Two friends attend the same school in a deprived Essex seaside town. One leaves for university, gradually finds a different sort of life and settles down with a young woman whose background is more privileged. The other stays and is unhappily sucked ever further into emotional and economic poverty. Tensions build over the eight year  narrative span and there’s a great deal of anger, angst and guilt. It’s hardly an original story although many people will identify with it.

This seventy-minute piece is Jack Condon’s first play (he also plays the confused, disappointed, furious John) for Jawbones, a new company he has set up with Sarah Stacey, who directs. Although it’s a generally pleasing debut some of the writing is laboured especially in the first half hour which includes far too much clunky expositionary dialogue. The “issues” stick out clumsily. It does, however improve as it proceeds.

But the acting is excellent.  Condon stomps about being outrageous and often furious as well as deeply flawed and hurt. As James, Theo Ancient finds calm, reasonableness in his character and we identify with him because John really is difficult to deal with. Yet there’s also a troubled complexity especially in the memorably powerful  final scene when Whitney Kehinde, now his pregnant wife, tries to confront him about his unhappiness  so that they can move on together. She is calm, determined and worried, all of which Kehinde conveys beautifully and the way the two actors bounce of each other at this point packs a real punch.

First published by Sardines:https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/if-destroyed-still-true/

Photo: Taken at The Jack Studio Theatre

A companion piece to Ross McGreggor’s Holst: The Music in the Spheres  to which I awarded five stars in February, Payne is another delight – even though I am not quite as comfortable with physics and astronomy as I am with classical music.

Cecilia Payne (Laurel Marks) was a student of Gustav Holst at St Paul’s Girls’ School. From there she went to Cambridge and from thence to work as a researcher at Harvard. She was a pioneer who broke a great deal of new ground in her field although as the play makes clear she didn’t initially always get the credit for it. Among other things she worked out that stars are made predominantly of hydrogen and helium thereby refuting three thousand years of scientific theory – as Henry Russell (Toby Wynn-Davies) acidly and patronisingly points out to her.

The play is a detailed, intelligent exposition of the routine discrimination against women a century ago and a taut account of one woman’s struggles. Marks is an outstanding actor. She gives us a lumpy, awkward woman with the distorted vowel sounds of her period and class but indefatigably focused on her work. She is very good indeed at evincing the pain and hurt she feels when her character’s work is marginalised and yet her rare smiles light up the stage.

The five other cast members are generally strong and, as before. I was totally convinced by Wynn-Davies as Holst two scenes with whom effectively frame the play. American accents are, however, a bit iffy and although amusing, Alex Stevens makes Harlow Shapley simply too excessive and irritating to be taken seriously as head of department.

Nineteen twenties music links the scenes so that we never forget where we are. Lucy Ioannou as Adelaide Ames helps with that too. At first she seems a fairly frivolous flapper and a stark contrast with Cecilia but she gradually develops into something much deeper and we begin to see her as a serious scientist – with a healthy life/work balance. There is a very beautiful physical theatre/dance scene with her at its centre to symbolise her untimely death and the reactions of her friends and colleagues.

McGreggor, as director, does imaginative things with the gauzy backcloth providied by Odin Corie’s set. Some scenes, evocatively lit, take place beyond it to suggest outdoors or something otherworldly and it acts as screen for occasional projection.

THE TAXIDERMIST’S DAUGHTER – PRODUCTION PHOTOS BY ELLIE KURTTZ

This is a weird show in every sense of the word. In the traditional sense it’s about demonic behaviour and in the modern sense it’s strangely incoherent with some very odd directorial decisions. Sinead Diskin’s gloomy, disturbing music and sound dominates everything. There’s an awful lot of angry/anguished/frightened shouting over it which gets wearisome because there isn’t enough ordinary life to balance it. It often feels overacted and overblown.

It’s 1912 and we’re mostly in Fishbourne and Chichester where Kate Mosse, who has adapted this play from her own novel of the same name, grew up. Taxidermy is fashionable and there’s a local museum dedicated to the art. Strange things happen at the church on St Mark’s Eve (24 April so it’s topical as well as local). Birds are everywhere, dead and alive, and it’s sinister. After all a play which, in an early scene, provides you with a detailed account of how to remove the eye of a dead bird with a scalpel and then eviscerate it ready for mounting is probably signalling that nasties are in the pipeline.

Graylingwell was the asylum, later psychiatric hospital, in Chichester which finally closed in 2001. I know that because I was at college in the city for three years in the 1960s when it was still fully operational but it would have taken me a long time to infer it from this often incomprehensible play. Perhaps the local audience is simply expected to know.

Two women have escaped from Graylingwell and various characters are very worried about what they might now do. It’s a convoluted plot but Cassie Pine (Pearl Chanda) incarcerated for ten years, has every reason to be bitterly, determinedly vengeful which is why the local “establishment” men are worried. Before the show I met and was chatting to a colleague who asked me if, as he had, I had read the book. I hadn’t and by the interval I could see why he asked because I hadn’t got a clue what was going on – none of the scenes hang together or make sense. The story telling is a little clearer in the second half but still puzzling in places. The bright sunlight traditional happy ending, for instance, is  unconvincing and seems to belong in a different play.

Some of the acting feels laboured although Daisy Prosper pleases as the eponymous daughter who’s quietly doing the work because her father (Forbes Masson) is literally out of his mind and Akai Osei is good value as the chirpy servant Davey, although he says he’s from Portsmouth but sounds like a London barrow boy. Taheen Modak is warmly appealing as the refreshingly decent Harry Woolston and Pearl Chanda is strong in her cunning psychosis – moving from horror to everyday chat in an instant.

Andrzej Goulding’s video designs and Prema Mehta’s lighting work very well to create a grey, menacing atmosphere. The weather is dreadful through most of the play. We get magnificent rain, thunder and lightning and a terrifyingly rough sea. In many ways these are the best bits.

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

This very decent account of a show about decency makes good use of the delights of the splendid Bob Hope Theatre. Director Sarah Chapman ensures that every inch of the large stage is used (this show was originally intended for the larger Churchill Theatre Bromley, pre-Pandemic) and that the action spills engagingly onto the side steps and the gap between the pit and the front row. Steve Trill, meanwhile, and his nine piece band in said pit gives us a lot of pleasing sound.

Shrek the Musical is a celebration of otherness. One of its best lines is “Beautiful ain’t always pretty” in this piece in which the “monster” gets the princess without turning into a prince and that’s very 2022. It’s also a fine choice for an enthusiastic amateur company because it features a big cast with lots of tasty cameo roles among all those feisty fairy tale characters who form the main ensemble. No wonder there are so many productions of it about at present.

Ellie Mulhern is outstanding as Princess Fiona. She dances with verve, sings with passion and twinkles attractively as well as being believably naturalistic. Michael Flanagan finds a lot of witty physicality in the persistence of Donkey and he, too, has strong stage presence. Jamie Fillery excels as the appalling Lord Farquaad and Laura Whittingham is very successful as Dragon and Wicked Witch – what a voice!

Shrek is a difficult part to play because this ogre is meant to be quiet and self-effacing in contrast with almost everyone else on stage. Ian Chapman begins so mildly that you hardly notice him but he grows as the show goes on. By the time he gets to falling in love with Fiona we are very much on his side.

The ensemble numbers – including the post curtain “I’m a Believer” are lively and entertaining, imaginatively choreographed by William and Jenni Rye. And both the dragon and the plastic horse are very show stoppers.

A cast this size ensures an audience brimming over with supportive enthusiasm so that the atmosphere feels like a family party and that’s good to see and hear after so long. I hope, however, that someone sorts out the sound system for the rest of the run. There was a great deal of crackle and incidents of radio mics cutting out at the performance I saw.

First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/shrek-the-musical-6/