Review: The Consultant, Theatre503

Written for Culture Wars

Q: How many consultants does it take to change a light bulb? A: What’s your budget?

That’s more of less the jist of Neil Fleming’s petite new satire, which is underscored by a sneer of disdain for those that bark ‘advice’ from the sidelines. Consultancy, Fleming would have us believe, is a parasitic profession, charging extortionate sums for nothing that the client doesn’t already possess. James Ross (Pip Donaghy), the messiah of management in question, reduces it thus: “What do you want? How far are you prepared to go to get it?”

Ross offers little more than a sounding board to Hugo Shackleton (James Wilby), Chief Executive of a medical technology firm threatened by a Korean firm’s accelerated developments. As Hugo prepares to face his board of governors, he prods and goads him into the hardened, cutthroat businessman that he aspires to be. Questions are machine-gunned and the answers are inevitably common-sense. “We make money,” Hugo eventually realises, “because people will pay anything to escape the fear of death.”

The irony, of course, is that consultancy hinges on the same principle. It thrives as bankruptcy looms and vultures circle overhead. Often, however, you feel that Fleming has too much control over his subject. The failing company seems to trade in X-rays, for example, to prise open the possibility of ‘seeing through’ the consultant.

Those touches of over-neatness overspill into a character-driven plot. Ross is so psychologically-astute that any planned manipulation falls out perfectly. His use of reverse-psychology and carrot-stick methodologies are beyond exemplary. With such slickness, the danger is that Pip Donaghy veers into Bond-villain territory, a problem exacerbated by Ross’s being wheelchair-bound and dressed in black.

Fleming scores his hits palpably, but, dramatically, The Consultant is fairly one-note. It exists solely to defame and undermine, to point out the emperor’s nakedness. His interest lies with the central, masculine battle of Ross and Shackleton, a relationship that verges on Frankenstein and Monster and relies on the seductiveness of urgent business-speak, the Mad Men/West Wing appeal, as it were. The play’s women – Hugo’s wife Claire (Sian Webber) and junior consultant Nicola (Helen Millar) – exist as mere narrative offshoots. They are, respectively, mother-figure and mistress, always serving the needs of another.

None of this is fatal. It’s just bland; flat-footed rather than nuanced. Fleming is so determined to grind the axe that he over-elevates his material and advisor becomes devil on the shoulder of the good man turned by worldly goods. Though its satire undoubtedly reflects it, The Consultant itself never feels rooted in reality.

(As a postscript, that’s a consistent problem at Theatre 503. Even with a beautifully crisp design from Agnes Treplin, which conjures corporate opulence on a shoestring and handles a number of location and time shifts efficiently, the space prevents any sense of a world beyond. The box stage is so tightly constrained that, without careful attention, it has a tendency to strangle plays.)

Review: Shore, Riverside Studios

Written for Time Out

For the son lugging around his father's corpse like Mother Courage's cart, death becomes a rite of passage in Lebanese-born Candian writer Wajdi Mouawad's delicate epic. Learning of the death during the final few thrusts of a meaningless sexual encounter, Wilfred's quest for a fitting burial becomes a journey of self-discovery. Grappling with the anxiety of adulthood proper, Wilfred imagines himself followed by knights and camera-crews, paralysed by self-imposed ideals.

However, Anne Khazam's production fails to bore through the personal to the play's big themes of nation and ancestry. In part, the problem here is contextual. 'Shore' is underscored by Mouawad's Lebanese heritage: hereditary responsibility hasn't the same resonance in the UK. But Khazam's staging, which trades in individual moments rather than a coherent whole, lacks the vocabulary to delve deeper.

It's also tonally bipolar: po-faced one moment, goofy the next. Joseph Elliott's Wilfred suits the fool better than the philosopher, but Mouawad's play demands sincerity and here 'Shore' is all at sea.

Review: The Exonerated, New Players Theatre

Written for Time Out

What does it mean to escape an unjust death sentence? In spite of the hardships, which range from rape to the botched executions of loved ones, there's a striking sense of calm in Jessica Blank and Eric Jensen's verbatim accounts from six innocents on Death Row.

These men and women talk with the graceful philosophy that comes from having made peace with the world. "It's not easy to be a poet here," intones Derek Gilbert's Delbert, "yet I sing. We sing."

The Exonerated is to America's penal system what 'The Vagina Monologues' is to feminism. Minus the jokes. It's ardent and urgent documentary theatre, but Jaclyn McLoughlin's revival does little more than give the text a well-acted outing.

As in the original production, big underlying ideas remain unexplored. Delivered with flawless talking-head naturalism, the six stories are both poignant and powerful, but McLoughlin strikes an odd tone that's too readily sympathetic and, thanks to George Bishop's showy lighting, far too stagey. It veers dangerously close to repackaging testimony as uplifting entertainment. This is a subject which needs its harsh edges exposed.

Review: The Cleansing of Constance Brown, AE Harris Building

Written for Culture Wars

She stands there, at the end of the corridor, with a camera hanging from her neck, staring out at us. “I can see you,” she says, softly but with edge. It’s a flirtatious warning. Nothing goes unnoticed.

Stan’s Cafe place us at the end of a corridor that stretches until it shrinks. It’s like looking down a mineshaft or along an air-vent. Up and down its length, criss-crossing between its doors, move figures from history, from film, from our world and from those of which we’ve dreamt or imagined or heard. Janitors cross paths with policemen. Soldiers and spooks pass sobbing secretaries. Queen Elizabeth I glides forward. All the corridors of the world, for all of time, are amalgamated before us.

Like Peter Handke’s The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other and Forced Entertainment’s 12am: Awake and Looking Down, this is theatre as list. It is a sequence of people and events linked only by the their collision in space and time and the connections in your head. It differs by leaving scenes to linger, developing morsels of narrative within. That diminishes its ability to overload. It never achieves the strobe-effect that leaves you snatching at images to retain them. It is, in other words, too easy. We can settle in and absorb too readily. At times, it’s as softly hypnotic as a screensaver.

That said, Stan's Cafe offer some beautifully elegant moments, none more so than a woman in a black hijab watched over by another in the traditional white garb of the spa: dressing gown, towel-turban and face mask.

The Cleansing of Constance Brown also parts from other list shows by virtue of its selectiveness. We assume, initially, that this will be an arbitrary selection, perhaps falling under the umbrella of ‘instances from corridors.’ Gradually, a definite bent appears in the content. All manner of cleaners appear: scrubbers, sweepers, sprayers, shiners; cleaners in tabards, in boiler suits, in protective clothing, in decontamination suits; single cleaners and cleaning teams.

Recurring so thoroughly, the become the central image from which to view others around them and quickly The Cleansing of Contsance Brown becomes a meditation on the sacred and the profane, on protection and fear of others and our environment. Its priests, soldiers and security men; binmen, businessmen and white-trash all seem to pivot around the same territory.

So what of the all-seeing Constance Brown? She’s in there too, watching, witnessing. She’s the cleaner that steps into a security situtation. She’s the neighbour privy to an arrest. She’s the interviewee that sees a company in meltdown, frenziedly shredding its incriminating documents. No matter how hard we scrub, how concentrated our bleach, stains will remain. Even if no one else can see, they sear themselves in our own memories. Nothing is eradicable.

Here, we are the watching eyes behind one-way glass and the ears of the walls; the CCTV camera peering down. We are the collective conscience that never forgets. For seventy minutes, we are Constance Brown, watching and witnessing. Beyond the show, she is our independent adjudicator, observing all we do over our shoulder.

There’s definitely philosophy beneath The Cleansing of Constance Brown, (At least, I formed one another it. Others will see differently.) but it is a piece where matter remains just beneath the surface. You connect the dots you perceive and delve to the level you wish. How much depth is the piece itself, I’m not sure. Much of its reward comes from murkiness clearing as your interpretation forms. It offers instances, but doesn’t mine their significance in full. We do the hard work, which is fine, but I can’t help but feel that it’s possible to get further along the corridor than Stan's Cafe themselves.

Photographs from Stan's Cafe website

Review: The Boy on the Swing, Arcola Theatre

Written for Time Out

'Hello! Is anyone there?' asks the very ordinary Earl Hunt, having found a business card for the Hope and Trust Foundation, which claims to offer a hotline to the divine. After a series of bizarre personality tests at their grungy premises, Earl wakes up - drugged and robed - at the feet of an elderly looking man, who may or may not be God. But is this the real deal or a grotto for grown-ups?

There's too much repetition and a few longueurs but, at its best, Joe Harbot's kooky comedy combines Kafkaesque bewilderment with the daftness of Douglas Adams. Straightening out vast metaphysical paradoxes into customer-friendly language results in some cracking gags. It's more than a string of jokes, however, and Harbot neatly skewers the commodification of faith.

Better when disorientating than menacing, Joe Murphy's snappy production doesn't quite manage to ground the metaphor in a reality, but it boasts some great performances. Nick Blood nails the awkward comedy as dim receptionist Jim and Will Barton makes a delightfully manic manchild of Mr Hope.

Review: Mogadishu, Lyric Hammersmith

The Big Society has its first theatrical talisman in Vivienne Franzmann’s Mogadishu and – here’s the kicker – it hasn’t a single solution to offer.

Salem comes to the schoolyard of a London comprehensive, when a bullying black, male pupil pushes an upstanding white, female teacher. Rather than apologising or admitting his error, however, Jason Chambers (Malachi Kirby) co-opts his peers into a single lie: that she racially abused and pushed him first. With five further testimonies against her, Amanda’s policy of absolute appeasement leads her first into suspension and later into criminal charges.

Rather than seeing a born bully, she sees “a boy with issues,” repeatedly trotting out statistics about disadvantaged Afro-Carribean children. She’s vilified for stubbornly believing in the potential for decentness and rehabilitation through education. Jason, meanwhile, fixedly sticks to his story as its consequences escalate. Her headteacher proves ineffectual, bound as he is by procedure and bureaucracy, and thus, lefty lunacy gets its comeuppance.

Essentially, Franzmann makes a cocktail of several major mob-mentality pieces. In its obstinate group testimony set against the innocent, it’s The Crucible – surely it’s no coincidence that the drama teacher is called Sue McCarthy. In the escalation of a lie that gains its own momentum, it echoes Dennis Kelly’s DNA and in its children making their own rules, it borrows – almost exactly – the dynamics of Lord of the Flies. Jason is your Jack; young Turkish victim Firat, your Piggy; thick and thuggish Chuggs, your Roger; and Becky – Amanda’s daughter and the only one willing to stand up to them – functions increasingly like Ralph.

While one has to admire a narrative of such scope, especially when it retains credibility in its plotting, Franzmann sacrifices ambiguity to achieve it. Though its ethical issues are, as Amanda categorically states, “not all black and white,” Mogadishu often seems precisely that. It’s as if the TiE department has been granted a stay on the main stage. You almost expect the action to stop while a workshop leader with a microphone steps in to ask: “Now then, what do we think Jason should have done?”

Dramatically, it becomes more interesting in its second-half, as Franzmann goes searching for root causes and solutions. Society, she suggests, begins at home. It’s there that Jason withstands a barrage of criticism from his authoritarian (widowed) father, a security guard with the mantra, “What have I told you about that,” and Becky turns to self-harm to cope with imposed aspirations and past grief. Ultimately, it’s a parallel too far, however, leading to a too-tidy final showdown between goth and gangsta. What Franzmann, herself an ex-teacher, seems to want to conclude is that children are the responsibility of the family more than the school system. (There’s something unpalatable about Amanda’s eventual resignation after the accusations have dissipated, which almost goes so far as to suggest that working women betray their familial responsibilities.) Extrapolate to a wider picture of the nation and, lo and behold, you’re left with a portrait of localism and a hands-off state, otherwise known as the Big Society.

Of course, Franzmann is allowed her politics. What’s more problematic, however, is the way she muddles that message. She argues against positive discrimination on the basis of circumstances, both of nature and nurture, while – at the same time – pointing towards those circumstances as the root cause of behaviour and personality. For a play that seems advocate treating people as people rather than problems to be dealt with procedurally, Franzmann’s characters look awfully like symptom-bundles. Perhaps, all this is simply to attack the absence of family values, in which case surely the school/state ought to step in. The phrase “in loco parentis” crops up at least once. Perhaps it is to note that Amanda/the school/the state’s sympathetic, softly-softly approach –not to mention the difference of standards – is not equivalent to good parenting, which must punish as well as praise. Interestingly, Jason’s father looks, at first, like a good parent, when his discipline is set against the soft school approach, but proves just as problematic when we realise that its his only mode. Perhaps, Franzmann’s point is that its all rather complex and all this is too reductive.

Regardless of all this, I have problems with Mogadishu as a piece of theatre. Franzmann’s characters are as flat as pancakes. Around well-meaning but over-liberal Amanda are the strict disciplinarian father, the sympathetic step-father and the weak headmaster with the best of intentions and the worst of inaction. That’s just the adults. By the time we enter the school-yard, characters are classified according to their predicted grades. Only Jason and Becky have opportunity shows two sides. He is both stony playground pack-leader and victimised son; she is Juno-esque Indie and surly self-harmer.

Beyond that, I’m not sure that Mogadishu really earns its title, which paints the school system in the light of the Somalian civil war. Perhaps if it were a little more distilled, losing the in-jokes and chat that can be very funny, but punctures the tension and momentum of the issue in hand.

None of this, however, is the fault of Matthew Dunster’s production which rattles along on Tom Scutt’s cracking design, a rusty fence that suggests cage-fighting, holding-pens and tetanus. There are lively performances, even if few reach beyond the limits of one-dimensional characters. Julia Ford manages to find sympathy for Amanda’s frustrations without excusing her approach and Fraser James is brilliantly stern and unmoving with his fearsome father, Chris. Of the teenagers, Shannon Tarbet is outstanding as Becky and Malachi Kirby draws the distinction between timidity and intimidation. It’s newcomer Hammed Animashaun as Jordan, a likeable joker with a good head on his shoulder’s, who steals the night, brilliantly letting us into the playground jokes as he rises above it’s trivial troubles with a perfect mix of humour and incredulity.

Photograph: Jonathan Keenan

Review: Fen, Finborough Theatre

Written for Time Out

Feudalism is alive and well according to Caryl Churchill’s serf and turf play not seen in London for 27 years. In a series of disjointed narratives, Churchill shows how capitalism inevitably breeds personal crisis through a cycle of exploitation and desperation that ultimately leaves people valueless.

England’s corners have become foreign fields, earning for international corporations at the expense of those that work them. On a strip of earth, over which hangs a sickly fog, potato pickers undercut one another to survive. At home, they replicate the power-play: a mother forces boiling water down her daughter’s throat; a child is taken hostage for leverage. They dream of elsewhere and huddle together for warmth. Even those that abscond, like mother of two Val (Katharine Burford), attempting to restart life with her lover, can’t escape a system so all-pervasive.

Fen’s strength is its fullness. Even without an interval, Ria Parry’s capable and clear production never drags. Both tender and bleak, it’s carefully performed by a versatile cast, from which Burford and Alex Beckett stand out.

What’s lacking, however, is the sting of Fen’s cruelty. For all its empathy, Parry’s staging hasn’t the anger of Churchill’s text. It pities those affected, but never rails against the injustice.

Photograph: Paul Toeman

Review: The Red Shoes, Battersea Arts Centre

For those coming to Kneehigh’s work late in the day and left, like me, wondering what all the fuss is about, The Red Shoes is a chance to change all that. It is the Kneehigh that you’d always imagined existed and hoped one day to see. This is Kneehigh before big budgets and West End residencies, before scale and spectacle, tricks and high-kicks. This is the Kneehigh that actually adheres to its own buzzwords, embracing chaos, generosity and naughtiness. Put simply, this is Kneehigh pure, playful and painful.

First seen in 2001, The Red Shoes takes Hans Christian Anderson’s fable for a high-speed spin. A careful-what-you-wish-for story about a girl (Patrycja Kujawska, impeccable) cursed to dance forever after wearing inappropriate footwear to church, The Red Shoes is laced with the harshness of reality. Exhausted and exasperated, she’s finally forced to cut off her feet. In the final image, as the company falls into line and sways in time, you realise where Kneehigh’s sensibilities lie. Without exception, their eyes are moist. “If only,” they seem to silently scream, “If only it were possible to dance forever.”

What makes The Red Shoes so delightful is its willingness to reach beyond its own charming aesthetic. It’s battered suitcases and peeling doors have since become old tropes of a poor travelling theatre rife with rustic charm. If we’ve come to expect only whimsy and melancholy of this aesthetic, Kneehigh refuse to be confined to the slightness and sepia-tinted nostalgia. They manage sex and coldness, ferocity and punch. At one point, the stage bursts with light and noise like an enflamed nerve. It’s built for purpose rather than mere aesthetic; rough and ready as opposed to poised. Kneehigh are prepared to get nasty: The Red Shoes can snarl as well as smile.

The five-strong ensemble wear white underwear. Their heads are shaved; their eyes are smoky. They look like cygnets passed over by Matthew Bourne. Each puts on a pair of clogs. Even the titular red shoes are clumpy and unclassy – a long way from Jimmy Choos. When they dance, they do so loudly and rapturously, losing themselves in the rhythm they create.

It’s folksy, but also rather modern. There’s an edge of punk about it. But there’s also delicacy. Individual moments and objects are handled with enormous care. There’s a sense of preparing for surgery or stripping an antique rifle. It’s a pleasure to see material handled with such reverence. That goes for Bill Mitchell’s design as well. His ‘chocolate and cream’ colour scheme is sumptuous but simple. The stage is a series of squares and frames that allow Emma Rice to handle certain moments almost like film. Peeping out of the church doors, half of the girl’s face is obscured. Other moments are framed by panels. At times, it has the same lingering serenity as Amelie.

That contrasts beautifully with its boisterous side. Mike Shepherd, in particular, launches into various absurd caricatures with gusto and aplomb. His stern vicar – all tweed and specs – is a particularly bombastic treat, but it’s as Justine, the shoddy sideshow performer that provides light relief, that he has us doubled up. He’s at his best when trapped in a sack, wriggling like a larva, in a failed escapology act.

It’s also worth saying how well The Red Shoes sits in the BAC’s main hall. When not serving as a black box, there’s a distressed music hall feel to the room that perfectly compliments Kneehigh’s style. Moreover, it’s a pleasure to have the arch windows behind the stage, increasingly glowing with streetlamps and buzzing with life. You can look across the road and see neighbours fiddling in their kitchens, oblivious to the madness to which we’re privy.

It’s a madness that I’ve not seen of Kneehigh before, though I’d heard tell, and it’s wickedly contagious. It’s almost enough to make you advocate their return to a shoestring.

Photograph: Steve Tanner

Review: Throats, Pleasance Theatre

Written for Time Out

A sometime collaborator with Beckett, Heiner Müller and Phillip Glass, Gerald Thomas gave up on theatre in 2009. 'I do not believe,' he wrote at the time, 'that our times reflect theatre as a whole (or vice versa).' On the evidence of this vitriolic return, which does little more than outline his gripes, it's tempting to suggest that theatre gave up on Gerald Thomas.

Tiresome and time-warped, bold but boorish, 'Throats' feels like sub-par Howard Barker. It shows a host of symbolic figures, among them a black orthodox Jew, a Shoreditch dandy and a severed head, banqueting beneath the rusted carcass of the Twin Towers. On Jan-Eric Skevik's scab-like set (a rare positive), it's The Last Supper painted by Banksy.

Before long, playful surrealism is suffocated by generic, scattergun rage. Legitimate targets - celebrity, vanity, egotism, ideological vacuity - are splurged together to form an ineffectual litany of grievances.

When it comes to railing, however, a little specificity goes a long way. Thomas is so intent on rebuking 'the emerging generation', that he shouts himself hoarse, spouting nonsense like, 'Respectability and absurdity are first cousins secretly fucking each other. While status films it. Wanking. Over the tits of culture.' Quite.

Review: Eat Your Heart Out, Kindle Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Nothing puts butterflies into the stomach like the prospect of a strange meal in an unfamiliar setting. Perhaps it’s just me – I was a terribly fussy child – but there’s a huge element of trust involved in eating another’s food. Those that usually cook for us come with the backing of inductive reasoning. Restaurants have licences and customer approval. (How often do we reject a restaurant on the basis of emptiness?) Friends and family have history. Beneath this not just the threat of food-poisoning, but the simple uncertainty of taste. Sight and smell, good guides though they can be, can’t fully ascertain whether you should be entirely grateful for what you are about to receive. The proof of the pudding, as they say, is in the eating.

All of which gives Kindle’s form of digestive theatre a certain je ne sais quois. Though there are some nice touches along the way, Eat Your Heart Out doesn’t fully capitalise on the potential of its form. As a theatrical experience, it’s more an amuse bouche, than a satisfying meal in itself.

Framed as a banquet at the end of the world, Eat Your Heart Out imagines the cutthroat cookery and scavenging necessitated by disaster. On the menu are such specialities as Asteroid Ash, Coal Bread and Desiccated Butter.

In a dark, dank cavern of a banquet hall, a vast platform serves as both stage and table. Three comedia-clown chefs (Samantha Ann Fox, Jessica Mackinnon, Emily Ayres) and a contorted hostess (Nina Smith) explain the circumstances – or deliver a related, expository fable, it’s hard to know which – that this is the final underground remnants of a dismantled society. Dramaturgically, it’s a patchwork quilt that doesn’t quite stitch together. Immersive, experiential theatre clatters up against story-telling, such that one is never quite sure whether one is in the story or outside of it. Are we guests of this post-apocalyptic society or Londoners enjoying a ritualised, fictional banquet? Is the eating central or illustrative? It’s never fully clear.

The same confusion goes for the menu. Where the Asteroid Ash starter, a shot of sharp, tangy and unexpectedly unpleasant powder (a nasty shock that serves to elevate one’s nerves, suggesting further tricks in store), is entirely unplaceable as an eating experience, other courses are altogether familiar. If this starter attempts to alter the theatrical experience with food, the main course reverses that process. Titled Hearty Stew, it is quite clearly a standard beef stew, distorted by the ritual that proceeds it, in which one of the guests is selected for sacrifice. We are, it implies, chowing down on one of our own. The overall event is punctured by differences in its ontology: Kindle need to decide whether they are playing with fiction or reality.

Momentarily, it tickles both tastebuds and funny bones. Edible flowers, which taste unexpectedly as one would expect, and parched butter make the most interesting foodstuffs. There’s something rather lovely about the charred stains left on hands and faces by the coal bread, which only become apparent from the stares of strangers after leaving. It’s as if the meal has marked you.

Nonetheless, for all its evident potential, Eat Your Heart Out disappoints overall. The lack of rigor leaves too many gaps and too much unexplored. More nouvelle than haute, Eat Your Eat Out is undercooked.

Photograph: Steven Davis