Review: Grief, National Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

“For me,” Sam Shepard once wrote to Richard Schechner, “the reason a play is written is because a writer receives a vision which can’t be translated in any other way but a play. It’s not a novel or a poem or a short story or a movie but a play.”

Mike Leigh’s latest narrative speaks volumes about the world. It is psychologically acute, typically meticulous and beautifully expressed, but it is not a play. Oddly, I suspect it might be a painting.

For Leigh has attempted something bordering on impossibility, breaking two of the foremost rules of dramatic narrative without shattering the form. Leigh’s central characters are both fervently resistant to change and completely rooted to the past, always using the present to hark backwards to the way things once were. As a result, with Grief’s episodic structure showing moments in an unchanging routine, nothing happens twice every five minutes.

Yet, it’s not that which makes Grief a slog to sit through but Leigh’s incessant way of signposting such symptoms. Every topic discussed, every item of clothing worn, every song sung and every drink drunk is noted as either being passé or fashionable. His method of communication involves boring holes in our skulls with the unstoppable insistence of a woodpecker. Once you’ve got the point, all that’s left is the headache.

Hard to sit through, then, but harder still to shake off. Lesley Manville’s Dorothy, widowed by the Second World War, and her brother Edwin (Sam Kelly) have been left behind by a world that keeps on turning. Their suburban household has been blanched of colour like a faded photograph. Outmoded etiquette remains intact and Dorothy is mortified to be caught in an apron. Both speak in hushed tones, as if nervous of making an impression of the world, and, when they harmonise old Cole Porter songs together, they draw the curtains and close the door. Routine rules and, sure enough, sags in the sofa cushions testify to their permanent passivity.

The effect is to frustrate, and eventually frazzle, Dorothy’s teenage daughter Victoria (Ruby Bentall), who fades from rebel to recluse over the course of 1957/8.

All this is, of course, mightily insightful. It marks the generational divide across seismic historical changes: one is unable to forget, the other unable to remember. Dorothy’s paralysis, so delicately played by Manville, is quietly, but potently, heartbreaking. As colourful guests pass through, always rushing, always jabbering, Manville recedes into background silence, totally incomprehending. She looks down at a fashionably short hemline as if it were a complex quadratic equation.

Worse still is Kelly’s Edwin, a man with neither ambition nor passion, whose forty-five years at an insurance firm are marked by a silver salver engraved with a misspelt name.

There are lovely cameos – characteristic suburban grotesques (Leigh-viathons?) – from David Horovitch as a relentless jovial doctor and from Marion Bailey and Wendy Nottingham as two garish gossips.

As drama it may be stillborn, but the ideas behind Grief, so finely expressed, are gently horrifying. It is a slow-motion car crash that you can’t tear yourself away from, yet I maintain that, with careful consideration, it could have been distilled into a single image without the slightest loss.

Photograph: Charlotte Macmillan

Review: this is where we got to when you came in, Bush Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

It’s just a room above a pub overlooking Shepherd’s Bush Green. It’s tatty and it’s small, but for the past forty years it has housed little patches of elsewhere, courtesy of writers, directors, actors, technicians and a whole raft of others.

Now, it’s empty – or rather emptying – as the Bush Theatre relocates to a larger found space around the corner, formerly the local library. From October, it really will be just another room above just another pub overlooking just another green.

Treading a fine line between navel gazing and inconsequence, outgoing artistic director Josie Rourke has commissioned a final audiotour of the theatre from theatrical journey-makers non zero one and writer Elinor Cook. The result is a walked talking-heads documentary, bristling with absence and memories, through the warren of rooms that made it all possible. It’s not a fanfare of a farewell, but a single minor chord lingering into silence.

If the concept risks self-indulgence, seeming a canny attempt at self-mythologizing, the tour opens itself outwards, crucially acknowledging the role of four decades worth of audiences. Finally, this is our space and our goodbye. Our memories – perhaps not so many, perhaps not so extraordinary – are just as vital as those of former employees.

For that reason, well-researched though it is, this is where we got to… requires an existing relationship with the Bush to strike its note of sentimentality. One must feel a tinge of loss standing finally on the stage itself, stripped of any scenery and purpose. You note its smallness, its scruffiness, it’s surprising proximity to the outside world, before taking your leave for the last time. That moment is built by the journey that precedes it, but it needs some foundation to function.

Otherwise it’s just an access-all-areas theatre tour, thriving on curiosity, but nonetheless conjuring the thrill of theatre as it goes. We see the tiny office with its single table, makeshift blackboards and ramshackle archiving system. We see the dressing room, teeming with first-night gifts, thank you cards and everyday detritus. We walk the fire escape to the stage itself, overlooking the surrounding rooftops and a small mound of fag butts dragged in nervy haste.

Somehow, in spite of seeming intricately sculpted chaos, this is where we got to… overcomes its own contrivance. Poking about might feel ridiculous, but there’s enough momentary magic – scrawled memories materialising in toilet cubicles, unexpected pubs where kitchenettes should be – to lance the cynicism and the journey itself is well-constructed, building a crescendo as the gravitational pull to the stage increases.

That draw, you realise, is responsible for the entire structure. The Bush sprang into existence not on a whim but because it was needed. It’s not an ideal set-up – in fact, it’s barely even logical – but it worked because it had to, even if that meant propping it up with devotion and sacrifice, invention and imagination, grit and cheap wine.

Stood onstage you can’t avoid a flicker of total finality. For a split-second, the room expands to appear an archaeological attraction: alien, primitive, empty. What if this was the last theatre in existence? After this, I’m certain we’d walk out and plot a replacement somewhere, somehow, don’t know where, don’t know when…

Review: Victoria Station / One for the Road, The Print Room

Written for Time Out

Two starters can't satisfy like a main course, but the quality of these minimalist miniatures is undeniable. Director Jeff James matches Harold Pinter's eye for mystery and intricacy in a production as fine-tuned as the car engine onstage.

In Alex Lowde's exquisite design, that engine signifies a taxi in Victoria Station, a frustrated radio conversation between a London cabbie and his command centre. Pinter's text catches the unnerving incongruity of the early hours in a short that's like No Man's Land triple-distilled. Kevin Doyle's Driver, Number 274, and Keith Dunphy's Controller both seem on the edge of breakdown, and the other's crackling voice is at once solace and threat.

One for the Road keeps topping up its menace as members of a captive family are individually interrogated. What initially seems like score-settling between associates escalates slowly. Doyle as questioner Nicolas starts as a social oddball, becomes a gangland boss and ends a cold-hearted dictator. Callous and chilling, it's a brilliant metaphor for power-hungry expansion.

Both dramas keep you on shifting sands, trying to gauge the situation. Always crisply tense, Jeff James's calculated direction adds to the puzzles: why is Nicolas so averse to leaving fingerprints? Can we assume his three prisoners are husband, wife and son? The questions, not least their connections, keep niggling long after this classy double-bill.

After this run at The Print Room, Victoria Station and One for the Road play the Young Vic between 6th and 15th October.

Review: The Kitchen, National Theatre

The secret of a good setting is often precisely its secrecy. Today, restaurant kitchens are a good deal more familiar to audiences than they would have been when Wesker’s retouched first play hit the Royal Court stage in 1959.

Cookery programmes have, in the past decade or so, moved from the home into the pressure cooker of the professional environment. From Hell’s Kitchen to Celebrity Masterchef, we’ve glimpsed inside the backstage bowels of restaurants often enough to know the heat of a busy lunchtime serving.

Following John Osbourne’s first shot, the Royal Court revolution was still in full-swing and Wesker’s play, eventually produced off the back of Chicken Soup with Barley and Roots, offered a rare viewing panel into the world of work. With that comes the working class, a hallmark of Tynan’s champions, and, in The Kitchen possibly for the first time, a multicultural melting pot.

Of course, these social factors means The Kitchen has retained its relevance fifty-two years later. It’s a long way from being stale, but its certainly no longer fresh.

With all this in mind, director Bijan Sheibani is right to treat the play expressively, rather than with the strict naturalism that Wesker might be associated. The problem is rather that, by beautifying the workplace, he misses the tone entirely.

Sheibani and his movement director Aline David give us symphonic choreography for the busy service periods. They sculpt a beautifully choppy sea of chefs; their white uniforms bubbling like a pan of boiling water. Arms clutching knives extend out of the mass and disappear back in slow motion. Utensils tap out rhythmic beats on metal implements. Waitresses circle the outside, collecting crockery on a round of the dancefloor. Two even get hoisted up on wires to complete the stage picture, freezing in elegant leaps, limbs extending.

This is the workplace as inhabited by Darcy Bussell and Carlos Acosta, as a sequence from Fantasia. The kitchen becomes a Rune-Goldberg machine, a conveyor belt both graceful and effete. Indeed there are moments where the stage picture resembles a tiered wedding cake, complete with an outer frosting of waitresses, or a merry-go-round turning jollily along. “In my last restaurant, you had to move like a ballet dancer,” says a new waitress, before pirouetting off, plates in hand.

“Ummm,” we purr, “How very pleasing on the eye.”

However, Wesker’s kitchen cannot be beautified. It needs gristle and grit. The knives need to be out. Tempers need to boil over. It needs to be that moment in Titanic where the engine room door opens to show sweating, coal-smeared goblins toiling endlessly. Wesker is not concerned with dignifying such work, but with showing its indignity. “You get used to anything if you have to,” is the recurring motto of the staff.

In such a well-oiled machine, through no fault of Tom Brooke’s knotted performance, German chef Peter begins to look less idealist revolutionary than spoilt brat. Peter is The Kitchen’s Jimmy Porter. Of course, he should have a pathetic edge, but that must come from his failure not only to enact his principles but to even offer a positive dream and the pettiness of his final protest. In this context, however, his dissatisfaction looks like ingratitude.

Even if Sheibani betrays the play, The Kitchen remains a good watch. With its cast of twenty-nine, it is a play crammed with personal stories and rivalries that hold your interest throughout, even if some of Wesker’s leads never come to fruition. Sheibani has found some beautiful, eloquent moments within. Peter’s arrogance and laziness is beautifully expressed in his unwillingness to even light his own cigarette. Giles Cadle’s set, though possibly too pristine, resembles a beige kiln and the combination of Mortiz Junge’s costumes and Mark Henderson’s lighting allows a scale of whiteness to express the purity of individuals at given moments. Not for nothing does Peter blend into his surroundings.

Moreover, there is some first-rate acting on show. Brooke catches Peter’s charisma without ever losing sight of his unattractiveness. Sinewy and skeletal, he is an inspired piece of characterful casting; all head, no guts. Sam Swann makes a sweetly sympathetic Dmitri, the lowly but likeable kitchen porter, and Samuel Roukin, an honest East End realist as pastry chef Paul. In fact, there’s great characterful work wherever you look, particularly from Katie Lyons, Marek Oravec, Tricia Kelly and Rory Keenan.

Review: Disco Pigs, Young Vic Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Splattered with references of its time, among them Terry Wogan as a television frontman and half-forgotten Irish footballer Phil Babb, Enda Walsh’s 1996 breakthrough has become a period piece. However, the aging process has served this tale of teenage kicks well and Cathal Cleary, this year’s JMK Award winner, pumps it full of nostalgia and naivety. Leave the chrysalis of adolescence and your rose-tinted specs fall off.

Cleary gives the whole thing a halcyon glaze. With its wallpaper swirls, jaded balloons and velour-suited mannequins, Chloe Lamford’s set is like every ancient children’s party photograph rolled into one. Pig and Runt, two teenage bezzies born minutes apart, neighbours with their own private language, have outgrown their tiny, rundown town. They charge around it, downing cider and tubthumping away in empty discos, with more energy than they know how to expend. With a whiff of underlying love – maybe just misinterpreted, one-sided lust – the pair seem a latterday, small-fry Bonnie and Clyde.

Pig and Runt are caged animals, bored by confinement. The surroundings they’ve inherited aren’t made for them, but for their quieter, clapped-out elders. Even the local pub is “a sad old place.” Squint and Pork City could be Ireland as a whole.

When they finally reach the Palace Disco, underage and over-awed, it seems the brave new world of their dreams. After bluffing past the bouncers, they stand in the doorway, mouths open, diaphragms paralysed, dazzled by flashing lights and possibility.

But dreams come to life are seldom all they promise and it's here that the bond between Pig and Runt is ripped asunder. While Runt eyes up the crowd, Pig feels its eyes on him. A kiss is met with jealous rage and, by the time the lights come up, drenching everything in pallid reality, it’s as if two Siamese twins have been ripped at the seam.

Rory Fleck-Byrne and Charlie Murphy are, frankly, fantastic. Blustering with pent-up aggression and pheromones, their teens defy the lipglossed perfection of Skins and Hollyoaks. They are bruised and gawky, but pumped full of life. Neither is conscious of their own facial ticks – his jaw hangs down gormlessly; her nose crinkles with mischief – so it’s fitting that Cleary begins their shared epiphany with a reflection caught in a mirror.

It’s hard to imagine a production that better captures the essence of Walsh’s seductive play. Cleary conducts the action perfectly, contrasting hormonal heartbeats with oases of calm that suggest teenage sentimentality and glints of suicide. He makes us see the world through their eyes, such that the action swells and subsides, carried by tides of emotion and adrenaline.

Thrilling, turbulent and dangerous, not to mention full of theatrical flair, Disco Pigs becomes a party popper that leaves shrapnel wounds in its wake. Extraordinary.

Photograph: Katherine Leedale

Review: The Wild Bride, Lyric Hammersmith

Written for Culture Wars

Kneehigh’s name is starting to look less an invocation of childhood, than a fascination with limbs cut short. After the footless Footloose story of The Red Shoes comes an adaptation of Grimm folktale The Handless Maiden. Here, though, the former’s clean chocolate and cream aesthetic is replaced with mud and spit.

It is both to Kneehigh’s credit and their detriment that The Wild Bride stretches the simple tale out so long. A girl, accidentally sold to the devil by her father in a classic diamond in the stuff mix-up, is shorn of her hands after proving too pristine. From there follow her wilderness years and subsequent rescue by royalty, marriage and crude bionic limbs. The devil, however, is not done yet and scuppers her happiness once again.

Kneehigh deliver the tale with a characteristic sumptuous simplicity in a gorgeous production. Shot through with the blues – and Stuart McLoughlin’s charismatic hick of a devil really does get all the best tunes – it’s Deep South rolled into Black Forest. It could so easily have been cute – “sickening sentimental claptrap,” as the devil says – or worse, Burtonesque, but Kneehigh achieve the rawness of ripped flesh.

You really feel Bill Mitchell’s mud-soaked design, dominated by a funeral pyre tree and scattered leaves. Bright red hands, sometimes bandaged, pull painful focus. Again, Malcolm Rippeth’s lights swell like exposed nerve-endings. Beautiful and fervently performed, it’s engrossingly told. Credit too to Stu Baker’s heartfelt music and Carl Grose’s somersaulting text.

Only, because Kneehigh don’t dissect their story, your mind empties as your senses delight. Too many empty physical expressions of suffering and wildness simply aren’t painful or wild enough.

There are flashes of thought – the silence of the woman against the spluttered excuses of men; the passing of the role between three actresses (Audrey Brisson, Patrycja Kujawska and Éva Magyar) as a burden to be shared – but aesthetic never develops into a core motif and it’s never fully apparent why this story is told. At best, its an expression of life as time to be passed, whether by enduring suffering with dignity or diverting oneself with devilry.

Photograph: Steve Tanner

Review: Tinderbox, Broadway Studios

Written for Time Out

Its flaws remain unhealed, but second time around - post-riots, post-Starkey - Lucy Kirkwood's debut play should be respected for its prescience. Tinderbox's caustic portrait of English nationalism flourishing out of social decay seems less dystopian than when premiered at the Bush in 2008.

The setting is Everard's butcher's shop, the last vestige of a once-great empire, outside of which riots and rising seas are swallowing Britain.Inside the shop, Saul Everard (Christopher Knott) presides over his wife and latest assistant Perchik (Nick Howard-Brown) with a rusty meat cleaver.

National heroes hang on the wall - Churchill, Beckham, Davidson - and depleted roadkill stocks are topped up using Mrs Lovett's method of meat sourcing.

Though performed with a little too much relish, Bill Buckhurst's semi-immersive production is vivid and vile. He places us on the shopfloor and, brilliantly, walks us in through Everard's back garden, complete with murderous cement-mixer.

However, while Kirkwood's situation merits lip-smacking comparison with Philip Ridley and Jez Butterworth, the play is exposition-heavy and narrative-light. Her characters lack clearly defined motivations and as a result seem degenerate, and the state-of-the-nation imagery is ambiguous to the point of disorder. Tinderbox needs a rewrite more than a revival.

Review: Decade, Commodity Quay

Written for Culture Wars

Marking the tenth anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Centre, Rupert Goold’s Decade aims to peel back the iconography that has become ensconced in our collective memory. The front-page image of two burning skyscrapers, two plumes of thick black smoke conjoining over the New York skyline, has overpowered its underlying intricacies. So much so that even George Bush has previously recited an impossible memory of watching the first plane hit the North Tower live on television.

In leaving these images well alone, Goold is free to probe more delicately. Decade is a collage of responses from almost twenty prominent writers and, defying the singularity that might be said to characterise 9/11’s legacy, its strongest suit is its plurality.

Taken together, like wide-ranging articles pinned to a noticeboard, they offer a panoramic view, while simultaneously acknowledging the impossibility of anything comprehensive. Gaps will inevitably remain. Testimony is mixed with analysis, personal stories with global ramifications, fact with fiction, recollection with hindsight.

Structurally, Decade sits between the Tricycle’s Great Game play-cycle on Afghanistan and Theatre Workshop’s Oh What a Lovely War. Like the former, it allows individual writers to come at a range of related subjects with stylistic freedom, but it shares the latter’s sense of channel-hopping. Though some pieces are presented whole, Goold chops other contributions up, interspersing fragments alongside snippets of Scott Ambler’s choreography. We return to three widows, breakfasting in remembrance each year, one of whom is unwilling to move on even ten years later.

Other critics have seen fit to respond with a report card of individual writers’ efforts. Admittedly, the individual pieces are uneven, but to do so goes against Decade’s intentions. There may come a point where the shorts are presented as stand-alone pieces, but Decade functions through accrual and association. Contributors should not be set in superimposed competition, but rather viewed relatively, as offsetting and intersecting one another.

Because Decade builds like candy floss, accumulating over its three hours as strands stick together. Its structure does not allow solidity and definiteness, but something altogether wispier and fragile; a cloud of associated ideas. With that Decade demands careful, detached watching and the onus is on us to find connections. It deliberately avoids anything overly emotive and incendiary, at least until its dignified but affecting final number, Adam Cork’s textured choral number composed from text messages sent as the morning progressed.

It’s main thrust is that this was a game-changer, “a bona fide historical enormity […that] ticks all the turning point boxes”: an innocuous statement perhaps, but an important one nonetheless. It is expressed simply and poetically. Over the course of that morning, milk turned sour. So did previously integrated communities. Good mornings grew hollow. Ten years on, we still have dust on our shoulders. We can’t simply brush it off.

There’s an immediate reminder of that on entry, as each of us is scanned, searched and interrogated by American customs officials. The suspicion that we have come to accept as par for the course is re-rooted in its origins. For all is gimmickry, you remember that it wasn’t always this way.

The main effect, however, was to reduce people to type. Not only do we remember where we were that day, we are defined in relation to it: as victims, as survivors, as widows, as firefighters, as cops, as terrorists. But also according to race and religion, the connotations of which become concretized. Dialect and slang is reclaimed. Incidentally, this suits Goold’s style perfectly, for he works largely with uniforms. Doctors race across the upper corridor, firefighters march through our midst, joggers stop in their tracks and look upwards, suits search for phone signal. Most potent are the wind-whipped office workers trapped behind glass. The sense, emphasised by Ambler’s choreography, is of a universal, perhaps prescribed, response. Yet, as with Earthquakes in London before it, you feel the cast of twelve is still too small. Goold needs the option to flood the space with people.

If it changed everything, Decade also suggests that 9/11 changed nothing. Ella Hickson’s short takes place in and around the gift shop at Ground Zero, a place that capitalizes on the disaster. In it, a young shop assistant swoops in on tear-stained women, trotting out the same lines of seduction. Ben Ellis shows a middle-aged eczema-sufferer speed-dating in a piece that can be read as a tarnished ideology desperately seeking suitors. Elsewhere, in Mike Bartlett’s offering, a journalist attempts to persuade the Navy Seal that shot Bin Laden into an interview. Political points are scored, stories are exploited and memories and mourners are co-opted. Rather than changing when attacked, the system instead eats its own tail, flogging off its own ashes. It responds with ultra-defensiveness.

Its interesting, then, that British accents characterise noble causes and dignified responses, while the deeper the American twang, whether Southern drawl or Brooklyn nasals – the more crass and suspicious the material. The last word, in fact, gets an RP accent and goes to Simon Schama’s easily identifiable monologue, in which ‘The History Man’ calls for a new system of tolerance as “the burn of memory fades into history." That’s all well and good, but one can’t shake the feeling of cultural appropriation at play. Especially since New York itself seems oddly absent, despite panning out at either end of the room. Where it appears onstage, it does so with the glaze of a Tropicana advert and there’s something uncomfortably problematic about that. To what extent is this event ours to dissect?

Miriam Buether’s design places us in an approximation of Windows on the World, the restaurant that sat at the top of the North Tower. Astonishing views across Manhattan frame the space at either end. The audience sit at tables and booths surrounding an island cabaret-style stage. As in Earthquakes, the reconstituted space mirrors Artaud’s ideal theatre of cruelty: a glass-walled corridor above serving as a balcony stage. The action weaves around us, sometimes popping up on table-tops. If the concept feels a touch manipulative and crass, slightly too close to anodyne flashback, Buether’s design at least acknowledges the oddity of atrocity-dissection serving as entertainment.

Arguably, taken as a whole, Decade cancels itself out with cautiousness. If it presents one side, there’s a sense of obligation towards the other. Obama is counterbalanced with Osama, both leaders played by the same actor. Admittedly that feels forced, as if opinions, people and subsequent events – we see shoe-bomber Richard Reid, disgraced soldier Lynndie England, Guantamo Bay and Benazir Bhutto’s assassination – are being ticked off a checklist. As if fleeting acknowledgement was deemed preferable to missing anything. But it’s beneath the surface that connections occur and pieces glance off one another.

Review: The Time Out, Forest Fringe & A Machine to See With, St George's West, Edinburgh

Written for Culture Wars

There is, at the heart of theatre, a game of hide and seek. Novels can be stories taken as they are, at face value: stories for stories sake. In theatre, stories function as carriers. They are disguises that need peeling off or layers of wrapping paper around a prize. A great deal of an audience’s enjoyment – at least for me – is in the process of decoding; the attempt, in real time, to see what’s going on beneath the surface, to discern meaning beneath the metaphor.

Blast Theory’s A Machine to See With and non zero one’s The Time Out tell very different stories. In fact, both involve us in very different stories. The first pitches us on course to rob a bank, the second as a water polo team before a major final. Actually, beneath the surface, both have the same aim. That is, both seek to connect us with those around us. While nonzeroone’s is the more immediately affecting, Blast Theory’s is the more satisfying precisely because of its mastery of disguise.

The Time Out seeks to forge a team mentality in a group of strangers. Sat on benches in an approximated changing room, wearing adapted swimming caps with headphones which feed us instructions, we are taken through a series of team-building, motivational exercises. In gradually pumping us up and breaking down our inhibitions, nonzeroone undoubtedly succeed and, in doing so, demonstrate the ease of manipulation. At the end, we charge towards the non-existent pool, psyched up and raring to go, only to re-enter the real world with nowhere to place that energy. Outside, we stand rudderless, almost awaiting further instruction or leadership and our passivity becomes abundantly clear.

A measure of The Time Out’s success is that, since taking part, I have had social encounters with two of my teammates, formerly strangers, outside of the space. It’s undeniably involving, cleverly stirring up a passion you didn’t think possible, but its direct approach leaves little to linger.

By contrast, Blast Theory ambush you with an unseen crux. What seems one experience – a path towards a bank robbery – turns out to have been another entirely. It pivots around a moment spent in a car with a stranger that, at the time, seems part of a wider narrative, only proving central after the event.

A Machine to See With pitches you as the protagonist in a heist movie of your own. A recorded voice at the end of the telephone instructs you through the city. It takes you into public promenades, multi-story car parks and toilet cubicles, stoking your adrenaline as it leads you towards a high street bank that you’re supposedly about to rob. “How far will it actually go?” you think, “How much will it ask of me?” After all, the voice is keen to stress that your in-flight actions are real and incur responsibility. It mentions the police. Will I have to deal with the police?

As preparation for a heist, the piece works by pulling you along, preying on the audience member’s tendency to follow a piece in good faith. You’re never sure quite how close to the cashier it will take you or at what point you might have to abandon the plan.

However, Blast Theory’s decision to frame this as a movie in which the individual audience member is the protagonist is equally important, if not – by the end – more so. The recorded voice asks you to imagine teams of cameras swirling around you. Your walk changes: you notice that you’ve started to act slick, a pale imitation of Ocean’s 11 or Reservoir Dogs. This, after all, is where most of us cultivate an idea of the etiquette for such acts, a fact that Blast Theory’s chosen locations – all rather Grand Theft Auto, defined by urban anonymity – plays on smartly.

Crucially, the imagined cameras turn your focus entirely on oneself. You see yourself in the third person, conscious of acting rather than simply doing unthinkingly. Other people, passers-by, become extras on your movie set. Your co-conspirator becomes your supporting-lead. You sit together for almost ten minutes, almost entirely in silence, before heading directly towards the bank.

It’s only at the end that these ten minutes come into real focus. (I had fallen into the trap of getting a bit lost and, with an unexpected delay, may have missed the full impact of an ending that might have re-connected you and your partner.) The realisation is that, in their version, you were a mere bit-part player; that, in your absolute introspection, you barely took notice of the person sat next to you, even though you trusted them implicitly and unquestioningly at the time. What was it David Foster Wallace once said? “This is water, this is water.”

How curious that the thought should come at the end of a bank heist rather than just before a water polo final?

Photographs: John Hunter

Review: Venus at Broadmoor/The Demon Box, Finborough Theatre

Written for Time Out

Compared to Bedlam, as seen on the Globe stage last year in Nell Leyshon's play of the same name, Broadmoor seems a holiday retreat. Instead of leeches and laxatives, inmates are treated with art and understanding, even love.

These two parlour plays - the thinking man's melodramas - complete Steve Hennessy's Lullabies of Broadmoor series at the Finborough, in which exhumed medical cases are given posthumous examinations. While tenderly empathetic and infused with atmosphere, both are so gentle that they're in danger of leaving little impression.

Venus of Broadmoor is the crispest. Chocolate Cream Poisoner Christiana Edmunds is an intoxicating presence as played by Violet Ryder, whose hollow eyes suddenly twinkle in flirtation. And Hennessy draws sharp parallels between lunacy and love.

Patricidal artist Richard Dadd (Chris Bianchi) becomes a delusional schizophrenic with a specious relationship to myth in 'The Demon Box'. Though Hennessy deftly threads ideas of time and liberty, it's sluggish and fuzzy, only finding punch as it ends.

The one constant is a biased narrator, asylum guard John Coleman, delicately played by Chris Donnelly as a yardstick of social norms. Well-meaning but only human, his own cracks prove sanity a concept without instance in the outside world.

Review: The Faith Machine, Royal Court

Written for Culture Wars

Though absolutely attached to the offstage world, Alexi Kaye Campbell’s latest reaches beyond mere topicality. It is concerned not with events taking place on the world’s surface, but with the very axis on which it turns. His target is the accepted order of things, the belief system that underpins everything – namely, individualism.

Campbell’s play personifies various worldviews, but it’s tightest on the moral character of capitalism. That’s embodied by Kyle Soller’s Tom, a young American sell-out; once an aspiring novelist, now an advertising executive. Amongst his campaigns are a leading pharmaceutical company with an unethical record.

It’s that which breaks up his relationship with Sophie (Hayley Atwell), an English post-grad heading into journalism, on September 11th 2001. The Faith Machine time-hops through their relationship – him growing increasing ensconced, her campaigning against global inequality. It keeps returning to Greece, to the home of Sophie’s headstrong father Edward (Ian McDiarmid), a bishop who has rejected the church for its stance on homosexuality. It’s here that Tom’s character reveals itself: sychophantic, side-swapping and ultimately, in Campbell’s most potent scene that shows an incontinent Edward is cleaned and changed by his daughter, inhumane.

The Faith Machine is a play of accumulation, all the better for revealing its purposes gradually and, even then, never head-on. As narrative, it suffers from arbitrary scene selection, but as meditation it’s concise without being cack-handed. Campbell steers clear of simplified taglines, but it becomes apparent that he believes God to be dead and society non-existent.

That’s not to say it’s a play without hope. “Nihilism is the victory of the status quo,” says Edward, “so it’s time for the storytellers.” Instead it aspires to a new globalisation, in which every nation works together on equal footing. His final image, over-constructed though it is, has a Chilean academic, Ukranian ex-prostitute, Ugandan student, Tom and an English homosexual co-operating. If that all sounds unstomachably like a Benetton advert, Campbell’s softly-softly approach manages to dissolve cynicism. We must, according to Edward’s teaching, take it as metaphor.

Nor is Campbell naïve enough to presume that individual action will suffice. He nods to communism’s failure and the system’s drowning out of individual dissent. Rather The Faith Machine addresses its audience collectively. If that system is to change, Campbell argues, we must find an alternative together. If anything, he’s open to charges of optimism.

Jamie Lloyd’s production has both purity and elegance, largely due to Mark Thompson’s restrained design and some superb performances. Admittedly, Atwell plays Sophie a little too straight down the middle, achieving earnestness with bland conviction. McDiarmid, open to accusations of hamminess, is nonetheless captivating and clear. He finds both serenity and a roaring steadfastness in Edward, but softens it with a wry sense of mischief.

Soller is best of all. He is an actor so full of potential energy that he seems to vibrate. You’d think his veins pumped not blood but expresso. In the past, I’ve found him too much, but here he is perfectly cast to capture Tom’s nervy bluster. He seems a watch wound too tight, always in danger of popping a spring. Tom could so easily have been swish and set, another Ivy League success-story, but Soller lends him almost catatonic insecurity. Always the first to bottle, incapable sincere connection or ease, he pierces tension by blurting reckless jokes or self-vindication.

However, his best comes with the gradual decompression as Tom matures towards gentle epiphany. His calm, felt regret is halfway to absolution and makes alternative models seem possible. You leave Campbell’s play cleansed, challenged and committed.

Photograph: Stephen Cummiskey

Review: Wittenberg, Gate Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Hamlet, Dr Faustus and Martin Luther walk into a student union bar. That’s pretty much the premise of David Davalos’ scholarly dazzler that pits opposing philosophies against one another. The load is lightened by a bawdy humour, but it’s also cheapened by smartass tendencies.

Davalos makes Wittenberg the theatrical equivalent of Jamie’s Dream School, at which the undergraduate Hamlet finds himself torn between Martin Luther’s Theology course and John Faustus’ lectures in Philosophy. With two conflicting worldviews swirling around his head, Hamlet gets caught in a spider’s web of lofty ideas, though it often seems a case of ‘you say co-gi-to, I say cog-it-o.’

As such, it’s a pushmi-pullyu of a play. Two sides – Faustus’ scepticism and Luther’s faith – tug in different directions with equal and opposite force. The result is equilibrium and, with it, stagnancy. They never tear the central seam and birth something that might drive the action forward because Davalos is more concerned with showboating than purpose.

Though his ambitions are Stoppardian, the flair remains largely surface, reliant on linguistic, rather than logical, gymnastics. Too often his chopping of three plays into lines satisfies through crass recognition rather than real achievement. It becomes something of a smugfest – on our self-congratulatory parts as much as the writer’s. As it continues, knowing winks are increasingly accompanied by elbow nudges and heel clicks.

Nonetheless, Wittenberg is thoroughly entertaining stuff. Faustus and Luther make a cracking odd couple; the one a swaggering silver fox, the other a constipated bore. Sean Campion and Andrew Frame spar with just the right combination of affection and animosity.

Of course, the dice are loaded in favour of Faustus’ humanism and that in itself entails pointed accusation. We are Faustus’ descendants: sceptical egoists all, faithful only to ourselves. The Apple logo, gilded gold all over Oliver Townsend’s impressive and intelligent set, roots consumer capitalism in original sin. Let’s not forget that the forbidden fruit came from the Tree of Knowledge.

Christopher Haydon’s production is full of such asides - almost too full, in fact, as an overload of symbols teeters on the edge of arbitrariness. Does it add anything to costume Edward Franklin’s Hamlet in the Villain T-shirt of the recent National production?

Tonally, however, Haydon gets it spot on with his mix of theatrical conceit, calculated camp and jaunty pop post-modernism. It feels like an arch spoof of Shakespeare’s Globe. Most of all, for its many problems, Wittenberg is laudably ambitious, unphased by enormity. With Haydon set to take over the Gate next year, that surely bodes well for this tiny space.

Photograph: Tristram Kenton for The Guardian

Review: You Once Said Yes, Underbelly, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for Culture Wars

There’s just about the spoonful of sugar in You Once Said Yes to help its bitter medicine go down. It is essentially a city-wide guilt trip, reliant on the deep-set sense of selfishness, that, no matter how honourable your intentions and how charitable your actions, there’s always more to be done. Were it not for the niceties, the moments of kindness and good turns provided, it would be hectoring and patronising.

Greeted by a tour operator, dressed in the obligatory pencil shirt and pillbox hat, you’re prepared for adventure. An orange knapsack is filled with titbits. Names and details are taken. Cheeks are pecked. And you’re off, out of the Underbelly onto Cowgate with no further instructions.

A gently probing string of theatrical encounters, You Once Said Yes offers multifarious first-person experiences along the lines of You Me Bum Bum Train. Only they take place in public, rather than a private space in which to live out fantasies. One moment you’re singing with a homeless man, the next, chasing a clown around the Royal Mile. Your willingness to play along, to stand out from the crowd, to offer a kindness is constantly in question.

At points, the experience is downright humiliating and it’s most potent when you feel the eyes of onlookers boring holes in you. Here your behaviour feels under active public scrutiny.

In fact, given the evident construction of the event, every choice you make feels under inspection. Knowing you’re opposite an actor entails knowing that you’re on show. The pressure, therefore, is to go along with the game; to offer an equally constructed version of yourself by breathing deeply and sucking up the punishment. You empty your pockets into the hands of a ‘tramp,’ model with extra ease in a charity shop and readily carry books or hand over cigarettes to a ‘panicked student.’

The moral kicker, therefore, is in the difference between your behaviour within and without of the piece. Would you have acted likewise in an everyday encounter?

Only once do the two coincide, when the show disguises itself well enough to pass for normal life. Here one is left alone for the first time, stranded in public, vulnerable, waiting for something extraordinary to pick you up and take you to the next destination. What happens is so entirely embedded in the situation that it’s easily missed and, as I did, uncharitably dismissed. Reader, at this point, I said no and, such was my conscience on realising, my subsequent yeses were said with five times the enthusiasm.

This is well-meaning theatre with a real world effect. It is an intervention smuggled under the guise of entertainment and you’ll come away with newfound good intentions. To pass off a moral lecture with humour and flair is an admirable feat, even if You Once Said Yes is more naïve than it likes to believe.