Review: Hotel Sorrento, Cock Tavern

Written for Time Out

Perhaps it’s best that Chekhov’s three sisters never made Moscow. On the evidence of Hannie Rayson’s Australian classic, it would have made for a pretty tumultuous family barbecue.

The bickering begins once two expatriate sisters return to their childhood home in Sorrento, a seaside town near Melbourne, where the third has remained, caring for their father. The first, Pippa, flies in from New York, newly fashioned in wardrobe and character. London-based Meg arrives after a Booker Prize nomination for a semi-autobiographical novel packed with home truths and closet skeletons.

Wearing its various theses about Australian identity so openly, Rayson’s 1990 play fees syllabus-ready. Even when her characters aren’t debating the nation’s ills outright, one always sees the symbolism beneath the translucent narrative. Rayson’s Oz is a picture of boorish parochialism, “rife with xenophobia and anti-intellectualism.” It’s all boozing and snoozing, and little else. And yet, she’s careful to balance the slobbish with the snobbish. Her expats aren’t exactly sympathetically drawn.

But one has to question its programming. Exactly how pertinent is the state of the Australian nation on the Kilburn High Road? Is the stuck-in-the-mud, head-in-the-sand portrayal still applicable given the Sydney Olympics and more recent political upheaval?

Nonetheless, director Adam Spreadbury-Maher creates a strong sense of Sorrento’s nostalgic charms, aided by Micka Agosta’s horizon-like design, while Maggie Daniels provides emotional weight as the earthy, anchored Hilary.

Review: 101, C Soco

Written for Culture Wars

Be careful what you wish for. For a while now, the cry has gone up for interactive theatre that allows true freedom. We have asked for more than a toy world, one with unlimited options where volition doesn’t bash up against perimeter fences. How can theatre that allows us agency avoid mollycoddling us? Can it treat us like unfettered adults?

101, a set of four interactive experiences created by recent graduate company Oneohone, commits to this boundlessness with immense integrity. Outside the performance space, in a room that functions more as briefing room than decompression chamber, we are each given a white sash that signifies our active involvement. Removing it removes one from the experience. Crucially, the performers have the same sashes and the same options. It is, we are told, as much ours to control as theirs and, therefore, the same safety procedures apply to both parties. This is, in no small way, a game between consenting adults.

Push against it and 101 moulds to fit. If you’re game, it says, so are we.

Only, before long, it doesn’t feel like a game anymore.

The room into which we file for the encounter nicknamed My Own is a furnace of whooping cheers. It feels *hot* from the start and the temperature only rises. Stood in an awkward line, almost awaiting instructions, we are hauled out in turn to join two groups. It’s recognisably playground. Each of us co-opted into a team is greeted with ecstatic yells and backslapping cheer. “My brother,” they say, looking earnestly into your eyes. Teams picked the fire-stoking begins. Mantras are chanted, rituals are undergone. Something rises in your chest: an aggression noticeable when your teeth grit and your chest puffs. It’s far from nuanced – the situation is quickly recognisable and left more or less uninterrogated, serving almost as experiential literary criticism – but it carries you away.

Unless you check it. At a certain stage, the realisation fell that these statements I was shouting – “There is no revenge unless you surpass them” or something to that effect – were ugly and empty. This rivalry, whipped up into a frenzy, was an empty one spun for rivalry’s sake and detached from original offences. We were footsoldiers recruited. Or rather conscripted.

And so, sash still around my wrist, I stepped back. A conscientious objector, looking on but refusing to represent. Participating by refusing to participate.

At this point, two problems become clear. First, that moral retreat looks much like discomfort and – safety being very much on the company’s mind – an actor broke ranks to explain the rules of the sash. Second – and far more problematic – the inauthenticity of the event. For all that I felt moved to intervene, to follow through my objection with a disruptive action, I did not. One is aware that this is not just *your* experience, but *our* experience. Who am I to intervene in the experience of other paying participants? They’ve come to see the company, not the heckler.

That means that interactive theatre is caught between two poles. If we play in the real – and 101 very much creeps that way, despite a surface level of fiction – we must be bounded by the status of constructed event. Unless, perhaps, we are lone audience members. If we play along with the fiction, the danger seems greater. Actors and performers come prepared. They have processes to aid commitment and immersion. For us, lacking the rehearsal period, commitment is more slippery and the fiction more fragile. Where it sweeps us away, we are not in control in the same way. We lack the techniques and triggers of the performers, who have built to this point and constructed a method of entry without abandon over time. Thus unprepared, we are either carried away with the fiction or ejected from it. To act is to exist in and embrace a state of liminality. It is to exist on the threshold of two worlds and that is a fine tightrope to tread. To do so requires training.

This feels dangerous. Safe as a game constantly monitored, but dangerous beneath the surface, where it exists unchecked.

Review: Ovid's Metamorphoses, Pleasance Dome

Written for Culture Wars

Blinded by Juno for his insistence that women are fare better in the sexual pleasure stakes, Tiresias is bestowed with foresight by Jupiter. His pronouncement is of a future governed by war.

Given Peter Bramley entrenches Ovid’s tales of transformation in the 1940’s, Tiresias’s prediction seems somewhat workaday. All around him saunter trimly uniformed servicemen and, overhead, bombs whistle and sirens wail. Like, tell us something we don’t know, Tiresias...

Actually, the concept proves a rather neat fit, drawing attention to the seismic shift the world suffered in the wake of World War Two. The move towards post-modernism becomes a transformation bestowed both as punishment and a new enlightenment. Mainly though, it works because Bramley and his company of recent drama school graduates have fine-combed Ovid’s tales for parallels, the witty application of which frequently elucidates both myth and modern counterpart.

So, Cupid becomes a catapult-wielding evacuee and Narcissus, a silver-screen star lost to the caress of the camera. Semele’s bovine transformation is marked with a gasmask, conjuring ideas of cattle packed together and heading towards slaughter. Aviation pioneers Daedalus and Icarus resemble both Biggles and the Wright Brothers, all flight goggles and chocks away.

This is a spritely and charming revue show, imbued with a ticklish soundtrack that borrows from Coward, Vera Lynn and the Boswell Sisters. Even the musical accompaniment is staged with witty smoothness. Drums are played by disembodied hands and cymbals crashed by casual passers-by.

While it flows efficiently, thanks to diligently executed transitions as four screens slide into positions to create all manner of landscapes, it can still stutter. You’re always aware of the process of application that must, at one point, have asked, “Ok, how can we stage this?” A greater sense of the overall and it might slip down smoother.

As it is that overall boils down to a style of delivery, with which some of the cast seem more confident than others. The clipped voices and stilted etiquette lend a daintiness that occasionally risks it floating away like an untethered Zeppelin. Attempting to anchor, the company shoehorn a final environmental health warning, which fits Ovid’s themes better than it does their style.

Nonetheless, it’s a pleasurable, playful hour that works best when considered from all angles. Their retelling of Theseus and Ariadne, in which he becomes a comatose soldier hits the spot in that regard, as a chorus of well-choreographed nurses tend to his injuries and dreamily swoon over what lies beneath the bandages. A bright concept is followed right through to satisfying staging with no trace of the token. More of that and Ovid's Metamophoses would emerge victorious.

Review: The Friendship Experiment, Underbelly

Written for Culture Wars

When it’s done well, improvisation can be a joy to watch. Everything just seems to click into place. Stories know exactly where they need to go. Gags get hit and problems unravel. Yet there’s always struggle present in the face of an emerging narrative, which makes it all the more enjoyable. Even its failures can delight.

Done badly, however, it’s excruciating and it’s at this that Big Wow, a chipper double act reminiscent of The Right Size, aim their potshots with a spoof improv show about friendship in which our suggestions never seem to satisfy the errant performers.

They begin with a generic unexpected phone call. One talks of that thing that happened “way back when.” The other nods in agreement, but only wants to know why the other’s called. Their characters’ defining features turn backflips: civil partners spring into life, accents meander around the globe, IQs pogo up and down. Each commitment made sends the plot beyond the other’s control. It’s a hilariously acute assault on the pretentious indulgences of theatre, delivered exquisitely by Matt Rutter and Tim Lynskey, infuriated and puppyish respectively.

Having settled on a solid Scouser and a mishap-prone Mancunian, they embark on an On The Road style adventure to Blackpool for a tumultuous stag do.

There’s a relentlessness to Big Wow’s style, however, that just tips the scales. For all that their exasperated straight man and downtrodden goof formula is perfectly honed, we’re never given a chance to breathe under a barrage of chaotic gags. Paradoxically, with a bit of down time, the laughter would feel ceaseless.

As it is, they get stuck, reverting to a Pirandello-esque revelation, in which Matt discovers the script. In attempting clever-clever critique the pair only wind up in a tailspin, from which, eventually, they have to eject themselves for the sake of a conclusion.

But that shouldn’t take away from the pleasures of watching Big Wow. With more refinement, they should prove something special. And by that, I mean West End special.

Review: En Route, Traverse Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Edinburgh, for me, is covered in numbers. Those of us that migrate here annually know the city as it appears on the map at the back of the Fringe Programme. We collect in certain spots and plot our dashes between venues, sticking to well-trodden paths, barely looking beyond the familiar markers of the festival. We know the city only by the circulation system that connects the festival.

Much of the joy of En Route, a playful, pensive audiotour through Edinburgh’s public spaces, comes from going off-piste and discovering the innards of the city. We’re led through piss-stained alleys into residential estates, winding through shopping centres, train stations and multi-storey car parks. We see the city from unfamiliar angles. We see it as a city, rather than a framework.

What about local audiences; those already familiar with these spaces? Presumably it offers the opportunity to see it afresh, as if for the first time. We know the form can transform even the habitual of environments, by placing a frame around them, by changing the way we look. En Route, with its soundtrack of atmospheric accompaniments, achieves that filmic experience, whereby you feel yourself as both protagonist and cameraman. But we know the form can do that. So, frequently, do iPods that shuffle as you scuttle.

What En Route adds to the form is freedom. This, it reinforces, is your time. It may have plotted a course, but it lets you find your own within it. Frequently we get destinations rather than handholding guidance every step of the way. Here and there, we follow arrows chalked in the gutter, invisible outside of this particular frequency. There’s no prodding as to where to look and what to see, just an invitation to see.

And also to be seen. With text messages landing with split-second precision and gentle abductions along the way, you’re always aware of the benign overseeing presence behind your walk. It’s a safe experience, buffered at the edges and, therefore, seemingly limitless. This is no mere monorail tour.

There are some stunning vantage points and some intriguing moments within En Route. The sense you get of Edinburgh as a particular and a universal, the deeper exploration of what cities are for and how they function, is strong. But, pleasant though the experience is, solidly constructed and well-conceived, it offers very little that this kind of work hasn’t already achieved. In lacking a novel twist, En Route seems content with the form as it is. Increasingly, however, we need more than just another audiotour of just another city.

Review: Beautiful Burnout, Pleasance Courtyard

Written for Culture Wars

When it comes to tales of sporting endeavour, we all know the formula. Set up an opposition of sorts, usually either between the best of friends or the bitterest of rivals, and gradually bring it to fruition in a contest on which everything rides. Prior to this, show both parties developing, taking knocks and growing increasingly determined. Along the way, you’re advised to throw in a near-miss, whereby the protagonist almost misses out on said final showdown, only for fate to throw chuck them a lifeline.

In the main, Bryony Lavery sticks to the rules in her treatment of five aspiring Scottish boxers, subverting proceedings with a final sucker punch that, though well concealed, isn’t quite the knockout blow that’s needed. Cynicism aside, she pads the skeleton with some muscular subplots, notably by throwing some femininity into the ring.

Bobby Burgess – or God to those he’s training – tends to his stable of teenage pugilists, of whom Ajay Chopra (Taqi Nazeer) is the most talented. He knows it as well: showboating as he dances around the others, winding them up and humiliating them with his class. In the other corner, Cameron Burns (Ryan Fletcher) is a new recruit, a born boxer immediately hooked on the sports’ cocktail of adrenaline and self-discipline. In a perfectly-pruned metaphor, Lavery has them both seeing stars as each dreams of newfound possibilities and a life worth living.

It’s the softer edges in Lavery’s script that are most interesting. There’s Ainslie Binnie (Henry Pettigrew), the academic of the group, who’s more interested in astrology than his own star’s rise, but still smarts at Bobby’s rejection. There’s Dina Massie (Vicki Manderson), the sort of smash’n’grab girl found in the Beano, eager to prove herself with the big boys. Gutsiest of all though is Carlotta Burns (Lorraine M McIntosh), a mother who just wants the best for her son, pleading a case both for and against his involvement in the sport. She never takes a punch, but it’s her hurt that surfaces like a shiner.

But Beautiful Burnout’s narratives are less exciting than its staging. Frantic Assembly have achieved high-definition theatre to the techno-thump of Underworld’s soundtrack. You feel every punch that connects, as if your own senses are knocked sideways. Lights flash, sound muffles, time slows. Directors Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett have replicated the televisual experience brillantly, such that the ring rotates 360˚ and the action slows to a freeze-frame. What emerges is a love-hate relationship with the sport. They allow you the satisfaction of a palpable hit and the shockwaves of the violence. The boxer’s aims are distilled down to the attempt to “administer a shock to the nervous system and overloading the brain so it crashes."

In that it does more than show those in the ring, even the support network of trainers, referees and mothers behind it. It envelopes us; the spectator. “Why”, it asks accusingly, “have you come here to watch this? What did you hope to see? What did you think would happen?”

Review: Operation Greenfield, Zoo Roxy

Written for Culture Wars

In glancing a decade or so backwards, Operation Greenfield – the latest from the scorchingly promising Little Bulb Theatre Company – feels very Class of 2010. There’s a modishness about its embrace of retro kitsch and its folksy sound, as if it longs for a simpler time when phones made calls and teenagers made noise. Glazed with nostalgia and powered by spirit rather than polish, it contains – I suspect – an underlying rejection of all things 2.0. Yet, at the same time, there’s a near-permanent irony, patronising the past for its low-fi, low-def simplicity. That seems symptomatic of a generation content with its lot, but not the means behind its achievement. It couldn’t live without its gadgets, but loathes all they signify. It can’t help cynicism, but longs for genuine connection. It champions the uncool and values innocence enormously.

Operation Greenfield, arguably like Crocosmia before it, examines the loss of innocence during one’s formative years. This time, we’re in small-town Stokley, where a group of gawky teenagers are coagulating into a band, both as friends and musicians. What starts as a funk duo grows to a folk foursome with eyes on the local talent competition, for which they are penning a musical interpretation of the Annuciation.

There’s much to warm to within and yet, as a whole, it doesn’t fully satisfy. For all that Little Bulb make for delightful company – their gentle, homespun anarchy remains thoroughly infectious – Operation Greenfield suffers from a lack of rigour. Too many scenes function solely as gags that, though risible more often than not, seem like tangential asides. At times it comes perilously close to indulgence, averted only by their geniality. While there’s a newfound sense of layering, particularly in the way it compares Christian theology and rock ideology with the adolescent experience, Operation Greenfield never quite penetrates the surface or achieves an emotional velocity. It’s crying out for cuts.

Largely that’s to do with its performance mode, which keeps the corner of an eye on the audience at all times. For forty-five minutes the half-cocked presentational delivery amuses, lending an acutely observed absurdity to the teenagers. Their words, scattergun non-sequiters, are all doubting caution; their bodies are squirming contortions. Rather wonderfully, the rhythm of their movements recalls the stuttering animation of early arcade games, lending a dated quality to proceedings. However, as tenderly as Little Bulb handle the soft-cynicism, never straying into scorn, the two-dimensionality eventually grates. There’s a craving for sincerity, for the company to take these teenage-boppers seriously and invest emotionally. It’s all so throwaway that it starts to feel disposable.

But there’s also real diligence in their handling of the teenage experience, which never simplifies the difficulties and dichotomies of growing into and shaping one’s own identity. Little Bulb have found theirs and, with added intensity and scruples, it could prove rather exceptional.

Review: Sex Idiot, Zoo Roxy

Written for Culture Wars

How serious is Bryony Kimmings? Sex Idiot – a collection of cabaret turns on and around her recent diagnosis of Chlamydia – hits the clichés of performance art so often, I can only assume she intends it as a self-parody. She is, after all, proclaiming herself an idiot, so the earnest but mediocre artist seems an appropriately buffoonish persona.

So we get a version of Dylan’s Subterrean Homesick Blues composed of vaginal euphemisms, a clumsy pelvis-thrusting dance entitled “Sex? Yes!” and tears induced by tiger balm while Richie Valens’s sob-song Crying plays. Kimmings even goes so far as to fashion a moustache out of pubic hair donated by the audience. Her material is cheap and brash and nasty, but it is deliberately so.

The thing is, most idiots don’t know that they’re idiots, and those that do don’t step onto a stage to play the idiot. They are ashamed of their idiocy. That there’s a knowingness to Kimmings’s performance makes Sex Idiot an exercise in self-flaggellation. She is playing the fool in public, humiliating herself for one reason or another.

In that case, there needs to come a moment of sincerity. At some point, she needs to mean it. However, just as you think she might be serious, she undermines herself with a comic clunk. What looks like a heartfelt love song, tinged with sadness, to a man with whom she fell in love, is sabotaged by its inept, monotone chorus: “Me, me, me, me. You, you, you, you.” When she finally delivers a series of apologies into a microphone, she cannot resist the descent into the comic.

The clue, funnily enough, is in her underwear. While Kimmings parades in a series of ridiculously extravagant costumes, from lederhosen to feathered headdresses, the bra and knickers to which she strips are comparatively demure and classy. Underneath it all, there’s a vanity that belies her clowning and public disgrace.

To give Kimmings her dues, though, she is a sparky, funny and likeable performer. There are shades – albeit quite consciously – of Ursula Martinez with added chaos. If you’re in the right mood and mindset, Sex Idiot will probably entertain and engage. Personally, it lost me or, perhaps, I lost it. I suspect that’s possibly a product of my being male. To be honest, my inner-cynic can’t stop questioning Kimmings initial motivation. At what point, on receiving notification of an STI, does one think: “There’s a show in this?”

Review: Hot Mess, Hawke & Hunter

Written for Culture Wars

Are we twenty-somethings really as schizophrenic as Ella Hickson diagnoses in this cute, but astute, contemporary folk tale? Presenting two twins, the one the inverse of the other, Hickson paints a picture of a generation struggling with its oxymoronic nature, caught between savage cynicism and wispy romanticism. The choice seems one of armour-plated self-preservation or an exposed underbelly ripe for the sticking. Either path – let alone a confused combination of the two – leaves us ill-equipped for life.

Polo and Twitch, brother and sister, were born with one heart between them. That wound up in Twitch’s chest, leaving Polo with a cavity at his core. Where she falls too readily, at, say, the merest meeting of eyes across a crowded dance floor, he is incapable of love, perhaps even of empathy. They’re both realised with composed verve by the marshmallow soft Gwendolen Chatfield and Michael Whitham, who grounds Polo’s acidity in his own scars.

As the twins approach their twenty-fifth birthday, Twitch finds herself in a tender, but doomed, relationship with Billy (Solomon Mousley), while Polo and his neon-horror of a fag-hag Jax (Kerri Hall) can offer only snide sneers at the world rotating around them.

Even if Hickson sometimes overplays her hand – the neatness can become a touch sickly and the constant oppositions stick in your throat – she handles her narrative exceptionally, keeping us engrossed. There’s real smoothness to her dialogue as well. It’s entirely apt, for example, that the quixotic Twitch is quick to translate life into metaphors and similes, where Polo snaps forth blunt realities best left unspoken. Just occasionally, when the four characters deliver interlocking monologues into empty space, Hot Mess drifts towards Royal Court cliché, Crimp-Kane sort of territory. That is, however, as much the fault of the design (the play is performed in the modish but shallow nighclub that inspired it) as it is of Hickson’s text.

However, Hot Mess is a cracking watch, wonderfully light without losing its density. Further proof, if it were needed, of Hickson’s knack for taking the temperature of the times and catching the mood her contemporaries.

Review: Bunny, Underbelly

Written for Culture Wars

“I know what I’m doing,” Katie keeps telling us. But beneath her veil of sexuality and bluster, the eighteen year-old is nothing but a rabbit caught in the headlights.

Jack Thorne’s monologue starts with a splat. Walking through grey old Luton, Katie’s older boyfriend Abe drops his ice-cream when a boy on a bicycle careers into him. That sparks a chain of escalating retaliation, in which the thrill of the chase quickly supersedes the disrespects felt. Before long an impromptu pack is trailing the perpetrator all the way to his bedroom door.

Caught in the middle, out of her depth but refusing to let slip, is Rosie Wyatt’s bittersweet Katie: a girl incapable of folding her cards. Even when forced to remove her knickers in the passenger seat of a Vauxhall Astra, one breast hanging out of her school shirt, she remains front-footed, calling the bluff of those affronting her. It’s not difficult to see how the cycle spirals out of proportion. Two wrongs, she says, have managed to make a right.

Wyatt relates events, amongst a cyclone of tangential offshoots, in relentless jabber of information. Her tone swings between warped pride, defensiveness and borderline self-loathing. For all that she’s a likeable presence, you register that Wyatt is roughing it. Katie’s harshness doesn’t come naturally and she’s missing the volatility to set you on edge.

Nonetheless, she’s brilliant at coaxing out the more sympathetic side of Thorne’s text, which steers clear of easy condemnation. Bunny never peers down its nose at its characters, though it reserves a special scorn for Luton as a place. However, the spite of Thorne’s descriptions isn’t carried by the cutesy design, in which Jenny Turner’s cartoonish outlines are projected behind Katie. Smart, pressing and credible, but there’s more bite to Bunny than Joe Murphy’s production allows.

Review: The Sun Also Rises (The Select), Lyceum Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

The Elevator Repair Service haven’t so much adapted Hemingway’s first novel of note into a play as plonked it onstage as is. For much of the four hours, they are faithful to the last full-stop, such that we learn – to borrow the retort to Method Acting – precisely what the characters had for breakfast each morning.

Such idle details might be fine when dreamily leafing through pages, passing your own time, but onstage, they tend against the streamlined nature of drama. Occasionally, the company utilize the messy transition from page to stage, exploding the text into unruliness. So, we get sudden bursts of vivacious hip-swinging choreography repeating itself as if Hemingway’s fiestas have been sampled and looped. When it does so, we get flashes of virtuosity. The novel bursts its banks and its heart and soul spill out. There’s a reluctance to detonate, however, which leaves the whole thing caught in the middle: either two hours to long or two hours too short.

Here, Hemingway’s novel plays out beneath the bottle-lined shelves of The Select bar. It’s tables, which later sprout horns and charge at matadors, are littered with glasses, all half-full or half-empty or, much like the characters themselves, half-drunk and half-finished. We follow Jake Barnes (Mike Iveson) and his disillusioned companions as they lollop around Europe, fishing and fighting and fuelling themselves with alcohol, en route to the Pamplona festival and its daily bullfights. In their midst, casting spells and melting hearts, is Brett Ashley, almost an antidote to Holly Golightly, who, in Lucy Taylor’s hands, seems entirely drained of colour. Her gamine magnetism stems from a desert dryness. Those enraptured by her are parched, desperately trying to quench the unquenchable.

Once you’ve settled into the pace, which draws out the longueurs of sobriety into slow drawls, things become more imaginative. Life looks and sounds better when under the influence. The lights soften the pallor and glint off bottles. Sound dislocates: bottles glug-glug-glug as they pour, glass smashes as tumblers tumble. Nothing is quite real, until – in the dying moments – Iveson’s Jake works his way through six glasses of red wine in quick succession and wobbles, glazed, towards the end of the tour.

The cast are tremendous. The likeness of each character is perfectly captured, from Ben Williams’s boisterous, jocular Bill to Matt Tierney’s weaselling Robert Cohn.

And yet, it never quite satisfies, largely due to an odd mix of styles. Where their fidelity and their explosion treat the text with reverence and inquiry, its frequent slips into spoof – plastic fish fly over the stage, the moustachioed Spanish hotelier coughs up his words – belittle and cheapen the rest, even as they land laughs. What ought to be dizzyingly humid, manages only tepidity. This should be stuffed to the brim or trimmed to the bone. It needs, quite frankly, to take the bull by the horns.

Review: Stationary Excess, Underbelly

Written for Culture Wars

Jessica Latowicki’s feet are spinning like whirligigs beneath her. Her hair catches her face as often as her dress strap slips off her shoulder. She gulps at the air, grits her teeth and grips the handlebars until her knuckles whiten. Pedalling with a manic desperation, it’s as if she’s trying to uproot the exercise bike – an instrument of Tarturan torture – from its bolts. It’s exhausting, endless and entirely futile.

As if that weren’t enough, it’s all washed down with a bottle of champagne, which is itself soaked up with an entire packet of digestive biscuits. All by 11.45 in the morning.

This, Latowicki and her co-writer Tim Cowbury would have us believe, is the ride of your life. Their text, largely a cleverly-constructed and well-concealed portrait of Superman, rails against the pressures of the capitalist ideal. As an argument – even as a metaphor – it’s as familiar as a proverb: ‘we work for money for stuff for appearances for what exactly?’ You’ve heard it before, I’ve heard it before and, yet, on we all cycle.

That said, the pair carry it off with a rare neatness. Latowicki, gutsy and sincere throughout, dolls herself up, only to undo the look with the champagne, the heady effects of which are later cancelled out by the biscuits. It’s imagery of the roaring twenties, nuclear wives and dotty cat-loving neighbours is astutely all-American: Hollywood staples subverted. But most estimable is Stationary Excess’s grip of its own reality. When the bell forces Latowicki back into speed mode, her struggle hits you hard. There’s an urge to relieve her of the duty, to reassure her that it’s alright, that she needn’t go through all that for our benefit. (Interestingly, were she male, I doubt we’d care a jot.)

Only, of course, we don’t – we watch: half amused by the fruitless indignity, half horrified by it. We let her cycle on, applaud her efforts, and then return to the saddles of our own lives. Let’s face it; Stationary Excess won’t change anything. It’s worthy, I’m just not convinced it’s worthwhile.

Review: Maria de Buenos Aires, Zoo Southside

Written for Culture Wars

Within seconds, a shrouded woman has removed a slab of sirloin from her underwear and plonked it, crackling and sizzling, into a frying pan. Blood siphons from another’s sleeves and is downed with gusto by two moustachioed pierrots. Handfuls of dust fly through the air. Knives scrape and pierce the wooden stage. Come the end, the same woman – the lady of the steak – is encased in a giant bubble, singing in an empty snowdome.

Needless to say, Teatro Di Capua’s realisation of Astor Piazzolla’s tango-opera is a visceral, macabre experience. En route, we’re also privy to handfuls of dust, mangles of pasta and molehills of sugar. At one point, the air grows thick with ground coffee, which is scattered by an enormous ventilation shaft, clogging and rasping at the back of your throat.

The whole thing teems with animal passions. Sex and death hover over it like flies on dung. Yet, given that its sung in Spanish, the plot is almost indiscernible beyond a vague cocktail of violence and eroticism. A young, handsome couple tangos, quite entrancingly, at the front of the stage. A singer warbles, quite beautifully, in a selection of evening gowns. A goblin-esque hombre – part-clown, part-narrator, part-minstrel, part-demon – oversees proceedings, entering on stilts at one point dressed only in a sparse tangle of fairy lights. The abstraction prevents connection. More help is needed. (I’d recommend either a synopsis or a carefree attitude of acceptance.)

At times, it’s quite the spectacular, but the haphazard, over-busy staging leaves potholes of puzzlement along the way. It flicks from the sublime to the ridiculous: one moment, you’re gobsmacked, the next, you’re giggling at the OTT absurdity of it all. There’s satisfaction therein, but it’s stuttering.

Review: Pedestrian, Underbelly

Written for Culture Wars

Tic-Tacs. That’s what he called them. Tic-Tacs. You might know them as Newton’s Cradles. Suspended ball bearings, endlessly clackering away, back and forth, ticking and tacking, going nowhere at a fairly measured pace.

It’s an appropriate symbol within Tom Wainwright’s swirling dream-sequence solo, which sets its crosshairs on the inane daily grind of the workforce-consumer, as is the goldfish with which he shares the stage. The trouble is it’s also a fitting characterisation for Pedestrian as a whole, which – silver-tongued and well-executed though it is – provides little more than a diversion.

As he recounts a recurring dream, Wainwright’s feet click-clack on the spot, while on a screen behind him a cobbled street sweeps towards the vanishing point. It’s like Stephen Berkoff’s take on Bittersweet Symphony by The Verve, with Wainwright enacting the ubiquity of the Great British High Street – running the gauntlet of chuggers, a pit-stop in Tesco Metro – pursued by an oversized, aristocratic goldfish.

Wainwright is an engaging performer. Well-drilled and resolutely disciplined, he offers an impressive plethora of urban buffoons, all spun from a keen-eyed knack for definitive details.

However, what starts as an intriguing, if familiar, slant on mundanity eventually becomes an observational comedy routine squeezed into shape. Wainwright, not dissimilar to Russell Howard in either looks or style, makes use of the tried and tested species of humanity turn, introducing us to the cling-film mafia, sweaty-backs and snappers. He’s got a nice line in exasperation: beads of sweat begin to burst from his skin as the pressure increases. You swear you spot the vein on his temple starting to throb and yet the explosion never comes.

Rather than going postal, Wainwright drifts deep into the surreal, winding up in orbit. That’s the problem with dream sequences: anything goes. And when anything goes, everything goes. That Wainwright could insert anything undercuts the value of all that he’s included. By this point, floating aimlessly in space, it barely matters. (Besides, does anyone really dream like this, jumpcutting from stock extreme to stock extreme?)

Thanks largely to the computerised animation, I couldn’t shake the notion of a screensaver. Hypnotic and beautiful, perhaps, but little more than a way of passing time that could probably be better used. Tic-tac.

Review: Derelict, The Zoo

Written for Culture Wars

Seven conspicuously middle-class squatters have invaded a grand townhouse in a well-to-do neighbourhood. They talk about bursting bubbles and making statements living off the city’s castoffs. More often they bicker; each desperate to prove themselves committed to the cause. Only they can’t even agree on its nature: radical activism or calm subversion. Is it about holistic sustainability, egalitarian meritocracy or simply settling grudges? Besides, distractions abound; there’s fun to be had, pills to be popped and bodies to be explored.

Lara Stavrinou’s play is almost onto something. I say almost because Stavrinou doesn’t quite balance between two opposing objects of derision. On the one hand, you see traces of Stavrinou the idealist, rallying against the system imposed on the young, frustrated with the hand she’s been dealt. On the other, there’s Stavrinou the conservative, unwilling to overlook the inconsistencies and hypocrisies of her privileged occupants and offering them up as fools. Individually both are worthwhile subjects; together they cancel each other out.

Technically, however, we get Stavrinou the naïf. Derelict offers glimpses of promise, but little understanding of dramatic technique. The pace is fast-tracked, such that arguments cut to the chase without building and most of the dialogue reveals before it conceals. She spells every link in the narrative chain and seemingly lives by the rule that drama necessarily equals conflict. With more comic bite, bottled tension and minute attention, however, Derelict could be something special.

As it is the flaws go unnoticed in a Lotte Englishby’s over-faithful production that would benefit from a controlled explosion. However, she demonstrates a keen eye for detail, coaxing a handful of pinpoint touches within individual performance, notably Charlotte Brand’s level-headed, worthy Est and EJ Martin’s puppyish Viv.

Review: Nicki Hobday Conquers Space, Just the Tonic at The Caves

Written for Culture Wars

Nicki Hobday seems more interested in overthrowing theatre than conquering space. Such is her cynical disdain for the ‘magic’ of the medium that she never gives it a chance to function. From the moment she begins the demystification process, speaking of the empty stage and our expectations, it seems a pale imitation of Forced Entertainment’s Spectacular, half-conjuring an absent show without the craft and comic edge of Etchells’s text. She mocks the notion of wings, for example, having fashioned her own out of two flats. Essentially she’s setting the whole thing up in order to knock it down.

The result is a cyclone of self-references, painting pictures within pictures within pictures, such that the lecture eventually swallows itself and disappears from view. In lacking an eloquent conceit, it lacks anything resembling an argument. By the time she attempts to shatter the show entirely, introducing the usher as an intruding fiction-cum-reality, she has tangled herself in knots.

Admittedly, Hobday offers a sleek, robust performance and achieves a few neat moments. Her manipulative engagement with her audience, refusing to accept anything offered, is a droll examination of power play and she manages a smooth turn of phrase, but a thesis consisting only of assorted musings is ultimately no thesis at all.

Review: Threshold, Zoo Roxy

Written for Culture Wars

You can’t accuse 19;29 of lacking ambition. Previously, they’ve placed Sarah Kane’s Blasted in its real-life setting of a Leeds hotel room and transformed a derelict town hall in London into a ghost-filled maze of identical doors for Hall. Here, they file us onto a coach on Roxborough Place and deposit us, a hour later, at an isolated manor house seemingly torn straight from the pages of E.E. Nesbitt.

Like Macbeth before them, however, ambition proves the company’s ruin, just as it did in Hall earlier in the year. In fact, it’s starting to look as though their problems stem less from foolhardy aspiration than dogged carelessness.

Trooping off the bus, we are cast as guests at a warped wedding ceremony. Flute of flat champagne in hand, we are introduced to the four Hunter children – jolly-hockey-sticks types one and all – and the house staff. The groom, their father, remains conspicuously absent – much to the newly arrived bride-to-be’s confusion – as we traipse and dart around the gardens behind one or other of the characters. Here we hide in the bushes, there we dash through a maze, always aware that secrets and locked doors hold sway over the children’s lives.

Yet, after a handful of ends, both loose and dead, it becomes quite clear that the young company doesn’t have the answers. It’s all too symptomatic, for example, that the bolted cellar door conceals an empty room and that the wicked father – always the bridegroom, never the husband – fails to appear. It’s pretty much all hokum, seeking to provide little more than a cheap spook.

Nor, as merry dances go, is it a particularly satisfying one. While there’s fun to be had in being outside – even in Thursday’s downpour - the failure to investigate the audience relationship is fatal, generating overblown performances composed of character traits. Given how Enid Blyton it all is anyway, the Hunter family become ridiculous creatures and our interactions are left us hovering between bemused disbelief and awkwardness.

We’ve seen these symptoms before, of course. Threshold is almost entirely reliant on its site and the titillation of the chase, which makes it more National Trust than National Theatre.

Review: Others, Pleasance Courtyard

Written for Culture Wars

The Paper Birds are shedding their skin. In the past, their work has been characterised by delicacy: gentle choreography bathed in tinkling pianos overlaid with tender texts. The materials used – beds, ice-creams, coin-filled tins – had a certain comfortable familiarity. Applying this formula to an unflinching subject, as they did so well with sex-trafficking for the Fringe First-winning In A Thousand Pieces, results in sure-fire teary-eyed worthiness.

Others almost goes so far as to seek absolution for that. The initial intention, it seems, was to represent disenfranchised women onstage; to become a mouthpiece for other women worse off than those in the company. To that end, in the hope of gathering material, The Paper Birds began correspondence with a female prisoner, an Iranian woman and Heather Mills, only to have an epiphany. “What”, they ask instead, “gives us the right to speak for them? In fact, how can we speak for them without speaking from our perspective?”

Accordingly, Others is characterised by its own disintegration as its honourable intentions hit brick walls and shatter. At one point, as the onstage technician-cum-musician repeatedly strikes up the familiar piano overture, he gets berated: It’s too much. It’s not right. It’s manipulative and it’s sentimental and it’s patronising.

As an interrogation of their own practice, then, Others is honest and necessary. Certainly, you have to admire the company’s bravery in admitting to naivety and failure. The trouble is that, in doing that, it cuts its audience out of the equation. What do we gain from watching a piece that speaks only of its own insurmountable obstacles? To overcome that, Others needs to ask why we’ve turned up and what we hoped to gain from watching theatre about those worse off than us. It needs to confront us with our own bourgeois inaction.

Even on its own terms, however, the original project-spec lingers, muddying the central argument, and too much of the physical realisation remains token, merely dressage intended to beautify.

The three performers finally tear up the stage, purging it of soft furnishings, the company leave three lampshades warmly glowing on one side and a bare bulb shining on another. Here, they are caught halfway between the two. It bodes well for the future, but doesn’t satisfy in the present. Essentially, Others is a chrysalis in reverse, transfiguring the company from an over-aesthetic state into something starker, more robust and rigorous. The chrysalis should serve to make the process of change private. From the outside, sadly, it’s just not that interesting to watch.

Review: After the Tone, Bridewell Theatre

Written for Time Out

Such is the relentless navel gazing of the four lovesick losers pining for her, it's little wonder that Livvi doesn't answer her phone. Their company is such a drag, all one-note whining and lyrical waxing, that if she had any sense at all, Livvi would have long since assumed a fake identity and emigrated.

Maybe she has, given that she never appears. We see her only through the eyes of those she's hurting. Presumably, we're meant to begrudge her manipulative selfishness and arrogant disregard for others. After all, this is a girl that thought a supermarket-standard pot plant consolation enough after her oldest friend's attempted suicide and stood her boyfriend up twice consecutively, causing him to miss his sister's wedding. As for those newly caught by Livvi's magnetism - a student infatuated from afar and an Indian girl desperately trying to engineer chance encounters - we're probably supposed to sympathize.

Only the forlorn four are so jaw-clenchingly insipid, it's impossible not to resent them their woes. Their musical monologues feel like diary entries by unrequited teenage depressives: a problem worsened by the deliberately languid performance mode. Russell Thompson's libretto smacks of post-university fear of the big wide world - tedious to those accustomed to it - and Oliver Fenwick's book flounders. His lyrics feel forced ("She's hot, but single she is not") and rhythmically, it's often counter-intuitive.

Review: FIB, National Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

From the white lies that allow us to co-exist amicably to the more barbed, malicious and even motiveless, there are simply so many types of lie that deception makes for an impossibly broad subject matter. FIB makes the mistake of tackling it head on, meaning that, aside from scratching all over a large surface, it rarely manages to offer anything beyond the obvious.

Stood in a corridor of numbered doors, each leading into an individual booth, we enter each one by one to be confronted variously by live performance, video, installations and vaguely interactive micro-situations. In one, we’re screamed at by an absent spouse, who seems to tower above us. In another, we’re asked to scrawl “dirty little secrets” on the wall of a toilet cubicle.

Admittedly, there are some nice strands of thought within – particularly its musings on the performative qualities of art, in which manipulated versions of the self can be presented as truth, and the stories we concoct to soften the world’s edges and make death palatable – but overall the form isn’t probed to its full. Though it manages to place us in the judge’s chair a couple of times, attempting to ascertain truth from falsehood, FIB fails to thrust a real dilemma upon us, which the compartmentalised structure certainly has the potential to do. One wonders what Ontroerend Goed might have done.

The techno-music and swirling spotlights of the corridor – presumably there to up the adrenalin – are irritants, giving the whole the feel of a mid-nineties gameshow, and there’s a tattiness about the actual construction itself, which nags at you throughout.

If anything, the forced half-smile I wore on encountering one of the three performers so as not to offend says it all. In most of the booths, when alone, my eyes rolled at the tedious inanity of it all.

Review: The Great Game, Tricycle Theatre

Written for Time Out

When view in the present alone, current affairs seem murkiest. Offering a perspective on 150 years of Afghanistan's history, ripe with cycles of conflict, The Great Game colours in the newsprint. Interspersed with verbatim testimonials, its 12 plays piece together a complex jigsaw.

It's striking that, in spite of being individually written, the plays pick up repeated motifs. A country that seemed "a death-trap for foreign armies" in 1842 is finally described by Simon Stephens as "the new Northern Ireland." Its history is born of geography: its location makes it a crucible for international violence, drawn out and made bloody by its terrain. Too vast and inhospitable, perhaps, for democracy and too easily ambushed by neighbours, tribal warlords or totalitarian regimes.

The new recruit for this second Tricycle run, replacing JT Rogers's Blood and Gifts, is Lee Blessing's Wood for the Fire. Blessing opts for much the same angle on the mid-80s: the irony behind America's surreptitious arming of local warlords against the Soviet forces. The ISI and CIA chiefs haggle over weapons like Big Brother contestants chalking up a groceries list. America's "dream situation," hitting the Russians without risking its own men, will, of course, become its nightmare. It's a neat fit: light but pinpoint.

Inevitably, some of the plays are more full-bodied than others. Most potent are Stephen Jeffreys's haunting opener, Bugles at the Gates of Jalalabad, in which four buglers await a long-dead army; Miniskirts of Kabul, David Greig's empathetic portrait of incaracerated former President Najibullah; and The Lion of Kabul, Colin Teevan's chilling portrait of Taliban executions. Taken together, however, they are richly textured and rewarding.

At its end, Stephens's Canopy of Stars places us onstage. A sergeant on leave is confronted by his wife, desperate for him to come home. "You're changing nothing," she implores. Perhaps, but that's no excuse for inaction.