Category Archives: Venues

Grit (Traverse: 6 Feb.’14)

Posted in Rated: Unrated, Theatre, Traverse by

Grit

“an admirable sincerity”

Editorial Rating: Unrated

Presented as part of Manipulate, a week-long festival of visual theatre, Grit is an earnest analysis of how children around the world are affected by war.  Well-regarded by critics during 2012’s Edinburgh Fringe, it views this biggest of topics through a close-up lens – using a war photographer’s diary to frame the story, and drawing occasional parallels with his own life at home.

The tale’s told through a mix of puppetry, projection, and shadow-play – a combination of techniques which occasionally feels overwhelming, but in the end comes together remarkably well.  It’s not the most original of styles, but there are some creative details to enjoy: an especially powerful projected sequence cleverly brings just parts of an image into focus, picking out first a ruined building, then a man cradling a child.

But if the presentation’s deft, the storytelling’s clumsy.  Exposition comes courtesy of a pre-recorded voiceover, which very definitely tells-not-shows the photographer’s reactions to the horrors that he’s seen.  It’s desperately unsubtle, and oddly uncompelling; a war correspondent ought to be a fascinating, contradictory, damaged character, but here he seems cast as Everyman.

And sadly, it feels as though they don’t quite trust their puppets to hold our attention or to tell their story.  One otherwise-effective scene, consisting of a striking series of shadow vignettes, is accompanied by a narration so literal and descriptive it begins to feel like a sequence from a children’s TV show.  As we see a young foot thrust into an army boot, the voice tells us that a boy has become a soldier – a plot point which, quite honestly, they could have trusted us to work out for ourselves.

It would be crass to overlook the importance of Grit’s theme, and there’s an admirable sincerity to the way Tortoise in a Nutshell confront it.  But this is recognisably an early work, from a company which have (by all accounts) since gone on to great things.  It flits too quickly between too many different stories, and in the end – unlike that clever projection – never quite throws the focus on any of them.

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Reviewer: Richard Stamp (Seen 6 February)

Visit Tortoise in a Nutshell homepage here.

Hotel de Rive (Traverse: 6 Feb.14)

Posted in Rated: Unrated, Theatre, Traverse by

Hotel de Rive

“an existential struggle for meaning that made Giacometti’s eyeballs dance in front of his head”

Editorial Rating: Unrated

You can tell that Hôtel de Rive is not UKIP territory. A German, French, Swiss co-production based upon surrealist writing accompanied by alpine horns, l’Hôtel is foreign. The show has Vorsprung durch Technik design credentials. It looks expensive, it runs well, has done 60+ outings since 2011, and – critically speaking – has definite and appealing hybrid form. But what, exactly, is it doing on stage? There’s your existential question, especially if you’re not in the Euro zone.

A search engine helps, which is a bit of shame, but Hôtel de Rive needs its back story. Its subject, Swiss artist sculptor Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966), had to stay in Geneva during the German occupation of Paris between 1942 and 1945. Biographies now headline this period as coinciding with his ‘critical transition period [beginning in 1935] … when he questions his work and tries to find a new way of looking and translating what he sees.’ He took a room at the Hôtel de Rive and his sculptured figures grew smaller and smaller, some barely a few centimetres high. They were imagined on a wide and shifting flat surface and not in anything as reassuring as three dimensional space. Insomnia took hold and Geneva nights (as back home in Paris) were spent in bars and clubs. Shabby, grubby, a chain-smoker, ‘on’ six to ten cups of coffee a day, and not exhibiting his work for twelve years, the artist then was a long, long, way off 60 million pound auction prices and being the face of Switzerland’s 100 franc note.

But you can see where the hallucinogenic Hôtel de Rive is coming from: an existential struggle for meaning that made Giacometti’s eyeballs dance in front of his head, which – projected – is like a bio-exorcism out of Beetlejuice. There was appreciative if nervous laughter from the audience.

Of that anxious, frustrating and near impossible time Giacometti said, “A large figure appeared wrong to me, while a small one was intolerable, and then they became so minuscule that with a final cut of the knife they often disappeared into the dust … and tirelessly I began again, only to end up, a few months later, at the same point”; which might have been the crumbling, enervating effect of Hôtel de Rive. Fortunately its creator, Frank Soehnle, responsible for ‘Set and Play’, has given its animation more visual and literary coherence than you might think.

A more than nodding acquaintance with Giacometti’s The Dream, the Sphinx and the Death of T (tellingly published in Labryinthe magazine) would have helped a lot. I didn’t have a clue but now know, for instance, that the Sphinx – outlawed and closed down in 1946 – is/was the celebrated, bizarre, brothel in Montparnasse. Its pleasures are, surely, represented in l’Hôtel by hot trombone and a shimmying, bejewelled, and wasted puppet with a purple flower for a head whose petals fold delicately when she settles into an outsize wine glass. See it, and more, on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TguqiDIXGfM .

Single actor, Patrick Michaelis (who has to be Giacometti), suffers sand pouring over his head, then a wee demon of a puppet- familiar on his skull, then a yellow spider, then outstretched, skeletal arms protruding as if from the back of his coat. Did I appreciate the following elucidatory text on a screen somewhere: “A blind man extends his hand in the void (in the dark? In the night?/The days pass and I dream of catching, stopping that which flees”? No, I did not; Giacometti’s 1952 haiku-like poem probably was evident somewhere but there were too many available options: actor’s voice, electronic voice, chalkboard, tablet screen, revolving PC monitor, big screen. And the music plays all the while: on conch, muted trombone, synthesiser, and those impressive alpenhorns.

This breadth of choice, I suppose, derives from the show’s extended title, Hôtel de Rive – Giacometti’s horizontal time (lost to UK marketing), where linear narrative style is discounted in favour of a segmented disc on a single plane. A different event is contained in each segment that narrows to a single, all-inclusive point. Got it? Anyhow, the show does actually close with an up-tempo approach to the artist’s last work, Paris sans fin, a series of 150 lithographs of that city.

I’m pleased that I know more of Alberto Giacometti’s life and art. I liked watching Hôtel de Rive work its inventions out but it was a slow, creepy, ride. Accomplished, skilful, polished; but really just an assembly of clever components, I felt.

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Reviewer: Alan Brown (Seen 6 February)

Visit Figuren Theater Tubingen homepage here.

Arcadia (Bedlam: 5-8 Feb.’14)

Posted in Bedlam, Rated: Nae Bad, Theatre by

Arcadia apple   Arcadia2

“the counterpoint of rhetoric as chat-show”

Editorial Rating: Nae Bad

Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia (1993) still has time on its side. There are two apples on the table, the original that Gus offers Hannah at the end of scene two and now there’s Valentine’s MacBook.  Whether ‘Pro’ or ‘Air’ I don’t know but – for a while – let’s stay with ‘Pro’ because this is a student production with professional heft.

The principal roles carry with admirable ease; big ideas don’t sound too heavy; and the impression grows of well-rehearsed supportive work, for even the closing waltzers look to be in step.

Anyway, you don’t ‘do’ Arcadia lightly. This is a recognised heavyweight of modern British drama. Go to The New Yorker online for ‘Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, at Twenty’ and see what I mean. The plot need not be reviewed – ‘I can’t do plots and have no interest in plots’, said Stoppard when interviewed for the Paris Review in 1988. OK, a soundbite and before Arcadia, but he makes it clear that he does not like ‘narrative mechanics’. What matters is structure (most difficult) and dialogue (easiest). He looks forward to writing ‘a literature play rather than an event play…. in one setting …. where all the time and the energy can be devoted to language, thought process, and emotion’. Eh voilà, a few years later, Arcadia, where Thomasina (13 and brilliant) picks up the leaf of the apple and says “We will start with something simple. I will plot this leaf and deduce its equation”. Note restricted use of ‘plot’. That, as it happens, leads to iterated algorithms of grouse numbers on the MacBook in Act 2 but Arcadia, for all its astonishing architecture, breadth and ingenuity, is a stage play and not a spreadsheet.

A pertinent example:
Bernard:     Because time is reversed. Tock, Tick goes the universe and then recovers itself, but it was enough, you were in there and you bloody know!
Valentine:   Are you talking about Lord Byron the poet?
Bernard:     No, you fucking idiot, we’re talking about Lord Byron the chartered accountant.
Valentine:   (Unoffended) Oh well, he was here all right, the poet.

Not that directors Eric Geistfeld & Charlotte Hodge have much room to enjoy this. The Bedlam stage has to be extended to accommodate the large table at its centre. Additional seating is provided onstage, left and right, but is unhelpful. Stoppard’s own description is of a bare room, uncarpeted, where ‘nothing is impressive but the scale’. Shooting parties are heard as noises-off and the schoolroom table accumulates the right props: folders, books, paper, pen, ink, an aged tortoise called ‘Lightening’ doubling as a paperweight. In the last scene, importantly, there is a pot of dwarf dahlias but otherwise the very large country house in Derbyshire in 1809, a stately home in 2014, is a distant setting in Bristo Place.

Upfront, down stage and around the table, however, there is solid, focused performance. Lauren Moreau is Thomasina Coverly and is entirely convincing as genius pupil and smart child (think Outnumbered Karen), who is as fascinated by jam in her rice pudding as she is by kissing. Pedro Leandro is her tutor, Septimus Hodge, who does languid and attractive intelligence to the nth degree of Fermat’s last theorem. Stoppard’s George in Jumpers (1972) belongs ‘to a school which regards all sudden movements as ill-bred’. Septimus went to Harrow, maybe played in the eleven with Byron, and learnt the same lesson. Leandro voices the elegant wit of the gentleman scholar as if to the manner born. Peter Stanley as Valentine Coverly, post-grad mathematician and modern day heir to Sidley Park, has the other sort of manor but the same gift of lazy concentration. As with Septimus, Valentine’s words provide rhythmic measure and reflection and Stanley makes you listen. Rik Hart as Bernard Nightingale provides the counterpoint of rhetoric as chat-show. Almost insufferable, ‘bouncy on his feet’, an academic bloodhound, the part drives the actor and Hart controls it very well.  Sita Sharma, as Hannah, has to manage this clever, unrelenting, assault and still stand her own ground. A threatened kick in the balls and calling him an “absolute shit” gives her an encouraging, winning, start that a poised Sharma does not relinquish.

Supporting roles are better than also-rans but it is uneven going. Arcadia is an unforgiving estate in 1809. The costumes looked really good but this is not period drama and the physical comedy cramped up. Braying outrage from Henry Conklin as Chater and a glowering Capt.Brice RN. (Sebastian King) were fun but … too much. Rosie Pierce as Lady Croom went all out for pure-bred aplomb and witty hauteur, leaving Derbyshire far behind. Poor Mr Noakes (Lewis Robertson), jobbing landscape gardener, had no defence but a soft Scottish accent, which was nice. The remaining household: butler Jellaby (Will Naameh) and Lord Augustus (James Beagon) – stay impassive, dumb in my lordship’s case, and that served well.

In contemporary Sidley Park, Catherine Livesey is Chloe Coverly, 18 – giddy, kind and susceptible; whilst James Beagon is back and now speaks as ‘Gus, at Eton and pretty cool.

As students might plough a tough exam it is entirely possible to plough  Arcadia and bury it. But not this time. Directors Eric Geistfeld & Charlotte Hodge and cast should reap a reward.

nae bad_blue

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Reviewer: Alan Brown (Seen 5 February)

Visit Arcadia homepage here.

The Seas of Organillo (Traverse: 4 Feb.’14)

Posted in Rated: Nae Bad, Theatre, Traverse by

Organillo

“The Seas of Organillo is a birthing pool for puppets.”

Editorial Rating: Nae Bad

From above – and occasionally in – The Seas of Organillo master puppeteer Stephen Mottram manipulates a biosphere of his own making. In a general Wiki sense a biosphere is a closed, self-regulating system containing ecosystem(s) – ‘including artificial ones’. There you have it: a puppet show that is deeply immersed in itself as a creative process. Highfaluting? Not at all, once you’ve seen it, heard it, and come up for air.

The electro acoustic score is vital and accompanies the whole work rather like an evolutionary agent. Mottram explains its genesis after the show (and on YouTube). He brings on the organillo, a small hand-turned barrel organ, that he built himself over four months out of his old wardrobe, drain pipe, lining paper, and B & Q. Each cylinder roll provides eight minutes of music but multiple recordings of the whole clicking, bubbling, breathing, box provide the soundtrack. There is no speech. Call it organic, obviously.

There are seashore calls and off-shore waves but nothing on-shore. On the surface the seas support a couple out rowing but it is only a couple of turns around the bay before they’re gone and a swimmer comes into view. More homunculus than human, a tiny ET in a cycle helmet, really; for, says Mottram, “I liked the poetic idea of swimming creatures somewhere between fish and people”. Whatever they are, they love the sea – and each other, which is kind of the point.

The Seas of Organillo is a birthing pool for puppets. It is sex under water for little, primitive, humankind and as such it is both innocent and fascinating. You see a bubble of life-giving air rise to the (invisible) surface; hands move and stroke each other in deep space; an egg floats free. Sperm penetrates the egg and – as with a multiplying shoal, more or less – cell division begins, a womb is formed and new angelic life begins. Up top, Mum and Dad now row into sight with an infant in tow.

So much, so familiar in biological terms but the puppetry is something else. There are a lot of puppets in The Seas of Organillo and they are often moving alongside automata – “sexy machines”, Mottram calls them – to help create the liquid, holistic illusion. Occasionally I couldn’t figure it out: the triffid-octopus like ‘thing’ of a fallopian tube; the egg eating clam; the stripping-off of colourful layers from around the fertilised egg – but then, after the show, I read the helpful hand-out that I should have read before I went under.

I’m a pretty poor hand at keeping fish. They survive but without much support. In The Seas of Organillo, first conceived  around 1998-2000,  Stephen Mottram has made puppets akin to biotechnology. Probably a first.

 

nae bad_blue

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Reviewer: Alan Brown (Seen 4 February)

Visit Stephen Mottram’s  homepage here.

Bestiaires (Traverse: 3 Feb.’14)

Posted in Rated: Outstanding, Theatre, Traverse by

1. bestiaires_ester_photo_Jaka_Ivanc

“Zeus is packed off, squashed into a crate marked ‘Fragile’, for sale to China – again.”

Editorial Rating:  Outstanding

Bestiaires is part of the Visual theatre Festival, 31 January to 8 February, at the Traverse Theatre. Edinburgh49 is reviewing four productions. Bestiaires was the opening show.

Mythology is flexible and so is foam rubber. This provides Duda Paiva and his company with all it needs to create Bestiaires or – for its Norwegian audience last September– Manbeast. The work is not a monster manual, although there’s a golden, hungry, Cerberus; nor is it really an outing for the properties of polyurethane/latex, although they’re wonderful; no, this is about the enduring life of the gods in our more secular time. The exclamation “For Gods’ sake!” is used often enough to make you think, sadly, of how they’re getting on.

Not too many gods – Cupid, Persephone, Hades, Zeus and Athene principally – and the Medusa, transformed from fit dancer, Ilija Surla, (that’s elasticity for you – check out your Pindar) to writhing Gorgon puppet. Nowadays all is far from well on Olympus. Death-dealing Hades has become western ‘civilisation’s’ best-selling export and Zeus is packed off, squashed into a crate marked ‘Fragile’, for sale to China – again. For the time being: a relative concept in this show of seventy memorable minutes – Cupid (Mart Müürisepp) holds the stage as rueful narrator and demi-Chorus: his bow, a long microphone lead; with a hip flask of whisky to lend him a dram of Dutch courage.

Nevertheless and in generous spirit (to restore Greek finances) Cupid would reunite a wilting Persephone and a Hades, who’s looking the other way at Medusa’s pects. Cue Hades’s immortal line: “You’re hot. You want to party?” There’s some easy morphing of Demeter and Persephone but no matter; what has real, unequivocal presence is the dancing of puppeteer and foam rubber puppet. By now, since 2004, this is the company trademark and it is exceptional. Video animation of spring flowers and unerring sound, musical and vocal, complete the impression that everything on stage is alive, not least those gods.

Ester Natzijl is literally inside the square head of Zeus who does not stand tall. Instead he’s reduced to amused contemplation of the F word, as applicable to his small condition, as in “Get me the F out of here!” or “What the F!”. Classically moulded Hades gets grossly fat and cannot regain his place. Three mouthed Cerberus may play ‘Fetch’ with Cupid’s wig but it can still get very dark out there. Put the mirror of eternal beauty in the hands of these gods and you invite trouble. Medusa and Athene dance in jealous, nightmarish combination.

There is a compilation of acts on dudapaiva.com called Break the Legend. Bestiaires is original work of high quality that would do just that. Zeus, unfazed by market conditions in China, gives a homily on love – of all his attributes, the least familiar – that has probably held him together since those titan wars. It must be the magic quality of that rubber for, as Duda Paiva puts it, “I’m just fascinated by foam, because it is generous, it is about generosity.  It’s such a giver.”

In a respectful word: awesome!

outstanding

Reviewer: Alan Brown (Seen 3 February)

Visit Duda Paiva Company homepage here.

Bedlam Festival 2014: 3 ‘shorts’ – ‘Seawall’; ‘On One Knee’; ‘Rob and Roberta’

Posted in Bedlam, Rated: Unrated, Theatre by

Bedlam Festival 2014

“and – magic – you have theatrical Snapchat”

Editorial Rating: Unrated 

LOWDOWN: The ‘Bedam Festival’ is a six day festival … operated by the longest running student theatre in Britain … completely administered, staffed and performed by students and young people primarily studying at Edinburgh University.’ 

In case you wondered (because you’re not a student), the Bedlam Theatre is the ninety seat theatre housed in the old New North Free Church on Bristo Pl, looking down towards George IV Bridge. It is Fringe venue No49 in August when use of the pa. system seems important. Last week, on the one occasion that I heard a solemn “The House is now open”, it was laughingly decried as ‘train station posh’.I saw three productions on consecutive evenings at 6.00pm. Audience numbers looked good at around 50+. Rob and Roberta had two performances; Seawall and On One Knee were one-offs.

Seawall by Simon Stephens.  This is a surprising and effective piece. It is a grief-stricken story of sudden loss and immanent mourning. Jonathan Oldfield as Alex is quietly alone on stage and is looking back at what happened and would bring his audience with him to the edge of his personal darkness. The submerged seawall of the title is where you back away from the depths of misery on its other side. This tale is thirty minutes in the telling but you wouldn’t know it. Alex moves you through in tones half conversational, half confessional, and the emotional tug is unremitting. There are sorrow smudged sketches of his partner, Helen; of her father, Arthur; and of their child Lucy; but it is Alex alone who gains real definition.  Oldfield’s monologue would be heart-breaking in its gathering intensity but writer Simon Stephens waives the sentimental, preferring a body blow to the stomach. Alex used to cry at anything – that moment in Groundforce, for instance, when the made-over garden is revealed to its surprised owner – but not anymore. Oldfield’s performance has real gut-churning weight behind it.

On One Knee by Delia Bloom is thirty minutes of original writing for EUTC and opens up with Bruno Mars’ ‘Marry You’, whose dance track is just right for this light and irrationally accurate show. ‘Looking for something dumb to do’? Easy, put one lovelorn loon, Jamie, on the left of the stage to propose marriage to Christine and put his two pals Tom and Erica on sofas to the right with lots of vodka shots.   John Forster is sweet Jamie and a very credible sucker for Imy Wyatt Corner as Christine who – of course – fancies another, fitter, laddie. So much, so deliberately cringeworthy; but meanwhile there’s comic action across at the flat where friends Tom (Jonathan Barnett) and Erica (Isabella De Vere Rogers) are texting to save Jamie from himself.  Writer Delia Bloom gets it right here: life for this merry band is ‘one story after another’, just link arms and skip from one side of the stage to the other and – magic – you have theatrical Snapchat. De Vere Rogers, sassy, and Barnett, smart, work well together and try out stylish Anna (Blanca Siljedahl) as a better girlfriend for Jamie. How ‘better’? Who cares baby, let’s just play ‘The Settlers of Catan’. Congradulations (sic) to director Sally Pendelton.

Rob and Roberta by Rory Keller is more loaded. You are still in flat share land but there’s talk of careers underway – the law, medicine – and relationships are heavier to shift. Rob (Laurie Motherwell) is weary before his time and relieves the weight by being snide to his best friend, Roberta (Emma Nevell), and it is a wonder she puts up with him as cheerfully as she does. If he had lots of words Rob would be messing with the heads of his friends, as it is he contents himself by pulling them away from each other. Rida (Daniel Orejon) loves Cheeto (Adam Butler) in less time than it takes to crunch a cornmeal snack but that kind of wholesome enjoyment is not for the jaded Rob. He is therefore the challenge that pert and determined Rachel (Izzy Hourihane) is looking for. She will ‘fix’ her man within a year, she declares, and the play’s action describes that attempt. Hourihane’s energy is vital and holds your attention through multiple scenes past and present but at times I, for one, was wondering ‘What for? Is Rob worth it?’ He does resolve this for himself at the play’s shocking end but I got the distinct impression that Rob and Roberta is a psychological drama that had lost its plot.

I really would have liked to have seen more shows; I should have done.

Reviewer: Alan Brown (Seen 22, 23, 24 January)

Visit Bedlam Festival 2014 homepage here.

1933: Eine Nacht im Kabarett (Summerhall: 22 Jan. – 2 Feb.)

Posted in Rated: Unrated, Summerhall, Theatre by

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 ‘… determined to enjoy a decadently subversive cabaret’ ? 

Editorial Rating: Unrated

It’s 30 January, 1933: the day President Hindenburg made his fateful, fatal choice, and appointed Adolf Hitler as the Chancellor of Germany.  That night, a group of citizens and foreigners gather at a Berlin club – determined to enjoy a decadently subversive cabaret, while that pleasure’s still permitted to them.  And we’re invited too.

1933: Eine Nacht im Kabarett is essentially two shows rolled into one.  There’s the cabaret itself, up on the stage; and there’s the back-story, played out at the bar and at the tables, by actors who walk and sit among the audience.  It’s an ambitious and challenging production which dares to break some sacred rules, but unfortunately, it adds up to less than the sum of its parts.

The cabaret itself is nothing short of a delight.  David McFarlane and Calum MacAskill are multi-talented performers, playing dancing brown-shirts or failing magicians with equal, expressive ease.  Hazel DuBourdieu delivers a bravura performance as the ironic “perfect German girl”, while master of ceremonies Bev Wright is a dissolute, self-destructive dominatrix.  The original score, which Wright co-wrote with Fiona Thom, is just as well-matched to the milieu: sometimes it’s poignant, sometimes it’s rousing, and sometimes it’s a little sordid too.

So 1933 hits a lot of the right notes, but not always in the right order.  The opening is both lengthy and awkward; it’s not immediately clear whether we’re watching a painfully-misjudged shambles, or a sharply-observed satire.  It takes too long to get acquainted with all the key characters, perhaps because there are simply too many of them.  And most of all, the first half lacks the feel of reckless escapism that the setting demands: we’re told the Hitler Youth is marching in the streets outside, but little sense of danger spills over into the room.

The scene finally snaps into focus after the interval, with the arrival of Nazi official Captain Vöhner – deftly played by a commanding Andy Corelli.  As Vöhner seats himself very visibly among the crowd, our role as the audience becomes an increasingly uncomfortable one.  At one point we’re asked to sing along to a catchy ditty, lampooning Hitler’s rise to power, and the whole room turned a nervous eye to Vöhner’s table.  Would he see the funny side?

For the most part though, 1933 sits in a frustrating middle ground, making unconventional demands of the audience without granting corresponding freedoms.  Daringly, playwright-director Susanna Mulvihill often has two dialogues happen simultaneously, one at each end of the room.  But you have no choice which to listen to; stuck in your seat at a cabaret table, you may well find a crucial character-defining conversation being drowned out by small-talk at the table next door.  It’s true to life, certainly – but it’s not a satisfying way to tell a story.

And on a larger scale, too, Mulvihill’s script often has too much going on.  Overall, she needs the help of a fearless editor: someone who can cut the repetition, bring a tighter focus to the storyline, and point out the places where her messages grow overly obscure.

1933 is a fascinating experiment, with some genuine highlights both on the floor and on the stage.  It’s a shame it doesn’t quite hold together.

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Reviewer: Richard Stamp (Seen 24 January)

Visit 1933: Eine Nacht im Kabarett homepage here.

Long Day’s Journey into Night (Lyceum : 17 Jan. – 8 Feb.’14)

Posted in Rated: Nae Bad, The Lyceum, Theatre by

Production photos for "Long Days Journey Into Night"

‘‘Health and happiness ’ and then, perfectly, ‘that’s a joke’.’

Editorial Rating: Nae Bad

By now Long Day’s Journey into Night has a lot of followers. Written in 1941 this is Eugene O’Neill’s Facebook page from hell – and back – and without any privacy settings. Received by the New York Times in 1956 as a ‘saga of the damned …. like a Dostoevsky novel in which Strindberg had written the narrative’ it is a remarkable and important play. Watch it (occasionally not easy), follow its story (not difficult) and you’ll realise, in epic Facebook terms, its ‘social utility’ for our time.

You will like the kind and sympathetic realization of character in this Lyceum production. Diana Kent, who plays Mary Tyrone, says “There’s no baddie in the play. Everybody is flawed, everybody damages everybody else, but there’s a reason for it, and everybody can be forgiven. It’s a hugely compassionate play” (HeraldScotland, 5 January). For director Tony Cownie it’s ‘a very personal family situation [turned] into a very meaningful intense drama’ (Lyceum programme). Guilt and retribution – the acid feed of some productions – come a discordant second to underscored themes of conflicted love and understanding. A word here for the dialect coaching of Lynn Bains, for the accents are never strained, however keenly pitched. Cue also sorrowful cello, piano, and a quiet sea  – off-stage right  – rather than screaming strings and raucous gulls.

Paul Shelley is James Tyrone, handsomely retired actor, who at sixty-five would still command the stage or living room with debonair gesture and manner. Seduced by $35000 a year net profit at the box office he gave up on Othello and Shakespeare for the lead in melodramas. He shows off his cigars but does not smoke them and the theatrical metaphor is never far away. ‘The final curtain will be in the poor house’ he declaims but whilst he can guard his whiskey (he’s an Irish American remember) and wryly attack the fecklessness of his sons he is again losing his wife to her morphine habit. Shelley shows the pronounced make-up of a man whose dignity and loyalties are keeping him together but are wearing him out at the same time.

Tyrone often holds his wife of thirty-six years but Mary is not really there. He might as well embrace the air for Diana Kent plays Mary as a woman in love with a happy, momentary, past. Her speech is limpid clear and sounds as lonely as she feels. Even when animated and with their vivacious young housekeeper, Cathleen (Nicola Roy), Mary is receding. Her addiction will reclaim her, is reaching her all the while, as inescapable and as all-enveloping as the sea fog that O’Neill would fold her in.  A muted foghorn signals the same. Kent’s performance is one to admire and to think about.

The two Tyrone ‘boys’, James Jnr (33) and Edmund (23), do love their parents and it is naturally selfless, unlike what came next in O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten (1947). Adam Best as James Jnr. and Timothy Evers as Edmund are very well matched. Their open exchanges provide a sure solidity and warmth that shore up the fragile state of their parents’ relationship. Granted they do drink a lot of whiskey but that allows Edmund, of all people, to propose ‘Health and happiness’ and then, perfectly, ‘that’s a joke’.

However, as is the case here, cut over an hour from O’Neill’s script and put too much distance between the Tyrones and the play’s autobiographical anguish, then you might, cheekily, unfairly, plot this Journey to a few miles out of Elie or maybe Troon. The Tyrone’s car might be a Lexus (actually it’s a Packard) but it looks cheap compared to their neighbour’s S class Mercedes. James Tyrone routinely buys to let and is cash poor; he worries about his electricity bill. He expects his sons to make money. He’s meanly content with the state hospital rather than pay out for private healthcare. Mary wants a proper upholstered home, preferably in the city. The men change into dapper suits to go to town. The full-on wooden wall of the ‘cottage’ interior looks like the neat cladding of apartments in Edinburgh’s Quartermile. There is, I think, a bourgeois milieu here that is pretty comfortable and spacious, some way off O’Neill’s cabined and pathological closeness, and that has to limit the tragedy of a family on the rocks.

Is it helpful to salvage significant pity and modest understanding from the fuller, near mythical qualities of this great American drama? Yes. This is a good, clear-sighted, production of Long Day’s Journey into Night that stops well short of the gloaming.

nae bad_blue

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Reviewer: Alan Brown (Seen 21 January)

Visit Long Day’s Journey Into Night homepage here.

‘Peter Pan’ (King’s Theatre: 30 Nov ’13 – 19 Jan ’14)

Posted in King's Theatre, Rated: Nae Bad, Theatre by

PP_masthead

“On deck aboard the Jolly Roger, pint-sized John Darling, with obligatory top hat and brolly, upstages the big, very tall, Captain Hook (Grant Stott) with talk of human rights and the Geneva Convention”

Editorial Rating: Nae Bad 

Hook up with Peter Pan and you’re way beyond parental guidance. There is, of course, no ‘PG’ certificate attached to this ‘swashbuckling pantomime adventure’ that splashes music, dance, colour and broad comedy over young and old alike. J.M Barrie is in small print but never mind for within moments of Mrs Smee’s (Dame Allan Stewart) balloon landing she is squirting water from her eye-catching boobs and foolish, lovable, Mr Smee (Andy Gray) is off on a plump pantaloon’s dream ticket, riffing on ‘balloooon’ until his lugubrious jowls fold in helpless laughter.

The show fits its Christmas billing. The outsize programme features ‘Panto Puzzlers’ – try Michael’s Star Maze for example – and happy seasonal advertising for the young at heart. ‘If you can dream it, you can do it’ is a good enough way to Never Never Land (not Musselburgh) …  via the second star to the right. There is lots of fairy dust and spectacular lighting to fly us out of Edinburgh and to transform the ‘wee green bogey man’ into the fearless, battling, Peter who will not grow up.

On deck aboard the Jolly Roger, pint-sized John Darling, with obligatory top hat and brolly, upstages the big, very tall, Captain Hook (Grant Stott) with talk of human rights and the Geneva Convention. Poor preening, impotent Hook! There is snide mention of his little blue pills – Tiger Lily gets leered at – and his quarter-deck shakes a bit as he clashes swords with the agile Peter. His (over-used) command of ‘Pirates Attack’ brings on a nice dance trio who would not attack a sand-castle. Regardless, Stott preps for his dastardly role by a brief appearance as Mr Darling, twirling his moustache and singing a wicked little ‘It’s a banker’s life for me’. The later mention of Fred Goodwin is happily inevitable.

The really funny routines are firmly with the Smees. Allan Stewart and Andy Gray perform with gleeful, twittish and tickling spirit as sparring couple, squashed couple and as a pair of beached mermaids. One scene, involving mops on parade and the baldy joke, is too long but the two become real pantomime villains when with the lights up they turn a tv.camera on the audience. Grown-ups beware!

“But where”, the cry should go up, “is Peter?” Well, he is not quite as lost as his Lost Boys, but he is nowhere near Wendy either, which makes Maggie Lynne’s part sweet but distant. Daniel Healy flies in well – one leg perfectly bent at the knee – but it is not easy to land lines like ‘To die would be an adventure’ amidst the fire balls and dance numbers, not to mention an interloping 007 and Adele. Peter’s rousing ‘Cock a doodle doo’ greetings cannot stand against the fun to be had with sing-along ‘Rum tum tickle your bum, Everyone one shout hurrah!’ or a barfing, “HiYa”, Tinkerbell.

And give the animals their place in this entertaining show: one large Nana dog, all big eyes and paws; Hook’s smart-alec parrot; and the mother of all crocs. You do want to see that croc!

nae bad_blue

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Reviewer: Alan Brown (Seen 17 December)

Visit Peter Pan homepage here.

‘Amanda’ (The Kilderkin: 28 Nov ’13)

Posted in Other, Rated: Nae Bad, Theatre by

“Actor Anne Kane Howie makes a nicely detached Amanda, far from emotionless yet tightly controlled, the perfect match for her ambiguous role”

Editorial Rating: Nae Bad 

Part of November’s “Theatre Uncut” season, the one-off short play Amanda lends an important global political issue a distinctively Scottish spin.  From a Holyrood office to a New Town retreat, we follow one woman’s progress through a perfectly ordinary day; a day that involves both struggle and compromise, sometimes with voices from her own past.

Wisely, given its twenty-minute duration, the story’s confined to a single scene and a single character – the titular Amanda.  In the company of two narrators, we visit Amanda in a moment of quiet introspection, alone in the bathroom of her Georgian flat.  Building such a short piece around such a low-key premise is a mature decision from playwright Kieran Hurley, but perhaps it’s a little too luxuriant; when all’s said and done, the piece develops slowly and ends with little territory explored.

Hurley does, however, deliver an elegantly subtle turnaround.  At first, it seems we’re expected to dislike Amanda (rather unfairly, since her only obvious crimes are to sprinkle her bath with rose petals and enjoy the sound of posh voices on Radio 4).  But later, we learn she’s a more complex character than she first appears; and perhaps, the script seems to suggest, our reactions to her need to be complex ones too.

Actor Anne Kane Howie makes a nicely detached Amanda, far from emotionless yet tightly controlled, the perfect match for her ambiguous role.  Nick Cheales and Yvonne Paterson perform well as the dual narrators; they’re unobtrusive without being inconspicuous, and their deft handling of the props required to create Amanda’s bathroom speaks of meticulous rehearsal.

As always, director Andy Corelli works in some charmingly quirky motifs – right up to the curtain-call, where he remembers something I’d completely forgotten, that Amanda needs to step out of the bath.  He also makes good use of the improvised space at the Kilderkin, proving that rooms behind a pub don’t have to be the exclusive preserve of stand-up comedy.  There’s an incongruity to the setting that can’t quite be denied, but some clever scene-setting and an opportunistic use of the Christmas lights successfully evoke the essence of the elegant New Town.

Overall, the odd thing about Amanda is that it’s not an activist piece – or even an especially political one.  You might choose to think that the title character has sold out her principles; but you might think she’s simply grown wiser as she’s grown up.  The script presents some facts about her life yet your interpretation of those truths comes entirely from within.  So is that an abdication of the playwright’s duty, or a valuable spark for debate?  On that question also, you’ll have to make up your own mind.

nae bad_blue

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Reviewer: Richard Stamp (Seen 28 November)