Review: Goodbye to all That, Royal Court

It’s saying something when, fifty minutes into a young playwright’s debut, you can feel let down by a particular scene. Luke Norris demonstrates such an acute understanding of theatre’s ability to rattle your spine that, when he slips a mawkish little song and dance sequence into Goodbye To All That, you immediately want to remonstrate. “No!” I scribbled in the moment, “you’re much, much better than that.”

Admittedly Norris isn’t always in complete control and he raises a number of ideas without following through to fruition, but he has come up with several sequences that knock wind out of you like a well-aimed punch to the kidneys.

Take the Santa hat that’s plonked on an elderly stroke-victim or the firm pinch to stop him tugging out his cannula. These are heavy moments, horrific and hard to watch, but deeply human and complex. They’re match by dawning realisations that creep up behind you and leave you utterly slack-jawed and horrified. (To reveal would, of course, be to ruin them.)

At sixty-nine, more than half a century after they first met, Frank has decided to leave his wife Iris for his mistress Rita. Pumped with Dutch courage, he ends up having a stroke and is taken into intensive care and, later, an NHS hospice. Rita’s got the money to get him into private care (at a cost of £3,300 per month), but Iris isn’t about to give up her husband without a fight – much to the disapproval of her teenage grandson, David. Set in Romford, Goodbye To All That is brilliantly programmed alongside In Basildon; two more women feuding over a man in a hospital bed. At least this time, he’s the property they’re fighting over.

There’s so much going on here that Norris’s play doesn’t have a central thrust, preferring instead to flit from one subject to another. Politically, it goes after the stretched NHS, in which Frank’s poor health gradually gets worse and worse due to neglect. Those rich enough to afford private care, meanwhile, have a significantly higher chance of recovery.

If there’s an ounce of naïve idealism in this, it’s curious, because elsewhere Norris is particularly attuned to the grey complexities and compromises of reality. Where eighteen year-old David is steadfast and absolute, his elders have a more pragmatic approach. Iris knows you’ve got to be cruel to be kind, hence the pinch, Rita understands that love sometimes means sharing, and Frank’s humility and open fear shows up his grandson’s bullish invulnerability.

This is all part of the natural rhythm of life, which Norris paints in rather glib colours. Just as the scales are tumbling from David’s eyes, his grandfather is releasing that he’s lived a lie. Adulthood, as Norris conceives it, is nothing but a matter of fitting in with social norms; only in childhood and old age are we truly able to be ourselves and act according to our own desires.

And yet such independence doesn’t suit the rest of us and it’s startling to note the change in attitude towards Frank after his stroke when, unable to express himself beyond attempting to prevent pain, he sits staring at a television screen from which Dick and Dom blare out. “You’re not offering much to the relationship these days,” jokes David, “Bit of dribbling, but…” He wipes the spittle from his grandfather’s mouth, relishing the chance to demonstrate his maturity. It’s a horrifying moment to watch, doubly so, given the cheer with which David enters into banter. Frank just stares out. This is how we prefer our old folks, not shagging away, but shagged out, waiting for death.

Norris is clearly a promising talent. Once or twice, he pulls something astonishing out of the bag, such as Frank’s advice to his grandson: “You break heads if you need to and hearts if you have to…” Simon Godwin’s production is perfectly adequate and, like the performances, seems designed to let the writing showcase itself. Susan Brown plays a stern forward-defensive as Iris, while Linda Marlowe’s Rita is the soft cheese to her chalk. Roger Sloman is crushing when incapacitated; though he can’t express it, you can see traces of muscle tension that betray Frank’s terror and embarrassment.

Photograph: Tristram Kenton

Review: God/Head, Ovalhouse Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

On the 21st April 2011, Chris Goode was walking home from the supermarket, carrying three shopping bags in two hands, listening to his iPod and thinking about another show, when, all of a sudden, he became absolutely conscious of God’s existence. He felt it at the top of his chest and he felt it just to the right of his heart. That patch of London pavement became his very own Damascan roadside.

“Nothing was more real or more vivid,” he explains, calmly, rationally, convincingly, “than God In whom, I don’t believe.”

God/Head, perfectly titled as it is, is Goode’s attempt to explore the implications of that moment, not just in terms of his own belief or non-belief, but expanding beyond the personal and into the abstract. The main thrust is about certainty and uncertainty. Goode has not converted, but has instead found cause to question his initial scepticism; to doubt his original doubt, as it were. Atheism has flicked into agnosticism. He wants to be able to talk like Iyanla Vanzant, a pro- inspirational speaker, but he hasn’t the heartfelt conviction. And that’s fine, isn’t it?

Formally, God/Head is a patchwork of texts that illuminate his experience and subsequent exploration of it. He’s also joined onstage by a guest. Not a guest performer. Just a guest. Like on Graham Norton or Jonathan Ross, only without the artifice or promotional intentions. This inserts an element of uncertainty into the event itself – partly through an unscripted voice, partly by granting control to an uninformed party. (Goode provides instructions in sealed envelopes, passing the reins to the guest.)

This, however, is not developed fully enough. It never threatens to derail the event – a key component of genuine risk – since the whole is content with its own informality and looseness. That, perhaps, is the point: that we must learn to tolerate and accommodate uncertainty as God/Head’s structure manages. What was intended to become a journey-style narrative, “all very Radio 4,” has proved too messy, full of blurred intangibility and loose ends.

However, I feel Goode has not fully cracked the form, and God/Head mostly reminded me of parodies of self-indulgent off-Broadway solo shows, in which a performer relates and over-philosophises a seminal personal experience to the point of losing his or her audience. (Those familiar with his work know Goode’s far smarter than that, so, in the spirit of honesty, I’ll admit to nervousness about voicing the thought.) He tells us early on that this is not about his experience being more important than any of ours, but – for me – that caveat doesn’t ring true enough. It felt a disclaimer, tacked on and intended as a get-around for a show that kind of goes on to do just that.

In fact, there’s an element of manipulation in God/Head that seems curiously unlike Goode’s usual practice. Recounting his experience, he seems to – at some level – act it out, or rather relive it in some way, and it rings a bit forced.

Nonetheless, there is some deeply fascinating content and some beautifully-sculpted articulations along the way. Not least Goode’s connection with his ‘religious’ experience and his previous experiences of depression, which questions whether both can be explained away in equal physiological terms. A conversation with an academic, restaged with his guest, raises the possibility of its being “a neurochemical experience” that was interpreted in such a way as a result of suggestibility; he had been reading the King James Bible for another show, after all, and it’s conceivable that the music in his ears had a hypnotic or numinous effect.

Yet, for all this rational explanation, which might once have satisfied Goode the atheist, it’s no longer quite sufficient. He speaks of wanting to believe – of really wanting to believe, to really believe – despite being unable to do so entirely. It’s this note of failure in the face of desire that he picks up to end, by playing a final – beautiful, haunting, resonant – recording of My Sweet Lord over an empty stage.

Photograph: Malcolm Phillips

Review: Brightest and Best, The Half Moon

Written for Time Out

Thanks to all-round naivety, 'Brightest and Best' lasts just shy of three hours. It could boil down to a taut 90 minutes. But writer Matt Morrison, briefly a teacher himself, shows all of his workings. We see too much of former management consultant Rob's backstory, before getting to the thrust: his new job teaching English at an independent school.

Rob (William Owen) clearly wants his own Dead Poets' Society, but teaching proves harder than it looks, and his timid, over-friendly approach leaves him as flustered as his class.

Morrison's slack structure means low-level drama, which, in turn, sees him up the ante with compensatory artificial crises, including an overdose, self-harm and an affair visible from scene three. Director Natalie Ibu exacerbates the problem by promoting flair above functionality. She could save 20 minutes on scene changes alone, and much of the acting is bloated, attempting to do something with every single line or gesture.

Hetty Abbott comes out unscathed with a collected performance as Rob's wife Kate, but this school-set play feels like too long in detention.

Review: In Basildon, Royal Court

In Basildon is brilliantly full. Were David Eldridge to try and squeeze one more socio-political point (no matter how waff-er thin) into his portrait of an Essex family, the play might very well explode all over the Royal Court auditorium, leaving its audience smattered with jellied eels. For two and a half hours, it jangles around the subjects of class and politics like a high-scoring round of pinball. Thatcherism – ding! New Labour – ding! Immigration, aspiration, culture, regeneration, welfare – ding, ding, ding, ding, ding!

However, what makes Eldridge’s play so sturdy is that (one major lurch into outright debate aside) it places the human first and foremost. Eldridge has spoken of his decision to use the four-act form, passed down from Chekhov, to let his characters lead the drama, and it pays dividends, upping the tautness and empathy. The play becomes an ethnographic case study. Its social-political observations – that third-act open-floor debate excepted – come to the surface through action and character.

Two warring sisters, Maureen and Doreen, are reunited at the deathbed of their brother Len in the living-room of the family home, its single most valuable asset. Len’s promised it to Doreen’s son Barry, but had recently changed his will, entrusting best mate Ken to pass on his instructions after the funeral. The question on everyone’s mind – and obliterating any remaining family ties – is who stands to gain and who to lose.

Eldridge also brings in two middle-class characters: Maureen’s daughter Shelley, the first of the family to go to university, and her plumy boyfriend Tom, an aspiring playwright who talks patronisingly about making theatre about and for the working classes. Though Eldridge can employ these two heavy-handedly at times, they add another layer to the complex debates that swish through the play.

Essex is, of course, Eldridge’s county of birth and he achieves a vivid picture of its inhabitants and their values, some of which are condoned, others criticised.

Two things emerge most prominently. First, a difference of aspiration; unlike Tom and Shelley, who have the luxury of not needing to do so, most of the characters aspire only to increased financial security. Barry’s face – not to mention his wife’s – crumples on hearing the house will be sold and proceeds divided. Both Maureen and Doreen, with varying degrees of cunning and subtlty, attempt to forge a life sponging of Ken’s relative wealth. Second, you see the working-class pride – in its heritage, its humour and both self-sufficiency and graft – that refuses to be compromised by the definitions or help of others, particularly when that’s passed down from more privileged social strata. Of course, in the case of Len’s will, there’s a meaty contradiction here, which Eldridge explores fully.

Where the play becomes more overtly political, as a tipsy Tom argues against the family’s firm Conservative values to the point of dismissing them as ignorant, momentum slows and opposing points of view bounce back and forth. It is, nonetheless, a big old subject, argued with passion, acutity and humour. Len, we find out early on, was a man who wouldn’t have a world said against Magaret Thatcher. It’s no coincidence then, that when the fifth act skips back to the point where family tensions first spark, it takes us to the morning after John Major’s election. This is a slice-of-the-nation play and it accuses post-Thatcherite politics of abandoning the blue-collar classes. The widening gap between rich and poor looms into view and the impression is of a nation sacrificing its own populace to appeal to corporations and immigrants.

It gets a full-bodied production (in traverse) from Dominic Cooke and the performances – almost without exception (Jade William’s is too BBC audiobook as Shelley) – are exceptional. Linda Bassett keeps you guessing about Doreen’s true feelings throughout with a stone-set poker face, while Ruth Sheen’s Maureen wears a conniving smile to peers down on her relatives. Lee Ross is a complex and clear Barry – as genuine in grief as in self-interest – and Peter Wight, a jovial arbiter as Ken, and Max Bennett’s Tom is a mix of spite and naivety. Wendy Nottingham makes a delicious addition as next-door neighbour Pam, at one point awkwardly sidestepping out of the room like a dressage horse.

Photograph: Keith Pattison

Review: 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, Barbican Centre

Written for Culture Wars

Let’s start with Bridget Jones; an unlikely counterpoint to John Ford’s brutal revenge tragedy, admittedly, but one that surfaces in Cheek by Jowl’s thrilling revival nonetheless.

Like our Bridge, Annabella is torn between two suitors of opposing parental approval. Jack Hawkins’s Soranzo is the eligible, square-jawed nice-chap; Jack Gordon’s Giovanni, greasy-haired and dressed in a tight-fitting black T-shirt, is the irresistible bad-boy; the intriguing, bookish, chauvinistic social misfit with a magnetic sexual pull. He’s also her brother, and thus comparisons with Hugh Grant – sorry Daniel Cleaver – come to an abrupt halt.

Ok, so they’re not like for like, but my point is that Annabella’s lot is, in some ways, a cinematic staple. Think of American Beauty’s Ricky Fitts, James Dean’s causeless rebel Jim Stark, even Grease’s Danny Zucco. Or, slightly differently, look at the battle for Ryan Phillippe in Cruel Intentions. Were ‘Tis Pity… a rom-com it would end in one of two ways. Either with the bad-boy tamed or with the good-at-heart girl’s renouncement of him for the triumphant good-guy. Ford’s play, of course, is anything but (rev-trav?), and ends with Annabella and her unborn child dead and Giovanni brandishing the heart he’s ripped out of her.

In any case, designer Nick Ormerod leaves us no doubt that Hollywood (and, wider, pop cultural aspirations) should be at the forefront of our minds throughout. Annabella’s teenage bedroom – the production is contemporary and youthful, almost ‘in-thy-face’ theatre – is lined with posters: Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Gone With the Wind, True Blood. For every iconic ingénue there’s a femme fatale, and Lydia Wilson’s fantastic Annabella aspires to both simultaneously. In fact, she is split like a half-and-half musical hall act. Seen in one profile she’s perfectly demure; in the other, tattooed and shaven-headed. Her voice is just as schizophrenic: prim and clipped politeness interrupted by cavernous growls that burst from her gut. She truly is the “double soul” of which Giovanni speaks.

Donnellan’s production centres on attraction and revulsion, showing the two to be thoroughly connected emotions. Centrestage is Annabella’s bed, to which hopeful lovers – not just Giovanni and Soranza – are drawn. They circle it like hyenas descending on a carcass and call to mind the patrons of Baz Luhrman’s Moulin Rouge, salivating over Nicole Kidman’s showgirl. Yet, just as often, they spring back in disgust, and pin themselves to the walls, horrified, but nonetheless unable to avert their eyes. After Annabella’s death is revealed, each one in turn walks coolly over to the bloodstained en-suite bathroom and peers in, inexplicably pulled to the murder scene. Some recoil, wretching. Others stand transfixed. All must look, but none can bear to see. Omerod’s design is all lipstick and bile; deep red and chemical green throb discordantly together. The whole things pulsates with sex.

That finds a contrast in the hollow iconography – both sexual and religious – of the world around them. Annabella is first seen dancing as if in a Beyonce video, surrounded by suited men. She becomes a Vegas virgin Mary in Soranzo’s shrine, mirroring the gauche poster of the Madonna (not the popstar) on her bedroom wall. Here sex is everything and nothing at once, and Donnellan handles it – and the play’s violence, mostly half-glimpsed in back rooms, as elbows lash out and nosebleeds begin – with relished flair. At one point, Soranzo storms towards Annabella with a contorted coathanger; a sharp contrast to the mostly bouyant atmosphere of fiestas and folk-dancing. Nick Powell’s sound design is fantastic, adding to the tone of an Anthony Neilson-style hallucination.

For all this could, ultimately, be in Annabella’s head. Finally, she stands over Giovanni, looking at her own heart. Are these her dark fantasies, urged on by female role models seen onscreen: sexualised pop stars and Hollywood’s array of vixens, vamps and virgins?

Photograph: Manuel Harlon

Review: The Bomb: A Partial History, Tricycle Theatre

Written for Time Out

Talk about going out with a bang. Nicolas Kent's final production as the Tricycle's artistic director is a two-part, ten-play cycle, on the subject of the atom bomb - or, as David Greig puts it, "a truly philosophical weapon".

Greig's offering, The Letter of Last Resort, is the highlight. On her first day in the job in 2015, the newly elected Prime Minister must decide whether or not Britain retaliates, in the event of London (and Radio 4) being destroyed by such an attack. If she does not retaliate, that would nullify the initial deterrent and render Trident void. "The only rational way to behave is to be irrational," her advisor warns.

Sixty years earlier, Clement Attlee faced a similar dilemma about the inception of our nuclear programme, as shown in Ron Hutchinson's excellent Calculated Risk, and equally absurd paradoxes of mutually assured destruction are a running motif. Schrödinger's cat, Pandora's box and Joseph Heller's Catch 22 recur, helping to paint a big picture of a Reservoir Dogs-style stalemate on a global scale.

The first group of five plays, First Blast, describes the history, with brilliant contributions from Zinnie Harris, Amit Gupta and John Donnelly, who gives Ukranian arms-dealing a twist of Martin McDonagh.

Part two, entitled Second Blast, looks at contemporary power play. It covers Iran, Israel and North Korea and adds both potency and urgency. An entertaining, provoking dossier, with admirable nuance and real purpose, The Bomb epitomises Kent's tenure. London theatre will miss him.

Review: A Midsummer Night's Dream, Lyric Hammersmith

The first thing to say about Filter’s remixed Midsummer Night’s Dream – and it cannot be said too loudly or too often – is that it is absolutely hysterical.

Every Dream has to contend with the fact that its bulk rarely matches the its final five minutes for incapacitating hilarity. Pyramus and Thisbe, the tacked-on play-within-a-play (in which Shakespeare pips Frayn to Noises Off) that’s performed with glorious ineptitude, is almost always the highlight. Recognising this, Filter and director Sean Holmes have reframed the whole thing as a similar shambles and extended its delirium throughout. The mechanicals have taken over the fairy kingdom.

They begin with a bungled introduction, forever drifting into tangents, from Ed Gaughan’s Oirish Peter Quince, who, in trying to summarise the play, ends up harpooning its prospects. “You’ll be wishing you’d gone to see One Man, Two Guv’nors with that bloke off of Gavin and Stacey,” he blusters.

Nor does it help that their Oscar-nominated special guest, set down for a one-off turn as Bottom, has become trapped in a lift backstage. Aside from being very funny, the eventual solution (which it would be unfair to reveal) wittily illuminates the presumptuous gall of Bottom’s taking charge.

But Bottom’s not alone in that. Here, every actor, believing he or she knows best, wrenches the play in a different direction. The lovers – polo-necked, tweedy thesps all – upstage one another, until there erupts a massive food-fight (bready-brawl is closer to the truth). Jonathan Broadbent’s Oberon, seemingly given free-reign in the wardrobe department, becomes a speccy superhero, while Ferdy Roberts makes Puck a disgruntled and tattooed techie with no patience for posturing. Lord, what fools these actors be. Most of them exit pursued by an irate stage manager.

If Filter’s dramaturgy looks incoherent, well, that’s the point. More problematic is the question of whether the play benefits from this theatrical metaphor. Of course, it’s not the first to use it, and Hyemi Shin’s papery design harks back to Peter Brook’s white box, but it goes further than ever before.

The answer is only in part. While it works wonders for both the dream motif and the fairies’ magical manipulation – allowing different layers of reality, whereby Puck stomps through the walls and Oberon sulkily protests his invisibility, to co-exist – Filter come close to reducing the whole to single moral: ‘Aren’t theatrical types pretentious knobs?’

Combined with their determination to avoid any obvious or recycled gags (those that we’ve seen a hundred times before, that still please nonetheless), there is a sour whiff of smugness here. It seems to say, ‘We know best,’ and that applies not only to other productions, but also to Shakespeare’s writing itself. Rather than cutting to refine, Filter have ripped out anything they deem outmoded or padding. In the process, they’ve removed a few vital organs. More than their brilliant and equally riotous Twelfth Night, this is Shakespeare for those who don’t do Shakespeare.

There are, inevitably perhaps, as many losses as there are gains. Just as we’re not bothered about the actual story of Pyramus and Thisbe, the plot here often feels like a chore. While set-piece moments and individual inventions –particularly their stock-in-trade use of sound – are as sparkling as they are surprising, we end up waiting for the next. There’s no care for the overall narrative and the careful balance of individual strands – not to mention pace and momentum – is upset by a tendency to digress.

The ultimate problem is that their thrills and laughter fade. Filter’s preference of a gag means that they surf through the play, moment by moment, but don’t really get underneath it. As such, the further I got from the theatre, the more I cheated I felt. For all the fun, there’s not much purpose, and the sense is of a company torn between populism and interrogation, forever succumbing to the former’s temptation. With the lighter comedies, that’s just about fine, but what we really need is Filter’s irreverent take on the big, weighty Shakespeares; the tragedies, histories and complex comedies. It can be done – look at Propellor – but until Filter commit to the whole, rather than the moment, that will remain beyond them.

Photograph: Keith Pattison

Review: The Recruiting Officer, Donmar Warehouse

Written for Culture Wars

BRAZEN: “A privateer may be ill-manned.”
PLUME: “And so may a playhouse.”

Not this one. Josie Rourke’s inaugural production at the Donmar Warehouse oozes class. Everything, from the starry ensemble to Lucy Osborne’s gorgeous rustic design, flickering under candlelight, via Michael Bruce’s folksy score, is perfectly pleasing on both the eye and the ear.

However, until the production’s inspired final coda, class is precisely what falls out of George Farquhar’s restoration comedy.

In The Recruiting Officer, the town stomps into the country and grossly exploits its populace for personal gain. Aided by the gnarled Sergeant Kite, Captain Plume (Tobias Menzies) strides into Shropshire and, with devilish cunning, tricks its yokels (male and female alike) into the army.

By having the five-strong house band playing various locals, Rourke loses the sense of a community being raided. This may be intentional, as a means to better sting us with her ending, in which the quintet sings Over the Hills and Far Away before, one by one, marching off to war. It’s undoubtedly poignant, but the flipside is to lighten the heart of a play that needs a snarl beneath its sniggers.

Even so, the comedy is still too genteel to really score. Admittedly, second night sluggishness seemed to have crept in at the same time as I did – the pace felt groggy and a couple of corpses betrayed hazy focus – but if you’re going to play it up, really play it up. It needs a strong dash of grotesque.

Only Mark Gatiss as Plume’s recruiting rival Captain Brazen – a foppish mix of Captain Hook and Wendy Darling – has the raucousness to raise unfailing laughter. As Kite, Mackenzie Crook manages it when disguised as a German fortune-teller, but elsewhere plays against his own nature by gruffing up for a machismo to which he’s not suited. Menzies’s Plume is standard-issue swagger (a case of the Flashhearts); he holds himself as if sitting for a portrait and hits first syllables with a full-on baseball swing.

Lucy Osborne’s set, which makes a wooden barn of the Donmar’s extraordinary auditorium (once again, the real star), is similarly decorous. All twinkling candles and powder-blue sky, its chocolate box charm only adds to the quaintness and the whole comes across a courtly and civil recreation of the Globe stage. It’s all a bit luxurious and cosy.

In fairness, the women fare better. Nancy Carroll is just delightful as Slyvia, the love Plume is too proud to admit, embracing a mousey vulnerability, while Rachel Stirling finds a neat caricature of new money in Melinda, with her forced elocution and a too-too-tight corset. Aimee-Ffion Edwards’s Rose is consistently amusing as the impudent Rose.

Perhaps all this is too harsh, for The Recruiting Officer is a beautiful production done well, but it’s ornamental appeal – like a oil painting restored –leads it into insipidness whenever it droops. However, when the stars align and the playing zings, I’ve no doubt that Rourke’s Recruiting Officer improves immeasurably.

Photograph: Johan Persson

Review: The Shallow End, Southwark Playhouse

Written for Culture Wars

If, as an aspiring theatre critic, I didn’t come out of The Shallow End thoroughly depressed, it would be doing something seriously wrong. Doug Lucie’s play, first seen at the Duke of York’s Theatre via the Royal Court, presents the death throes of the newspaper industry. Reader, I’m pleased to tell you that it toe-kicked me into the bluest of blue funks.

However, that’s not to say that Stone Junction – the company behind last year’s fringe revival of Jez Butterworth’s The Winterling – is doing everything right. Lucie’s play, which is crass enough already, needs downplaying before it needs relish, and director Sebastien Blanc fills it with wide-boys, toffs and tarts.

The point, surely, is that the Street of Shame drags its ordinarily reasonable and respectable inhabitants down. In a media culture – indeed any culture – that puts profit above all else, standards of decency are continually eroded. Intelligent men and women choose to sell out, betraying the fundamental of journalism: truth. The noble and the ignoble, who face off in various permutations during each of the four distinct scenes, should not belong to different species.

The Shallow End is, of course, a thinly veiled attack on Rupert Murdoch’s empire. News International is here renamed World News Corp – there’s little more nuanced than that – and it’s Sunday paper is being reinvented by new editor Malcolm Kirk (Mario Demetriou, replacing the Scottish-accented Andrew Neil-alike with an Essex wide-boy a la Andy Coulson). That means culling his staff – the old and the idealistic – and bringing in new faces, brash and inexpert hacks every one. As Kirk himself says (and you to realise that, whatever the fate of newspapers, he’ll survive elsewhere), “So the wheel turns.”

Kirk‘s hiring and firing takes place at the mogul’s daugter’s wedding. Lucie takes us, step by step, towards the inner-sanctum, from the frivolity of arts and features (out with the critic, in with the straight-talking, sexualised columnist), through sport and politics and, finally, holding the whole company over a barrel, maverick foreign correspondent Harry Rees. That means the play can swell, but even where barnstorming conspiracy supplants pettier misdemeanours, it is fatally two-dimensional.

With the Leveson machine rumbling on, Lucie’s bludgeoning attack looks timely from afar. However, The Shallow End is very much a mid-nineties play, and – worse – a product of the very same culture it sets out to satirise. Full of blow, bubbly and banging, it slots quite snugly into the post-Mojo slipstream of men behaving badly. For every moment of Lucie’s lucidity, there’s another dragged under by luridity, and The Shallow End starts to look like the Fleet Street equivalent of Footballers’ Wives. Pravda, it is not.

Review: Muswell Hill, Orange Tree Theatre

Written for Time Out

The pre-show instruction to switch off your mobile phone is also the take-home moral of Torben Betts's comedy of (bad) manners, in which bleeps and tweets ruin a middle-class dinner party on the night of the 2010 Haitian earthquake.

Everyone in married couple Mat and Jess's plush kitchen has their head buried in a handheld device. However, Betts digs beneath the ironic trope regarding our inability to communicate in the communications age, offering an astute and multifaceted diagnosis of a very modern malaise.

Every aspect of his characters' lives is infected by the internet. They're disconnected from reality, incapable of interaction and trapped beneath inflated aspirations. None of them accept, let alone tolerate, their own ordinariness. They are the stretched middle, torn by envious resentment of the A-list and liberal guilt for the Third World.

Darkly funny (Mike Leigh writ large), Muswell Hill thrives by transplanting online behaviour into real life. Characters speak in self-absorbed status updates, proffer irrelevant Wikipedia morsels and troll one another with acidic pedantry.

Sam Walters's boisterous production is richly performed, with Jasmine Hyde fantastic as the hostess holding it all together, and colourful turns from her oddball guests, most notably Dan Starkey - hilarious as the narked and lonely pipsqueak Simon.

Review: Absent Friends, Harold Pinter Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Absent Friends is basically Alan Acykbourn’s bread and butter. He is, after all, the grand master of awkward afternoon teas, and this one – held to gee up an old friend, Colin, after the death of his fiancé – has all the requisite ingredients from the off. It’s been three years since anyone saw Colin, a social butterfingers at the best of times, and there’s a sprinkling of adultery to enhance the unease. The social stiltedness, Ayckbourn’s signature, comes too easily and the playwright needs not bother with patient, piecemeal accumulation.

Played in one location and real time, it’s solid, textbook fare – perfect for the West End – and Jeremy Herrin’s production can’t afford to put a foot wrong.

Happily, it doesn’t, even building to an elegantly mournful conclusion in which five of the six friends stand staring into space, each locked in their own miserable thoughts. The other, hostess Diana, is zonked out on sleeping pills upstairs, more distraught than any of them.

All of them, except Colin, have been run down by the passage of time. Dreams have faded and romances, dwindled into routine. Melancholy has set in with blame laid squarely on the broad shoulders of masculinity, all forms of which are represented here. Steffan Rhodri’s Paul is a typical Ayckbourn alpha; distant, unfeeling and altogether unrepentant; John (David Armand) is beta, nervously twitching and limply sucking up; the unseen Gordon, Mr Gamma, permanently laid low with petty ailments, phoning in for motherly advice from his too-too-patient wife Marge (a droll Elizabeth Berrington); finally, Reece Shearsmith’s Colin, off the scale of omega, is sensitive and keen-eared, most of all cheerful, but ultimately a child. “He’s a nice boy,” says Marge, when he finally goes home.

To refine it, male arrogance is on trial here. Paul thinks himself a sports star; John, a comedian and Colin, the first to know true love. As Kara Tointon’s stony-faced Evelyn – Paul’s one-time mistress – suggests, “All men think that they’re experts with women. By the time they are, they’re too old to do anything about it.”

Where does this leave the women? Well, thoroughly depressed, trotting after their husbands and trying not to cause a fuss, mostly. Katherine Parkinson’s Diana grittedly soldiers on, but slips into black holes en route and, eventually, bursts into a bray of pent-up tears.

Tom Scutt’s design suggests t’was ever thus, not only capturing the gauche horrors of seventies décor (every shade of beige is here), but wittily implanting a prehistoric twist. Pot plants hang from the wall and a wood-carved crocodile stands on the stone mantelpiece, itself reminiscent of a cave wall. It is a perfectly Pangrean living room.

The flip side of all this is that Herrin is playing with archetypes, and only Shearsmith punctures through to give us a distinctive original. His Colin is a speccy little mole of a man with a bad case of the verbal squits. More specific are the various combinations of individual relationships. Nonetheless, there are some brilliantly arch comic moments – particular in the don’t-mention-the-dead-fiance mould – and its always emotionally supple and full of subtext.

Herrin has delivered a well-oiled, fine-tuned, and deftly-performed production of a decent play that’s come straight off the conveyor belt.

Photograph: Simon Annand

Review: The Devil and Mr Punch, Barbican Centre

A Punch so strong it might well have been spiked, Julian Crouch’s meta-puppet show is the best Improbable piece I’ve seen to date. For anyone, like me, born too late to catch Shockheaded Peter it’s unmissable, for it works the same alchemy to restore theatre’s discarded junk into gleaming vintage.

Not that The Devil and Mr Punch is nostalgia fest. Yes, Crouch’s gorgeous glove puppets have the same evocative resonance as an old-fashioned sweet shop, but Crouch has here pinned Punch to the psychologist’s chaise-longue for a sharp, extensive and probing interrogation. This is Mr Punch played with Red Button extras, including player-cam and director’s commentary.

Its core is an extended version of the classic Punch sequence: baby goes out the window, wife gets thwacked to death before the various social custodians out to apprehend our crescent-faced villain follow suit. Thus, Punch weaves his way towards the gallows and, beyond, into a puppet hell lined with disused doll corpses and populated by inquisitive dinosaur phalluses - or phallic dinosaurs. (Either way, they're vile.) Even at this level, it’s barking mad – a mix of Terry Gilliam and Jean-Pierre Jeunet – and never spurns a chance to milk its gags dry.

But, characteristic of Improbable, The Devil and Mr Punch walks a drunken zigzag path, veering into tangential side roads. Alongside a miniature variety show, including a piglet formation team, a pair of singing butchers, a dancing skeleton and two knights destined to duel forever, Crouch zooms out to show the controlling hands of Punch’s Professors, Mssrs Harvey and Hovey (Nick Haverson and Rob Thirtle), who are forever popping out of panels like figurines on a Swiss clock. With their formal wear and whiteface, Harvey and Hovey resemble the Godot boys biding their time with roadside puppetry. Who, Crouch asks, is pulling whose strings?

Such haphazardly meandering structures can be offputting, but here the cast cock us knowing looks that say, ‘Stick with us.’ The reward is philosophy – of art, of human nature, of time – pulled loosely together, still leaving room for further work on our part, but illuminating its subject from all angles. What becomes of the unfashionable artist? Why is violence so entertaining? How does Punch exist in each of us?

Haverson, in particular, gives a virtuosic performance, clownishly contorting himself and blooming into the squeaking, squawking voices of his characters. He shows us the madness, the sadness and the solitude of the puppeteer, all perfectly punctuated with mock hamminess. Come the end, he sheds a single tear and seems as lifeless as a glove puppet without a guiding hand.Photographs courtesy of Improbable Theatre

Review: Paper Cinema's The Odyssey, Battersea Arts Centre

Written for Culture Wars

As John Torode and Gregg Wallace might say: poetry doesn’t get more epic than this. Homer’s The Odyssey, a vast travelogue of Odysseus’s hazardous return from Troy, reads like a Who’s Who of mythical beasts. Amongst its celebrity critters are the Sirens, the Lotus-Eaters, Circe and Cyclops. When similar ancient epics – think Clash of the Titans or 300 – land onscreen, they’re usually chock-full of CGI and bare-chested muscleman.

Not so with Paper Cinema, who manage it – gracefully, exquisitely, honestly – on a micro-budget, armed with only black ink, paper cut-outs and a couple of camcorders. Delightfully homemade, the resultant silent movie is created live and accompanied by musicians. It’s an impressive feat that demonstrates impeccable technical aplomb, though it suffers from diminishing returns.

The technique is, essentially, one of childhood toy theatres, only infinitely more ambitious and honed with precision. Nicholas Rawling and Irena Stratieva manipulate 2D cut outs – all gorgeously illustrated in Rawling’s scratchy, but stylish hand – in front of a stationary camera. They replicate staple cinematic techniques, such that the camera seems to pan through windows and trail alongside moving characters. The delight comes from seeing their rudimentary process and charting its effects (at least, for those of us on the right side of the auditorium). There are profile shots and close ups, panoramas and perspective shifts. The effect is often witty and always impressive, especially given the minute scale, which means that two millimetres either way ruin a shot’s framing or perspective.

The story is told simply, without narration, and remains engaging enough throughout. Besides, there’s plenty to watch: film, puppeteers, musicians, instruments, audience, set. There are, admittedly, natural limitations to the form and once or twice Paper Cinema shirk Homer’s details. The Cyclops, for example, is detached with a stalactite to the eye and a quick scarper. There’s no attempt at sheep or Odysseus’s invented alter-ego Nobody. In fact, the whole is similarly simplified – a bit like a BBC Schools adaptation that trots through basic bullet points without getting under its skin. Is this, you start to wonder, a pointless demonstration of skill?

For all that you admire it, however, Paper Cinema’s The Odyssey must be sat through in real time and gradually wanes. Because we may well know the story – especially in this simple form – delivery becomes more important than narrative when it comes to retaining our attention. Unlike their previous show, The Night Flyer, we don’t itch to find out what will happen so much as how. Paper Cinema’s fault is to rely too heavily on the same tricks and techniques, such that, eventually, it drags with repetition. The cinematography needs variety to keep us captivated as well as impressed.

Photograph: James Allen

Review: Night of January 16th, White Bear Theatre

Written for Time Out

Who knew Ayn Rand was a pioneer of interactive theatre? Her 1934 play signs its audience up for jury service and our collective verdict determines the ending. If the law is an ass, Night of January 16th is basically a donkey ride.

Intended as a serious illustration of objectivist ethics (Rand's system of self-interest), it's essentially a schlocky murder mystery: mediocre, but also great fun. Crooked financier Bjorn Faulkner, for whom wrong and right mattered less than can and can't (he always could), is found dead. In the dock, his lover and secretary Karen Andre (Francesca Secchi) stands accused of murder.

Fantastic work from Jonathan Rigby and David Mildon as the two jousting attorneys keeps things snappy and taut, making Night of January 16th a real guilty pleasure.

Review: The Changeling, Young Vic

Written for Culture Wars

As problem plays go, The Changeling is right up there. Primarily because it’s two plots – the first of Beatrice-Joanna’s disastrous courtship with Alsemero, a vicious cycle of murder and infidelity; the second, of a paranoid husband’s jealousy in a local madhouse – run parallel without properly knitting together. It is widely held that Thomas Middleton and William Rowley wrote one each, semi-independently. On top of that, of course, you’ve got constant (crucial) asides, whereby subtext is writ uncomfortably large, and the small matter of an intervening dumbshow.

In this extraordinary production, director Joe Hill-Gibbins puts his head down, bares his horns and charges. “’Nuff talkin’,” you hear him cry, “Let’s do this. Leeeerrrroooooy Jeeennkins.” There is no trace of apology, nor any attempt to smooth the cracks. Scenes screech to abrupt halts. Music cuts out like a stalled engine. Lights snap to black, as if a fuse has blown. The play bunnyhops on.

By the time it comes to its clumsy conclusion – concurrent narratives wrapping up without intertwining – Hill-Gibbins has them drown each other out. His direction is of the Nike school and, by his just doing it, we don’t dwell on the inconvenient strewths. He that knows better how to tame a play, now let him speak.

There is, however, far more to Hill-Gibbins’ direction than brazenness alone. His aggression is countered with supreme control. At the production’s centre is a robust and straightforward performance of the play. His actors play the scenes simply and truthfully, taking care of the story. Hill-Gibbins then plays Buckaroo with it, hanging dramaturgical pointers off the core action, stopping just short of overloading it. A wedding cake remains onstage throughout. Cupboards, cages and boxes line Ultz’s unfussily bare stage. Food connects sex and violence, pointing (a touch heavy-handedly) to the animal urges that give rise to madness. Costumes are a collage: military uniforms, morning suits and high-street casuals.

The effect, like the different signature tunes that coarse through an opera, is to allow different perspectives on different elements. We can enjoy the narrative and decode it at the same time; the production is both plot and literary criticism. The play is exploded into its individual components, which are presented like a list of apparatus. If there’s a downside, it is that, occasionally, one sees right through the play to the other side.

When it holds together, however, this Changeling is brilliantly multi-faceted. Hill-Gibbins’s approach is that of a cocktail mixologist, finely balancing and counterbalancing individual scenes with dramaturgical seasoning. So, for example, when on her wedding night Beatrice-Joanna discovers Alsemero’s virginity-testing potion, Hill-Gibbins has the reception disco’s choons seeping through the walls, while at the banquet table the brother of her original fiancé Alonzo pieces together evidence of his murder.

The production’s other chief achievement is in making extreme actions seem utterly plausible, even sympathetic. Hill-Gibbins has a real eye for translating the text into startling images: Daniel Cerqueria’s De Flores, his pustulous face like a nest of maggots, becomes as accursed as he is abhorrent; as is his opposite number, Lollio (Alex Beckett) lusting in turn over his mistress; Henry Lloyd-Hughes’s Antonio, feigning the symptoms of cerebral palsy to get access to Isabella, is even more starkly repulsive. Yet, all are grounded in the strength of their motivating (animal) urges.

These, too, do for Kobna Holdbrook-Smith’s Alsemero, who bursts from straight-laced preppiness to raging cuckold like the incredible hulk and Jessica Raine’s Beatrice-Joanna, whose attempts to extricate herself from an undesirable situation only serve to tighten her tangle like a fly wrigging out of a spider’s web. That she seems collected and rational throughout, despite plotting murder, allowing herself to be deflowered by De Flores and bedswapping with her maid is an extraordinary feat in itself.

And all this without mention of the dumbshow. Infused with Gaga and Beyonce, it is warped and ironic, hysterical and hideous, and, for my money, provides ten of the most thrilling, squirm-inducing and brash minutes you’ll see in a theatre all year.

Photograph: Keith Pattison

Review: Love Letters Straight From Your Heart, Southbank Centre

Written for Culture Wars

Perhaps someone at the Southbank Centre was cracking a joke by placing Love Letters Straight From Your Heart into the Blue Room. There may be no A-List nudity, but Uninvited Guests’ mutual love-in shares its ambition with David Hare’s play of the same name and La Ronde, on which it is based; namely, to celebrate love in all its permutations, smooth-running or otherwise.

“In this room”, says a suited Richard Dufty, “it is always Valentine’s Day. Everywhere.” Sat around a rose-specked, red-clothed banquet table, as if guests at a wedding, we listen to tales of romance and unrequited love, of broken hearts and bezzie mates.

At either end, behind laptops and sound desks, gazing into each others’ eyes, sit Dufty and his performing partner Jessica Hoffmann. Armed with well-stocked iTunes libraries, they start to duel with love songs, cycling through the anonymous song dedications and love stories donated by its audience. There’s Elvis and George Benson, Burt Bacharach and Beyonce. Some are gushingly overblown. Some are scorched with regret. Others, a tad inappropriate. All are elegantly, glowingly sincere.

Besides the fun of spotting the loved-up culprit (usually either teary or shame-faced), there’s a gentle, but unabashed, sentimentality in all this. Certain songs take a tuning fork to your spine (Fools Rush In gets me every time). Others tickle your tear ducts into life or tease your lips into a light smile. It can be pinpointedly affecting.

Yet, there’s a more cynical side to Love Letters..., which (knowingly) manufactures the seemingly personal as much as any inscription on a love heart. “This was our song and it will remain that way forever,” runs one dedication. “Hang about,” you think, “it’s my song too.” They are all out songs. Smartly, even as it uses such cultural triggers, it consciously undermines them.

Lit by the lonely glow of their computer screens, Dufty and Hoffman seem like two late-night DJs forever churning out dedications; a purgatory of other people’s romantic gestures. They grow increasing dishevelled and start to compete. Loving stares tense into sharpened glares. Love songs seem to slip out of tune like milk turning sour.

Love is…a lived experience. Not a greetings card slogan. It runs in the blood, not bloodless prose. And it can hurt like hell.

This is all part of the endless chase – itself a central (and beautifully constructed) image of Love Letters..., which manages to suggest that perhaps we are all placed on earth to scour its face for a mate.

At the same time, the piece rattles off a number of ideas, without really nailing its colours to the mast. Uninvited Guests open up an hour for the consideration of love, but, for all the delicacy of their offering, don’t really say that much. As a show reliant on lists, a post-dramatic trope that almost guarantees gratification, it is inevitably flattish and, I daresay, a little easy.

Photograph: Uninvited Guests/FUEL