Judi Dench is on record as saying that she loathes The Merchant of Venice because none of its characters is likeable. I thought a lot about that as I watched Abigail Graham’s take on it because it’s clearly her point of view too.

It’s a modern setting with mobile phones and briefcases. Carnival in this version of Venice means sinister masks and a great deal of boozy hooliganism. And in amongst all this we have Adrian Schiller’s Shylock quietly trying, against a background of hideously aggressive anti-semitism, to make an honest living. It’s a nuanced performance which presents a man who is calm, dignified and reasonable – until he is pushed right over the edge by his daughter’s perfidy and the hatred of everyone he speaks to.

Against that Sophie Melville gives us the nastiest Portia, ever. She refuses to shake Daniel Bowerwank’s hand as Lorenzo because he is black. She belittles Jessica. She is furious with Nerissa  (Tripti Tripuraneni) for hooking up with Gratiano. She exploits her sexuality and she sadistically enjoys every moment of humiliating Shylock in court. She is so viciously rude, racist and self-interestedly loathsome that her sudden simpering passion for Michael Marcus’s overtly gay, money-grubbing Bassanio doesn’t ring true at all.

Michael Gould’s Antonio is utterly foul too. Apart from the physical affection he shows Bassanio he is relentlessly hostile in a distinctly National Front sort of way, growling abuse even as he begs a favour from Shylock. At the trial scene when he’s stripped to the waist awaiting the knife I felt no sympathy for him at all as he continues, even then, to goad Shylock by repeatedly muttering menacingly under his breath “come on, kill a Christian” as Shylock hesitates, knife shaking in his hand.

Every director makes cuts in Shakespeare partly to heighten some chosen emphasis and partly to keep the show to a manageable length. Graham has gone much far further than most. This show which runs just over two hours opens with the defection of Launcelot Gobbo (Aaron Vodovoz) to Bassanio’s employ from Shylock’s – that, for the record, is Act 2, scene 2. Eventually it doubles back to a very irascible Antonio lamenting his sadness but it doesn’t make narrative sense played in this order. Moreover, Graham cuts the whole of Act 5 – the usual return to Belmont and the business with mistaken identity and rings has gone completely.

Instead the play closes at the end of the Trial scene which works reasonably well with Lorenzo and Jessica present (despite their having been instructed to keep the home fires burning at Belmont but we’ll let that pass) so that she can have a surreally staged moment of repentant reconciliation with her father. It’s an interesting idea but a bit abrupt – nothing in her previous behaviour has hinted at this.

It’s a production full of pros and cons, It has its moments but it also  paddles in the tempting shallows of gimmickry. The four piece jazz band plays well enough but why is it there? Setting up the casket lottery as showy TV game show is a shallow for-laughs travesty. So is the silly wedding dance. And is the perpetual booziness of Venice’s young men supposed to excuse or explain their appalling behaviour? Why is Antonio coughing in a wheelchair at the trial scene? Every directorial decision should add something to the play. If it doesn’t then don’t do it.

I had similar reservations about the recent Measure for Measure and Hamlet in this venue.  It’s almost as if Shakespeare’s Globe no longer trusts its eponymous playwright to work effectively unless his work is cheapened and dumbed down for a 21^st century audience. Yes, of course there are many ways of staging these plays and stressing the topicality but if you go too far you’re hoist with your own petard, as the Big Man said himself, because what’s left is not the play he wrote.

First published by Sardines.

All photos: Pamela Raith Photography

Don’t go to this show for light entertainment or  – heaven forfend – many laughs. David Mamet’s rather laboured 1977 play is seriously, very seriously, intense.

Nick’s family have a holiday home in remote, rural Michigan. He has invited his girlfriend, Ruth, to spend some time there with him. But all is not as well as it initially seems. He is searching for lasting meaning in life in a country whose icons tend to be shortlived. She is intrigued by the romance of the vast countryside and questions everything.  In different ways both are searching for a narrative anchor. The sexual chemistry between them is powerful but brittle. Ninety minutes (no interval) later each is broken, in every sense, but may – just possibly – now be able to continue their respective stories together.

Francesca Carpanini and Sam Frenchum both turn out good performances. Carpanini endows Ruth with cheerful, intelligent innocence seasoned with strength and Frenchum’s Nick has plenty of troubled, sometimes appalled, decency.

Director Russell Bolam has made imaginative use of the square, in-the-round, playing space so that sometimes the actors are within arm’s length of the audience and it all feels very immediate as we ricochet, sometimes exhaustingly, from passion to anger to insouciance to speculativeness.

Andrew Lamble’s simple set gives us a spacious upstage back porch with an outdoor sofa and suggests that the rest of the space is the land beyond the house. Bethany Gupwell’s lighting subtly suggests changing times of day and a rather good storm with lightning, which rakes up the tension.

A shout out too to Haruka Kuroda, fight and intimacy coordinator. There’s some pretty graphic sex in this play which is quite hard to do convincingly when your audience is so close. Kuroda has done a fine job with these two actors who really do seem to be doing a lot of invasive touching – it’s interesting acting. And the scenes in which they actually attack each other manage to horrify, even as another part of your brain is wondering how long they had to rehearse it for.

So yes, it’s a decent piece of theatre with plenty to commend it but the exhausting, insular navel-gazing grates in 2022 and I wasn’t sorry when it was over.

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

What better entertainment than an upbeat, bijoux production of, arguably, the most upbeat and tuneful operetta ever written, on a wet, windy cold  Sunday afternoon in the stunning Opera House at Tunbridge Wells? And, as ever, I’m struck by the enlightened (in this instance) approach of JD Wetherspoon, which, once a year allows its pub to revert to its original function for two performances, with a meal package if you wish.

John Ramster’s eight hander adaptation runs with the wackiness of the piece. Hands, and other things, poke through holes on the side cloths of Bridget Kimak’s set and her costumes range from Pierrot to Alice in Wonderland with a splendid, massive, shiny yellow suit and chrysanthemum-topped headdress for a scary-looking skull-masked Mikado (Matthew Quirk).

The advantage of working on G&S with a small cast – and I’ve seen it with other companies such as Illyria Theatre and Charles Court Opera – is that you can hear every note and every word because it’s all so exposed. Music director Bradley Wood, sidestage on keyboard, has wisely run mostly at fairly moderate tempos so that the clarity is crystalline – after an oddly nervous opening number at the performance I saw.

Christopher Faulkner, as a gor-blimey, insouciant Ko-Ko, for example, delivers the all-topical little list, which he wrote himself, with impeccable timing and hilarious precision. The Mikado’s song is, unfortunately, a bit muffled by the mask but I really liked the way Gareth Edmunds, a fine tenor, and Wood managed all the tempo  and mood changes in A Wandering Minstrel I. And the madrigal,  Brightly Dawns Our Wedding Day is, as sung here, a lovely example of a quartet really nailing it. I could almost feel Sir Arthur applauding.

Ashley Mercer as Pooh-Bah is magnificent. Tall, slender and sneering he literally wears a multiplicity of hats all piled one on top of another. He oozes stage presence and his bass voice is resonant and authoritive.

The larger-than-life Susan Moore is terrific as Katisha too. She has an old fashioned contralto voice like good claret and acts beautifully as the frumpy but oddly vulnerable and pretty vindictive woman nobody wants. She is also very funny, pulling faces and flirting with the audience.

Every director wants – needs, even – to put his or her own stamp on a piece as well known and much loved as this. If G&S is to work, it has to sparkle. It was, let it not be forgotten, lack of freshness which eventually alienated the Arts Council and killed the D’Oyly Carte company. The trouble is, though, that there is a fine line between imaginative artistic innovation and gratuitous gimmickry. And sometimes Ramster crosses that line. What on earth does it add to the piece to do Howdy Do in Texan accents as if we were at a rodeo? Why change the word Japan to Pajan? Why have Mathew Quirk, doubling as Pish Tush speak in a distorted accent which is a cross between West Midlands and cod-Jewish?

For various reasons I saw this touring show late in its run. It includes a lot of stage business with long bendy arms with which characters touch each other, kiss and so on. This is clearly how it was rehearsed last year when on-stage social distancing was a requirement. It would then have seemed quite witty. Now it feels a bit quaint. When this production is next revived, I’m sure this aspect of it will be dropped.

First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/the-mikado-5/

It isn’t often that I see a new play running for two and a half hours which holds a hundred per cent of my attention from the first moment to the last, causes me to dab my eyes several times, gasp in wonder more than once and chuckle a lot. Holst: The Music in the Spheres did all of that. And more.

Cecilia Payne, who went on to be a pioneering astrophysicist was a student of Holst’s at St Paul’s Girls School where he tried unsuccessfully to persuade her to study music instead of science. Ross McGreggor explores that relationship and finds an ongoing link between Holst’s Planets Suite and Payne’s work on stars. The play I’m reviewing here is one of a pair. This one focuses on Holst. The other – Payne: The Stars are Fire – I hope to see in April.

The play provides, with lots of time shifts, Holst’s life story from his troubled childhood, his poor health, his friendship with Ralph Vaughan Williams, his marriage and, of course, the music he was writing although for many years he also had to teach to pay the bills. Although he was born and grew up in Cheltenham his Germanic name inevitably caused problems in the second decade of the 20th century. The best scenes are the ones set in his studio at St Paul’s School where McGreggor imagines that Payne (Laurel Marks – a very intelligent performance) spends so many detention periods that these two lonely people become quasi friends rather than teacher and pupil. When his eyes are bad she morphs into his amanuensis, for example.

Toby Wynn-Davies is totally convincing as Holst – shivering with misery as a sickly, misunderstood child, diffidently courting Cornelia Baumann’s Isobel Harrison (good), weeping with joy as he conducts Jupiter or fretting about money and struggling with self confidence. It’s very nuanced acting. Even the piano playing at his desk works.

Edward Spence makes Ralph Vaughan Williams into a witty joker as well as a very supportive friend and Lucy Ioannou shows impressive versatility in switching between the prunes-and-prisms high mistress of St Pauls and Holst’s kind, down to earth aunt. Also strong is Alex Stevens as Holst’s stentorian, authoritarian father, and as Sydney Bressey a member of Holst’s orchestra at Morley College, killed in the war.

There’s a lot of music in this show and several times we get a surreal ballet ensemble sequence such as the one in the first act when Holst’s inner turmoil is evoked by projection on the back screen, Mars driving along in its relentless 5|4 rhythm on the sound track while a tableau evolves from the whole cast moving a table. I also loved the scene in which Holst conducts and the rest of the cast becomes his orchestra – miming cellos, timps, trombones and so on as they become prominent in the music. It’s excitingly ingenious movement direction by Will Pinchin.

It’s a meaty, intelligent play with some good  jokes for educated grown ups although it’s never abstruse. I loved the crack about using a clarinet for a death, for example. “No, no” says Vaughan Williams. “Death is always an oboe.” And as a former Swale resident of course I enjoyed the Sheppey joke – I had no idea, though, until now, that Holst ever lived there.

I saw the final performance of this play at the Brockley Jack because the performance I was due to see earlier in the run was cancelled. The good news is that both plays are having another run – at  New Theatre Wimbledon 11-24 April. Catch it then if you possibly can.

Adapted from Eileen Browne’s much loved 1995 book, this 35-minute show is effectively an opera for preschoolers. Akeyo (Rujenne Green) wants to take a gift of fruit to her friend Handa (Hannah Akhalu) but all the fruit she gathers is eaten by animals she meets on the way so it’s fortunate that a goat knocks some tangerines off a tree. Tangerines – and every child in the audience is given a segment – turn out to be Handa’s favourite and that’s the surprise.

It’s a rhythmic story in which each fruit celebrated in song, in an African language, in a repeated melody and there’s a little tune which I know as The Farmer’s in his Den. The music is very simple and, almost entirely consisting of rounds based on major chords. One child, at the performance I saw, was singing some of it back to them before we were even half way through. Green and Akhalu both have clear, sweet voices and their intonation is excellent. There is no accompaniment although both actors are on stage smiling and rocking and sweeping to steel pan tunes before the show starts.

The fruit eating animals are puppets (by Peter O’Rourke)  which either emerge from the edge of Sophia Lovell Smith’s sandy African set or are assembled from around  Green’s person. The delicate teetering monkey is attractive and we get a neat zebra from inverting a neck sling that Akhalu is wearing. The giraffe is probably the tour de force moving with spindly elegance on its bamboo legs.

The children and their parents are seated on the floor round three sides of the square playing space – as a venerable (or something) onlooker I am given a chair. All the puppets tour the audience to wave at, inspect, gently peck the children in the audience which goes down well.

It’s a show which exudes charm and it’s very engaging. All the children I saw it with were entranced.

First published by Sardines: