The story – such as it is – ranges episodically across several generations of one family from an RAF pilot and his wife in the 1940s through to the present. The chronology leaps about disjointedly so that one minute we’re in World War II and the next we’re thinking about pandemic restrictions. Apart from some business with an RAF jacket the role changes are done, often instantly, almost entirely through voice work. Nathaniel Christian, Rachel-Leah Hosker and Hamish Macdougall are all pretty good orally but not good enough to make the story telling clear.

It isn’t a musical but in one of her several incarnations Hosker is an aspirant singer so occasionally she breaks into a 1940s song sometimes “accompanied” by Lewis (Nathaniel Christian).  His piano miming is woefully weak – although the rest of his acting is convincing. Her singing voice is interesting. It has a slightly gravelly quality, faintly reminiscent of Edith Piaf but an octave or so lower.

Hamish Macdougall meanwhile gives us a father, an adult son, a young boy, a young husband and a brash party organiser – among other things. He’s clearly a skilled actor but we don’t see him at his best in this muddled narrative.

Paper planes are big symbolic thing here. Meant to connote the RAF link ( I think) they actually seem pointlessly silly although it’s a nice moment when Christian as a grandfather is teaching Hosker, as a very young child, how to fly.

In modern times one of Nathaniel Christian’s characters is a musician looking for a break trying to be realistic but optimistic about his future. This is a relatively gripping narrative development but seems to belong in a different play.

I liked the simplicity of the set, though, by Joshua Gadsby and Naomi Kuyck-Cohen. It uses a raised, sloped board as the playing area. Surrounding it are chairs to enable actors to get on and off and to provide a seat when one of them is on the edge of the action. Zac Gvirtzman’s music and Kieran Lucas’s sound design together provide an evocative atmosphere too.

At the heart of the modern scenes is a 1940s-themed party in a country house repeatedly described as “fucking weird”. Actually that’s a pretty good description of the whole play.

Originally published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/the-winston-machine/

Image: John Chapman (Rehearsal photo by David Sprecher).

The key thing with Beckett is timing and making silence speak. And John Chapman who shuffles, sighs, grunts and yawns very evocatively is master of both.

Krapp’s Last Tape is a solo one act play featuring an old man reflecting on his past sexual encounters. He has an ongoing taped autobiography including spool 5 in box 3 which he recorded 30 years ago. As well as listening to that, he is now trying – but mostly failing – to record his final one.

It was a treat in the performance I saw  – as Chapman worked through the opening long silent section including the famous banana sequence – to hear the audience listening intently even when no words were being spoken. There was real theatrical chemistry in the room.

Stout, dishevelled, laughing, wheezing, weeping and getting drunker, Chapman is both compelling and moving. He and his director Robert Pennant Jones are clearly a strong and sensitive team because we really feel Krapp’s regrets alongside his wistful longing and anger at his younger self. He also made me notice afresh the poetic glory and spareness of Beckett’s prose: “a bony old ghost of a whore” for example.

The attention to detail is impressive too. Chapman as Krapp sits at a desk behind an ancient, battered Grundig-type reel to reel tape recorder. At one point he rethreads it. When he hits the switch the reels are actually rotating. Then there’s his off-stage drinking. We hear corks drawn and liquid being poured into a glass (sound design by Laurence Tuerk) and each time Krapp returns his face is slightly more flushed.

Krapp’s Last Tape, which runs less than an hour, was written in 1958 and first performed as a double bill with Endgame. And it’s in this pairing that I’ve seen it presented in the past. After the interval Tower Theatre chose, instead, to offer a talk by  Robert Pennant Jones about The Tower Theatre’s Beckett productions during the last 60 years followed by a film entitled Stones which is an extract from Beckett’s 1955 novel, Molloy. A truly Beckettian evening.

First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/krapps-last-tape-2/

This production of Stephen Dolginoff’s take on the story of a pair of young, 1920s Chicago murderers, was originally staged at Hope Theatre when its director Matthew Parker was Artistic Director there. Featuring the same two actors, it has worn well.

Set at the time of Nathan Leopold’s 1958 (successful) parole hearing the account of robbery, arson and eventually murder – all fuelled by, and bound up with sexual frisson and the relationship between the two men – is unravelled in a series of flashbacks. It’s taut, tense and profoundly disturbing because of their total lack of moral compass.

The quality of acting is remarkable. Bart Lambert as Leopold twitches, talks with his fingers which stray like white slugs across his often manic face while his eyes gleam with – at different moments –  desire, menace, chagrin and cunning. He’s a very dangerous young man whose main problem is that he will do anything Loeb (Jack Reitman) says if he can have sex with him. I am also fascinated by what he does with his voice. As the worn, 50-something prisoner he uses a strangled, tight, quite deep voice which connotes pain, careful self control and longing for freedom. When he reverts to his youth he sounds like a young middle class Chicagoan, full of passion, longing and hope, except when he’s frightened of what he’s getting into. It is outstanding, imaginatively nuanced work.

Reitman’s Richard Loeb is a very different character – large, confident, ruthless and totally self-centred. He manipulates Leopold with chilling, cigarette smoking calm – except when he too, eventually, gets frightened as the law closes in on him. His knowing, glinting smile is one of the nastiest things I’ve seen on stage in a quite a while. An 80 minute two hander like this only works, of course, if the two actors are totally attuned to each other and directed with sensitive intelligence – and this show ticks all those boxes.

It is actually a musical but in an oddly low key way. Pianist Benjamin McQuigg (very good), seated fairly unobtrusively upstage right, plays a near continuous score which underpins the action as it might in a film. Songs segue so seamlessly and naturally out of the dialogue that you barely notice the difference.

Lighting designer, Chris McDonnell has excelled himself in this show. We go from the gloom of the prison to the brightness of a park in which the two young men used to meet and there’s a fine arson scene in which, although it’s all done with lighting, you can almost feel the heat of the flames.

Definitely worth seeing, it’s part of Jermyn Street’s Outsiders Season and runs until 5 February

First published by Sardines http://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk

The two actresses ( I usually write/say “actor” but they wouldn’t have done) are on either side of the stage in their dressing rooms surrounded by costumes, props and personal belongings (set by Paul Doust). Upstage and up a few steps is a window and an area to suggest the film set itself.

We watch Donna Dawson as Crawford knitting and being sweetly feminine or pretending to be. Then Pauline Armour turns up, coarse, forthright and aggressive as Davis. There is a lot of well conveyed tension between the characters and professionally managed chemistry between two pretty competent actors.

We watch Armour converting herself into the hideously disturbing Baby Jane, a former child actress who now torments her paraplegic sister. She whitens her face, applies doll-like colour hides her hair and finally dons the scary ringletted blond wig – all the time talking sometimes in monologues, sometimes on the phone, and sometimes directly, bitchily to Crawford.

Dawson’s Joan is nicely over made up – eye shadow and lipstick trickling into the carefully constructed creases – as she tries to hide her fears, inadequacies and resentment of Davis behind a gentle mask suggesting sweetness. Actually, the point of the piece, is that she gives as good as she gets.

Both performances are engaging and the play is well directed (Scott James) but I found the accent work troubling. Davis came from New England (as she reminds us several times in this play). At the beginning, that’s how she sounds but it quickly wanes and soon there’s barely a trace of American left, let alone anything as nuanced as Massachusetts. If this was a directorial decision because accents are hard to sustain and after a while the audience won’t notice then I think it’s a mistake.

Crawford, on the other hand, came from Texas and started out as a dancer – which Davis can’t resist snobbily mentioning several times in Bette and Joan. Perhaps she ironed out the Texan drawl, Dawson gives her no trace of it. In fact, after a few minutes, like Davis, she barely sounds American and that feels odd.

And a final note: there is no point whatever in printing cast biogs in the programme in black on red in a font so tiny that it is totally illegible. Even in daylight with a magnifying class the next morning, I struggled and my sight, with glasses, is perfectly OK for all normal purposes.

First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/bette-and-joan/