Press ESC or click the X to close this window

The Witchfinder’s Sister (Susan Elkin reviews)

 

Venue: Queen’s Theatre Hornchurch. Billet Lane, Hornchurch, Essex RM11 1QT

Credits: by Beth Underdown. Adapted for the stage by Vickie Donoghue. Produced by Queen’s Theatre Hornchurch

 

The Witchfinder’s Sister

3 stars

Matthew Hopkins was a self-appointed  “witchfinder”, responsible for the deaths of at least a hundred women in mid-17th Century East Anglia at the time of the English Civil War. Of course it was all presented as righteous Puritanism. In fact he was probably in it for financial gain. His ideas and methods later resurfaced in Massachusetts.

Well, Vickie Donoghue’s play (based on a novel by Beth Underdown) is definitely not The Crucible but it is both thoughtful and thought-provoking. Historically, little is known about Hopkins’s family. The play posits a sister Alice (Lily Knight) who tries and fails to make him see sense and to show compassion. It’s essentially a feminist piece with a cast of five women (one of whom, Jamie-Rose Monk’s Mary, is on his side) and Matthew (George Kemp).

Libby Watson’s set is clever. Lots of shimmery dark panels act as mirrors and add to the murky atmosphere. The wide stage at Queen’s Theatre becomes three different spaces with the aid of Matt Haskins’s lighting design so that scenes flow seamlessly. Doors are flown on and off from above which I thought was ingenious until they began to remind me of lifts going up and down.

I also had a problem with Owen Crouch’s sound design. Almost the entire play is accompanied by loud music and noise which is clearly meant to sound variously creepy, dangerous, frightening and indicative of mental turmoil. For me it quite quickly became an irritant and I pitied the actors who had to speak over it. Although they were all very clear and audible I should think they were pretty tired by the end.

The first act is a bit slow, some of the dialogue wooden and the acting static but it picks up dramatically in the second half when we meet Anne Odeke’s moving Rebecca who agrees to speak for Matthew at a trial in order to save her mother but of course he’s utterly ruthless. The scene in which she is “floated” is beautifully staged.

Kemp is chilling as Matthew and Knight sustains her demanding role as Alice with passion although I’m at a loss to know why she is required to recite The Lord’s Prayer, complete with anachronistic error, quite so many times. Miracle Chance is good as rough and ready but sensitive Grace, the young servant girl detailed to conduct bodily examinations of women for Matthew.

It’s a dark play in every sense. The persecution of these innocent women was/is appalling and it should never be forgotten in these days of “cancel culture” just how easily this mindset takes hold. The names of the women who were killed are, at one point, intoned as part of the soundtrack and they are often mentioned by name in the text. Yes, we should remember them and this play really helps to do that.

This review was first published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/the-witchfinders-sister/

Schumann’s 1840 song cycle Poet’s Love, with its wealth of colour and mood across sixteen song settings of Heinrich Heine’s poems, is ideal for a lunchtime recital. And baritone Thomas Olemans makes a fine team with pianist Malcolm Martineau assisted by the latter’s highly skilful masked page turner/slider. These songs are definitely duets even down to the moving piano coda delivered with sensitivity at the end.

In places Olemans injects a quality of smiling wondrousness into his high notes making the audience feel the gentle personal drama. Elsewhere we got gravitas and fortissimo in the more declamatory numbers as well as pleasing lightness in the faster songs and anger where required. He’s certainly a versatile singer and actor.

This 60 minute concert opened with songs by Niels Gade, a Danish friend of the Schumanns and several of Clara’s songs. I especially liked Olemans’s warm passionate delivery of Der Mond Still Gegangen and the way he and Martineau segued from Clara’s Die Stille Lotosblume into Dichterliebe.

The setting was, incidentally, both attractive and apt with the two performers on a platform in front of St John the Evangelist Church’s carved tracery rood screen so that natural light and the green Trinity altar hangings providing a very pleasing backdrop.

I don’t care for digital concerts in general but it wasn’t logistically possible to get to Oxford this week. It is, however, a real treat to see on screen the live audience there in the church – a great improvement on the recent past and a sensible idea to offer both options.

This review was first published by Lark Reviews: https://www.larkreviews.co.uk/?p=6696

Society: Chichester Festival Theatre (professional)

Venue: MINERVA THEATRE, Chichester Festival Theatre, Oaklands Park, Chichester

 

Home

Susan Elkin | 14 Oct 2021 23:25pm

Image: Daniel Cerqueira, Dona Croll, Hayley Carmichael, John Mackay in CFT’s HOME. Photo: Helen Maybanks

David Storey’s agonisingly poignant play, first seem at the Royal Court in 1970, is set in the garden of what used to be called a mental hospital – although it’s a while before we realise that. When I was growing up, there was such an institution in every area known by name and reputation to all locals. Today, of course, we look after (or not) such patients differently.

My first impression of Sophie Thomas’s set was that, filling the Minerva’s thrust it was pretty. In fact the faded ferns and big downy seed heads (like giant dandelion clocks) about to blow as the light fades at the end of the play is movingly symbolic. Each of the five characters, all of them patients, is faded and finished in some way.

John Mackay as Jack and Daniel Cerqueira as Harry are tidy in collars and ties pretending to be two successful businessmen but conversation goes round in vacuous circles of invention, “Oh yes …” says Harry about fifty times, ever troubled and often weeping. Mackay’s character constantly invents relatives who’ve experienced or achieved interesting things. No one knows the truth about anyone else.

Hayley Carmichael’s Kathleen is a forthright and cackling but pitiful suicide survivor who can’t walk properly because she’s not allowed lace up shoes or a belt. Marjorie (Dona Croll), often acidic, befriends her but has too many troubles of her own to be sympathetic to anyone else.

And poor lobotomised (yes, that was a standard medical procedure at the time) Alfred, played with gutsy sensitivity by Leon Annor is an ex-wrestler who keeps practising weight lifting with the garden furniture and trying to remove it. Even his costume is evocative. Alfred walks about in the garden in stockinged feet –  worn out multicoloured socks through which some of his toes have pushed.

The impressive thing about all this is how the cast, intelligently directed by Josh Roche, bounce off and respond to each other. This must be a difficult script to manage because it’s so repetitive and deliberately banal on the surface over the surging sub texts – but this cast sustain the momentum pretty effectively.

Although some of the dialogue is funny because it’s so inconsequential – characters don’t listen to each other but of course the actors do – this is a deeply serious, uncomfortable play. I think you’d probably need to be in the mood for it. Don’t go if, for any reason, you are feeling unhappy.

 

First reviewed at Sardines https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/home-2/

Venue: CHICHESTER FESTIVAL THEATRE, Oaklands Park, Chichester

Credits: A new adaptation by Suhayla El-Bushra. Based on the novel by Andrea Levy (World Premiere)

Performance Date: 07/10/2021

The Long Song

3 stars

Suhayla El-Bushra’s  take on Andrea Levy’s (final) 2010 novel is an arresting account of slavery immediately before and after its abolition in Jamaica. It’s also a celebration of story telling and oral history in which so many narratives are laid one upon another that in the end we have to make up our own mind about truth and what we mean or understand by it.

A youngish black man, Thomas Kinsman (Syrus Lowe) has prospered and bought an estate in Jamaica – perhaps in mid-Nineteenth Century. He finds an elderly black woman named Miss July (Llewella Gideon). He has reason to believe she is the slave mother from whom he was separated in infancy. Eventually, with courtesy and respect (and a lot of food!), he persuades her to tell her story and her bent, dignified feisty figure dominates the stage from them on as she remembers her past.

Enslaved black workers emerge from sugar cane upstage (designer Frankie Bradshaw) amidst atmospheric drum led music and you can feel the heat. Each person is characterised and of course each of them is ready to rebel when the time comes. It’s multifaceted as they, too remember, often recalling things quite different from Miss July’s account. Tara Tijani is strong as the younger Miss July, whose mistress even tries to take her name and insists on calling her “Marguerite” and I enjoyed Cecilia Appiah’s hoity-toity Miss Clara.

Scenes with the white overseer and the owning family are deeply shocking. There’s a fair bit of the sort of colonial language which would have been common currency at the time including the word which is probably now the most offensively emotive in the English speaking world but perhaps the line which stood out for me came from Olive Poulet as Caroline Mortimer: “Don’t kill him. He hasn’t finished my garden”. On press night the audience chuckled and then you could almost hear a collective appalled gasp as they had second thoughts.

It’s a sensitive and very timely contribution in the age of Black Lives Matter. You simply listen, believe and feel horrified shame as you marvel at the warm theatricality of the piece.

There is, however, an audibility issue. Hard as the cast have worked on their diaspora accents with voice coaches the end result is arguably over rich for UK audiences. I missed, for example, about half of what Llewlla Gideon said, powerful as she is in this role. And the thrust stage lay out at Chichester Festival Theatre means that sometimes characters are a long way from some of the audience and facing away from them. However fine the play you can’t respond adequately if you can’t hear much of what’s said – and, for the record, I don’t have a hearing problem.

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

Maidstone Symphony Orchestra Mote Hall 9th October 2021

MSO Logo

Rarely have I watched a performer who exuded as much palpable pleasure in the music as Mayumi Kanagawa playing Bruch’s first violin concerto. She smiled several times at the leader during the piece and rocked appreciatively during the orchestral passages. Perhaps, since this was MSO’s first concert for 20 months, she was as delighted to be playing live as the audience was to be there.

Technically pretty impeccable, Kanagawa gave us some fine cross string work and double stopping and, later, dug out lots of romantic richness in the allegro moderato. The orchestra, meanwhile, accompanied her warmly. I occasionally hear in colours and perceive G minor as a navy blue key. Kanagawa’s simple dark blue outfit reflected that so perhaps she does too.

Her showstopper encore, Paganini’s The Hunt, was very welcome icing on the cake. Played with expert insouciance and lots of colour, her flamboyant double stopping and “impossible” leaps certainly impressed this indifferent amateur violinist.

The concerto was sandwiched between an incisively dramatic account of Beethoven’s Coriolan overture and, after the interval, Mendelssohn’s third symphony “Scottish”. I was pleased to note that Brian Wright took the whole symphony more or less attacca so that there was no space or temptation for audience applause between movements. It makes the work so much more cohesive than if it’s chopped up. Despite occasional fragments of raggedness, it resounded with melodious energy. The management of dynamics un the opening movement created a lot of lively interest and I liked the way Wright let the wind interjections, especially bassoon, shine through the texture. We were also treated to an elegantly understated second movement and as for the adagio … a conductor I was working under once commented: “This is one of the most sublime melodies ever written but you musn’t milk it”, MSO didn’t … but I still felt something in my eye at the end.

Yes, it’s utterly brilliant to see MSO in action again. They still sit at separate stands which makes page turning difficult for string players and the distancing changes the sound slightly but it’s hundreds of times better than the long, long silence we’ve all been through.

First published by Lark Reviews: https://www.larkreviews.co.uk/?p=6680

This is the best novel I’ve read about the Suffragettes who fought for votes for women before the First World War. It’s a compelling page turner which really nails their uncertainties, split loyalties, determination, sacrifices and suffering.

And Jeni Whittaker comes at it from an unusual position. Her great aunt, Gladys Mary Hazel, brought up the author’s father after his mother drowned. She was therefore, effectively, Whittaker’s paternal grandmother. It wasn’t, however, until she took her very ailing and elderly father to see the 2015 film Suffragette that he told her that his aunt had been very actively involved in the movement. Eventually that became her starting point for a “novelised biography” of the interesting Gladys some of whose papers she found in her father’s house.

It’s a first person narrative in which we learn about Gladys’s childhood in Ireland as one of seven, the move to England, teacher training and, eventually being drawn into “the cause” partly because of her social conscience but also because of her strong sense of injustice. Her activities inevitably alienate her parents as would her love affair with Michael if they’d known about it.

It’s carefully researched. The accounts of forcible feeding and its long term after-effects are graphic and shocking. But one of the many things I like about this novel is that every character and situation is presented in a balanced way. Some of the doctors with feeding tubes are distressed and traumatised by what they’re doing. Gladys has reservations about some suffragette activities. Her mother supports the cause but not the violence. Michael is attractive, loving and loveable but ultimately deceitful. Lots of decent, if sometimes misguided or misunderstood human beings, inhabit the pages. Nothing in this long, readable novel is black and white.

Many of the characters are real: Doctor Gertrude Austin, a wise woman and a mainstay to Gladys, for instance. The characterisation of complicated Emily Wilding Davison, who was probably mentally ill, is skilful and plausible.  And of course the Pankhursts are floating about – inspiring their followers but sometimes a bit self interested and lordly and not always behaving well.

Everything here is gloriously multi-dimensional. And I learned a lot. The title, by the way, comes from a game devised by Gladys’s older brother back in Ireland. They had to carry out unpleasant tasks and undergo little ordeals without sound or protest. It was good training for a future Suffragette.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman.

Ruth Rendell’s decision to write as Barbara Vine in parallel with her other titles gave her the scope to write a completely different sort of personality based thriller. Like her crime novels, each of her Barbara Vine titles was very compelling and wonderfully original  and I remember reading them in tense admiration as they were published – usually one a year. She was a very prolific writer.

So where to start re-reading? I looked at the list of titles and decided that I’d return to A Dark-Adapted Eye (1986) which was Barbara Vine’s debut. And of course I wasn’t disappointed. I was hooked from page one as if I’d never read it before although I remembered the end so I was acutely aware of some of the detail in a way I don’t think I was first time round. In that sense it reminds me faintly of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, another novel which matures with each re-reading.

Vera Hillyard was hanged for murder. We know this from page one. The question is why? Whom did she murder? Her narrator niece, Faith, is looking back many years later and reflecting as she visits a man named Jamie in Italy. Gradually, tense drip by drip, but almost in passing, we learn who all the members of this family are and how they are related to each other. Some of them are quite conventional which provides an immaculately crafted contrast to Vine’s greatest strength. She is utterly brilliant (as is her alter-ago Ruth Rendell) at creating very strange but totally believable people. Vera, who is married to an absent military man is inscrutable, loves to sew and create beautiful things, has strange snobbish tics about, for example, eating habits, is humourless and puts others down constantly. She is also – we gradually realise, lonely and vulnerable – and given a terrible time by her very unpleasant son Frances whose character is another example of Vine’s gifts.  But it’s a very long time before we see how she could possibly have murdered anyone. Vine keeps you whipping the pages over to the very last.

Ruth Rendell died 22 years ago in 1999. She was a reliable best seller for decades and it’s odd that we don’t hear much about her now. A Dark-Adapted Eye is as fresh as the day it was written. If you’re a Rendell/Vine virgin you’re in for a treat.

I admired Rendell for another reason too. She married the same man (Don Rendell) twice. Divorced in 1975, after 25 years of marriage. they remarried in 1977 and remained together until her death. I think there’s something rather lovely about realising (presumably) that you’ve made a massive mistake and putting it right like that.  51u3FdgkKyL._SY291_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_ML2_

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The Courage Game by Jeni Whitaker

Show: Ophelia Thinks Harder

Society: Sedos

Venue: Bridewell Theatre

Credits: By Jean Betts and William Shakespeare

Ophelia Thinks Harder

4 stars

Jean Betts is well known as an actor, director and playwright in New Zealand but less so in the UK. And that’s a pity because her Ophelia Thinks Harder is the most grown up, clever – and very thoughtful – play I’ve seen in a long time. Full marks to Sedos for staging it with such aplomb – and under such difficult circumstances. It was all set to go in March 2020 and we all know what happened then. Now it is reborn as the opening show in Sedos’s post-pandemic season.

We’re in Hamlet – obviously. Ophelia (Natalie Harding-Moore) is mourning her mother and thinking hard about a lot of things such as how women should be defined. The play is for her a journey of discovery as we work, more or less, through the plot of Hamlet with lots of spin, quirks and re-roling as the characters we thought we knew all morph into something else along with other characters such as the ghost of Joan of Arc (Freya Thomas – good), three old women who are actually Macbeth’s witches and various maids. There’s Horatio (Rhydian Harris), kind, reasonable and sympathetic to Ophelia in more ways than one. Polonius (David Pearson) is hideously self interested and repugnant. Danielle Capretti’s Queen, who operates the King as a glove puppet is slimy and as unmotherly as she could be.

And all this uses Shakespeare’s language woven in and out of modern English and asides. The Shakespeare goes way beyond Hamlet. There are witty borrowings from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The Taming of the Shrew, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet. Macbeth, the sonnets and probably lots more I missed as the dialogue sailed past. The script is as good as anything by Stoppard.  It’s fiercely feminist with a lot of profoundly shocking things said by male characters. So much so that Sedos have placed a warning notice near the auditorium entrance.

It is, then, a challengingly ambitious play for a non-professional company but this is Sedos directed by Matt Bentley and it comes off very successfully. It makes, for example, excellent use of the Bridwell’s big performing space fading back into the shadows where clothes rails stand. Harding-Moore’s Ophelia begins as a rather wooden heroine. Two and a half hours later she’s bouncing with new-found confidence as, disguised as Osric, she joins the Players (who have, by the way, a lot of fun with sending up theatre. actors and the industry) and sets off for a new life. Harding-Moore is a fine actor in a huge role who really makes you think about the plight of women at all points in history.

And I’ve left Josh Beckman as Hamlet until last because he is outstanding – snarling, posturing, dominating. Even the curl of his fingers is expressive. His (sort of) closet scene with Capretti is a tour de force. He is an actor who changes the dynamic on stage the moment he appears.

Definitely one to catch if you can. Or if you can’t then at least read the play.

First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/ophelia-thinks-harder/