Review: Unburied Treasures/Strip Search, Rosemary Branch Theatre

Written for Time Out

Like a Heat magazine for the stone cold, Unburied Treasures exhumes apocryphal tales of celebrity corpses and spins them into a series of witty ditties. Mark Bunyan's book is a curiosity shop of posthumous peculiarities, covering everything from Evita's embalming to Ines de Castro's coronation.

However, for all Bunyan's ticklish turns of phrase and the relish of a well-balanced and characterful ensemble, it rather runs out of puff with half an hour remaining. Wry asides and contrived bickering can only sustain a show for so long and Bunyan's didactic finale, though drolly self-aware, is not quite recompense enough.

It makes an unusual aperitif - and, trust me, you'll need one - for Strip Search. Squaddie, a former teenage rent-boy and soldier, strips to fund a gambling addiction. His increasingly fiesty monologue, which weaves through his life story, is intercut with flashes of his striptease act.

It's uncomfortable viewing, which suits well the social injustices within, though the opportunity to use the act's choreogrphy and song choices politically is missed. Titus Rowe, himself Boyz magazine's Stripper of the Year, perfectly balances boyish vulnerability with cocksure machismo. Peter Scott-Presland's text is as clever as it is outraged, making Strip Search a (back, sack and) cracking piece of fringe theatre.

Review: Little Gem, Bush Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Elaine Murphy’s debut invites you into the family fold with open arms. When its three women – mothers spanning three generations of the same working-class Dublin family – talk, you feel as if you’re sitting across the kitchen table over a cup of tea, rather than in the stalls with anonymous others. Their entwined monologues are confessional gabbles, joshing us along with warm, wry self-deprecation and lovingly snide asides. By its end, as your thoughts return to your own kin, Little Gem is the sort of piece that has you reaching for your phone to fire off a quick text home.

That’s got a lot to do with Murphy’s delicate lacing of sentimentality, which sees the play fall into a familiar pattern of births, sex and deaths. Freewheeling ladette Amber has fallen pregnant at 19. The father has hopped off to Australia. Her mother, Lorraine, is rediscovering herself with some mid-life spiciness and Kay, grandmother to the clan, nurses her ailing husband following a recent stroke. We know we’re heading for a funeral from the moment Kay opens her mouth, but Murphy writes with such warmth, good humour and joie de vivre that it hardly matters.

Looking closer, there’s a running conflict between selfish desires – me-time – and familial duties. All three struggle to banish a clutter of everyday concerns and lose themselves in a moment of sexual encounter. Amber snoozes as her boyfriend chugs away, half-waking only to gather that the condom has split and doze off gin, Lorraine has to suppress her urge to tidy Lego and Kay wrangles with the idea of trialling a vibrator while her incapacitated husband sleeps next to her. They can’t turn off in order to turn on. Being a mother, being a wife are constraints that bring other pleasures. Murphy’s suggests these to be more rewarding, particularly with her final image of three women in a double bed chuckling themselves to sleep, but one cannot but be aware of the absence and imbalance. “All I want,” says Lorraine, “is a break from myself.”

This quiet celebration of women, too gentle and tender to feel like full-blown feminism, does leave itself open to accusations of lopsidedness in its portrayal of men. When they appear, caricatured by the women, they are invariably cock-hipped and tight-lipped with lilting, leering voices. Even Niall, the good-natured doctor dating Lorraine, is notable for his excessive body hair, baldness and sweat. Are we really all that bad? Or does Murphy place her browbeaten women on a flimsy pedestal? The only man celebrated along the way is Kay’s husband, and even here it is only a brief eulogy. It does, however, stand as a nice contrast to the life-changing rites of passage elsewhere, as Gem is remembered in miniature moments – a karaoke song, a Santa Claus outfit, umbrellas. “What really makes a life?” you ask, “What makes a person? Their relationships? Their offspring? Or their actions and the gentle reverbertations that they leave behind?”

Paul Meade directs simply, placing the three women on chairs that are characterful in spite of being ordinary and giving each their own pool of light, but he demonstrates attention to fine, intangible details of human expression, which manifests itself in three splendid performances. Amelia Crowley’s pinched Lorraine is all blinking eyelids and sweaty palms. As she grows calmer, confident even, the mischief increases. Girlish chuckles leave laughter lines. Sarah Greene also develops nicely through the piece as Amber’s firm-footed aggression softens into enforced but inadvertent maturity. There is a lovely moment in which she makes her weeping, eating and excreting newborn sound like a Tamagotchi.

Best of all – and she truly is a joy to witness – is Anita Reeves. Her Kay is a rosy-cheeked rascal, permanently puckish and buoyant. Life, for Kay, has become a laugh; modernity a mystery, as hilarious as it is perplexing. Dithering over her vibrator, Kay tosses us camp, gleeful ‘Carry On, Vicar’ glances, creasing up at the thought. When her thoughts turn to her family, her deep sincerity and concern is punctured by snappy asides, unable to resist a gag, but never a jab. Giggling and gutsy, Reeves is a delight in a play that is a pleasure to watch.

Review: Tape, Old Red Lion

Written for Time Out

In a Michigan motel room, vindictive idler Vin orchestrates an impromptu high-school reunion. However, this is no time for genial reminiscing, given that soon after graduation his best buddy Jon date-raped Vin's teenage sweetheart Amy.

A dark waster-comedy, Tape drips with the dregs of the American dream. Its elements verge towards being archetypal - narcotic-fuelled no-hopers in the middle of nowhere - and Stephen Belber peppers the fraught scenario with flashy turns of phrase as dry as the desert itself. Vin, for example, is "too high to get high and mighty" and has "a tendency to act in a phallic fashion." It's easy to see why Hollywood sunk its chops into Belber's script - Richard Linklater's film had a cast that included Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman.

Suddenly the problem beneath Yaller Skunk's toothless production becomes all too clear: it smacks of British reserve. Where it ought to swagger, Tape is stilted. Director Julia Stubbs misses the sweltering atmospher and, as such, never makes us sweat. Her cast, through no fault of their own, are simply too ordinary to meet the demands of the text.

While Belber's cutthroat comedy is fierce enough to hold attention, this is never more than an approximation. Sadly, that makes Blockbusters the better option.

Review: Delusion, Barbican Centre

Written for Culture Wars

Laurie Anderson’s stories, rather her poetic ruminations and parables, are born out of alternate states of consciousness. Some are the stuff of dreams; others stem from calm contemplation; some rise from deep within, unlocked by meditation. Even where they are scientific – she talks at one point about Large Hadron Colliders and space-time theory – they have a hazy, wistful quality. They swirl and blur at the edges, melt, warp, smudge and bleed.

It makes perfect sense, then, that Anderson should attempt to alter our state of mind, drawing us out of everyday alertness that we might share her headspace. That she does with dazzling efficiency. All around me, heads slant and bodies slip into slumps, sliding down in their chairs before propping themselves back up to slide once more. Anderson’s voice – a soft American whispered drawl, not dissimilar to Peggy Lee’s in Is That All There Is – is as soothing as Night Nurse. It soaks in the music that whirs on underneath, occasionally submerged by the soft violin and pensive saxophone to reappear moments later. On screens around the stage, hypnotic images turn circles: cameras pan back and forth across deserts, smoke swirls, leaves fall, ripples breathe in and out, forward and reverse.

Accordingly, Delusion is a relaxation chamber. It massages the mind as a muscle that can achieve total relaxation and, once that state is achieved, her words jangle around inside your head. They are graspable only by the subconscious, chiming and resonating, but never slotting into a recognisable pattern or registering their presence.

I cannot fault Anderson’s execution, but I must question the wisdom of her aim. Sometimes massage can contrive to increase tension and Delusion was, for me at least, an experience characterised by increasing frustration. Her words prick the interest. She tells tangential tales of owning the moon, of dying donkeys and small jars of men’s tears. She talks of giving birth to her dog, having surgically inserted it into her womb. All I wanted was to listen, to laugh along, and yet – teeth gritted and nails dug deep into palms – it was all I could do to ward off sleep. Every ounce of my attention became devoted to the attempt to concentrate, leaving nothing for the object of that concentration. Every now and then a phrase punctured through the concerted effort, but looking back at my notes, I cannot place such fragments within the overall. The event disintegrates as it goes along, memories melting as they ought to solidify.

Now, I am reminded of Iris Brunette – Melanie Wilson’s equally deep-cleansing, spa-like experience – which I saw in Edinburgh this summer. The details of Wilson’s sonic steam-room have long since faded underneath the general feeling of calm and yet, I don’t mind so much. By placing us within that atmosphere, Wilson encourages us to feel, where by standing before us, often behind a lectern, Anderson sets up the expectation of delivery. The difference is that Wilson’s words are tools, where Anderson’s are content and that content – odd and indistinct as it may be – serves to disrupt itself.

I should love to tell you more – the function of her two duetting voices, one male, one female; the chalk animations and the traces left behind – but Anderson’s work was too effective for its own good. The rest, as they say, is silence.

Review: Polar Bears, Donmar Warehouse

Written for Culture Wars


We never find out the name of Kay’s affliction. By not disclosing it, Mark Haddon questions its very existence, inviting us to make our own diagnosis. The title’s implication is that she has Bipolar Disorder and, sure enough, Kay endures more ups and downs than the Grand Old Duke of York’s ten thousand, but whether we classify that as a syndrome, as do her husband and mother, or, like her brother, a facet of her personality is left up to us.

Either way, Haddon sides unsympathetically with her carers, making a case against altruism. Polar Bears is, essentially, a love story of the can’t-live-with-can’t-live-without mould. Throughout the course of the play, John (Richard Coyle) meets, courts, marries, cares for and kills Kay, wrapping her corpse in a carpet bag to decay – a process we hear about in extensive detail. He vows to love her forever, through the magnetism and the mug-throwing, both as Jekyll and as Hyde, and yet, after enduring abuse, affairs and spontaneous absenteeism, John cannot fulfil that ongoing promise. His weakness is rather a strength ground down; he cares for her because he needs her as much as she needs his care. Likewise, Kay’s mother (a perfectly cast Celia Imrie) has spent her life warding off potential suitors, tending her daughter to the point of suffocation so as to clip her wings and prevent her flight.

Haddon, of course, wrote the bestselling novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, an examination of autism made touching by his deft handling of kooky detail. That same quality is present in Polar Bears, but softened. Unlike a novel, theatre cannot make us privy to the whirring of Kay’s mind. We see her as others do, where we are given a privileged position in The Curious Incident.... For all Haddon’s attempts to offer an alternative more mystical – there are regular appeals to the phases of the moon and the lure of the North – we watch Kay as we would in life, firmly entrenched in our own worldview.

As such, we don’t learn so much about Kay and her own experience – although we are privy to a comatose hallucination in which Jesus arrives baring flapjacks and machine coffee– as we do about what it is to live with Kay. Haddon’s emphasising device is to muddle time, jump-cutting from high to low. Several times, Kay drops to the floor as if her blood sugar levels have nosedived without the slightest flicker of a warning light. John, therefore, seems constantly on tenterhooks, unable to predict the lurches from one day to the next. Though it ramps up the drama, as does the foreknowledge of Kay’s death, Haddon twists the truth slightly beyond credence by overplaying the situation’s volatility.

Director Jamie Lloyd makes the most of the jagged timescale, dragging us forcefully through the jumbled chronology. Vivid, but also – thanks to Soutra Gilmour’s dusty and sparse design – ghostly, Polar Bears does away with location. Its characters seem almost to hang suspended in the void, grating against one another while the world beyond them has disintegrated. They are all caught in Kay’s orbit with varying degrees of gravitational pull.

As Kay, Jodhi May is superb: she wears the swelling tides of personality just beneath the surface of her skin. When warm and attractive, she finds a hollowness; when slumped on the floor, a fervent passion. Coyle, again superbly cast, can’t quite make enough of John. He handles the first scene – a bewildered confession in which the details of Kay’s death leak out of him – with a keen sense for the humour and power of a swallowed bombshell. Paul Hilton, by contrast, constructs a fascinating character from Kay’s bitter brother Sandy. He’s frayed but held together by a well-tailored suit and hair-gel like glue. We are constantly aware of the turmoil beneath the constant snarl. The scars born of a twisted, privileged childhood – he gives a crisply lucid description of his father corpse hanging, bloated in the hallway – remain invisible but for the constant scratching.

For all this, Polar Bears is less than the sum of its parts. It’s a little see-through, particularly when asking questions of identity. Haddon’s writing veers dangerously close to latte-philosophy dressed up in beautiful language. No one, Kay informs us, has been killed by a polar bear for fifteen years. With its well-trimmed claws and lack of muscle, Haddon’s play is unlikely to change that.

Review: Andersen's English, Hampstead Theatre

Written for Time Out

As new writing goes, Andersen’s English is the sort of quaint relic commonly assumed to be extinct outside of Richmond, where audiences apparently delight in ponderous, fusty dramas grown sepia-tinted with nostalgia. Taken on its own terms, however, there is a quiet Donnish intelligence to Sebastian Barry’s portrait of Charles Dickens as a household dictator authoring the lives of his family as if characters in a novel.

The celebrated Danish author Hans Christian Andersen visits Dickens’s Kent home, oblivious at first to the domestic turmoil therein. As Dickens grows increasingly tyrannical, banishing his wife Catherine (Niamh Cusack) and sending his son to war, Andersen naively outstays his welcome.

So fascinated is Barry by his own subject matter that he neglects our interests, heeding thoroughness at the expense of a good yarn. Writing more with a historian's than a journalist's sensibility, Barry feels the need to cover every angle, refolding his story to ensure that we see every possible character combination and cramming in biographical idiosyncrasies wherever possible.

Max Stafford-Clark’s production does little to enliven Barry’s text, bar matching the breathless claustrophobia chez Dickens with Lucy Osbourne’s cramped, furniture-heavy design. David Rintoul gives Dickens sufficient pomp and self-import and Danny Sapani’s sing-song broken English mines some humour, but there’s little by way of universality or urgency in this thesis of a play.

Review: 1936, Arcola Theatre

Written for the Financial Times

With little over two years until London 2012 gets under way, Tom McNab’s engaging dramatisation of events preceding the 1936 Berlin Olympics provides a reminder of the inevitable invasion of politics into the sporting arena. That it’s playing at the Arcola Theatre in Hackney, one of five London boroughs set for rejuvenation in the process, gives it added pertinence.

McNab focuses on Hitler’s determination to flex the muscles of his Third Reich with the grandest Games to date. Having been convinced of their utility by Joseph Goebbels, who was himself persuaded by his mistress, Hitler demanded 100,000 seats and 30 gold medals. (Goebbels would deliver 110,000 and 33 respectively.) What went unanticipated was the threat of a US boycott, spearheaded by Judge Jeremiah Mahoney, on account of the expulsion of German Jews from the country’s sports clubs.

Here 1936 draws a smart parallel with the discrimination against black athletes in the US. Jesse Owens, who would famously go on to win four golds in Berlin, trains alone, denied the sports scholarship that should have been his due. His unswerving determination to compete is twinned with that of Gretel Bergmann, the Jewish high-jumper who, despite equalling the national record a month previously, found herself excluded from the German squad.

While McNab achieves a sharp 90 minutes from fascinating subject matter, he pays the price of over-simplification, sacrificing interrogation for intelligibility. His tendency towards soundbites coupled with the employment of a well-positioned, honourable narrator – William Shirer, an idealistic American journalist – gives 1936 a neatness that undermines its putative claim to historical accuracy.

Occasionally, the need for explication causes McNab to stray into improbability. Thus Goebbels has difficulty in persuading Hitler of the benefits of hosting the Olympics – but would the Führer really fail to recognise the Games’ propaganda potential, let alone that of the rings that symbolise them? Further, to accept the play’s final hypothesis that the rescinded boycott might have averted the second world war is a triple jump too far.

Jenny Lee’s unfussy direction brings great clarity, easily negotiating the vastness of events portrayed. For the most part, the strong cast tackle multiple roles without relying on caricature, but Tim Frances and Chris Myles can’t quite match the challenge of Hitler and Goebbels, who seem almost a drolly mismatched odd couple.

Review: Trash City, Camden Roundhouse

Written for Culture Wars

I’ll give Trash City this: its production values are high. Lit up like a stadium concert, costumed like a catwalk show with a grand set that could pass as a fantastical centrepiece in any exhibition centre. However, while the design is gloriously excessive, Trash City’s content – more than that, its ideology – is grossly so.

Curled around the edge of the Roundhouse is a decrepit street front, frayed in both structure and morals. Sex shops saddle up to rusty garage doors. Enormous neon signs announce hotels. Mounds of televisions, entwined in colourful industrial wiring, splutter erotica with the hawking rhythm of a smoker’s cough. Thirty foot up, a wrecked car heaves smokes where it has smashed through a wall. An asteroid of kerb, ripped from the ground, is caught mid-trajectory above our heads. It looks brilliant, both grandiose and base. The debt to the endless Downtowns of Marvel comics is obvious, but there are quieter hints of Blade Runner, Tennessee Williams and the Blitz.

As soon as the show starts, however – as soon as the populace of Trash City emerge – it reveals its inauthenticity. The plasticized falsity of that set becomes totally apparent as this is a circus concerned only with image. It manages to make a Disneyland of grunge and deviancy by offering only iconography – and particularly chauvinist iconography, at that.

Instead of interrogating the concept and aesthetics of trash culture, Trash City regurgitates it unquestioningly. It is a parade of crass masquerading as cool; totally cosmeticised, totally hollow. At one point, a woman with bloodied prosthetic horns for breasts hangs from a chandelier, her modesty protected by only a thong. She pulls a necklace from her vagina and dangles it into the faces in the crowd below her. Elsewhere, two backcombed, busty vampires pluck victims from the crowds and tear into their throats mid-air, needlessly exposing their breasts. The whole affair smacks of masculine fantasies: man as overlord, women at his bidding call. All is titillation, a counterculture emptied of its subversion or radicalism and instead presented as little more than a harem dancing for we sultans gathered below. Its leather and latex is bound up into a neatly commercial package, like soft porn on late night cable or a raunchy Kerrang! music video. For God’s sake, the male ringleader has two phallic guns over his crotch that light up like a bull’s head.

What strips Trash City of content is its willingness to tick boxes with its individual set-pieces. We get flashes of aerial work, sparks of fire eating and half a clown routine. Nothing is allowed to build in a production content with its own dilettantism and the result is wholly unsatisfactory. It’s not even as if those moments are structured into anything beyond a conveyor belt of routines; if there’s a narrative intended, it is muddled to the point of obscurity.

If anything is worthy of interest, it is Trash City’s way of making strange bedfellows of grunge and high camp. Drag queens and excessive glam cosy up to the gothic and vampish in such a way that suggests an identity crisis. It’s as if Trash City can’t decide whether to take its own darkness seriously or send it up. To be honest, neither is a particularly appealing prospect for a self-satisfied, half-hearted circus with the attitude of a rebellious schoolboy showing off his stick-it-to-em independence, blind to his own surly immaturity.

Review: Kontakthof, Barbican Centre

Written for Culture Wars

Last week, I started moisturising. Perhaps that decision – although it wasn’t quite as conscious as the word suggests – stems from vanity, having finally appreciated the importance of skin to overall appearance. However, I can’t shake the nagging suspicion that, somewhere under the surface of conscious awareness, I’ve become – not scared exactly – but sensitive about the process of aging and the onset of time.

Having wept my way through From Where I’m Standing last Saturday on account of fading fathers, on Friday night I found myself moist-eyed and fascinated by The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. It was the brevity of peak condition – the fifteen year period when the fated lovers fell into sync, when body and mind matched up – that got to me. The rest is ripening or wilting, developing and dying.

Then, come Saturday evening, within seconds of Kontakthof’s restart, I found a frog in my throat (smaller than that, really: a tadpole, frogspawn even). A woman walks steadily and straightly downstage. Her hair is a glistening auburn; her walk delicately cross-footed and alluring. She cuts a commanding presence. And yet, she is marked mostly by her age, since, earlier that afternoon, the same shapely pink dress had housed a teenage girl: taut, wholesome and brazen. The disappearance of that girl, the shock of her shapeshift, is instantly affecting. In the auditorium, a thousand minds jumped to their inevitable future selves with a pang of sadness and a flash of horror.

Really, though, these versions of Kontakthof – the same choreography is danced by two non-professional casts: one composed of teenagers between fourteen and seventeen, the other of pensioners over sixty-five – are as comforting and affirmative about aging as Benjamin Button can be. The wrinkled version seems combative and optimistic. It counters patronising concerns, defies expectations and testifies to vitality. It is a joyful, mischievous chorus of Anything You Can Do and a hearty reprise of Anyone Can Whistle.

Set in an over-large hall that seems, depending on its inhabitants, a school assembly room and a community centre, Kontakthof often calls to mind a semi-formal social encounter in which the sexes come together. For the teenagers, it seems a polite disco; for the oldies, a tea-dance. For both, it is an opportunity for mischievous flirtation: a chance to parade one’s wares, grab a partner, grab many partners and let go. Vitality is equally present in both, but it raises its head at different points and with different textures.

An early sequence, for example, builds a routine out of an identification parade. The dancers hold out nails and palms for inspection, bare teeth and push back hair. They turn on the spot for profiling, as if undergoing a full-body scan. As performed by the teens, the ritual seems enforced. There is a nonchalance, a touch of impatience. The older cast, by contrast, seem to offer themselves up for scrutiny freely, even eagerly, as if to say, “Look: I’m still standing and I’ve still got all my teeth.”

In another, the cast trot down a corridor of light at the side of the stage wearing plastic masks that contort their faces into hairless wrinkled wrecks, caricatures of old age. That decay, the descent into the doddery, seems just as distant and unrealized. Why act your age when it’s an idea that doesn’t conform to reality? When it’s a fear of the future that is permanently one step ahead, never now, always just around the corner?

However, there are differences – at least, differences appear. The playfulness enacted, interacting both with the environment and with each other, takes on a different quality. In the teenagers, it seems exploratory, as if boundaries are being tested and the world’s working are being discovered. That changes with the introduction of agedness. It seems knowing, as if irony is permitted and tomfoolery has become conscious. Or else, it can seem motiveless to the point of irrationality. The lurking possibility of dementia haunts the more absurdist individual images: a man starting to sing alone, before others join tunelessly in; a woman crouched on a chair tearing at hair; a man repeatedly lighting matches and playing tame fire-eater.

The thing is that you’re never quite sure what you’re projecting and what’s there to be read. Such is the presence of age – when you watch one, you can’t help but imagine or recall the other as comparison – that it can obscure anything else. It’s hard to see the work for the teens, as it were. You are constantly aware of the impossibility of seeing the choreography in any pure form, as initially intended. It is the ever-absent middle ground. The infinite versions that might have been – imperfections each, perhaps, or just permutations, parallels, possibilities – jump inevitably into mind. But, for now, this is all there is; these are all there are and that’s that.

Look beyond the wrinkles and the acne and the work is actually more concerned with gender relations than anything else. However, the effect of playing the same actions with two casts somehow flattens that subject, as if its only purpose is to demonstrate the constancy of behaviour between men and women regardless of age and other conditionals. Both sets preen and puff their chests; they flick, flaunt and fiddle; they flirt and infuriate.

Tonally too, there’s a flatness to Kontakthof. There’s no doubting Pina Bausch’s eye for a stage picture. She has a startling ability to juxtapose an instance of serenity with scrabbling chaos and to carve up space so that the mind can take in two things at once, perhaps even acknowledging the situation’s reality and the fiction floating around inside it. However, until a short segment in which a gaggle of suited men surround a woman to the point that she seems consumed by a crowd, hands picking at her flesh like vultures’ beaks, Kontakthof desperately lacks real cruelty. Everything is a little cozy. What violence exists is given a soft edge, born of flirtation or mischief rather than anger or hatred. Human behavior is treated with a quaint curiosity, not dissimilar to nature documentaries – such as the one on ducks shown within the piece itself. The viewpoint is oddly detached, as if we are asked to observe and chuckle along rather than judge. The result is that, for all its delicacy and the thoughts born of comparison between its dual casts, three hours stretch out rather further than one might expect. Just like life, really, if not skin. No matter how much moisturizer one applies.