All photos: The Other Richard

Alan Bennett is past master of insouciant incongruity – and trademark eloquent silences which are often hilarious and sometimes poignant. It’s slightly odd to see a Bennett story adapted by a different writer but I can confirm that Adrian Scarborough has more than nailed it. My only slight gripe is that Bennett’s novella of the same name dates from 1997. Scarborough has made some attempt to update it with references to Mary Berry, not being in the EU, digital TV and the like but it isn’t always consistent bcause we also get polaroid photographs and Kiri te Kanawa (now 78 and retired)  in live performance. Thus the play doesn’t always feel historically quite secure but it doesn’t matter much.

Maurice Ransome (Adrian Scarbrough) and his wife Rosemary (Sophie Thompson) have been to Covent Garden. Cue for several glorious Cos fan tutte sound bites. When they get home to their flat they discover that, in their absence it has been burgled: emptied, stripped bare so that they are left with just the titular clothes on their backs. Even the lavatory roll has gone which allows Bennett the opportunity for a few of his characterstic bodily funtions jokes. He has been accused, with some justification, of an obsession with excrement.

The unlikely plot which follows gives us – with Bennett’s unique blend of wistfulness and laughter – the chance to explore the Ransomes’ marriage, the significance of possessions, what friendship really means and a great deal more.

Scarborough and Thompson are magnificent together. He is, of course, insufferable with his bossy, pedantic, humourless, bigotry,  and self-absorption. Most of us would have put arsenic in his tea long ago. But his wife is loyal, dutiful and long suffering so she doesn’t do that. Thompson does a good line in brittle dappiness, deep underneath which is an independent woman who’d really quite like a life. She has a way of communicating – and getting laughs – by just looking. And everyone in the audience knows exactly what she’s thinking.

Also outstanding in this production are the three support actors: Ned Costello, Charlie de Melo and Natasha Magigi. Between them they play a whole raft of meaty cameo roles with oodles of versatility and impressive voice work. Magigi, for instance, delights as the overbearing, hands-on (literally) counsellor. De Melo’s Mr Anwar, local shopkeeper is warm and caring in stark contrast to Scarborough’s character. And Costello, who graduated from LAMDA, only last year is definitely one to watch. He pops up in so many convincing roles you keep blinking and checking that it’s the same actor.

A word of praise too for Robert Jones’s ingenious set which, using advancing and receding hydraulics, gives us the Ransomes’ sitting room in three different guises along with several smaller roll-on, roll-off scene evokers.

It’s well worth a trip to Nottingham.

First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/the-clothes-they-stood-up-in/

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  All photos: The Other Richard

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Enter Anthony McCarten’s intelligent, neatly crafted play based on his 2019 book The Pope. First staged at Royal and Derngate, Northampton in 2019, this is its first London run.

Anton Lesser as Benedict is sardonic, authoritative and oozing white robed charisma. That’s why the informal scene when, more or less in mufti, he visits his friend Sister Brigitta (Lynsey Beauchamp)  for supper and TV drama works so well – the incongruous contrast  means that we meet a wholly rounded character. And she is the first person to whom he confides his thoughts about possible resignation.

Nicholas Woodeson gives us a powerful contrast in Bergoglio: “I’m an Argentinian. Tango and football are compulsory.” At 75, he too wants to retire and travels to Rome to discuss it with the Pope – thus allowing McCarten to make long scenes between the two men the backbone of his play. They disagree about almost everything: gay rights, abortion, birth control and, most serious of all, the condoning of abuse by Catholic priests. Equally, as two old men who worship the same god they have much in common too. And both are from backgrounds they would have done well to distance themselves from much earlier: the Pope from Nazi Germany and Bergoglio from the Junta in Argentina.

Dramatically, none of this is heavy or static and there are a surprising number of laughs in the play which manages to be moving, funny and thoughtful all at the same time.  McCarten’s dialogue is as sharp as a razor blade and Lesser and Woodeson – both actors at the top of their game – know exactly how to spin off each other to spellbinding effect.  And I liked Duncan McLean’s video projections which use images on a huge proscenium frame atmospherically to evoke various rooms in the Vatican – and at one point, noisy colourful Argentina.

There’s a nice performance from Leaphia Darko as the sister who assists Bergoglio and questions him in Argentina but Malcolm James and Angela Jones, billed as “ensemble” are oddly underused

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  All photos: Manuel Harlan

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Antigone, written nearly two and a half millennia ago, is a political play about power. It’s also about family issues, tensions and conflicts of loyalty. You’d be hard put to find anything more searingly, timelessly topical especially in the hands of playwright/poet Inua Ellams. It took a few minutes to find its feet on press night but thereafter was pretty riveting.

Antigone (Zainab Hasan) is part of a 21 Century British Pakistani Muslim family whose uncle, Creon (Tony Jayawardena) becomes Prime Minister early in the play. A shootout leads to the death of Antigone’s police officer brother, Eteocles (Abe Jarman), a state of emergency declared and the body of the executed Polyneices (Nadeem Islam) detained indefinitely – a dreadful fate for a Muslim for whom burial rituals are crucial. Creon meanwhile, every inch a right wing Tory politician immaculately observed by Jayawardena, insists repeatedly that the law (which he has changed, of course) must come first. That means that no imam will bury Polyneices or be seen to sympathise with an extremist, however much Antigone pleads with her uncle. Of course neither Sophocles nor Ellams gives us a happy ending. As some wag behind me remarked at the end in rich Estuary “It’s Greek drama innit?”

Ellams’s language is richly poetic although most of the dialogue is in prose. I really liked Antigone’s opening speech – full of passionate rhetoric –  when she’s trying to prevent the closure of the youth centre she’s been helping to run and the moving poem Ellams gives her at the opening of Act 2 when she’s in prison. Hasan is splendid in this role. Her everyday London accent is very natural and she is totally convincing as a feisty young woman with passions, determination, love for her cousin, Haemon (Oliver Johnstone – good) and a powerful sense of right and wrong.

But the real star of this show is the chorus. What do you do with a Greek Chorus in a 21 Century play? Ellams repeatedly reworks them as young people in the youth centre, a posse of paparazzi, feminist groups, street demonstrators and much more. They rhythmically spit out angry, thoughtful or apposite words (often in iambic pentameter) and are spikily choreographed by Carrie-Anne Ingrouille to Michael ‘Mikey J’ Asante’s arrestingly dramatic music. It provides slick and very engrossing backbone to this interesting, gripping version of the play.

Welcome too is the casting of Islam as Polyneices. He is deaf and signs as he speaks as do some other cast members while he’s on stage. It’s a pleasing performance and adds yet another dimension to the drama – as well as making a fine production more accessible.

All images: Davor @ The Ocular Creative

So what happened to all those Greek gods and goddesses once people stopped believing in them? They became stories and are therefore here, among us every day living in a world of climate destruction, dog shelters, the Internet and home schooling. And as such they still matter. A lot.  That is the central point of Ross McGregor’s fiercely intelligent, compelling reworking of the Persephone story which is often, incidentally, very funny.  And what a timeless story it is – a girl finding her feet in the world, leaving a clingy mother for a sexier option and eventually reaching a time-share compromise.

All four actors are very strong and work cohesively together to deliver this immaculately well written piece, directed by the playwright so everyone is pulling firmly in the same direction. They are, though, four sharply different characters. Beatrice Vincent is outstanding as Hestia, goddess of hearth, home and family. She speaks eloquently even with her eyes and does wonderfully evocative, but subtle things with her hands. I couldn’t take my eyes off her during another actor’s long speech throughout which she wanted to stop the speaker but couldn’t quite manage to do so. She finds anxiety, awkwardness, earnestness, passion, tearfulness in her complex character and her fingers twitch when she’s angry. Bravo.

Cornelia Baumann gives us a forthright, furious, sweary, embittered Demeter slightly overdone at the start but her performance settles to become believable and we gradually see past the brittle carapace. This is a single mother who loses her only daughter and she does terror and despair well in this play which rests mostly on mini monologues and statements rather than on dialogue. Goodness knows, incidentally, how a male playwright knows post natal vaginal surgery feels “like opening an umbrella inside you” but the accuracy made the audience gasp even as it chuckled. And of course Demeter was Goddess of the Harvest so there’s a powerful – uncompromising –  environmental message in much of what she says and a solution to all our ills. It’s called a tree.

Daisy Farrington plays Cora – who later renames herself Persephone – the truculent daughter who runs off to Eastbourne with Hades who runs a dog rescue oufit called “The Underworld for the Underdog”. Later, in glamorous frock she goes to stay with her controlling father Zeus – a splendid performance from Jackson Wright. Wright first appears “one million and nine days earlier,” according to Laurel Marks’s backscreen video projection, bare chested, long fair hair flowing and oozing entitled charisma. Later he is neatly pony-tailed and be-suited as a man who pretends to be charmingly reasonable but is, of course, a bully who has raped lots of women – so there’s a court case sitting at the centre of this complicated narrative.

Towards the end comes a long speech from Jackson – angry and rapidly delivered at fortissimo. It’s a diatribe against modern life and it lasts several minutes as he works himself up and up. I found it hard to resist applauding when he eventually reached the end. I’m not sure how much this Sir Humphrey moment adds to the play but it’s a terrific bit of theatre. It won’t be long before it turns up as an audition speech – or party piece.

This is the third play by Ross McGregor, artistic director of Arrows and Traps I’ve seen this year and yes, Persephone is just as good as Holst: The Music in the Spheres and Payne: The Stars are Fire.    He and they have proved themselves a reliable source of high quality theatre for thoughtful adults. What’s next?

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

I was delighted to see this production because the cast are fomer ALRA students. Their school suddenly closed earlier this year leaving the students course-less although some have continued at Rose Bruford. Bridge House Theatre offered to stage what is effectively a graduate show with these ten students in the hope that it might act as a springboard and help them to get representation.

Luke Adamson’s adaptation is very fluid and reduces the running time to 85 minutes without interval. It is now set in the 1920s (lovely vintage frocks) and apparently moved to Britain although this is confusingly inconsistent. Characters talk of going to London (instead of Moscow) but also of moving to Europe, for example. Masha (Leila Wetton – suitably brittle) snorts cocaine instead of swigging alcohol. There are a lot of references to Shaw and Wilde as having written plays to aspire and quips about experimental theatre. These are good ideas but nothing feels definite – which may be deliberate but it doesn’t make for clear story telling.

Gender blind casting gives us two male characters played by women which reminded me faintly of school plays at the girls’ schools I attended and taught in. Alice Gibson is however good as the impoverished, opportunist school teacher who marries Masha – not exactly a marriage made in heaven. Gibson brings nervous, diffident, insensitivity to the role and it works.  And Sally Toynton  is feistily strong as Dorn, the doctor who strides about being businesslike but of course there are cross currents in his relationships.

Best of all – and it’s a pretty good cast on the whole – is Anna Cameron-Mowat as Sorin. She lives and breathes the part, communicating with her eyes and every other part of her body. She does age and illness well too. It’s a terrific performance. But, again, there is confusion. The part is shared with Lewis Tidy who is presumably male as Chekhov’s Sorin originally was. At one point someone addresses Sorin with Cameron-Mowat in the role as “Mrs Sorin.” Thereafter she is often referred to as “he” and addressed as “uncle” which is a bit distracting. Gender fluidity is all very well but this is not Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Cameron-Mowat is very clearly female.  At one point her character wears a glitzy dress and a wedding-style hat. The text should be adjusted to the sex of whoever is playing the part at each performance.

The Bridge House playing space is quite small and very simple. Adamson and his team (designer: Verity Johnson) make thoughtful use of it for this production using pallets covered with boards to make low level rostra and a red velvet curtain to suggest an opulent room. The all-important lake is conjured in the imagination by characters gazing into the corners of the space.

It’s always a pleasure to go to the Bridge House (excellent tea at the bar downstairs and surprisingly comfortable seating in the theatre) which runs a reliably innovative and interesting programme. This version of The Seagull is a novel take on a familiar play which certainly asks questions and sets you thinking. And I really hope it acts as a launch-pad for these actors.

First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/the-seagull/