Review: The Last of the Duchess, Hampstead Theatre

Written for Whatsonstage.com

You wait years for a drama about Wallis Simpson and then three turn up at once. Last Christmas, she popped into 65 Eaton Place during an episode of Upstairs Downstairs and, this year, she got a biopic of her own – albeit somewhat derided – courtesy of Madonna.

Now here she is in the opening dream sequence of Nicholas Wright’s latest play, leaning louchely against the mantelpiece of her Boulogne chateaux and fixing herself up with small buckets of ‘vawd-ca.’

That is indeed the last we see of the Duchess. For the rest of the play, adapted from Lady Caroline Blackwood’s book of the same name, she is bedridden upstairs, rumoured to be senile, shrivelled and mute. Possibly even dead.

In April 1980, Blackwood was dispatched by the Sunday Times to profile the Duchess of Windsor, only to be denied access by her lawyer and protector Maitre Suzanne Blum (Sheila Hancock, outmoded and frosty as granita). Instead, with Blackwood sniffing around for a scandalous scoop, Blum herself becomes the piece’s subject and faces accusations of theft and abusing her power of attorney.

That sets up a rather fascinating game of cat and mouse between interviewer and subject, though it takes a long time to get there. Wright’s first act, teeming with high-society tittle-tattle, is like a staged edition of a vintage Tatler. It lacks the double perspective to mine universals from its aristocratic subjects.

However, after the interval, Wright settles down to business proper and presents a proper journalistic duel. While Blackwood, joyfully played by Anna Chancellor with the lolloping surliness of a tipsy teenager, builds towards a cry of "J’accuse", Blum guards the Duchess with parries and deflection. Wright makes an entertaining and even bout between the ruthless and the rueful.

Beneath all this is the question of truth and representation. With both Blackwood and Blum’s versions skewed by their opposing motives, Wright’s concern is with history’s gatekeepers. As the piece ends on a mournful note, he sides with neither Blum’s self-elected censor nor Blackwood’s bitter megalomaniac. Nor, in an admirably neutral piece, is he naïve enough to advocate unbiased truth above all else.

Chancellor and Hancock make worthy adversaries, each filling their role with characterful forthrightness, but Richard Eyre’s production would be better served by a less literal staging. Though Anthony Ward’s copper green gauze walls add a ghostly quality, the naturalistic setting – all regency sofas and antique statuettes – emphasises Wright’s light drawing-room comedy over its titanic clash. It does, however, allow decent comic turns from John Heffernan and Angela Thorne as Michael Bloch, Maitre Blum’s own loyal protector, and Lady Moseley respectively.

Review: Death and the Maiden, Harold Pinter Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Sometimes a faulty production can be as instructive as a great one. Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden reads as a taut and sinewy distillation. It seems to spit and tear itself from the page as Paulina Salas, a victim of gang-rape and torture under a recently ousted dictatorship, takes justice into her own hands. Jeremy Herrin’s West End revival, the first in London since the play stormed into the Royal Court Upstairs in 1991, reveals its slickness. And not in a good way.

Paulina is played by Thandie Newton, pristine as a porcelain doll, and even though she never seems as brittle as all that – she’s still steely – there’s a composure to her performance that makes the play a pop thriller. In her glossed lips, “It turned out just as I planned” gets the cunning inflection of a mastermind detective, relishing the moment the final jigsaw piece fits into place.

That clever, twisting structure is the foundation of Dorfman’s play, which needs to thrill in any production. However, if it is not concealed, Death and the Maiden becomes a flippant exploitation of deadly serious events. Reduced to a pop thriller, as Herrin’s production manages, it seems to dance on the mass graves of such regimes.

All of which makes Paulina the piece’s lynchpin. The actress needs to almost work against the play, to deliver a performance that knocks it off its pedestal. Paulina needs to overpower the play’s neatness, to upset its clockwork heartbeat.

This is beyond Newton, who would be adequate in a less viscerally demanding role. Instead, dressed in an Armani blouse and skirt, she is every bit the nourish film star. She points a gun like a pro, but she remains as dangerous as saline solution and strips Paulina of her essential unpredictability.

Because when Paulina takes the man she believes responsible for her systematic abuse hostage after he turns up by chance, having rescued her husband from a roadside flat tyre, she must be capable of anything. Just as important, we must – at least in part – not begrudge her anything, even if we acknowledge the ethical conundrum. For the duration of the play’s events, Paulina must be a very sympathetic psychopath.

Herrin is, however, more interested in a making the play look good, crackle along and pulsate with a creepy atmosphere. In Peter McKintosh’s design, the Salas’s home resembles an open grave, an underground bunker and an interrogation room. Headlights surge through the window like searchlights that stop escapees in their tracks.

Nonetheless, Tom Goodman-Hill and Anthony Calf make interesting, complex and credible choices as Paulina’s husband, who tries to regain control and maintain composure, and the doctor taken hostage. Calf, for example, strikes a very fine balance between a distinctive voice and a unique one. In another production, you’d trust them to explode, but here, in a production made safe as a stage handgun, they can’t pierce the poise and polish.

Photograph: Alistair Muir

Review: 13, National Theatre

Written for Whatsonstage.com

Theatre is championed for its ability to react to current events. With talk of social media revolution, impending war with Iran, riots and chasmic class-divide, Mike Bartlett has certainly done that.

Rather than state-of-the-nation, Bartlett does state-of-the-globe and, here, he attempts to cram the whole thing onto the Olivier stage in three hours. It was never going to fit and 13 is overstretched. Broad archetypes serve as political mouthpieces and the narrative skips like a scratched CD to set up a showdown. But, in spite of such faults, the piece captivates throughout. Its direct address demands our attention.

At its centre is John (Trystan Gravelle), a saviour in sweatpants preaching a new world order of genuine choice and possibility from on top of a bucket in a London park. Amongst a group labelled “his disciples” (Bartlett labours his Christ parallels unnecessarily) are a casual prostitute, a reformed lawyer and two activists with whom John went to university.

As John goes viral, this movement amasses followers until half a million have occupied Trafalgar Square to protest against Conservative Prime Minister Ruth (Geraldine James) and her informal advisor, her former lecturer and public atheist Stephen (Danny Webb). Beneath their anti-war cause is a deep-rooted and unpinnable dissatisfaction.

Bartlett’s chief success is in his portrayal of the symptoms that breed this dissatisfaction. Once again, he shows an uneasy world fuelled by coffee and e-numbers. Each night, the whole of London wakes from the same nightmare.

But Bartlett’s real target is atomisation and the cult of the individual. Everyone here is out for themselves - they can’t even remember one another’s names – and, if John catches the zeitgeist, he does so because everyone feels the same problem without actually sharing it. Bartlett shows unity built on the alignment of individual concerns to be inherently fragile.

The second half whittles down to a Newsnight-style debate as John and Ruth, with the help of Stephen, face-off and, though worthy, it’s not earned in theatrical terms. Nonetheless, Bartlett works hard to leave us with a question rather than a solution, showing how cautious conservatism wins out against equal opposition.

Like Headlong’s Earthquakes in London, premiered last year in the Cottesloe, 13 really needs an aircraft hanger and a cast of hundreds, but director Thea Sharrock does well to capture the piece’s scale. Tom Scutt’s design, a huge black cube revolving in the shadows, is vast and uneasy.

The cast are all in comfortable territory and Bartlett’s archetypes leave little room for manoeuvre. Gravelle suits John’s genial charisma; James, Ruth’s unflinching resolution; and no one does terminal illness as well as Webb. Only Adam James’ rambunctious lawyer and Shane Zaza’s zany student offer a slant on their stereotypes in a big play with its fingers on the pulse, if not its eye on the ball.

Review: A Round-Heeled Woman, Riverside Studios

Written for Time Out

Taboo-busting doesn't get much tamer than this. Jane Prowse's adaptation of Jane Juska's best-selling memoir, subtitled My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance, offers a gently comic, sweet and affecting peek into the sex lives of the superannuated.

Aged 66, Juska - played by Cagney & Lacey star Sharon Gless - placed a personal advert in The New York Review of Books: 'Before I turn 67 next March, I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.'

Among her 63 replies were Georgio from Utah, 68 and sex-hungry, and Wilson, a horny New Yorker of 72. Neither makes the maybe pile.

Those that do are either unpalatably forthright about their motives or gentlemanly until the deed is done and Juska's excitement hollows into embarrassment. The exception is Graham, a Trollope fan the same age as her son.

Gless has an ease onstage that most of us reserve for relatives and her wicked, sassy humour brings out the best in a script that has little up the sleeve on which it wears its heart. Ultimately, there's nothing wrong with A Round-Heeled Woman, but there's nothing much to get excited about either.

Review: Jumpy, Royal Court

Jumpy is just that. April De Angelis relies on momentous events – pregnancies, marital crises, affairs, gunshots – to make her points, only to subsequently bottle them with some coincidental get out clause or other. It’s a shame, because, not only could tighter plot-points have carried equal weight, this tendency is the only major fault of an hilarious theatrical firecracker.

At its best, Jumpy matches One Man Two Guv’nors for laughs, but without sacrificing real-world purpose and political drive. It can be elegantly poignant and Nina Raine’s direction is among the best you’ll see this year: never showy and concept-heavy, but full of intelligent and restrained choices that eventually hit home. On top of that, Raine has drawn performances of extraordinary emotional suppleness from a first-rate cast.

Unlike De Angelis’ early work, Jumpy is not an outright feminist play. Sure, it sees the world through a prism of feminism, but it is far from restricted to the subject. As well the ageing process and family, De Angelis targets the replacement of ideology with irony and a society so materialistic that it views children as lifestyle accessories.

Tamsin Greig plays Hilary, a mother-of-one recently turned fifty and undergoing a delicately underplayed mid-life crisis. De Angelis tells us all we need to know in the first pinpoint image: Hilary enters, shoulders slumped with the weight of her shopping. She wears sensible clothes, black and olive green, and no make-up. Her fifteen-year old daughter Tilly (Bel Powley), dressed and dolled up like a rainbow, bounces down the stairs to the beat of her iPod, blasting out Florence and the Machine’s Dog Days Are Over and goes out for the night. Immediately, a bottle of wine comes out of the shopping bags and Greig sorts herself out with a large glass and a sigh.

Ostensibly, then, Jumpy charts Hilary’s mid-life crisis through separation, burlesque and dalliances with men both her own age and half it (including a neat nod to Saved when a twenty year-old cleans a cut on her knee). Raine has various items – a cuddly toy, iPod dock, make up bag, duster and blanket – accumulate on the stairs, marking the several ages of woman.

However, there’s plenty more going on beneath the surface and Jumpy really stirs as it gradually refines. De Angelis diagnoses our society with a fatal insincerity deep-rooted in materialism.

Frances once protested at Greenham Common with Hilary, now she’s busy “ironically deconstructing” burlesque. Tilly’s friends share a gun “for a joke…like men having long hair in your day – or women taking the pill.” The clinical white walls of Lizzie Clachan’s set, with their cupboards of hidden clutter, suggest an anxiety about self-revelation. “Why won’t anyone take me seriously,” is Hilary’s final lament. It’s as much about her age as the world that refuses to do so.

But Jumpy’s flipside concerns a crisis of youth. De Angelis draws comparison between Hilary’s first period, marked with a miniature rite of passage to demarcate childhood’s end, with Tilly’s claim about fresher’s week, during which a childhood totem is set alight for the same purpose. Children, she suggests, remain children too long; nineteen is the new thirteen. They’re mollycoddled and responsibility-free. They’re helped with homework and plied with toys throughout their teens. “We gave them everything,” the adults intone, not realising that they have treated their children like status symbols or pimped up accessories, like Tamagotchis to be displayed around the playground.

At one point, De Angelis manages to implicate us exquisitely. Tilly returns after running away. Her hair is knotted and her make-up smeared. Her tights are laddered and she only has one shoe. And, while we assume the worst, she cheerily takes herself off to bed. “I lost a shoe. Off the pier at Brighton.” De Angelis nails what Aleks Sierz has called “the culture of fear,” by planting it in us alongside her characters. Why can we not trust a sixteen year-old girl to take care of herself?

Powley is terrific as Tilly, contrasting a vulnerable child with a spitting gremlin. Doon Mackichan is in her element as Frances, given free reign with a free-spirit, which reaps huge dividends and hearty laughter in an extended, excruciating burlesque routine that almost tears through the pages of De Angelis’ text. There’s brilliant work from a characteristically oil-slick Richard Lintern and Susan Woodward as a cold and corrosive mother.

But Greig is best of all: absolutely, but invisibly, controlled, her emotions flow in streamlets. She keeps Hilary real, finding brittleness without tipping her into fragility or nervous breakdown. Greig handles comedy like a tap-in merchant: laughs are mostly scored through reactions and her touch is light but accurate, but, as she proves with a burlesque of her own, she can goof with the best of them.

Photograph: Robert Workman

Review: Inadmissible Evidence, Donmar Warehouse

Written for Whatsonstage.com

The old criticism of John Osborne is that he wrote not plays, but character studies. It holds true for Inadmissible Evidence and, though it gives Douglas Hodge opportunity to dazzle, the play never gains momentum of its own. As the chaotic and splenetic solicitor Bill Maitland, Hodge is both protagonist and power generator. Were he to stop, you half suspect the lights would switch off.

Osborne himself was notoriously insecure and, like Jimmy Porter before him, Maitland is a bottled expression of the playwright’s own emotional state. The famous anger remains, but unlike Porter’s, it is turned inwards in self-loathing. Maitland recognises that he is the root cause of his own problems, but can’t get a decent foothold on life to turn things around. We see him over two days in which he barely leaves his grimy office, which, in Soutra Gilmour’s design has the look of a fish-tank that needs cleaning.

Maitland is an alcoholic, a serial adulterer and an absent father. His marriage is disintegrating, his legal practices are of dubious legality and his sense of self is in tatters. Life is a vicious circle of guilt and distraction that here catches up with him.

For a man whose idea of a to-do list is a role-call of his secretaries, the future always arrives too quickly and it terrifies him. No calm sniper, Maitland is a blunderbuss taking pot-shots in the dark. Always on the cusp of hyperventiliation, he bats away oncoming problems with forced charm and puerile humour. Hodge plays him like a rhinoceros learning to rollerskate, slipping and sliding around, but occasionally pulling off an inadvertent triple pirouette.

Hodge’s energy is, in itself, remarkable, but he still maintains several layers with real care. His Maitland is both entertainer, chasseing across the stage and twisting case notes into punchlines, and embittered depressive. It is a complex performance that never loses sight of either humour or torment, even as the latter grows dominant for Maitland’s eventual breakdown.

It’s here that director Jamie Lloyd pulls off his best move, warping Osborne’s play to further reflect Maitland’s mental state. The string of divorcee clients that come through his doors, all played by Serena Evans, are disarmingly similar. In one, Maitland sees a vision of his own life; in another, Mr Maples, a newly-out homosexual collected and at ease with himself, all he wants to be. Lloyd smartly has Al Weaver double as Maples and Jones, the young clerk whose youth and togetherness Maitland so envies.

There’s great support from Esther Hall as Maitland’s level-headed mistress Liz and Daniel Ryan as Hudson, the lawyer tired of holding the fort, but Karen Gillan’s fans might be disappointed, since her cameo role has been over-billed.

Photograph: Johan Persson

Review: Sixty-Six Books, Bush Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Scale, ambition and a spirit of collaboration make the inaugural event at the new Bush Theatre, which has moved from its compact warren above an O’Neill’s pub into a gorgeous new building, a former public library next to Shepherd’s Bush Market.

A few words, first, on the new theatre, designed by architect Haworth Tompkins in a mere few months. It is, quite frankly, a brilliant new addition to London’s cultural scene. It has always seemed a miracle that great new plays were tucked into the tiny, dishevelled black box of old. The new theatre, at last, fully befits the work inductive reasoning suggests it will house.

Overall, the Bush feels like a halfway-house between the Donmar Warehouse and the Battersea Arts Centre. It has an elegant auditorium similar to that of the former and the latter’s welcoming, homely nature.

The auditorium itself – the natural state of which is perfectly shown off in Amy Cook’s simple, elegant design for Sixty-Six Books – is an open and flexible space that allows the seating to be reconfigured at will. Despite four pillars, which limit capacity in any formation to 144, sightlines are barely an issue. There is plenty of legroom and the work feels like it can breathe, not only for the first time, but better than in most London theatres.

However, the real joy is that the Bush doesn’t stop there. The theatre now is now a complex. It’s new bar is spacious and cosy, better than those at the Finborough and the Young Vic, not least because it comes with a playtext library and a garden. Behind the auditorium, unseen by audiences, are an office capable of actually fitting the theatre’s staff, a passable rehearsal room and, in due course, proper dressing rooms. All this must feel like a luxury to those that have played sardines above Shepherd’s Bush Green and ought to bring in better work and, given its 125-year lease at peppercorn rent, increased income.

It opens with Sixty-Six Books, a collection of sixty-six plays by sixty-six assorted writers drawn from a number of disciplines, each inspired by a book of the bible and played by a cast of 130, none of whom double up. I can’t think of a better way to open a theatre. The pieces can be viewed together over 24 hours, with another marathon closing the run on the 28th October, or in nightly sections.

Of course, the quality varies as widely as the angles of approach taken. Of the seventeen I saw, those drawn from the New Testament generally worked better. Perhaps this is down to familiarity – for one is always aware of source material and, where one is unfamiliar with it, the inability to crack the code is frustrating – or perhaps it has to do with the more human focus of the New Testament.

The best of the collection present something present-tense, breaking through the original’s tendency to sit outside of a story as reportage. Some apply an easy and literal filter of modernity, such as Jeanette Winterson’s take on Genesis Godblog, which casts God as CEO of World.com with Catherine Tate dictating tweets to an angel secretary. Elsewhere Paul talks of taking Christianity viral in Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran’s knowingly Pythonesque Epheseus-Schmepheseus.

Others burrow into the stories with more commitment. Chris Goode’s The Loss of All Things (Philippians) finds in St Paul’s activity echoes of a peaceful, but provocative, revolution against an old order, as two gay schoolboys wear down their teacher with passive resistance during his detention. Stella Duffy’s The Book of Ruth (and Naomi) humanises the text with an empathetic and emotive version told from inside rather than out. For Leviticus, full of prohibitions and maxims, Caroline Bird explores morality and sin through a woman brain-washed to self-destruct.

Those that seek to dissect rather than dramatise are harder going. Exodus, densely handled by Anne Michaels in The Crossing, is poetic but tangled, while Neil Bartlett’s fusion of Numbers and a memory of chapel-reading is unfollowable without a base understanding of the original. Both suffer from an reliance on spoken text over dramatic dynamic and, in a crowded context of information overload that benefits dilettantism and lightness, neither provide a necessary foothold.

For all its faults, Sixty-Six Books is nonetheless a triumphal fanfare to welcome a remarkable new theatre.

Review: When the Chickens Came Home to Roost, Brixton Empire

Written for Time Out

Laurence Holder's biographical drama about Malcolm X is the inaugural production of the Brixton Empire. Daljinder Singh's new venue is better known to ravers as the nightclub Mass. Though it can't conceal its dual purpose, it offers a decent-sized flexible hall, set up here in traverse.

Blending fact with fiction like Peter Morgan (Frost/Nixon), When the Chickens… charts Malcolm X's relationship with Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam, from his conversion in prison to his assassination by members of the organisation in 1965.

Holder glosses over more unsavoury beliefs to suggest a righteous, media-savvy moderniser scuppered by commitment to his cause. Beneath the outward civility, there's a nuanced and tactical power struggle.

However, while Holder's dialogue is absolutely believable, he sacrifices context for realism, never providing a crucial leg-up for those new to the subject. Singh's production, dark and dreamy thanks to Azusa Ono's minimal lighting, boasts fantastic performances from an enigmatic Ricky Fearon as Malcolm X and Peter Landi as Muhammad.

Review: Third Floor, Trafalgar Studios

Written for Time Out

Jason Hall 's Third Floor is a broad comedy about neighbourly etiquette among residents of a London apartment block. Number 10 irritates the occupants of 11 and 12 (Craig Gazey and Emily Head play the anonymous leads) by leaving smelly binbags outside her door.

As the pair bond over mutual irritation and gritted-teeth tolerance, everything points towards a budding romance, right down to their contrasting doormats. Hers is a tasteful, orderly Mondrian; his welcomes visitors to the 'House of Love'.

The romantic-comedy-of-manners contains enough laughs to overcome the sort of heavy-handed funnies for which BBC studio sitcoms get torn to shreds. Despite overusing the downward inflection, Gazey makes average material funny as the gawky oddball in 11, while Head proves a likeable foil with a good line in polite, hasty retreats.

However, Hall tries to squeeze in too much drama from his slight situation and, for all director Russell Labey's efforts, the play's unexpected lurch into comic thriller is both clunky and unnecessary.

Review: Saved, Lyric Hammersmith

Edward Bond hasn’t granted permission for a London production of his second and most famous play for 27 years. If that seems self-righteous, Sean Holmes’ Lyric Hammersmith production shows why. It makes you realise that Saved is a play to be broken out only in case of emergency.

In fact, there should be a fine for its misuse. Played too often or too carelessly, Saved loses the potent toxicity that makes it fit only for a crisis. It is an alarum of a play: relentless and monotone, too grating to be ignored. With diligently restrained ferocity, Bond shows how a society that is incapable of providing its citizens with purpose strips people of their humanity. When the world outside does not echo the one onstage, Saved’s warning shots become empty cries of wolf.

Holmes certainly can’t be accused of shirking the play’s brutality, nor its uncompromising bleakness. If anything, he goes too far, almost tipping the play from gruelling to torturous. He leaves us nowhere to hide. Bond’s specified empty space is given a white backdrop, allowing no room for distraction. There are only people, actions and words.

Those words are never merely spoken. Instead, everything is barked, snapped, yelled, spat, screamed, whined or needled. Bond’s words are monosyllables, rhythmic and grinding as a saw through wood. With every scene whittling down to a hoarse argument, the effect is as incessant as tinnitus. Holmes has prodded his cast’s performances just beyond naturalism, as a digital photographer tweaks and enhances the colours of reality. Scenes are elongated until they become unbearable; the nagging and backbiting goes on and on.

As such, the frustration transfers from stage to stalls and we find our jaws clenched in sympathy with Len, who bears the brunt of the badgering. He’s first seen attempting to sleep with teenage prostitute Pam, while her father readies himself for work. They give up and sit instead, sharing sweets – children despite adult appearances – and Len moves in to the impoverished family’s home.

Morgan Watkins finds the right note of sweetness amongst brutes. He’s strong, but soft; a good lad who constantly fails to intervene. He watches the baby’s death from the trees and fails to stand up either to or for Pam, a ragged and vulnerable Lia Saville. When she accuses him of sitting on the Radio Times, he goes through a full-blown slagging match before finally standing up for proof.

There is no respite from such frustrations for Len. Pam’s parents’ arguments have grown into a permanent state of war. The mere existence of one spouse sets the other’s teeth grinding. His friends, led by the callous and cowardly Fred (Calum Callaghan), goad each other on until any intervention becomes impossible: too big an ask, too risky a self-sacrifice. And so, on it goes, cycling through scenes, stretched and hernia-inducing, that flare up and simmer down, but never get extinguished.

It is a hot sleepless night of a production, all dead eyes and discomfort. Holmes attacks with a nail-file rather than a sledgehammer. Sure, even now, the stoning draws sickened groans – the unseen proving its power with each wet slap of stone on raw meat – but he also manages to make Fred’s hooking of bait repulsive, even mimed, when the worm’s flesh resists the barb before being punctured. Then, there’s the baby’s crying, unattended for five minutes, that scratches away as only crying babies can. It sounds like a shrill accordion vomiting bile.

As such, for all the bravery and skill of Holmes’ production, Saved is hard to recommend. My notebook is littered with torture references, from hairdryer’s held against skin to drips tapping on foreheads. Certainly this is a piercingly effective production, but it leaves you irritable, not morally outraged. Perversely, were its edges softened, Saved might prove more effective.

Photograph: Simon Kane

Review: Fit and Proper People, Soho Theatre

She’s here. She’s there. She’s every-fuckin’-where: Georgia Fitch. Georgia Fitch, who crams every major footballing scandal from recent years into a single season at a single East London club. There are bungs changing hands and guns in the changing room; there’s gang-rape, infidelity, an injunction and, just to complete the set, a multi-millionaire investor wanted on terror charges.

Fit and Proper People dearly wants to be professional football’s Enron, but in trying to kick the ball right out of the park, Fitch puts it into her own net. While Lucy Prebble achieved a graceful epic with a neat and singular central narrative, Fitch sprays her drama around and so overloads her plot. It’s not quite the stuff of Dream Team – there’s too much political impetus for that – but it’s certainly 'Transfer Window Shopping and Fucking'.

At its centre is players’ agent Casey Layton, played as a maternal predator by Katy Stephens. Layton manipulates the club from every angle, hopping into bed (literally) with new chairman Frank Wong and moving the players around like Subbuteo figurines. All she wants is to oust manager Anthony Whitechapel (Steven Hartley with a larynx like a buzzsaw), a “sortuffeeurf” local lad and former footballer, responsible for her being raped as a teenager.

Brushing up against wider cultural concerns about media, politics and big business, Fit and Proper People is an accusation of comfortable corruption. It draws a stark division between the loyal fans, who prop up the club with their minimal salaries, and the crooked insiders that stand to profit. The case is relentless but restless.

Steve Marmion’s production goes to town in transforming the theatre for an embedded experience. Tannoy announcers call the show and we troop past fluorescent-jacketed ticket tearers before filing onto the hallowed turf of Tom Piper’s 360° design. There are half-time pies, programme vendors and advertising hoardings, but, like a champagne signing intended to sell replica shirts rather than make a difference on the pitch, it all feels like morale-boosting window-dressing.

Review: Something About You (makes me want to hurt you), Asylum Chapel

Written for Culture Wars

Electra, with all its grand, sweeping passions that seem to have knotted the intestines of its characters, with it’s epic sweep of royalty and revenge, with it’s frisson of incest, is boiled down to a domestic fantasia in this devised piece by Dirty Market Theatre. The result is like sub-par Caryl Churchill.

I say ‘boiled down’, but the process is closer to dilution. Despite running at ninety minutes, Something About You… feels flabby. It’s swirl of images, scattered over the vast, crumbling Asylum Chapel, has prosaic, non-literal dances sidle up to over-written snapshots of suburban psychosis, but lacks the potential energy of a coiled spring. Where there ought to be burning inevitability, magnesium-bright, there is only a banal blancmange of self-pity and sobbing. It dearly needs an adrenaline shot.

Electra herself becomes Egg (Francesca Dale), a depressed, agoraphobic woman whose sap of a husband sleeps in the car outside and pushes cuddly toys through her letter-box. Her brother Orestes – sorry, Dave (Tom Harris) – looks like he’s just returned from a gap year, while their mother, played by a bouffant Benedict Hopper in a pink skirt and kitten heels, has stepped out of the 1960’s.

The aim is to marry expressionism with a modern ‘neurotic middle-classes’ slant on the original myth, but, for all that I admire the ambition of Georgina Sowerby and Jon Lee’s production, the two sides neither sit comfortably together nor work on their own terms. There’s a strong, dreamy atmosphere, but everything – text, acting and movement – remains approximate; a fact testified by an over-reliance on the word ‘fuck’ to stand in for anything more specific or meaningful.

Beneath all this is the fatal problem of an adaptation that dresses the original in fancy post-modernism (“Weep. Change your sex. Ask questions to which the answer is Electra”) without ever really adding to it. Rather than excavating Electra’s story, getting beneath its skin to tear its guts apart, Something About You... functions only in relation to it, as a redundant translation of a vastly superior play.

Photograph: Roelof Bakker

Review: Farewell to the Theatre, Rose Theatre

Written for Time Out

Delicacy is insufficient recompense for tedium and there's plenty of both in this previously unseen two-hander by Harley Granville-Barker, who drew up the blueprint for the modern stage.

Written in 1916, months before Granville-Barker enlisted in the army, Farewell to the Theatre is underscored by melancholy. Dorothy (Jane Asher), an old-school actor-manager no longer capable of drawing the punters she once guaranteed, visits her lawyer to discuss the final curtain. Decades devoted to her art have left her with a country house and a decent pension, but little sense of legacy and impact.

On the other side of the table, Richard Cordery's Edward is her missed opportunity. He has loved her throughout, but his various proposals have always been met with rejection. Granville-Barker extends ephemerality from theatre into life to poignant effect.

In Stephen Unwin's production, Asher and Cordery have the ease of lifelong friends, but ultimately there's nothing at stake and, even at 55 minutes, this wistful mood piece struggles to sustain itself.

Review: Bound, Southwark Playhouse

Written for Culture Wars

Jesse Briton was still a student at East 15 when he wrote Bound, a story of six Devonshire trawlermen facing an economy crashing down on them like forty-foot waves. You’d never guess because his debut play is absolutely watertight.

Briton handles dramaturgy like an old pro, exploiting fissures amongst his characterful crew and raising the stakes notch by notch all the way to eleven. That his direction should also achieve atmosphere, elegance and genuine emotion absolutely belies Bound’s grass-roots beginnings. It could easily have come from the pens of Lee Hall or Simon Beaufoy.

Without ever feeling indebted to them, Bound has much in common with both Billy Elliot and The Full Monty. It is a working class drama that shows an unlikely, fractious team struggling together to ward off poverty.

With the recession digging in and his last catch sold off at half-price, Woods (John McKeever), captain of ‘The Violet,’ is unable to pay his crew. Instead, he asks them to sacrifice their leave to take advantage of competition-free waters.

A trip built on such premises, however, is never plain sailing and, sure enough, the weather turns on the trawlermen. Woods is forced to take risks, gambling their safety for economic gain. It’s a neat reflection of the behaviour that caused the global financial crisis, only inverted as result rather than cause. It’s rooted in desperation, rather than greed, seeking survival instead of excess.

Much of Briton’s skill is in the balance of his characters. Young upstart Graham, given a twist of camp metrosexuality by Joe Darke, clashes with Alan Devally’s old-timer. James Crocker’s jaded business-partner John does likewise with his arrogant old friend, Woods, and Thomas Bennett is magnificient as Kerdzic, the Polish agency worker whose mere presence sets tensions running, not least for Daniel Foxsmith’s outspoken Rhys. In such a pressure-cooker environment – cramped, isolated and increasingly dangerous – tempers are bound to flare.

That inevitability is a mark of Bound’s absolute solidity, but it also means it’s incapable of really rocking the boat. Beneath the surface, there’s a familiarity to the narrative structure that leaves pre-emption possible. If anything – and indeed, if possible – Bound is almost too perfect.

Review: The Taming of the Shrew, Southwark Playhouse

Written for Culture Wars

There’s colour and character aplenty in Robin Norton-Hale’s production of Shakespeare’s least agreeable play, but in trying to smooth its rough edges, the director has sanded it down to nonsense. Not only is the end result bafflingly implausible, it’s no more a Taming of the Shrew than Hamlet is.

Of course, directors today must approach The Taming of the Shrew tactically. Contemporary audiences will not readily accept the straightforward success of Petruchio’s methods and the usual solution involves reframing Kate’s eventual acquiescence as irony, rebellion or tragedy.

Norton-Hale opts instead to sidestep misogyny by having Elexi Walker’s Kate freely chose to drop her guard. Essentially, the play becomes a rom-com between two anti-heroes. The lovers end up playing the same game, cynically toying with a world to which both are utterly, arrogantly, indifferent. What does it matter whether the moon shines or the sun? Or if old men be deemed young women? The world can be as these two lovebirds see fit to dub it or else it can go hang.

Why then does Walker deliver Kate’s final hymn to obedience with sincerity? True, there are half-smiles in Petruchio’s direction, leaving it possible that this is another of their private jokes, but she seems to be in earnest and Dave Fishley’s Baptista wells up at her words, genuinely touched by his daughter’s transformation.

The only plausible explanation, what with Petruchio’s concern for dowries and high-stakes betting, is that Kate and Petruchio have gone all Rooney Senior and fixed the match unseen on the journey home. The Taming of the Shrew as a scamster’s con trick? “Split the winnings, Kate, then split?” Hmm.

But where Norton-Hale’s cosmetic surgery morphs the play out of recognition is by cutting the attempt “to kill a wife with kindness.” On arrival in the countryside, Kate is served not a fine meal dismissed “in reverend care of her,” but a microwaved lasagne dished up in its plastic packaging. Worse still, it’s actually burnt. Is it any surprise that she has trouble sleeping, given that they all seem to be kipping down in sleeping bags?

Why, this is the way to drive a wife to suicide; less hospitality surplus than hostage situation. Perhaps Norton-Hale is advocating the treat-em-mean, keep-em-keen philosophy.

Or perhaps she simply hasn’t read her Sparks Notes. As if in pointed defiance of the text, the outfit Petruchio has delivered is perfectly tailored. Kate’s even happy to wear it for the remainder.

If you can forgive all this – and you shouldn’t – there’s more than enough humour and fizz to satisfy. Norton-Hale has a sense of theatre, even if she misses that of the text.

Oddly, though, the solution is staring her in the face, namely, class. In fact, it’s the central pillar of this production, which offsets Brixton girls against gents made in Chelsea, but goes unused, dramaturgically at least. It certainly provides humour: Giles Roberts making a brilliant buffoon as a Barboured Gap Yah Hortensio, signing off phone calls with an abrupt ‘Anon.’ But with echoes of colonialism and Bullingdon bluster, Norton-Hale has all the negative spin she needs. As is, class simply becomes excess, unconsidered noise.

A shame, because it has allowed Darwen, in particular, to mine a smart link between Petruchio and Iago, namely a radical indifference that allows him to treat others as playthings. He seems, at first, a man who can’t even be bothered to summon up callous disrespect, shrugging as he schemes in self-interest. His is a Petruchio up for the challenge and out for the dowry and, were he not handicapped by such woeful misdirection, Darwen could have nailed a part that few get right.

Photograph: Peter Dobiesz

Review: Mixed Marriage, Finborough Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

St John Ervine’s 1911 play could easily begin with the ‘Ding! Ding!’ of a boxing bell. It is, essentially, a right royalist rumble so full of polar oppositions that it needs nothing more to hold our attention. Catholics square up against Protestants, the working class take on their executive bosses, men eyeball women and fathers and sons locks horns. It survives even Sam Yates starch-stiff production because it is a bruiser of a play; one that grabs you by the collar and simply shakes for an hour and twenty minutes.

This brute force makes for a feisty watch, but Ervine’s play can’t be granted heavyweight status. It is too sluggish for that, too naïvely absolute. Ervine sees the world in black and white and, while such clashing rival forces produce explosive bouts, they do not belong to the real world. To be worthwhile as well as watchable, it needs a little compromise.

The irony is that Ervine holds stubborn absolutism itself in absolute contempt. John Rainey’s unwavering refusal to allow his eldest son’s marriage to a local Catholic girl not only collapses a workers’ strike that has put sectarian differences aside, it sparks a fully-fledged riot on the streets of Belfast. Even as stones hammer against his windows and shots ring out across the square, he sits in his orange collarette, scowling his disapproval; a captain going down with his ship even despite a space on the lifeboat.

One could argue that equal fault lies with Hugh (Christopher Brandon), the son defying his father for the first time by sticking to his engagement, but Ervine affords love a sympathy that he refuses to give to religious faith and moral principle. There’s a romantic naïvety in that too, for neither love nor faith is freely chosen, and Yates ought to level the fight and chide both for their respective obstinacies. As Mrs Rainey repeats throughout, men are children prone to pigheadedness.

As John, Daragh O’Malley is certainly that, but he lacks the grip of a dictator in his own household. Hugh’s act of disobedience must be a regime-toppler, previously unthinkable. Against O’Malley’s softer touch, it only raises eyebrows.

That aside, the ensemble is emotive and delivers the text beautifully. Yet Yates’ production remains mechanical. In fact, with two doors on its back wall, it can resemble a Chalet-style cuckoo clock. That’s largely down to designer Richard Kent halving the Finborough stage to an incommodious two-metre strip, but the cast’s over-gesticulation doesn’t help. You’d think the Rainey’s so poor that they can’t even afford anything to do with their hands. It’s not enough to fatally wound this muscular play – this could have been a brilliant radio play – but it does prove a constant distraction.

Review: The Veil, National Theatre

Conor McPherson’s latest is a curious piece: a penny dreadful with the sort of highbrow ambitions that ought to set you back a shilling. The Veil is a ghost story shot through with philosophical and political metaphors, but, since these are vague and tangled, glanced rather than gored, the play never really reveals its purposes.

Even so, if one can forgive it’s exposition and speechifying, there’s plenty to hold the attention and McPherson’s tale is full of gothic delights.

A decaying country estate in 1822, debt-ridden and turbulent after Ireland’s economic woes, is home to three generations of Lambroke women. The youngest, Hannah, is due to marry a wealthy Englishman, the dowry from which would resolve the family’s financial slide.

However, Hannah is troubled by voices and visions of her father, whose suicide she was first to discover, and makes easy prey for the visiting Reverend Berkeley, recently defrocked, and his laudanum-fuelled companion Charles Audelle, romantic philosophers with leanings towards mysticism.

McPherson’s primary subject is, I think, rationality, as applied to both the world and society. He presents a world of blind acceptance opening its eyes for the first time, but simultaneously warns against slavish submission to reason alone. We must at least entertain the possibility that there might be more things in heaven and earth &c.

McPherson’s characters take personal experience as proof, seeking explanatory causes outside themselves. Each gets carried away with their own recounting, swelling their language and raising their voices as they veer towards trance. Contrastingly, Lady Lambroke (a schoolmarmish Fenella Woolgar) reasons away her own apparently spiritual experiences as dreams caused by a full stomach. She may seem the one to side with, but McPherson suggests that the truth is not so neat as all that.

The same goes for the play’s social side, as a simmering revolution proves itself worthy but unwise and impractical. Estate manager Mr Fingal, unpaid for 13 months and working for love not money, finally challenges the old order only to fizzle back into servitude.

But McPherson obscures the piece by attempting too much. The philosophical particulars under interrogation are too dense to take on in one sitting and the play creaks under the weight of literary allusions. While the faltering estate, complete with its unrequited manager, clearly echoes Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard, there are further nods to Ibsen’s Ghosts in the collapse of a local property and J.B. Priestley’s fascination with time’s fluidity. Arguably, there are also subtler chimes with Twelfth Night, Berkeley and Audelle cast as Belch and Aguecheek, and The Tempest.

Tonally too, it seems uncertain, occasionally swerving into pastiche when its melodramatic tendencies – a necessity for gothic chillers – are indulged. Mostly, however, McPherson’s own direction demonstrates real nuance in pace and rhythm, sometimes heightening tension, sometimes puncturing it. These are brilliantly choppy waters and Rae Smith’s design, gorgeously mildewed and crumbling, smartly keeps you on edge with periphery shadows. A moonlit pot plant and a flickering candle, so far stage right they’re actually in the wings, repeatedly catch your eye to harvest goosebumps aplenty.

McPherson’s willingness to let your eyes roam the stage also allows the ensemble acting to blossom and the reactions are as fascinating as the raconteurs.

Jim Norton’s Berkeley, “the soul of joviality,” is a delicious pomp, squeezing his words out as one does tunes from a bagpipe, and Adrian Schiller finds in Audelle a complex bohemianism, effete and ineffectual, that’s both ludicrous and poignant. Together, they seem like unlicensed and immoral ethnologists, abusing their subjects for personal gain. Emily Taaffe, all Brontesque beauty, delicately pure but haunting, smartly dissolves Hannah’s initial self-confidence towards brittleness and, even if it’s observation tips the scales towards humour, Peter McDonald does sloshed with real panache as Mr Fingal.

Review: The Baker's Wife, Union Theatre

Written for Time Out

Michael Strassen, king of the micro-musical, has previously compacted Assassins and Company for the Union's tiny stage. Even he can't get a rise out of this doughy adaptation of Marcel Pagnol's 1938 film about a cuckolded old baker.

After the baker's pretty young wife absconds with the local alpha male, the breadless townsfolk have no shortage of old beef. But differences must be put aside for the sake of a communal problem.

With Joseph Stein's book adding no flesh to its central archetypes, The Baker's Wife is as formulaic as it is naïve. The best of Stephen Schwartz's songs are ticklish and catchy, but they can't outweigh the banal simplicity of the surrounding story.

Strassen's production is spirited, but treats the musical with undue respect and too much sepia rustic charm. A little subversive cynicism might have offered some extra spark.

Nonetheless, the leads are cracking. Michael Matus is endearing as the baker, doing sozzled with particular relish, while Lisa Stokke is delicately torn as his wife. Ricky Butt, not seen onstage for more than a decade, also makes a storming return as the town's hearty landlady.