Review: Flyboy is Alone Again This Christmas, Barbican Centre

Written for Culture Wars

Now, don't get me wrong: I like Flyboy, Matthew Robins' mutant schoolboy, half-human, half-fly. I like the useless and arbitrary nature of his essential characteristic. I like the winding, limitless quality of his adventures; the way that a whole host of bonkers things befall him and get dealth with somehow or other. And I certainly like the stylishness of Robins' shadow-puppetry: fragile, clumsy and homespun as it is. But in this gig-cum-cabaret session, my god, Flyboy gets underneath your skin.

If the average life expectancy of a fly is between 24 and 48 hours, two and a quarter is equivalent to several human years. To survive that length of time, Flyboy needs a grand narrative. And there really is no reason why he shouldn't get one. It certainly worked when The Death of Flyboy was projected onto the vast National Theatre flytower. However, here Robins only gives us musical vignette after musical vignette and the result is a variety show without variety. Flyboy is a sideshow act, a genus that needs company. Lacking it, Flyboy quickly becomes an irritant.

What Flyboy does have is an effortless pathos. He seems to us an unfortunate outcast in an ordinary world. But really we know very little of that world. We assume it to be familiar, given that its architecture and municipal amenities resemble our own. In his school uniform - an outfit we immediately associate with fitting in and falling out of the crowd - Flyboy seems at a permanent disadvantage.

Every miniature adventure that Flyboy winds up on - be it a trip to the Zoo or hauling a planet across the solar system - is, therefore, a small act of spirited defiance. He carries on in spite of his lot; the plucky little mutant in a human world. His accomplices are not people, but animals. It is with them that he associates himself.

But, as I say, all this is based on assumption. The only other occupant of Flyboy's world that we encounter is Mothboy, a schoolboy in a similar position. For all we know, Flyboy and Mothboy could be perfectly normal because Robins doesn't show us the norm. He leaves it to our anthropomorphic assumptions. A world that looks like ours, we extrapolate, must be a peopled world.

Nonetheless, the charm of Robins' work is undeniable, even if there is a tendency to drift towards the twee. Certainly, he overplays the scuffed performance aesthetic of mangled manipulation and apologises far too readily from his piano. All of which makes the National's Beauty and the Beast (for which he has supplied the spiky, crisp and delicate shadow-puppetry) a better showcase for Robins' obvious talent.

Photograph: Jane Hobson

Review: Twelfth Night, The Space

Written for Time Out

From its first line to its less quotable last, vowing to "strive to please you every day," Twelfth Night is well-suited to a music hall interpretation. Alongside drag-acts and drunken clowns, sing-a-longs and costume confusion, there's even an emcee of sorts in Feste, Shakespeare's most musical fool. Director Chris Chambers, however, has not delivered the goods here.

Rather than embracing vaudeville, Chambers recalls it haphazardly, sporadically remembering his brief. Instead, we get yet another generic '20s version, all boaters and bow-ties and bland ubiquity. It's like a garden show on the run, lost and dishevelled.

In fact, Chambers only rebels against the obvious when he misses it completely. Viola is waistcoated before asking for concealment, Feste points on his first 'by the church' and Michael Good's Malvolio demonstrates 'her great P's' with a disgusted sniff, as if Olivia had pissed into the envelope.

Twelfth Night can arguably survive without mirth, melancholy or music, but it cannot lose love. Here, hearts flicker only during explicit declarations, making a madwoman of Olivia, an obsessive of Orsino and an opportunistic sex-pest of Malvolio.

Review: Get Santa, Royal Court

Written for Culture Wars

Pity those parents with inquisitive kids, for they shall be faced with a barrage of why’s after the Royal Court’s first ever family offering. Why is Santa such a grumpy grumbleguts? Why does Gran have a regular tattooist? And why – oh why – has Mum married a dog called Bernard? To these questions – and many, many more – there really is no answer. Shoulders will grow tired from bemused shrugs. The response – ‘I really don’t know, dear,’ – will squeeze through increasingly clenched jaws.

If it occasionally baffles, Get Santa does so with laudable relish. Really, we should have expected nothing else from Anthony Neilson, a writer who has always been intent on smashing sensibilities. Here he delights in mischief-making. Sometimes, he sides with the kids, throwing in barmy plotlines and asides that defy adult logic. Elsewhere, he is gobsmackingly subversive, like an uncle needlessly delivering half-camouflaged home-truths to the child sat on his knee. Newsreaders lie, we’re told; all adults do. Santa’s good-children-only rule is nothing but “a system of control,” Justin Beiber isn’t all you’ve been lead to believe and parents can be every bit as selfish as their offspring.

Get Santa involves a plot to do just that. Ten year old Holly – a smart, if shouty, stage debut from Imogen Doel – is seeking revenge for disappointments of Christmases past. All she’s ever asked for is the return of her father, and yet, each year, all she gets are standard issue material goods. Only the trap she lays, of crisps, superglue and spark plugs, snares not Santa, but his bungling beanpole of a son, Bumblehole (Tom Godwin).

Her hostage situation, however, turns into another, after Bumblehole accidentally animates her teddy, who immediately hatches a plot to keep himself thus alive. Pretending to be Holly’s father, Teddy convinces Holly to magically restart Christmas day repeatedly in order to prolong the spell of life.

It’s here that Neilson and his storyboarding collaborator Nick Powell (also responsible for the nauseatingly sweet songs that recur) score highest. Increasingly dishevelled adults, cracker hats hanging off their heads, are forced to endure endless Christmas cheer. Bloated and exhausted, they give and receive the same presents daily. At one point, Mum seems to have woken with yesterday’s final truffle still chewing around in her mouth.

With Miriam Buether’s garish living room (once again, proving herself the boldest designer in the country) becoming increasingly strewn with Christmas detritus and the messy innards of party-poppers, Get Santa is more Nickolodeon than CBBC. It feels like Doctor Seuss on a sugar rush: all E-numbers and artificial colourings. Kids will go wild.

But I can’t shake the suspicion that Neilson spoils the froth with too many crooks. There are too many villains for a satisfying narrative. With a snide, Scrooge-like Santa, a conniving Teddy and the oft-brattish Holly facing off, there comes a point where you can’t side with anyone. Each holds another hostage, much like Tarantino’s three-gun salute in Reservoir Dogs. Neilson comes close to scuppering himself with his own defiance of conventional cheer.

Nonetheless, Get Santa holds its own in a very Royal Court way. In that, parents ought consider whether their children are ready for it. Neilson and Powell don’t hold back, but every now and then, at Christmas in particular, over-stuffing is excusable.

Photograph: Manuel Harlan

Review: Anansi: An African Fairy Tale, Southwark Playhouse

Written for Time Out

Incy Wincy had it easy peasy. In order to win the stories of the world from Nyame the Sky God, Anansi the Spider must capture a sabre-toothed leopard, a swarm of poisonous hornets and a fairy that's never been seen.

Director-adaptor Lisa Cagnacci bulks up this Ashanti folktale with traditional Jamaican and Zulu subplots, all tied together with a twist of South London attitude. It's boisterous and - thanks to Christabel Cant's zesty flat-packed forest backdrop - exotic, but hampered by scant details. Too often Cagnacci just makes do.

What a pity that the African flavours feel so inauthentic and that Anniwaa Buachie makes no attempt to physicalise the arachnid in Anansi. But there are lively comic turns within, not least from Andy Serkis voicing Nyame with gravelly, sardonic flair.

For a show about the necessity of stories, however, it's surely criminal to mangle the storytelling and Anansi cries out for dramaturgical surgery. With a tendency for bagginess and repetition, it's an hour longer than needs be. Cagnacci could do worse that heed the African proverb: "Seeing is better than hearing."

Photograph: Donald Cooper

Review: The Animals & Children Took to the Streets, Battersea Arts Centre

Written for Culture Wars

Almost inadvertently, 1927 have found themselves on the political frontline. Little over three miles away from the Battersea Arts Centre, in the cutthroat cold of Parliament Square, students and schoolchildren were clashing with riot police. “Whose streets?” the marching youth had cried earlier, “Our streets.” So when 1927’s animated young stick-figures tear up a communal park, bouncing on ice-cream vans and setting fire to lampposts, it no longer seems the stuff of dystopian fantasy. Offstage reality was only missing the animals.

I only say ‘inadvertently’ because the uncanny precision behind such concurrence goes beyond prediction’s reach. Work on the show began almost two years ago with a first scratch showing in January. Nor are 1927 directly concerned with tuition fees and the incumbent coalition. However, I add ‘almost’ because the echoes of offstage reality are not entirely coincidental. They are the product of Suzanne Andrade’s insight and foresight, which is astonishing enough to merit joking calls for the ducking stool’s reintroduction. This is more than just a matter of right time, right place.

For Andrade sets her story in a city divided by wealth. Its wide-angle panorama is of impressive skyscrapers and economic success. To look beneath the surface, to peak between the cracks, however, is to see its discontented underclass, crammed into a cockroach-infested, overpopulated ghetto called the Bayou. This is a “fully-furnished shithole;” it’s “someone else’s bad dream” and, in its midst, its children are revolting. Their demands: “Better living conditions, better education and,” in an eagle-eyed sideswipe at the so-called post-ideological generation, “an X-box.”

It’s a wry aside typical of Andrade’s unfailingly delicious text, which swaps the cheeky grin of Marriott Edgar and Eric Idle’s poetry for an arch snarl. Set to Lillian Henley’s silent-film pastiche of a piano score – all tumbling tinkles and chase sequences – Andrade’s text approaches layered libretto. Simple rhythmic repetitions underpin some dazzling linguistic acrobatics.

This marks a major, major step up for the celebrated young company. Where their breakthrough piece, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, was a touch ramshackle and brittle, here they prove themselves ready to fly the Fringe. While Paul Barritt’s animations remain as luscious as ever – the move from Victorian silhouette to graphic novel adds colour and complexity – the company have cracked the enigma of integrating live action and projected image. Where before it traded on its own awkwardness, the innovative technique has graduated to a slickness that allows it to be truly spectacular. The reason is a reversal of cause and effect. Previously animation affected action; now, the effects of action appear onscreen. Dust clouds emerge from sweeping brooms; splattered stains appear after flies are swatted.

But most admirable is the newfound restraint. The narrative’s requirements always come first, sometimes at the expense of dead-end gags. That can see performers doing very little; it can even get rid of them entirely, allowing the animation to take the lead. In other words, the form has evolved from novel gimmick to a genuine hybrid.

Plot-wise, it revolves around a glum, misfit janitor with ambitions to leave the Bayou and a social reformist, Agnes Eaves, determined to pacify the unrest, preferring education to the sedative sweeties distributed by the government. But it’s success is the world Andrade and Barritt have created, with quirky details lurking in every nook and cranny.

The result is visual theatre that drips with class and fresh possibilities. Its prescience and perception stands testimony that devised work can trade political punches with playwrights without sacrificing aesthetics or playfulness. It’s about time something replicated the success of Shockheaded Peter and 1927 could deservedly follow Improbable into the commercial realm. Alert the judging panels: The Animals & Children Took to the Streets should not be overlooked.

Photograph: 1927

Review: Cart Macabre, Old Vic Tunnels

It may not quite take you to hell on a hartcart, but Cart Macabre – a ride through the pitch-black, stopping at a series of momentary vignettes and stills – has all the eerie uncertainty of a trip across the River Styx.

Having handed over all our earthly possessions, like dead sailors trading coins for safe passage, we are stretchered into the dark on white mortuary slabs and shunted into rickety wooden compartments. Your head is ducked under the doorframe like an arrested citizen folded into a waiting police car. Sat there, in the chilly dark, your arm grazes against someone else’s. It’s both comforting in its intimacy and disconcerting in its anonymity. And then, you wait; abandoned and expectant, anxious and excited.

What follows is a sequence of pit-stops, at each of which the box’s various panels – in front, behind and above – open into windows. Each provides a glimpse of entrancing darkness: butterflies flickering through a candle, clouds of ink dancing in diffusion. In one we watch a film, reflected in a stagnant pool below, of a human heart torn apart at the sinews and remoulded in reverse. Another places us on the ceiling of a bedroom as a woman sleeps below: a dizzying out of body experience.

All the while, distant siren-song calls: soft, almost seductive, sea-shanties that mangle your defences and lull you into trance. These anonymous, echoing chamber-voices sing of “wastelands without even waste,” of the empty void and the purposeless existence. “Do you,” a looming, cartoonish sea-captain’s face demands, “have a good idea / of what you are doing here?”

The truth, for the most part, is no. What one sees, always laced with death, is more kaleidoscopic slide-show than narrative route. It tickles your brain without entirely coming together. One thinks of purgatory, where time forever passes, in the not-unpleasant hypnosis of individual stops and in the quietly foreboding journey through the dark.

Can that blind journey, trundling along on bumpy wheels, be considered substantial? Certainly, the in-between makes up a large part of Cart Macabre and, though it is always disorientating, its returns diminish. One grows accustomed to the dark and relaxes into the uncertainty. What feels, at first, positively dangerous, softens into safety.

If anything, Cart Macabre trades too heavily on the ride itself. At points, the sensation can be spectacular, as when you genuinely – and I have no idea how it was achieved, preferring not to root about afterwards – seem to take flight, lurching gently left and right. Elsewhere, you incline and descend. Or seem to move, but can’t be sure. But the overriding sensation is one of pleasurable passivity. In that, the ride is much like massage – or, perhaps, its inverse.

For where, with massage, one’s physical boundaries are affirmed by contact, here they become uncertain. Your own stability and firmness, your orientation, is here dissolved. Rather you sit suspended in space, blurry and ill-defined. The self-awareness, the definite feeling of presence, is just as strong, but it is not so defined by physical existence. You lose sight of your skin. Your edges disappear.

Cart Macabre is undoubtedly enjoyable, but that pleasure is more kinetic than sensory; much like being rocked in a cradle or pushed on a swing. The sights and sounds contained enhance the ride, sending a tide of tingles down the spine, but – as theatre, rather than fairground attraction – it should be the other way around.

Photograph: Living Structures

Review: Beauty and the Beast, National Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Few seasonal offerings for family audiences contain overt espousals of proletariat values. Fewer still have their heroine reject the trappings of feminity, pointedly throwing off fine gowns for the freedom offered by britches. Only Katie Mitchell’s will tinker with the fairytale’s telling to demonstrate the motives behind the narratorial voice.

While I’m all for this breed of smarty-panto, I just wish it wasn’t quite so constrained by its goody-goody attitude.

Much has been made about the improbability of arch-experimentalist Mitchell helming a children’s show. Far more unlikely, in my opinion, would be directors wedded to psychoanalytical realism; Howard Davies, for example, or Michael Grandage. Mitchell’s willingness to explode stories, to leap over the conjunctives, seems an ideal grounding. Uninitiated in the art of suspended disbelief, children can be more at ease with the theatrical self-awareness of onstage storytelling.

Mitchell takes advantage of this by framing Madame de Villeneuve’s fairytale in the musical hall. Leading proceedings, accompanied by a shoe-boxed insect orchestra, is Mr Pink (Justin Salinger), a stilettoed dandy with a whirling bow-tie and a candy-floss suit. (Reservoir Dogs, this is not.) Aided by two browbeaten assistants and a ‘Thought Snatcher’ mind-reading device, Pink controls the telling: pausing, rewinding and fast-forwarding to suit the needs of his bitterness.

With this device in place, Mitchell has given herself room for spirited fun. Her camp emcee has licence to run riot, but instead offers a muted presence. For all his strengths, Salinger is not a larger-than-life actor. His charisma rests in subtlety, which is wasted on a clown so far downstage. The barked orders of a bossy-boots seem merely petulant; the turns of a show-off have too much grace. Politeness does not become Mr Pink.

Without hurtling into the gusto and bawdiness of music hall – even aimed at kids – the split becomes unnecessary, disrupting what is, in fact, an elegant and pertly sophisticated main-course.

On Vicki Mortimer’s lush cream set, thorny roses curling up the wall, Mitchell takes real care of both Beauty and Beast. Sian Clifford’s Beauty is more than just a pretty-faced princess in waiting; she is a young woman increasingly torn, between her family and her own life, between immediate contentment and long-term happiness. The slowness with which she thaws, eventually offering a coy hand for Mark Arends’ monster to kiss, is delicate and captivating. As for Arends, he is truly monstrous: an unkempt hairball with a carnivorous jaw and the distorted voice of Legion. His features are nightmarish, echoing the warped bunny of Donnie Darko. Towering over Beauty on stilts, he moves about the stage with a spider’s swiftness and menace. Escape is not an option.

Even when the prince finally oozes out of the carcass, with all the grossness of a sci-fi movie, Arends keeps sight of the beast. His legs remain twisted and inhuman; his hands seem awkward. There is in him the most touching vulnerability. Without self-control, you sense, that gourging, animal horror could return. It is a superb performance, entirely without vanity.

Perhaps that makes sense of Mr Pink, whose frippery and poise (one can easily imagine him being scented) is set against the ragged savagery of the Beast. Such excessive civility is no more befitting of man than its total absence. One wishes that Mitchell had found equal beastliness in Mr Pink. Or else, just let Beauty and her Beast be.

Photograph: Stephen Cummiskey

Review: Black Watch, Barbican Centre

Written for Culture Wars

In May of next year, the 150 British troops still stationed in Iraq will quit the country, a year after the majority were withdrawn. While even one soldier remains there – or, for that matter, in neighbouring Afghanistan – Black Watch will remain a social necessity. The National Theatre of Scotland’s landmark production, first seen in 2006, serves a stark reminder that those of us nestled comfortably in velvet seats are a long, long way from the front line.

Heralded by The Sunday Times as one of the top ten plays of the last decade, it’s hard to approach Black Watch without expectation weighing heavy. Perhaps that explains my initial scepticism. Its first half is almost casual, off-hand. Off-duty soldiers meet the playwright in a Scottish pub for a guarded introduction and interview. With plaudits like these, one expects explosive brilliance from the off. We want our two hours worth of tears and anger dished up with an immediate jugular attack on those responsible.

But Gregory Burke’s script is cleverer than that. It rejects both sensationalism and sentimentality. This is no Journey’s End; there are neither pristine young Raleighs, nor war-stained Stanhopes. Instead, it shows these men as professionals, there of their own choosing. It’s not that they “cannae do anything else,” nor down to exploitation. Much as David Elridge did with the hawkers of Market Boy, Burke heeds the soldiers due respect without the patronising disservice of airbrushing, indeed, without necessarily approving of them.

The squaddies are, at times, childish, defensive and unfeeling; prone to a laddishness that can stray quickly to brutality, as when one jumps the playwright and threatens to snap his arm at the elbow. But they are also proud, humorous and very human, often to the point of fragility. More than anything, they are a unit. One eye is always looking out for another.

Mainly, though, Burke keeps individual personalities at arms length. ‘Who’ is less important than ‘that’. Despite the camaraderie between characterful individuals, the soldiers are, foremost, instances of a species; a small selection standing for the many. Even at the end, as a suicide bomber sends three flying through the air in a nightmarish spectacle, they are identified by number, not name. They don’t die on our terms or those of the media, as heroes or as victims, as young lives cut short; rather, they simply become P4, the army’s code for “dead or dying”. Black Watch’s power resides in its constant restraint; in turning its back on easy, lazy manipulation of our heartstrings.

Part of that discipline is the refusal to attempt full representation. The closer Black Watch gets to the action - the stronger its dread, the more shocking its violence - the further John Tiffany’s production retreats into theatricality. It parries horror with elegance, at times, approaching the splendour of ballet. Faced with in-company tension, the sergeant orders his men to cool off with a ten-second wrestle. Here, choreographed by Stephen Hoggett of Frantic Assembly, it becomes a contagious pas de deux that spreads through the cast. It reeks of testosterone and temper, scarily so, but it also glints with homo-eroticism and grace. Its beauty – its unexpected delicacy, its sudden familiarity – slams home the distance. Sat here, good little liberals all, we don’t know the half of it.

But Burke also forces us to address the unimaginable by turning focus on the familiar. Though they never make the news, everyday pressures and problems don’t defer to the situation’s graveness. Comrades rub up against one another, jokes grate, the drinking water is almost undrinkable and, on one operation, nature comes a-calling. We recognise such symptoms as uncomfortable, but place them in a warzone, where three-inch bullets fly and IEDs lurk, and the situation becomes unfathomable.

Unfathomable, but not impossible – and certainly not pitiful. War, after all, is what the men from Fife & Tayside have trained for and aimed for. Whether aptitude came first or developed along the way – we see glimpses of the training process throughout, but they mostly dismiss it as unsatisfactory preparation – is by the by. “It’s not like any other job,” says Cammy, acting as the group’s spokesman, “It’s part of us. It’s who we are.”

This non-judgemental frankness, Burke’s ability to tell it straight, is what makes Black Watch so vital. Perhaps he damns the war in Iraq too frequently, having a commanding officer describe it as “the biggest western foreign policy disaster ever” and never missing an opportunity to spin it as invasion rather than mission. But that is not the decision of the troops. They are not responsible for their presence in Iraq. They only have to deal with being there and their daily grind, on the knife’s edge of survival, is captured with unflinching empathy and honesty that leaves you shell-shocked.

Its revelations about the everyday realities of a modern soldier’s existence seem, to us, intolerable. And yet, these men do more than just endure. There are no tears to be had here. There is no fierce sense of injustice or righteousness. There is just something entirely glad its not you, because you simply couldn’t do it. And a deeply felt respect – not untinged with incomprehension – for those that can, have done and continue to do.

Photograph: Manuel Harlan

For show information, visit the Barbican's website.