Review: La Clique, London Hippodrome

Written for Culture Wars

Ignore the slightly plastic commercialism and the newly reopened Hippodrome seems an escapist paradise in the midst of economic instability. Encircled in lush red velvet and heavy with the aroma of popcorn, it has the atmosphere of a decadent elsewhere – perhaps prohibition America or Weimar Berlin – even before La Clique begins is carousel of freakish fantasies.

Filling the space, from a small circular stage, is a collection of the fabulous, the erotic and the gasp-worthy with a heavy lining of irony. Every spectacle that bursts through the velvet pays its dues to music hall, circus or burlesque traditions, while simultaneously subverting those expectations into something altogether smarter.

What a joy to see an audience turned topsy-turvy in its ogling of Ursula Martinez’s playful striptease when she coaxes a final empowering red hanky from her naked person. Or the eroticism at play in aerialist David O’Mer’s mix of the marvellous and the mundane, swinging from, over and through a bathtub in clinging jeans, like an cologne commercial brought to life. Or Captain Frodo – who has squeezed himself through a tennis racket, dislocating his shoulder in the process; who has stumbled and tumbled off the stage; who nightly throws caution and dignity to the wind – now perched on a six-foot makeshift tower of dented buckets, legs behind his head, encouraging us to follow our dreams.

For all the delightful mischief of Miss Behave’s regular interruptions, the show lacks a master of ceremonies to bring some semblance of order to the madness, especially once the novelty dwindles in the second-half. The grainy recorded sound and overpriced bar do nothing to add to the entertainment.

Nor, however, do they take too much away given the strengths of the acts parading before us, which provide a workout for the facial muscles as jaws drop and cheeks ache. There simply aren’t enough superlatives, but then, that’s the point.

Or, if you delve into the significance of Cabaret Decadense’s final piece – a gradually deconstructed puppet that boils down to the barest of essentials: three hands with fidgeting fingers – perhaps La Clique is nothing more than the crafty illusion of danger, difficulty and daring. Regardless, this is glorious, glamorous entertainment.

Playground Reactions

To witness an audience united in uproar is a thrilling and daunting experience. Individuals become a vociferous pack, reacting physically and baying as one. Feeling simultaneously immersed in, yet detached from, that collective response provides a glimpse into the sheer power of theatre as a live medium demanding a live response. It is not, however, an experience one expects from a Friday morning at The Unicorn Theatre.

Carl Miller’s Red Fortress, which plays at the children’s theatre until November 8, is a hopelessly idealistic piece that dreams of a Golden Age in which “children learn no hate and no one is an infidel”. It pits three teenagers – Rabia, a Muslim girl; Iago, a Chrisian; and Luis, a Jew – against the might of the Spanish Inquisition. Alongside their failed quest to prevent the fall of Granada, a triangle of unrequited love emerges, leading to a small act of defiance against an authoritarian regime in the form of three shared kisses.

First, Iago and Rabia lock lips, then Rabia and Luis, and finally, Luis and Iago. It’s a brave moment; though perhaps too aware of the reaction it seeks from its young audience. To an adult viewer these are quaint meetings of lips, a world away from the beached writhing of Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr. To children, the fleeting kisses represent a forbidden unknown – casual, charged and exploratory. Gasps and tentative wolf-whistles build to aghast catcalls and repulsion. Within seconds a restless gaggle of school children becomes a tumultuous sea of shock, bouncing in their seats like a stereo’s volume bargraph.

Their reaction undoubtedly has something to do with the taboo of sexual gratification. These are not the functional kisses expressing a mutual relationship that permeate children’s entertainment, but the culminations of lop-sided desire. As Rabia, Géhrane Strehler turns from one partner to another in a second. It is a collectively orchestrated activity, rather than the familiar exclusivity of physical relations. On one level, the children see it as a titillating test at the edges of social norms, as their own exploration through the actors onstage.

However, their primary provocation herein is the final kiss between Iago and Luis, which triggers ‘urghs’ and ‘bleurghs’ that linger on when the pair accidentally hold hands minutes later. The young audience’s shared response of genuine rejection of the act is only furthered by the vague recognition that the kiss is not solely embedded in the fiction but actually happening before their eyes, between two real men.

Of course, children make for an honest audience, unabashed at displaying boredom or delight, but a response so strongly animal from a crowd so young is shocking in a society that believes itself accepting of homosexuality. There is undoubtedly a prejudice at play in schools, which can only stem from a more latent intolerance across society.

That DV8’s verbatim exploration of homophobia, To Be Straight With You, opens at the National Theatre this week is both necessary and urgent; not as reprimand to the behaviour of its own sympathetic, liberal audience, but as a firm reminder, rooted in reality, that such attitudes exist and demand reaction, that tolerance extends further than mere passive responsibility. If we are to get that message into playgrounds, surely the exposure of concrete realities must replace dreamy romanticism.

Review: A Disappearing Number, Barbican Centre

Written for Culture Wars

Watching Complicité at their best is akin to an out of body experience. Theirs is a theatre of ethereal fluidity and all-encompassing abstraction played without a single hair out of place. Hypnotic and vortex-like, you tumble into it headfirst, emerging in an audience of one where their performance and your ideas gently jostle together in hazy clarity.

Returning to the Barbican a year after its first run, A Disappearing Number retains this quality of theatrical cannabis, but in seeking loftier truths it loses sight of the concrete realities of human existence.

After an intriguing and increasingly obfuscated lecture on the nature of infinity, A Disappearing Number interweaves two fragmented narratives of relationships which have maths at their centre. As the lecture theatre’s walls disappear, leaving only the criss-cross of piping and a blackboard behind, Complicité’s stage becomes a space-time diagram charting the contemporary courtship of maths lecturer Ruth (Saski Reeves) and American-Indian businessman Al (Firdous Bamji) alongside the work of Cambridge mathematician G H Hardy and his self-taught Indian prodigy Srinivasa Ramanujan during the First World War.

The beauty in all this is not so much in these narrative plots as in the concepts whizzing around them and their pitch-perfect, rhythmic realisation under Simon McBurney’s direction. Using video projections, we glide into firm locations – Hardy’s archaic study; bustling, chaotic Chennai; a ruffled hotel room – where suspended moments of history seem pristinely preserved in amber.

Yet McBurney also guides us further, into an intangible infinity of possibilities. Individual scenes, captured live on camera, form their own backdrop and linger into eternity; characters slip under a rotating blackboard into multiple versions of themselves; a single hall houses three spatially and temporally distant lectures; spoken numbers morph into overlapping, complex beat poems. All this conspires to dazzle the senses and confound perception; like a page dense with numbers it is blurred and woozy, nauseating and alluring.

What hits hardest is a sense of one’s own insignificance and the interconnectivity of everything - that the continuity of space and time link us inextricably to the past and the absent. The whole of history seems present through its absence, as if we are privy to a handful of slides in an endless collection or a few lose pages of a molten scrapbook of everything.

It is, perhaps, too rich in its design and too reliant on the awe and wonder of its concepts, but, for all its lack of emotional sway, A Disappearing Number might linger on into the future like Brook’s Mahabarata or Lepage’s Far Side of the Moon for its ambitious complexity and existential beauty.

Hardy once said that just as artists are makers of patterns, so too are mathematicians and that there is no place in the world for ugly mathematics. Complicité and McBurney have done him proud.

Review: Spyski, Lyric Hammersmith

Written for Culture Wars

With their fast-paced, physical spoofs, Peepolykus have built a reputation for sharpshooting pastiche. Regularly selected for British Council showcases, they finally hit the West End two years ago with a much-lauded Hound of the Baskervilles. However, Spyski (or The Importance of Being Honest) – a potentially lethal concoction of espionage thriller and Oscar Wilde – has the hit ratio of an anonymous henchman.

During rehearsals for The Importance of Being Earnest, lead actor John Nicholson (John Nicholson) finds himself laid down with gastric flu and caught up in international intelligence operations. Passed a globe-trotting mission by a poisoned Russian agent (Javier Marzan), Nicholson must save the midlands from coerced compliance, get the girl and fend off an array of enemies by rescuing a genetically modified infant.

Spyski’s trick is that all this is covertly retold on the Lyric stage under the guise of Wilde’s comedy. Opening with Worthing and Algeron’s first exchange (played with a keen eye for stilted coattail-swishing amateurism), the play is interrupted by the blurting radio of an undercover MI5 operative whose noisy retreat gives space for the actors’ clandestine revolution.

However, this promising device is both underused and overplayed: instead of complicating the actors’ task with intrusion and confusion, it is relegated to framing a limp lampoon. The collision is left to the incongruity of set and action, as Russian oligarchs appear through French windows and palm trees appear in the parlour. Without Wilde, Spyski reduces to an easy target treated with an overdose of zaniness. Far too much is at the level of speedy costume changes and signposted gags, throwing up momentary guffaws rather than an escalating tumble of comedy.

Javier Marzan provides most of the laughs, exhibiting a destabilizing, dark playfulness almost entirely lacking in the polite comedy of his very British counterparts – only Richard Katz approaches it elsewhere in a show-stopping turn as a Chinese gangster as a slurred stereotype. Other than a brief caricature of a Katie Mitchell onstage film and the notion of Ronny Corbett golfing with the Bronski Beat, Spyski more closely resembles slack pantomime than slick parody.

Review: Broken Space Season, Bush Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Snaking its way up the stairs at the Bush is a timeline of decay, detailing the theatre’s journey into darkness as flood damage escalated. Far from closing shop, the theatre has gone dark by commissioning a series of short plays to be performed without theatre lights. However, the resultant Broken Space Season is a muted response to an emboldened battle cry.

What really comes to the fore here is atmosphere. More than simply broken, the space is a wilderness of peeling paint and exposed wires. Yet there is a magic within: from shelves overhead, a hoard of desk lights peer down on us like nymphs. The air crackles and tickles as the real intermingles with the fictions presented therein, various giving the event shades of site-specific work, happening and immersive experience. It feels quietly underground, at once illicit and tacit.

Each night showcases two plays – responses to the growing darkness of night – around Declan Feenan’s constant centrepiece St Petersburg. Beginning with one of three monologues, accumulated under the title Falling Light, the evening ends with a play presented in pitch black from the collection What The Dark Feels Like. However, despite the presence of talented writers – Neil LaBute, Simon Stephens and Lucy Kirkwood among others – one can’t help but wonder how much further it might reach in the hands of, say, Punchdrunk or Sound and Fury.

In St Petersburg the deterioration of the theatre becomes that of an old man’s living room, neglected through his own physical decomposition. As a cartoon blares away in the midst of the dust, John (Geoffrey Hutchings) tries to rally his silent grandson before in turn being cajoled by his daughter (Mairead McKinley). While the atmosphere created – creaking and heavy with the scent of burnt bacon fat – is strong, the text itself is subsumed. Feenan paints such a bleakly realistic picture that mundanity and absence overtake events as John rasps his way towards a passive expiration.

Equally ensconced in the pitfalls of the past is Simon Stephen’s monologue Sea Wall. Spiralling haphazardly around a child’s death on a family holiday, Andrew Scott addresses us directly with the stumbling hesitation of lingering pain. Stephen’s exploration of memory, whereby athlete’s foot cream remains as vivid as a daughter’s blood, is touchingly truthful. However, his reliance on a story recounted with shambolic honesty requires almost too much of its audience, as words drift into disappearance and conjured mental images fade.

Where Stephens relies on the reality of the space, Anthony Weigh places us graveside, with peat underfoot, in his eerily comic ghost story, The Flooded Grave. John Ramm, all bucolic turmoil, tells a tale of a very everyday exorcism, in which the mundane and the mystical coalesce. In the near darkness we can finally find ourselves transported elsewhere, cast as curious local sceptics, we look on at Ramm through torchlight, a railing madman in the throngs of grief. Wiegh’s script is both sharp and poignant, while Josie Rourke’s simple direction creates a questioning tingle of uncertainty down the spine.

As with those before it, The Flooded Grave is an exciting experience but leaves little to linger long in the memory. The Broken Space Season is a triumph of atmosphere over action in which the space itself emerges as star, lacking in electricity but always brimming with charge.
Till 25 October 2008

Review: Cradle Me, Finborough Theatre

Written for The Stage

After a brief foray into the city with his last play Turf, Simon Vinnicombe has retreated to the suburbs for Cradle Me, circling the voguish prey of a bourgeois family in freefall behind a well-groomed exterior.

Following the death of her teenage son, Marion (Sharon Maughan) succumbs to an affair with his reclusive best-friend Daniel (Luke Treadaway). As her husband seeks solace in champagne, Marion finds it in her admiration of youth: the pert flesh, the posters splashed on walls and the gentle bounce of reggae. In turn Daniel becomes ill-fitting adult, eventually confronted at a dinner party cum crisis summit.

Vinnicombe’s script is too easy in the watching, lacking a real sting in the tail. Solid without sparkling, it captures the wandering inanity of youthful conversation with more subtlety than the clunky life-lectures of his adult characters.

Treadaway gives a wonderfully animalistic performance, mixing squirming uncertainty with chest-puffed confidence. The weathered Paul Herzberg is perfect as the father, swinging and swigging forlornly, while Sarah Bedi adds humour and sensibility through her muddled adolescent.

Casting us as prying neighbours in traverse, director Duncan Macmillan finds a voyeuristic responsibility, ensnaring his audience through simple sexuality and the watchable crumble of a family already in despair.

Though well-observed and engaging, Cradle Me never shatters familiar territory: it’s That Face with blemishes instead of scars.