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.

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.

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