MA in Acting in 2021 and You Can’t Understand was initially developed during her training. It’s a one-act play which runs just forty-five minutes – ten minutes less than advertised.

The piece – with a lot of humour and flirty audience participation alongside some serious issues – explores the identity of a mixed race child/teenager named Kika at different stages of her young life. There are several characters and, because this is a one-woman show, Wilson plays them all – with plenty of versatile flair. I especially liked her take on Kika’s white Welsh mother and on Murray the grunting, deep-voiced, taciturn boy that the slightly older Kika crassly throws herself at. She does a great deal of leaping the length of the centre stage bench to convey conversation between two people, in the time-honoured way.

The writing is strong but I was less impressed by the dance and mime sequences. Yes, when Kika’s in a ballet class and annoys the teacher by insisting on doing her solo piece with her own inappropriate (by that class’s standards, anyway) choreography you need to see some dance. But at other moments it seems like a way of stretching the action and there’s a mime scene in which (I think) she’s meant to be  having sex with Murray – but that’s not an easy thing to evoke on your own and it’s unconvincing.

Francesca Solomon, lighting designer and operator, deserves a few plaudits. Her work is imaginatively atmospheric and makes Wilson – at one point in white make up and lipstick, which she has asked an audience member to apply, smeared grotesquely all round her mouth – look quite vulnerable.

This play certainly has potential but at present it feels like work in progress.

First published by Sardines https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/you-cant-understand/

When I was a teenager I saw Sybil Thorndyke, Edith Evans and Lewis Casson in Arsenic and Old Lace. When the latter, who must have been in his late eighties, first entered down a staircase he got a respectful, thrilled round of applause. You don’t see or hear that very often but it’s what happened to George Takei, 85, first took the stage at the opening of Allegiance, now running in London for the first time. Yes, this veteran actor is fulfilling a lifelong ambition to be on stage in London and is doing it with dignity and aplomb.

It’s a very attractive, quite traditional musical – more Rogers and Hammerstein than Sondheim with some of the most powerful story telling I’ve seen in new musical theatre for a while. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in 1942 all Japanese Americans, many of them born in the US, were rounded up, deprived of their property and assets and put in pretty primitive internment camps hundreds of miles away. And for a long time they were not allowed to enlist. This is a shameful, shocking bit of history which, until now, few people have been aware of and it hits especially hard in this show because it reflects Takei’s own story. Born in Los Angeles to a Japanese immigrant father and an American born but Japanese-educated mother, he was 5 when they were arrested at gun point and incarcerated in various concentration camps for the rest of the war.

Takei plays two roles. In the framing device he is a very elderly war hero, Sam, being told that the sister he’s been estranged from for decades has died. Then at the very end he learns the identity of the messenger and has many audience members reaching for tissues. In the central 1940s flashback Takei plays the family grandfather while the excellent Telly Leung gives us the younger Sam. Both roles are very old men and Takei is, obviously, convincing. He has a strong voice, both spoken and sung, and a nice dead pan way of delivering jokes to his loving family who’ve heard them all before. It’s a very warm performance

He is well supported by a talented cast of 14. Amongst these Aynrand Ferrer is outstanding as Sam’s sister Kei – she sings with strength, passion, terrific intonation and her full belt is quite something. She also creates a totally believable character who cares, worries, falls in love and is devastated by the estrangement from her brother.  There are noteworthy performances from Megan Gardiner as the nurse in the camp and from Patrick Munday as Kei’s boyfriend, Frankie, who makes different choices from her brother. The marriage proposal duet sung by Ferrer and Munday is especially beautiful with appropriate close harmony.

Charing Cross theatre is configured, for this show, with raked audience seating at both ends and a square playing space in the centre. Director Tara Overfield Wilkinson, who also choreographed the show, makes excellent use of the space so that every inch of it is used to naturalistic effect.

The band, which plays beautifully, is led by Beth Jerem on a balcony overlooking the stage. Lynne Shankel’s orchestrations give us plenty of ethereal Japanese-style flute work and I was faintly amused at  composer Jay Kuo’s use of the pentatonic scale to connote a Japanese vibe in “Wishes on the Wind” when the whole cast is at prayer. It’s a simple time-honoured trick but it works every time.

There’s a lot of stage smoke (liquid carbon dioxide) in this show. It is used, quite effectively. to suggest the dreadful dustiness the internees have to deal with in Ohio. I know it isn’t supposed to have any adverse effects on anyone but I’m afraid it makes me cough – and the audience is pretty close to the action in this show. It’s a minor gripe, though.

Love, forgiveness, reconciliation – they’re all here in abundance and that makes Allegiance a very heart warming experience.   I hope Takei gets that welcoming applause at every performance. It’s well deserved

• First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/allegiance/