Review: Lullaby, Barbican Centre

Written for Culture Wars

Lullaby, the latest theatrical inversion from crack cabaret outfit Duckie, sets out to be a snooze-fest. It is a late-night cabaret of dreams to which we come to “take our ease and sleep an act or two”. Theoretically, the more effective the show, the less of it you see.

So, pure theatrical Night Nurse, then? Not exactly.

Though an intensely relaxing experience, Lullaby succumbs to its own paradox. In having to do something to encourage sleep, it gives you a reason to stay awake. Awareness of your own dozy descent causes a little jolt of curiosity and your eyelids heave themselves open. Others, as the gentle purring around me testified, had no such problems, but it took me a further two or three hours to will myself, limb by limb, to sleep.

It is basically a live, adulted-sized hanging mobile – hypnotic, regressive and ungraspable – designed not simply to anaesthetize, but to ease the passage to slumber. A distraction to ward off the bedtime panics that can spring from nowhere. The theatre becomes a sleep factory, soothing and remedial enough to overcome the dystopian connotations of Brave New World or The Matrix.

Once you’ve checked in and changed into pyjamas, you’re tucked into one of twenty-nine single, double or triple beds, arranged around a circular stage. After a forty-minute cabaret of Matthew Robins’ gentle music-box tinklings and a quilted pageant of cutesy creatures, including a chorus of spangled squid, you break for teeth-brushing and final cigarettes.

Back in bed, the second half is a gradual winding down. Through half-closed eyes, you watch the cotton-wool creatures return, strangely distorted. There are soothing lectures on Pythagorean planetary theory, tree roots and the nervous system and twee songs about tigers and moons. Eventually, it gives up on sense, dropping into unconnected, free-associating sentences, on which your ear momentarily snags, but your brain can’t retain. (“It’s ok to like baked beans.”) Slowly, smoothly, the hymning voices grow distant, the music fades and your closed eyelids throb with the pulsating glows of passing plastic clouds.

Here’s the problem, though: either Lullaby works for you or it doesn’t. If it sends you off, you get a pleasant, sensory show and a nice surprise on waking. Everything Duckie do, from reception to revival, seems built with your comfort in mind. It is caring and concerted and generous.

If not, however, Lullaby is merely a pleasant prologue and epilogue to a long and lonely restless night. It’s essentially a torturously over-extended interval. Given all the effort that’s gone in to this reverend care that feels increasingly like a failure on your part and the frustration escalates. The game is simply not worth the candle.

Being fair, though, Duckie can’t be held singularly responsible. Some things just can’t be helped and Lullaby certainly has its strong points, from the first-half’s witty subversion of more conventional late-night entertainment to the subtle way it draws your attention to the process of falling asleep, bringing a light awareness to your body as it gradually shuts itself down for the night. I do wish, however, that the company hadn’t aimed their content so directly at images of sleep and dreams.

For all its kookiness, Lullaby can’t match the promise of its concept, but then, reality rarely lives up to dreams. And with that, I’ll to a much deserved bed.

Photograph: Hugo Glendenning

Review: Richard III, Hampstead Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

‘Bloody, bloody England’ indeed in Propeller’s sharply amputated and annotated version of Richard III, which lends England’s civil war all the brash menace of an encroaching buzzsaw. Edward Hall’s production is so thrilling and guttural, its Plantagenet protagonist so slickly maniacal, that it’s second half tips brazenly into high camp. As it cackles on, it seems increasingly a pantomime of pain.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Hall revels in the play’s ultraviolence, such that each dispatching is grizzlier than the last. Masked soldiers carry improvised implements instead of weaponry. Chainsaws rip through cartilage, electric drills bore into brains and sickles hook intestines like rubber ducks from a fairground stall. Thick strands of arterial blood loop through the air. It’s almost graceful in its brutality, haunted by the spectres of Kubrick, Hitchcock and Tarantino.

By the time that Wayne Cater’s Tyrell appears as a bogeyman figure – soft toys dangling from his belt, his facial features distorted by a Perspex mask – and Robert Hand’s Richmond arrives clad in a brilliant white suit to save the day, Hall seems to be suggesting that dictatorships escalate to the point of parodying themselves. When corrupt leaders believe themselves invulnerable, their cruel methods extrapolate towards sadism, serving no purpose beyond themselves.

Not for nothing is Richard Clothier’s Richard, like Draco Malfoy, Roy Batty and Max Zorin before him, a blonde villain. Severely and handsomely Aryan, dressed in a fusion of military spick and velvety louche, he looks the spit of archetypal Nazi command. (Seriously follow the link...)

In fact, Clothier makes a rather fascinating creature early on. Unusually upright for a crookback, he seems to have turned his deformities into strengths. There’s a trace of bionic supervillain to him. His hunched shoulder, covered in leather, ripples like steroid-infused muscle; his braced leg has the power of the Hulk’s fist, causing miniature earthquakes when stamped; his missing left hand is replaced with knives and hooks. He looks like Riff-Raff straightened out and surgically enhanced.

Not only does he command gruesome butchery, his regime heeds the dead no respect. Body bags are dumped like household refuse and trodden over. This is a Richard with no regard for the flesh and Clothier brilliantly suggests a man who has long since divorced identity and physical form. At one point we discover him knelt in prayer, a cane thwacking down on his hunch. Hall takes this dualism to extremes, slamming the slaughterhouse into the cathedral. His chorus of butchers – all masked with bandages, such that one can’t be sure whether they are victims or perpetrators – don’t so much whistle while they work as hymn in layered choral arrangements.

If Clothier’s performance has faults, it is that it can seem composite, stitched together like Frankenstein’s monster, rather than a complex whole. He spends much of Act 4 showing Richard as a child, legs dangling from his throne. Though justifiably suggesting leadership as guesswork and a psychology stalled in infancy, this seems a point-proving detour. However well Hall blends his tools – here the singing segues into tinkling music box and toys replace the torturous weapons – one suspects that he is working in slogans, rather than subtle refrains.

If that hampers the literary-critical rigour of Propeller’s production, it only enhances its punchy gratification. Bursting at the seams with invention, this remixed Richard III is bloody, bloody brilliant.

Photograph: Manuel Harlan, Propeller Theatre Company

Review: Dream Story, Gate Theatre

An edited version of this review appeared in Time Out

Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella spawned Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrick’s last film, in which Tom Cruise spends a Manhattan night in erectile limbo. Returning it to turn of the century Vienna, Anna Ledwich’s clever but protracted adaptation restores its sense of seedy descent.

Rather than Kubrick’s overblown opulence and conspiracy, Ledwich lowers us into the city’s grubby underworld as Dr. Fridolin (Luke Neal) seeks to satisfy his throbbing id. Leaving his wife asleep, he spirals through the city, stumbling into a secret society for anonymous promiscuity. His subconscious drives him on, but spluttering conscience holds him back.

Like La Ronde, Schnitzler’s most famous play, Dream Story is mathematically structured: a tidy palindrome that peaks at the club and retraces its steps.

It’s best at its deepest and darkest, particularly when allowing us into Fridolin’s neurotic perspective. Scenes echo as dissociation sets in and, thanks to savvy doubling and Helen Goddard’s disorientating design, the city seems a projected fantasy. Luke Neal is both upright and uptight as the dirty doctor. His tall frame seems to stiffen with guilt.

However, more everyday sections are tentative and unfocused. Ledwich flags the shortcomings of language compared to feeling, but, in doing so, proves there’s nothing so dull as the recounted dreams of other people.

Review: Hand-me-Down, Tristan Bates Theatre

Written for Time Out

This show, set in a charity shop, is winning and likeable. The one thing it needs to do is throw some stuff out. Kate Craddock's material is strong. It's just that, given her meandering structure, it becomes a jumble.

Hand-me-Down has a hint of Jim Cartwright in the way place is portrayed through population. Amidst the bric-à-brac, we encounter genial volunteers and bargain hunters. Among them are a 'meeja type' trawling for vintage chic, a child thrilled at spending pocket money and, most poignant of all, an immigrant mother who can't afford basic clothes for her children.

There's real moral complexity within: we can't simply patronise or sympathise. The 'meeja type' genuinely cares about the cause, while the penniless mother finally steals a jacket, replacing it with an outgrown baby-suit.

Hand-me-Down uses its little premise to ask big questions. Consumerism, altruism, celebrity and the Big Society all come into focus and Craddock brilliantly suggests an unwillingness to heal a world where global imbalance and exploitation props up our own way of life.

Review: Betrayal, Comedy Theatre

Count the ways that Jerry, Emma and Robert – Pinter’s mobius triangle of lovers – betray one another and you soon run out of fingers. Most plainly, there’s the basic premise of infidelity. A single affair entails two marital betrayals and another of friendship. In turn, each manifests itself a hundred times over, rippling into everyday deceptions and withheld information.

Emma and Jerry’s seven-year relationship is, famously, played backwards. We start with their hungover reunion and end on a drunken first kiss. In each scene we are equipped with information at the same time as the characters are stripped of it; disarmed by ignorance. Even within there’s a bartering for information and knowledge proves itself power: Robert is privy to his own betrayal long before Jerry ever realises. It’s a whisker away from an I-know-you-know-I-know situation. Most of all, though, Pinter allows the consequences of any betrayal to stain the act itself.

Ian Rickson’s production, however, is best in it’s handling of another sense of the concept: betrayal of the true self. By that, I don’t mean the selling out that Pinter ingeniously uses as a parallel, in which Robert and Jerry hollow out into middle-aged moneymen – publisher and literary agent respectively – treating literature not as art, but stock to be shifted. Instead, I mean the telltale signs, the give-aways and letting-slips; those moments in which pretence gets punctured. Here, the play’s future – already known to us – exists in the present moment. It pre-empts itself. Though not always an express concern of the text, this is integral to the success of Pinter’s play. (Perhaps even to naturalistic theatre as a whole.) Without the emergent subtext, the jangling guilt and suppressed secrets, betrayals might go unnoticed.

Rickson’s cast pepper their activity with fidgets and tics. Wedding rings are twisted, ankles clasped and wineglasses wobbled. In these actions, the stress of maintaining a constructed outward image reveals itself. The internal pressure under another’s gaze finds an alternative point of release that gives the lie away. You see it most clearly when they believe themselves unwatched. The moment Emma’s back turns, for example, Robert’s face drops into a cold stare of aggression. The smile doesn’t fade. It is whipped away like a magician’s tablecloth.

In these terms, Robert and Jerry’s dinner becomes climatic, because it teeters on the edge of cataclysm. Everything so nearly comes out. Robert, who has recently learned of the affair, bites his lip. Without showing his cards, he gives off a sense of a killer hand that Jerry picks up on, but can’t pin down. They match each other drink for drink. They eyes constantly interrogating. Ben Miles (Robert) and Douglas Henshall (Jerry) both give extraordinary performances. Each is so precise and in tune with the other that one truly believes their body language to be unconscious reaction. Beneath the table, their feet mirror one another. Not two stags locking horns, as one might expect of men battling over a woman, but rather two fencers in a stalemate, feinting and braced.

I was less enamoured of Kristin Scott-Thomas, who, for all her breezy ease and flow, lacks the fine-tuned physical nuance of her castmates. She is an expressive whole; they are sum totals. You sense Scott-Thomas, where you read Miles and Henshall. The result is that anything remotely deliberate or set-piecey feels contrived and stilted. Her clangers, like the clunks of the set, shatter conviction.

As for Rickson, he makes two curious decisions, both of costuming. Making Miles up into Pinter’s body-double – the thick sideburns, the waves of black hair, the leather jacket – is a red herring. Anyone that would recognise the resemblance would surely be aware of Betrayal’s underlying autobiography. (Pinter had his own seven-year affair with BBC presenter Joan Bakewell.) Only the husband is surely not the autobiographical role. That it’s not Jerry but Robert – admittedly, the part Pinter played for radio – could suggest the play to be self-flagellatory, as if Pinter was putting himself in another man’s shoes.

The second is to keep Henshall in the same blue shirt, brown jacket and chords for a whole decade. Scott-Thomas and Miles, by contrast, change costumes and hairstyles more often than Lady Gaga. Though tremendously heavy-handed, it speaks of the permanence of The Other Lover, for, where one sees first-hand the many faces of a life partner, the adulterer is only seen in a single situation: the clandestine meeting, isolated from the clutter of either party’s life and so, entirely out of time. The Other plays only the part of lover; the life-partner must multi-role.

Perhaps that explains why the tics disappear when Jerry and Emma are alone in the flat. Here, Emma and Jerry seem as easy and unguarded as when alone or unwatched, as if they can breath easy and be themselves. Johanna Town’s lighting instills the crisp air of a seaside getaway, not the muggy smog of Kilburn High Street. It seems to cleanse the blanched and blotchy wallpaper of its grubbiness. The flat, which permeates every other location (albeit, I suspect, more out of practicality than design), becomes as much a safe-house as The Dumb Waiter’s basement or The Caretaker’s attic.

There’s real intelligence herein and a willingness to trade in minutiae. Rickson has played psycho-sociologist, classifying the different betrayals as they stack up like a body count. There mightn’t be the hurtling inevitability of emotional implostion, but, at its best, Rickson’s staging must rank amongst the most insightful. It’s the sort of show to which you long you take a magnifying glass, if not an entire forensic team, so as to better scour for clues.

Review: Realism, Soho Theatre

Anthony Neilson’s Realism premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival two years after The Wonderful World of Dissocia and is, more or less, the same play with the volume turned down. Mind you, given Neilson’s explosive style, that’s rather like a sonic boom heard through earplugs.

Realism uses the same hallucinogenic technique as The Wonderful World, swapping Lisa’s dissociative disorder for Tim Treloar’s blue funk. (Treloar keeps his real name, so in the original production, the same ‘character’ was called Stuart McQuarrie.) Nursing both a hangover and a heartache, Treloar opts to spend his Saturday slobbing around his flat alone. In his pants.

However, his restful day off soon sinks into restless off-day, as that most masculine of traits, sentimental self-pity, takes hold. The fragments of his imagination – parents, ex-partners and pop cultural icons – leap out of his brain and into his living room. They spring from the bin and burst out of the washing machine. A giant carrot drops from the ceiling. Sand trickles down. Black and white minstrels troop out of his fridge. His cat gets home and gives him what for. They goad, scold and titillate, shunting him into a mix of nostalgic remorse and morbid angst, until we finally see his jubilant funeral.

In Steve Marmion’s production, all this is great fun to watch. The various phantasmagoria have a Boosh-like brashness; each bounces around the set with a Tiggerish energy. Enjoyable as it is, the production gets carried away and lacks the discipline to carry off Neilson’s more reprimanding intentions. It misses the darker shadows and sharper edges that make Tim’s thought-cyclone so unhealthy. Nothing comes with haunting menace or tips into mania. It’s all a little upbeat and wacky, dare I say, a little CBBC.

That’s largely down to Marmion’s tendency towards archetype. Treloar, for example, offers a stereotypically Neanderthal version of arse-scratching, lesbian-loving, knuckle-dragging masculinity. The role strikes me as more complex: softer, though still infused with the masculine. There is both fussiness and an ungrudging domesticity, hence the genuine irritation at a sock left out of the washing machine, the initial politeness to a cold-caller and the constant parental presence.

Likewise, Rocky Marshall plays the best friend with a wahey and a leer, where there is something tender about the concern shown. Marshall plays it a touch mockingly, almost cruelly, with too much oh-get-over-yourself impatience. Together it’s too strongly laddish, too Men Behaving Badly, for the depressive side to come through.

That the layer of objective reality is already halfway to its inflated fantasy prevents Marmion from achieving the bleak emptiness of Tim’s inactivity. The actual is heightened, where it needs be humdrum. Beautiful though his design is, the usually excellent Tom Scutt must take some blame, since the flat is already vibrantly cartoonish: block colours and bold outlines. Here, the two levels fuse too easily. It also furthers the cheery quality. As with the playing style, the design needs Dali’s disorientation rather than pop art’s brightness. (To be fair, Scutt is somewhat constrained by the Soho theatre’s inability to follow Neilson’s original ending and fly in the realistic kitchen-sink set to finish.)

Nonetheless, Neilson’s text is strong enough that the (well-worn) ideas about universally-felt anxiety and insignificance survive in tact. More importantly, so does the basic subversion of his title, which knocks naturalistic theatre out of the park. This is real life, Jim, exactly as we know – and live – it. It’s no Wonderful World, but it’ll just about do.

Review: The Flying Karamazov Brothers, Vaudeville Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

If we’re being generous, The Flying Karamazov Brothers have got half a show. Towards the end, their juggling grows genuinely impressive and, on occasion, rather transfixing. Their best trick is to dupe their audience into forgetting the sheer tedium that preceded it. That’s closely followed by their marketing, which probably fooled your ass onto the seat in the first place.

Kilted and caught in mid-air, posing like rock-stars, as the posters display them, the four New Yorkers seem cavalier and careless. In actual fact, they have all the swagger of an IT department loosed for the office Christmas cabaret. Utterly incapable of showboating – without which any act claiming virtuosity will seem limp – instead, they goof and gurn. Only that mode is rather obviously not affected. Just as you need, at base, to trust the trapeze artist, no matter how precarious the feat is made it seem, clowns must let us see the man beneath the make-up. We need to know we’re laughing with, not at.

So, when the four put on tutus and trot around the stage or engage in spoof swordplay, it is frankly embarrassing. No one onstage seems comfortable and no one off it – bar a single Japanese tourist, presumably taken in by their crude stereotyping of her countrymen – was laughing.

Each half ends with a signature act. The first – 'The Challenge', in which Dmitri Karamazov (Paul Magid) juggles any three objects offered by the audience – is rather undermined since no one seems to have brought anything along. The teapot and whipping cream, though not the Pret jelly pot, were onstage before we turned up.

The second, a group routine involving so-called objects of terror, actually proves impressive in spite of their overhyping. Introducing each object, among them a cleaver, a bottle of Cava and an egg, individually through the show, only serves to make them seem a bit unambitious. You start to long for chainsaws, Ming vases and Rottweilers.

There are some nice moments of Stomp-like beat juggling and the odd sharp joke, but, for the most part, The Flying Karamazov Brothers is filler. Its attempts to mine juggling for something philosophical are as lame as they are vague. Most of all, however, the act just seems rather quiet and quaint, a relic from a bygone era that lacks real engagement or spectacle. They’d be great at a wedding, but on a West End stage, the Flying Karamazov Brothers are out of their depth.

Photograph: taken from TNT magazine

Review: Chicken Soup with Barley, Royal Court

It’s rather surprising to see the Royal Court charging admission to Chicken Soup with Barley, given that, for the duration of its run, the theatre is, to all intents and purposes, operating as a museum.

In fact, it’s hard to even call Dominic Cooke’s fine production a revival, given the term’s connotations of resuscitation. Rather it is an exquisite piece of taxidermy.

In other words, presented straight, as Cooke does, Chicken Soup with Barley can be nothing but an artefact. That is not to say that it has no relevance whatsoever to a contemporary audience. It does so just as ancient relics of exinct cultures carry universal meaning, but, like them, its significance today is primarily historical. It serves as both a primary and a secondary source: both in itself, as piece of theatre history, and in its content, as representing a past present. The play is now incapable of direct address. Any signs of life, and there are certainly some within, might be thought of as the muscles spasms of a stuffed corpse.

Arnold Wesker’s play, the first (and, it is often claimed, best) in his trilogy of national diagnosis, premiered at the Coventry Belgrade in 1958, transferring to the Court immediately afterwards. It shows an East End, working-class Jewish family, the Kahns, across three decades. In 1936, they are full of hopeful socialist defiance, counter-marching against Moseley’s blackshirts. By the end, in 1956, against the backdrop of Stalinism and the Hungarian revolution, not only has their ideology splintered and deflated, so too has that of the next generation.

A landmark production in theatre’s post-1956 revolution, Chicken Soup with Barley was another example of a stage stormed by an Angry Young Man. Reviving it at the same theatre inevitably comes with a whiff of self-celebration, especially since Cooke merely digs out, dusts off and displays the piece as it might originally have been. It’s almost an archaeological approach to theatre, though, somewhat problematically, it never admits as such.

Instead, Cooke presents it as one might any other piece of new writing, as if its core state of the nation message still stands. Only it doesn’t. Because of Thatcher. Because of Regan. Because of Blair and Brown. We cannot stop the collapse of the Kahns’ various socialist ideologies, because to do so would require us first to resuscitate them.

To be capable of direct address, a play must resonate with its contemporary audience, if not intrinsically, then instrumentally; that is, in its presentation. This still involves treating it as an artefact, only not by handling it with protective gloves, but as raw material to be refashioned. It involves the same irreverence with which the Chapman Brothers painted over a Goya orginal. (In theatre, there can be no charge of reckless cultural vandalism, since there can be no irreparable damage. There is no original to lose. Everything is proposition.)

Peering into Ultz’s meticulously assembled sets is much like visiting the Cabinet War Rooms. The production has a sense of preservation, perhaps even restoration, about it and, because Cooke makes no reference to that process, it’s strangely unsettling. Ghostly. Perhaps we are so accustomed to watching ourselves on the Royal Court stage that we cannot settle into the sort of period drama one expects of BBC2 on a Sunday night, for that is what Wesker’s play has become. Cooke almost needs to pump in the unmistakable stench of formaldehyde that we might know to watch accordingly.

While there are innumerable plays that can wholly survive without such directorial intervention – Shakespeare being the obvious go-to example – Wesker’s is not one of them. It is too firmly lodged in its own historical moment for that. It addresses England in 1958. It calls the dead to arms. Today, it serves firstly as a history lesson or, at a big old stretch, as a lesson from history.

What poignancy remains comes instead from our failure to heed its warning. Today, the most striking line is Sarah Kahn’s premonition of “a world where people don’t think any more,” satisfied as they are with their new television sets. Watching today, all we can do is hang our heads in shame for her struggle has long since been lost. Chicken Soup with Barley is thus made hopeless.

This is what becomes of the state of the nation play when the nation it reflects no longer corresponds. Wesker’s play has crystallised into allegory. It’s politics, so urgent in its own time, is now replaced by softer, pensive philosophy. It no longer matters what the Kahns believe, but how their beliefs wane.

Like his increasingly paralysed father, agonisingly played by Danny Webb, Ronnie (Tom Rosenthal) simply exhausts himself with dreamy romanticism, while Ada (Jenna Augen) flees the bickering unions for the freedom of the countryside. The initially ardent Monty, played by Harry Peacock as if years of shrugging have left his shoulders hunched, fades into self-interest, leaving London to set up as a greengrocer: “There’s nothing more to life than a house, some friends and a family.” A realisation dawns: aren’t we all Montys now?

Only Sarah Kahn holds onto her ideals. As played by Samantha Spiro, Sarah exists in an alternate time, as one imagines a Galapagos tortoise might do. While those around her wither, Spiro merely slows slightly and drops a notch. If she has a summery disposition in 1936 – floral print dress, bright pastels – it takes twenty years for autumn to set in. Her husband, by contrast, is in deep-freeze, two strokes down the line, paralysed and incontinent.

Today, Chicken Soup with Barley is less about the Left, whether utopian like Ronnie’s or pragmatic like Ada’s, than the effects of time. It becomes existential, a meditation on the glacial, inhuman pace of change and the hopelessness of the world as experienced. If Wesker’s play has become an artefact, we ought to make a memorial of it: a reminder that we must continue to fight.

Review: We Hope You Are Happy (Why Would We Lie?), Riverside Studios

Too often the claim that all elements of theatre are equal, leaves some more equal than others. In retaliation against the writer’s stranglehold over British theatre, text suffers discrimination and neglect.

So it’s rather brilliant to see a young company placing it at the centre of the devising process. Tim Cowbury’s text, clattered through with parched cynicism by Jessica Latowicki and Chris Bailey, has clearly grown out of the rehearsal room. It combines (seemingly genuine) personal histories, a hallmark of devised work, with riffs on global concerns to skewer the ludicrous self-pity and hollow righteousness of Western consumer culture.

We Hope You Are Happy (Why Would We Lie?) might be shot through with liberal guilt, but if you can see past that, there’s a sharp attack on its complicit and complacent audience. What elevates it above your average exercise in self-flagellation, however, is its outward mask of polite concern. The repeated claims to care for us are revealed as empty self-protectionism. As long as we’re all fine and dandy, the others can go hang. Any costs are irrelevant.

Its hands might be clasped in prayer for our safe passage, but concealed within is a shard of glass ready to slash throats. Like the prologue of Henry IV, Part II, Made in China preach “peace, while covert enmity under the smile of safety wounds the world.”

Two friends, a boy and a girl, gather round the coolbox, gorging on beer and ice-lollies, almost to the point of choking. They talk in that wry tone of smartass teenage irony that sees every sentence, like, broken up and, um, rising at the end. As if they’re, you know, afraid to commit or incapable of care. Any sincerity is pockmarked and punctured.

They talk of disaster. Of Haiti. Of the Blitz. Of 9/11 and 7/7. Of Thailand, drowning. All are totemic; those that have been delivered unto us by the media. They talk of them in superficial tones, wilfully conflating terrorism with natural disasters. She talks of having broken her foot. He ups her with some other minor injury. They chug another Bud, do a little dance, belch and carry on.

By the end, covered in flour and ketchup and resembling the dust-crusted New Yorkers of a decade ago (an effect I first saw in Longwave at the 2002 NSDF), we must concede the category mistake. That is to say, terrorism and natural disasters are incomparable, since only the latter are truly random acts. For all the attempts to reframe it as indiscriminate, terrorism is motivated and targeted. Its destruction is reactive.

I’m reminded of something I read (though I can’t now find) at the time of Hurricane Katrina: that natural disasters leave no room for feelings. When it takes everything just to survive, there can be no space for happiness. It is, at base, a luxury and – as Latowicki and Bailey chug on, seeking happiness in excessive consumption – indulgence.

Photograph: Made In China's website

Review: Little Baby Jesus, Oval House Theatre

Written for Time Out

In other hands, this could so easily have been facile: three coming-of-age stories about self-acceptance and standing up to the crowd ought to be flatly moralistic. Instead, thanks to the delicacy and fizz with which Arinze Kene writes, Little Baby Jesus is utterly magnetic.

Kene's vivid text works like a zoom camera, picking out details from a panorama. His three entwining monologues combine into a vivid teenage view of a black inner-city community - its grandmas as influential as its gangs - without reverting to 'Into the Hoods'-style archetypes.

If anything, Kene avoids high drama. The only knife to appear never gets pulled. Stones and spit are the weapons of choice. Kehinde, Jodie and Rugrat all come into contact with local gang the Cally Road Boys, but each shirks their responsibility to speak out. Kehinde (Fiston Barek) betrays his sister over an impromptu race; Rugrat (Akemnji Ndifornyen) stands by as his peers pelt an abandoned baby with pebbles.

The direct parallel with Edward Bond's Saved is fiercely accusatory. Today's black gangs are no different from yesterday's white ones; both fester when failed by society. Narrative connections can prove elusive, but Kene's text thrives on its skilful association of ideas, which Che Walker's crisp direction brings out beautifully.

Review: I Belong to this Band, Riverside Studios

I suspect that Kings of England’s tribute to a lost England can only work in a metropolitan setting. It is too reliant on the otherness of rusticity and folk to exist without surgically removing its content from its natural habitat.

Each time it plays, Simon Bowes recruits a number of local musicians and/or performers into an impromptu band. Together they deliver and dissect a selection of traditional folk songs, lost in “the passing of time” to which Kings of England’s work always refers. It is at once a mourning ritual and a celebration. For each, we get a synopsis by way of explanation and sometimes several alternative renditions, which stress their oddity. At first the music seems quaint and bucolic: its plots seem almost doltish for their totemic animals and faint mysticism. Yet there’s something infectious and irresistible. The surprise is to find yourself singing heartily along.

The crucial image comes early on. The five performers kneel, almost ceremonially, upstage, bearing baking paper cut-outs of string instruments that they slowly crumple into balls and discard. These seem like autumn leaves parched and disintegrating. They shrivel in the same way that glaciers melt: slowly but inevitably. So too does the rural way of life to which they point, as the countryside becomes subsumed by expanding cities. I Belong to this Band concerns extinction and one can’t help but feel that Bowes’s is recruiting not so much a band as a rebellious militia of sorts, determined to stem the advance of urbanity. King Canute of the Countryside Alliance, perhaps.

Such an attempt, however, seems futile and Bowes is not so naïve as all that. Rather than attempting to force a U-turn, I Belong to this Band causes pause and pensive reflection. It is a remembrance service for a way of life that still just about exists. Nature here is absent. It is constructed. Dogs and birds are cut from the same baking paper; their barks and chirrups are played through speakers. These are symbols and the implication is that they will soon be without equivalents. I Belong to this Band is therefore a eulogy for a non-urban existence. It needs the urban backdrop and metropolitan audience because its momentum exists only insofar as we realise that our norms are destroying those of others. In the expansion of our ecosystem, we impose upon another one.

That we find ourselves joining in, of course, is what turns that momentum into melancholy and, having done so, makes the change matter – if only fleetingly. That’s why the DIY style, the ramshackle shambles of forgotten steps and uncertain singing, is so vital to the piece. It invites us to sing along, not led by rehearsed and goading performers, but with them in their tentative uncertainty. (That said, the piece deserves a better performance than the distracted and uncommitted one given last Friday. Bowes can ill-afford awkward self-consciousness in leading his troops.)

That strain of sentimentality is the chink in the piece’s armour. It needs the present-tense tinge of sadness of golden-hued nostalgia and that, of course, fades from view. Leave the theatre and the surrounding city feels, for a while, unnatural and all-pervasive, unstoppable, but it will not do so for long. Later it will serve its practical purposes as per. It will need negotiating or navigating through. It will throw up its pleasures and possibilities, its razzle and its dazzle. By the time it does, rest assured that you won’t concern yourself with its cost in rural terms. It might still have the radical discomfort of a one-way trip to hell in a handcart, but solutions will not be found in rose-tinted reflections on rurality. Pleasing though they might be.

Photograph from Kings of England website

Review: Foley, Riverside Studios

Jo Bannon’s Foley is a clear and simple short. In fact, that’s its greatest flaw.

Foley, for those that don’t know, is the recreation or simulation of particular sounds, usually for insertion into an audiotrack accompanying a film or radio play. It’s appeal for theatre practitioners is obvious; foley is sonic representation, whereby one sound can stand in for another by virtue of resemblance. It functions through the same mimesis as dramatic theatre.

All this Bannon explains totally needlessly at the start, for it will become apparent later on, even to those unfamiliar with the term used – again unnecessarily – as title.

Having laid out her intentions as if conducting a school science experience – aim, theory, apparatus and method – Bannon then executes them. What follows is made pretty much redundant by conforming to the information she’s already provided. Foley becomes mere demonstration, as opposed to exploration.

It’s a real shame, because, in doing so, she wholly scuppers the inherent oddity of the artform.

That every object on the wooden table centre stage is in its proper place, outlined by masking tape, would in itself suggest some definite purpose. Each is laid out clearly, within easy reach, like handbells waiting to be played. From this order, so carefully constructed, we (perhaps mistakenly) presume an overarching purpose.

And yet, Were it not for the title and Jo Bannon’s introductory demystification, it’s purpose would, at least initially, elude us. The objects don’t add up and the table remains unplaceable. From the foodstuffs – milk, vegetables, cereal, jelly, steak, half a lettuce – we might anticipate some form of cookery demonstration, but even they don’t tally into any recognisable recipe. The presence of other incongruous objects – a saw, red shoes, microphones – further the unsolveable riddle. Instead, we know too much and nothing can be totally unexpected.

The structural problems don’t end there, however. Bannon takes us through a story, pausing to illustrate the sounds that crop up en route: tuning radios (the snap, crackle and pop of Rice Krispies), waves lapping against the shore (a plastic bag against a microphone) etc. Given that it serves the sound effects, rather than vice versa, this narrative serves only as connective tissue. In which case it doesn’t really matter that Bannon has stripped her thriller of thrills with an advance warning of murder.

Her problem, however, is that she does the same in framing her sound effects, announcing them in advance rather than allowing them their ambiguity. By using narration, Bannon smacks a label on each effect, revealing the dislocation of cause and effect, the non-correspondence of representation and simulation, at the heart of foley. With the label coming first, however, she pre-empts the struggle to identify and so forecloses any possibility of satisfying revelation. Rather than thriving on suggestion, it becomes illustration: call and response, tick following tock.

Most problematic is that Bannon’s demonstration doesn’t break itself. Yes it fails, descending into chaos as she frantically slaps steaks, gargles water and hammers her lettuce struggling to keep up with the action, but it does so by sabotage, rather than by sticking to the rules. Its as if Bannon gives up. After all, she is in control of the narrative’s pace. Were she trying to keep up with a film or recording, the failure would be honest. Instead, the solution, namely to keep the task manageable, is within her own grasp.

Foley, then, is uninteresting in spite of its subject matter, a clear case of structural mismanagement. There’s a cracking piece within, but Bannon needs to start afresh. She needs to watch from her audience’s perspective.

Photograph: Carl Newland