Review: Frontman, Chelsea Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

In the past, Action Hero have miniaturised the big screen Western and the stadium daredevil. On one level, Frontman does the same, scaling down arena-sized rock until it could fit into a matchbox.

However, their latest drops any retro charm and droll irony for a more direct approach. This time, despite the roadie in a cute fluffy bunny hat, it’s dead serious.

On a raised stage in a smoke-filled room, Gemma Paintin eventually appears. She wears a sequined cut-short cat-suit with a cute bow on the chest. She sits on a stool, legs at ten to two, and lipsyncs to a live recording of Elvis Presley’s Heartbreak Hotel, stomping her right foot. She coos to us with a Marilyn Monroe husk, flattering us as her favourite audience to date, even stepping into our midst for an acoustic, tambourine special.

All this is in contrast to the aggression and noise that will come later, when she screams herself hoarse onstage. A deep roar right from the stomach that squeezes the air out of her lungs. The speakers behind her surge with noise, screeched feedback and deep rumbles that set your insides to vibrate.

That said, it’s nearly not as loud as I was expecting and certainly nothing on Ann Liv Young’s Solo, during which Ain’t So Sunshine seemed to shake the foundations of Battersea Arts Centre in 2009. There’s an unexpected musicality beneath the blasts of sound and it’s a surprise to find your foot tapping along in reflex reaction.

More transparent than their previous works, which have wrapped their ontological enquiries about the nature of performance in more layers, Frontman is itself a front. It’s less a commited exploration of its central figure than a vehicle through which to explore the nature of performance more generally. Focus is largely drawn to the invisible threads between performer and audience. We’re alternately drawn in by warmth and sweet talk, then pushed away with aggression and volume. It’s clear that the former is the route to popularity, but which is the more honest and potent?

There’s a nice line, too, in the relationship between limelight and backstage shadows, but Frontman is largely driven by dichotomies. It’s refusal to admit the existence of grey areas between is to its detriment.

The musical icon proves an adequate mode of performance from which hang what is essentially a performed essay on performance, but it never feels irreplaceable. For all Frontman’s gusto and deftness, it doesn’t fully skewer its subject.

Photograph: Briony Campbell

Review: The Malcontent, White Bear Theatre

Written for Time Out

Written in 1603, as Shakespeare worked on Measure for Measure, The Malcontent sees a leader smuggle himself into the society he rules.

Predictably enough, when Duke Altofront (Adam Howden) disguises himself as the misanthropic Malevole, he's not happy with what he sees. Once-trusted peers set about a-killing and a-cuckolding, sycophants swap sides and lusty singletons get down and dirty.

Rae McKen's flirtatious production makes sure we know we're implicated in all this vanity, lust and power-hungry usurpation, throwing a steady stream of winks and raunchy asides our way. It's a contemporary twist on Elizabethan court entertainment.

However, the spirited performances reduce the play to a parade of archetypes: some even enter to their own signature tune. Gershwyn Eustache makes a commanding villain and there's droll support from Richard Kiess and Matthew Gibbs as two fey dandies. But Penelope Watson's twisted period costumes come close to stealing the show.

Review: The Kitchen Sink, Bush Theatre

Like a Mike Leigh play with laughter lines where furrowed brows should be, The Kitchen Sink marks Tom Wells out as an extraordinary young writer.

Its title is an affectionate, gently ironic backwards nod to a once-fashionable style. Kitchen sink dramas are strict social realism famously championed by the Royal Court from John Osbourne onwards. Generally speaking, they’re depressing affairs: all squalor, frustration and hopeless dreams. Wells not only pulls that off, he punches through the other side with a comedy that cares.

Pipe dreams and nightmare pipes abound for a working class family in Withernsea, Yorkshire. Dad Martin’s milkround is dwindling from supermarket competition and his milk float is sinking out of service after twenty years. His two children have bigger dreams. Billy is off to Art College in London and Sophie is hoping for a black belt in ju jitsu. Mum Kath just wants a happy family and a fully functioning kitchen.

Wells charts a calendar year in the household, which is hugely affected by seismic change in the world beyond. The reality of the economic crisis puts paid to both high ambitions and lowly achievements.

Built into this is a younger generation’s fear of failure and subsequent self-sabotage: Billy almost talks himself out of his interview, Sophie belts her examiner and her boyfriend Pete struggles to pluck up the courage even to enter the house, let alone go in for the kiss. They are boom-time children, puffed with parental backing, but entering a crowded market.

Wells is nicely noncommittal in generational comparisons. It might seem better to dream naively than to be content with coasting, but there are moments when satisfaction and family seem more than enough to compensate for lack of ambition. After all, Martin and Kath’s hard and unrewarding graft is responsible for the home and the kids’ upbringing. Perhaps Wells is championing Pete, a lad with “a love for drains,” but what was it Socrates almost said about satisfied plumbers?

But all this is done with real aplomb. His characters say exactly the right things at the right times and some of the lines they come out with are unexpected delights. Wells also has the ability to hollow out a laugh into poignancy and then turn it inside out into a smile once more.

Once upon a time, The Kitchen Sink could well have reached the West End. It has just the right measures of cynicism and sentiment, humour and heart to attract a ‘night-out’ audience, but also the necessary lacing of astute – often rather damning – social critique to justify its importance.

Tamara Harvey directs beautifully, catching moods like waves and orchestrating her characterful cast in the round with both intuition and diligence. Steffan Rhodri plays Martin with a real deft touch, getting to grips with both good intentions and gruff, uncommunicative masculinity. Ryan Sampson is both brilliantly camp and sweetly tender, as is Lisa Palfrey as his mother, dispensing both hugs and advice without a word of complaint. Until, of course, a very unusual bout of waterworks on Christmas Day.

Best of all is Andy Rush as the nervy Pete. Despite swallowing his sentences, bumping into the furniture and never once working out what to do with his (presumably clammy) hands, he comes across as the most grounded of the lot.

Review: Matilda the Musical, Cambridge Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Matilda’s got its own Spiderman in the first five minutes: a spoilt brat in crude, homemade fancy dress. The RSC’s homegrown musical proves that you don’t need $75 million and mid-air battles to make a musical smash. It takes massive heart, fizzing wit and songs that stick with you like a superglue-lined trilby. Matilda’s got the lot and it already feels like a West End mainstay.

It works so brilliantly because, unlike so many musicals, it makes sure that it’s always one step ahead. There’s so much going on – never too much, mind - that just keeping up is all you can do. Nor does it ever shirk or sugarcoat the story’s harsher side, particularly the loneliness and cruelty. Each scene, number or routine knocks whatever came before completely out of mind, so that you spend two and a half hours completely in its thrall.

Faithful to Roald Dahl’s original story, Matilda makes a must-have playground accessory of outsider status. No matther the mockery, the little girl, scorned by her repulsive, slobbish family (if ever the term noveau garish needed inventing…) for preferring books to the box simply keeps on reading. By the time she gets to school, the terrifying Crunchem Hall, she’s standing up to anyone and everyone, including the dreaded Miss Trunchbull.

Where it makes additions, you’d think someone had a direct line to Dahl himself. We get Matilda’s story about a fantastical circus act, which turns out to enhance Miss Honey’s as a specifically Dahl heroine. In fact, this show makes sure that we see Miss Honey’s own struggle in its own right.

That a musical should have a message is rare these days. That it should have several – about standing up for yourself, intelligence and the fallibility of adults – is nothing short of astonishing. Matilda never patronises its audience, nor its young performers.

Dennis Kelly’s book is a brilliant, full of pace, snap and the savagery that makes Dahl such a delicious read. It’s in perfect sync with Tim Minchin’s score. His lyrics dazzle – miracle/umbilical anyone? – and around half of the songs are as catchy as the headlice at Crunchem Hall. When I Grow Up, a sudden jolt of sentimentality that opens act two, catches you offguard. It is a song destined for signature tune greatness.

Matilda’s famous powers of telekinesis feel rushed through, but this is a minor quibble. Matthew Warchus’s production, with ambitious choreography from Peter Darling, is a headrush of exuberance and perfectly captures the writer’s child’s eye view of the world. In Rob Howell’s scrabble-influenced design the colour is all out of reach.

The kids are tremendous, particularly (in the matinee I saw) Cleo Demetriou’s tiny Matilda and James Beesley’s mature Bruce Bogtrotter, and there are deliciously grotesque turns from Paul Kaye and Josie Walker as the Wormwood parents.

It is, however, Bertie Carvel’s show. His Miss Trunchbull is extraordinary: Richard III in a skirt. Carvel plays against your expectations. Rather than a bloused barbarian with a booming voice, he plays up the femininity. It’s a masterstroke and the result is a monstrous and steroidal amalgamation of Hannibal Lecter, Noel Coward and Margaret Thatcher. Cross ‘The Trunch’ and she drops to absolute zero, seething with buttocks clenched, before striding towards an arbitrary victim, her bosoms a waist-high battering ram.

An Oliver! for the 21st century, don’t be surprised if this is still around in ten years time. Quite simply, Matilda is a Giant Peach of a show.

Photograph: RSC

Review: The Riots, Tricycle Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

London was still burning when Nicolas Kent proposed that writer Gillian Slovo assemble a verbatim piece on the subject. Only three months later, it’s onstage at the Tricycle, charting and dissecting the four days of civil unrest that sprung up this summer. The distillation of fifty-five hours of recorded interviews, The Riots is everything you expect it to be. Nothing more, nothing less.

It pulls off the extraordinary paradox of being absolutely necessary and almost completely unnecessary at the same time.

On the one hand, you have a consistently fascinating account covering a diverse range of witness statements and diagnoses of an event that demands attention. At the same time, however, The Riots offers very little that hasn’t already found its way into the media and the public consciousness – certainly not when one looks to its broader arguments: cuts to youth services, excessive consumerism, the excessive powers and negative perceptions of the police and extreme societal imbalance.

Its advantage over other media presentations on the subject, however, is that The Riots happens outside of everyday, real time. In other media, an issue intrudes into life momentarily, whereas theatre puts life on hold for the sake of that issue. The Riots open up a space in time, a window of two hours, in which we might properly and purely consider its subject, then sends you back out into the real world with a headful of opposing arguments that need – no, demand – further thought and a sense of social responsibility.

This, Slovo does well. Both narrative and argument are treated judiciously, with opposing testimonials and opinions fitted together to appear as direct debate.

However, the inherent problems of verbatim theatre as a form are such that The Riots can’t entirely stand up to deeper scrutiny. Its foundations are rather insecure. For starters, the familiarity of the opinions is hardly surprising given that the interviewees are largely the sort of people that the media has also turned to. Indeed, The Riots is theatre at its most journalistic. To a certain extent, it has (perhaps unavoidably) sacrificed depth for breadth and speed. It’s also open to accusations of being over-reliant on and over-eager to secure false dichotomies.

There is also – understandably, perhaps – an imbalance in the interviewees. The rioters presented by name are remorseful and relatively sympathetic. Those that are not – at least two, though they could just be symbolic figures – remain anonymous. That’s understandable, given that Slovo’s material is constrained by their willingness to come forward and it is better to have those voices than not.

More questionable is Kent’s decision to use them comically, with older (and rounder) actors in hoodies relishing the street slang. That’s arguably countered out by comic representation of Michael Gove – who comes across as a relic of Edwardian values. He’s played stiff as a marionette by Rupert Holliday Evans, also ten years too old.

What we do learn, however, are the sorts of curious details that only first-hand witnesses can provide: that regional police had only A to Zs to find their way around, the rioters that hopped over the MacDonalds counter to fire up the grills, the Met Chief Inspector trimming his hedge while trouble brews, the call to leave the Hackney Empire untouched, the woman trying shoes on her infant to ensure the right fit. Combined with the productions grasp of feelings, both what it feels like to wear the uniform in a situation born out of hatred for it and the exuberance of a temporarily lawless High Street, Slovo has sculpted a strong sense of events, mining some knockout soundbites to boot. Told in the past tense, Kent directs with the flickering excitement and danger of the present. At one point – rather distractingly – flames lick the set.

Most interesting is the question of who has the authority to intellectualise and reflect on those four heated days. Not the politicians, certainly, who turn up after the explosion. Rather those that have watched it brew and build in pressure, those within the affected communities, such as Stafford Scott (a charismatic Steve Toussaint), who gets the first word. There are those that also have the right, such as Mohamed Hammoudan, who lost his flat in the fire at Tottenham. He is a dignified present, well played by Selva Raslingam, able to chuckle at the absurdities through forceful grievances.

All in all, The Riots is a success. It is intelligent, impassioned and empathetic. But that success is as surefire as it gets. If handled with a modicum of care, the subject matter, style and initial concept will do the work on their own. It is a raw riddle that needs dissecting and The Riots adds to the overall conversation, albeit without adding anything to change one’s view of it. As Gove says, people have hooked their own agendas to the rioting. Slovo’s multi-sided and all-inclusive collage hasn’t revelation enough to shatter that.

Photograph: Alistair Muir

Review: Reasons to be Pretty, Almeida Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Reasons to be Pretty offers none. Early on, in fact, it looks like an errant ‘r’ has snuck into its title. Reasons to be Petty seems much more appropriate.

Neil LaBute’s play – the third in his trilogy about physical appearance – begins with a monster of a barney: Sian Brooke’s Steph screaming blue murder at her genial, jocular boyfriend Greg (Tom Burke). She’s wounded and furious after his overheard, offhand remark describing her looks as “regular.” That it was followed by “but I wouldn’t change her for the world” does nothing to temper her temper.

She’ll later read him a viciously spiteful checklist, in the very public space of a shopping mall, of his own physical shortcomings. Steph seems to be hideously and callously over-reacting and our early sympathies are with Greg: literary, reasonable, gently wry and sensitive as he is. LaBute’s skill is to slowly turn that inside out, without ever making a villain of Greg. His offence is just as much ours. It is society’s wrong and runs deeper than the surface criticism of over-elevating physical appearance.

Because to see Reasons to be Pretty only in terms of looks is to watch a slimline morality play, almost an anti-rom-com. In fact, LaBute plays with that, constantly tiptoeing around narrative clichés. He teases us by dangling the possibility of reconciliation or an unexpected new romance with Carly, the disapproving wife of Greg’s misogynistic best friend Kent.

In fact, LaBute’s play is not simply surface didacticism. Beneath is a further layer of diagnosis and what looks to be about looks is actually concerned with actions. Keeping up appearances, it suggests, goes further than cosmetics. You see it in Kent’s two-faced approach to relationships, cheating on Carly but treating her extra nice, and in Steph’s assertion that “flowers don’t save the day.” In fact, with every nicety so manufactured (each scene is housed in Soutra Gilmour’s shipping container design), it is the very honesty of Greg’s initial remark that makes it so hurtful: “It is,” says Steph later, “completely and for all time’s sake true. You meant it and that’s why I’m leaving.”

Greg, then, only seems good because he does no wrong, but he doesn’t really ever do right. His one lie is to cover for Kent, but he never tells the whole truth, because - exactly as Kent accuses – he “hates not being liked.” The secret of Burke’s performance (and LaBute’s writing) lies in letting the intricacies of this dichotomy seep out so gradually; he gradually opens our eyes to Greg and, by extension, ourselves.

Even without this smartly ingrained layer, however, LaBute’s writing is psychologically astute and full of his usual flair and humour. It misses the scale of the greatest nights at the theatre – there is no rollercoaster within – but it is constantly fascinating and played with real panache. Michael Attenborough has drawn first-rate performances from his (brilliantly cast) cast. Alongside Burke, Brooke manages to be both repulsive and attractive as she softens in time. Kieran Bew is horribly unsympathetic as the unreconstructed Kent, his mouth a sluice spill, and, as Carly, Billie Piper switches brilliantly from bitchy to brittle.

That Greg’s comment serves as the spark to change all their lives for the better, shows the lies they were previously living. LaBute’s call is for heartfelt honesty as opposed to half-truths, white lies and weaselling flattery. Were we genuine by default, he suggests, the truth might not hurt so much. Perhaps a better title still would be Reasons to be Shitty.

Photograph: Keith Pattison

Review: TaniwhaThames, Oval House Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

There is a sirensong quality to this watery devised piece from Shaky Isles Theatre – a London-based company with strong ties to New Zealand. With soft sea-shanties and breathily whispered texts, it exerts a gentle pull despite the vague sense of something ominous beneath the surface.

Perhaps it is a taniwha, the Maori equivalent of the kelpie; a shapeshifting sea creature or mystical spirit that could, perhaps, be lurking in the River Thames. Here, it becomes an idol for emigrants; a nebulous but nagging symbol of a far-off home.

TaniwhaThames, a blurry series of short scenes and movement sequences, is full of interesting ideas, often uninterestingly expressed. Appreciation requires a certain generosity on the part of its audience. One must plunge under the surface – too often banal and old-fashioned in form – to the conceptual currents swirling beneath, tantalisingly vague and elusive.

The taniwha in the Thames is an expression of the emigrant’s dual identity, both New Zealander and native Londoner. All the capital’s attractions cannot eradicate home thoughts from abroad or compensate for the sense of rootlessness, of disconnection from the city’s own history. “Just being beside the water,” they say, “makes me want to cry.”

Under Stella Duffy’s direction, TaniwhaThames was created using a process based on Open Space, the all-inclusive, all-permissive format employed at Improbable’s Devoted and Disgruntled events.

While I am a passionate advocate of Open Space, I’m not convinced that it best suits the devising process. One of its main frustrations is the excessive sway of the lowest common denominator, since consensus requires everyone onboard. This accounts, I think, for the obviousness of some of the final forms: chorus walking about saying individual lines, ships physicalised, illustrative movement that includes an air steward safety routine. But the go-where-you-will permissiveness also, I think, leads to TaniwhaThames’s inconclusiveness, with harder questions shied away from rather than cracked.

Devised companies must, at some point, get stuck in and grapple with both process and piece until they break through. Breadth is easy. Depth is difficult. I fear the former will always win out in Open Space.

Nonetheless, TaniwhaThames also bears the hallmarks of Open Space’s strengths, particularly in its humility and the vocabulary it has developed – albeit still loose –to discuss fluid, complex ideas that have their basis in intuition rather than encyclopedias.

TaniwhaThames reaches no conclusions, nor even definite connections, but its central trope is potent and its churn of associations, appealing. This is a work that holds the attention by speaking in tongues; the result is less concretely cognitive than physically sensed.

Review: Salt, Root and Roe, Trafalgar Studios

Written for Culture Wars

Eroded by dementia, Iola’s mind has lost its sharpness in the same way as the pebbles she collects from the beaches of South West Wales with her twin sister Anest. The stones will eventually fill their pockets as the two women clacker down the beach, conjoined with a skipping rope, and wade into the cold Irish sea to die.

They leave behind Anest’s daughter Menna, wittering about dogs as she dishes out the stones, having spent the past few months caring for them like a parent of toddlers.

Tim Price’s play, his second after For Once earlier this year at the Hampstead Studio, tackles the emotions of all this before the ethics. At its best, it is agonising and familiar, but several times it finds itself becalmed. It is a play of chronological snapshots, windows on the world of others, rather than one of narrative drive. Individually, they can be devastating – as when Iola grows aggressive in her disorientation – but together the whole is somewhat tideless. It’s possible that this is intentional – a reflection of the drawn out, unpredictable nature of dementia – but it saps the energy of a piece that could have been more than just promising. Without real narrative development, Salt, Root and Roe drags in parts, despite Hamish Pirie’s strong, simple and unobtrusive direction.

Nonetheless, Price is very strong on both atmosphere and character. Helped by Chloe Lamford’s design – a breaking wave that sometimes glows to become icy veins – he unnerves from the very first moment. Iola and Anest, tethered together, twirl and babble with one another like a pair of Wyrd Sisters. They have an infantile quality, a pair of wrinkled schoolgirls in duffle coats, matched by Imogen Stubbs’s Menna, her voice a cloying gurgle. Menna’s OCD – which Stubbs often lets slip – only furthers this childishness.

Price’s point – and its well embedded beneath the action, never directly outed – is a reminder of our place within nature and, as such, the surety of our individual demise. That’s treated delicately, still horrendous, but also comforting and, as the elderly twins stride into the sea, their dignity remains wholly in tact.

It helps that it’s strikingly performed. Anna Calder-Marshall catches the stuttering of Iola’s synapses beautifully, such that she seems to stall and splutter like a clapped-out car engine. When words escape her, its as if she tries to wretch them up only to come out with a nugget of startling eloquence. Yet, like a cornered animal, she is as capable of forcefulness as of frailty. As her sister, Anna Carteret is outwardly serene, but lets slip a hollowing grief beneath that must be kept in check.

Stubbs, too, is strong, frayed at the edges and seemingly awkward in her own skeleton, but with a constant amiability. In spite of the vulnerability, Stubbs lets you see how hard Menna’s trying to be tough. She’s weepy, but never actually weeps, just as Price’s play is brittle, but never actually breaks.

Review: Yerma, Gate Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Anthony Weigh has distilled Federico García Lorca’s ‘tragic poem’ into a litany of the life-cycle. It hammers away, insistent as unquenched thirst, with images of food and drink, piss and shit, flesh and blood in contrast to a landscape as barren as its protagonist. Here, Yerma’s desire for a child is shown to be as natural and burning a human urge as any other. It is not simply a want, but an fundamental need and, when it goes unfulfilled, the effect – like starvation or suffocation – is dehumanising.

If Weigh captures the ideas behind Yerma’s position, he is less successful in conveying the feeling. Though he radically reduces the play to a skeletal form without losing the narrative’s robustness, Weigh gains no extra emotional potency. His Yerma is always a degree above body-temperature, never a furnace, which makes her eventual act of murder more one of exasperation or exhaustion than of passion. Its humid, but never heated and, while that reflects the stretch of her slow torture, it also lets the pressure out of the drama.

Ruth Sutcliffe’s design, a parched desert of scab-coloured sand and rusted corrugated iron, serves the text just as well as Natalie Abrahami’s blunt direction. By playing it with a deliberate awkwardness, unfussy about tonal range, Abrahami scuffs the sheen and poetry that could be found in Weigh’s writing and offers instead an intonation. It knocks quietly but relentlessly, like the soft repeated blows of a hammer on a chisel.

Yerma herself, played pallid, brittle and simultaneously rooted by Ty Glaser, is a naïf waif, whose husband Juan (Hasan Dixon) builds a rampart between them. Her every kindness is deflected by a man grown gnarled. Like Jack Spratt, Dixon is all gristle and Weigh suggests his cold unwillingness is rooted both in ambition and repressed homosexuality.

Those around them are thick-set, earthy stock. Ross Anderson’s wholesome butcher, the object of Yerma’s fancies, and Alison O’Donnell’s crude Maria (they’re always called Maria, aren’t they?) set up strong contrasts with the malnourished central couple, while Sharon Duncan-Brewster’s Dolores, a witchdoctor, also has a smooth sexuality that further isolates them.

If Weigh’s coolly meditative adaptation neatly entwines intelligent literary-critical interpretation with narrative sense, it perhaps lacks the heart of any real drama. However, its so well executed that its own rhythms and reasons take over, and the result is an absorbing and pointed theatrical exploration.

Review: Next Time I'll Sing to You, Orange Tree Theatre

Written for Time Out

If a hermit falls over, does he make a noise?' That's more or less the question asked by James Saunders's 1962 play, though it begs another: might these two hours be just as well spent elsewhere?

A neglected precursor to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Saunders's text is undoubtedly profound, but ultimately inconsequential. Like Tom Stoppard's play, it has grown stale and its passé postmodernism now seems an indulgent display of mental gymnastics.

Saunders uses the theatre to explore existentialism, as actors and writer discuss their predicament, trapped by script and stage: 'You said that last night,' etc, etc. However, you need a working knowledge of existentialism to keep up and, if you've already got that, the play adds little extra. It's wittily clever-clever but, really, what's the point?

To work, the play needs to fizz like popping candy, but Anthony Clark trots out a 1970s corduroy-and-turtleneck staging rather than finding a contemporary tone. That does Roger Parkins no favours as the clownish Meff, who is too forcedly old school to be funny, though Brendan Patricks is nicely withering as his opposite number Dust (imagine Withnail, sober and in work) and Aden Gillett finds the tension in pretension as writer/director Rudge.

Review: Festen, Barbican Centre

Written for Culture Wars

The tipple of choice at Helge Klingenfeldt-Hansen’s 60th birthday party is a glass of bitters. Appropriate indeed for an evening that reveals a walk-in wardrobe’s worth of closeted skeletons.

Festen, originally a film by Thomas Venterberg and Mogens Rukov but previously seen onstage courtesy of David Elridge’s 2004 adaptation, remains a grippingly ambiguous story. Following the suicide of his twin sister Linda, the adult Christian (a brooding and bruised Ion Grosu) confronts his father over the sexual abuse that marked their childhood. Its trick is that Helge’s guilt is only absolutely confirmed at the end when Linda’s suicide note is inadvertently read-out as a dinner-table speech. Until then, you can’t be sure that Christian’s insistent attempt at armour-piercing isn’t a warped joke or a childish provocation.

Vlad Massaci’s production for Bucharest’s Nottara Theatre presents the event naturalistically, which leaves those not blessed with fluent Romanian at a massive disadvantage. This is a work that requires close attention. With the family sat around a long dining table (Massaci has cut the more private scenes elsewhere in the house), we need to spot how accusations land with different onlookers. Who’s embarrassed? Who’s confused? Who’s shocked? Who’s ashamed? In short, the game is in searching for clues as to who knows what and what’s let slip?

To do so, one needs to look microscopically, which the need to constantly refer to the (awkwardly positioned and sometimes out-of-sync) surtitles almost entirely scuppers. What we see is doubly disaligned and we can only play ineffective detective.

Problematic though this is, it cannot be held against the production itself only its current circumstances. By placing us so close to the action – we are more or less the dining room’s walls – Massaci forces us to play zoom lense, splitting our attention onto individuals rather than the overall panorama. Nonetheless, the play’s embers desperately need stoking to make a furnace of the festivities. It has all the motions of intensity, but none of the corresponding effects.

Massaci wants the play to chime as an examination of the state. “The Klingenfeld-Hansen family is the very society we live in today,” he writes in the programme, “One that rejects dealing with recent history, and consequently looks hideous.” He lines the back wall with wire animal skulls and dresses Alexandru Repan’s bulbous Helge in ostentatious white-tie, as if nodding to fashionista autocrats. When he is finally thrown, blood-stained, onto the table, it calls to mind the captured Muammar Gaddaffi, dying on the bonnet of a jeep. His son Michael (Dan Bordeianu) then attempts to urinate on him.

Repan’s Helge orchestrates the party like a military parade, dishing out prescribed roles to his children and demanding that proceedings run to plan. Chairs must be perfectly aligned; glasses, spotlessly clean. These are the traces of propaganda – a fact drawn out by Massaci’s use of a video-camera to catch private moments and a microphone for the public speeches. It is key that neither Christian’s accusations nor Linda’s suicide note are amplified.

In these terms, Festen becomes a usurpation and Massaci has Christian take his father’s chair for breakfast the next day. Helge and his wife excepted, all still wear dinner dress. The ambiguity, then, is whether the cycle will repeat. After all, both Christian and Michael have followed their father into the restaurant trade, albeit overseas, and the best (slightly awkward) praise that can be found for Helene (Ada Navrot) is that she has followed her own path. Just as children struggle to throw off ingrained aspirations from childhood lifestyles, so too the establishment survives through a cycle of self-replication.

If watching Festen might not reach its fullest potential in the moment, Massaci’s robust and crisply intelligent interpretation nonetheless leaves plenty to chew over.

Photograph: Ciprian Duica

Review: Hamlet, Young Vic

It’s the mental state of Denmark we should be worried about in Ian Rickson’s concept-heavy Hamlet, which places Michael Sheen’s long-awaited Dane in a psychological institution.

The result is an Elsinore teeming with cranks and crackpots. Sally Dexter is a gurning Gertrude; Michael Gould, a pernickety Polonius and Hayley Carmichael makes a House Elf of Horatio, bobbing along like Hamlet’s squiffy sidekick. They’ve more tics between them than the residents of Battersea Dogs Home.

The cast have clearly divvied up the disorders, leaving the first half exhausting and laboured, as any narrative momentum is stunted by a multitude of individual traits to be established.

Overseeing the hospital, aided by an army of anonymous scrubs, is James Clyde’s oil-slick head doctor Claudius, an unusually genial and guilt-wracked figure of authority.

There is, however, method in the madness (groan) and Rickson catches a wave in the second-half as a strong metaphor reveals itself. Leave aside the Freud-Laing debate knocking around elsewhere: Rickson’s Hamlet is more political than it is psychological. It is a call to open our eyes, an incitement of Plato’s cave and a cry for revolution against a deep-rooted, self-elected establishment.

In this context, Sheen almost flips the role around and has Hamlet grow increasingly sane as he drives towards revenge. He starts an awkward, frazzled man in hotchpotch clothes. His chin is tucked into his neck; a hand rubs his heart and forehead. His father’s ghost is Hamlet himself – presumably a display of schizophrenic behaviour. (Internalised, it removes the validity of Hamlet’s convictions. When Jonathan Pryce used the same technique in 1980, his Hamlet was possessed. As Peter Brook, citing Edward Gordon Craig, once said: “If you’re not prepared to accept the supernatural in Shakespeare, go home.”)

Sheen’s journey is one of alignment, elevating the subversive rationality of Hamlet’s ‘mad’ quipping, until he eventually rivals Claudius for sanity and overthrows the entrenched controlling hierarchy of the asylum.

In this, Rickson finds real and urgent contemporary relevance in the play. That is, however, not the same as making a success of it and there are serious misgivings nonetheless.

Though it grows thrilling in the second half, its first is stilted and flat. The cast – and Sheen is the worst offender – mostly speak the text as if it was written in size 14 font, pronounced the highlighter marks over their chosen key phrases. It bloats the text and, in aiming for absolute clarity, it becomes almost unfollowable. In coming to us, it cannot draw us in.

Nor does Rickson find a sense of dis-ease in this Elsinore beyond the imbalance of a sane Claudius and a pyscholigically vulnerable Gertrude. There is no guilt about either murder or union. And there are a number of odd moments. What sense has ‘get thee to a nunnery’ from inside an institution? Why does Hamlet look up the effect of drama on the guilty in his own Moleskine notebook?

The overriding problem is that the world never feels real. It lacks the detail, preferring instead generic symbols of institutions – flashing lights, parping alarms, plastic chairs. The result is an anime vision, a production that aims a la Rupert Goold, but misses the attention to micro-moments that grounded, say, his Macbeth.

Yet, this is a Hamlet imbued with humour. Sheen leads a clownish ensemble, his eyes darting innocently, and there are great turns from gawkily square Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (Adeel Akhtar and Eileen Walsh) and from Gould as a Polonius like an officious janitor elevated to second-in-command. By contrast, Vivnette Robinson plays Ophelia straight with both purity and clarity and actually achieves a painful, red-eyed mad-scene, rather than the usual whimsical warbling.

Still such is Sheen’s quality that, by the time his motivational fuel powers through his over-poetic speaking, he becomes a gritted, gripping Hamlet. His best are his final moments, a death that creeps up like an incoming tide and is met with a snarl that subsides. Finally, it is his acceptance that registers: with his final words spoken, Sheen simply waits.

At least, it would have had Rickson not attempted a Sixth Sense twist too smart-arse by half. First, it suggests the whole thing never happened anyway – a frustrating end to a lengthy watch – and rewards your efforts with an unimpressive trick. (I note that Derren Brown is thanked in the programme.) Worse though, it is difficult to square with the rest, feeling like an early ‘what if’ that has since tripped up the process. Rickson both cheats his audience and further muddles a bold vision badly executed, which suffocates both play and performance.

Photograph: Simon Annand

Review: Roadkill, Barbican Centre/Theatre Royal Stratford East

Written for Culture Wars

Roadkill sears itself onto your conscience. It is a desperate and anguished scream that refuses to recede quietly, but rather shakes you into at least acknowledging the existence of sex-trafficking; a subject is too easily and too often swept under the carpet of urban existence and filed under ‘Someone Else’s Problem’.

Its potency comes from the proximity and intensity that comes from placing us ring-side. Perversely, though, it is both an easy and an impossible watch at the same time.

On the one hand, its overarching plot – uncomfortable as that term may seem – is bog-standard, allowing us to zone out rather than forcing attention. We have seen, or rather heard tell, of all this before. A Nigerian girl, possibly as young as 14, arrives in London full of excitable expectations and travel-guide titbits. None of that is to be, however, as her card has been marked for prostitution, an existence both inescapable and destitute. We see the usual array of pimps and punters and police as she is stripped of her passport, real name and dignity, trapped because there is nowhere else to go.

However, two things provide ample compensation. First, the horrifying details – the deliveries of condoms, the sex toys inserted violently, the mouthwash that pools in the sink - that needle away at your throughout.

Second, and far more devastating, is the way that, given the extremity of the situation, naturalism becomes expressionistic, a factor elevated by our being squished inside the decrepit council flat-cum-brothel. Mercy Ojelade’s Mary repeatedly curls up into a ball and bawls: a caged animal trapped, tortured and – essentially – raped. She looks up – I can still see her face days later – like a child in urgent need of a parent, of some human comfort. She begs, silently, unable to express the pain – both physical and mental – in words. We look on as incapable of helping as she is herself. It is one of the most gut-wrenching experiences I have ever had in the theatre.

Ojelade is almost intolerably good, but the more complex performance, swinging between humanity and monster is that of Adura Onashile as Martha, an ex-prostitute promoted to managing madame. She is torn between financial self-interest, fear of her boss (John Kazek, who plays all the male roles) and genuine empathy for Mary’s situation, the horrors of which she knows all too well.

Cora Bissett’s explosive production never lets us off the hook for a moment. Not only are we – good little liberals all – implicated in the form of a gentle middle-class punter, who shows a trace of kindness to Mary but still makes use of her, Roadkill leaves no excuse for ignorance. This, after all, is not taking place in the empty space of a theatre, but in the heart of the city most of those watching call home.

Photograph: Murdo MacLeod

Review: Fanta Orange, Finborough Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Another day, another ethically complex play about our relationship with African nations. Perhaps even more than The Swallowing Dark at Theatre503, Sally Woodcock’s debut play leaves us seesawing with moral uncertainty. It’s questions about the principles of aid – undoubtedly, but not categorically, a good thing – are as urgent as they are neglected.

Woodcock’s point is that the nature of such aid, not to mention the motivations behind it, is as important as the mere fact of it. To borrow momentarily from Brass Eye, there exists good aid and bad aid. It is remarkably easy for the hand that giveth to be the same one that ultimately taketh away.

She makes it with a debut that, though very rough around the edges, deomstrates barnstorming promise. Here is a play that manages to be truly epic in scope with only three characters onstage; a play packed with really potent, purposeful metaphors that contains at least one scene that could rival Bond’s baby-stoning for firebranding. As debuts go, I’d place it right alongside Polly Stenham’s That Face and Andrew Sheridan’s Winterlong for sheer guttural gutsiness.

That said, the jagged qualities are evident enough to cause Fanta Orange to snag along the way. Woodcock’s plotting is over-extensive. There is a more purified play within and, even if it’s never baggy, Fanta Orange feels bloated. Perhaps more perceptibly and immediately problematic is Woodcock’s tendency to overwrite speech where sparsity and silence would work better. Her best scene, in which a woman miscarries and immediately suckles another’s baby, is undermined by the calm rationality of words used where action and emotion, visceral as they are, would more than suffice.

Fanta Orange’s starting point, based on an Amnesty International report, is Regina’s rape by British soliders, a stark illustration of a nation abused by its supposed sympathisers.

Regina works as a housemaid to Roger, a Kenyan farmer whose child she is carrying when he meets – and soon proposes to – Ronnie, in Kenya to study local soil-eating practices. Her impulse to devote herself – and her trust fund – to supporting the local community drives the play and her charity slides into self-interest and Africaphilia. Though she attributes the natives with unwarranted halos, Ronnie ends the play with Roger’s farm, Regina’s first-child, a new and moneyed Kenyan partner and a sense of self-worth, albeit deluded and blind to the destruction she has caused.

The title relates to her obsession with milk, which is difficult to supply in Kenya without serious health risks, as opposed to the chemical-filled, but safe and abundant, eponymous fizzy drink. It’s another snappy metaphor from Woodcock, who also makes extremely clever use of the phrase ‘Nusu nusu’ – yes and no – throughout.

Gareth Machin can’t entirely heal the textual potholes, but he certainly delivers an engagingly bumpy ride and, rather ingeniously, folds the whole thing onto the tiny Finborough stage. Alex Marker’s design, full of hidden compartments and closing panels, easily manages the multiple locations without sacrificing atmosphere or landscape: a perfect pastel-blue sky wraps around the space.

Jay Villiers, though tripped up by his Kenyan accent too often, provides the standout performance as Roger. There are moments where his brain seems to stall, caught between two possible answers. Kehinde Fadipe is tender and dignified as Regina, while Jessica Ellerby catches the supercilious bluster of Ronnie without scuppering it with external judgement.

Review: Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, Southwark Playhouse

Written for Time Out

This fragile two-hander - as delicate and devastating as anything on the London stage right now - glistens with hope.

Two lost souls - Danny and Roberta, a bruiser and a broad - get talking in a downtown bar. They are deadbeat barflies drawn to each other's light in the absence of anything brighter. He greets the world with a clenched fist, she with open legs. Both are numb, hopeless and self-loathing, but they find a flicker of possibility in each other. Whether that will survive when moon gives way to morning is another matter.

John Patrick Shanley's script is symphonic, in its lyrical language and structure, which is based on an Apache dance in which dancers represent pimp and prostitute. Set in pre-Giuliani New York, a city of dirt and danger, it nonetheless resonates with the present and by chipping open a chink of light, it draws the most fragile of tears.

Not that it's remotely sentimental. You shouldn't care for these characters, but, in Ché Walker's intricate, heartfelt and sexy production, you just can't do otherwise. Everything is earned, built piece by piece as the pair gain each other's trust like horse whisperers.

Jonathan Chambers and Clare Latham are alluring and vulnerable. They let their defences drop like clothes peeled off in slow seduction. Surely one of the best Fringe shows of the year, Danny and the Deep Blue Sea shines like a black eye.

Review: The Swallowing Dark, Theatre503

Written for Whatsonstage

Lizzie Nunnery’s taut and terse two-hander defies black and white thinking. Like the best drama, it presents an ethical quandary that refuses to be boxed up as either right or wrong, with the implications of its central decision a matter of life and death nonetheless.

Nunnery’s focus is immigration and she makes you realise the complexities of a single case. Canaan (Wil Johnson) is from Zimbabwe, where he worked in Mugabe’s security force and as an MDC activist. He has been living in England for five years, but, having forgotten to resubmit for his status, he must go through the process from scratch under case owner Martha (Allyson Ava-Brown).

Like Joe Penhall’s Blue/Orange, The Swallowing Dark shows an individual tossed around by a bureaucratic system that cannot afford to admit his humanity. Canaan is a case to be judged, before he is a man – indeed a father – worth pitying. When Martha talks to him as such, it is off the record. If her dictaphone is whirring, she must stick to an official script.

The dilemma is between the right to refuge and the need to maintain its value. Cleverly, Nunnery makes you variously side both with and against a system that is over-cautious, inhumane and perfectly rational.

It seems clear that returning to Zimbabwe would leave Canaan in danger, but since the process must be legally watertight, the onus is on him to prove it beyond doubt. Martha, who gives her fifteen-year-old brother the benefit of the doubt against a manslaughter charge, is obliged not to offer the same kindness to Canaan.

Paul Robinson’s production makes the most of Nunnery’s knack for logical conversational courses, maintaining the back and forth ping, but opening up for Canaan’s carefully recounted stories. Alex Eales' intelligent design follows Canaan’s complaint of "having to justify myself every minute in this country," by making Britain seem one interrogation room after another.

However, the play’s underlying metaphor diminishes towards the end, which approaches television drama as it succumbs to ‘and then’ plotting. An ambiguous ending would have been more effective than the definite one Nunnery provides that lets sentiment seep in at the last.

Johnson and Ava-Brown give top-class, complex performances nonetheless. He leads us to presume Canaan’s innate goodness, but leaves cracks enough for her to sow seeds of doubt. Johnson treats every sentence tactically until passion or fear overwhelms self-censorship, while Ava-Brown shows the turmoil of the person behind the bureaucrat’s clipboard.

Review: Speechless, Arcola Theatre

Written for Time Out

Something's not right when a programme is more enjoyable than the show it's supposed to supplement. It suggests a fascinating subject with unfulfilled potential.

June and Jennifer Gibbons, the twin daughters of upstanding West Indian immigrants, react to bullying, condescension and social exclusion with a vow of silence. But, in taking us only as far as their teenage rebellion, culminating in arson that coincides with the Brixton Riots and Royal Wedding of 1981, Shared Experience only tell half the story. It seems odd not to show their subsequent stint in Broadmoor, which might be expected to exacerbate their isolation.

There's lots to admire here, not least the poetic text that Linda Brogan and Polly Teale (who also directs) have based on the twins' extensive, sprawling diaries. However, Speechless is most absorbing when it uses the Gibbons' public silence, rather than sidestepping it by showing them in private.

That's where Demi Oyediran and Natasha Gordon really flourish, playing the twins with a tender, bruised compliance. In silence, they are heartbreaking, but Shared Experience trust neither audience nor ambiguity enough and, in spelling out its story too deliberately, Speechless says too much.