Review: John Peel's Shed, Underbelly, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for Culture Wars

In 2002, John Osbourne won a competition. His tagline summing up John Peel’s Radio One show – “Records you want to hear, played by a man who wants you to hear them.” – left him the recipient of a box of old vinyl direct from the DJ’s shed. Nine years later, his knack for a tidy line comes to his aid again, in this gentle paean to radio.

John Peel’s Shed intersperses a handful of those records, which include OiZone, a Boyzone punk covers band, and Atom and his Package’s Pumping Iron for Enya, with a meandering paddle through Osbourne’s experiences of – and expertise on – radio.

He clearly knows his subject well. In fact, he’s written the book and, really, this feels pretty much like the edited highlights. It’s all very Radio Four, gentle and witty and snug, but the rambling structure ultimately pulls John Peel’s Shed down. There’s a small-town coming-of-age story within (director Joe Dunthorne wrote Submarine), but it’s not robust enough to suffice as the show’s skeleton.

Osbourne is not a natural performer, but, both for what he says and how he says it, he is an interesting specimen. There’s such gawky vulnerability that you can’t but swoon with pity.

Far removed from his cantankerous namesake, Osbourne is a human sheepdog: doltish and awkward, but endearingly benign. He’s the sort of chap grandmothers adore. This curly fringe droops over his forehead. His shoulders hang limp and his hands are never quite sure what to do with themselves. R’s soft enough to serve as fairground prizes add to the cuddliness, but after half an hour of served straight down the central aisle without a flicker of eye contact, it grows increasingly drowsy.

While there’s an awful lot of 'Quite Interesting' material, the whole is steeped in sadness. Even beyond Osbourne’s harmless obsession with his subject, here is a man still living off a sentence he wrote nine years ago. He’s won the competition, written the book, presented the radio series and, now, done the stage show. You can’t help but wonder what happens next.

It’s this good-will – not so much earned as a reflex response to a lost child – that provides John Peel’s Shed its foundations. If we follow Osbourne to the end of the earth, we do so not as disciples, but out of concern for his well-being.

Review: Minsk 2011, Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for The Independent



A man unfurls the Belarusian flag. He is bundled off by a gang of men in thick-soled boots. The same fate awaits a man who applauds, another who checks his watch, even a woman in the front row, just for watching.



Sometimes the mere existence of a show is all it takes. Members of the Belarus Free Theatre, who must perform in secret at home, have suffered the fate they represent. Their latest piece can be overly literal, but its angry power is undeniable. Neither imagined nor researched, it is lived.



A remorseful love letter to their capital, Minsk 2011 shows a city incapable of self-expression. A gay pride march is shut down, marchers are arrested and beaten. Strippers pass for culture and knock-out alcohol is cheaper than self-respect. A pop-up nightclub takes over a factory. The cityscape is vivid and appalling. If scars are sexy, they say, Minsk is the sexiest city in the world.



Belarus, however, is not. Certainly not in terms of international politics. It has no oil, no mountains, only people living under Europe's last dictatorship, ignored by the rest of the world. The Belarus Free Theatre seek to change that, one audience at a time. These home thoughts from abroad demand attention.

Review: Tonight Sandy Grierson Will Lecture, Dance and Box, Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for Culture Wars

A call to sincerity in a world of upwards inflections, raised eyebrows and winking emoticons, this slippery, unclassifiable one man show sees Sandy Grierson telling as tall a tale as you’ll ever hear. Taller, even, than its subject: his great-grandfather Arthur Craven, 6’4” with 19 inch biceps, whom he met last year in a drum and base club on the outskirts of Lisbon.

Craven’s life involves a string of identities, chance encounters with historical and literary giants and half a globe’s worth of countries. Had they been concocted, he’d have enough air miles to get him to the moon and back. He’s a boxer, a lover and “the poet with the shortest haircut in the world.” Oh, and he pipped Dada to Dadaism.

Yet, such is the intensity of Grierson’s adamancy, that, two days later, I’m still not ready to entirely dismiss the possibility that – maybe, just maybe – it might be true.

Ever since The Observer started its regular The BestPerformance I’ve Ever Seen series, I’ve been racking my brains for one of my own. Grierson is giving it nightly at the Assembly Rooms. You can’t take your eyes off him for a second.

What seems bizarre now is that he seemed to start too casually, passing from pre-show announcement to show without a flicker of change. From there, Grierson’s performance gradually swells: a ripple becomes a tidal wave. It sweeps us away.

Head tilted, nodding very gently, he bores his stare into us, eyes widened, and implores us to believe him. He is a coiled presence, sinewy but on the edge of explosiveness as he whips us up like a travelling showman. The plan is to attempt a transubstantiation, a summoning of Craven’s presence into the space. He comes as close as is possible: his voice drops a notch, French tumbles out, even his facial features seem to rearrange themselves. We are completely enraptured, totally still to the point of holding our collective breath.

However, it’s never entirely clear what his performance is in aid of. The takeaway maxim, Craven’s own, stands at the end: “Life has no solution. You have to learn to dream it with greater care.” If it’s attacking irony and flippancy, the sincerity it offers is itself illusory. It could be advocating passion, commitment, that life is for living and rules are for breaking. It never really reveals its motives. Perhaps it’s just a really great tale, really, really well told.

Photograph: Greyscale Theatre

Review: The Simple Things in Life, Fuel Sheds/Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for Culture Wars

With so much of so little consequence at the Fringe, FUEL offer a more reflexive attempt at something insubstantial. If that seems uncharacteristic of the independent producing house – their other show is the Belarus Free Theatre – the quality remains reassuringly reliable.

Dotted around the Botanic Gardens, tucked under willow trees or engulfed by rhodendra, are five inauspicious garden sheds. A single journey stops off at three sheds, each of which houses an artist or company, commissioned to respond to the title they share, The Simple Things in Life. The results, which vary in form and tone, are all carefree and delightful: they cut the brain loose, sit you back and allow themselves to be soaked in.

Each has interpreted the brief from a different angle. The London Snorkelling Team, a music and animation combo, offer a deliriously goofy gig, while Frauke Requardt and Makiko Aoyama present the pleasure of dance for dance’s sake. Lewis Gibson, my favourite half-hour thus far this Fringe, goes beyond show and tell, instead treating us to a carefully constructed experience of blissful empty-headedness.

First up – or to conclude, depending on your route – is The London Snorkelling Team’s 2011 Annual Science Demonstration and Space Fete, which subverts high science with an influx of wackiness. The particle accelerator we’re here to view, for example, is being used to cause a meat collision by blasting a pig at a cow. The result, and we’ll meet in two hours, naked, to enjoy it, is a meat shower. Jaunty and round-the-twist, this is infectiously funny stuff, smartly stupid throughout. Here, Einstein knocks out his theory of relativity after a day of continual mishaps and there’s Hawkings versus Dawkins over whether Mr T could take Rocky.

Makiko’s Shed is lined with mirrors, like a makeshift infinity triangle. Red velvet covers the walls and six bulbs glow to create a warming environment with an aftertaste of seediness. Aoyama, with the cheek to cheek grin of Edith Nesbit’s Psammead, dances in a corner, multiplied until kaleidoscopic. While the choreography loosely suggests the pleasure of cutting off self-consciousness, the real joy comes from letting your eyes fuzz over and appreciating the simple kinaesthetics.

Finally comes the lovely escapism of Lewis Gibson’s low-key members club, a chance to snip the spinal column and drift into an absent-minded haze. Gibson’s shed is a immersion chamber of sorts. It manages to create a private bubble in a public moment.

We wear ear-defender headphones, through which we initially hear Ella Fitzgerald hymning about solitude and later the live sounds inside the shed, including Gibson’s instructions. It all sounds distant, quilted and unreal. Looking through viewfinders, glowing sepia soft against the light, we notice sound and image don’t sync. Gibson charges our glasses with port or elderflower cordial and hands us a book. Reading alone, the sleepy pace dictated by a voice in our ear, familiar stories intermingle; the narrative gives up. Gradually the book gives up to, molting words before fading to grey, then white.

It takes half an hour, but effects last all day. Gibson has slowed us down, stopped us charging heedlessly to wherever we need to get to, but the skill comes in the way it sneaks up on us, softly, softly. By the time you realise what he’s playing at, it’s too late, you’re away, deep in blissful simplicity.

Review: The Invisible Show II, Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for Culture Wars

Marking a radical shift for Fringe veterans Red Shift, this live-broadcast headphone drama seeks to blend into the crowd. Unfortunately, while the concept is strong, the execution is utterly mangled and the whole thing reeks of digital immigration.

The overwhelming problem with The Invisible Show II is that it would be visible from space. Leaving aside the chunky, albeit flesh-toned, radio mics, its repeated re-use of the same four actors means it’s less a case of syncing audio with appropriate visuals than a round of Where’s Wally. A particularly easy one at that, since the acting is emotionally outsized. Olivier was never much crack at immersive theatre: splendid fury doesn’t lend itself to disappearance.

In fairness, the actors aren't helped by obvious and overwrought writing. The conceit is that we tune into private moments in the bustle of the Pleasance Courtyard. Each goes to eleven, much like miniature soap storylines. Passionate affairs come to angry ends. Unplanned pregnancies drop like bombs. Terminal illness strikes! You’d think the queue for Tim Vine’s chat show was the place to break bad news.

Much more fun is attaching such dialogue to unsuspecting and entirely inappropriate punters, kicking back with a beer or fending off flyerers. Believe me, two portly Germanic tourists discussing six-hour sex sessions that culminate not in orgasm but urination is quite the spectacle.

Review: Botallack O'Clock, The Half Moon in Herne Hill

Written for Time Out

There was almost a movie of Roger Hilton's life with John Hurt playing the obscure abstract artist. Thank heavens his story found playwright Eddie Elks, whose portrait of the painter outstrips mere biography. Dazzlingly eloquent yet always just beyond sense, Botallack O'Clock is a stunning miniature; surprising, profound and very very funny.

Roger Hilton spent his last decade in self-imposed hermitage, confined to a squalid basement in which he slept and worked, dashing out several poster-paint gouaches in a day. Surrounded by paint pots and whisky bottles, he sits beneath a low-hanging light, chain-smoking and talking to his radio, imagining himself as a guest on Desert Island Discs. "This is a crocodile," he says, introducing one of his paintings, "Eating my wife."

At its simplest, Botallack O'Clock is a study of the fine line between genius and insanity. The joy is in its strange yet sage philosophy. Hilton tells it as he sees it, rambling through nutty but lucid nuggets in a voice like Alan Bennett's best Michael Caine impression. The effect is something like Test Match Special suffering from heatstroke: woozy and delirious but purring on, always impeccably English.

The production, from Third Man Theatre and the Half Moon's grassroots fringe company Pilotlight, boasts a phenomenal and uncompromising performance from Dan Frost. Frost inhabits the role far beyond surface impersonation. He manages to find a note of panic beneath Hilton's jovial contentment. He personifies the artist's (and TS Eliot's) proverb that humankind 'cannot bear very much reality.'

To watch him fishing for his last gherkin is to understand the freedom that isolation can bring. His brow crinkles, NHS glasses slipping down his nose. Two minutes later, he finally skewers it with a paintbrush: 'Gotcha, you little bugger.'

How much of Botallack O'Clock's brilliance comes from its writer and how much from its subject is hard to tell. It really doesn't matter; this is the best kind of buried treasure.

Review: The Oh Fuck Moment, St George's West, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for Culture Wars

In a single second of realisation, your sweat glands burst. You can actively feel your pupils dilating. Your throat clogs, the world fades from view and your stomach – oh, your stomach – widens into a cavern in which bile sloshes about like an eddy. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Oh Fuck Moment.

Thankfully, Hannah Jane Walker and Chris Thorpe are entirely sympathetic. They’ve probably done worse and, even if not, chances are they’ll know someone who has. Somewhere between seminar, group therapy and public confessional, The Oh Fuck Moment drills a burr hole in each of us, releasing the build up of guilty pressure beneath the surface. By the end, you’ll wear your cock ups with pride: life’s little battle scars; badges of humanity.

An Oh Fuck Moment is the sort of mistake from which there’s no coming back. It’s the too candid email that hits the wrong inbox, the violin left in the back of a taxi, the ringing telephone seconds after an execution and the wrong label on a newborn baby. “Mistakes as eradicable as smallpox,” they shape us into the people we are today. They change the world irrevocably. History is written in its Oh Fuck Moments.

Each account works because we know its leading to some denouement, building towards catastrophe. While beautifully expressed with understated poetry and performed with a kind intensity, it’s the moments of reality that really hit home. Walker and Thorpe donate their errors for our sake, entirely without self-pity. The latter’s ownership of missing his father’s final moments is devastatingly matter of fact and universal. Such moments have real charge, particularly when it reaches beyond recounting to summoning. Acting out the black box transcript of a plane crash feels genuinely dangerous, as does bringing a hockey stick to better demonstrate its puncturing rectal tissue.

Our own seem paltry by comparison and lose their paralytic power. The physiological and psychological symptoms are empty hangovers, remnants of a more primitive existence. This is theatre at its most cathartic, acheiving instant effects that reach beyond the auditorium with wit and empathy. It makes a responsibility of taking responsibility, but it also makes it manageable. To err is indeed human, but Thorpe and Walker don’t put a foot wrong.

Review: Audience, St George's West, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for Culture Wars

Spoiler alert: If there's any conceivable chance that you might see Audience either at the Fringe or beyond, please don't read the following (or any other review, for that matter). It will break not only your experience of the show, but also that of others.

Whatever the merits or morals, outrage or otherwise at the start of the festival, Audience has since become inert. Too many people arrived braced or ready to take offence that it no longer contains the very thing it seeks to show, a real-life audience.

Let’s start by killing off an unhelpful misnomer: Audience is not interactive theatre. That would require dialogue, a genuine response to ours. Instead, it is a provocation and a reaction, which is, in turn, placed centre stage. An initial pinch, a resultant flinch and there the cycle stops.

The problem is that, in order to be interesting, our reactions must be genuine. They need not necessarily be sincere, but they must be formulated in the moment, live, as a direct result of what we are watching. The moment that our ‘reaction’ becomes a pre-meditated action, Audience has failed. To survive, it needs to anticipate our expectations. Adapt or die, basically.

Audience begins by recounting the ‘rules’ audiences ought to obey – no talking, try not to cough too loudly, sleeping is allowed etc – before immediately breaking them. We’re told we always have a choice. With a camera filming us throughout, the piece attempts to push us into action (or inaction) in various ways: parading our clothes, displaying our possessions and making assumptions about us. We’re mocked, goaded, manipulated, reduced, belittled, used and abused.

On the night i saw it, one male audience member pre-empted its abuse, leaping to the defence of the girl being rounded on (rumoured to be a plant by this point) before she even had cause to squirm.

From the stage, an actor singles her out for particularly rough treatment, telling her she’s ugly and unlovable, promising to stop as and when she opens her legs. The second the camera alights on her, our sanctimonious hero hops in front to protect the damsel not yet in distress. Coming so early, the company were left stumped with no alternative tactic to hand and the moment so dampened, our response became so irrelevant, that I had no qualms about taking £30 to start a chant: “Spread your legs. Spread your legs.” At that point, the money was the only thing with the same value outside the auditorium as in.

If we allow this particular section its provocative intention, however, as it must have originally worked, Ontroerend Goed have a win-win situation. If we act against them, they can point to the pretence; if not, to the reality. Heads they win, tails we lose.

This is the crux of Audience and, while it might seem improper to strait-jacket an unsuspecting audience, it breaks no previous pact and remains perfectly legitimate. Audiences, after all, are prone to manipulation, whether by those in front of them or leading from within. We still have free will as individuals, but that must be tempered by the power of herd mentality. To act in public, to stand against the tide, takes more than to do so privately. It’s a point bludgeoned by a final montage of archive footage that shows us Nazi rallies and Beatlemaniacs. By opting for the obvious, Ontroerend Goed cheapen the whole.

All that said, Audience shouldn’t be exhaustively defined according to its most seemingly controversial moment. Undoubtedly it succeeds in throwing up ideas – some familiar, some original – about user-generated content and reality television, about the commercial exchange at theatre’s heart, about the need to form audiences, as well as the dangers, and about Pavlovian response, individuality, and inertia.

The camera is key here, for it instantly puts us on edge, self-conscious. Footage of our entrances, filmed secretly, shows us unguarded: a man pops his ticket in his mouth as searches for his seat, another comes mighty close to picking his nose. When the camera appears, however, everything changes. Hands that appear on screen flicker fingers as if confirming ownership. Tight-lipped smiles spread across faces. Heart-rates increase and, by the time we’re shown in wide-shot, we look like a model audience, the sort you see sat upright on Jeremy Kyle, behaving exactly as expected. We conform, performing the role of ‘audience’ and, in doing so, we become a simulacrum.

In which case, perhaps there was never a real audience in the first place.

Review: The One Man Show, C Venues, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for Culture Wars

Man, some say, is the only animal that can act and what a nasty piece of work that makes him. At least it does for Nigel Barrett and Louise Mari of the Shunt collective, who hold both actors and acting in almost absolute contempt.

They’re shown as posturing and pretentious; irresponsible, attention-seeking children. Their craft is ridiculed for its inherent absurdity. At times, actors are dismissed as entirely redundant. Theatre can survive without them.

Barrett stands behind a gauze, running the gamut of human emotion on command. He eats a lemon. He sets fire to his trousers. He takes his trousers off. “Look at his face,” commands a voice, “LOOK AT HIS FACE.” He looks pathetic, smiling tentatively through the shame. It’s a savage and relentless attack without a split-second of sympathy.

Gorgeously raucous in design and performed with disjointed stop-motion awkwardness, The One Man Show is nonetheless let down by mean-spiritedness. The ground covered is too well-trodden to get away with such vitriol, which comes dangerously close to smugness. Such is its certainty that you end up feeling sorry for The Actor, wanting to champion the potency of pretence.

In fact, the only flicker of humility comes in its final moment. Barrett leaves the stage, but his shadow remains behind, imprinted, but fading, on the back wall. For all The Actor’s irritating awfulness and wrong-headed egotism, we miss him when he’s gone.

Review: The Table, Pleasance Dome, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for Culture WarsMore interesting for its playful forms than any content they hold, The Table is a delightful, but insubstantial, puppetry smoker. A series of three distinct sketches, two of which take place on or just above a trestle table, it lacks the satisfaction of an overarching purpose, though, at a push, it could contain shades of Beckett’s Shorts.

First up, is an old man stuck on a table, as he has been for forty years. His puddingy cloth body is topped with an oversized head that resembles an origami Patrick Stewart. Though he’s preparing to portray a one-man biblical epic, he is in fact a clown with no material. So, in a gruff voice, he explains the basics of puppetry, talking us through the need for a fixed point – without which the law of gravity seems to lose its grip – and the focus and breath that give life to an inanimate object. It’s a charming deconstruction, wittily worded and hilariously demonstrated, there being very little more amusing than shoddy puppetry.

He’s a characterful little thing: knees wobbling when impatient, not quite sure what to do with his hands. Yet, the search for subject matter as he trots out the table’s vital stats still feels baggy, like a rehearsal room improvisation feeling its way. The introduction of a human, sat reading her diary unaware of his presence, suggests an alternate reality and sets up some elegant imagery, so it’s rather a shame that the spirit of gentle enquiry is dropped for a standard issue slow-motion action sequence.

It’s second is an unnerving spectacle, in which disembodied heads and hands swirl through and bounce around three picture frames. They look like those holograms you get in museums, only eerily anonymous and disjointed so that they, explode, evaporate and condense like misty spectres. It reminded me of Soft Cell music video elongated and quietly horrifying, but, with the puppeteers themselves concealed behind flats, there’s a suspicion that the mechanics might be more interesting.

Finally, a table-top cartoon, in which simple story – an arbitrary chase narrative – is told through series of marker-pen stills taken out of a briefcase in order. Though peppered with witty instances and a neat experiment in narrative minimalism, it’s a sliver of a piece that struggles to maintain momentum or offer anything more than momentary gags.

Featherwieght but, by virtue of simple pleasures within, forgivable, The Table is a stylish and self-contained hour.

Photograph courtesy of The Pleasance

Review: Doris Day Can Fuck Off, Zoo Southside, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for Culture Wars



Greg McLaren will tell you that this one-hour oddity is all about communication and miscommunication. It’s best not to entirely believe him, no matter how true it rings. Essentially, McLaren is distracting us with a glove puppet in order to better slap us in the face.



McLaren spent a month singing instead of speaking, just as they do in Doris Day musicals, recording every encounter on his trusty lapel microphone. That decision makes him a social pariah: people stare at him or walk away, unable to make head nor tail of him. He loses his job, irritates his own theatre company and struggles to get a straight answer out of anyone. Occasionally, someone sings back to him, like the shop-owner who had sold him dodgy batteries or the station attendant who tells him to step outside the city walls to avoid an ASBO.



Ostensibly, McLaren asks what’s so strange about singing. What’s so disarming about stepping outside of ‘normal’ behaviour? We’ve always done it and it’s not harmful in itself. If anything, it’s more expressive: “A word,” he hollers, “is not a feeling.” Perhaps it’s also more human, a unique quirk of evolution traded for the ability to swallow and breathe at the same time. Just like our brains, we’re using less than 10% of our vocal range, even though, like the car park attendant whose speech McLaren loops into a rap, we’re singing more than we like to think.



It’s a haphazardly structured, rather bonkers, performance lecture. McLaren, an ever-engaging oddity of a performer, hops clunkily from one thing to the next, as if proudly presenting a drawer of miscellaneous objects.



Beneath the surface, however, it’s a lot tighter than it lets on. Doris Day Can Fuck Off is less concerned with the lower larynx than with cash and capitalism. Almost every encounter McLaren replays revolves around money: from the initial lost job that cost him £1000, through Big Issue vendors, to awkward attempts at busking.



McLaren’s singing is as subversive as living without cash; it bucks the system and questions our conformity to social norms. His invocations of billionaire recording artists – blessed with money-spinning singing voices – point to the inbuilt inequality of capitalism. A snap of Doris Day kicks in: “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” Songs exploit, making money by telling us what we want to hear, wrapped in tidy, rhyming sentiment, rather than anything honest and heartfelt. Capitalism, McLaren suggests, is a collusion.



By asking us to listen to how, rather than what, he communicates, McLaren sneaks his point in unnoticed, like finely chopped vegetables hidden in a Bolognese sauce. It’s not far off subliminal messaging, entertaining his audience but leaving something to niggle away beneath the surface. To never confirm it as such is a seriously brave artistic choice.

Review: The World Holds Everyone Apart, Apart From Us, Underbelly, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for Culture Wars

Just when you think it’s safe to disregard Stuart Bowden’s cutesy comic book storytelling, it creeps up and kicks you in the tearducts. Arriving fresh-garlanded from the Adelaide Fringe, The World Holds Everyone Apart... is elevated by its mastery of disguise. You think it’s a pithy space fantasy, but later realise that its shot through with real-world grief. Beneath the spaceman’s visor, you’ll find a tear-stained face.

Avian, a cosmonaut attempting to immunise himself against loneliness, has lived in hermitage for fourteen years. In the middle of the Aticama desert, the driest on earth, he’s fixing his one-man spaceship, The Story, so as to get as far away from everyone else as possible. In that time, he’s encountered only three people, with one of whom, an astrophysicist called Sarah, he falls in love. Having grown accustomed to isolation, the further he falls, the scarier it gets.

Bowden knits form to content beautifully, telling Avian’s story as if keeping himself entertained. Milk crates become supersized lego blocks and a soundtrack – two parts Amelie, one part the xx – is composed from live sample-loops. Even so, it starts off a cotton-wool daydream, so light it’s in danger of floating away. “We are the world’s emotions,” Bowden suggests, nearly suffocating us with schmaltz.

However, the narrative glances off its crux so nonchalantly that you, like Avian, barely register Sarah’s terminal illness. No amount of forewarning prepares you for the actuality of a loved one’s death, since love lives only in the present. It doesn’t think things through, existing not as thought or even want, but as a need. It longs to collapse the distance between us, as if two hearts have been tied together with a bungee chord. Avian’s eight years in space, once the elastic has snapped, are rather eight years of life lived on hold.

Bowden makes a welcoming, sometimes impish, narrator with a slight overreliance on kooky charm. However, it’s his writing, pristine and fragile, that really deserves plaudits. As his tale gains matter, his text finds a purity, particularly where love is concerned. A couple of lines, too perfect to spoil, could stop hearts in themselves. Looking back, I can’t really work out how it all made sense together, but, just like love, it definitely did at the time.

Review: The Caroline Carter Show, Zoo, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for Culture Wars

Caroline Carter falls between the two stools on which she and Barney, the guitarist she’s recently found in a nearby pub, perch. It’s never quite clear whether we’re watching character comedy or musical whimsy, because Carter’s material is simply too good for her.

On the one hand Flick Ferdinando has created a cheery fantasist, absolutely at out of kilter with reality. Carter talks dreamily about her smalltown superstar status, having “stormed Canvey Island” and torn up Teddington with her Country & Western music. Though it never becomes full-blown idiocy and Carter is thoroughly likeable, we’re invited to laugh at her naive disillusionment.

Yet, her knowing songs crackle with genuine charm and warmth. Her schtick is spinning miniature epics, heart-tugging ballads out of utter banality. So we get a sexy, upbeat-yet-bluesy number about mohawk Joe from the Highways Cleansing Depot and a chirpy litany of drunken sexual bungles in “I wasn’t thinking, I was drinking.” They’re wry spins on the flotsam and jetsam of England’s pubs and service stations: the ordinary given a sprinkling of glitter.

The trouble is the two things work against one another. Either we appreciate the songs or we ridicule the songstress.

Better taken as slight musical musings with a hefty dollop of whimsy, The Caroline Carter Show is more showcase than show, never really adding up to a satisfying whole. She’s exactly the sort of act that would slot perfectly into a line-up, but an hour of one-note musical comedy is fifty minutes too much, no matter how welcoming, likeable and generous a host she makes.

Review: Mission Drift, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for Culture Wars

To create a little chunk of Vegas in the middle of a drizzling, miserable Edinburgh is something of a miracle. Yet Mission Drift, the dazzling fourth Fringe outing for The TEAM (Theatre of the Emerging American Moment), does just that. Right down to the desert scorch that slows everything to a languid drawl.

In fact, location is right at the heart of this explosion of American capitalism, which manages to humanise dense theory with intelligence, heart and showmanship. The Vegas on show is simultaneously the neon boneyard of tourist snapshots and the nuclear testing ground beyond. It’s alluring but parched; addictive and parasitic; sexy right to the edge of repulsion; a headrush that tips into a migraine. Mission Drift shimmers with an artificial magnetism and spirals like a chain reaction, spinning faster and faster, growing more and more toxic. The glitzy city, the only blink of colour for hundreds of miles, seems to sap the life out of its surroundings.

But also from its inhabitants such as Joan, a cleaner – lowly and earthy – with dreams of working in the city’s newest mega-complex, the Ark. Prospective employees are promised the chance to “live and work towards purchasing,” as if nothing else could possibly matter. In part, Mission Drift is a story of Joan’s leaping off the runaway train that we’re all aboard. She realises her exploited position – that she, and millions like her, prop up a system that doesn’t return the favour – on meeting a defiant desert cowboy, who never bought into it in the first place.

They can never fully escape it though. Sat in foldable canvas chairs they sip at beers that capitalism’s founding father’s, young Dutch couple Joris and Catalina Rapalje (Brian Hastert and Libby King), introduced to and forced upon the region.

Joris and Catalina’s relationship, extended over four-hundred years to envelop their future lineage, functions as a potted history of exponential expansion. Having left home for the new world, they keep on moving westwards, seeking new ground to birth new markets. Not pilgrims, but pioneers: “The frontier is the birthright of every American.” They are always fourteen and always invading an older order, attempting to leave a mark on the world. Everything they do is innately aggressive: occupy and expand, destroy and rebuild. Better. Bigger. Brasher. As the volume gets louder and the speed increases, it becomes hard to distinguish destruction from creation. They fill gaps in the market so full that other fissures appear elsewhere. They destroy in order that they create solutions.

Together they grow from naïve adolescents to the sort of adrenaline-fuelled roadsters that Hollywood adores, their hair flicking behind them in an open-top chevolet. Theirs is the sexiness of youthful passion steering its own course for the first time, breaking the chains of upbringing and expectation, doing it for themselves. Theirs is the cool of unbothered rootlessness, of motel hopping and finding a home on the road itself. Neither past, nor future matter; only now. Neither place of origin or destination, only here. As with money, movement is everything.

Catalina, always pregnant but never with child, becomes a model of regeneration. She must pop out kids like a vending machine, unconcerned about their upbringing. Yet, like the Ark itself, everything remains entirely potential and, being unfinished, potential always contains doubt, the danger being that it will not be reached. Hence, the crash that blows the system. The frontier they chase like wolves heading for the horizon closes in on them, leaving the ruins of the half-built Ark and Catalina’s first miscarriage in four centuries of reproduction. “Why,” The TEAM ask bluntly, “the right to boundless growth?”

All this, of course, without mention of the music, which would satisfy all on its lonesome. Mission Drift has a gig folded into its structure; or, more precisely, an intimate, sultry late-night Las Vegas cabaret. Variously perched at the piano or roaming through the action, Heather Christian, wearing an array of twisted showgirl outfits, plays Miss Atomic: simultaneously emcee and siren. Vocally, she is airy and girlish, woozy with a husky aftertone. It’s like sex and lollipops. Her songs, a fusion of bluesy wails and sky-high gospel, hit you smack in the chest and make your heart soar. At first, they are earthy and soulful, connected to both land and history, but they grow tinnier and shallow with the erosion of culture and countryside. The note of apocalypse never lets off: “I think somebody is burning down Las Vegas.”

Surprisingly comprehensible and admirably comprehensive, Mission Drift manages to be 100% gig, 100% theatre and 100% movie all at once. Its plot grips and its texts, almost beat poems, create vivid and textured pictures. Yet they are divorced from action on account of a reflexive minimalism that allows a layer of commentary. Add in the transformative euphoria of the music and the result is the most total piece of theatre in a very long while.

Photograph: The TEAM

Review: I'll Show You Mine, Lion and Unicorn Theatre

Written for Time Out

With the theatrical swarm migrating to Edinburgh, London audiences are liable to feel left out. Be thankful, then, for this taste of pur fringe, courtesy of the Lion and Unicorn's in-house company, Giant Olive

Drama tends to pinpoint the loss of innocence in a single, Earth-shattering psychotic moment. I'll Show You Mine is more honest about it, showing a gradual erosion of naivety. For Rachel, adulthood starts at six with the epiphany that she was "made by sex," moving through realisations of parental fallibility to first fumbles in a field.

Adapted from six stories by Raphaële Moussafir, I'll Show You Mine is made by Caroline Horton's winning performance, which shows the onset of adulthood as if sped up by a time-warp camera.

Horton is a master caricaturist with a real eye for comic essentials. As a gangly six year old, she's fidgety and attention-seeking, always turning her face our way for nodding approval. By the time adolescence sets in, she grows a surly, knowing edge.

Nostalgic, whimsical and a little bit batty, I'll Show You Mine is a delight.

Review: Thirsty, Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for Culture Wars

Addressing the cocktail of reasons for drinking, the Paper Birds portray alcohol less as a stimulant than a simulant. The cluster of vox pops that testify to everything from larging it to loneliness share one thing: alcohol takes us out of ourselves. It stops both superego and self-consciousness for, even when we look a dishevelled mess, we feel amazing. There’s a disconnect between sensation and actuality.

Thirsty is trim and smarter than it looks, but its mix of physical routines, personal history and verbatim testimonial never really tells us anything we don’t already know. We’ve seen it all on television, channel-hopping between Skins and Booze Britain. More than that, haven’t most of us have lived it at one point or other?

Despite the row of toilet cubicles, Kylie Walsh and Jemma McDonnell are intent that Thirsty won’t be a lecturing, hectoring Stags and Hens style affair, served with a chaser of Daily Mail disgust. They want to re-affirm the normality of drinking, that most of us drink responsibly, even if that involves occasional irresponsibility. “We love drinking,” they growl at the start, almost on heat. A much-needed drink, they say, tastes “like getting a seat on the tube...like passing a test first time.”

However, the cliché wants to be told. It refuses to be dismissed and, by the end, McDonnell is flailing around on the slippery tiles, her hair and clothes soaking, in a desperate bid to reach the toilet.

There’s a nagging suspicion that The Paper Birds want it both ways. After wheeling through a panoply of pissheads, they can get away with the hackneyed old binge Britain idea because they never meant to. Honest guv. The show pulls them in its own direction, it runs away of its own accord.

Rather like a boozy night, in fact. Thirsty’s salience lies in the subtlety with which form mirrors content, slipping gradually out of control. McDonnell and Walsh try to wrestle the narrative off one another throughout. Like little shoulder-devils, they bicker over whether a character should go home and stay sober or stay out and go wild. They interrupt, disagree and refuse to play along. Used understatedly, it’s a canny device.

Not canny enough, however, to compensate for simple material cutely delivered. After being told off for sentimentality in last year’s Others, Shane Durrant’s piano score is back to its twinkling self, sprinkling the show with unearned whimsy and wistfulness. It tips the balance unfairly in favour of the melancholic – those walking home in the rain or drinking alone – and gilds the picture of those sobbing into their own sick. Thirsty mixes its drinkers, but it favours the sweet and sickly.

Photograph: The Paper Birds

Review: Man of Valour, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for Culture Wars

Demonstrating the art of the deceptive blurb, Man of Valour’s entry in the Fringe Programme neglects to mention that prospective audiences will incur ninety minutes of mime. Impressive though Paul Reid’s performance is, after an hour I wanted to hold out two fingers, close one eye and line him up in imagined crosshairs. “Chck, chck. Doosh.”

Taking a standard-issue narrative of the little man caught in the cogs of a bigger system, Man of Valour explodes the banality of the office worker-bee into blockbuster daydreams. Attempts at fly-swatting morph into light-sabre battles, pavement-pounding grows into chase sequences and computer games envelop the player. It’s all framed as a son’s attempt to scatter his father’s ashes as he would have wished.

The truth, however, is that nothing really matters because this flittish narrative is used to demonstrate Reid’s skills rather than vice versa. Everything Reid does blends into one, not through lack of distinction on his part, but because distraction comes before narrative drive. We simply stop caring enough to bother distinguishing. This is the paradox of mime: individual actions are reduced to their essential signifiers, yet the overall is saggy with incidentals.

In fairness, if you can stick with Man of Valour, it’s does offer a sharp portrait of urban psychosis. Reid’s whitefaced naïf, whose eyebrows are permanently raised with anxiety, brilliantly conveys the everyman’s inferiority complex, in which aptitude is overwhelmed by timidity. The city, here, is a fearful place, a blank canvas for the projection of inner-demons. It’s realised with admirable concision in Jack Phelan’s minimalist projections that locate a scene using a specific type of light-fitting.

And you really have to give Reid credit for his virtuosic technique. Even if he’s let down by its outlet, it’s quite a marvel to watch. Just not for a full hour and a half.

Review: 2401 Objects, Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for Culture Wars

On the 4th December, 2009, Henry Molaison’s brain was divided into 2401 slivers of grey matter. Fifty-five years before, in a bid to cure his epilepsy, doctors surgically removed his hippocampus, the section of the brain responsible for the locking experience into memory, making Molaison the most perfect amnesiac in history. Or, as Lewis Hetherington’s elegant text puts it, “one of the most important brains in the world.”

Theatrical explorations of memory are often fragmented and scruffy, padding around the subject rather than pinpointing the core. Molaison’s case, told by crossfading between his life before and after the operation, allows Analogue to approach a prevalent subject with a rare neatness.

Sebastian Lawson plays Molaison pre-op, a nervy 30 year-old socially debilitated by epilepsy. Still living with his parents in the land of white picket fences, he struggles to romance the classic girl-next-door for fear of fitting in front of her. His older-self, played by Pieter Lawman, sits in an institution completing crosswords he can’t remember starting. The way Lawman looks up at his attendant nurse, his gaze benign but empty, unaware even of his condition, is gently heartbreaking. As is the patience with which she treats him, constantly repeating herself without a flicker of frustration.

There is a tendency for repetition, with Lawman’s scenes hammering home the same point with diminishing returns, as if suffering memory loss by proxy. Yet it’s staged with real grace, employing a mobile gauze almost as a three-dimensional etch-a-sketch, erasing characters and furniture as easily as it seems to print them into existence. It’s a beautiful echo of Molaison’s mind, as the present slips in and out of focus, fluid and ungraspable. Memories that should have been seem hazy behind it, looking on like unseen ghosts.

Since breaking through in 2007 with the Total Theatre-nominated Mile End, Analogue have built a reputation for their slick and inventive use of multimedia. Here it is used sparingly, mostly projecting backdrops to locate action, some of which melt as in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Curiously, that’s simultaneously too much and too little, neither meeting the technology’s potential, nor strictly necessary for the show. It’s like a Ferrari owner sticking to the slow lane while popping to the corner shop. Use it or lose it, basically.

Personally, I’d opt for the latter, since Analogue achieve almost all they want in a single moment that has us close our eyes, hands on our head, and imagine life without our hippocampi. It has all the empathy and intrigue with which they handle Molaison’s story and shows an increasingly exceptional young company refining its practice.

Review: A Slow Air, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for Culture Wars

David Harrower’s two-hander is an intricate portrait of neglect and decay, in which untended cracks become unbridgeable chasms. Both personal and political, A Slow Air is textured, meticulous and tender. Harrower might well have put it together with tweezers.

Forty-something siblings Athol and Morna (played by real-life brother and sister, Lewis and Kathryn Howden) haven’t seen each other in fourteen years. Morna works as a cleaner in Edinburgh, her ambitions having long-since faded. Athol, whose bobbled fleece makes him seem mossy, runs a flooring company in Houston, the town that unwittingly housed the Glasgow Airport bombers. “Trust Scotland to produce crap terrorists.”

When Morna’s twenty-one year-old son Joshua visits his uncle uninvited, he grows intent on forcing their reconciliation.

Told through intersecting monologues, A Slow Air is as precise a piece of writing as you’ll find. Its primary narrative is engaging enough, but, thanks to Harrower’s eye for metaphor and symbol, it’s the currents underneath the text that really make this special. Almost every moment is loaded with a hidden significance. Still waters do indeed run deep.

For Harrower’s focus is stagnancy. Morna introduces herself as unchanging: “Fasten your seat belts, it’s aw still, still, still wi me.” Both take the path of least resistance, ignoring unsightly problems for more immediate, trivial errands such as tax returns and birthday parties. Earning a living is task enough in itself. Without attention, however, problems fester like mould.

By embedding his characters so thoroughly in our world, Harrower, who also directs, skilfully suggests their unchecked rift mirrors those of the nation. Terrorism, the financial crisis and the rise of the SNP, he suggests, all stem from the same tendency. We have been distracted and placated by the meaningless comforts of boom-time, ignoring the mould for the materialism. Or as David Cameron has put it: “They didn’t fix the roof when the sun was shining.”

It’s beautifully performed, characterful yet casual and thoroughly engaging in its direct address. Lewis Howden brings the softness of old leather to Athol, while Kathryn Howden balances Morna’s hard edges, particularly her shirking of responsibility, with a personable sense of humour. Jessica Brettle’s eloquent design, in which dust gathers over layers of exposed flooring that resemble sedimentary rocks, perfectly encapsulates the meaning beneath this poignant, empathetic gem.

Review: The Perils of Love and Gravity, Bedlam Theatre, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for Culture Wars

If ever a show needed to pick a side, it’s this confused offering from Michael Keane and Christopher Brett Bailey. Not only does it flick between cutesy storytelling and anarchic spoof, the one totally undoing the other, its restless plot can’t decide on a central narrative. It’s like a schizophrenic with acute Attention Deficit Disorder.

Misha lives in a house wider at the top than the bottom that starts to sink. From there she writes letters to her absent mother, draws maps of a world she’s never seen and courts a string of suitors, all of whom meet untimely deaths in substantial subplots. Then the narrator gets involved, closely followed by his assistant and her doting manservant, Graeme (Phil Mann).

Imagine if Cinderella, while trying to get the ball, fell asleep for a thousand years, her hair growing out of the window to form a ladder, while her mother gets shot by huntsmen and her father trampled by stampeding gazelle.

To borrow the play’s architectural concern, The Perils of Love and Gravity is missing a supporting beam.

Beyond that it’s haphazardly staged and cumbersomely overwritten, never leaving a noun without an adjective, sometimes to the point of extreme bloating: “a soft, sweet, sensitve song,” anyone?

And yet, in spite of all these frustrations, it’s not unenjoyable. While Keane and Brett Bailey provide the odd cracking line, it’s largely due to the untamed, mischief of Mann. If he’s a touch hammy, he also manages to be creepy, unpredictable and rampantly chaotic, at one point charging across the stage, spade in hand, to illustrate an irrigation system literally. All of which goes to show that every Mann is the architect of his own fortune.

Review: I Hope My Heart Goes First, St George's West, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for Culture Wars

“I haven’t got any experience of romantic love,” says fourteen year-old Adam, banished to the back of the stage for the duration of this teenage-eye view of love. Chalking up his list of loves, among them Star Wars and Dad’s Chicken Curry, he looks like a schoolboy writing lines in detention, while others play outside. His Junction 25 peers, all aged between 12 and 17, happily hold forth on the subject, offering up tales of first dates and heartache.

For all their candour, these portrayals of love are largely characterised by naivety. Attempts to illustrate what love might feel like – sparklers and party poppers – are clichéd and simplistic, to some extent, knowingly so. Squashed tomatoes and screeching violins invoke broken hearts. They plunder pop culture, singing famous love songs and re-enacting Richard Curtis’s magic moments.

There’s a spider-diagram dilettantism to I Hope My Heart Goes First that means it skims the surface of its subject. Musings on familial love, in which two sisters end up in a brawl, material love and social pressures sit alongside a biological lecture on the heart. At best, it’s a reminder of our own formative experiences and the persistence of teenage awkwardness. Mostly it feels insubstantial and obvious; a problem worsened by a cyclical structure that hints at a deficit of material.

Instead, I Hope My Heart Goes First is more interesting for what goes unsaid. That their honesty reverts to cliché, that they struggle to express such feelings says more than the clichés and garbled attempts themselves. Experiences that might seem trivial to us, playground rejection and pecks on the cheek, are recounted as full-blown battle-stories. But then, so too would ours. Naivety comes to seem perpetual and love itself, ineffable.

The question, however, is whether we can credit the show for ideas that occur to us en route. That depends on whether Junction 25 are concerned with love or with teenagers. I suspect they want it both ways, much like last year’s Teenage Riot from Ontroerend Goed. In that, it relies on our own understandings of love to realise the shortcomings of that presented.

For the teenagers, romantic ideals rub against a cynicism that’s particularly acute on commercial exploitation and social expectations. Performers are introduced like a cattle auction, defined by dating credentials and vital statistics. They reject one another with a bluntness that teeters on callousness. They are eager to fall in love, to the point of competitiveness, but also wary of it. They don’t really know what to expect. But then, did anyone really need telling that?

There’s a niggling doubt about the show’s knowingness, it’s exploitation of the cute-factor, but I Hope My Heart Goes First is as poignant and sincere as it is shallow. While directors Tashi Gore and Jess Thorpe manage some strong images, the performances of their young cast – totally comfortable and honest – do them most credit. None more so than in Adam, looking on excluded, wearing his heart on his sleeve and his hand on his heart.

Photograph: Junction 25

Review: The Lady of Pleasure, White Bear Theatre

Written for Time Out

James Shirley's 1635 comedy shows a husband scheming to correct his wife's behaviour, but it is less taming a shrew than reining in a shopaholic. Aretina Bornwell, the titular lady, spends and sleeps her way to the centre of the social elite. To curb such excesses, her husband opts to trump her at the same game, taking a mistress, Celestina, and lavishing on her the best that money can buy.

Director David Cottis transposes the action to 1960s London, which neatly fits the characters' freewheeling, fashion-conscious attitudes, but resonates strongest in terms of gender and generational difference. Elizabeth Donnelly's Celestina bristles with feminist ideas, but she's not above a coquettishness à la Marilyn Monroe.

Aretina, played noveau riche by Sally Mortemore, seems all the more ridiculous for being mutton dressed as Lulu.

For all that the setting makes sense, its treatment remains superficial. The version of the '60s is generic and catch-all and Cottis illuminates neither play nor history. Nonetheless, this Lady of Pleasure is diverting enough.

Review: Double Feature: Introduction, National Theatre

Written for Culture Wars



On account of London Road’s blistering success, which led to a Summer extension in the Cottesloe, this double, double bill of new writing has been shunted from the Cottesloe into a ‘found’ space elsewhere in the National Theatre. Actually ‘found’ is rather misleading. Better to say ‘repurposed,’ since the Paintframe is an intergral space in the National: its set construction workshop. Double Feature is not site-specific or site-responsive, but ‘pop-up’ theatre in the truest sense.



And it doesn’t half look brilliant: a disused industrial hanger lined with steel and construction lamps. With its high ceilings and long, open floorplan, it would make an ideal replacement for the old Shunt Vaults. Were it not for the strength and scope of design on the National’s usual stages, you’d have good reason to call for the space’s transition to be made permanent.



Soutra Gilmour carries on exactly that same spirit of intelligent, bold design, dividing the space into two auditoria with a central arch. Not only has she dressed the overall space with a punchy sense of fun, her individual designs are remarkably varied in terms of both tone and functionality. From the end-on, punctured naturalism of Edgar and Annabel’s kitchenette to an atmospheric (almost immersive) impression of an East End pub in D.C. Moore’s The Swan. Her traverse stage for Nightwatchman enables both its content (cricket) and form (direct address), while she just about meets the significant challenges of Tom Basden’s ambitious oddity There Is a War.



That the four plays should be such different beasts is testimony to the uninhibited spirit of Double Feature, which marks a welcome move to integrate potential alongside tested excellence. Four young writers, two young directors (Lindsay Turner and Polly Findlay) and a predominantly youthful cast makes Double Feature something of a rarity for a theatre dominated by absolutely established talent. These are the artists that usually go unseen in the National’s ecology, tucked away in the safety of the National Theatre Studio, so it’s rather great to see them pushed into the public arena with all its challenges.



My one grumble is with NT Associate Ben Power’s recent Guardian blog that, while being both eloquent, elegant and a touch sycophantic, made the whole ‘pop-up’ concept seem planned from the off, when it was, in fact, a happy accident. Because it’s fine to admit it as such; the National deserves credit for the solution, for extending London Road without any programming casualties and doing so with flair. To disguise the fact – though Power never goes so far as to bend the truth – is to belie the process and, in fact, theatrical processes in general. Power’s article gives the sense of everything playing out as originally planned, entirely without hitch. In his series of essays On Directing Film, David Mamet describes film-making as entirely dependent on pre-production. To shoot the thing is just a matter of sticking to the plan. Theatre doesn’t work like that: it thrives on happy accidents and grows out of contingent occurrences. The internet offers, we are repeatedly told, the possibility to open out processes that have always occurred in secret. If that’s important, the least we can do is be honest about it.

Review of Edgar and Annabel

Review of The Swan

Review of Nightwatchman

Review of There is a War

Review: Edgar and Annabel, Double Feature, National Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

A man walks into a kitchen, announcing himself to a woman preparing food: “Honey, I’m home.” She turns to greet him and freezes, almost collapsing into the sideboard. Her knees half give way, they cock inwards. It takes her a moment to recover before she takes the blue papers he holds out and they continue this mundane conversation, reading lines about work and dinner from a script. They remain physically awkward, but speak like life-partners. What they say doesn’t correspond to reality: he talks about their salmon supper as she produces a chicken from the oven. He doesn’t seem to know his way around what seems to be his own kitchen. She doesn’t seem to like or trust him at all, though her words are tender and comfortable. Everything they do is stilted and forced; they clunk.

So begins Edgar & Annabel. It makes next to no sense, yet it’s oddly captivating. It feels like a puzzle with answers. The scripts and the awkwardness, the consciousness with which the actors perform means that you’re not even entirely sure how to watch. What’s fiction, what’s staging? It is a hugely courageous start from Sam Holcroft, refusing us a foothold to from which to start. Even more bravely, she doesn’t give us any answers whatsoever until the second scene.

It turns out that Edgar and Annabel are, currently, Nick and Marianne (Trystan Gravelle and Kirsty Bushell), two members of a resistance movement against an Orwellian regime. With each house bugged by a computer capable of analysing sounds and speech-patterns, they must play Edgar and Annabel, sticking to the script to ensure continuity and imperceptibility. They do so while plotting revolution, leading to a brilliant sequence in which they prepare a bomb, drowning out the noise with a raucous Singstar competition. Insurgency to an off-key power ballad soundtrack.

Edgar and Annabel is the most original piece of new writing I’ve seen in ages. Though one has to buy into the world – Why aren’t the government using CCTV? Wouldn’t Nick’s voice register differently to his Edgar predecessor? – Holcroft delivers a gripping and volatile plot that keeps you guessing. Moreover, she does so with real panache, exploring every nook and cranny of the situation for comic potential and dramatic tension.

Much of this is down to the layers of performance that rub against each other. Edgar and Annabel is, at one level, about acting. Nick and Marianne fall off script and trip one another up. They fall in love as their characters grow apart and argue. Props go missing and solutions are improvised – none better than Gravelle’s brilliant vocal impression of uncorking a wine bottle. Holcroft’s masterstroke is to embed high stakes into the most banal conversations: sticking to the script, to everyday inanity, is a matter of life and death.

The dislocation of text and action is both hilarious and pointed. This is subtext to the nth degree. Meaning is not hidden within language, it must be covertly – often clumsily and confusingly – inserted.

At base, Holcroft is interested in commitment to a cause. Subsumed by the characters they have to play, Nick and Marianne give up their entire lives. The constant question is, “What price ideology?” The individual’s sacrifice here is exploited by the larger political force and those on the front line, living their lives tiptoeing on the precipice, are shown to be mere pawns, expendable and unvalued.

Much like the rest of us, in fact, manipulated by the system imposed on us by the establishment. The genius – and I don’t use the word lightly – of Holcroft’s script is that it works both ways. Not only are Edgar and Annabel constructed roles, they also stand for each of us. The banality of their script is the very same as that of our lives: work and dinner and idle, empty conversations. In this, Holcroft implies that the system, the unchallenged order of things, even the state as a whole, is performed into existence. Our conformity is coerced, since to act as we would like would be to stick our heads above the parapet; to interrupt the mechanism that, while not ideal, nonetheless functions smoothly. Pretend for long enough, however, and the pretence becomes real. But step out of that act, even for a second, and you puncture it irrevocably.

Lyndsey Turner’s production is admirably clear, performed with both lightness and vim by Gravelle and Bushell, who distinguish between different modes without reverting to signposting. While it is constrained by its length – with so much to set up, it has a tendency to skim and could use, and pull off, the thoroughness of a two-act structure – Edgar and Annabel is an ambitious, dexterous and fiercely intelligent piece of political theatre, all the better for keeping its radicalism tucked up its sleeve.

Photograph: tbc

Review: The Swan, Double Feature, National Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

As in Edgar and Annabel, no-one’s saying what they really mean in DC Moore’s The Swan, a raucous elegy to an ingrained British decorum. Initially, it’s a product of inarticulacy. The same swear words serve a multitude of purposes and sentences peeter out half-way, the speaker unable to find the right word. (“You look a bit…”) Yet as preparations for a wake roll on, the lack of words, the secrets kept, the feelings bottled up, start to take on a surprising dignity. As the middle-class Mr Downing, perched at the bar with his crossword, commands: “Do not underestimate the determination of a quiet man.”

The Swan is a worn-out, run-down, unmanned pub in London’s East End. On it’s tables are the debris of the night before, crumbled crisp packets and sticky glasses, and the provisions for a forthcoming wake: tupperware, finger food and fizzy drinks. Jim [Trevor Cooper] has avoided his son Michael’s funeral. What seems at first a cowardly act is gradually mitigated by Moore’s perfectly managed drip, drip of information.

He’s soon joined by his granddaughter Denise, who has herself left halfway through, much to the fury of her mother Christine, turning up afterwards and vilifying Jim. Yet, as Michael’s true character becomes clear – he was a serial womaniser, whose death came en route to his long-term mistress – Jim’s willingness to accept her anger seems self-sacrificial and protective.

Moore has a wicked way with snappy lines, which will catch the immediate attention. Clare-Louise Cordwell’s Amy, brassy, brash and high on “one too many skittles,” is a scattergun of snap retorts. But there is an underlying delicacy to Moore’s writing; he layers up ideas of quiet dignity to suggest that class is in dignity not economic standing. He does so with real subtlety. Mr Downing, known to locals as Downton Abbey, twice warns Denise of fluff on her jumper: “It should be on the inside, love, where it functions best.”

It’s left to a biblical quotation to eventually hammer home the point, with Denise reciting Corinthians 4:16: “Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day…Look not to the things that are seen, but to the things that are unseen.”

While Moore’s skilful construction of this central theme is impressive and intelligent, the pleasure of The Swan is its story and its characters. At this level, he displays real empathy and real humour, never patronising his characters despite their cartoonish quality.

Trevor Cooper holds the stage magnificently, coupling no-nonsense joking with an inner-strength and there’s real delicacy from Pippa Bennett-Warner as Denise, who moves from soft fledgling to solid adult. Sharon Duncan-Brewster is sharply forthright in her remonstrations and there’s brilliant comic support from Nitin Kundra as the dopey, vomit-stained Bradwell and Cordwell as his demanding wag, whose looseness of tongue (and elsewhere) sparks the revelations about Michael.

Review: Nightwatchman, Double Feature, National Theatre

Written for Culture Wars



Prasanna Puwanarajah’s ambitious monologue probably overreaches itself, trying to tackle sport, family, national identity and Sri Lanka’s civil war all at once. To be fair, it comes pretty close and, thanks to a charismatic performance from Stephanie Street, is both clear and engaging. Were it more compact, certainly less prone to repetition, it would be a really robust, heartfelt and, what’s more, digestible piece of political theatre.



Street plays Abirami, a British-Tamil cricketer called up to the England Women’s Squad for the first time to face Sri Lanka in an international test. The night before, she’s in the nets, facing up to a bowling machine and turning over the political and personal repercussions of her time at the crease.



Puwanarajah’s text is brilliant at melding its subjects together, in particular the familiar metaphor of sport and war.



As the invisible balls hammer down the wicket – sometimes knocking a stump or a hanging light above her, despite being present only through Carolyn Downing’s considered sound design– Abirami grows aggressive. In both her politics and her natural batting style, she is a slogger, tonking balls and smashing rhetoric around. The frustrations of Tamil stereotypes and her father’s placidity get the better of her.



Her eventual decision – and it becomes a rather moving display of determined strength – is to remain at the crease at all costs. To temper her natural style, her desire to hit a six over the Lord’s pavilion, in order to stand against the Sri Lankan force used against the Tamils. So, channelling Michael Atherton’s two day stand against South Africa and Alan Donald in 1998, Street plays rigid backwards defensive after backwards defensive. Stepping out for England becomes an act of passive resistance.



Yet the text can be equally stiff, sticking so firmly to the three subjects that it has a tendency to drone.



There comes a point where Nightwatchman takes its eye off the ball, so to speak, and drives its argument home too directly. Instead, it’s best when the real subject matter is chopped so fine that its hidden within the overall, like vegetables smuggled into a Bolognese sauce. That Abirami is constantly apologising for the subject matter (“I can’t believe we’re talking about this”) suggests unease on the writer’s part.



Credit then must go to Street herself, whose performance – if not necessarily always her cricketing technique - is spot-on. She’s muscular and rousing without letting go of a chink of vulnerability. You get swept up in her passion. Cricket matters. This matters.



Photograph: Johan Persson

Review: There Is A War, Double Feature, National Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Tom Basden, once of the celebrated sketch troupe Cowards, is growing in confidence as a playwright. His first, Party, was more of less a sitcom seeking a television slot: squiffy character-driven comedy with very little in the way of actual plot. After that came Joseph K, a screwball adaptation of Kafka’s The Trial for The Gate.

For his part of Double Feature, Basden attempts the rather extraordinary feat of writing a play in the spirit of Joseph Heller’s Catch 22. Like Joseph K, the format plays into his sketch-based past, by placing a single protagonist on a conveyor belt of characters, situations and events. Though some of these have real comic zing, it does remove the possibility of dramatic momentum. The story simply continues, going where it goes, more arbitrary than necessarily. It feels like a string of events.

That said, this accumulation results in a hefty dossier detailing the headless absurdity of war. Even if the overall grows wearisome, there are several scenes of real panache.

Phoebe Fox plays Anne, the Yossarian-figure caught in a war between two almost indistinguishable armies, the Blues and the Greys. Like a fly in a spider’s web, the more she struggles to make sense of it all, the more entangled she becomes. Earnest, browbeaten and moralistic, Anne is a doctor desperately trying to reach a front-line hospital that seems to move with the horizon.

Basden’s trick is to inject the inhuman with absurdity and banality. Clowns stalk the front line as a weapon against child soldiers. Torturers have repetitive strain injuries. Those melting down body parts natter about old school friends with a familiar pub humour: one holds up a disembodied hand and calls for a high 15. A pop star releases the same war song to both sides, simply swapping Blues for Greys in the lyrics.

Best of all is the hapless Martin Reece (Basden), renamed Neil Hill on account of there being another Martin Reece already on the books. Having been advised towards boastfulness on his application form, Reece describes himself as “the best soldier in the country” and is promptly made a general. He toddles through the war he’s supposed to be leading like a clueless child.

This is a war run by buffoonish bureaucracy. Decisions come down to accountancy, such that the tactician’s maps use matchboxes and sellotape for landmarks. But then, what war isn’t about minimizing costs and casualties, rather than preventing them absolutely? Spin and coins rule supreme.

Despite the structural mayhem, just about managed by Lyndsey Turner’s boisterous direction, Basden pulls off two remarkable coups to relate There Is a War to our everyday lives. With all walks of life – from nannies to dance teachers – on the front line, he extends war into a metaphor for society as a whole. The suggestion being that we are all pawns, moved this way and that by a clueless leadership. Or should I say, knowing elite. Soutra Gilmour’s Honey I Shrunk the Kids style design makes toy soldiers of us all, dwarfed by the scale of the world.

Second, his final scene, which takes place after the war’s end has been announced, brilliantly implicates institutions. Having reached the hospital, Anne becomes embroiled in the war of the wards, as the newly formed Reds battle the Oranges for control, invading radiology units and canteens. There are never enough resources to go round – a point that registers particularly strongly in today’s economic and political climate – and each of us is fighting over scraps to ensure our own sustainability or carve out comfort.

Undeniably intelligent, often acutely funny, There Is a War best demonstrates the characteristic quality of Double Feature: ambition. For that alone, it deserves a forgiving audience willing to overlook its potholes and celebrate its successes.

Review: The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Young Vic

Written for Culture Wars

To judge from Martin McDonagh’s modern classic, first seen in Galway before transferring to the Royal Court in 1996, Leenane is a town so stagnant that a skin has congealed on its surface. Nothing changes and nothing gets forgotten: “You can’t kick a cow in Leenane without some bastard holding a grudge for twenty years.”

The Beauty Queen of the title is Maureen Folan, a dowdy, middle-aged spinster living with her mother Mag in a remote rural outhouse with a lingering stink of urine. Their relationship is as mutually destructive as it is mutually dependent. Trapped together in the middle of nowhere, they rile each other endlessly: Mag clips her daughter’s wings by burning love-letters and playing helpless, Maureen tortures her with lumpy Complan, stale Kimberley biscuits and worse. Back and forth, they slap each another in turn, eye for eye, tooth for tooth until bruised, blind and gummy.

A one-off fling with local stud-of-sorts Pato Dooley offers Maureen the possibility of escape. Invited to join him in leaving for America, Maureen looks set to fly the nest like a fully-grown fledgling.

This being Ireland, of course, escape was never really on the cards and the problem with Beauty Queen is it pat visibility. McDonagh’s dramatic irony is thicker than Mag’s Complan. It is a play full of Ibsen’s famous hanging guns, largely because the implements of torture (hot oil, poker, Complan) are so tantalising, not to show them used would be negligent. It feels too pristinely constructed – all polish, no turd - not that it prevented the youthful first-night audience from gasping along.

McDonagh’s high-definition violence often draws lazy comparisons to Tarantino. It’s not unfair, but the image of cartoonish gore the comparison conveys is misleading. Where the two coincide is in their flirtatious relish of and flair for torture. The closest parallel is to Mr Blonde’s razor-work in Reservoir Dogs. McDonagh knows precisely which nerve-endings to brush when wriggling a finger inside a wound.

A closer counterpart, I’d argue, is Jez Butterworth. Like Butterworth’s countryside seen in Jerusalem and The Winterling, McDonagh’s world is backwardly rural but savage. But where Butterworth’s plays are crazed and stampeding bulls, McDonagh’s seems a sheep trotting obediently into the pen.

Joe Hill-Gibbins’ production is meticulous and beautifully acted, even though it goes easy on the agony. He’s too eager to move to action, meaning that we miss the Mexican stand-offs that might string out tension. Instead, decisions are snap: Derbhle Crotty’s off-kilter Maureen turns on her heels to clatter a pan of oil on the stove. There’s no psychological torment that comes from anticipation. She lacks Mr Blonde’s shuffle.

What she does brilliantly, however, is bumble. In showing off her supposed sexual conquest, she does so like a drunk bumping into walls, confident but misjudged. She mixes a crass sexiness totally in keeping with the cheap slip that barely covers her erse with a touching naivety. That provides Frank Laverty’s Pato, a good solid bloke, with all he needs to both gawp and politely avert his eyes.

But the masterstroke remains Rosaleen Linehan’s glorious Mag. The only returning cast member, Linehan has the mischief of a schoolboy scamp and the curmudgeonliness of a vicious codger – at times, she seems a female version of Pinter’s Max in The Homecoming – but beneath it all is sadness and fear. Her face folds like origami as she gurns, her tongue has a mind of its own. Sat in her rocking chair, it seems as though the house has been built around her and, when she’s finally gone, the chair keeps on rocking and rocking.

Photograph: Keith Pattison

Review: Four Dogs and a Bone, Phoenix Artists Club

Written for Time Out

What is it they say about people in glass houses? If you're going to produce a satire portraying the film industry as a superficial shambles of ego and compromise, you better be damn sure that you're safe from the same accusations.

Sadly, Josh Seymour's production for Rock 'n' Roll Theatre looks as if it has been chucked at the Phoenix's makeshift stage without due care or attention. George Moustakas's set of blinds aims to conceal rather than reveal and consequently seems to be apologising for the theatre space. And Four Dogs and a Bone feels like a rehearsed reading. With a faint whiff of vanity, it's played for laughs before anything truthful.

John Patrick Shanley's script, loose ends tangled rather than tied, is no dramaturgical masterclass, but it still deserves far better than this. What's missing here is the bitchy humour of his two squabbling actresses (Amy Tez and Laura Pradelska, tail-wagging and hangdog respectively) fighting over the film.

With Daniel O'Meara's exasperated but ineffectual producer stuck in a rut, trying to keep the peace and the unseen director vilified, only the young writer Victor (a convincing Joe Jameson) emerges with any sympathy in this dog's dinner of a show.