Review: The Promise, Orange Tree Theatre

Written for Time Out

On 17th November 1917 – long before the state of Israel was established – the British Government effectively promised Palestine as “a national home for Jewish people” through the Balfour Declaration. In The Promise, Ben Brown tracks the Zionist revolution behind it as led by Herbert Samuel, the first practicing Jew in parliament, and its forceful opposition by Edwin Montagu, his cousin and fellow MP.

There is a riveting cabinet drama within Brown’s script, but at present it cries out for a good whittle. At its best, it reminds one of Peter Morgan’s vibrant historical speculations without the reliance on pop culture. However, Brown lacks Morgan’s delicacy in eliding public actions and private lives: the two strands shoulder-barge where they ought to sashay.

There’s no doubting the play’s direct relevancy (though director Alan Strachan takes no chances, beginning with an assault of contemporary soundbites) but Brown draws several other smart parallels, particularly England’s “historic role of civilizer of the backwards country” and the suggestion that history is shaped by the personal whims of a select few.

Nicholas Asbury’s Montagu is forceful, though a touch over-gnarled; Christopher Ravenscroft is a gentle, crease-cheeked Asquith and, as Balfour, Oliver Ford-Davies gives a performance of masterly concision. Sadly, that quality evades both set changes and script alike.

Review: Tim Key - The Slutcracker, Soho Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Best described as a miscellany, every moment of Tim Key’s Edinburgh Comedy Award winning hour – for show would give the wrong impression – requires savouring. Not because it’s a machine-gun clacker to leave you gasping for air, but rather because its profundities and poignancies are so infinitesimally small that to blink is to risk missing one.

Key trades in slivers of everyday life as slotted between glass slides and viewed through a wonky microscope. In an assortment of petite poems and mumbled musings, he offers a pointillist portrait of modern, urban existence. ‘Tanya googled herself / Still nothing,’ reads one. Others cover thrill-seeking colleagues skinning eels in their lunch-break, the moments in which relationships crack, and “the thorny issue of dew.”

Sprinkled around this primary structure, cleverly fracturing the poetry recital feel for something more roundabout cabaret, are a series of sundry set-pieces. Soft-focus videos bring his words to life, lists of animals into which Key may or may not fit and a final mini-adventure that sucks one straight back to childhood.

Stylistically, Key’s main comedy tactic is a tightrope of delicacy and precise clumsiness. Miniscule moments of sensibility are interrupted by the blunt or the surreal. Frequently, Key wraps up his micro-narratives, romantic as they can be, with a sudden burst of realism. In one, several suburban names – Anna, Geoff and Tim, I think – are tearing at a fleshy corpse. One guzzles down the testicles, only for Key to add, in a gorgeously unexpected footnote, that the majority are lions and gazelles. Only Anna (who chomped on the chaps) is revealed to be human. “Probably on her gap-year,” he suggests.

The result is that Key can play with punch-lines, subverting his set-up quite classically, without us spotting their approach. His fumbling delivery, often in the form of asides, explanatory digressions and footnotes, allows him to catch us off-guard as a postmodern gag-man. It’s not the carefully orchestrated chaos that many would have us believe.

If anything, in fact, Key has smartened up since I last saw him. In The Slut in the Hut (2008), a shabbily-suited Key scuffed his way around an over-cluttered portacabin venue. His set, supposedly structured around four different beverages, seemed to be determined by whatever came to hand. Permanently searching himself and his venue for material, at one point Key withdrew a waterbiscuit from a pocket to find it inscribed. Here, the waterbiscuit returns. Only this time, in a mini-disc case, deliberately protected for use.

The result is to give Key a philosophic authority. Rather than a failed bum, out of touch and dealing in the preposterous, he has become an ethereal laureate, still strange but also strangely wise. With that wisdom, he achieves something quite theatrical; namely, to change the way you see the world. And that is something only the best of comedy can do.

Review: Jonny Sweet - Mostly About Arthur

Writtern for Culture Wars

That Mostly About Arthur is mostly funny because of Jonny Sweet’s adopted persona, rather than the craft of his material about his fictional older brother Arthur, is probably ironic somehow. It’s also a very common syndrome amongst emergent comedians. While Sweet suggests very promising future, his debut show – which saw him steal away from this summer’s Edinburgh Fringe with the Best Newcomer award – is too untamed and haphazard to fully satisfy.

Here, armed with a standard issue clunky clip-art and google-image slideshow, Sweet sets about eulogising Arthur, seeking “a slumber-party vibe” to do so. So begins a journey from the school corridors of Filey, in which Arthur would receive high-five after high-five, through a celebrated career as “the best blurbist of his generation” and the face of Outlook Express: a trajectory that would ultimately end in controversy and, later, tragedy.

In reality, though, Arthur is little more than a construct that enables Sweet to jumble together a string of random titbits. Here the emphasis is on the zany, the surreal and the non-sequitur. Anything remotely sensible is off-limits in a set that hops from death by dog to games of Pear Touch (essentially touch the pear without touching the pear).

Indiscriminate and meandering it may be, but Sweet just about manages to pull it together somehow. Perched firmly on the spectrum, he fidgets his way around the stage, shattering social conventions and manhandling his audience like a safari chimpanzee. Everything is over-familiar, from the speech peppered with public school anachronisms to the padding touch and the gently slobbered kisses imprinted on foreheads. That on the night I saw him, Sweet easily handled a ten-minute break in proceedings, due to a technical hitch with his projector, is symptomatic of the strength of character over material.

All of which bodes well. With a tighter focus of script and, perhaps, more control of character, Sweet could become a deftly anarchic absurdist.

Review: The 14th Tale, National Theatre

Written for Time Out

Behind the bikeshed of a London school, four names streaked in schoolboy piss testify to truancy. On the evidence of The 14th Tale, such is Inua Ellams’s way with words that his particular tag must have stood out as much for its artistry as its exoticism.

Delivered in a voice as sonorous as a steel drum, Ellams’s poetry is smooth enough to melt in the ear, yet packed full of snap, crackle and pop. Accompanied by a fluid but simple movement score, his words conjure vivid cartoonish images imbued with both atmosphere and detail.

The latest in “a long line of troublemakers,” The 14th Tale recalls a string of mischievous antics and sets them up as formative. There’s the revenge taken on a school bully using a tube of toothpaste and a pack of pins. There’s the cheating ex-girlfriend’s shower-head unscrewed and filled with paint. And, of course, there’s the doodling with his doodle.

We’ve all got stories of misdemeanours past, but Ellams’ are elevated above romanticised nostalgia by their underlying focus on immigration. Born in Nigeria, he moved to England with his father aged twelve before relocating briefly to Dublin (“a world more alien than London”). These then – though they never overstress the fact or preach – are tales of insiders, outsiders and ingratiation, of culture-shocks and commonality.

What really makes The 14th Tale, however, is the winning likeability of Ellams himself. He has a wry smile and generous helpings of charm, wit and pluck: critical assets for performance poets and troublemakers alike.

Review: 11 & 12, Barbican Centre

Written for Culture Wars

Emo Philips tells a great joke about religion, in which he encounters a suicidal man with his toe’s curled over the edge of a bridge. “Do you believe in God?” he asks.

“Yes,” comes the reply.

“Are you a Christian or a Jew?”

“A Christian.”

“Me too. Protestant or Catholic?”

Again the reply is affirmative. The enquiry continues, discovering more and more shared beliefs. “What franchise?” Baptist. “Me too!”

Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?” Northern Baptist. “Me too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?” Northern Conservative. “Me too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?” Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region “Me too!”

Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879 or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?”

“Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Coucil of 1912”

“Die heretic!” Philips cries, shoving him over the edge.

Peter Brook’s latest covers the exact same territory, albeit wearing a more sombre, sober expression to do so. It latches onto a particular dispute in Islamic practice, stemming from a single moment of uncertain ambiguity, as to whether a particular prayer should be recited 11 or 12 times. Leading the two factions are two spiritual sages, Tierno Bokar and Cherif Hamallah, each of whom preaches tolerance as an absolute principal.

Truth be told, the concrete intricacies of the plot are tricky. To follow fully the hierarchies and political position of French colonials and African natives requires a patient ear and sturdy unfaltering concentration. However, I found the particularities of less import than the abstract archetypes underpinning them. To exert too much effort into the narrative is almost to lose sight of the pointed philosophy beneath. The preaching, in other words, has more resonance than the preachers.

On this level, 11 & 12 pulsates with pluralism. There are, we are told, three truths: yours, mine and the ineffable, objective truth of which the first two are but hazy refractions. It tackles the problem of others, the unbridgeable gap between each of us that leads to inevitable misunderstandings and the impossibility of true communication. Not that this excuses one from the attempt to do so or the duty to hold fast to one’s own beliefs on the grounds of shrugging subjectivism. The snake, we are told, need not bite to stand his ground. When provoked, it need only hiss.

The result is a purification ritual, utterly meditative and centring. It removes you from yourself for the duration, but, by the time is releases its grip, the world you re-enter is altered. Somehow calmer and more grounded. You really feel your place within it, small but integral, one amongst many.

All this, Brook achieves with a staging that values what is said over the act of saying it. In fact, to see Brook’s work firsthand – perhaps it is more accurate to say his work now, aged 84 – is to see the way in which his theory has been manhandled and misrepresented. We have taken the idea of Brook and added make-up. We have glammed it up with thea-tricks. We have become too clever by half and taken his name in vanity.

Here, though, there is no urge to dazzle or embellish. Instead, his actors move slowly and speak softly. For the most part, they sit and listen, drawing us in without demanding to be heard. Far from the haze-filled void that has come to stand for the empty space, Brook’s stage is here a walled floor. His scenic choices as little as repositioning barren tree-trunks to break up the space. There is, quite simply, a (surprising) trust in the text and a confident, composed certainty behind its delivery. Why seek to do more than is necessary?

Now I’d be the last to throw flair and invention into the wings, but there is something vastly humbling about 11 & 12 purity. It is as if it has thrown off earthly possessions or chosen to fast and sought a meaningful alternative. That may draw accusations of boredom and neglect for its audience – and one does begin to feel its length towards the end – but in actual fact it does us a great service. It offers an ethical code, rigorously and vigourous spelt out, and provides the space in time in which to digest it.

Photocredit: Pascal Victor, ArtComArt

Review: Hedda, Riverside Studios

Written for Time Out

Ibsen might be in vogue all of a sudden - this month the Sheffield Crucible re-opens with one of his and another begins a West End run - but, chances are, you won't see much like this.

The recently formed Ibsen Stage Company steer ardently against naturalism, instead entrapping Ibsen's newlyweds in an abstract void. Their dream home is replaced by a crater formed from the pages of an exploded manuscript. Director Terje Tveit sets his cast in orbit and foregrounds the inevitability of events, treating the play as little more than a closed system tending towards entropy.

The unashamed tone of inquiry claims narrative satisfaction as a victim and, although it is elegantly designed and smartly lit, the result is too coldly dispassionate to excite, but fails to compensate with real insight or specificity. Instead, Tveit offers determinism as a solution, spreading responsibility equally and reducing Sarah Head's Hedda, whose eyes flick back and forth in constant calculation, to little more than a data-processing automaton

Review: My Stories, Your Emails, Barbican Pit Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Hanky-Panky, Ursula Martinez’s canny subversion of striptease, involves the disappearance and reappearance of red hankies. Each time the vanished material re-emerges from an item of clothing, which is subsequently removed, until Martinez stands onstage in only stilettos, thumping her groin at the whooping audience. Then she vanishes the cloth once more and, with a knowing, challenging wink, she turns their ogling inside out.

One performance, however, made its way onto the internet against Martinez’s wishes, since when she has received regular emails of solicitation from around the world.

It is these texts that form the bulk of Martinez’s new solo show. Accompanied by a slide-show of attached images, she stands between a lectern and appropriates the words and accents of her male admirers with relish. So we hear a plethora of pathetic propositions. There’s po-faced Brad in California, who signs off with his telephone number. There’s Con, lusty but lonesome in Australia, and his string of insistent randy requests. There are the Police Explosive Searchdog Handlers stood in front of squad cars, who make misuse of riot shields seem a trivial offence.

It can be riotously funny, but Martinez never shakes off the sense that we are invited to laugh at these men. Individually, in the words they write to her and the very act of writing, these men may well do Martinez wrong, but does one wrong turn really deserve another? Martinez is clearly not driven by a thirst for vengeance, but at the centre of My Stories, Your Emails is a nasty streak, not dissimilar to the impulse to share viral quirks and spread shame.

Because, despite sharing their names, numbers and mugshots, Martinez treats these men as anonymous humans in much the same way that they do her. What she offers up – and what they initially respond to – is a ripple of the live event, the actual action (whether striptease or emailing) and the person. Just as we would never laugh at one child biting another witnessed in the moment, in youtube form it becomes re-packaged as joke and punchline. Martinez is guilty of the exact same reductionism.

And yet, somehow she just manages to get away with it by begging exactly that question. For the first half, dressed in the famous Hanky-Panky business-suit, she offers an assortment of quirky facts, titbits and fleeting moments that have forged her identity. For example, we discover Martinez turned down a game of spin the bottle at Salman Rushie’s stag do, that she and her sister were hit as children (and subsequently realised that life is not like Little House on the Prairie), that her mother wears scuba googles when chopping onions and says things like “chicken dressed as lamb.”

The point is double-edged, in that we learn far more about the person before us than grainy video footage can suggest but that the version remains just as utterly incomplete. It is a life reduced to cracker jokes, anecdotes and crass impersonations. It is also freely given, even relished, belying any possible idea of Martinez as shy wallflower unjustly abused. All of which raises the deeper question of inevitability: to what extent has Martinez bought the attention on herself through exhibitionism? If so, then isn’t the show itself an extension of cyclical actions whereby each one brings an equal and opposite reaction.

And here, when we step back from trying to make a black and white, concrete judgement about it’s ethical status, the aesthetic value of My Stories, Your Emails becomes clear and it lies precisely in the questions posed about its own morality.

Review: Until Now, Purcell Rooms

Written for Culture Wars

If girls are made of sugar and spice and all things nice, those of UK circus trio mimbre are oversweet and underseasoned. Until Now, a playful taking stock of their relationship over fourteen years, is almost too wholesome to stomach. After a while, I couldn’t shake off the comparison with advertising for pro-biotic yoghurts, in which the demonstration of enjoyment never rings true.

Bascially, everything is a bit well-behaved and goody-goody: a bit shake hands, make up, run along and play nicely. Where the three girls (Silvia Fratelli, Lina Johansson and Emma Norin) briefly fall out, they sit sulking and snarling at one another from across the stage, only to forgive and forget a little later – probably after a gentle tickle and a reluctant smile. There’s nothing more fractious than that; they’ll never scream until hoarse, scratch until scarred or pull out a flick-knife until their demands are met.

Without that as a possibility, it’s very hard to care. You know, deep down, that everything will work itself out. Best friends forever and all that. Sure, their routines are witty, nimble and piquant, but there’s not enough sustenance. While their tumbles and human pyramids, their balancing acts and tessellations are impressive in and of themselves – and genuinely contain enough real risk of failure to sustain your attention – they are closer to delicately crafted canapés than a hearty meal.

But perhaps I’m demanding too much. After all, sepia-toned niceties onstage are my syrup of Ipecac. (What are little boys made of if not nips and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails?) What Until Now does, it does relatively well and it is not without a certain charm, though the company occasionally veer towards cloying, as when serving tea to an eager audience of gannets. Where it really benefits from this softness is in the absence of bravado. The more astonishing moments are heralded by sly glances rather than cymbal crashes.

As a playing ensemble, mimbre are delightfully well-knit. The impish Fratelli is perfectly countered with the rooted staunchness of Norin, who also makes for a sweetly underplayed clown. Alongside them is the meditative presence of Johansson, whose sheer stillness instils grace into gangly limbs.

However, for all that the three-pronged signpost warns of an impending schism, Until Now will only ever end amicably. While their time together might be precious, it remains of little value to those of us looking in from the outside.

Photo credit: Eric Richmond