Review: The Taming of the Shrew, Novello Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Just as lipstick does little to disguise a pig, a Shrew caked in cosmetics remains a problem play. Indeed, as Conal Morrison’s commedia-inspired production shows, adding too much colour merely makes it stand out more. His stubborn intent that we should enjoy ourselves, which trails a blaze of pratfalls, comedy accents and innuendo so thick that it has become opaque, leaves the RSC’s latest Taming of the Shrew looking like a children’s entertainer at a funeral.

Morrison’s mistake is to play the Shrew as one might Shakespeare’s lighter comedies rather than use its own merits to mine a humour. The result is two plays in the course of a single evening, strung together with the barest of threads. For while Kate’s transition from fiery independence to burnt out compliance is dark and difficult to watch, it is counterbalanced by a menagerie of clunky comic creations where all is surface frill imposed upon the text itself. Morrison enforces a style of comedy he assumes to be universal and in adding so much, strips much of the play’s force and most of its humour. It seems to stand there screaming: “Why aren’t you laughing?”

Using the original framing device, Christopher Sly (Stephen Boxer) is embroiled in a Shoreditch street party, at which tribal masculinity is ruler and comedy headgear the dress-code, before being himself sucked into the narrative presented by travelling players. In contrast to Michelle Gomez’s beautifully played Katherina, who seems to draw breath to pull a snarl, Boxer’s misogyny appears effortless and almost erotically charged. He had her tamed by the wedding, but continues for his own satisfaction in a tirade of starvation and sleep-deprivation.

To his credit, Morrison circumvents the play’s main problem neatly, albeit without much clarity as to what he’s saying. In gradually morphing the setting from 16th Century Italy, complete with a Renaissance city in miniature, towards a contemporary wedding, Gomez’s Kate is continually out of sorts. In her initial fight, consciously laboured from embitterment of her sister’s preferred status, she resembles a ventriloquist’s dummy possessed. By the end, in her total acquiescence, she seems a plastic clockwork bird – a tiny thing of fancy, but little worth – fragile, tacky and unnatural. In turning to us for her famous last speech, Gomez cuts an isolated figure, preaching to the unconvertible. The world has come to its senses, says Morrison, but for a small few Petruchios. Its flaw, if the masculine smiles and fascination on show at the final wedding dinner are to be interpreted, is the rooted admiration and envy of others that act not so cruelly.

However, by the time Morrison actually achieves some resolution, we have grown so tired of the constant playground energy and surplus comic routines, that no demonstration of intellect and politic can truly stir us. It is a tragedy undermined by a painted smile where gritted teeth should be.

Review: Unbroken, The Gate

Written for WhatsOnStage.com

La Ronde, Arthur Schnitzler's frank examination of cyclical promiscuity, was denigrated as mere pornography at the start of the 20th Century. Alexandra Wood's Unbroken is the second play in the past year to take Schnitzler's as its inspiration. Like Joe DiPetro's F**king Men, recently seen at The King's Head, Unbroken borrows the structure of momentary encounters between A and B, B and C and so on until F turns out to be married to A.

However, where Schnitzler and DiPetro hang a broad array of human relationships upon the act of sex, Wood provides a collection of people too close to one another in class, culture and character. For her, sex seems something that happens, rather than the tool, even the weapon, to be used that Schnitzler's original portrays.

Nor does director Natalie Abrahami's decision to turn the play into dance theatre do Wood's script any favours, deflecting attention further from motivations and situations onto the sexual act itself. As such, Unbroken seems a study more biological than anthropological, which wouldn't be such a problem were it to interrogate the possibilities, varieties and extremities of sex.

Instead, Darren Ellis and Gemma Higginbotham repeatedly entwine their bodies with the utmost of affection and delicacy. Its all too gentle, too altruistic, too mutual. Even when rock star Johnno half-forces himself upon his ex-girlfriend Laura, she seems to succumb to the niceties of courtship after the briefest of scuffles. In fact, so sentimental is Unbroken that it would probably follow an orgasm with a single tear at the beauty of it all.

Thankfully, Tom Scutt's ingenious design – a sewer-like concrete rectangle, shallow and wide – provides an interestingly unfeeling backdrop and, in combination with Lee Curran's lighting, manages to make something of the bland visual content. With a hazy gauze stretched across the stage's front, it feels a bit like a cinema screen up close or an aquarium tank containing examples of a species rather than individuals.

Ultimately, the urbanity of their design highlights the desperate need for something less wispy, less Lost In Translation. It sorely lacks the metropolitan thump of Frantic Assembly's Peepshow and the debauched honesty of Sarah Kane.

As it is, Unbroken is more like a post-coital slump than sex itself – nothing much is said and everything's a bit tender.

Review: Shun-kin, Barbican Centre

Written for Culture Wars

There are two ways of looking at Complicité’s second collaboration with Japan’s Setagaya Public Theatre. One is as a straightforwardly textbook production from a company famed for their swirling sense of invention; the other, as a piece of storytelling with a calm beauty and visual purity. While Shun-kin may not reach the dizzying, dazzling heights of Complicité’s repertoire, it contains more than enough to spark both synapses and senses.

Springing from two texts by Japanese author Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, Shun-kin tells the story of the titular blind musician and her wholly submissive life partner Sasuke. As her servant from an early age, the ever-compliant Sasuke goes from plaything to manipulated instrument as her sado-masochistic beatings increase in frequency and ferocity. It is only once he has blinded himself in old age that the two sit side by side comforted by equality and Shun-kin can express gratitude for his decades of servitude.

As she matures from spoilt, obnoxious child to fearful dominatrix, Shun-kin morphs from puppet into an awkward humanoid, masked, robotic and still operated by puppeteers. There is a huge ambiguity about the shedding of her object status. It seems at once sympathetic of her disability, as if she is forced into a life trapped by the control of others, and damning of her own inability to empathize, as she rains down fierce blows upon Sasuke. Blind Summit, recently responsible for the magic of War Horse, once again stretch the possibilities of puppetry as the doll-like Shun-kin undergoes sexual encounters, pregnancy and violence.

If certain tricks, such as paper birds and human trees, seem as familiar as the picturesque vision of a pre-Western Japan, they don’t yet feel totally exhausted. However, the convention-busting discovery that first brought such elements into Complicité’s work seems absent here, as does the infectious sense of human movement – its hypnotic pulse and flow – that can have you swaying in your seat. Just like the blind Sasuke’s world, Shun-kin seems a hazy memory of some strange hallucination.

The primary story is told from three different sources: by the author himself, by the sage-like seventy-five year-old Sasuke kneeling in its midst throughout and by a recording artist narrating behind a desk-light. While Complicité don’t attain the multiplicity of, say, A Disappearing Number’s various strands, it does allow for secondary layers to unfold around the action. They seem to ask where fiction exists: in the mind of its creator, its audience or in and of itself? And moreover, when history becomes memory and resides in the same place, does it too become a fiction?

What a shame that, in seeking fiction’s source, Complicité have lost sight of its scope.

Review: Constellations, Royal Court

As settings go, the multiverse is a damn sight more ambitious than most. Over the course of its 65 minutes, Nick Payne’s Constellations comes within a whisker of making the most of it.

While Payne’s variations on a scene sit parallel to one another, there’s next to no real friction between them. The particulars that we’re privy to are merely alternatives, an arbitrary selection of scattergun possibilities.

Payne provides no reason why he shows us these versions as opposed to any other. Yet, to really nail the form, the different versions need to somehow rub off on or inform one another. Despite being distinct, they are, after all, seen sequentially. Each version inevitably impacts upon the next, because they add to the information about Roland and Marianne (as abtracts?) at our disposal. However, Payne hasn’t attempted to pin them together, so that what we see and the order in which we see it might inform our perspective of the rest. Without that relationship, Constellations is one layer short of brilliant completion.

Review: Plonter, Barbican Pit

Written for Culture Wars

Unsurprisingly, given recent events in Gaza, Plonter’s force resides in its sheer urgency. The title means ‘tangle’ in Hebrew and The Cameri Theatre of Tel Aviv offer a range of perspectives – human, political, satirical – that, together, give the sense of an ever-tightening and increasingly muddled knot. Rather than the calm rationality required to unpick the problems, the company suggest a quickfire impatience that serves only to confound them. The snapshots and sketches form a retrospective cycle of violent retribution where bloodshed leads only to bloodshed and an eye for an eye is no longer enough, making Plonter a damning indictment of spiralling short-sightness.

Though Plonter offers no solutions itself, it brims with glimpsed details ignored by international journalism and a fuzzy sense of the everyday existence. To get inside the auditorium, you must pass through a checkpoint at which identification is required, only to be confronted by stark, concrete slabs obscuring the entire stage. In playing the locked territorialism through the miniature conflicts occurring in its midst, the company place a very human mask on the politics. Family dinners bubble into riots, soldiers terrorise children and bus journeys are punctuated by paranoia – it is enough to coax an activist anger out of the most apolitical audient.

Yet, there is a peculiar hopelessness running through the scenes. In seeing the situation from either side, neither appears blameless and peace seems a distant impossibility. In spite of its fitful humour, the content almost becomes a nagging lament for human combustibility; a melancholy shrug at the stupidity of it all. This is, however, set in contrast by the event itself, devised and performed by a company made up of both Israelis and Palestinians. Difference dissolves on the stage, as Arabs play Jews and vice versa. Even the surtitles, in both Hebrew and Arabaic, as well as English, seem to blend into a shared language.

This lends a hint of the ridiculous that rears its head fully in the best sketch of the evening, in which a Palestinian house is divided by the barrier and its occupants forced to pass through a check point to use their bathroom and kitchen. The growing queue of family members faced by a young Israeli soldier begs the fundamental questions of ownership and control. What gives anyone the right? And, when a life lost is of less import than the bullet fired, does it really matter?

It may lack the magic and imagination of other offerings around at present but, with its weighty rootedness and pressing activism, Plonter has a power and drive seldom seen on the London stage. This is vocal soapbox theatre that demands attention.