Review: The Thrill of It All, Riverside Studios

Written for Culture Wars

“We’re going to take you on an adventure,” intones an impish woman in a sequinned dress, “with a capital A.” Her voice is a squeak, manipulated by her microphone so that it fizzes with over-excitement. It seems like the room has been pumped with a cocktail of helium and laughing gas. This, she explains, is going to be fun. As in capital letters, ten feet high, flashing in beautiful neon fun. Not just fun, but fun exclamation mark exclamation mark smiley face.

As always with Forced Entertainment’s work, the foremost story is that of the show itself. Here, it is a show desperate to do its utmost; one that sets itself such high ambitions that – if all goes to plan – there’ll be no point in playing it again tomorrow. Of course, that show buckles under its own pressure. Orchestrated fun is no fun at all and its not long before the cracks become fissures become chasms. The more it breaks, the harder they try; the harder they try, the more it breaks and so on until a brawl has erupted and the show as intended is more or less forgotten. It swallows itself like a white dwarf become black hole.

For the most part, it feels like a working men’s club cabaret in the land before time. The troupe seem a Neanderthal display team. Their wigs – identical black mop-tops for the boys, blonde for the girls – are dishevelled and askew, ungroomed despite the crass glitz of their costumes. Spangled dresses sit unsubtly above red leather boots. Cream blazers collide with bright red shirts and snakeskin boots. Behind them is a clump of fake palm trees, awkwardly fashioned from felt and crepe paper. Its Tropicana via Tesco’s Value: a very everyday exoticism.

The early hedonism – implicit in a title that evokes both cravings and overdose – is presented with a certain primitive edge. It is born of animal urges and the simple sensory delights of being alive. There is no thought of later, of the bigger picture, the whole, only now, here, this, me.

Where the women are light, ticklish and flirtatious, the men are flat-footed and heavy: their distorted voices are deep and woozy. One sex quick-witted, sensible and very much in charge; the other lurching and lumbering, drowsily confessing sentimental meanderings. Where the women ponder the ‘Big Questions’, the men profess love to random, assorted audience members, all the while competing, upstaging and outdoing one another.

And they all dance, terribly, to a mix-tape’s worth of Japanese lounge music, crooning fifties pop that remains resolutely cheerful.

To paraphase Eric Morecambe, they’ve got all the right moves, but not necessarily in the right order. Tim Etchells manages the mangled routines with a sharp eye for frayed edges. Each follows the same choreography – a jazz hand here, a hop and a step there – but it can’t coalesce. Symmetry is beyond them. Each wears his or her own gait too strongly. Some sashay, others goosestep. High kicks hit different heights, one or two barely making it above the ankles. Occasionally, they veer too close to one another: half-colliding, half-emergency-stopping.

And all the while, each wears an expression of intense concentration – making their shoddy achievements all the more absurd. Eyes dart with uncertainty, looking to other performers for confirmation and to us for affirmation. Fixed smiles cause facial cramps and, before long, fade into grimaces.

In all this, we get what we have come to expect of Forced Entertainment: well-choreographed collapse of the theatrical event. But, more so than much of their work, The Thrill of It All resonates with the world beyond the stage. It packs a significant political punch as well.

It comes in the decay of a thrill-seeking boom that implodes. The happy families of the first half, clumped on a sofa as if guests on a chat show, end up bickering and brawling. In their attempts at hedonism and immediate gratification, the need for increasing pleasure, the party gets punctured. Early on, they list a series of dreamy desires. “Wouldn’t it be nice,” they repeat, “if taps ran with lemonade.” Or if men’s sweat tasted of candyfloss rather than old socks. Or if heroin wasn’t addictive. This is care-free thinking, imagining a state of affairs that – as the repeated formula makes clear – absolutely isn’t the case. “Wouldn’t it be nice,” you can imagine them offering, “if booms were never again followed by busts.”

But, of course, that bust inevitably comes. Eventually one man, Jerry, stands barking orders at another, Tom, who has previously admitted that he’s rather down in the mouth tonight and might be better off calling it quits. Instead, he’s stood centre stage being forced to extract laughter from us by naming fruits and falling flatter and flatter. The resultant rebukes sprout bouts of fisticuffs. After a while, everyone’s involved and the initial dispute is forgotten. It’s like a stag weekend in its final throngs. Sluggish punches miss their targets. Bodies grapple to keep the peace. It’s not fun any more.

And from there, the question of recovery looms into view: how, you think, does this regain its momentum, its joie de vivre? Until, from behind a miniature drum kit, a voice pipes up with ominous familiarity. “After all,” it says, “we’re all in this together aren’t we?”

Photographs: Hugo Glendinning

Review: Parachutists or On the Art of Falling, Barbican Pit

Written for Culture Wars

It’s not just gravity that makes us fall. Hearts can have an equal pull, according to this charming but bitty piece for children from Croatia’s Theatre Mala Scena.

At one level, it’s a wordless lecture about the science of flight. In rolled down jumpsuits, Kristina Bajza Marcinko and Tomislav Krstanovic demonstrate the paths that objects take through the air, firing balloons that whirligig as they deflate and paper aeroplanes that soar gracefully towards us. The pair clamber over a cubic frame of scaffolding, perching on its corners or hanging off it. Momentarily, they seem to walk on air, pedalling their feet as if hoping over clouds like lilypads.

Yet, all the time, a game of chase is going on, as a playful friendship develops. The two seem to send each other spinning, at one point quite literally, as Krstanovic follows an arrow chalked on his chest like a dog chasing its tail. But they also offer mutual support, leaning into one another like balanced counterpoints.

The truth is, for all its gentle humour and humanity, Parachutists remains rather ordinary. Even when they hang a vast orange parachute as a swing, they rock only back and forth, smiling sweetly at us and each other. It never takes you anywhere, preferring instead to offer objects and body parts for ticklish examination – never transformation.

In fact, Parachutists starts strong: with a series of like-objects – socks, feathers, inflating balloons - peeking from holes in a blue-sky mural before plummeting or plopping to earth. From there, in spite of a few jovial sequences of bawdy playground clowning, Parachutists never really takes off. It sustains itself and the interest of children for forty minutes, but there’s not the terminal velocity for a long-haul trip.

Review: Tribes, Royal Court

The Royal Court sets out once again to expose the ‘er’ at the centre of liberal sensibilities in Nina Raine’s expressive and articulate play that inserts a deaf protagonist into the chattering classes.

At times, Tribes seems like a nature documentary. In its natural habit, primarily pinging provocations around the dinner table, the family unit Raine presents is driven by pack mentality and pecking order. They erect a perimeter fence around themselves with a cultivated cultural bias that both strengthens and excludes. Yet, their meritocratic snobbery belies their social liberalism. Some animals remain more equal than others.

Dad’s an academic, Mum’s a novelist. The eldest, Daniel, is writing a doctoral thesis on linguistic philosophy and Ruth, his sister, is an aspiring but uninspiring opera singer. Billy, the youngest, is deaf.

So, as conversation clatters around the pointedly circular dining table, Billy gets left behind. He sits silent, struggling to spot whose lips need reading before the argument darts off to another of the talking heads around the table. The irony is that Billy has been brought up so as not to be defined by his deafness. His parents absolutely refuse to let it be “a handicap.” That it should prove exactly that is down to their refusal to admit it as such and embrace sign language together.

The telling moment is the family’s reaction to Billy’s new job lip reading for the Crown Prosecution Service, as suggested by his new girlfriend Sylvia. She’s losing her hearing, but having been raised by deaf parents, is fluent in sign and immersed in the Deaf community. On Billy’s announcement, the family stop, stunned, never having considered the possibility of Billy’s deafness proving advantageous. “It’s a skill,” he says. Their astonishment belies the family’s perception that deafness is a disadvantage better glossed over than acknowledged.

The dramatic thrust comes as Billy shifts allegiance, growing ever closer to the Deaf community. Again at Sylvia’s suggestion, he learns sign language, finding his voice for the first time. At the same time, however, Sylvia moves oppositely, looking on the family that comes to accept her as an escape from the insular, hierarchical structures of the Deaf community. “Everyone,” she says, “has slept with everyone.” As her hearing decreases, so do the people with whom she can really communicate, dictated by a mutual fluency in sign.

The conflict, then, is between the acceptance of disability and the refusal to be defined by it.

What’s incredible about Raine’s script is the way in which she constructs a credible world from a single theme. Almost every component part has to do with communication or the impossibility of it. Underneath the surface, which pits lip-reading, sign language and speech in competition, Raine riffs on everything from body language to translation. For instance, Harry Treadaway’s Daniel, Billy’s older brother, develops auditory hallucinations, regains the stammer that afflicted him through childhood and has a slight but mystical ability to communicate with Billy telepathically. It’s as if Raine has painstakingly assembled the play with tweezers and the result is, at one level, a deeply pensive seminar on linguistics.

Roger Michell’s direction picks up on it beautifully, sometimes adding the most remarkable insights with equal delicacy. The projected surtitles that accompany Billy and Sylvia’s signing fade gently, echoing the dispersion of the smoke-filled words that drift from Daniel’s mouth mid-ciggarette. Words become transient. Some are effervescent, some are thudding, but all are fleeting and only half considered. Their effects, however, are strong and often lasting. Here you become attuned the rippling consequences of words uttered. Human communication becomes a chain reaction of cause and – often unintended – effect.

Equally fascinating is Raine’s portrait of the chattering classes. Theirs is a worldview governed by merit – and a particularly bourgeois notion of merit at that. Intellectual snobbery is rife. For this lovingly provocative family, as Daniel says, “you are how talented you are, how quick you are.” “The majority,” jokes Christopher, “is always wrong.” Outsiders are excluded by family slang (cigarettes are ‘nuit-graves’) and in jokes. Ex-girlfriends are derided for their Northern roots and perceived plainness. There is no greater sin than bland conformity. This family abhors a vacuum.

From that worldview, there emerges a savage sibling rivalry. In fact, the whole family seems – for the most part – angry with one another, constantly at each others’ throats. Daniel derides his sister, Ruth prods at her brother. Dad knocks them both at every opportunity, whilst pretentiously over-peppering his figs. Little that his children are yet to leave home, given the exaggerated hype and pressure of the so-called ‘real world’. Raine perfectly captures the paralysing imposition of baby-boomer ideals onto a new generation.

But this is how they love one another: not affectionately, but competitively, challenging one another. Prior to the final conciliatory embrace between brothers, there is almost no physical contact between family members. Occasionally, Daniel pinches Ruth or Ruth flicks out at Daniel, but contact is never born of warmth. The closest we get is when Beth (Kika Markham) sits bursting her son’s blister, hunched over his feet like a personal valet.

What doesn’t quite come across so well is the emotional connection of the piece. In part, that’s down to a second half that, by squeezing too much in, must skim over some narrative progression. Raine is guilty of overdoing the symptoms that we have come to associate with Royal Court kids: the signs of schizophrena that Daniel develops due to pot don’t quite feel deserved and Ruth’s inadequacy, though it justifies her neurotic self-pity, is too all-encompassing.

More than that, though, it is a symptom of Michell’s calculated and minimalist direction, which often feels legible rather than truthful. Rather than playing the family dynamic naturalistically, allowing his characters to wonder whither they please, Michell choreographs them into pointed place. We’re never allowed to miss the allegiances being formed thanks to blocking that regularly clumps a group on one side of the table and leaves the individual under attack isolated on the other. Tribes would benefit from more domestic clutter to conceal its thematic aims. Michell needs to distract the characters from the internal relationships if we are to succumb to Tribes emotionally.

That’s also evident in certain performances. Where the various characteristic strands coalesce into a whole – Townsend and Michelle Terry are particularly well-rounded – there’s a transparency to the actor’s workings. As, Billy's elder siblings, Treadaway and Phoebe Waller-Bridge both make excellent choices to convey stilted awkwardness and insecurities, but can’t quite carry them off smoothly. They still feel like conscious choices rather than unconscious traits.

But this is stunning stuff, simultaneously nourishing and beautiful. Challenged on the failings of sign as a linguistic system – the assumption being that one tribes’ language is above anothers – Terry’s Sylvia translates a poem with her hands and there emerges a moment of transfixing serenity. Her hands move with the precision and fluency of kabuki theatre, a rhymthic whir of fingers that – like language spoken – really resonates. Raine’s play – dense, though never tangled; wise, but not pompous; critical, but never harsh – does the same. Forget Clybourne Park, Tribes is the most intelligent and human play of the year.

Review: The Charming Man, Theatre 503

Written for Culture Wars

To be frank, it’s astounding that The Charming Man made it through the Theatre 503’s literary department in its current shape. Unwieldy, baggy and overlong, Gabriel Bisset-Smith’s play scuppers its satirical ambitions with a naivety that goes entirely unchecked. It makes Tim Roseman and Paul Robinson’s recent Guardian blog look all the more ill-considered.

Like criticism, satire need not offer a credible alternative. That is the job of the opposition. What it must do is diagnose the problems with the system and expose them as such. Good political satire is therefore entirely reliant on a sound understanding of the mechanics of contemporary politics. Bisset-Smith might manage the identification of its failings, but he cannot couch them in a credible world. Rather than let punches emerge from the politics, Bisset-Smith shapes the system according to the needs of his satire. As a result, despite being faced with the easiest political target this century, The Charming Man ends up flapping loosely and limply before simply wearing itself out.

More’s the pity, because Bisset-Smith has found a robust starting point: the conflict between honest, heartfelt ideology and populism needed in order to achieve power. It is the dilemma so obviously personified by the Lib-Dems during the last election and, though the play ostensibly concerns the Green party, one suspects that Nick Clegg is Bisset-Smith’s primary foil.

Having piped up at an open meeting to harp on about the solution that youth centres offer, Darren Lloyd (Syrus Lowe) finds himself fast-tracked through the ranks of the Green Party. Before long, he’s at its helm, which – given that he’s both gay and black – throws up a heap of concerns about the electorate’s level of tolerance. A quick spin of sexuality later, Darren finds himself hitched and hurtling towards number 10.

With his bitterest rival, oleaginous old-timer Marcus, heading up the newly-titled Neo Lib Dems, after his victory in a televised ice-dancing competition, Lloyd is pitched in a final televised debate that culminates in a rebuttal of spin and a reclamation of pride.

But Bisset-Smith’s presents a universe so alternate that he can’t really land punches on our political spectrum. How convenient, for example, that the Conservatives and Labour seem to have dropped out of existence? Or that his Paxman-equivalent should kick proceedings off with a question as panderingly easy as “Why should your party be in power?” And what opposition leader calls a radio stations phone-in to personally attack his opposite number?

Bisset-Smith’s biggest mistake, however, is the stupidity of his characters. Does he really expect us to accept this array of morons as educated politicians? Good satire – no, functioning satire – crafts its stupidity intelligently, not simply as default. Stupid decisions are made by intelligent individuals in impossible situations under unbearable pressure.

Instead, the whole thing bears all the reality of a wacky BBC studio sitcom, a tone mirrored by Libby Watson’s atrociously overbearing design. Watson has surrounded the stage with blocks of shiny blue plastic – possibly representing office windows (poorly) – and a strip of bright red. It gives the action absolutely no space to breath whatsoever and is further undermined by an impractical set of wood furnishings that puncture all pace when reconfigured between scenes.

Redeeming features are few and far between. Bisset-Smith achieves a handful of sharp one-liners along the way, which might make it past The Thick of It’s script editors. He gives a nicely cynical view of Obama’s victory, presenting it as a gorgeously far-fetched conspiracy theory, including the ensured election of the worst white president paving the way for a black one, though certain elements – such as the West Wing’s role – have been previously voiced. The brilliantly-cast David Verry gives a strong performance as the self-serving Marcus, lending him all the bloated pomposity of a bullfrog, and Kate Sissons does particularly well to mine credibility from the underwritten former activist Olivia. As the charming man himself, Syrus Lowe is likeable enough, but the text’s tasks are too great.

There's ambition here, both from Bisset-Smith and Theatre 503, but – much like Clegg’s Liberal Democrats – it ends up looking foolhardy and delivering next to nothing.

Review: Ivan and the Dogs, Soho Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

The Ivan of Hattie Naylor’s title might as well be known as the Moscow Mowgli. In a severely impoverished Russia, circa Boris Yeltzin, households must make any savings possible. For the poorest amongst them, this means evicting anything that needs food, drink and warmth. First to go are the dogs, thrown out onto the streets. Next, for the worst hit, are the children.

Ivan Mishukov jumps before being pushed. He escapes his mother’s alcoholic, abusive boyfriend and his “fists like forever” for a feral existence on the city’s savage and over-crowded streets. Alone and unequipped for survival, the four year old finds himself watched over by a pack of dogs. Its not long before he’s joined them, shedding his human traits for canine manners.

The same story was, of course, told by physical theatre troupe New International Encounter. Where their comic, clunky version was drawn with marker pen, Naylor’s is etched out in faint watercolours. The dog that appears projected behind Rad Kaim’s Ivan is as ethereal as a cloud on a blue sky; almost a protective spirit.

Naylor’s script is beautifully played by Kaim, a presence as tender and refined as the finest sirloin. His Ivan recounts his existence “as if it were now” in a voice on the edge of breath. He almost whispers and we lean in to listen. The feral nature is found not in animal savagery but a soft, vulnerability: more dormouse than deerhound. His presence is an airy retreat, tucked unseen into urban crevasses and shadows. His eyes flicker, scanning for danger, but Naim seems simultaneously serene. Until, that is, flight must be swapped for fight and he stands, upright for the first time, his voice grown full, and barks and howls and guards himself with a relative majesty. Still a child, but also a lion.

In all this, Kaim is aided by one of the most fascinating designs this year. Naomi Wilkinson presents a small white box (almost a miniature Appiah space) on stilts. It makes a puppet theatre of the Soho’s space, allowing Kaim to fill it rather than seem adrift. Like Kaim’s delivery, Wilkinson’s space draws us in; it’s theatre’s equivalent of a pinhole camera.

Certainly, it presents Kaim a range of physical options. For the most part he sits, legs dangling, on its edge, like a child on an adult chair or a puppet on a shelf. When inside he crouches, primed for fight or flight. He folds himself into corners and – at the points where Naylor’s script has Ivan at his most animal – Kaim hops to the floor and stands upright, as if at his most human.

If there is a problem, its Naylor’s script itself, which never manages to tear the story open and gorge on its real points of interest. The combination of broken English and child’s eye view – though it increases the softness – flattens the language and the telling glosses over more savage, animal elements, as if embarrassed by them. It is all light and maternal. Occasionally Naylor needs to stop protecting her protagonist, else she risks sentimentality.

The curiosity is that Naylor’s text has birthed an interesting piece in Ellen McDougall’s fine production. In itself, it is flawed, but its manipulation and execution employ such delicate slight of hand that they are circumnavigated deftly. A simple and pure piece of theatre, superbly performed, but Ivan and the Dogs needs more bite.

Review: The Redemption Solos, Old Red Lion

Written for Time Out

Though both contain a death averted after a change of heart, the two monologues that make up the Underground Collective’s debut are so mismatched that their juxtaposition feels like a category mistake.

Christopher Hanvey’s The Native is a mood-piece with the slow drawl of the American West. A man and his thermos sit under a leafless wind-wracked tree. He recounts abandoning the murder of a pregnant Native American girl. There’s a fogginess to the narrative and Hanvey’s somnolent, shrugging delivery adds neither clarity nor snap.

Gary Mitchell’s Suicide Brunette fares better, though it follows Hanvey’s into the pitfalls of the past. Mitchell at least offers some initial present-tense drama, as a depressive Belfast mother of three threatens to broadcast her suicide online. However, her impending reversal is too obvious too early and Mitchell’s piece becomes memory play, offering causes and symptoms.

That diagnosis of society’s ills – from net obsession to terrorism via political correctness – is impassioned, but Mitchell overreaches and veers towards tangled rant.

Review: Hamlet, National Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Rory Kinnear’s Hamlet is a marked man; most definitely “the observed of all observers.” The Elsinore he inhabits is a surveillance state. Where once there might have been gargoyles, CCTV cameras peer down. Courtiers have been replaced by wired-up security men, relaying information into their cuffs and receiving orders through earpieces. They are a constant presence, lurking in the shadows and peering through windows. Patrick Malahide’s Claudius certainly follows through with his own advice that madness ought not go unmonitored.

Denmark’s rot, it is implied, lies in this Orwellian paranoia; the state’s eye is trained on itself, always on the lookout for treason and ready to shoot at the first sign. When, after stowing Polonius’ body, Hamlet has scaled the building, he is surrounded by marksmen, their guns raised as if wary of the potential terror threat. By the same measure, rather than drowning accidentally, Ophelia is scooped up and bundled off by these anonymous agents. Her madness has become a hazard and, after a knowing nod from the king, requires dealing with.

Monitored thus, Hamlet is constantly performing. When, after the players have finished rehearsing, he says, “Now am I alone,” Kinnear turns up a spotlight on himself as if half-aware that he’s still on show. His performance is designed to throw his observers off the scent. To the outside world, he presents an unpinnable, veiled personality, consistently inconsistent. Having found a sense of determined purpose on “I know my cause,” he next appears pondering whether to be or not, puffing on a cigarette as if instinctively siding with the latter. His feigned madness to Polonius, a clunking charade, has resonances of theatrical conceit: he walks in animating a book into a bird as if a member of the Complicite ensemble and crawls into his truck like enacting a bedsit version of Beckett’s bins. When he talks of his “too, too solid flesh” he spins like a flailing ballerina, seeming to slip for the grasp of invisible captors. It is by the multiplicity of his performed persona that Hamlet melts and disappears.

The problem should be that we are observing Hamlet too, that his inconstancy should have us confounded. But Kinnear lets us into the act. He first appears as the only one in black (mirrored later by Laertes at Ophelia’s funeral) and sits staring ahead, half-sullen and half-empty. From there his Hamlet seems to freeze over until he reaches absolute zero. His antic disposition is accompanied by the bluest of blue funks, having lost not just his mirth but any impetus whatsoever. Kinnear beautifully suggests a madness born of sanity, as he drops out of the social ethos that surrounds him. Torn free of its etiquette, he becomes free to exploit it. The burly savagery with which he charges, rhino-like, at Laertes sits in marked contrast from the waifish wimp who, on punching a table in frustration, rubs his hand and lets slip a petite, charming ouch.

But Kinnear’s Hamlet is twice marked. He spends the majority of the second half quite clearly branded as a villain. Indeed, the word is scrawled across his chest below a crudely-drawn smiling face; the sort that defined nineties raves, only shakier in its lines and oddly drowsy, as if wide-eyed and hallucinating. (Interestingly, it called to my mind the image of Obama morphed into the Joker that circulated the net last year.) In itself, that’s an interesting conceit. After all, Hamlet’s actions are not those of an upstanding citizen. It asks us, even forces us, to view him with ambivalence, as both sympathetic hero and devoted anti-hero. Why, we must ask, do we side with a man who bumps off his best friends and sticks the knife into Polonius, who rails at his mother, who is intent on rebellion? He is, in effect, the exact opposite of the tragic hero: a man full of flaws, erring and sinning, yet made good by one saving grace, his commitment to a noble cause. Unlike the standard tragic hero, however, the social ethos in which he finds himself is itself corrupt. That allows the cathartic cycle to work through as usual, only it is the state that we must look on with distaste, not the man in its midst.

For all its own intelligence, however, it is a device chiseled into place in Nicholas Hytner’s production. The T-shirt belongs in an essayist’s production, a non-natural exploration. Hytner is a storyteller and must find cause for such trappings in the telling. As such he has Hamlet hand out the shirts in the play scene (perhaps Hytner is jabbing at clumsier efforts at interativity and implication). It becomes the rebellion of a bright student: sharp with irony, yet totally harmless. As it happens the label only sticks to Hamlet and Ophelia for any length of time. Claudius is rubber, Hamlet is glue…

In fact, it often feels as though Hytner is himself intent on revolution. His production feels very much the sum of its parts. While there is enough momentum for the narrative to just about coalesce, there is something disjointed, as if Hytner has treated individual moments as lilypads to hop between. The plot rumbles on such that we almost skim over the gaps. Yes, the world he has created hangs together, but Hytner tends to play a string of moments, interpreting each but letting the surveillance state serve as the unifying whole, which is not entirely satisfactory. At times individual moments become too pat – the cigarette certainly, Gertrude trampling over her second husband’s portrait on seeing her first’s ghost. Like Kinnear’s performative Hamlet, constantly inconstant, it allows Hytner to embrace the scope of the text’s concerns. Perhaps that’s cheating, by not finding a unified whole into which they fit, perhaps it’s merely inevitable.

Alongside the political, Hytner elevates the familial such that, at times, this is a Hamlet that belongs over at Dominic Cooke’s Royal Court. He treats royalty as suburban pretence. Claudius’ initial address is a televised speech to the nation, staged to convey a family far better off than the dusty and sparsely furnished palace suggests. They are keeping up appearances. In its concealed chaos amongst royalty, it calls to mind Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s Love. Kinnear’s jogging bottoms, cigarettes and disheveled bedroom echo her slobbish Hippolytus. Clare Higgins’ Gertrude, rarely without a champagne flute to hand, has shades of the monstrous mother Linsey Duncan created in Polly Stenham’s That Face. The choirboy sincerity behind Kinnear’s “goodnight mother” is both sweetly tender and quietly disconcerting. But there is also an undercurrent of generational discord, as baby-boomer ideals are opposed. David Calder’s Polonius is a hilarious mixture of bluster and pomp, sidling up to Malahide’s unsympathetic, reptilian Claudius. Laertes and Ophelia, lent an indie rebelliousness by Ruth Negga, snigger at their father’s out-of-touch, windy lecturing. Rosencratz and Guildenstern make enemies of themselves by weakly falling into step.

Needless to say, this is a production of dense intelligence, but one that perhaps overreaches itself by trying to illuminate each component part. Its ability to do so comes from Kinnear’s brilliance with the text. He spins it out with such clarity that each speech seems utterly clear and fresh. The problem is that such transparency opens up the play’s multiplicities and Hytner gives us too many Hamlets all at once.

Photograph: Tristram Kenton

Review: A Number, Mernier Chocolate Factory

Written for Culture Wars

Caryl Churchill plunges straight into a number of dilemmas, both ethical and epistemological, in her disarmingly intelligent two-hander presupposing the possibility of cloning.

At its centre is the simple theatrical conceit that a single actor is ideally placed to embody a series of replicas, since he or she can play a multiplicity of people without being able to entirely reconfigure their appearance. Every character an actor represents – no matter how diverse – will necessarily share certain resemblances by virtue of being housed in and created by the same individual. In this revival of the Sheffield Crucible’s 2006 production, Samuel West tackles three in a line of clones in conversation with their father Salter – here, played by his own; Timothy West..

The first son, given a twist of nerdish fascination by the younger West, has just discovered that he is one of twenty-odd replicas, perhaps more, and struggles with a newly slippery sense of self. He seeks both comfort and contrition from his father, who lost his first child at four in a car accident. The second arrives claiming originality, snorting with furious indignation, and exhumes an alternative versions of events from his father. Finally, one of the additional replicas illicitly produced by the firm behind the initial cloning process meets his biological – if not natural – father for the first time.

Clearly, Churchill’s text contains conundrums enough. What it requires in the playing is emotional tinder. Rather than savouring the philosophical puzzles within, it must suppress them for the feelings behind each encounter. Here, Samuel West gets caught in his head. His eyes glaze with introspection as the cogs whir, relishing the riddles from the start. At times, his first clone seems to enjoy his own status as oddity, allowing himself a half-smile before catching himself with the situation’s reality.

However, he lacks the danger – physically, if not also in terms of emotional volatility – that Daniel Craig brought to the 2002 Royal Court premier and Rhys Ifans to the BBC’s televised version (opposite Michael Gambon and Tom Wilkinson respectively). His original Bernard, the most hot-blooded of the three, is reliant on a bitter squint, shooting daggers from tiny slits of eyes, but there’s no threat of explosion. By leaning towards the intellect, West dampens the drama of the three confrontations.

By contrast, Timothy West finds Salter’s inner-turmoil with delicacy and precision. There’s a quiet, unrevealed guilt that sits underneath his outward demonstrations of regret. His croaked admission – “It was all my fault” – has a hint of accusation to it, echoed by his primely arched eyebrows that seem caught between cynicism and shame. West’s Salter is robust, yet shrivelled; his head peeping from his cardigan like a tortoise, blinking to acclimatise to the light. That places Salter’s remorse into the present, as well as the past. He seems to question the ethics of his current interactions, particularly in approaching the third, previously unknown son. After the death and incarceration of Bernards 1 and 2, Salter seeks a further replacement. He can’t help himself.

What does emerge, however, is a tint of tenderness. Rather than pure recrimination, there is an urge for mutual comfort in the face of personal, interlinked struggle. Jonathan Munby’s production – partly just by casting kith and kin – presents a confused relationship: hatred cut through with love. In short, the familial dynamic is far more present. The differing relationships between Salter and the three Bernards – one raised, one abandoned, one unknown – come to the fore. Their individual personalities, manifested in the way each handles the confrontation, has its roots in the relationship. And here the younger West excels with a delicate display of difference, aided by Jackie Orton’s smartly constructed costumes. For the sons, nurture’s effect becomes as apparent as nature’s. For the father, one realises quite how definitive offspring become. Salter is a man living through his children: however misguided and subconsciously selfish, he believes that all is done in reverend care of them.

That this is Salter’s trial becomes apparent in Oliver Fenwick’s lighting. Between scenes, a thin strip of blue scans his person like frisking hands. Above him, designer Paul Wills has created an instrument of execution: test tubes hang like spikes ready to crash down and impale. His chair – the only object on the bleached wooden floor (itself, curiously similar to the Royal Court’s herring-bone stage that – from my position in the upper circle – seemed to locate the action on the back of a giant tortoise) – calls to mind Bond villains with its white leather studded with gold at the edges. Salter has dared to play god, tampering with the sterilised birthing fields above him, and it doesn’t suit him. He is too human: a suspiciously damp circle that has formed at his groin stands testimony. Wrapped in comforting wool and corduroy, an old man stands on the brink of dismantling under the neurosis. That which he leaves behind him, the children that he can’t stop seeing, is forever tainted with guilt.

Review: Faust, Young Vic

Written for Culture Wars

There’s no doubting that Vesturport, Iceland’s primary theatrical export, have gone for flair with their circus-heavy adaptation of Goethe’s Faust. Above us is stretched a giant safety net, upon which all manner of fetishized daemons plummet and clamber. Mephisto and his accomplices scuttle spider-like up the netted walls and peer down on Faust like vultures. Lillith is conjured into existence as if shot from a cannon, soaring an arch above the stage, and Asmodeus bursts through the floor like an elevator out of control.

Yet, for all that, there is a shoddiness that belies their spectacle. Where it wants to be hellish – peeling faces, cloven feet and, thanks to its nimble acrobatics, an inhuman conquest of physical space – it often ends up looking tacky. Filippia Elísdóttir’s costumes seem like an Anne Summers’ Halloween range: all leather, lace and lattices. Director Gísli Örn Gardarsson proffers a very high street hell-on-earth.

That really is a shame, because the initial sense of dark foreboding is truly mystical. In a run-down and institutionalised state nursing home, a slumber of pensioners sit slumped in wheelchairs. The hall is draped with tawdry Christmas decorations. Occasionally, they move, twisting rusty necks one way or another, as if just breathing were effort enough. Everything seems coated with a layer of dust and cobwebs. Intermittently, this motley crew are coerced into a wheelchair dance routine set to Wham’s Last Christmas, rolling themselves slowly forwards, backwards and around, with disintegrating dignity.

Comparatively spritely and bored stiff is Johann, a retired, once celebrated actor. His mind still whirs and his humours still pump, having taken a fancy to Greta, a prettily fresh-faced nurse. By the time he starts reciting Faust, the one role he hasn’t played, the hall is stalked with an imminent darkness. A flicker of electric danger sets the air tingling. As Johann, Thorsteinn Gunnarsson seems at first a teenager tinkering with a oujia board. He plucks an apple off the Christmas tree, as if outwardly displaying his disbelief. A camera flashes and a darker parallel world appears for an instant. The play itself – the simple words of which it is composed – has powers of their own.

When it comes to fruition, after Johann attempts to take his own life by hanging himself with Christmas lights, that darkness gets punctured. It might dazzle initially, but Vesturport’s stage becomes a box of tricks. It is built to function: actors burst through seemingly solid surfaces and drop from the sky, a bottomless hole opens up in the floor. However, with repetition, those frills lose their thrill. They become blasé.

The struggle is that Gardarsson’s adaptation is not full-bodied enough to compensate. While it occasionally slips into cod-verse, its flaw is a surface-level exploration. His daemons are all together one-dimensional. Hilmir Snaer Gudnason’s Mephisto owes a heavy debt to Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice, lumbering and lurching around the stage, employing powers of elasticity to himself and the world around him. Alongside him, Nina Dögg Filipusdóttir’s Lillith is lithe and lusty. For the most part, we get the story’s skeleton, though there are some nice strands of thought dashed through. That, for example, Faust’s ultimate desire involves its own impossibility – he chases Greta endlessly, each time coming closer to winning her – and finds himself cycling through a stream of echoing moments as she lends him a gentle kiss goodbye, before disappearing. However, the arch frustrations of affections forever out of reach don’t make themselves fully felt and, as Faust gives up the ghost and banishes his daemons, there’s not quite the emotional momentum to justify the final payoff. He might have learn the meaning of life, the inevitability of its shortcomings, but his lesson here feels academic. He might as well have picked it up from a book.

The same might be said of the whole production, which – for all that it aims to revitalise the fable – ends up playing it by the book. Not Goethe’s book, admittedly, but an aesthetic that has become familiar to the point of hackneyed. The smack of Rocky Horror about Vesturport’s revival serves to coat its more interesting elements, which are in short supply themselves, with sugarcandy and is indicative of a company more interested in trickery than truth.

Review: The Sleepers Den, Riverside Studios

Written for Time Out

While Peter Gill's latest directorial venure plays at the Bush, a mile down the road his 1969 debut play gets a tender, if not exactly prescient, revival at the venue he founded.

A peephole into the daily frind of a debt-ridden, working-class household in Cardiff, The Sleepers Den proves a delicate portrait of familial obligation, in which cohabitation is both curse and comfort. For Mrs Shannon (Charlotte Moore, touchingly frayed), the stagnant living room has become the whole world. Julia Berndt's musty design has others materialise on its doorstep and dissolve on leaving.

Gill's play reamins a fascinatingly intricate study. Silences hang heavy and morbid, suggesting lives more endured than lived. Here overall atmosphere wins out over action. More forensic finesse, however, and Adam Spreadbury-Maher's production would really crackle.

Review: On Ageing, Young Vic

Written for Culture Wars
"When I had my first hip replacement," says a twelve year old into a tabletop microphone, "I had a party." He tells us that he had another after his second. Next to him, an eleven year old girl waxes lyrical on the importance of skin care, which has - she says - taken years off her. Beneath the conference table, her leg swings back and forth, her foot never quite reaching the floor.

Fevered Sleep, widely celebrated for their work aimed at young children, have placed wise words into the mouths of babes in this devised piece performed by children. Seven fresh-faced miniatures, all aged between seven and thirteen, deliver verbatim quotations originally spoken by those at the opposite end of life. The effect is charming - at times overtipping into cutesy - but also rather disorientating. Once one settles into the piece and sees beyond the oddity of children onstage, the ageing process is presented at a distance, almost objectively. Age loses its threat, its associations of deterioration and of death and seems instead a perspective, a point from which we view (and experience) the world. It becomes a state of affairs, a fact of life. As one of the cast suggests, "they're just numbers, aren't they?"

There's a curious twofold effect to the divorcing of text spoken and speaker, which is both to equalise and emphasise. We define the cast both by their youth, in marked contrast with those on whose behalf they speak, and as people, equally likely to voice similar attitudes in future and - even now - experiencing life as once each of us has done. The children's voices, high of pitch and clumsy in rhythm, distort the words as much as those words alter our perception of the child speaker. The disjunction sits oddly and the performers become slippery, almost defying categorisation. They seem a curious mixture of immiscible characteristics: they are simultaneously wise and naive, innocent and wry.

On the one hand, the children gain a precociousness as they reminisce on lives they have not lived. Sat behind their glossy white conference table, leaning into microphones, they lecture us. They address and advise us, their elders, through baby teeth. They have a worldliness to which we feel they have no right; they know more than most of us. Somehow, they seem to be gently mocking us, like pint-sized stand-ups poking fun at the expense of their audience.

Equally and oppositely, however, the words spoken lose what authority they might have had. The textual tone is one of knowledge acquired through personal, lived experience and passed on to inexperienced others. The quotations are tips, warnings or reports from a higher vantage point. They speak of our futures with an air of "you'll see" or "just you wait." Yet, divorced from experience and age, the words of wisdom grow ridiculous. Voiced by those younger than us, less experienced, they become statements plucked from nothing. The combination is frequently amusing.

However, compared to the teenagers of Ontroerend Goed's Once and For All… or the primary schoolers of That Night Follows Day, Tim Etchells' collaboration with Victoria, Fevered Sleep's children seem more like mini-adults. That's not just down to what they say. They are too well-behaved and too measured. They seem to be following orders in order. It is when they fidget and fumble or when they crack smiles off the back of our laughter, enjoying the effects of their actions and showing off, that they really seem like children. More often they follow a script without distraction; they play only as they are instructed to play. Its a shame, because when their impulses break through, they become infinitely more interesting.

Besides, Fevered Sleep don't merely make mouthpieces of their young cast. They speak for themselves as well, as if to assert - almost proudly - their own partaking in the process being discussed. The youngest, Theo (a being whose fidgety presence gives him a constant pull on your attention), has grown 0.24 centimetres since rehearsals began. Others have lost baby teeth and bought training bras. Voices have dropped, schools have been started. On press night, perhaps every night, a tenth birthday is celebrated in front of us. This is seventy minutes that ensures you note its passing. You emerge a little older - but also a little more youthful in spirit.

I'm not convinced, however, that you leave any wiser. In presenting their thesis spun from examples, there is a breadth to Fevered Sleep's content that precludes real depth. On Ageing never really opens its subject up to discover its beating heart. Instead it is content to offer the obvious: that you're only as old as you feel, that the body buckles faster than the spirit, that ageing is living. It does so delicately and gently, reassuringly even. In fact, the tone of delivery is not dissimilar to their work for children. There's a soft directness that seems to spell things out and hold your hand. That's not to say it patronises or mollycoddles, since we there's no sense of being talked down to. Rather, I think, it draws us gently to its level, comforting and cradling us. It infantilises.

That's accompanied by a certain sentimentality, which sits at odds with the frankness of its message. While we're effectively asked to see ageing neutrally, as something that simply happens, there is a retro, vintage quality that plays on the emotions undercover. Over the course of the piece, the children flood the stage with objects: a lifetime's worth of stuff assembled like an old curiosity shop. There are clocks and Russian dolls, rugs and lamps, toys and tools. There are highchairs, plastic chairs, office chairs, cinema seats, armchairs in studious leather, armchairs in comfortable felt. There are televisions from various decades.

Essentially, On Ageing relies on these objects - though it doesn't fully admit their power. Taken together, they mark the accumulation of life in a physical manner, mirroring the ageing process of the mind and memory. What builds is an image of a life lived (one that we can all relate to - in this country at least). They also create a serene and beautiful stage picture: well-dressed children dotted in the foliage of objects on a white background. It's picture-perfect (and quite right that an audience member is asked to capture it on Polaroid). However, these objects have an individual power. They chime with us as individuals, vibrating in accordance with our own memories. That they are old-fashioned, often gorgeously retro, coats the whole thing with a quiet nostalgia. Fevered Sleep indulge us, they give us the means to muse on our previous selves and on loved ones of the past. For me, the pull was to a bunsen burner - an object I haven't seen or used for almost a decade - but one that remains familiar. Equally the porcelain knick-knacks - clowns, I think - took me back to the houses of grandmothers and great-grandmothers. For all that it wants us to accept the ageing process as is, On Ageing refuses to let us let go of personal attachments. It says one thing and does another.

All of this is, of course, overseen by a skeleton wheeled on and, later, decked in a party hat. Death is part of the party and, on the televisions dotted around the stage, waves are seen lapping against the shore. Waves swallowing waves just as generations endlessly envelope their elders. "We'll still be here tomorrow," they announce at the end. There's a barb in that - chances are, they will outlive us - but there's also hope.

Photo: Keith Pattison