Review: The Big Fellah, Lyric Hammersmith

As David Costello, Finbar Lynch bursts in to the New York flat being used as an IRA safe house. He barely breaks stride, unlocking, swishing through and slamming the front door as if silencing a small-town saloon on entry. He's awful small for a man known to New York and the IRA as the Big Fellah, but - my god - does he live up to the name. His feet are so firmly planted they could have grown roots; his stance is a cool lean, almost Californian. But this smooth exterior houses a fearsome individual, one who - were he ever to lose his temper, which he does not - could explode like a fleet of synchronised car bombs: unexpectedly and forcefully.

Costello is the leader of a small IRA unit housed in this particular Bronx bolt hole. What seems at first a student hangout - the play spans three decades from 1972 to September 2001 - morphs into a Pinteresque purgatory, in which occupants await orders, one of which - relocation to Mexico - indicates execution.

The result is a fascinating peek behind enemy lines, as we get drawn into motives that - in this country, at least - have been characterised as ignoble. Here, such is the seductive charisma of Lynch's Costello, they seem quite the opposite. Ruairi O'Drisceoil (Rory Keenan), wanted for his role in the murder of a young woman on a previous operation, becomes a martyr of sorts as he takes to the dock to protest his innocence. Astoundingly, we want him to succeed. Likewise, there's a warmth to firefighter Michael Doyle (David Ricardo-Pearce) - the flat's owner - who offers his services in an misconstrued bid to honour his Irish ancestry by joining the IRA. That he comes from Protestant stock never strikes him as problematic.

Much of the appeal stems from the likeability and surprising gentleness that Richard Bean lends these blundering eediots, perfectly handled by a top notch cast. Bean laces the play with dark, yet unimposing, humour. What violence we are privy to - the po-faced 'security man', Frank McArdle (Fred Ridgeway), who turns up with his trusty electric drill; the muscular but moronic Tom Billy Coyle (Youssef Kerkour), planted in the NYPD, waving his gun around as if playing Starsky and Hutch - has its edges smoothed down by their bungling. The comedy has echoes of Martin McDonagh's hitmen-in-hiding romp In Bruges.

Yet Bean is careful not to let the menace slip - and director Max Stafford-Clark makes a fiery crucible of the flat. The threat of Mexico hangs over the action and Costello - Lynch really is on dazzling form - changes the room's temperature every time he steps through the door. It's not that he always stokes the fire. His second entrance, staggering slightly with a head clouded by drink, positively releases steam, without wholly relieving the pressure. Elsewhere, when he half-forces, half-tempts Frank off the wagon with a fine whisky on the rocks, there's an icy intensity: the sort of cold that burns the skin.

Besides, one is always aware of events overseas - whether the hunger strikes in Long Kesh prison, Bloody Sunday or the bomb that gutted Omagh's high street. It's as if Costello's crack unit have had a hand in each of the events fixed in the history of the troubles.

Stephanie Street - gradually softening from sultry to sympathetic - seems miscast as the undercover FBI agent to whom O'Drisceoil spills his secrets, but the role is underdeveloped - more in terms of context than character. The actions of the FBI remain unclear, given that they intervene after information only once and let the terrorist cell continue in the heart of New York. Bean also overplays his hand with a final scene, set in September 2001, that sees Michael heading off to work before the air fills with sirens. He made his point about the IRA's usurpation by Al'qaeda in the 1990s, with Tom seeking clarification over the aims of "them Muslims."

Perhaps it serves to further humanise those that we’re used to demonising. But, if Bean believes a turn towards sentiment is necessary, he's mistaken. This sharply funny, gutsy and informative play does so throughout with real class and momentum.

Photo: Finbar Lynch as David Costello (credit: John Haynes)

Review: Lovers Walk, Southwark Playhouse

Written for Culture Wars

There's something about the South Bank. Somehow, it overcomes its own cliche to retain its romance. Somehow you can own it. London disappears and - momentarily - its just the two of you. Waterloo Bridge has hosted no less than seven of my first kisses. The riverside walkways are lined with various hand-in-hand strolls. I've ambled through the Tate Modern attempting to craft a cultured persona; I've shared ice creams by the Scoop and - just like Rosie and Matt, the couple whose relationship we trace in this gentle charm of a promenade - I've leant over the river's railing, my shoulder softly grazing hers (or hers, or hers), and stared at London Bridge in silence, caught in a suspended sigh.

It is London's prime kissing post. It really is Lovers Walk.

Led by two actors-cum-tourguides, we wonder through Southwark's back streets and down to the riverbank, stopping en route at key sites. This alley - tucked behind a cubist clash of glass-fronted offices and housing estates, littered with scaffolding and two sad green beer bottles - introduced them to each other. Looking up from his cigarette, Matt saw Rosie and her red umbrella. The same red umbrella he'd followed a few weeks back in the hope of engineering a chance meeting. A chance meeting such as this. The alley probably doesn't know what it started. After all, it's just an alley: the urban equivalent of a clearing in the forest, unaware of its own magic.

Through their intimate encounters - first kisses, first arguments, idle smalltalk about cobbles and warships, break-ups and reunions - the city is slowly reconfigured. This is a tourist trail of echoes. Outwardly mundane spots - nooks, crannies, air-vents, benches - are elevated into monuments to their romantic entanglements.

The lingering tremors, still vibrating long after the event, are well handled in Gemma Kerr's production. You tingle as their recounted; your spine seems to shiver. Matt Odell and Rosie Waters step in and out of a story that may or may not be theirs: playing out an argument, reconstructing an embrace. Their fictional counterparts, also Matt and Rosie, seem like invisible ghosts, superimposed on the geography. They exist as spaces. We seem to stand around them looking on, while Odell and Waters narrate their private thoughts and actions. To us, we are watching an embrace caught in time, stamped onto the nondescript urban landscape like lovers transposed onto celluloid. To passers by, walking through the city as per, unaware of Matt and Rosie's history, we must appear to be focussing in on nothing in particular.

And, in a sense, we are. Lovers Walk is as light and frothy as a first-date cappuccino. It's airy and sweet, but it barely offers anything calorific. Nor does Matt and Rosie's relationship seem a particularly interesting specimen. They meet, they court, they fall in love, he cheats, they break up, they struggle apart, they reconvene. The narrative comes straight off the production line; turn it upside down and you'll find "Made in Curtisland" printed underneath. But only by fitting the mould does it gain its considerable charm.

The path it follows, the story it unravels episodically, is the standard-issue fairytale for an audience that won't allow itself to believe in fairytales. It has just the right amount of heartbreak to appease the cynicism of the urban romantic. Where traditional fairytales have their protagonists overcome adversity in order for love to blossom, the contemporary equivalent has chance throw lovers together before ensuring that they produce their own obstacle, which is, in turn, subdued. We simply won't accept the smooth running of true love and so Marcelo dos Santos throws in an affair - and a drunken, impulsive, one-off affair at that.

Matt's fling, then, the obstacle to their blossoming relationship is a contemporary cliche. But, because it seems to subvert the notion of fairytale, confirming our realistic expectations that love is not an easy ride, it is precisely what allows us to take ownership of the narrative ourselves. Their imperfections allow us to cast ourselves as Romeo and leap into the fantasy of life throwing up a soulmate from the flotsam of the urban existence.

Like the South Bank, it's not so much that Lovers Walk overcomes its cliches to acquire its romance. Rather it does so by wearing those cliches quite openly. Our ownership of both occurs because they exist as conventional ideals. We picture ourselves stepping into the archetypal fantasy, rather than happening upon our own route. Not only can we see ourselves as Rosie or Matt, we positively long for what they've got.

Lovers Walk manipulates those whimsical ambitions artfully. But you can't help but feel a bit cheated afterwards.

Review: Boiling Frogs, Southwark Playhouse

An edited version appeared in Time Out

You can't boil a frog by adding hot water. Gradually increase the heat, however, and it will accept its fate compliantly. Steven Bloomer's lofty play - left-leaning all the way off its high horse - attacks our unwitting complicity in the similar erosion of our civil liberties. Freedom of speech, he suggests, is as fantastical as hobbits and elves.

Bloomer twists the present into an Orwellian police state laced with Dario Fo's absurdity. As carnival placates the locals, the police enjoy a shindig of their own: passing nibbles and popping streamers. Locked in a shrinking cell downstairs, as yet uncharged, are two costumed protestors (Superman and Jesus, who closer resembles Gandhi) and a policeman. Faced with their own prisoner's dilemma, the three turn on one another.

However, Bloomer mistakes a balloon debate for drama, presenting not people but points on a triangle: apathy, idealism and action. His insistence on our culpability, noble though it sounds, grows wearisome. Besides, there's a nagging hypocrisy: if he really cares, why rail in a fringe theatre?

There are deft touches, notably Pochoir's boilersuit costumes stencilled with Banksy-like uniforms, but The Factory's laboratory techniques and multiple casts become redundant: hangovers from their feted improvised classics that, here, needlessly scuff the polish.

Review: Deathtrap, Noel Coward Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

There’s more than a whiff of The Master Builder about Ira Levin’s comedy-thriller. The once-celebrated crime writer Sidney Bruhl (Simon Russell Beale) hasn’t had a commercial hit in years. With funds running dry, he finds himself stalking the floorboards of his study with the perfect manuscript in his hands. Only it’s not his script, but that of bright-eyed whippersnapper Clifford Anderson (Jonathan Groff). There’s one thing for it, really: murder. Make a killing to make a killing. It’s not so much youth beating on the door, as the dour beating up the youth.

At least, that’s how the situation seems. Levin’s script, committed to celluloid in 1982 with Michael Caine and Christopher Reeve, turns somersaults like the showiest of gymnasts. While the first of these is genuinely leap-from-your-seat spectacular, the remainder can’t match it for kicks. Largely that’s because Levin’s is a thriller about thrillers. It becomes so meta-theatrical, that it begins to teach you its own rules. Both Bruhl and Anderson frequently remarking that the course of events would make a great thriller – so great, in fact, that each sits down to write a version of it. The various plots become too legible. We know by the end, for example, that any corpse cloaked in shadows will spring to life with a furious vengeance. The scares don’t shock.

But are they meant to? Isn’t Deathtrap, seen as a discussion of the form, a demolition of its own ambitions? After all, it plays by the rules of conventional dramaturgy, whereby structures are well-rounded and complete within a closed system, meaning that the clues are inevitably available. Levin takes that to the extreme, bringing on a supposed psychic, Helga ten Dorp, whose first prediction comes to pass – genuinely unexpectedly – forcing our attention to the inevitably of her second: that a ceremonial dagger hanging on the wall will kill Sidney Bruhl. Once the witches’ predictions are set in motion, Macbeth can chill, but it can never thrill. As Christopher Hart noted in the Sunday Times, Rob Howell’s set, which resembles the ribcage of a whale with its arching beams, takes the ‘gun on the wall’ principle to the nth degree. It’s every surface is hung with potential murder weapons: axes and crossbows, pikes and spikes, each a sword of Damocles hanging. Deathtrap knows that – as a play that aims to satisfy – its audience are halfway there already, considering the playwrights options. The thriller writer’s skill is in the wrongfooting with misdirection, but we’re on the lookout even there.

Levin gets all that. His entire narrative concerns two men consciously plotting – both on the page and against each other, seeking the unnoticed chink in the other’s defences to make their pounce. The question as to whether life imitates art or art life is all-pervasive. The writers are both killing for their art and simultaneously making an art of killing. Deathtrap is an admission of conceit and contrivance.

That’s why Levin opts for roguish humour and camp archness. He knows his hopes of thrilling flap about like a suffocating fish, so chooses instead to amuse. And with a cracking line in guiltily pleasurable one-liners, some of which creak like floorboards in a gothic novel, he has a knack for crowd-pleasing.

In Simon Russell Beale’s mouth, such groaners become lip-smacking. No one savours a forced pun like Russell Beale. He seems to taste the syllables, curling his lips into a half-smile that’s simultaneously shameful and smug. A little movement of the head, neither a nod nor a shake but a pompous vibration, follows like the aftershock of orgasm. This is Russell Beale playing, enjoying the ridiculousness of theatre in a way that many relish the furrowed rigour. He delights in sending himself up, tickling us as he goes. And yet, every now and then, there’s a rasp of cruelty at the back of his throat: a threat kicks out, almost hellish in voice, before the humming niceties return.

Unfair to expect it possibly, but Jonathan Groff is far less virtuosic. He’s got a nice balance of chest-puffed pride and demure sweetness, but Clifford’s precociousness seems to stem from the actor himself. There’s something gross about Groff, like a hairball you can’t quite bring yourself to swallow. He’s fine, but he’s greasy, almost over eager to demonstrate his talent, but doing nothing beyond the obvious.

As Bruhl’s wife, Claire Skinner is suitably anaemic, but Estelle Parsons is rather too full-bodied as Helga ten Dorp. Where Russell Beale keeps tight restraint on his zeal, Parsons overdoes it: popping her eyeballs and rolling her Germanic accent ad infinitum.

Yes, Deathtrap swallows itself in its own reflexive rotations, but as guilty pleasures go, it’s moreish.

Photograph: Hugo Glendinning

Review: The Wonderful World of Hugh Hughes, Barbican Pit Theatre

Written for Time Out

Hugh Hughes could stare into the bottom of a pint glass, swill the dregs and still call it half-full. He sees the world through rose-tinted glasses and greets it with an open-mouthed smile of gormless wonder.

Everything is brilliant; everything's amazing. So brilliant and amazing, in fact, that the Welsh emerging artist feels his every discovery needs sharing. Far from grating, however, this permanent puppyish enthusiasm is infectious: just the tonic for for the cynicism and drudgery of London.

Hughes is the semi-fictional alter-ego of Shon Dale-Jones. He's not just a character in a play, but one that creates and stars in plays of his own making. The three shows that form the Barbican's mini-season, each having started life at the Edinburgh Fringe, are pockmarked with Hughes's characteristic naivety. They work because nothing quite works. Hughes's failures are Dale-Jones's successes.

In Floating, Hughes recounts how - just as he was leaving it - the Isle of Anglesey uprooted itself and toured the North Atlantic, unnoticed, while the world's eyes were on the Faulklands. The homely clutter and jumbled over-excitement is pared down for Story of a Rabbit - the most exquisite of the three - in which Hughes entwines his father's death with that of a neighbour's pet rabbit.

Just as things teeter into whimsy or sentimentality, Hughes punctures proceedings by eagerly showing his workings. It's a smart device, allowing Dale-Jones to have it both ways: he can explain his intentions without the hassle of actually acheiving them in practice.

The limitations become apparent in 360, in which an irritable Hughes aims to retune his joie de vivre by climbing Snowdon. Though ostensibly about friendship, it's more about being Hugh Hughes. Turned inwards, it veers into indulgence - as if Dale-Jones has fallen for his own creation. He's right to, but only when we see through his eyes to the wonderful world beyond.

Review: Waiting in the Wings, Pentameters Theatre

Written for Time Out

They don't make them like this any more. Waiting in the Wings, the fiftieth play to emerge from the nib of Noel Coward, arrives at the Pentameters Theatre looking like it's spent the past half-century pickled in formaldehyde.

Toothier productions might have drawn comment on an ageing society or twisted the thumbscrews on a vacuous, backstabbing media culture fueled by gossip. Not so director Aline Waites, who's content to celebrate its gentle joviality and nostalgic pensiveness as is.

This isn't Coward at his best. Set in The Wings, a retirement home where old luvvies go to die, it centres on the rivalry between two grand dames, May Davenport (Frances Cuka) and the newly arrived Lotta Bainbridge (Juliet Aykroyd). But the latter's keenness to appease diffuses any narrative impetus and the setting lends itself to Coward's specialism in snide retorts too easily. Delivered as reflexes, they lose their pointedness.

There's warmth and tenderness enough to redeem the docility of its farce. Waiting in the Wings is laced with a touching melancholy - May, in particular, struggles to accept faded glories. Mostly it throbs with robust vigour and dignity: qualifies exemplified by the veteran performers, with Audrey Nicholson and Maggie McCourt providing a strong case against retirement alongside Cuka and Aykroyd.

Review: Clybourne Park, Royal Court

“Knowledge is power, Bev.” So decrees all-American Jim when bickering with his wife over the origins of the word Neapolitan as applied to the tricolour ice-cream. True as that may be, it’s not the only weapon used in the two power-struggles fought over house number 406 on Clybourne Park. Though separated by half a century (to the very hour), both battles hinge on roots, rights and, most doggedly of all, race. Combatants use class as artillery and thick-skins as armour, seeking to claim the tactically advantageous moral high-ground with mock-offence. The outcome matters dearly. After all, as one pugilistic proprietor explains, “The history of America is the history of property.”

Clybourne Park is an area of Chicago, into which – in Lorraine Hansberry’s American classic, A Raisin in the Sun – a black family aspires to relocate following an inherited sum of $10,000 shortly after the Second World War. It’s an exclusively white neighbourhood and there’s some debate amongst members of the Younger family as to whether the move will prove beneficial or inflammatory. On learning of their new neighbours-to-be, the local residents send one Mr Karl Linder on behalf of the Clybourne Park Improvement Association, offering money if the Youngers keep to their side of the city.

Bruce Norris fills in the gaps with this intelligent time-hopping two-act play, which leaves a sour aftertaste lingering as the laughter fades.

His first act presents the opposite side of this transaction. We learn that the property’s price has been knocked down after the suicide of the owners’ son, Kenneth, who was a Korean war veteran. Into this grief-stricken household strides Karl Linder (Martin Freeman), adamant that the sale will demean the neighbourhood, both morally and financially. The sale, he insists with increasingly overt racist tones, must not go ahead. “First one family will leave, then another, and another, and each time they do, the values of these properties will decline.”

As it so happens, Karl’s predictions prove spot on. By the second act, in 2009, the house is falling apart. Its walls are rotten with damp, its windows are clouded with dirt. In the eyes of Steve and Lindsey, a middle-class white couple, it’s perfect. Not to live in, per se, but to rebuild upon. The only problem is the neighbourhood’s representatives, a black couple, are keen to preserve the area’s cultural heritage. For the past fifty years, it has housed an exclusively black community. The sparring couples, overseen by their respective legal representatives, wind up competing with a string of increasingly offensive racist jokes, as if each is keen to assert that race totally isn’t the sticking point.

Throughout Norris nails a whiplash comedy. The laughter he achieves is so close the knuckle that your head half-turns away from the stage in recoil.

The first act resembles a period sit-com, only one that refuses to confirm its gags with an outward glance or knowing nod. It’s framed by a comedic theme tune that comes tinkling from the wireless. The lighting is stark and white; at once a crime scene under investigation and a television studio. Sophie Thompson’s Bev wears a clownish smile, all teeth and lipstick, that often seems a demented grimace. She bustles around the house, keeping up appearances and attempting to maintain civility as debate descends towards a full-scale riot.

Into this room, Norris places a herd of elephants. If Karl and Jim initially dance around the central issue of race, you know that the room will eventually spark on account of the inflammatory circumstances. Karl’s wife is deaf, so a great deal needs repeating. Bev talks of a ‘monogloid’ working in a nearby grocery store. Jim refuses to admit mention of his dead son. All the while, Francine – the family’s black maid – and her partner Albert tuck themselves away in a corner, half-unnoticed, as the argument spirals. It’s furiously tense and, when it finally boils over, intensely furious.

Later, Norris employs a different tactic, turning to comedy of painted smiles, and righteous appeasement. Tiptoeing platitudes, the desperation not to cause offence, replace the brazen candidness of the fifties.

My reservation, though, is the neatness with which Norris parallels the two eras. Time and again, the contemporary second act mirrors or inverts its predecessor. In both, Lucian Msamati deadpans a joke, mocking the unsaid assumptions, which is twice met with uncertain silence. There are two pregnant women and two arguments over trivial geographical labels. Certain phrases snag on your ear, half-familiar. While the footlocker trunk containing Kenneth’s possessions needs to make its double appearance, I feel that Norris overplays his hand. Given, for example, Karl’s first-act dismissal of ‘skiing negroes,’ it almost groaningly inevitable that the contemporary black couple will favour winter sports. The repetition of set, time and actors – not to mention the reversal of the entire situation – is more than enough to set us comparing and contrasting.

But to hang Dominic Cooke’s fraught yet skittish production for such momentary excesses would be unfair. It is, without exception, impeccably acted. Freeman excels as both the finicky Karl, padding down the pockets on his jacket as he tries every angle of attack, and Steve, more amicably incredulous but equally stubborn. Sophie Thompson, more cartoonish than those around her, finds a neat thread of discombobulated mania connecting Bev’s frailty and Kathy’s laconic drawl. Msamati and Steffan Rhodri both manage perfect archetypal American figures before and after the break, while Lorna Brown and Sarah Goldberg switch from silent bystanders to prattling one-upmanship effortlessly.

Ignore the consciously sentimental ending, which owes too great a debt to the ghosts of J.B. Priestley and Tennessee Williams, and Clybourne Park is a wicked delight. Car-crash comedy, perhaps even anti-comedy, which keeps the Royal Court’s sharp eye trained on its audience and savages the American bourgeois.

Review: How to be an Other Woman, Gate Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

There comes a certain point in a young woman’s life, probably somewhere in her early to mid-twenties, when the place once occupied by Disney’s princesses is usurped by Hollywood’s sirens. Wide-eyed, white-toothed wholesomeness is no longer satisfactory. Allure takes over. Glamour gains a sexual edge. For the princess is fortunate: her material benefits – ballgowns, tiaras and the like – are bestowed upon her. She is privileged, yes, but she is merely fortunate. The mistress, however, is her own woman. Using her feminine assets, her desirability, as a stranglehold over slack-jawed men, she deserves her fineries of choice: shoes, champagne and such. She earns her keep – and she keeps her earnings long after each admirer departs.

Lorrie Moore’s Other Woman, Charlene – a creature most definitely worthy of capitalization – remains anonymous and archetypal in Natalie Abrahami’s physical adaptation. She is a dream figure, one that has slipped from the silver screen into the streets of New York, as ethereal and unreal as a reflection in a department store window. Stepping into her (designer) shoes is a moment to be savoured. Taking the role in turn, each of the four female cast members slide slowly into her beige mac, flicking the wrist as it emerges from the sleeve and extending the arm in marvelling self-admiration. In the background, perhaps somewhere in their heads, there is a musical twinkle: the sort that marks the silver stars and magic dust of Cinderella’s transformation.

Abrahami is careful to keep this figure a fantastical fiction. She exists only as enacted by four department store dollies, as does the married man for whom she falls head over high heels. He is a silent, shadowy and unsentimental presence, always cradling her from behind. Sharply turned out, but never showy, his eyes are always hidden beneath the tilt of his trilby. He oozes outward confidence, yet is always gentle with her. He is the epitome of eroticism, a perfect balance of danger and paternalism.

When these two fantasies collide, it’s the man that wins out. The casual nature of his desire outmanoeuvres her capitalization of it. There is, it would seem, a remnant of the princess beneath the Other Woman. For all the excitement of the dashing cad and the rewards of laconic manipulation, there still exists a little girl longing to be loved, envious of the other Other Women, delicate, brittle and ultimately unsatisfied. She is caught in a paradox of empowerment and submission, left walking a boulevard of broken dreams, staring at her reflection in a rain-soaked department store window.

Perhaps Abrahami – following Moore’s lead, admittedly – comes perilously close to giving up on men altogether, sweeping us under the carpet as uncaring, capricious, lust-led bastards. There is, however, at least an undercurrent against the idealised form presented. That the women play the trilbied chap, always falling short of genuine masculinity, suggests the unrealistic impossibility of the Platonic construct.

At the risk of shattering anyone’s image of my own mysterious masculinity, I rather enjoyed How to be an Other Woman. It has the whimsical comfort factor of romance, the sort that draws you sofa-wards to pass a rainy afternoon in front of a classic film.

To do so, though, one must settle into it. One must overlook a certain lack of snap, because Abrahami’s production is a little reserved and, dare I say it, a bit British. It’s coy rather than sexy and a touch precious where it should be brassy. To borrow from Sex & the City (and further undermine my own masculine credentials), there’s too much Charlotte, not enough Samantha. More problematically, Abrahami replicates a familiar style rather than fully owning it, playing at where she ought to be playing straight or playing with. The instructional nature of Moore’s text remains intact, narrated as if stage directions, but it’s handled with a literalism that reduces it to tell and show stuff.

That’s not to suggest an absence of invention. As it warms up – maybe as we warm to it – the staging becomes more complex, bolder. Beige macs take over to become a walk-in closet and a marital bed; the ensemble knits together, multiplying the populace that surround the Other Woman with echoing gestures. It begins to capture the cyclone of the city and, gradually, the Other Woman seems a windswept little girl lost.

Of the uneven cast, Cath Whitefield demonstrates precisely how to multi-role, capturing the essence of a caricature with a deft precision and, more importantly, genuine commitment. Faye Castelow suits the Other Woman like a glass slipper: gamine, doe-eyed and full of delicate charm.

Enjoyable though it is, Abrahami’s production never really critiques Moore’s perspective. Despite locating the world in a daydream with Samal Blak’s shimmering, sleek design suggesting the a Vogue fashion shoot, Abrahami never punctures the bubble. She permits the material girl her aspirations and, even when the affair turns sour, there’s a nagging sense that the Other Woman ought dust herself down and try again. Perhaps there’s hope in that – the princess still searching for her prince – but there’s also an inevitability of repetition. The magnetism of the enigma remains reward in and of itself. Ensnare the man, become the Other Woman. It aspires to be treated like a princess with or without the happily ever after.

Is that problematic? I’m not sure it’s my place to say.

Review: The Maddening Rain, Old Red Lion

Written for Culture Wars

Across the stage of the Old Red Lion, yellow arrows point to a door labelled ‘Stage Right Exit.’ The way out is clearly marked. Whether anyone will use it is another thing altogether.

The same could be said of the city trader stood before us: a sensitive soul in a suit, a lamb in scapegoat’s clothing. In the midst of the big-bucks boom, anyone could have walked away and yet no one did. Why would they? With its £400,000 bonuses, its after-hours magnums, Porsches and girls denying their Essex roots before you’ve even asked, surely the trading floor beats the “dead time” of bank telling or Marks & Spencer tilling, doesn’t it? You don’t even need to understand the economics. Felix Scott’s amicably, doltish self-starter hasn’t the foggiest what those around him mean when they start using “words like crash and recession.” That’s no bother, he’s just got to buy in, keep his head down and follow the first rule of trading: don’t lose money.

There’s a lot going on in Nicholas Pierpan’s monologue, which dissects the seduction of the city with surgical precision. He paints a vivid picture of contemporary London, twisting it from utopian moments of sunshine and sweethearts to a droid-filled dystopia inhabited by identikit individuals. No one really likes each other here; no meaningful common ground is shared. Hollow laughter rings out, bloated one-upmanship bounces around. Deloitte becomes “a human battery farm,” herding its workforce up to Leicester for a colleague’s funeral. This pack mentality is underpinned by a dog eat dog culture. Just as in the morality tale that provides Pierpan’s title, in which a town goes mad beneath a contagious downpour, the insane lead the insane. To survive, let alone to thrive, the sane must catch the bug. In Pierpan’s eyes, the city is infectious.

That sane man is our eyes on this world. But he only seems sane because of his candour. Thanks to Alison McDowall’s intelligent set, which shows us a backstage area with double doors leading to an office (that budget constraints leave too shabby by half), we know that Scott is not presenting the public face of this anonymous trader. He admits as much; that he laughs along at their jokes; that he bluffs and showboats with the worst of them. Here, however, he is very much a whistleblower.

The thing about whistleblowers is that their revelations lose force with hindsight. Come 1913, any old fool could identify the Titanic’s susceptibility to icebergs. So it is with Pierpan’s text: we already know the ills of greed. (Even the coffee shop used by the traders is called Mammon.) Dominic Savage’s brilliant television drama Freefall told us, Lucy Prebble’s Enron told us, thelondonpaper’s City Boy told us.

That turns the stage into, if not exactly the stocks (Scott’s character is too sympathetically drawn for that), then certainly a public tribunal. There is a touch too much self-pity and self-loathing about Scott, a sheepishness that appears too early. We know that it’s going to burst, Scott can’t afford to. From its outset, The Maddening Rain is an apology. Its tail is firmly between its legs.

However, that shouldn’t take away from Scott’s formidable handling of the narrative itself. Even if he doesn’t feel entirely real, you’re hanging off every word of Pierpan’s well-constructed tale, eager for it to unravel in spite of its archetypes: the wideboys and wizzkids sat side by side, the letches and lost loves, the blue and white collars. Credit must be shared with director Matthew Dunster, who handles a one man show like Nigella Lawson handles puddings. His touch is epicurean and enjoyable. What would be excessive with a larger cast, compliments the sparseness of the monologue form. Muted music, almost as if heard underwater, adds location; the sound of screeching tubes or landing airplanes, increasingly metallic and grating, suggests the impending crash; Emma Chapman’s ever-changing mood lighting, for all its tendency towards being prescriptive and unsubtle, keeps things visually exciting.

With new artistic directors Henry Filloux-Bennett, Stephen Makin and Kellie Spooner – seemingly a young and savvy bunch – replacing Helen Devine at the end of the month, they could do worse than set the bar with The Maddening Rain. It does exactly what Fringe theatre ought to be doing – albeit a bit late.

Photo credit: Jenny Grand

Review: Teenage Riot, Traverse Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Teenage Riot is a magic eye. / It’s a two-tone tie. / It’s a line-drawn bunny that seems like a duck. / It’s a rotating advertisement perfectly stuck.

Teenage Riot is two shows in one. What you see depends entirely on your angle of approach. It’s no surprise, then, that it has split opinion and been both vigorously championed and violently condemned. Look at it one way and you have a crass, confused, aggressive and illogical piece of fierce teenage rhetoric and anti-adult agit-prop. Look at it another and you have a poignant expression of the failure and impossibility entailed by the teenage existence and experience. The first sees a tantrum thrown; the second sees a tantrum shown.

What we see is a white box in the middle of an empty stage, into which eight teenagers retreat and shut themselves away. As they enter one by one, each throws us a look that’s half accusatory and half apologetic. It’s a look that seems to say, “It’s come to this. Shame.”

The cube functions as a literal den: the sort of teenage bedroom that has ‘Adults F**k Off’ scratched on the door. But it also recalls the absolute insolubility between generations in terms of culture and communication. All that we see of the interior, its contents and inhabitants, is delivered to us in a mediatised form: filmed and project onto the front of the box. The film cleverly welded together such that the divide between live action and pre-recorded events is almost inconspicuous. Sometimes you know, sometimes you can’t be sure, sometimes you’re duped with clever stageplay.

Now, it strikes me that Teenage Riot was (in part, at least) born out of a particular discussion that surrounded Ontroerend Goed’s previous show performed by teenagers, Once and For All We’re Going to Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up And Listen, namely that the teenage performers were not speaking for themselves. In other words, the version of adolescence that they were acting out and referring to was actually imposed upon them by the older creative team. To a certain degree, it’s a fair cop: Once and For All... thrives on a certain nostalgia, but, personally, I never felt it a problem. It was a play. It had a process, like many plays. The teenagers were performing it. I recognised my teenage experience within it, as did others, as did – I believe – the cast themselves. I believed in it. They believed in it.

Here, the cast have control of what we see. Quite literally, they control they way in which they project themselves. The staging also serves as a neat device that throws up the mediatisation of the 2.0 world and user-generated content. Early on, one says: “We’re going to do whatever we want to.” No one, they insist repeatedly and vociferously, is putting words into their mouths or shaping their actions.

How one responds to Teenage Riot largely depends on whether one accepts that statement or not. The first time I watched Teenage Riot – in a room hot with anticipation and performances that probably rose to meet it – I didn’t buy it.

Mainly, I think, because the piece seemed to have forgotten the ambiguity and multiplicity of onstage reality. It seemed to have forgotten our predisposition to doubt. By setting out so consciously and deliberately to be authentic, it only raised the question of its own authenticity. Onstage, “This is real” cannot but become “Is this real?” So, the more that Teenage Riot insisted on its veracity, the more I doubted it. Little wonder that when the piece says “we’re going to do whatever we want to” (or, to put it more poetically, “I don’t got to do shit”), we become aware of the artificiality of the situation. After all, we know that their actions are preset and rehearsed, that this – live though it is – has been constructed, that it is not solely a product of this moment. We know that the camera has a set path. They can do whatever they want only within the context of a set text. They can show us what they want only insofar as they stick to what they have previously decided to show. We see the presence of an undisclosed process, about which we know nothing. We do not know how this material originated. We have no way of verifying their claim to total authorship. In fact, we start to suspect otherwise. We doubt.

Therefore, when the cast stand onstage and accuse the audience of all manner of sins – incidentally tarring us with a single brush in precisely the way that they reject our singular projection of the archetypal teenager onto each of them – I reacted against it. “You are not an example,” they say, having pelted the images of certain audience members with tomatoes, “You are a warning.” “It’s not your problem,” one of them says. “How dare they?” I thought, “How dare they assume, not only that I don’t share some of these problems as a twenty-five year old, but that I’m actually responsible for them.” In fact, given my cynicism about the authorship of the piece, it felt to me as if the adults behind the piece were delivering a smug and sanctimonious set of accusations that implied their own superiority. (Rather hotheadly, I tweeted as much immediately afterwards.) “We work with teenagers. We make theatre,” it seemed to say, “What do you do?” I left seething.

After my tweet, I was asked to see the show again by Ontroerend Goed’s director Alexander Devriendt and to take the teens at their word by accepting that they had control over the piece’s content. Watching in this way second time around, in a calmer auditorium that drew more level-headed performances, Teenage Riot became less about its riot and more about its teenagers. What the teenagers said, shouted and did sat behind the way in which they spoke, shouted and behaved. Rather than heeding their polemic and reacting against it on the basis of its flaws, I began to see its shortcomings as the focal point. In other words, rather than watching the show from or by the teenagers, I was watching the show about them: the tantrum shown, rather than the tantrum thrown.

After all, what hope of constructing a piercing social critique when, as one of the song lyrics runs, “I want almost everything.” Besides, as one of the boys says to camera with his back towards us, “what comes out of my mouth never seems to be what I think.”

What emerges is a picture of adolescent frustration that rings true. It is not so much what they try to provoke as that they try to provoke; not such much about understanding their inarticulate formation, as appreciating its inarticulacy. Their Teenage Riot is always pitched at the highest volume, it is all taken to excess. They rail against so much – the way in which teenagers are seen; the identities thrust upon them; the world in which they exist with its various pressures of appearance, sex and behaviour; the world that was created before they arrived, over which they had no say; their own state of ‘not a girl, not yet a women’ inadequacy – that their piece of theatre is inevitably toppled by its own scattergun density. It fails to communicate as a result of (to quote soundtrack’s the final song) “the fury in your head.” This is not a provocation, but a testimony to the teenage need to provoke and the impossibility of doing so.

Essentially, Belgian collective Ontroerend Goed have done a Duchamp. They have framed a piece of theatre and presented it as a living artefact. Unlike Duchamp’s Fontaine, however, the thing presented remains in the same context. There is no signification about its status. Presenting a piece of theatre – warts and all – in a theatre is like showing us a urinal on the wall of the Gents. How are we supposed to know to look differently?

Teenage Riot’s failure comes in not revealing the quotation marks that sit around the whole. There are two frames here. The first exists around the piece made by the teenagers, which, by existing on a stage, can be watched like any other piece of theatre, by seeking meaning in the same way. The second exists around this first frame, and it means that every action on stage carries a second layer of meaning: it matters more as an example of a statement, than as a statement in its own right. However, the outer frame does not enforce its presence and so it’s quite possible to watch Teenage Riot in accordance with the usual rules, the single-frame format, of conventional theatre. To do so, however, is to see Teenage Riot as I did first time around.

This begs a slightly different question of Ontroerend Goed. While it avoids accusations of manipulation, it perhaps raises the question of exploitation. After all, the company are using the actions and words of their teenage cast in a different way than the teenagers intend them. For those words and actions to function, the teenagers must believe that they are genuinely accusing the audience, when in fact they are testifying to themselves and their peers. Everything the cast are driving at seems undermined by its existence in inverted commas.

However, the picture is not quite as clean cut as all that. The boundaries are blurred. After all, the adult members of the company must be quite happy with (some of, if not all) the accusations being made, just as the teenagers must be quite happy to stand as examples of their own frustration. The cast let us know, quite frequently throughout the piece, how hard being a teenager today can be. That difficulty reflects rather badly on the world created by their elders. In those terms, the piece as much an accusation against the adults of Ontroerend Goed as it is the audience. We are all pilloried and vilified, but it is an easy argument to escape and counter. Teenage Riot is as much in the mind as it is outside of their control. The combination is combustible.

Perhaps that’s where the poignancy of their final split exists. After blaming and humiliating us, presenting some of our number onscreen and pelting their images with tomatoes, the teenagers split. Half return to the box, half enter the auditorium. They are each caught for a moment, some more indecisive than others: not wanting to lose the righteousness that senses the problems with the world, but wanting to escape the fury in their heads. As one girl suggests, even as an adult “I’ll say I’m as angry as a fourteen year old.” The tragedy is that we can’t have a happy medium. Either we exist in the box, struggling with our own frustrations, or we come to accept the wrongs for the sake of a quiet life.

Either we throw a tantrum or else we throw a towel.