Review: Shallow Slumber, Soho Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Looked at objectively, Shallow Slumber is a bit of a shambles. However, playwright Chris Lee handles his gut-wrenching subject, that of child abuse, with such rawness and empathy that the play holds you rapt in spite of clunking flaws. With a strict dramaturgical going-over, it could be shatteringly good.

Inspired by the case of Baby P, Lee works backwards in time, piecing together two disintegrated lives to the explosive moment that blew them apart. Three days out of prison, Dawn (Amy Cudden) turns up unannounced on the doorstep of her former social worker. As Moira, stood in her dressing gown, Alexandra Gilbreath freezes in shock. Her face gives nothing away.

Nor, at this point, does their conversation; Lee has them talk cryptically – unnaturally so – about their shared history, pointedly keeping secrets from us to allow his structure to work. The trouble is that the benefits of hindsight aren’t intricate enough. Lee takes us backwards not to illuminate the past, as in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, but simply because he’s building to a climatic scene that happens to be chronologically earlier. Besides his pained efforts to withhold the nature of Dawn’s crime is undermined by the openness with which the production has marketed itself.

Shallow Slumber subsequently rewinds through Dawn’s stint in prison and prior judicial procedures, until it reaches the fraught confession that led her there. Here, Lee unleashes everything. Dawn’s admission leaves images of stinging cruelty: experimental punches, cigarette-tips burning holes in baby-soft skin, a kettleful of water that finally scalds the life out of her child. The pain reverberates into the auditorium in collective gasps.

However, Shallow Slumber is no mere in-yer-face exercise. Beneath it are nuanced social points about class and the co-dependence of the care-system and its clients. Not only is Dawn aware of the injustice behind the assumption that she needs a social worked, deep down she knows that, in her case, it’s a fair one. For all that she might not have, Dawn needs Moira.

Yet Moira needs Dawn just as much, if not more; a point well-made by Georgia Lowe’s design of a corridor with two ends that reflect one another. Each becomes more fully human through the other. Their relationship is one of mutual gratification; of submission and domination. Moira has to visit Dawn in prison. When she gets up to leave, Dawn slams a knife into her hand. Even in the first scene, with Dawn begging for help, Moira’s gestures push her away as if resisting the temptation of an addiction overcome. Fixing things is Moira’s fix; it’s how she feels secure and superior in her own middle-class, comparatively comfortable existence.

Lee’s writing falls down when it comes to credibility. Though the characters and their relationship are rounded and three-dimensional, their language and actions are often incongruous. Dawn is certainly too eloquent, prone to poetic flourishes that jar, but both behave irrationally. They give up incriminating information too readily and willingly splurge backstories, some of which are too bloated, all suicides and murder. In this way, Lee neglects situation and his characters are self-consciously creatures of the stage; they would work much better in direct address.

Though director Mary Nighy cannot get around these problems, she has nonetheless drawn two stunning performances from Gilbreath and Cudden. Cudden’s Dawn is an open wound, emotions and inner-conflict always babbling to the surface and threatening to drown her. Gilbreath, on the other hand, is externally unflinching. She presents us the blankest of blank canvases, embracing the ambiguous mysteries of the text by forcing us to do the work. Her transformations are fantastic and she can go from fresh to drained in an instant. Hers is a remarkable performance that hints at hidden depths and keeps Shallow Slumber on track throughout.

Review: The Trial of Ubu, Hampstead Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Simplicity of premise provides the beauty of Simon Stephens’s The Trial of Ubu, but it also proves the biggest constraint. There’s great satirical potential in wrenching Alfred Jarry’s overblown despot Pa Ubu back into the real world to face the consequences of his grotesque actions in an ICC-style trial. However, the purity of the central concept is such that, with only a basic understanding of the original, one can grasp Stephens’s overarching ambition from brochure copy alone. The risk is one of triteness.

However, those that avoid the Hampstead on that basis will miss the craft with which the subject’s surrounding intricacies are explored in Katie Mitchell’s production. Admittedly, The Trial of Ubu has less to chew on than the superior Wastwater, which gave chase to a greasier pig, but there is nonetheless an awful lot to keep one’s mind occupied, both during and after proceedings, if you let it.

For starters, following a Punch and Judy-style synopsis of Jarry’s original, Mitchell presents the trial not as is, but at one remove, through two interpreters, who translate and repeat the words spoken inside the courtroom itself.

There will be those that cry tedium; that the commentary box has nothing on the match itself. They are wrong. This is a chance to engross oneself in the minute details that would otherwise go unseen. By refracting rather than simply representing the trial, Mitchell better reveals its component parts. Her production sees clearer precisely because it does not look directly at the sun. So dazzlingly grotesque is Pa Ubu that his presence would outshine any nuanced reflection.

Certainly, the text is delivered with all the tonal variation of Morse code. Reported back, it is stripped of emotion and, to a certain extent, intention. Punctuation becomes garbled, replaced with a steady, but stuttering, flow of words; pauses are scrapped as they struggle to keep pace; language warps. But do we not learn more from a fingerprint than from the lines on a palm, even though the contours offer less contrast?

Rather than the performative behaviour of a trial, in which everyone is aware of being watched, Mitchell can present genuine – often involuntary – reaction. Words send shivers and draw gasps, but can’t be fully digested or registered, such is the speed of their task. While Nikki Amuka-Bird’s interpreter is ever professional, getting the job done with a stony-faced, machinated aloofness, Kate Duchêne is entirely human. She fits with giggles, wells up with tears and succumbs to a cold. In the contrast – both sides of which are familiar responses – lies the production’s heart.

As such, The Trial of Ubu is not so much about the nature of such regimes themselves – though, of course, it can’t completely sidestep that subject, no matter how broadly Stephens treats it. Rather, it concerns the impossibility of a proper, fitting and just response in the aftermath. How, Stephens and Mitchell combine to argue, can we possibly begin to assign responsibility, let alone conduct a fair trial, given the enormity of expectation, of prejudice (in the strictest sense of the word) and of suffering. How, in other words, can we humanly respond to the categorically inhumane?

Paul McCleary’s Pa Ubu is both intensely human and, at the same time, not at all. He is a frail old man, whose jailor must help him smoke, let alone stand, so the maximum security that surrounds him seems ludicrous. “Is the architecture all for me,” he asks the Judge. However, made up with the same soaked clown face as Heath Ledger’s Joker, Ubu becomes a cartoon villain. Certainly, he’s tried as such; as a scapegoat, the very opposite of a puppet leader. “J’accuse,” the witnesses cry, shifting the blame from their own shoulders. “He told me to.” “He said I’d be killed.” In punishing him, they absolve themselves of any responsibility. Ubu is their Get Out of Jail Free card.

Interspersed with scenes outside the courtroom – Ubu in his cell, two lawyers in conversation over a cigarette – The Trial of Ubu becomes a fascinating indictment of the international justice system. The neatly packaged narrative belies a web of responsibility and reduces complexities into grim folklore – which perhaps explains the filmic quality of Lizzie Clachan’s individual box sets. Its central case is no less vengeful than the stringing up of Benito Mussolini or the uncivilised disposal of Muammar Gaddafi. If it lacks the horror of such hellish ends, Ubu’s trial is instead purgatorial: “I think I’m losing track of time a little bit,” he says to the judge. For all its criticism of the system, The Trial of Ubu isn’t so perverse to entirely undermine it and endless assessment comes to seem a fitting punishment in itself.

Mitchell’s production is characteristically well-drilled and precise, but the masterstroke is to re-invent Stephens’ play for the nuances around its edges than its straightforward centre. As such, The Trial of Ubu needs watching from an angle, with a willingness to make connections and grapple, rather than head-on, waiting for answers to be dished out.

Photograph: Stephen Cummiskey

Review: L'Autre, Southbank Centre

Written for Culture Wars

For all its stylish serenity, L’Autre has all the substance of a mirage in the desert. It’s the sort of non-verbal piece that soaks up any interpretation we so chose to project and, while it wears its hazy existentialism lightly, Claudio Stellato’s solo-for-two is ultimately forgettable.

On a red carpet, which seems to scrunch up of its own accord, are two wooden blocks. One is a tall, thin cupboard; the other, a short, squat television stand. Stellato variously climbs over, under and inside each. Here he seems a hermit crab, there a trapdoor spider, and elsewhere an escapologist unconcerned by spectacle.

L’Autre is an advocation of play. Stellato defies the accepted order of things, the one that says square pegs belong in square holes. He encourages us to see with fresh – often quite disbelieving – eyes. At several points, gravity seems to stand back and gift Stellato the floor. He walks a plank that oughtn’t support his weight, until, in a hauntingly tranquil final image, he dissolves into darkness.

The question is, “To what end?” The possibilities of L’Autre are, exactly as the title suggests, simply other. They have no meaning except in relation to the usual state of play. For all it’s quietly mischievous beauty, L’Autre is rarely seems more than a demonstration of Stellato’s imagination and stage trickery infused with the aroma of vague philosophy.

Not one for the faux-naif goofing that wins its laughs by protesting it doesn’t deserve any, Stellato is a stoical, almost sage-like clown. His play is calm and considered, not haphazard tomfoolery and happy accidents. His every move seems to follow logically from the last, even if, ultimately, they are all equally pointless. Or rather, as Stellato would no doubt argue, who’s to say life is any less pointless than L’Autre.

Photograph: Martin Firket

Review: Kafka v Kafka, Brockley Jack

Written for Time Out

Who is Franz Kafka's opponent? Is it the hearty father with whom he trades damning indictments, or is it his own reflected self? Howard Colyer has adapted Kafka's never sent but revealingly resentful letter to his father into a bitter war of words.

Neurotic and melancholic, Kafka Jr blames his father for childhood scars and personal shortcomings. In his shouted attacks, he often seems like a little boy mid-tantrum, swinging his arms while his father disarms him with a firm hand to the forehead.

Colyer interrupts the text of the letter with fragments from The Trial, suggesting that Kafka's fight is not only unwinnable, but futile. He rages against life's greatest injustice: that, try as we might, we have little control over our own character.

Best when it is simplest, Leigh Tredger's production occasionally makes Colyer's knotty text doubly cryptic. The abstract devices aren't necessary, as the actors are good enough to carry the piece.

Jack Wilkie deftly retains our sympathy despite making Kafka a pathetic weakling and Gareth Pilkington is drily unrepentant as his no-nonsense father.

Review: Constellations, Royal Court

You can’t have a love story without the right click. The same holds true for this review.


(UPDATE: I know this undermines the mystery, but tips are to use new tabs and go looking for the right text, but notice where you are. Some threads are longer than you might think.)

As dramatic settings go, the multiverse is a damn sight more ambitious than most. Over the course of its 65 minutes, Nick Payne’s Constellations zaps between parallel universes to tell the stories of Roland and Marianne’s relationship.

Roland’s a beekeeper. Marianne’s a quantum physicist. They meet at a rainy barbecue, when Marianne charges up to Nick with an inane chat up line about the impossibility of licking your elbows. He rejects her outright. “I’m in a relationship. So. Yeah.” Then. Zap. Another barbecue, another attempt. “I’ve just come out of a really serious relationship. So. Yeah.” Zap. Another turns out to be married. Zap. And so on. At first, while we’re still unaccustomed to his rules, Payne dupes us into thinking this is something Marianne says to all the boys, but it soon becomes apparent that these are all different Rolands. This one’s too hot; this one, too cold; until eventually, one’s just right.

Going forwards, we see multiple versions of various pivotal moments in their relationship – from first dates through to proposals and beyond. The structure has it’s own parallels in Alan Ayckbourn’s Intimate Exchanges.

Constellations is, essentially, a good old fashioned postmodern romantic comedy. Rom-coms have their dramatic tension in the question, “Will they or won’t they?” Ultimately, we know that yes, in the end, they will, inevitably, live happily ever after, but the game is in the obstacles that get in the way. Payne’s multiverse allows the possibility for both at the same time. He can take us down dead ends, missed opportunities and vicious break ups, safe in the knowledge that, in another universe, everything is going swimmingly.

Payne’s subject is the impossibility of total control. Everything here is contingent: every decision, responsive; every happy ending as sweet and brittle as honeycomb. In this, language becomes central. Even something as unthinking as word selection, which brings the most minute shift of meaning, can, like the butterfly flapping earthquakes into being, have a significant impact. Not for nothing does Marianne lose the ability to find the right word towards the end. Payne also suggests that we are, to some extent, pre-destined; programmed to suffer certain illnesses or, like the ’umble ‘oney bee, to wind up with the same partner whatever happens.

Emotionally supple and engaging throughout, Michael Longhurst’s production goes a long way to covering the text’s shortcomings. At its heart are two blissfully easy performances from Rafe Spall and Sally Hawkins. Spall is tender, gangly and emotionally bunged up as Roland, while Hawkins is, by her very nature, the perfect rom-com actress. She is just as awkward as we all feel, but still attractive and likeable to the end. Tom Scutt’s elegant design – a honeycomb floor with a cluster of white balloons above – is full of resonance, suggesting everything from thunderclouds to stars, molecules to brain matter, celebrations to dreams.

Smart and delicate, Constellations ultimately falls short of its considerable ambition. It reaches for the stars and, though heavenly, doesn’t quite get there. (Zap.)

Review: Mundo Paralelo, Southbank Centre

Written for Culture Wars

Mundo Paralelo, a collaboration between NoFitState Circus, National Theatre Wales and Théâtre Tattoo, purports to explore the “parallel worlds” of circus and theatre and to challenge “circus artists to find new ways of connecting with their audiences.”

How, then, does it manage to make circus seem so utterly untheatrical? It’s as if, grateful for the opportunity to step onto a proper stage, NoFitState have abandoned all the raucous energy that makes them so watchable for the airs and graces of polite society. Yann Tiersen style piano music twinkles throughout. Gracious courtly bows and dainty curtsies follow each act. Eliza Doolittle at the Embassy Ball was not so mindful of her p’s and q’s.

In trying to make the case for circus’s theatrical credentials indisputable, Mundo Paralelo manages to weaken both elements. The dramaturgy is so confused that it makes no sense as theatre, while, as circus, it never takes the handbrake off, leaving it largely safe, insipid and unspectacular. What’s wrong with creating pure circus that is nonetheless capable of metaphor and resonance, as NoFitState have managed so thrillingly in the past with work like Tabu or The Mill? The former insistently tells you it can do it. The latter just gets on and does.

Mundo Paralelo focuses on theatre’s liminal properties and its ability to step between different worlds. Performers follow one another through portals, vanishing and often appearing elsewhere a second later. As far as I could tell – and it’s such a miscellaneous mess that I can’t be sure – its narrative shows various individuals coming together in a magical forest type of space. Judging from the one audible voiceover section, there’s something about angels and humans in there too, but as for who’s what, I’ve no idea, as everyone seems equally capable of superhuman feats. Presumably, those in period costume are angels, but that rule doesn’t seem to hold fast throughout. Nor does it explain the waistcoated cowboy. (Again, I’m guessing.)

It’s only fair to mention the rapturous applause that followed, but, for me, it commits the cardinal sin of dullness. Circus is certainly capable of gentle tranquillity, but Mundo Paralelo struck me as tranquilized gentility and proves little more than that bad circus can be as excruciating as bad theatre.

Photograph: Kiran Ridley

Review: L'immediat, Barbican Centre

Written for Culture Wars

A woman gets home. She puts her keys into the front door. It crumples into a heap of wooden slats. Unphased, she goes to put her satchel on the table, only for it to give way at the knees. Her keys jump from their hook, her scarf swoons off its rack and, eventually, chunks of wall cave in, until she and her husband (whose trousers, incidentally, just won’t stay up) are buried beneath the rubble centrestage.

Suddenly, as if panicked, he springs out and darts off, triggering a vast domino effect, as ladders, furniture, lighting rigs and junk clatter and crash to earth. Noise’s Off’s second act, in which everything that could go wrong unfailingly does, ain’t got nothing on the giddy bravura of L’immediat’s opening ten minutes. You sit open-mouthed, and watch the escalating chaos of a wittily destructive Heath Robinson device. In searching for solid ground, the cast bring the world tumbling down.

Then, from a door at the back of the stage, a lone, unsuspecting cleaner turns up with a binbag. It’s the equivalent of stepping into a warzone armed with a toy sword.

Created by Camille Boitel, formerly of James Thiérrée’s Junebug Symphony company, L’immediat is a series of physical expressions of rising panic, halfway between circus and slapstick, none of which quite match the first. How could they? In the end, it deflates instead of developing, repeats instead of refining. A shame, because were it structured otherwise, L’immediat would get the standing ovation it deserves. Instead, it seems self-absorbed, even a little smug.

One woman starts to float away; another is repeatedly kidnapped by furniture; the world tilts on its axis making everything an uphill struggle; people pop out of cupboards and drawers and dart headlessly off to nowhere in particular. Stagehands scrabble about in furcoats, as if feral and desperate hobos fighting off the cold and battling for resources.

Everything is fraught and frantic. Loud bangs and metallic clashes come from the wings. It’s a show that seems to hang on by its fingertips (even if its always totally in control).

As well as the problem of diminishing returns, there’s a lack of emotional connection. L’immediat describes a feeling without actually conveying it. Nonetheless Boitel nails his target and each sketch pinpoints the hollow horror of everyday existential crises, of heart palpitations and lonely nights, when just staying afloat in the present is all you can manage.

That, incidentally, connects the piece to its predecessors on the Barbican’s main stage during Mime Festivals past. It’s a narrative that reflects the times in which we live. From the precision counterbalancing act of 2009’s Öper Öpis, to the swinging pendulum of last year’s Du Godron et Des Plumes and now the scrabbling slapstick of L’immediat, staying upright seems to be getting harder with each passing year.

Photograph: Vincent Beaume

Review: Haptic & Holistic Strata, Linbury Studio

Written for Culture Wars

Migraine-inducing, heart-palpitating, epilepsy-triggering, ball-dropping, but above all, extraordinary, Hiroaki Umeda’s double bill of minimalist movement and scenic design is a sensory overload. Were either to last longer than half an hour, your ears might well expel steam and your eyes pop out like champagne corks.

The stage – a white floor and backdrop that, together, resemble an open book – is used as a canvas for technical aspects. In Haptic, it is splashed with vibrant and vibrating colours, strips and washes. Holstistc Strata uses it as a projection screen for a universe of white dots that whizz head-swirlingly past in every direction.

In both, Umeda himself blends into (or stands out from) the overall composition, as one element among many. The performer becomes a fixed focal point with which to stave off motion sickness.

For long swathes, he stands still, but when he moves, each action chimes perfectly with its surroundings. Despite the fact that Umeda could teach Peter Crouch a thing or two about ‘the robot,’ he rejects the virtuosic for the maximum effect. Sometimes its as simple as shifting his weight from one foot to another.

Larger movements are rarely human; sometimes he’s mechanical, sometimes elemental and sometimes animal. At various points, he pulsates as if buzzed with an electric current, ripples like a series of connected joints and undulates with the utmost of fluidity. Once or twice, he flails his limbs and cracks his neck, looking like a zombie fast-forwarded into elegance.

However, there comes a point where your mind stops seeking analogies. Such are the sensory qualities of Umeda’s work that you’re too overwhelmed by stimulus to engage certain, more rational and linguistic, faculties.

“What I want,” Umeda says in programme notes, “is to transmit sensations, rather than messages, to the audience. Therefore there are no conceptual themes in my shows, which I empty of everything that might constitute a meaning.”

He’s certainly achieved that. At its best, Haptic throbs like the dance equivalent of a Rothko painting, even if, in blander sequences, it’s more like a Dulux colour chart. Nonetheless, there are two spectacular moments: one in which seems to refract his shadow into a rainbow of multiples, and another that recreates the gilt-edged effect of looking at the world through three-d glasses.

Holistic Strata is the more effective. A moving magic eye, it fires dizzying collections of dots until your eyes cross. Sometimes, Umeda seems a man in a snowstorm; elsewhere, when the dots cover his body, he seems the snowstorm itself. It looks as if light is escaping inside him, as if he’s breaking up on re-entry. Holistic Strata needs seeing to be believed.

All the while, Umeda pummells you with electro white noise: clicks and crickets, spasms and waves. The result is often maddening, but never infuriating – thanks to the bracing, cruel beauty of Umeda’s work.

Photograph: Bertrand Baudry

Review: Pss Pss, Southbank Centre

Written for Culture Wars

A good prop can be the making of a clown. So, when I say that a stepladder is the star of Pss Pss, I mean no slight on Camilla Pessi and Simone Fassari, who go together under the name Baccala Clowns.

When a trapeze plummets from the flies, the two stand shoulder to shoulder, gaping upwards. The ladder, handily placed by a stagehand at the back of the stalls, is hauled through the audience, fast-ducking as it swishes overhead. Placed upside down, apparently unwittingly, it becomes an object so unusual that it is capable of surprising us just as much as them. They blow tunes through its rungs, spring it open and shut with their jaws and, finally, climb it in spectacularly awkward style.

The ladder – like the less everyday trapeze, on which they later sprawl and clamber over on another precariously – unlocks their play in a way that the staple objects that precede it can’t. Instead these generally give rise to standard clowning games of status and (happy) accident. There’s a touch of teacher-pupil to their relationship, with Fassari as the prissy parent, prudishly tucking his chin, to Pessi’s fidgety child, her pigtails frayed and frazzled.

Until 2010, Pessi and Fassari largely played circuses and cabarets, before turning their hand to theatre-based clowning. That probably explains the turn-based structure of Pss Pss, which trots through a series of individual routines without attempting any broader coherence.

Even so, these are cute and ticklish with a nice line in feigned ineptitude. They greet the unremarkable with astonishment – bowing after ‘juggling’ a single apple – and the impressive with unaffected nonchalance. Yet all this is the clown’s meat and veg and its only when the ladder breaks the mould that you feel Pessi and Fassari really own Pss Pss. The rest is time-filling tomfoolery by the book.

www.mimefest.co.uk

Review: Execution of Justice, Southwark Playhouse

Written for Time Out

What's the point of verbatim drama when the wrongs it seeks to right have lost their topicality? Emily Mann's tribunal play replays the trial of Harvey Milk's killer, Daniel James White. It's a fascinating case but, 30 years on, Mann's forensic scrutiny can feel monotonous.

White was a conservative district supervisor in San Fransisco. That White shot Milk and Mayor George Moscone is never in question, but was it murder or manslaughter?

The play sets out to show that, at his trial, the establishment protected one of its own. Defence Attorney Douglas Schmidt (an arch Christopher Lane) argues that for a reasonable man to act so thoroughly out of character he must do so irrationally (thus ruling out premeditation) and fire chiefs, politicians and even the homicide chief, offer favourable witness statements.

Well acted by a cast of 20, Joss Bennathan's production plays it straight. But despite flashes of urgency, this too often feels like one retro suit after another, and I left wanting to know more about Milk himself than his killer.

Review: Lovesong, Frantic Assembly

Written for Culture Wars

Lovesong is an intricate, nuanced essay that’s been smudged into illegibility by tears. While it glances off a wealth of complex and ambiguous ideas, none of them really take hold because ultimately, Frantic Assembly and writer Abi Morgan ultimately want to smack a lump in your throat and poke you in the tear ducts. What a crying shame.

In fairness, it’s devastatingly effective. But then Lovesong’s central formula is one of sure-fire sentimentality: an elderly couple, William and Margaret, consumed by memories of their younger selves.

Basically, William and Margaret are both abstract and particular. They stand for themselves and for any old old couple. It is the latter that, when contrasted with their younger selves, makes them sentimental. The combination of faded youth and missed potential is inevitably poignant. With its encroaching ends, physical restrictions and hopelessness – by which I mean it’s lack of a real future tense - old age always is.

That Lovesong is so determined to make you feel a certain way makes you push against its manipulation and mawkishness. Simulataneously, in weeping for them as abstracts – and we do, because as abstracts they stand for all of us; we are weeping for nothing less than our own inevitable demise – we lose sight of their particularities, which are drowned out by emotion. William and Margaret are infinitely more interesting as particulars than as hangers for latte-philosophy about life’s transience.

Of course, it’s impossible and unfair to put their respective contributions through a process of fractional distillation, but generally, Frantic Assembly treat them as abstracts and Morgan as particulars. Accompanied by sighing strings, the older couple dance with their younger partners, hopping into cradling arms and entwining their limbs in the characteristic – though never characterful – choreography that Frantic’s artistic directors Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett trot out time and again, varying only the pace and tone. Here its tender and mournful, and the reality of old and young dancing together is affecting, but really, what does it actually mean or matter?

Morgan, though her writing is infected by this tweeness, is onto more interesting specifics, in particular, the effect of childlessness. “They’ll come,” the thirty-year old William reassures his wife, “Children will come.” But they never do. Instead, the couple stop progressing through life. While it never splutters with a backfire, their relationship stalls. Life becomes an endless cycle through the seasons, marked by the starlings that circle overhead and the autumn leaves that litter the floor. Without children, William and Margaret are denied the developing shifts of parenthood that happen alongside one’s offspring.

Morgan’s deft skill is to neither rose-tint their relationship, nor demolish it with grayscale. Their love and fondness is plain to see and Siân Philips and Sam Cox manage to seem simultaneously content and incomplete. Sure, they still bicker and irritate one another by the simple fact of co-existence, but their shared silences are mostly comfortable and they tackle life’s little interruptions – dead birds and lost cats – together, clearly relying on one another.

However, all the promise of the past has waned. Life has passed William and Margaret by and they no longer have a future to care about in the way that they did at thirty, when newly married, recently emigrated and trying – hoping – for a child. Edward Bennett and Leanne Rowe are spritely and gooey, but take care to start the process of hollowing out which will lead to their drab future together.

By that point William and Margaret live only for one another. A cat, Biscuit, and a house are all that binds them together, and it’s not hard to understand why they opt for suicide and solitude respectively. Eventually, their teeth will be their only legacy.

Review: The Kreutzer Sonata, Gate Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Prior to its New York run in March, Nancy Harris’s erudite adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s 1889 novella returns to the Gate. Tolstoy had hoped to see it accompanied by Beethoven’s music, which courses through the story’s veins, in his lifetime and it’s obvious why. The two collide and entwine powerfully in Natalie Abrahami’s elegant staging.

Hilton McRae plays Posdnyshev, a man eaten away by jealous suspicions that his wife is having an affair with her musical partner. When his mind races, the music is nimble and dainty. By the time he reaches his conclusions it surges into a feverish swell, raging and spitting fury. McRae doesn’t so much speak the words as dance them, tapping out syllables like expressive footfalls. His voice is a drum kit; it can rasp like a snare or clatter like cymbals or swish like a soft brushstroke. The moment he hits upon the crucial detail – “That was it,” he says – his vocal chords seems to have become corroded by an upsurge of stomach acid.

Even after his acquittal for her death, on board a train home, Posdnyshev’s mind throbs with resentful misgivings. He imagines them tossing their instruments aside to gorge on one another; he sees her fingers scrabbling over the ivories like spiders and his bow thrusting away at the cat gut strings. The images appear, behind and projected onto a gauze in Chloe Lamford’s design, as if in the glow of scorching flashbulbs. It is searing as an unshakeable migraine and jealousy has left him quivering and swollen-faced.

And yet, for much of its build, The Kreutzer Sonata suffers from the pitfalls of the past tense. The dramatic vigour of events, when they are replayed as recollection, becomes viscous and swampy. “Nostalgia,” Posdnyshev mutters, “it’s a poison.”

But this is a staging that achieves the tone of its original form, absorbing you in the way that delicately enthralling books manage. It makes a pinhole of your focus, zoning in on McRae’s pinched features, as his mouth sculpts the words into being. He exhales the words “my wide-eyed wife,” snagging on a half-whistle. Around him, the piece teems with atmosphere. Accompanying images are fluid and ethereal, and the whole is as fragile and unctuous as a curl of smoke.

Such careful attention to tone is rare and McRae carries it off exceptionally: flickering with paranoia and sharp as lemon-zest, when keeping watch; humid and drowsy as he describes the murder; and, at the last, serene and remorseful with his wife – and, with her, his jealousy – finally dead. Exquisite.

Review: Frankland & Sons, Camden People's Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

At the heart of this real-life father and son two-hander is an unearthed secret that takes an axe to their family tree. It cuts their entire through-line and leaves behind limp threads that need reorganising and retying.

What’s starts as a scatty and flitful stage equivalent of Who Do You Think You Are, birthed from a suitcase of love letters discovered left behind by grandfather Len, grows into a genuine attempt to handle new information and heal unexpected wounds. Tom Frankland and his father take on the repair-job together. There is a gorgeous final reflection: “I always knew. Even when I never knew or thought about it, I always knew.”

Like a home-made Father’s Day present, Frankland & Sons is to be prized not for itself, but for the love with which it is made. It seems held together in a tangled clot of sellotape and string, but the thought that counts is abundantly clear and worth displaying. Shambolic and clumsily executed – intentionally, though its unclear whether by design or acceptance – the piece has the feel of scrambling in the attic.

The biggest pleasure is to watch such an unnatural performer and have-a-go hero as dad John Frankland. Never entirely sure what’s going on, never quite in control, he makes a sweet and amusing stage presence. When he knocks a picture off the wall, his son darts over to patch the show together. When his trousers fall down, his son chuckles gently and steps in to cover his modesty. The relationship itself is beautiful: unforced, tender and fragile.

But that’s not really enough to nourish an audience and the first half, in particular, never breaks through from personal landmarks to universal appeal. It takes an hour to deliver the main thrust, because it needs to set up the lineage that becomes endangered. However, with the show's hinged as yet unrevealed, it is a series of births, deaths, loves and losses like any other.

The Franklands attempt to perk it up with sketch show assembly and a preference for humour – much of which doesn’t land – over honesty, but it never adds up to much more than fluff and flotsam.

Review: You Me Bum Bum Train, 21-31 New Oxford St

For the uninitiated, there is still no greater thrill in theatre than tumbling through the rollercoaster of You Me Bum Bum Train. It is a kaleidoscopic head rush; the fullest of lives flashing before your eyes. The form – a rapid-fire succession of scenarios that plonk you, blinking and disorientated, into the protagonist’s shoes – is exhilarating, potent and unlike anything offered by day-to-day life.

For around forty minutes, you are thrown into the middle of a major identity crisis. One moment you might pop up at the despatch box in the House of Commons; the next in a soup kitchen’s late-night queue. You never know what’s through the next door. Strangers greet you by name and hurl you into the action, always apparently fully convinced that you know exactly what’s going on. Imagine a network of wardrobes leading to Narnia. Imagine a short-circuiting Tardis. Imagine Mr Benn with serious amnesia.

Riding The Bum Bum Train feels not dissimilar to running fast than you can manage, in that way that children do. Off-balance, you’re only able to remain upright by increasing your speed, which, of course, makes retaining poise and control even harder. Eventually – inevitably – you trip.

I’ve written before about the problems of return audience members. When you arrive front-footed and braced for anything, the experience changes. It becomes easier, slower and more about playful improvisation than unexpected impulse. It strokes your ego, rather than assaulting it; panders rather than challenges.

Morgan Lloyd and Kate Bond haven’t entirely solved that for the current incarnation, which has taken over an old sorting office on New Oxford Street. There remain too many empty corridors – perhaps a necessary byproduct of increasing the scale – which allows you to take stock and regain composure, but they have upped the stress levels of their chosen scenarios.

In previous years, scenarios have mostly involved a small handful of volunteer-performers, often integral to the scene. Burglars and barbers. Your actions are private, between you and the actors facilitating the scene, who are therefore acting along before watching and judging. Here, however, there are eyes on you at almost every turn: audiences, crowds and cameras watch your flailing efforts and getting it ‘right’ suddenly matters. After my first Bum Bum Train, I raised “the slightest of suspicions that the joke might just be on you.” In this instance, there are sequences where that’s openly the case, but that openness makes it more inclusive, less private snigger at your expense.

At present, what You Me Bum Bum Train has to say about the world, it still achieves largely through form, i.e. regardless of the scenarios within. It concerns the primacy of the individual and the ubiquity of televisual and cinematic fictions. That we know exactly what’s expected of us in each of the situations – no matter how removed they are from personal experience – speaks volumes about our cultural referents.

There are two related questions, here. First, does it set out to critique that culture or is it content to simply rely on it? Beneath this, then, is the question as to whether it warrants – or even wants – the status of art rather than extravagant fairground ride.

Presently, the shuffle effect – tossing us from celebrity to dole queue – means that YMBBT is no more than the sum of its parts. Individually, the scenarios provide a snapshot of someone else’s life and, as such, foster empathy. Often the roles you’re thrown into are much harder than you’d expect – and there are a couple of real corkers in this incarnation, which make you totally re-think the way you look at others in the outside world. But, at this level, the whole is pretty much a mix-tape: an assortment of semi-arbitrary ‘what-ifs’ and ‘wouldn’t-it-be-cools’.

Taken together, the important thing is that we find ourselves in a situation, rather than this particular situation. How, Lloyd and Bond need to ask, can it add up to more? How can the scenes coalesce into an overall dramaturgy? How can a particular Bum Bum Train journey achieve a thematic thrust in spite of its dependence on being unpredictable? How, in other words, can content match form in speaking about the real world?

If it is unable to do so – assuming we want to grant it meaning – then YMBBT is the equivalent of a playwright endlessly writing the same play under different guises. Each will say the same thing in the same way. If its creators don’t probe its possibilities, they risk making their form inert. For all its unique, elating brilliance, it’s time the Bum Bum Train got an upgrade.

First Light/Mr Darwin's Tree, King's Head Theatre

Written for Time Out

Old-fashioned but effective, Murray Watts's two shorts are linked by a theme: loss of faith. In one, the heart abandons religion; in another, the head grows sceptical.

In the first, a recently bereaved school chaplain is grappling with doubt. He's disturbed late at night by a grieving pupil, Merry. Bright, flirtatious and 14, she sweet-talks her way into his study. In a long night, the pair find genuine solace in one another. School rules, however, entirely disapprove. As the regulations outlaw even a consolatory hug, they seem inhumane but - given the trickling undercurrent of lust here - not unfounded.

Watts has his sights on two twenty-first-century bugbears: red tape and total tolerance. Yet, despite a sprinkling of Robert Pattinson references, First Light's school is so quaint and obsolete, it could be Another Country. Ambiguity is key and Watts's own direction extracts it well. Natalie Burt is brittle and manipulative as Merry, while Andrew Harrison finds a predatory glint in the benign master.

However, Mr Darwin's Tree, a Charles Darwin biopic, feels uncomfortably tacked on to make up the double bill. Well written and piquant, it would nonetheless be more at home in the Science Museum than the back room of a pub.

Review: Fog, Finborough Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

“Micky Mouse Britain,” as Tash Fairbanks and Toby Wharton present it in Fog, contains a Welfare State Mowgli.

Gary – or Fog, as he’s nicknamed, meaning ‘Fuck Off Gary’ – has just left a care home to move in with his newly-returned father, a soldier. He comes across as a mongrel; a lost boy playing adult in the only way he knows how. At home, he throws tantrums and loses days to his Game Boy. Alone and amongst peers, he puffs his chest, slashes a knife around and hypes himself as a gangster in the making.

His tragedy is never to have stood a chance and, in laying ultimate blame with absent dad Cannon (Victor Gardener), Fog is a play with its roots to the right. Its society is rudderless; expectant of reward rather than willing to earn it. Meaning has been lost, such that estate blocks are named after Romantic poets and rosaries are empty fashion symbols.

As such, Gary does not know how to be a man. He has none of his father’s practicality: while Cannon fits up the flat, Gary plonks himself in front of MTV Cribs. He imitates his father’s actions and reactions, echoing them awkwardly a split second late. The craving for an adult male role model is obvious. The welfare state steps in inadequately where families have failed to do so. All Gary has had previously are his care home elders, some of whom, we’re told, once locked him in a cupboard and broke his arm.

The mixture is one of timidity and savagery, and Gary has shades of a wolf-cub: alpha and aggressive amongst peers, but meekly cowering in the presence of elders. He’s unsteady in society, completely vulnerable, yet believes himself a ‘big man’. It’s a disturbing concoction with shades of Edward Bond’s Saved, played with extraordinary nuance by Wharton himself. He flicks between mewls and snarls in the snap of a switchblade knife.

Where Fog falters, however, is in its attempts to embed Gary and Cannon into a wider, real-world situation. The father-son relationship works best well when semi-detached; when it’s just the two of them alone in their flat, negotiating one another after years apart. By bringing in a reformed junkie sister and a university-bound best mate, Michael (Benjamin Crawley, with a delicate touch), Fairbanks and Wharton slip into unnecessary cliché. While these relationships allow Gary’s other side and past to emerge, they puncture the disconcerting intensity and warped isolation of the central relationship. Like Andrew Sheridan’s Winterlong, Fog presents a twisted, harsh bubble in a world that is just recognisable as our own. By stressing the latter point it dilutes the former.

Che Walker’s production – in particular Georgia Lowe’s design – follows suit, deflating as it grows increasingly naturalistic. At first, a right angle of concrete slabs with an upturned rusting tricycle serves as the flat with perfect sparseness. It stands in, but speaks volumes. Michael and his sister Bernice’s living-room, with its sofa, ironing board and framed photograph, is bland by contrast.

Nonetheless, Walker characteristically draws some fine, animal performances from his cast. He’s particularly good at finding characters’ own blind spots; the traits that they are not themselves aware of. Kanga Tainkye-Buah is brilliantly snags the flaunting vanity of Bernice, while Crawley catches the shrug-shouldered softness that her brother would never admit. Gardener is raw and brutish as Cannon, but finds the underlying cowardice that stops him from taking real control of his son.

Photograph: Finborough Theatre

Review: Don Quixote, Warehouse Theatre

Written for Time Out

Staging Miguel de Cervantes's epic novel takes some serious cojones, but the Warehouse Theatre's in-house company get away with it through sheer charm. With more cod Spanish than a fish-and-chip shop on the Costa del Sol, the self-appointed saviour of La Mancha gets a Horrible Histories-style makeover.

There's goofy gusto and knob gags aplenty as Don Quixote's deluded chivalry goes into overdrive and, with his squire Sancho Panza in tow, he battles windmills and goats, believing them to be giants and demons.

While Vince Foxall's script turns somersaults - at times, it's so stuffed with wordplay that the sense falls out - the fun is largely in the playing. Philip Benjamin finds a sweet bewildered benignity as the titular knight-lite and Mark Sangster makes a droll, energetic sidekick as Panza.

What's missing, however, are the frazzled hysterics of a Ken Campbell Roadshow. To counteract the formulaic narrative, Ted Craig's production needs a bit more bonkers invention to keep things fresh. After two-and-a-half hours without it, half-baked, homespun charm runs thin.