Review: Jimmy Stewart, an Anthropologist from Mars, Analyses Love and Happiness in Humans (and Rabbits), Battersea Arts Centre

Jimmy Stewart, that handsome Hitchcockian everyman, is a Martian. At least, that’s what Tassos Stevens would have us believe in this intriguingly dotty piece of storytelling. Why, you ask? Well, Stewart was held to make acting look effortless, but, inwardly, felt it rather harder than all that. From this disconnect, Stevens explains, he concluded that he must be an alien with the outward appearance of a human.

Believing love to be the most human trait of all, Jimmy sets out to understand its ways in a pseudo-scientific ethnographic study. The term itself is ineffable or, to follow Willard Quine as Stevens does, suffers from “an indeterminacy of translation.” While we can understand the word individually, we can’t fully communicate it without relying on one another’s analogous experiences. You only really know it when you feel it.

Given that each of us feels it differently, then, Stewart’s theory starts by assuming that love is defined by consensus. Where better to start, then, than with famous love songs; with funny feelings inside, eternal flames and three coins in the fountain.

Over a series of encounters – both with humans and talking rabbits – Stewart’s theory develops. Love becomes a combination of opposing forces, gravity and levity, which can be measured in Chakkas; one Chakka being a perfect balance of the two. To be ‘in’ love is, he believes, more potent than pure love, since one can love someone having fallen out of love with them. Perhaps love is mere narcissicism as lovers trade atoms through frictional contact and end up seeing themselves in their partner.

This is where Jimmy Stewart… is best, offering a gently nonsensical but meticulous philosophy of love that manages to be both cute and acute at once. It is as much about love as about language; a point elevated by Stevens’ employment of a synaesthetic sound system, which is, essentially, a soundtrack of surtitles that conjures noise through words alone. ‘Glenn Miller. His Band. On the radio. Reception Choppy.’ ‘A breeze, like a startled dog.’ Here, description is enough to summon the sounds. Why don’t those assorted metaphors, similes and clichés do likewise for love?

The question, however, is whether all this might work better reformatted as a lecture, rather than wrapped up in a surreal narrative that tends towards wilful obscurity. Though Stevens makes a warm-hearted, rumbling narrator, its hard to keep pace with his narrative and even harder to see through its indistinct motives. Instead you alight on moments and morsels, scraps of delightfully piquant thought. The result feels more a ramble than a carefully plotted route and, while that’s no bad thing in and of itself, it lacks that certain transformative something, that moment that punctures through and makes sense of the whole by revealing an overarching purpose (or two).

Review: Joking Apart, Union Theatre

Written for Time Out

Richard and Anthea are one of Alan Ayckbourn's quintessential perfect couples; so bloody lovable that they would loathsome, if only they weren't so damned nice.

Over 14 years of garden parties, their regular charity-case guests unravel into middle age. There's Sven, the business partner who can't compete; 'Uncle' Brian and next-door neighbour Hugh, an awkward vicar with an awful wife.

Ben de Wynter's production is astute in its character analysis, but let down by the actual playing. His cast have caught the very particular social types, but none are realised with the necessary detail.

The clue to Ayckbourn's twenty-first play is in its title. Under the seemingly benign banter run deep currents of envy and sadness, which occasionally erupt in all seriousness.

Ayckbourn isn't as easy as you'd think and De Wynter completely misses the social awkwardness - faux pas and nervous laughter - that create vital surface tension. Without it, this intricate play simply deflates.

Review: Cinderella, Richmond Theatre

Written for Time Out

There's no telling when and where the panto gods will descend. When they do, however, the effect is as dizzying as any office party. They have certainly smiled on Richmond this year and, boy, was I beaming by the end.

The suburb's seasonal fare can be rigidly traditional and blandly well-behaved. Not so this year. Christopher Dunham has thrown everything at the stage, including Shetland ponies and a gag about local celeb Fenton the Dog, and it aligns deliriously. Not least because of its twin motors, Graham Hoadly and Paul Burnham, as the Ugly Sisters, Beatrice and Eugenie, complete with pretzel antlers. One is round as a Christmas pud, the other spindly as any tree: they are a tremendous double act, wickedly funny and caustically callous.

This Cinderella is Disneyfied, but not deflatingly so. Some big pop numbers help to keep it buoyant. I left with only two grumbles: Jenny Eclair is misused as a fairy godmother, as her dottiness is never given space of its own, and the repeated sneering at poorer London boroughs becomes rather repugnant.

Review: Noises Off, Old Vic

Written for Whatsonstage

Short of natural disaster or nuclear holocaust, nothing can derail Michael Frayn’s masterclass in farce. Noises Off is so fine-tuned that, even just short of its absolute finest form, as in Lindsay Posner’s nonetheless excellent Old Vic production, it delivers a laugh almost every thirty seconds. There isn’t a stand-up comedian on the planet that can match that for two and a half hours.

Farce usually takes time to wind itself up into orchestrated meltdown. Frayn’s masterstroke is to make his set-up a farce in its own right, namely 'Nothing On', a fictional stinker of a play chock full of sardines, fake Sheikhs and skimpies.

We see its hapless touring production from three perspectives: on its dress rehearsal the day before opening night, behind the scenes in Ashton-under-Lyme a month on, and, finally, it’s last mangled performance in Stockton-on-Tees. Frayn’s skill is such that the jokes in the first act, which seem so fully-formed, leave gaps for exponential comic exploitation in the second and third. Props go awry, cues are missed and understudies charge onstage misguidedly, but the show, so they say, must go on. First it frays. Then it implodes.

Ironically, the only course of action is to stick firmly to the script. Posner does just that and concocts some superlative sequences: Jamie Glover’s Garry LeJeune waddling about with his laces tied together, Amy Nuttall’s ditsy actress on autopilot falling out-of-sync with actual events, Jonathan Coy’s incessant nosebleeds at any glimpse of violence.

While Posner makes the most of moments, his production sometimes struggles with momentum, particularly in the wordless backstage sequence of the second act. At its best, this should leave us helpless, but here it moves too quickly, blurring the narrative as we’re not sure quite where to look. I suspect blame lies with the narrowness of the Old Vic stage, which prevents the crucial half-second of breathing space.

However, even just short of its summit, Noises Off remains one of the seven wonders of post-war theatre. Posner handles the spoof element with particular relish and the fictional farce is creakier than the boards on which it plays.

In a top-notch cast, Celia Imrie disintegrates delightfully as the show grinds on. Spritely and balletic in the dress, she limps on in Stockton like a horse waiting to be put out of its misery. Janie Dee makes a perfect head-girl as Belinda Blair, desperate to keep the show on the road, Paul Ready is hilariously hapless as stage manager Tim and Karl Johnson’s Selston delivers his opening line (‘No bars, no burglar alarms’) as if it were ‘To be or not to be.’

Most noteworthy, given how difficult the text’s prescriptiveness makes individual interpretation, is Robert Glenister’s director Lloyd Newman. Usually a sympathetic sane-man drowning in idiots, Glenister makes him a spiteful, snarling failure and adds some rare fight to Frayn’s delirious froth.

As much a masterpiece as the Mona Lisa, Noises Off is one of the few plays you must see before you die.

Photograph: Johan Persson

Review: A Christmas Carol, Arts Theatre

Written for Time Out

Though it's about as surprising as the satsuma at the bottom of your stocking, Simon Callow's spoken-word rendition of A Christmas Carol has quaint Christmas charm to spare.

Dickens's story has always been a stage staple. Within three months of publication, there were eight productions running simultaneously. Neat, mystical and transformative, it's an inherently theatrical tale, complete with hardcore lefty politics.

Callow draws these to the forefront, emphasising the gritty social realism within the pearly fairy tale. As one would expect, not a syllable goes uncherished. Callow's voice - deep and crisp and even - explores every contour of Dickens's phrasing over a streamlined 80 minutes.

One or two characters are delivered with real comic aplomb. When Scrooge calls out of his window the morning after his visitations, a surly horn-voice replies: 'Uh, it's Christmas Day, innit!'

Tom Cairns's minimalist staging, with its revolving gauze and the odd scene-setting item, is classy, and Callow, as always, is warm as chestnuts roasting on an open fire.

But there's still something lifeless about this. It never really connects with us. On press night, Callow only acknowledged our presence when struggling with a tricksy bit of stage business, which leaves an unsavoury sniff of vanity in this otherwise fine Christmas fare.

Review: Haunted Child, Royal Court

Written for Whatsonstage

Metaphorical resonance threatens to drown out narrative in Joe Penhall’s three-hander. Ostensibly a family play with a young son caught up in his parents’ battles, Haunted Child makes no secret of its real purpose. It shows the colossal tussle between a broken society and a new world order.

Penhall is open to accusations of over-directness and many will prefer their bitter pills better disguised, but there’s no denying the play’s forceful urgency.

It starts with a child’s midnight existential crisis. Convinced he’s heard a ghost – possibly his father’s – in the loft, Thomas darts downstairs to his mother Julie [Sophie Okonedo]. “If we’re just going to die anyway - what’s the point?” He is answered with a hug.

In fact, Dad is not dead, but disappeared. Douglas [Ben Daniels] soon turns up, bedraggled and shivering, having converted to some cultish pseudo-scientific spiritual system. He dictates a credo to his son. He chants, induces vomiting and starves himself, renouncing pleasures and proclaiming the “need to look for an alternative.”

Needless to say, Julie, faced with the everyday pressures of child and income, hasn’t got time or patience for what seems to her nothing but a mid-life crisis.

There are a swirl of potent questions here: Can a marriage survive one party’s identity overhaul? Are we responsible for our beliefs? Should children be raised to question or to accept? Penhall’s skill is to make both spirituality and practicality well-matched opponents: equally necessary, but equally selfish.

However, the narrative is transparent: where Julie represents a materialist status quo, Douglas is the alternative with unfledged answers. On fixing the radiator, he declares: “The thing about these old systems is the valves go.” These are old tricks: the unkempt house, a symbol of a broken society; the son, who leans towards his father and sees nothing odd about his behaviour, is one of our future.

Jeremy Herrin turns this into advantage with an extraordinary production that combines the robust thinking of new writing with the tonal attention of devised work. Slow, heavy and mournful, his staging has a devastating preciseness. Images tumble out of it. A banana momentarily seems a microphone for Douglas’s breakfast speechifying.

Daniels and Okonedo are astonishing, pulling off a blunt style that, in the wrong hands, can look like bad acting. Daniels, who finds hints of Julian Assange in Douglas, is captivatingly intense, embedding tai chi into everyday behaviour. Okenedo is more easily heartfelt; earthy, emotionally drained and – most of all – urgent.

That quality is Haunted Child’s best and, in the final image of the torn family hugged together while the ceiling of Bunny Christie’s restrained design lowers, Penhall’s message rings clear and strong: the old system’s valve is going and we need to find an alternative.

Photograph: Johan Persson

Review: The Ladykillers, Gielgud Theatre

Written for Whatsonstage

A heist movie that trips into farce, The Ladykillers is a patchwork narrative. Originally a 1955 Ealing comedy starring Alec Guinness, it flicks between genres, so that what starts out noirish, ends up nutty.

Graham Linehan’s ticklish stage adaptation succeeds because it honours that, spicing up old-fashioned goofing with a contemporary knowingness. It is both homage and histrionics.

What the original’s flitting prevents, however, is the escalating intoxication of truly great farce, which needs to build in pressurised chaos until it whistles like a kettle. The Ladykillers hasn’t the frenetic overlap for that, but its fitful routines are packed with classic slapstick and fine-tuned asides. The result is a caper that delights, even if it can’t disarm.

Led by Peter Capaldi’s lithe Professor Marcus, a ragbag gang of five old-school crooks plot a robbery while operating out of an old widower’s London residence. To keep the scheme hidden, they pose as a string quartet (plus conductor), but a cello case that falls open to reveal the loot gives up the game.

With their landlady Mrs Wilberforce insisting that they turn themselves in, they attempt to bump her off; a feat that proves far trickier than any of them initially imagined.

Linehan offers some cracking lines (“You’re making a mockery of teatime.”) and sensibly embraces the stage, even, bravely, playing with the awkwardness of transposition itself. The robbery itself sees remote-controlled cars crawling the walls and crashing with delicious bathos.

Director Sean Foley, once of the Right Size, throws in textbook trickery: blackboards clatter against foreheads, five squeeze into a cupboard and knives – even a banister – stick out of body parts.

Unlike their musical efforts, the gang make a well-tuned ensemble. Linehan hitches up their individual characteristics for comic effect and the casting is note-perfect. Each actor is on home turf, allowing relish and freedom in the playing. Capaldi is always best when surrounded by morons and there’s a touch of Peter Sellers in his facial gurning and blithering obsequiousness.

Ben Miller has fun with a Romanian accent and an over-zealous attitude. James Fleet stutters sweetly as only he can, Stephen Wight is a half-cocked cockney and Clive Rowe dopes with aplomb as the former boxer One-Round, who has just enough brainpower to stay conscious.

They have a tidy foil in Marcia Warren’s Mrs Wilberforce, whose genial obliviousness becomes prim disapproval.

Best of all, though, is Michael Taylor’s jaunty and jumbled set, which received two separate ovations of its own on press night.

The Ladykillers might lack the lethalness of crack comedy, but it still proves the Ealing power of laughter.

Review: Lecture Notes on a Death Scene, Camden People's Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

The death scene up for consideration in this reflective spine-tingler from Analogue is your own.

At least, it is one of your own, for the lecture doing the considering concerns Jorge Luis Borges’s short story The Garden of Forking Paths, an illustration of parallel lives and universes. So, as well as victim, you’re also lecturer and killer, witness and writer. The result is like a refracted reflection; a fly’s eye view of your selves.

Essentially, Borges holds that we multiply at each choice we face, with an infinite number of different selves diverging. The life we live is one forked path amongst an infinite number.

In this instructional (not fully interactive) piece for one, Analogue make you feel the presence of those ghostly selves on your shoulder. Each time you act, you’re aware of the choice and, as such, the divergent selves peeling away from you. It’s a canny use of the solo audience format, which is inevitably – perhaps inherently – reflexive.

Dressed in a blue hoodie, you glimpse these other selves in the mirror that faces you. They sit with their backs to you, their faces obscured, holding the same photograph you hold. They sneak out the door just before you catch sight of them. They feel as if they’re standing just behind you, but you daren’t turn around to check.

Admittedly, it’s a slight piece; one that elegantly catches a familiar philosophical idea, but never quite shakes it about. The same goes for its sensations, for it induces a shudder without actually unsettling; it’s too easily thrown off once you’ve left.

The multiple narratives, which fades in and out of the fog of philosophy and sets you driving into the woods at night, could use a little more care. However, this is an inventively staged and smartly structured experience, which makes a hall of mirrors of a darkened room and surrounds you with warped reflections.

Review: Goodbye Barcelona, Arcola Theatre

Written for Time Out

''Ere Mum,' squawks 18-year-old cockney Sam, 'You seen this 'ere Spanish Civil War in this 'ere newspaper? That there General Franco, one of them fascists, is staging one of them coup d'etats in this 'ere year of 1936.'

Alright, it's not as bad as all that, but KS Lewkowicz and Judith Johnson's musical is pretty patronising. It dearly wants to be 'Los Miserables', but it educates its audience about the historical backdrop instead of telling a story against it.

In fairness, the skeleton structure is in place - naive Sam travels over to join the International Brigade, followed by his worried mother, and both fall in love - and there are a couple of rousing numbers that would be fine in a more varied and interesting score.

However, Lewkowicz's lyrics are dreadfully inane ('I wish I had a book/I'm learning how to cook') and, were it not for the efforts of the cast, this would be unbearable. Mark Meadows, in particular, finds genuine depth in the world-weary Jack, but Goodbye Barcelona is best avoided.

Review: Hamlet, Barbican Centre

Written for Culture Wars

In Britain, we tend to take our Shakespeare as it comes. Directors that dare draw out – or worse, impose – particular concepts are best advised to round off the edges and tie up the loose ends. The warning message: please don’t feed the purists.

Thomas Ostermeier, artistic director of Berlin’s Schaubühne, eats them for breakfast. He ended A Doll’s House, seen at the Barbican in 2004, with gunshots instead of a door-slam. His Hamlet is just as wilfully inverse. It’s as if he’s making the play undergo wear-and-tear consumer testing. It’s Hamlet subjected to a thousand structural knocks.

So, on a pitch of earth – a good deal of which ends up in the performers’ mouths throughout – Hamlet’s most famous monologue, ‘to be or not to be,’ comes early on. Later he’ll skid across the stage and launch into it again as an angsty teenage tantrum. He plays The Mousetrap in panties and suspenders, obliterates the poetry with mouthfuls of party food and proffers up a well-timed fart, wafting it into the auditorium.

Just as Sarah Kane twisted Hippolytus into a monster in Phaedra’s Love, Ostermeier strips Hamlet of his nobility and focuses on his faults. He turns what we accept as tragedy into a warped comedy.

There are, inevitably, losses; the largest being a sense of the narrative's emotive power. It’s a hefty price to pay, but the intellectual illumination offered is revelatory enough to (just about) prove recompense. Ostermeier’s not so bothered about the story; his is a character study. It shows a Hamlet often glanced, but never before given such free reign. Lars Eidinger’s Hamlet is drama queen, spoilt brat and, um, general dick. He is the ultimate surly stepson and, for two hours and forty minutes, he throws the mother of all Oedipal wobblies.

And yet, Eidinger’s podgy Hamlet remains a figure of perverse admiration. He takes no prisoners and obliterates anything vaguely sycophantic or preening. Above all else, he is a man of action. The maudlin, dawdling Dane is nowhere in sight. If we are to hold anyone in scorn it is Laertes, a stick in the mud who so defers to the rules that he can barely strike the blow to kill his opponent. By contrast, Hamlet goes for him with a nearby shovel.

True, Ostermeier comes close to a Hamlet without Denmark. The rest of his six-strong cast, who double inventively, are reduced to props and puppets in the cyclone. In spinning everything so furiously, Ostermeier’s approach tosses Gertrude, Ophelia, Claudius and the rest aside.

But that is precisely the piece’s thrill: to watch Ostermeier sink his teeth into the text and shake the carcass for his own ends. That is, perhaps, the only way to get to its heart today.

Review: The Comedy of Errors, National Theatre

For a winter vacation of sorts, Dominic Cooke has skipped from his Sloane Square office to the biggest stage on the South Bank. Presumably, he took a roundabout route. His Ephesus has Soho’s neon and hookers, Wapping’s warehouses and dockers and a Harley Street clinic in place of an abbey.

While it may not make you see London in a new light – these are mostly familiar stereotypes of a metropolitan underworld presented for entertainment, rather than education – it certainly reveals Shakespeare’s play in almost all its glory. This is concept Shakespeare at its very tightest and the context Cooke has created leaves no loose end untied.

Into this London-Ephesus, Cooke trafficks Lenny Henry’s Antipholus of Syracuse and his sidekick Dromio (Lucian Msamati). The move means their mistaken identities become enveloped into the unfamiliar and strange-seeming customs. Alternately, flirted with and harangued by apparently familiar strangers, Henry and Msamati jump to the conclusion of witchcraft, hopping back with every greeting, clicking and clucking to ward off evil spirits. It manages the near-impossible feat of making the farce convincing, not contrived.

What’s missing, however, is the giddiness of it. The Olivier is too large for quickfire chaos and Bunny Christie’s design – gorgeous and multi-faceted though it is – further slows the pace. It’s not without goofy humour – far from it, Msamati and his opposite number Daniel Poyser, in particular, are nicely doltish and there’s plenty of slapstick and colour – but it never disarms you as the best farce manages.

Cooke’s skill is to make the laughs feel a bonus, for he has managed the drama exquisitely. From the start, he stresses the urgency of the situation. Joseph Mydell’s Egeon is frogmarched out, bound and on the brink of execution. His thousand mark debt for illegal entry is a dire situation and Cooke proceeds to draw out the financial transactions throughout the play.

No one misses an opportunity to pick a pocket or nick a wallet. Prostitutes demand payment and bribes are slipped in place of bail. You realise that every comic routine between the Antipholuses (Antipholi?) and their mistaken Dromios is formulaic and monetary: each time a large sum is given and the wrong goods are returned. What’s more, because Cooke animates the long (and often tiresome) opening speech, it’s clearer than ever that the Dromios were purchased in infancy. The rich exploit the poor; the overlords prey on and pay off the underworld. This is the London in which financial inequality faces off across a single post code.

Henry gives a strong comic performance, showing off the best poker-face in the business. Towering over Msamati, he just looks down, features still, before erupting and raining snooker cue blows down on his head. His opposite number Jarman lacks his inimitable natural warmth and the violence seems less comic in his hands, without being replaced with threat.

Adriana and Luciana become Stratford wives; women of leisure soaking in skin treatments and tottering in four-inch heels. Inventively played by Claudie Blakley (channelling Tracy-Anne Oberman’s stint on Eastenders) and Michelle Terry, they become a considered essay in feminism; the one brassy and barking orders, the other timidly clinging to her, advocating acquiescence. There’s great comic support from Amit Shah’s weedy Angelo, whose one-note interruptions make moreish comic morsels.

But Cooke’s greatest coup is the ending, in which the two sets of twins are reunited alongside Egeon and his wife, now the Abbess (Pamela Nomvete). Cooke stages it beautifully, emphasising the truest reconciliation with just the right note of sentiment to pop a lump in your throat. Their dignity and love, neither flash nor needing to prove itself, proves the point that the younger generation have missed.

Review: Same Same, Oval House Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Asha was born in a cubicle in a ladies loo at Kings Cross station at 17.13 on the 2nd July 1989. Her twenty-one year old mother abandoned her there, returning quarter of an hour later to a now empty cubicle. On the cusp of her own twenty-first birthday, Asha still hasn't met the mother that gave her up in her first few minutes of life.

Shireen Mula’s haze of a play peers inside the minds of both mother and daughter, separated by who knows what distance. Their thoughts seem to entwine together, as each reflects on their own past and imagines the other. The one’s reality is presented in the same register as the other’s dreams, so memories mingle with possible versions – some hopeful fantasies, others nervous nightmares – and you’re never entirely sure of the true picture. The narrative swirls like currents in smoke, perceptible but ungraspable.

In the most exquisite moment, they invent the same meeting, spotting one another across a street. A nervous wait outside Boots is filled with rehearsed hellos. A flicker of eye contact grows protracted and certain. The traffic lights turn amber, then red, but the pair never meet: in both versions an inattentive driver prevents them.

Same Same is elegant, eloquent and hugely empathetic, leaving a strong impression of the parent-child connection that exists only as an abstract idea and an ineffable sensation of longing. It captures mother’s need for daughter and vice versa, but also the fear that holds them back from acting upon it. Mula has a strong handle on multiplicity. She wisps casual contradictions and fleeting alternatives past us, and much like a scent that brushes smell-sensors to trigger a blurry half-memory, it bypasses the controlled mind. It is impossible to harvest every fragment (though the edges are softer and less defined than the word suggests), so the play goes to work beneath the surface.

That Asha is mixed race only adds to the potency of her longing. Her need to place her mother grows into a wider cultural notion of heritage.

The play is also particularly strong on the accumulation of personality through experience and the onset of adulthood. The shards of memories seem embedded on the mind like the after-images caused by flashbulbs. In each, the exact time appears, as if the moment has been marked with a glance at some nearby clock face.

It’s bravely directed by Dan Barnard and Rachel Briscoe, who have Zoë Nicole’s Asha and Bharti Patel’s Nid walk concentric circles around each other. They often brush shoulders, cross paths and momentarily fuse together before separating. The sense is of a magnetic field. It’s hypnotic, but soothingly so. Nicole and Patel renegotiate their relationship tenderly, turning on a sixpence but allowing moments to bleed together like running watercolours. Both speak the text beautifully, such that the words grow comforting and warm as a cuddle.

There’s a final shift in register that is either unnecessary or not handled boldly enough, but Same Same is a tender and poetic charm that will long linger in the memory.