Review: Mongrel Island, Soho Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Ed Harris' first major play - smartly partnered with Anthony Neilson's Realism at the Soho Theatre - is, first and foremost, a setting out of the playwright's stall. Set in an office so generic that it's never entirely clear what job it's worker-bees fulfil, Mongrel Island is a rejection of a nine-to-five, institutionalised, establishment way of life. It says, "Look at me, freelance and carefree." It says, "You see Dad, this isn't me." It is a broad brush-stroked justification that bears little resemblance to real life. That it feels familiar - and it is a staple of graduate festivals - is because every emerging theatremaker has a Mongrel Island in them. It is as formulaic as baby food.

That formula, for all that Harris carries it off with verve and swagger to provide an enjoyable entertainment, is very simple. At it's heart is routine - a mind-numbing task that gives characters something to do and a reason to be present. Added to this are a series of idiosyncratic rituals: here, the same lines repeated day in day out, a disappearing hole punch and a motivational oath sworn each morning. As for characters, take one normal one to whom we can relate and bed them into a gaggle of oddball archetypes ("You don't have to be mad etc etc") The only thing left is to up the absurdity ante until monotony and surrealism clatter together like ball-barings in a Newton's Cradle.

As for specifics, Harris goes heavy on the office as wasted life. Marie (Robyn Addison, not always at ease) is on probation in a job processing forms to do with the dead. Worse, though, is being forced to delve into the archive to log their possessions. Boxes of stuff, ballet shoes and old photographs, serve a painful reminder of the brevity of life, as the drones churn through a sludge of paperwork and devise new methods of winding one another up.

Mongrel Island's best note is the clever triangle around Marie. Hope comes with Elvis (Shane Zaza), a quiet autistic man, who finally escapes this Platonic Cave, riding his beloved bike over the hills and far away. It's nicely contrasted with the hopelessness of Pippop, an Eastern European cum Ewok of a cleaner, longing for her absent husband, and the embittered, parched cynicism of Only Joe (Simon Kunz) who gives a sense of corrosive purgatory.

There's humour within, but laughter is given rather than grasped, due to the ease of surrealism. Often anything goes as long as it comes from leftfield. Harris' sharper lines are those that snap across the office floor, particularly when in the mouth of a perfectly cast Kunz on top form. As is Zaza, whose absolute naïveté hovers between sweetness and threat.

Solid and flickering with promise, not least because it suggests a vivid theatrical imagination, Mongrel Island is just too easy by half. If Harris can find an area of his own - and a further notch of rigour - he could pull of something special. As it is, however, Mongrel Island is merely workaday.

Review: Wunderkammer, Barbican Centre

Written for Culture Wars

When circus moves its audience, it usually does so via the extraordinary, with feats of grace or daring. We marvel at it. Our facial muscles slacken, our eyes widen and our mouths form perfect Os. There’s a sharp intake of breath, so reflex that the air inhaled seems lighter than usual as it rushes down your windpipe. All you can do is stop and stare, amazed and dumbfounded.

Wunderkammer is different. It moves by dint of vulnerability. Not the sort that depends on danger, but simple, honest, human frailty. After 85 minutes of tumbling and trapeze, the six performers (there are usually seven, but Scott Grove is currently injured) strip down to their smalls and stand facing us, frank and self-assured with natural, gawky beauty. It’s a tender, touching end to a show with a thinly-veiled ethical and political message.

Looking back after a few days, however, Wunderkammer now seems mawkish and manipulative. The core message – a call for respect, imploring us to treat people as ends not means – is wishy-washy and unsophisticated. It works in the moment because it’s blurry and needs some figuring out. Satisfaction comes from spotting rather than appreciating or heeding it. Were that tritely obvious message stated simply, it would be almost instantly dismissible.

Instead, it’s carried in the mode of performance, which evolves from uncaring to generosity, becoming apparent only with gradual accumulation. The process is, essentially, from take to give: initially performers climb on one another, later they offer support. They go from mannequins tossed about to limp bodies tended to and cared for.

This beige mantra is applied first to sexual, then global politics. Early acts are given a twist of archetypal Amsterdam or Soho. All sultry neon lights and smeared lipstick. The performers cruise the stage, seeking and swapping partners with a blank sexuality. Dead-eyed women and predatory men. A clunky striptease plays in reverse, as a woman surprised to find herself in nipple tassles pulls on layers of clothing. Stilletto heels dig into the flesh of human stepping stones. Girls are pulled across the floor by their hair. A microphone sniffs around a woman’s body.

The penultimate scene, set against the Animaniac’s Nations of the World (‘United States, Canada, Mexico, Panama etc), returns to chaos. The glare of stadium lights gives the sense of a burning oil well.

The break comes with an aerial rope routine, pristine and fragile, that suggests drowning and dissociation. A cold splash of realisation. Lit starkly from behind, the performer resembles a fly caught in a spider’s web. There are few dramatic tumbles, in which she rushes towards the ground. Instead, she is isolated, trapped and eerily frozen. The technique is exquisite. We don’t gasp, we admire.

After this, it’s all gentleness and affection. Performers provide assistance, mutually collaborating to construct routines. A woman in pointe shoes tiptoes over small blocks moved carefully, precisely around the stage; her feet guided onto the stilts slowly. They help one another onto the trapeze and catch each other like the safety nets that fireman set up for jumpers. This is humane and dignified. It’s utopian and we melt at the sight of it.

However, with distance, heartwarming turns to heartburn. Without interrogation or specificity, this gushing and one-note ethical maxim makes us gooey and it would seem that Wunderkammer dupes us into a different kind of marvelling. Gawps have replaced gasps, but we’re still hypnotised into uncritical acceptance.

Photograph borrowed from Kicking Sawdust

Portrait: Kevin Spacey as Richard III, Old Vic

The following is an experiment that grew out of Lyn Gardner's Critic's Notebook on the absence of actors in theatre criticism. Largely it's to do with space and contemporary style, but it is surely, at least in part, also because we have to eyeball the actors that we avoid being too nasty about them. You rarely see an 'X can't act' review. The perception is that the casting process and direction are too blame for bad performances. Personally, I'm keen to see actors treated with critical respect and wanted to see whether one could review a performance singularly.

Described by critics as “mesmerising” and “compellingly watchable,” Kevin Spacey’s Richard III so motors Sam Mendes’ production that whenever he’s not onstage, you wish he’d return. For more than three hours we watch him almost exclusively. We can’t help it. He catches the light and we, dazzled magpies all, cannot avert our gaze.

Naturally, the instinct is to lavish praise on a charismatic superstar, but in actual fact, Spacey has developed an ingenious scene-stealing technique. By playing Richard as an attention junkie, a man that cannot fathom being upstaged, Spacey monopolises our attention by stealth. The moment someone else starts to speak, he turns to his supporters and undermines. He rolls his eyes and cups his ears as if to say, ‘Speak up, love.’ His good hand becomes a mocking ventriloquist’s dummy mouthing “Blah, blah, blah. Yadda, yadda, yadda.” Such active reactions overpower their triggers, making this a black hole of a performance, one that sucks our attention in, at the expense of almost anything else.

But, by god, it’s engrossing. Domineering it may be, but it hangs together perfectly, for Spacey’s is a Richard whose pride – no, whose egotism – stems from absolute disdain. The world, for him, is a computer game, in which he alone has consciousness and value. Other people are mere scenic effects or obstacles. Richard need not keep to their time. He blusters into meetings late, an empty chair waiting for him, and storms straight out again. There are no excuses or apologies. Instead, he flips the chairman a bird: “I have been long a sleeper.” Or, in other words, “Fuck you.”

It is this impulse of unwavering self-certainty, Spacey suggests, that drives men to autocracy and, in the second half, Richard becomes an all-purpose dictator. Here, he’s in a Kim Jong Il two-piece; there, a Herodian gown and crown. By Bosworth, his army look like the Galactic Empire’s and, finally, he’s strung up like Mussolini by the feet. The psychology is sound – Spacey’s Richard will surely be remembered for accepting the crown onscreen with the transparent mock-shock of an Oscar-winner; his humility more faux than fair – but it’s all rather heavy-handed, ticking off totalitarian tyrants one by one.

Even physically, he makes a human Swastika: his arms crooked into opposing right angles. The effect, though lolloping and ungainly, is camp villainy and coquettishness. His good hand over-gestures: often daintily, occasionally with a flourish that verges on jazz-hands. Presenting himself side on, he adopts the pose of a showgirl cheekily flashing a bit of calf. It’s a flirtation that lasts throughout. It is, ultimately, to us that he performs. When left alone, the false smile instantly thaws and he’ll turn our way to huff with scorn.

This is where Spacey excels as a Richard. You couldn’t wish for a more exquisite creep. His ability to chill resides in a quicksilver mind and a forked tongue. His danger is his slipperiness and ruthlessness. But it works best when threat or potential energy, when we don’t quite know what he’s capable of, because he lacks the muscle and the bombast to terrify. When he rails, even unexpectedly, there is a hollowness that betrays him. His hairdryer treatment is just a lot of hot air. Increasingly deserted, then, he looks weaker by the second and it’s hard to believe that he makes Bosworth without an internal coup.

Photograph: Alistair Muir

Review: Bodies Unfinished, Brockley Jack Theatre

Written for Time Out

An existential shrug of a play, Bodies Unfinished makes life seem an extension of the gestation period. Like cells in a petri dish, we exist to reproduce. Beyond that, it's an empty and angsty ride towards death. Insert food, add water and leave to breathe.

Aiming for barren desolation à la Simon Stephens, Lewis Hetherington can't quite let go of feelings and flowery language. Middle-aged Alan (Francis Adams) clatters against the three women in his life - mother, ex-wife and prostitute-turned-girlfriend - but traces of sentiment means showdowns that ought to grate, ingratiate. We're asked to care for the uncaring.

It's a shame, because the core here is adamantly bleak and well-knit. Newly divorced Alan, a soft underbelly ripe for sticking, starts a relationship of convenience with his regular prostitute Stella (a fine-tuned Katerina Stearman). You'd call it a mid-life crisis were it not the norm. He gives up on reality and responsibility just as his mother, mute in a care home, has given up on life in toto.

Though slowed by its over-reliance on entrances and exits, Timothy Stubbs Hughes's simple staging captures the pessimism and eventual hope sincerely. All Bodies Unfinished needs is more grit and less pearl.

Review: Mirror Teeth, Finborough Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Once again, the minnow that is the tiny Finborough Theatre is punching above its weight. With Nick Gill’s Mirror Teeth, it is, one suspects, trading blows with the Royal Court, little more than a mile up the road. For Gill plonks onstage a middle class family so brazenly generic that they have the double function of satirising those that have become such a mainstay at the Sloane Square venue.

In a tastefully-furnished house “in one of the larger cities in Our Country,” live the Jones family: James, Jane, John and Jenny. Dad returns from work and settles down with The Daily Paper. Mum dishes out more tea than a char wallah. Son, just back from the University, extols the virtues of a gap year to his Sister. Everyone smiles cheerily, terribly pleased with their way of life.

Gill’s family portrait is more barbed than the usual Royal Court fare, largely because its sneer is overt. Dad trades arms and Mum is terrified of “the Ethnics,” presuming all but one – a nice chap who works in the bank, who “has been naturalised…taken on our culture,” – carry as much threat as Somali pirates. Son and Daughter, meanwhile, bristle with an open sexual tension: she peers through a peephole when he’s in the shower; he dates her doppelganger and becomes regularly fixated by her assets. Etiquette comes before ethics, money before morality and appearance trumps all.

With all this so surface, Mirror Teeth has a tendency to feel over-familiar and a touch trite. There are traces of double standards, wherein by lampooning theatre’s fixation with the middle classes, Gill is able to repeat the same snarky criticisms.

More interesting, therefore, is the suggestion that Britain’s Empire complex is fit and well, as the Joneses emigrate to a. n. other Middle Eastern country in search of further profit. Gill skilfully elucidates the unchanging nature of this established order by presenting the middle class family unit as a self-replicating system, in which sons are moulded into their father’s image and outsiders, such as Jenny’s black boyfriend, are either co-opted or kept in check.

Kate Wasserberg correctly matches the over-direct dialogue with a heightened playing style reminiscent of Steve Martin’s WASP or Family Guy. David Verrey’s Dad is a bulbous toad of a man with overgrown adenoids causing a deep, nasal caw. Catherine Skinner is show-stoppingly fantastic as the mother, clinging paralysed to the wall at the sight of a non-white face. She flits half-ignored by the family, seemingly always on the cusp of a breakdown, but carefully maintaining perfect dimples and a voice like quilted loo roll.

Yet it lacks a certain mania that would allow the humour the element of surprise. Tonally flat, it’s initial bite grows gummy and, even as events darken and escalate to the very brink of the Jones’ control, Mirror Teeth sidles into drab absurdity.

Photograph: Robert Workman

Review: As I Like It, Chelsea Theatre

Written for Time Out

The sort of semi-autobiographical splurge that ought never have reached the stage, Amanda Eliasch and Lyall Watson's 'reflection' is a waste of everyone's time but theirs. The sheer level of self-indulgence is utterly infuriating.

In a fabulously kitsch boudoir, a wealthy, privileged, unsuccessful actress (Justine Glenton) pours out her personal history, from the psychological traumas of her childhood to a string of failed relationships. In a cut-glass accent, she describes herself as "fragile like a broken plate that couldn't be mended", and says things like: "I don't know why I didn't like mummy." The word 'I' recurs and recurs through a mist of self-pity and loathing and the whole thing reeks of unapologetic egotism.

That might be excusable if Eliasch and Watson had found a reason for placing this woman on stage. We find out almost everything about her except her identity or why we should care. The programme notes duly confirm As I Like It as thinly veiled autobiography.

If its purpose is therapeutic, why force it on a paying public? As I Like It needs not an audience's attention, but a therapist's. It is the most extreme case of self-love's labours lost.

Review: Emperor and the Galilean, National Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Now this, this is the sort of staging the Olivier deserves. Jonathan Kent and his designer Paul Brown have thrown everything at Ibsen’s near-unstagable nine-hour epic, here whittled into a thrilling, if not particularly nuanced, three and a half hours by Ben Power. The play remains a curio, rather than a wholehearted success. It’s admirable more for its hyperbolic brazenness than any particular nuance within.

The Olivier’s drum revolve seems to churn the earth beneath their feet: here, sinking sections like skinholes; there, raising mountains. The effect is of an entire city, strangely abstracted, appearing on the stage before us. It has the scale of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and the exoticism of one of Calvino’s Invisible Cities. At one eye-popping moment, an extravagant funeral pyre sits under a gargantuan incense burner hanging from the ceiling. Beneath it a subterranean maze, first of the city’s foundations and, a level below, its refuse, bagged in orange, green and black plastic to look like mould.

Caught between the two is Julian (Andrew Scott), a man aspiring to conquer heaven, but dragged unfailingly downwards in the process.

With echoes of the Icarus and Faustus myths, Julian attempts to defeat Christ and set himself up at the head of a new kingdom. As a lithe and pious student, he comes to believe as prophecies and signs that which we can see as coincidence or arbitrary connections. A fight for his own political survival mixed with an arrogance based on his deluded sense of destiny turns his self-protectionism into an all-conquering desire and, from a distant battlefield in Gaul, he turns to overthrow the Emperor.

Once crowned, a restlessness emerges and he sets his sights on Christ, intent on becoming, in John Lennon’s words, “bigger than Jesus.” So begins a purgation of Christianity from his empire.

It is with costume that Kent’s production scores its hits. Amidst the togas, laurels and breastplates of the old guard, Julian and his followers wear modern dress. He leads celebrations of the sun God, smattered in day-glo paint, the crowd like a chorus of a ninties production of Hair. His suits are slick and slimline. His final battle is fought in desert camouflage uniform.

Clearly, Kent is out to get us, warning against the sickness of today’s self-serving superhumanity. Or, as David Mament puts it in Three Uses of the Knife: “Today, as in ancient Rome, when all avenues of success have been travelled and all prizes won, the final prize is the delusion of godhead.”

Scott, who is coming to resemble a gaunt David Suchet, is ravishing as the Emperor that would be Ubermensch. Over three hours, he seems to grow an exoskeleton; his gentle face solidifying into a scowl. Marked by petulance and not without the odd childish tantrum, it is his voice that thrills. Scott speaks with a fruitiness – a trace of the tone that makes Lloyd Grossman ripe for parody – that gives him the overstatement of a game show host. It is a voice that grazes ear-melting beauty, only to fall short and plummet away from it. His syllables warp like melted metal and a scratchiness riles as fingernails on the underside of a mug induce squirms. Scott’s is a voice that rings in your ears for days afterwards.

In a cast of around fifty, occasionally stamping their feet in ominous unison, Jamie Ballard impresses as the devout Gregory, who finally – already blinded – tears the skin off his chest in protest and Genevieve O’Reilly’s Helena is an icy picture of queenly grace. Ian McDiarmid’s Maximus, the underworld soothsayer that spurs Julian towards his prophecies, is suitably shady if a touch cod.

All of which aligns to make Emperor and Galilean a brilliant exercise in what-the-National-Theatre-is-for. While there are more intricate and dexterous examples around, the sheer barnstorming power of Ibsen and Power, Kent, Scott and Brown, makes this a rarity worth seeing. For interested parties, it is unmissable, if only because there won’t be another chance in this lifetime.