Review: The King’s Speech, Wyndham’s Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

David Seidler’s theatre script is, of course, the original. The one spotted by Tom Hooper’s mum at the Pleasance theatre and sent spiralling into global phenomenon. However, don’t expect comparisons with the Oscar-winning, world-dominating Colin-Firth-elevating film. I’ve somehow managed to avoid even the trailer and, plonked in front of this perfectly predictable fare, I was all the more glad. Adrian Noble’s production is categorically proficient and eminently missable.

Of course, Seidler’s story is no match for cynicism, which quickly reduces it to the story of a speech impediment not quite overcome. Yet Seidler’s skill as a storyteller is to find exactly the right elements to magnify that slight core. He hikes up the tension by staking a nation – perhaps even the world – on a single speech. First, there’s his philandering partyboy of a brother and first heir, Edward; then, looming large in the background, there’s Hitler. With Churchill and Archbishop of Canterbury Cosmo Lang lurking conspiratorially, Charles Edwards' B-B-B-Bertie seeks out Lionel Louge (Jonathan Edwards) for unconventional speech therapy.

The King’s Speech offers the smoothest ride in town, including the London Eye. Every narrative inflection is in precisely the right place and its metaphors – mostly about the monarchy and the media – are pronounced with the utmost of clarity. To finish, Noble’s elegantly minimalist production provides just the right hit of patriotism to flush your veins and make rapturous applause a reflex response.

Ultimately though the whole thing feels like Shakespeare watered down for a GCSE English class. Siedler’s script is so well-whittled that every line is designed to move the narrative forward. On one level, that’s admirable, but on another it leaves everything a little too storyboarded. The result is a spasmodic structure, happy to insert a four-line scene where a deft dash of exposition would have been so much neater. I’ve never seen a rotating stage put to so much use. It’s like watching a washing machine cycle.

That the final production comes out so flawlessly unstained is perhaps the biggest problem with The King’s Speech. While it’s good, solid populist theatre, there is nothing whatsoever to get excited about. At least a corking, lowest-common denominator musical offers some spectacle. Edwards and Hyde give perfectly decent performances, though Edwards probably gets extra traction from the overt challenge of the stutter. Nonetheless, The King’s Speech is theatre at its most resolutely acceptable.

Review: Foté Foré, London Roundhouse

Written for Time Out

Footballers are forged on the streets of Brazil; entrepreneurs in London's East End, and acrobats on the beaches of Guinea in West Africa. All share the same individual flare.

Three years after forming, Cirque Mandingue have already toured the world with their first show, Foté Foré (Black White), which now opens this year's CircusFest. It is old-school display team circus without the theatrical metaphor that has elevated the artform in recent years.

However, their feats are made doubly impressive by sheer force of passion and showboating gusto. Other troupes manoeuvre themselves into daring positions inch by inch. Mandingue just dive in. Human houses of cards spring up in seconds. They attack a makeshift Chinese pole, each trying to outdo the last. In Abdoulaye Keita, it has the best contortionist I've ever seen. He comes close to making a Möbius strip of his spine.

However, quieter and comic sections can't compete with these explosions. Régis Truchy's bodypopping tourist character, all OTT gurns, is a clunky device that gives the show a hint of tourist board promotion.

Beforehand, downstairs, there's a 20-minute amuse bouche from tech-specialists Il Pixel Rosso. The Great Spavaldos uses virtual reality to transform you into a trapeze artist. Though it's scruffy and often out of sync, it's a dizzying little spin.

Review: Vera Vera Vera, Royal Court

To give Hayley Squires her dues, she writes impeccable dialogue. It is deft, responsive and, ninety-nine per cent of the time, handles subtext elegantly. Her characters play political games, skirting their true feelings and performing the people they want to be perceived as into existence. This takes some serious skill and, in one so young, suggests a natural playwright.

However, the problem with her debut play Vera Vera Vera is that it’s very difficult to pin down. The ideas contained, all of which are beautifully hung through careful signification, are nonetheless too wishy-washily diverse to coalesce into an argument. It seems variously a play tackling neolithic masculinity, class and the cultural glamorisation of violence. Either Squire has stopped short of picking a cause or she’s been unable to tie a number bugbears together. The result is a watercolour vagueness and it’s not helped by a production that pulls in different directions and leaves you scrabbling for an interpretative inroad.

For starters, Squires gives us two parallel narratives that, for the best part of the hour, seem unconnected. In one, two teenagers, Sammy and Charlie (Ted Riley and Abby Rakic-Platt), warm up for a playground fight to serve retribution for snide rumour mongering. In another, two siblings prepare to bury their brother Bobby, a soldier recently killed in action. His sister Emily (Danielle Flett), and her friend and secret lover Lee (Daniel Kendrick), want him upheld as a hero and all-round good guy; brother Danny, a bilious brute disturbingly played by Tommy McDonnell, has nothing but disdain for his comparatively wet brother, who failed to protect his sister’s reputation. After you’ve searched for mirrors and echoes between these two – and they certainly exist – Squires links them by blood to no great effect: Charlie turns out to be Bobby’s cousin.

The most prominent idea is that of honour and violence. On the one hand Squires seems to warn against the hollowness of mythologizing Bobby in death and is critical of computer games such as Medal of Honour. Yet, she also upholds the nobility of Sammy’s defending Charlie’s honour and Lee’s standing up to Danny over Emily. She’s not quite preaching peace, pure and simple, despite the implications of Sammy’s belief that “cuddles are the way forward,” or Emily’s sadness that “no one gave anyone cuddles at the funeral.” Nonetheless, Squires seems more at home with sentiment than resentment and the best sequences are the softer moments in which Sammy and Charlie’s relationship blossoms.

But then, Tom Piper’s design, an idyllic English landscape besmirched with litter, so strongly suggests a state-of-the-nation play that one’s thoughts turn to English repression and moral decay. You start to think in terms of class – the teenagers seem lower middle-class, their elders a Kray Brothers underworld – that’s not really present. I can’t remember a play so badly served by design. Not because Piper’s design is bad, in and of itself – it’s neither unsightly nor insignificant – but because it’s wrong; a red herring.

All this is not to say that Squires needs to write about something directly, but that Vera Vera Vera sends you into a tailspin. The sensation is like trying to solve a jigsaw that doesn’t fit together and, despite Jo McInnes’s skilled direction and excellent performances from McDonnell, Flett and Rakic-Platt, Vera Vera Vera is more frustrating than it is illuminating.

Review: Assassins, Pleasance Theatre

Written for Time Out

While Sweeney Todd stalks the West End, Stephen Sondheim's Assassins are patrolling London's fringe. Ironically, given both ticket prices and subject matter, you get more bang for your buck with the former.

Nonetheless, Sondheim's talent is such that 'Assassins' remains enjoyable despite this half-cocked production. Its cast of would-be US president slayers are catnip for actors, all eccentric and impassioned, and its songs surge into a rallying protest. Whenever Another National Anthem rings out it is as staunch as anything in Les Misérables.

Director Ray Rackham doesn't catch this tone of righteous indignation until the end, emphasising comedy over cause. He gives us crackshot crackpots and, while each wannabe killer enjoys their moment, bowing beneath the starry, striped curtain, we never really feel the injustices of the American dream that moves their trigger-fingers.

Instead, it's all a little underpowered and askew. Joe Bunker's musical direction flattens the score's subtleties. Some accents waver, some singing voices quiver, but there are some characterful performances nonetheless.

Brandon Force is likeably doolally as Charles Guiteau, Martin Dickinson makes a noble John Wilkes Booth and Johnjo Flynn's preppy Balladeer, the very spit of JFK, morphs unnervingly into Lee Harvey Oswald.

Review: The Master and Margarita, Barbican Centre

Written for Culture Wars

Mikhail Bulgakov’s great satiric novel cries out for theatrical adaptation. Not only does it use the theatre as an integral metaphor and a central plot point, it is so vividly written that the narrative runs like a movie in your head. At the same time, however, its kaleidoscopic structure seems too disjointed and its hallucinogenic episodes, too impossibly otherworldly to fit the stage. “Go on,” it seems to whisper with a grin, “Dare you.”

Simon McBurney’s staging then deserves praise for simply making it to the stage and handling its story with the utmost of clarity. What nags is that its central concern seems simply, “How might we stage this bit?”

Beyond Es Devlin’s projection-orientated design, which maps Moscow into a series of blueprint plans as Lars von Trier did in Dogville, there is very little attempt to link the various sections together thematically. The result is that Complicité present the story rather as is, without really weaving an interpretative path through. Rather than using the new medium to illuminate, McBurney’s production seems content merely to translate from one to another, simply realising the text in three dimensions. It seems a waste; theatre as technical exercise.

That’s not to say that The Master and Margarita is just a fantastical tale. It’s central message, that every individual has a responsibility to speak his or her true mind rather than blithely following the grain, seems particularly pertinent in a world struggling to reorder, even to reinvent, itself.

Bulgakov’s Moscow, corrupt and money-driven on the surface, is easy prey for the devilish Professor Woland because its majority silently conform. He can whip them into a frenzy or steer them like cattle. There are too few men like the Master (Paul Rhys), whose prosaic reconfiguration of Christ into a non-divine Holy Man shows his willingness to stand up and be counted no matter the cost. (McBurney and co-writer Kemp entwine these two layers exquisitely, so that Christ and Pilate exist next to the Master and his Margarita.) By making a casting triangle of Woland, the Master and Christ, McBurney sews them smartly together to form the truss of Bulgakov’s novel.

Beyond that, however, it is an impressive, but strangely cold and surprisingly heartless affair. McBurney has deliberately toned down the novel’s popping-candy quality in favour of a more sparse and Soviet aesthetic. That makes the more freewheeling second-half, which hops from the Master to Margarita’s tale, the more enjoyable, as a blue-bodied, raspy Sinead Matthews graces the Devil’s ball full of dinner-jacketed decaying guests.

Even so, the over-reliance on technology somewhat castrates Complicité’s stagecraft. For the flying sequence, Matthews lies on the floor, on which projected backdrops whizz past, and just wobbles a bit. Filmed from above and re-projected on the backwall, the effect reminds one of shoddy Superman green-screen techniques. The tram collision, a rush of bodies behind a phone-box-like structure on wheels, is ten times more effective.

The truth is that McBurney’s staging, for all its technical wizardry, can’t live up to the phantasmagoria the novel conjures in your head. Woland’s three henchman are a case in point. Here, Azazello and Koroviev – a squat, snaggle-toothed bundle and a humanoid brick wall – are reduced to the (admittedly caricaturish) human forms of Ajay Naidu and Angus Wright, while Behemoth the oversized cat becomes a rather ungainly puppet. In their own theatrical terms, none of these things are problematic, but next to the pictures Bulgakov paints they fall drastically – and inevitably – short.

Photograph: Bohumil Kostohryz

Review: Seven Day Drunk, Soho Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Bryony Kimmings is an enigma. Her work comes encased with whopping great quotation marks around it. So many, in fact, that you lose track of the layers of knowing irony you’re supposed to be peeling off and just sit back and laugh along. She’s a real hoot: thoroughly likeable, self-mocking and ferociously uninhibited.

Last year, Kimmings spent seven consecutive days drunk, maintaining a blood alcohol level of 0.7% between the hours of 10am and 7pm. That involved breakfasting on 11 vodka shots and totting up throughout the day, while being monitored by a walk-in centre’s worth of clinical psyciatrists, psychologists, neuroscientists and nurses. To explore the relationship of alcohol and creativity (like, why do so many artists drink so much, yeah?), she made a whole heap of art and tested it out in front of friendly, judicious audiences. It’s science, see? Except, of course, it’s not.

And that’s fine. We don’t go to the Soho Downstairs cabaret bar for the latest clinical testing results, and Kimmings is perfectly entertaining and passingly illuminating. Who knew that limp-wristedness can signify a malfunctioning liver, for example? Or that there were three main types of alocohol use in artists: mystical transportation, sensitive retreat from reality and middle class slumming?

What’s more obvious is that Kimmings's art – much of which she recreates for us sober – gets worse with the rising inebriation. So does her mood. Both were bound to, though, weren’t they? She kicks off with Day 1’s witty song and ends with Day 7’s downer, an semi-coherent moping ode to her family that took four hours to compose. Funnily enough, the clinical results attest otherwise, which suggests that audiences take pity on drunken artists. She has an audience member drink alongside the show, as living proof of alcohol’s effects, and talks us through her early associations with alcohol.

That she turns around after all this and describes an idyllic night’s raucous drinking that whizzes from beers in the park to ciders at a lock-in, shots in a club owned by Eastern Europeans and Bloody Marys over the next day’s The Observer presents a soaring, heady finale. More than anything, for the first time, she really, really means it. That makes all the difference.

Because Kimmings uses irony as a hiding place. Seven Day Drunk, like its predecessor Sex Idiot, is made up of knowingly jejune performance knick-knacks – a bathetic song here, a whimsical bromide there – all delivered in a series of flamboyantly ridiculous costumes that transform her into some sort of hipster clown. She takes potshots at the notion of art itself, most potently in the squawked number “I’m An Artist (A Fucking Artist).” It’s all designed to be absolutely, 100%, certifiably unpretentious. She refers to the whole process as an “art project” – a deliberately childish and amateurish label – and she fills the final show with shoddy, self-indulgent, but crucially self-aware, routines. (At least here, unlike in Sex Idiot, her previous drunkenness provides a surface reason for them.) She plays the classic clueless clown, except that she’s totally clued-up, so we’re all in on the joke. We can all see those inverted commas, right? Isn’t art stupid?

But no, no it’s not. At least, it doesn’t have to be. My point is that Kimmings could make really good art from really good components, but chooses not to. That way lies real risk – not the sort of faux daring with which she’s obviously completely comfortable. Instead, she makes decent entertainment out of substandard components. Ultimately, Seven Day Drunk does little more than confirm expectations, albeit with colour, sparkle and a huge sense of fun. Writing this feels excessively critical, but I’m positive Kimmings could keep all those qualities while doing something that genuinely matters, both to her and to us, and that, I really want to see.

Photograph: courtesy of Bryony Kimmings

Review: Sweeney Todd, Adelphi Theatre

Popular culture’s serial killers rarely resemble their real-life counterparts. Generally, we get ripped rippers and ice-cool assassins rather than the sort of social misfits found staring blankly from the news pages. Sondheim’s demon barber and his partner in prime cuts often get the same gloss. In Tim Burton’s film version they seemed like pristine porcelain dolls, butchering the hirsute of London with a balletic grace.

Not so with Michael Ball and Imelda Staunton. The brilliance of their confederacy is that they are both at once: cartoonish but chillingly sociopathic. They share a cross-eyed intensity, but otherwise make a perfectly mismatched pairing. Ball is barrel-chested and still as a mountain; Staunton’s Mrs Lovett is impish and fidgety. One zen, one manic. Their age difference – only six years, but it seems more – elevates the delicious perversity of the arrangement and their relationship – obsessed landlady rather than heated lovers – has a ring of Orton or Pinter to it. She drools over him, as he fixes his attention on his razor blades.

The actor’s challenge with Sweeney Todd is that we must cheer him all the way to his downfall and death. Ball handles it with easy flair and greasy hair. Every sinew of his body is devoted to taking revenge on those responsible for the death of his wife. When he flicks away Mrs Lovett’s profit-driven protestations, his resolution is admirable, but nonetheless repulsive. His eyes have a permanent glint, catching the light like his trusty blades, but it finally melts into a teary sheen; first fait accompli, then fate tragic.

Staunton, meanwhile, tiptoes between the humour and detached gruesomeness of Mrs Lovett blissfully. Her opening number, The Worst Pies in London, is given the bray of a woman frazzled to the very edge of sanity. She sings as if her larynx is covered in flour. Yet, elsewhere, she can be meltingly tender, summoning traces of a long-repressed maternal instinct for Not While I’m Around. You never know which Mrs Lovett you’re going to get and, while Staunton stops short of schizophrenia, she is brilliantly unhinged.

Almost everything in Jonathan Kent’s production is exquisitely done. In particular, Anthony Ward’s set, a towering East London of broken window panes and metal fire escapes, is gorgeous. Terrifically lit by Mark Henderson, it gets all the Hogarthian grime of the city’s gutters and the scale of its industrial warehouses. Ward’s 1930’s setting, suggesting a distant depression, also offsets hints of Victorian workhouses with flashes of 1950’s Americana: Pirelli’s travelling stall and con routine, the spangley new bulb sign above Mrs Lovett’s shop, Sweeney’s retro-red barber’s chair. It all delicately underscores the edges of their cutthroat capital gains.

Then, of course, there is Sondheim’s astonishing layered score, which reads clearly even to the most untrained ear (i.e. my own). He contrasts the buttery love songs of Anthony and Johanna (Luke Brady and Lucy May Barker) with sharp, shrill metallic clangs that suggest the clatter of a cutlery draw. All this without sacrificing the odd take home number; Johanna, in particular, seeps silkily into your brain as if by osmosis. From time to time a steam whistle explodes with a shriek, jolting you forward like a high voltage shock.

And yet, admirable though this production’s component parts are, Sondheim’s musical is not flawless. Yes, it’s smart enough to pick up the pace to a stunning climax that sends you home reeling. But the first half is exposition heavy and its songs often say the same thing over and over, without the necessarily ticklish play of A Little Priest. At times you’re longing for the throat-slashing to commence. Furthermore, though it adds tonal variety, the young lovers subplot just can’t compete.

However, a little patience does nothing to blunt a production as stunning, steely and eloquently acted as this.

Photograph: Tristram Kenton

Review: Shivered, Southwark Playhouse

Written for Culture Wars

Philip Ridley’s plays are like staged graphic novels. His worlds are familiar, but fantastical: like life embossed or outlined in black felt tip. He tinkers with the colour filter, so that everything is enhanced, more vivid, and his bipolar dramas flick from dream-like to nightmarish with the speed of seizures. His signature is a cocktail of viscera and glitter.

Usually Ridley works on a single setting in real-time. Shivered, darting frantically around in both time and space, takes his comic book style further than ever. There’s not much narrative, but, boy, does it go a long way. It is a sprawling thing, a web of thin individual threads, but it is bulked up by its cut-up chronology.

Were it played in order, we’d get snippets of backstory spread over a decade, a condensed burst of present tense action and a flash-forward epilogue. The pivotal point, perhaps, is an eruption between two teenage friends. Ryan (Joseph Drake) lashes out savagely at Jack, who has persuaded him to watch a YouTube clip of his soldier brother’s horrific death. Its sheer brutality comes with jaw-slackening suddenness.

As a shattered jigsaw, Shivered demands detective work of its audience. Early snapshot scenes seem unconnected, but as gaps are filled in, connecting threads become visible. Ridley’s exquisite dramaturgical craft means the process of reconstruction is simultaneously cryptic and effortless.

However, even pieced back together, Shivered’s narrative is less important than its social diagnosis. Individual characters and stories are secondary. The world that shaped them, a distorted reflection of our own, comes first.

With its post-industrial ruins and wastelands, its fairgrounds and run-down community halls, Shivered sculpts Essex into a vaguely post-apocalyptic dystopia; half-Marvel, half-mundane. Previously described by the playwright as “a state-of-the-nation dream play”, its England seems empty, perhaps abandoned; semi-lawless and feral. Disenfranchised teenage nerds are left to their own devices and go hunting for monsters in canals. Gangs are on the prowl: packs that hunt down such stragglers and ambush them for mobile phones and pocket money. Truth-seeking conspiracy theorists meet secretly in disused buildings. British soldiers are beheaded overseas.

These are unnerving images, but all are merely skin-deep symptoms of some deeper, undefined national infection. (Ridley, with his emphasis on storytelling and his high-def language, has always harnessed the power of the unseen, and Shivered’s vague sketchiness makes it all the more potently uneasy.) England – perhaps the whole world – seems sick. Real sick. Several of Ridley’s characters have trouble walking. They “feel the veins [in their legs] knotting together;” they keel over with cramp; they wind up in wheelchairs. One man, referred to anecdotally, “lost both his legs to sugar.” (Even one of the tripod’s legs is a bit stiff.) We are looking at a broken version of humanity; one so fearful of the real world that it has retreated from it and, seemingly, (d)evolved accordingly. It’s telling that the youngest generation are worst affected – Ryan’s hands are deformed, Jack limps from the start – but also that Ryan’s attack, when it comes, is almost prehistoric. He clubs Jack to the floor with a rock.

Instead they have turned to an escapist world of their own construction, in which everything is mediatised or faked. Jack (a gremlin-like Josh Williams) is a YouTube addict, telling tales of chainsaw amputations, impaled Santas and Guinness enemas. He argues, passionately and in depth, that the beheading video is a set-up. Meanwhile, Jack’s mother (who he frequently deceives) bluffs her way as a medium, but has nonetheless convinced herself of her ‘gift’. Ryan’s mum Lyn (Olivia Poulet) plays out rape fantasies with her lover Gordy, who works a raffle scam at the funfair that hosts his fake freak show.

The point of this – and here Ridley is guilty of golden ageism – is that Britain has turned away from reality. The disused car-plant, around which the whole of this particular community was built, is a symbol of a long-gone industrial Britain. Now, in this virtual country, it throws a long shadow over the town and its inhabitants.

Like many, Ryan’s family moved to Draylingstowe on account of the factory’s economic prospects. Once a source of life, it is now a tap run dry, after the Japanese owners deemed it no longer suitably profitable and moved their manufacturing overseas. That cost Ryan’s father Mikey first his job, then his life. He committed suicide in the empty factory hulk, which now serves as his son’s hunting ground and his wife’s sexual playground. It has become a totemic relic, a pilgrimage site to which empty lives gravitate in search of something long gone. Yet while Draylingstowe depended on it, the car-plant was also parasitic. Chemicals in paint used at the plant have, Mikey believes, caused the spate of mutations in Draylingstowe’s children.

Ridley handles his poetic politics deftly; all this is glanced throughout, but never rammed down our throats. His command of story is strong enough to remain the foreground and his language, always emotive and evocative, is beautifully heightened, almost to the point of romanticism. Director Russell Bolam stands back and lets the writing do the work, which is perfectly fine, even if it leaves the play’s dramaturgy unvarnished. His design team have worked wonders with the bare minimum: Anthony Lamble nails the graphic novel quality, while lighting and sound from Richard Howell and Tom Gibbons sends Shivered jangling down your spine.

Photograph: Helen Murray

Review: Play House / Definitely the Bahamas, Orange Tree Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

In his twenties, Martin Crimp wrote Definitely the Bahamas about a couple in their fifties. Now, in his mid-fifties himself, he has reversed the procedure with Play House, which centres on a couple in their twenties. The two shorts inform one another beautifully: one is the photographic negative of the other.

Initially, Definitely the Bahamas must have read as a clinical examination of a specifically middle-class species of middle-age. The play is sharp and sniping, unforgiving of the sort of suburban superciliousness that peers down its nose at others while ensuring it’s own looks perfectly powdered and blemish-free at all times.

Milly and Frank, a retired couple, natter judgementally about an acquaintance whose home was burgled while she was away in the Bahamas. (Or was it the Canaries?) More importantly, they keep careful tabs on the comings and goings of their young Dutch lodger Marika (Lily James) and speak gushingly about their thirty-something son Mike, who seems rather more unpleasant and manipulative than they would ever be willing to concede.

Yet, next to Play House – which is the feistier of the two – it’s emphasis changes from class to age. The needling criticisms of this prickly attack seem tempered by some level of understanding. It’s as if Crimp is, to a certain extent, empathising with those he once admonished.

Together the plays show the almost inevitable slant into conservatism and, alongside Play House’s gregarious young couple, Milly and Frank’s civil bitchiness comes across as a sad reflection of their own empty lives. They seem to sit on sofas, cups and saucers in hand, and live vicariously through the younger generation or replay their own pasts, bickering over the details of their memories. If, as George Bernard Shaw once quipped, youth is wasted on the young, middle age offers nothing to waste but dead time.

In Play House, Simon and Katrina have moved into their first house together. In short scenes, almost flashbulb snapshots, we see fragments of their daily lives. Everything is an adventure. Even scraping the congealed gunge off the fridge is exciting. There are promotions and pills, arguments and sex. Both relish their newfound adult status, even though they don’t really feel it. They dive into the game of life, viewing even Katrina’s occasional psychotic episodes (which she seems to have inherited from her father) as challenges of their maturity and independence.

Their scorn for others is different to that of Milly and Frank. It is more brazen and condescending, almost a matter of lauding their energy, activity and, most of all, their freedoms over others. In short, they believe they’re living life as it is meant to be lived: drinking and shagging and enjoying everything without needing anything more.

Nonetheless, insecurities lurk; they’d love a bigger, less shitty flat, higher salaries, to be taken seriously. “Why can’t we say or do or think anything of importance?” asks Simon. Here one sees the beginnings of the inevitable slide towards all that they despise: middle-aged conservativism, bitterness, regret and, possibly, psychosis.

Crimp directs both pieces with the same clinical crispness of his writing. Definitely the Bahamas is staged as the radio play it initially was, emphasising the fakery on show and bringing tell-tale vocal tics to the fore, while Play House lays out its props like scientific apparatus to emphasis the irresistible lure of material success. Kate Fahy is all quivering niceties and barbed compliments as Milly, opposite Ian Gelder’s lethargic, let-me-be Frank. Lily James, who also plays Marijke, and Obi Abili invest Play House’s younger couple with just the right edge of vitality that’s simultaneously enviable and erosible.

Photograph: Robert Day

Review: Moon on a Rainbow Shawl, National Theatre

Written for Whatsonstage.com

From an over-crowded patch of a Trinidad housing estate, everyone looks up at the same moon and dreams of escape. Here, noise constantly seeps through corrugated iron walls: someone else’s music, someone else’s arguments, someone else’s sexual groans. Eyes peer into private spaces as nosey neighbours pry. Tempers fray and territorial lines are drawn. The residents follow one another around with mocking catcalls. And it’s hot; the sort of sapping humidity that makes everything heavy and slow.

Little wonder that those living so on top of each other want out. Danny Sapani’s Ephraim, worn down by the daily grind of driving a trolleybus, has himself a ticket to England; Esther, his neighbours’ daughter, has won a scholarship and Mavis (Jenny Jules), a brassy prostitute living on the other side, is trying to sleep her way out of the slum.

For some, even brief respite is enough: Charlie, for whom cricket once offered hope of a better life in England, steals from his landlord’s business and enjoys a carefree night of drinking, to the frustration of his pragmatist wife Sophia.

Yet Errol John’s 1953 play is no mere poverty porn. By methodically laying out the obstacles that prevent escape, poverty’s cyclical grip, it’s too kindly and empathetic for that. Esther’s scholarship, for example, still doesn’t cover the cost of her uniform. She should be studying, but there are chores to be done and errands to run. Ephraim is wary of the trap, but any route out comes at the expense of his peers. By leaving, he abandons Rosa, pregnant with his child, just as Mavis slowly hauls herself out by making her neighbours’ lives a misery.

In this, Moon on a Rainbow Shawl transcends both race and place. Despite its historical interest around immigration, there’s no doubt director Michael Buffong intends us to see echoes of London’s poorest estates, but his languid, heartfelt production lets us make the leap ourselves. John’s play can be over-insistent and transparent, but Buffong always draws attention to its human side and perfectly achieves the atmosphere of scorched melancholy.

He’s helped by a terrific ensemble, all comfortable with the slow pace, hanging silences and gorgeous intimacy of Soutra Gilmour’s traverse staging. Their eyes glaze as their brains whir idle dreams. Sapani’s softness ensures Ephraim never seems cruel, even when damning Jade Anouka’s bright-eyed Rosa to the quicksands of poverty. Martina Laird captures all of Sofia’s steely mettle with saintly patience. On discovering Charlie’s crime, she steps back in disappointment, then steps forward to find a solution. Jules walks a catwalk-model’s hip-swinging snap, but stops short of ridiculing Mavis, and there’s strong work from Tahirah Sharif’s eager Esther and Jude Akuwudike’s dead beat Charlie in this fine find of a play.

Photograph: Jonathan Keenan

Review: One Man Two Guvnors, Theatre Royal Haymarket

Written for Time Out

A new cast moves into Richard Bean's uproarious update of A Servant to Two Masters without loss. All the bellylaughs are present and correct, but One Man, Two Guvnors still lacks what it's always lacked: a killer second-half routine.

Don't let that put you off, though, because Bean's play is top tier end-of-the-pier stuff. The restaurant scene that ends the first half is among the best-crafted farce you'll see. With Francis Henshall sprinting between his two supping superiors, Alfie, the frailest garçon in the West, gets caught in the culinary crossfire. Martin Barrass's doddery waiter justifies the ticket price alone.

Generally, the actors work harder, but serve Bean's play better. As Henshall, Harlequin's hip replacement, former understudy Owain Arthur is a proper old-school star, with shades of Oliver Hardy and George Formby. A steroidal Toby Jones with a seesawing Welsh accent, he's weirder than Corden, adding menace without sacrificing warmth. In times of stress, his face turns puce like a rising thermometer.

Gemma Whelan adds real flint to Rachel, the girl disguised as a gangster, while Hannah Spearritt increases Pauline's joyful dimness. Ben Mansfield and Daniel Ing nail the hammy asides of the cocksure men, and even if Jodie Prenger can't stop her hips from hula-ing, it remains a knockout.

Review: Avon Calling, Camden People's Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Any character that spills their guts without good cause comes across as completely unhinged. Louise Platt’s Avon representative Deborah, a maelstrom in magenta, arrives at your front door laden with both emotional and physical baggage. She volunteers personal information and emotional scars so freely in front of strangers – clients, no less – that she must be the first cosmetics saleswoman without any foundation.

That’s a real shame, because Avon Calling has the potential to be sharply political, as well as a hoot. Instead, it unravels too easily and too melodramatically to hit its target.

The form is a classic case of twist a non-theatrical form of performance into interactive theatre. Platt guides us through the party games designed to sell Avon products, so we’re up on our feet being pampered and playing Put the Lipstick on the Avon Lady and Sniff You Out from the off. Reece Witherspoon, the face of Avon, presides over it, peering glossily out of a vivid pink frame on the mantelpiece.

To make £38, an Avon representative needs to sell £150 worth of product. Given the wholesale discounts she’s forced to offer by the corporation, that’s nine bottles of So So Soft hand-cream per person per party. Debs is nothing but a corporate foot-soldier; a worker bee grafting away to line the coiffeurs of boardroom execs.

Rather than gradually fray in the situation, doing her best to plough one but collapsing, Platt’s character is a nervous wreck whose breakdown is immediately inevitable. In short, it’s her first time hosting solo, seemingly after the death of her mother, whose politely clipped vowels emanate from various moisturisers and mascaras. Of course, over 80 minutes, Debs realises her own exploited status and throws off the shackles for a new career.

But Katie Day's production needn’t go so far. The points about disempowered women, about the beauty industry and paradigms of appearance and, most of all, about corporate injustice read without being so thoroughly exposed and Avon Calling would be far better served by really committing to the Avon party form, rather than overturning it with drama-with-a-capital-d.

It’s still lightly charming and there’s plenty of awkward character comedy to go alongside the party games. Avon Calling works best as an Avon party for those too cynical to be seen dead at such a gathering. Essentially, it’s a parlour game first, and theatre second.

Photograph: Chris Keenan

Review: Can We Talk About This?, National Theatre

Written for Whatsonstage.com

“This is shit! Islamaphobic shit!” shouts the man who has just burst into the Lyttleton auditorium. He throws something – it could be faeces – at the stage. The interruption sends a jolt through the room. Heads turn. Concentration snaps. The show pauses.

It must have been staged. The stagehand that appears with a dustpan and brush is slightly too quick off the mark. The protest itself chimes too neatly with the material. And yet, I can’t be 100% sure. That doubt proves the bravery and potency of DV8’s danced documentary on multiculturalism.

Essentially, it dares to ask whether tolerance extends to intolerance. More specifically, whether liberal Western society should grant freedom of expression to those individuals – particularly individual Muslims – that call for its destruction.

It’s a skilfully weaved case, constructed mostly from verbatim testimonial and media transcripts, that argues post-Rushdie, and a long list of similar attacks on those to have criticised Islam, society has bowed to threat. That we have become unwilling to assert the moral superiority of certain values over others fearful of offence or, worse, repercussions.

Turning focus on forced marriage and Sharia law, DV8 maintain that multiculturalism stops short of cultural relativism. It sounds a bit ‘Britain for British,’ but it’s absolutely not. The one law for all they advocate can – indeed, must – encompass a cross-cultural blend.

Lloyd Newson’s production plunges headlong into this paradox with the wilful determination of someone forcing their hand into a food disposal unit. It was always going to be messy. He’s careful to distinguish between Islam and “some Muslims,” but the absence of any other species of intolerance leaves the piece disconcertingly prone to manipulation and misunderstanding; a fact not helped by information overload. (You leave with a list of further reading and a headful of questions.) It’s a seriously steely artistic choice. Some will call it foolhardy, but theatre exists for such acts of public courage.

Verbatim texts hover above gorgeous choreography, almost dislocated from each other, but always balanced and integral. The effect is to entrance your eyes, the better to attune your ears.

Performers start by hopping in sync, from foot to foot, like politically correct mannequins. As arguments develop, movements grow jagged, complex and arrhythmic. There are motifs of treading carefully, horses backtracking and, with regards media debates, boxing glove-puppets trading harmless blows. The best sequence shows Anne Cryer MP sensibly and carefully arguing against forced marriage while floating, guru-like, with a cup of tea in hand.

Kudos to the National for its continued efforts to make equal partners of theatre and verbatim texts, but the real credit belongs to DV8 for theatre that demands – requires – a second viewing. Hold that against it if you will, but I’d rather theatre that’s too full, too complex and too important for a single sitting any day.

Theatre this potent, this outspoken and this courageous is rare. When it appears, it becomes absolutely necessary viewing.

Photograph: Matt Nettheim

Review: Going Dark, Young Vic

While your eyes never get used to the total darkness of Sound&Fury’s latest, the rest of you does. At first, it feels unusual; somewhere along the lines of a floatation tank. You’re aware of your physical edges, your body’s boundaries, and of the expanse of space around you. There’s also the odd sensation of genuine privacy in public, of being alone in a roomful of people.

These contrasting sensations – of self and beyond – could not be better synced with Going Dark’s entwined subjects: the universe and blindness. It shows Max, a lecturer at a Planetarium, losing his sight. While the universe expands, Max’s view of it shrinks; his peripheral vision gradually clenching into a pinhole camera’s perspective.

In dim light, we see Max both at work, enthusing over visible galaxies 2.5 million light years away, and at home, caring for his young son Leo. As his sight fades, both lives become harder, to the point of being jeopardised entirely.

Hattie Naylor’s script is blissfully empathetic, and benefits hugely from the combination of John MacKay’s tender performance and Sound&Fury’s stagecraft, both of which are equally stunning. MacKay is absolutely humane: dignified and vulnerable, determined and terrified. You like, respect and admire Max enormously, but he is, at all times, just another one of us. He can laugh about his diminishing sight, setting himself blindfold challenges that result in packed liquid lunches for Leo, but he also trembles at its approach.

Meanwhile, Sound&Fury gift us his experiences, surrounding our heads with confusing, sometimes overwhelming, cacophonies: street scenes and train announcements, or simply the darting voice of his son, pottering around with his talking Thunderbirds figurines. They save the best until last: a gorgeous deconstruction of the sounds of Max’s rain-pelted garden – the silver birch, the concrete path, the rosebush, the roof – that the mind reconfigures into a landscape around you.

Yet, as you grow accustomed to the sensations of darkness and low-light, the returns diminish. Naylor’s script does little more than place two ideas next to one another. No matter how neatly they are backed up by sensation, the 80 minutes start dragging as the food for thought runs out. Going Dark is more about feelings than it is ideas; a triumph of stagecraft over substance.

Nonetheless, its staged with such poetic aplomb that you never begrudge its slightness. Glimpsed moments are meltingly beautiful. Sound&Fury create a variety of locations, from dark rooms to kitchen stoves and bathroom sinks, from next to nothing, often through a certain type of light alone. As such, Max exists in a void, surrounded by blackness, and it becomes apparent – increasingly so as his vision fades – that, for all its enormity, the universe is no more than one’s own sphere of perception. From our individual windows on it, each of us is master of our own universe, no matter how adrift we might feel in it.

Photograph: Robert Hubert Smith

Review: Abigail's Party, Menier Chocolate Factory

Written for Whatsonstage.com

It wasn’t all cheesy-pineapples and fibre-lights in the 1970s. Like Alan Ayckbourn’s Absent Friends, Mike Leigh’s best-loved play shows the undercurrents of misogyny and material aspiration swirling beneath the era’s gauche surface.

Leigh’s play, still a cultural marker thanks to the BBC film version, is by far the superior, achieving all that Absent Friends manages (and more) with none of the artifice. Where Ayckbourn needs the kick-start of a drowned fiancée, Leigh requires only the sort of teenage house party that pierces some suburb’s peace every weekend. The fallout is entirely driven by his unrivalled grasp of character.

One now realises that Sue, the middle-class mother taking refuge from that party with her nouveau riche neighbours, is the lynchpin of the play’s continued success.

Her plummy presence – Susannah Harker’s thank-yous are like the polite ding-dong of suburban doorbells – ensures the brash tastes of her horrific hostess Beverley (Jill Halfpenny) remain rooted in class, not just the mockable gaucheness of the period. She looks down on Bev and her husband Laurence, just as they look down on new neighbours Tony and Susan, with their smaller house and two jobs. Abigail’s Party shows the working-class suburban invasion, recalled by David Eldridge’s In Basildon, in mid-flow, so that the self-made find themselves shoulder-to-shoulder with old-pros and CEOs. Under the fixed smiles and forced niceties are values as clashing as the prawn and baby-shit wallpaper, and Bev’s soiree soon becomes a hostage situation.

Lindsay Posner’s production thrives in the Menier’s intimate surrounds. We’re so close that the sickly vanilla of Beverley’s Estee Lauder perfume rolls across the auditorium like poison gas. It allows everything to exist in the details, whether of Mike Britton’s intricately ghastly set or the fine-tuned performances of a cast treating plum roles with both relish and respect.

Halfpenny borrows the needling nasals and lashing lisps of Alison Steadman’s original, but her Beverley is a more determinedly glamorous creature. In a glaring lime maxi-dress, dolled-up to the nines, she looks like the Angel that Charlie forgot to call.

Andy Nyman is fantastic as her husband, deep-breathing his way through the emasculating humiliation of his wife’s overt flirtation with Tony (Joe Absolom), while Harker looks like she’s distantly imagining the stains waiting for her at home. Natalie Casey strays furthest from the original, but her lobotomised goat-herd twist on Angela is perfectly in keeping with the role, while wringing more laughter from it.

Posner gives us all we want, from Demis Roussos to chilled Beaujolais, but still finds the surprise punch to silence our laughter. He controls fraying tempers and momentary outbursts with a conductor’s sensitivity and confirms – if further proof were needed – Abigail’s Party as a truly modern classic.

Photograph: Catherine Ashmore

Review: We Hope That You're Happy (Why Would We Lie?), Battersea Arts Centre

Written for Time Out

Do a little dance. Chug another Bud. Get down about Haitian earthquakes, Indonesian tsunamis and starving Africans. That's the secret to Western happiness, according to this 50-minute pocket-rocket from emerging artists Made In China, which sets out to expose empathy as a sham.

Guzzling beer and forcing down ice-lollies, almost to the point of choking, two best friends forever wallow in the world's suffering. They dance, faster and faster, to David Bowie's Rebel Rebel. They hope that we're happy, as long as we're one of them. The rest can go hang. Global inequality suits us fine.

The show's other line of thought, which sees performers Chris Bailey and Jessica Latowicki covered in flour and ketchup like ghosts of 9/11, follows Mel Brooks: tragedy is when I cut my finger, but when a natural disaster befalls your country, that's comedy. They munch popcorn and watch the world burn.

Drought-dry and drenched in irony, 'We Hope That You're Happy' is a performance piece shot through with liberal guilt, only just saving itself from sanctimony and self-loathing. It's also admirably fierce, thanks to Tim Cowbury's punchy, poetic text and the awesome - not to mention, stomach-churning - commitment of its two performers. However, articulate though their protests are, Made In China's absolute idealism ultimately feels adolescent.

Review: What I Heard About the World, Soho Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

For the right price, someone, somewhere will fake it like they mean it. Fancy being kidnapped? Head to Amsterdam. Want a taste of married life? Try Iran. Need mourners to bulk up your funeral-crowd or protestors to kick-start a movement? Both very doable. (Tears and Molotov cocktails not included.)

Alongside this multitude of simulations, listed with the scatty quality of a television magazine show, Third Angel throw up harsh realities from around the globe. A role-call of massacres and poverty lines and sexual trafficking pierces the jollity, and shows the sickness at the very heart of capitalism. What I Heard… makes you question whether we’ve already reached its logical extension, tumbled headlong down its slippery slope into a warped world. Just how much further – sorry, lower – can we go in the hunt for ever-larger profits? And moreover, at what cost and who’s expense?

It’s a well-conceived pincer attack that takes its time in making its point. Allusions to the financial arrangements behind the various fake tales are well-disguised enough to require the audience to make the connection. The problem, however, comes at the other end and, once the penny’s dropped, What I Heard… merely continues in the same vein, arguably only increasing the volume. To really break through it needs more nuance and development on top of its basic stance of objection, no matter how sincere and valid that position is.

Performed with a no-nonsense presentational style, it’s likeably scatty. Admittedly, there’s a tendency to illustrate the instances cited rather literally, so that stories about mid-air hijackings are accompanied by a paper plane being ‘flown’ around the space and so forth, but easily overlooked given the scope of ambition of a piece that’s willing to chase big game. The result is as entertaining as it is unsettling.

Photograph: Craig Fleming

Review: The Leisure Society, Trafalgar Studios

Written for Time Out

Just as you can have a great night out in a poky dive, The Leisure Society is a feeble, puerile play that nonetheless makes for an enjoyable 90 minutes. Taking aim at yuppie hypocrisy, its cheap shots come with a chaser of shame.

Well-to-do married couple Peter (Ed Stoppard) and Mary (Melanie Gray) invite divorced party-boy Mark (John Schwab) round for dinner, planning to break off their friendship. He turns up with his 21-year-old shag (Agyness Deyn) in tow and, while the hosts' baby bawls upstairs, the group's thoughts turn to sexual adventures.

As the spineless Peter, Stoppard over-pitches his best Woody Allen impression. While he motors for the laughs, former supermodel Deyn handles François Archambault's acerbic comedy with a lighter touch. Sometimes her conviction slips, but she's got great timing and achieves a droll combination of drowsy allure and blunt disdain.

Writer Archambault has a vivid, scathing satiric voice, but his flip-flapping characters haven't a scrap of psychological credibility and, rather than plotting a through-line, he offers a string of chronological snapshots separated by jump-cutting blackouts. (And then. And then. And what?)

Swerves into darker territory - think Saved as a sex farce - clunk into heavy-handed melodrama, and 'The Leisure Society's only depths are the ones it plumbs.

Review: Snookered, Bush Theatre

Written for Time Out

Alcohol is the playwright's friend: it's the ultimate dramatic catalyst. And boy, do they catalyse themselves in Ishy Din's debut play. It's a miracle the four young British Asian men gathered in a pool hall to mark the anniversary of a friend's death can stand, let alone shoot straight. Snookered? Snockered, more like.

There's resentment from the off. Shaf and group dufus Kammy are stuck in rudderless jobs in Middlesborough. Old schoolmate Billy's back from London and Mo's just about to join him. Banter jostles into bitterness and, sure enough, old truths emerge.

Aspiration and materialism collide with heritage and custom, and the four have opposing views on subsuming themselves into wider British culture. There's a running competition over commitment to Islam, despite the level-peggings of Hajj and happy hour.

Din, a minicab driver of 20 years, shows remarkable technical accomplishment. While the truths get tangled at the end, he has a real knack for dialogue that both flows and follows. However, rather than heralding a new voice, Snookered is a perfectly decent mates-play in the late-'90s mould.

However, Iqbal Kahn's humorous production is made by its performances. Jaz Deol finds a kernel of sensitivity in Billy, Muzz Khan makes a lumbering giant of Shaf and Asif Khan is hilariously gawky as Kammy.