Thoughts on London, Brighton Dome

Simon Stephens wrote Sea Wall and T5 independently of one another: the first for the Bush’s Broken Space season in 2008, the second had been premiered by DryWrite a few months earlier. Paines Plough aren’t the first to bring them together – the monologues have been similarly twinned in Germany, Greece and Spain – but doing so proves a revealing exercise, albeit more instructive about the playwright than the world.

First off, it’s fascinating to return to Sea Wall in the light of Stephens’s recent work and, in particular, it’s lack of optimism. Ian Shuttleworth was, I believe, the first to put down this thought in his Financial Times review of Wastwater (2011): “I have long been fond of playwright Simon Stephens’ skill in creating unremittingly bleak portraits of ordinary people and then right at the end offering a glimmer of hope…Wastwater has given me a new experience: the bleakness without the hope.” Trace that through to Morning (2012) and the “glimmer of hope” has been daubed over and blacked out in a final ‘fuck everything’ monologue.

In hindsight, all the clues were there in Sea Wall. Here is a piece about a father losing his eight-year old daughter, his only child, Lucy. The family is on holiday in the South of France, at his father-in-law’s villa, when Lucy falls off a rock and cracks her head. The speaker, Alex, is swimming out at sea and watches the whole thing in an almost dissociative state. By the time he makes it back to shore, it’s too late.

The key image, as the title suggests is the sea wall itself: that sudden, steep drop where sea-bed plummets into the abyss. This is Alex’s own sea wall. Life, so brightly coloured beforehand, clouds over like a cataract. His emotions dry up and turn to stone. “You see people when they say to you that they can’t imagine not believing in anything,” he says, “because it would be just too depressing. I think there’s something sick about that. The level of cowardice in that is just unbearable to me.”

Having first come across T5 tucked at the back of my Wastwater text, it’s a surprise to see that it was written before Sea Wall. It has the hollow bilious tone that defines Stephens’s later work, that same hacking revulsion and viscous regret. In it, a woman in her thirties recounts a tube journey to Heathrow airport and catches the itchy paranoia and jaded anomie of urban life.

Planes and tubes, the instruments of terrorism and scourge of environmentalists, the harbingers of doom, are either explicitly central or underlying and it’s telling that both plays were written in the wake of Pornography, which premiered in Edinburgh, just between the two. (There’s a note to be made about a playwright’s bibliography; that the plays don’t necessarily arrive on stage in the order that they were written. Intriguing too that Stephens’s Curious Incident… adaptation was also written in 2008, a hangover perhaps from his meeting Haddon in 2006.)

The two are also linked by the notion of escape. They show London through the desire to get away from it. Not for nothing are they shot through with different colour schemes: T5 is a colourless text that, in Hannah Clark’s design, becomes fifty shades of beige, while Sea Wall seems as bright as holiday snaps; light and photography being running motifs. The only time it mentions colour is on Alex’s return to London (“the dirt and the colour and the roar of it”) and the implication is of its greyness: looming, oppressive and monotonous.

Director George Perrin gives us T5 first, with a production that owes a definite debt to the extreme naturalism strand of Katie Mitchell’s work. Perrin adds a definite location – a blank chain hotel room on the edge of Heathrow – and plays most of the text through headphones, so that it seems like an internal monologue. What this achieves, crisply, is to really draw out the atomization and felt voyeurism that Stephens hankers after. Here we sit, cocooned in our own headspace like so many commuters, silently watching and judging. It also gives a sense of information overload, of a fragmented world that’s impossible to take in all together. Focus on the words and the action goes fuzzy; focus on the action and the words disappear. Every now and then a plane roars past the window.

The trouble is that this form doesn’t quite fit Stephens’s text. Primarily because the monologue is definitely communication rather than thought process. It’s too selective, too conscious to pass for memory. In short, we – or at least, I – don’t think like this. It feels somehow detached from the action – Abby Ford potters and frets about the hotel room – almost like a voiceover in film, almost like captions beneath an image or surtitles. There’s also the tonal quality: headphones have a tendency to both flatten and soften a text. The matter of factness and humour of Stephens’s words is replaced with a soothing, meditative quality. At best, it’s numb. At worst, it’s like having camomille tea siphoned down your aural canal. T5 isn’t that. It’s a coiled, suppressed scream. It’s a cold sweat. It’s hyperventilation. Dissociation.

There’s a moment in Sea Wall that might explain all this: Cary Crankson wells up. Despite saying outright “I have a complete and total inability to cry” – and emotional numbness being at the play’s core – he stands there and grows teary. It smacks of a lack of attention and that’s a shame. Up until that point he’s found just the right tone of effortful warmth to handle the story’s arc and its casual quality. Nonetheless, the swelling heartwrench of Stephens’s play still comes across in droves, even if it would be better served by an emotionless void.

Photograph: Elyse Marks

Review: Dangerous Lady, Theatre Royal Stratford East

Written for Time Out

There’s enough plot in Dangerous Lady to warrant arrest under the Terrorism Act. It's got births, deaths and hospitalisations. Not to mention bank heists, police raids, corrupt clergymen, unexpected pregnancies and a car park full of exploding ice-cream vans.

You'd expect nothing less from a novel by hard-boiled crime queen Martina Cole and adapter Patrick Prior deserves huge credit for crowbarring it all into a quick-fire two-and-half-hours. That he finds time for some great jokes is nothing short of miraculous.

Conversely, it does end up looking totally reductive. Novels can take time to unravel thoughts and emotions. Theatre can't, and this story of protagonist Maura Ryan's rise to the top of an infamous London clan all boils down to being the response to an enforced teenage abortion.

The ever-dependable Claire-Louise Cordwell finds a fine thread of vulnerability beneath Maura's steely exterior while James Clyde is rasping and ruthless as older brother Michael.

Lisa Goldman's production could take more care with such social subversion, but tears off like a get-away car using the twin revolve to create a real stage-turner.

The guilty pleasures fade, though. When Cole's plot veers into standard double-double-crossing territory, Dangerous Lady grows wearisome.

Review: The Good Neighbour, Battersea Arts Centre

Written for Culture Wars

A friend told me recently about David Eagleman’s Sum, as a trade for my recommendation of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. In it, Eagleman imagines 40 possible versions of an afterlife. One, which my friend used to illustrate the format, consists of a vast waiting room that you only pass out of when all your earthly traces have disappeared. You leave this limbo when no one remembers you. Here, Shakespeare and Hitler might sit in one corner cursing as a billion Joe Bloggs pass them by. Others get recalled when their remains are dug up by architects or suchlike.

In this particular world beyond, poor old George Neighbour has just received his summons back. The plaque dedicated to his memory, after his death in a local fire in 1909, is tucked away near the Battersea Arts Centre’s Grand Hall. It’s likely gone largely unnoticed for years. With The Good Neighbour, however, BAC have hijacked his eternity and made him the pivot for a buildingful of work by various artists.

There are three age-specific journeys. Toddlers toddle off one way to a specially-refurbished play area; older children another, in the care of Bryony Kimmings, Coney and others; while those of us over 13 tramp the streets of Battersea led by Uninvited Guests.

Split into four groups, we’re walked down Lavender Hill, once purple and perfumed as its name suggests, towards 37 Lavender Gardens. During George Neighbour’s lifetime, the red brick semi-detached house was home to John Burns, a radical trade unionist who had, in the 1880s, incited the poor to loot West End bakers, before being elected to parliament.

The link with Battersea’s recent past quickly become apparent. Minutes later we’re stood outside the nearby Café Parisienne for a retelling of its owner’s experience of last summer’s riot. Kasim stood outside his shop with an inscribed rolling pin and defended his property and those around it, dishing out Coca Cola to riot police. For one night last August, this street crunched underfoot with broken glass. Abandoned trainers from JK Sports littered the road. Famously, only Waterstones remained unsmashed. Then, the morning after, out came the brooms.

When Uninvited Guests invoke the past, they don’t do so through mere passing reference. They summon ghosts. From instruments modified into speakers come whispers of Lavender Hill’s part: sirens and speeches, breaking bottles and brass bands. With words and imagination alone, they knock down new-build estates and terraced housing, suck German bombs back into the sky and spring greenery from the ground where Asda stands. Increasingly our tour guide, Richard Dufty, stands in for Burns, in his long black overcoat and pert bowler hat, and we for his gathered disciples. As groups conjoin, that long-gone community spirit – so absent and yet so present last August – bristles back into life. As we march to the oom-pah beat, there’s a prickle of camaraderie.

The crux of the tour is to hook two fires, separated by a century, that took place on opposite sides of the street. In 1909, the department store Arding & Hobbs, now another Debenhams, was engulfed by flames. George Neighbour, working as a carver in its restaurant, would lose his life there and Jim Burns would dive in to help with the rescue attempt. In 2011, across the road, The Party Shop would suffer the same fate; the result of arson, rather than faulty electrics. It’s a ghostly sequence: figures appear in the high-up windows of the store, a lone trumpet drifts down from a megaphone above. Dufty next appears in the sacking balaclava Burns fashioned to protect himself, an oddly Halloweenish figure.

In entwining these two events, Uninvited Guests prod at our understanding of the recent riots. They do so in a way that inhabits the inherent contradictions, allowing empathy to mingle with condemnation. There are no blanket proclamations, only the friction of one event against another. It’s left to us to reconcile them.

Yet this tour does more than illuminate. It fosters some spirit of its subject and, temporarily at least, forges some community from the rubble. When we finally gather back at BAC, for mulled wine and milling around, everything’s a little easier, a little cosier, a little more communal. Like a drinks party full of friends of friends. It sends you off with speeches that call for neighbourhood and understanding, for small acts of kindness and tolerance, all of which leaves a little surge in your chest. Yes, it’s a tad golden ageist and sentimental, but The Good Neighbour leaves an urge to do and be better, both as individuals and as community.

So sorry, George Neighbour, that your eternal rest has been disturbed. It won’t be forever, but it will be for the best.

Photograph: James Allen

Review: You Can Still Make a Killing, Southwark Playhouse

Written for Culture Wars

What’s particularly great about Nicholas Pierpan’s latest play is the way it entirely inhabits its subject.

New writing is often – too often – content to filter a plot through a particular vocabulary, so that while the subject is prominent throughout, it’s exploration exists on a surface level. This technique is about threading connections through a play, combining ideas and spinning images. It is spider-diagram dramaturgy and while still yields brilliant plays – Duncan MacMillan’s Lungs being a good recent example – it involves a reluctance to really tear a topic apart and get down and dirty with its internal organs. If it kills, it does so through shrapnel wounds rather than direct hits, shotgun spray as opposed to sniper rifle.

The banking sector is certainly a legitimate target, but it needs more than dispatching by implication. To do so would be to conform to the simplistic scape-goating that daubs all bankers with the mark of the devil. Fortunately, Pierpan has not only done his homework and constructed a plot so steeped in its mechanics that simply tinkering and transplanting it elsewhere would be impossible. A pivotal section involves a loophole-exploiting scam – sorry, scheme – that is both ingenius and convincing in its cunning, Enron-like circularity. I couldn’t tell you whether it’s been directly imported from research, but if not, I almost worry that Pierpan might be putting ideas into the heads of hedge fund managers.

You Can Still Make a Killing is not Pierpan’s first look at the financial services industry. His 2010 monologue The Maddening Rain showed one man’s journey into and then out of it, revealing the addictive lure and heartless drive of the trading floor. Now he widens his scope, not only locating the individual within the industry, but slotting the whole sector into the wider world. He refuses to let us forget either the human story or the bigger picture.

Unlike his inscrutable, inscrupulous friend Jack, Edward Knowles didn’t make it out of Lehman alive. He was one of those that cleared a desk on that fateful Monday, before heading home with a head clouded by impending mortgage payments and school fees. Edward had banked on the bank. Ninety per cent of his net worth was in now worthless Lehman stock. Professional standing dictated he couldn’t sell it and so he had accumulated £3 million of debt against it.

Yet, this wasn’t simply headless gambling. It was an act of genuine (mis)calculated investment. So absolute was the faith in that system – the one that declared an end to boom-bust swings – that people didn’t just employ its principles for corporate profit, they forged the foundations of their own lives out of them.

In dire need of a job and at the behest of his wife, Edward spends his days sat in the Fulham Road Starbucks tuning into the gossipy titbits from financiers’ wives; in particular the Cath Kidston accent of Jack’s art-loving wife, Linda. However, no such luck sees him apply, tail between his legs, for a (less lucrative, more substantive) job at the FRA –basically the Financial Services Authority by another name.

At this point, Edward turns sheriff. Tim Delap’s stance widens and his hands rest authoritatively on his hips as sets about cleaning up the city. Eventually – inevitably – his investigations turn towards Jack (Ben Lee, who, by the way, does some of the best drunk acting you’re likely to see.)

The world Pierpan presents is one in which every social interaction is a negotiation. It is an ecosystem based on having something that someone else needs. That probably explains why the majority of Pierpan’s scenes – particularly in the first half – are one-on-one dialogues, to the point where convenient phone calls or nappy changes come just too often. He’s reliant on a one-up, one-down formula and yet each pulsates with drama, given the squirm of someone with one arm wrenched behind their back and the delicious proposition of the tables turning as the world whirs on.

What you realise, as even Edward claws his way back to the City proper, is that the financial crisis has not changed a thing. The Tories, who once heralded themselves as the party “to bring law and order back to the financial markets,” have capitulated to the point of disbanding the FSA. (Two new organisations come into existence next April.) But it’s more than this; increased competition for jobs, a twitchier financial climate and the ruthlessness that’s content to resort to human resources sacrifice have left the banking sector looking more cutthroat and exploitative, not less. There are no halos here. You can, of course, still make a killing.

Indeed, in a capitalist system that makes growth its only goal, you must. This is where Pierpan works the threading technique into the mix; to show a world where stagnancy and stability is death. The only way is up. Things can only get better. Or, as the hedge fund boss finally puts it: “To infinity and beyond.” It’s everywhere: in the competition between wives to get three, rather than two, kids round the table; in Edward’s determination that his children get the private education that he himself missed out on in order to get ahead; in the cultural capital of Linda’s obscure artists and in the determination of her fellow donors to fund only the biggest-name artists – the Picassos and Rothkos – at the expense of interesting individuals. It’s telling too that with Edward working shorter hours at the FSA, and the family almost living within their means, their happiness peaks. It’s only the ceaseless itch for progress and growth that trips him back into the City.

Matthew Dunster’s production does everything the play requires of it, with some colourful, yet restrained, character acting throughout the ensemble. Despite the best efforts of producers Ben Rix and Mimi Poskitt, who have ensured a slick professionalism rarely found on the Fringe, one wonders what might have been achieved with the backing of a major subsidised theatre and the facilities that come as a result. Pierpan’s play is certainly good enough – and robust enough – to merit it.

Review: Terror 2012, Soho Theatre

Written for Time Out

After nine years, The Sticking Place's annual fright fest has become a shadow of its former self. This year's line-up can't decide between trick and treat. Too self-conscious to take itself seriously, it nonetheless stops short of really sending itself up.

It's telling that the best of the four shorts, Mark Ravenhill's The Experiment, has been exhumed from 2009 to replace a misfiring alternative. Even read script-in-hand by a guest performer, Ravenhill's creepy confessional sets you squirming with its intricate account of human testing.

Ravenhill refuses gimmicks, leaving it all to the imagination, but others can't resist. Robert Farquhar attempts Home Counties horror, but his distraction technique of inane babble takes over, while Mike McShane's post-Twilight look at Hollywood is all schlock, seemingly spun from a single pun. Alex Jones' Fifty Shades of Black, a peek at the trust beneath bondage, might work with better actors. Instead, it gets hosts Desmond O'Connor and Sarah-Louise Young and looks like a repetitious sketch, all its threat deflated.

Old school and affable, they're much better in-between the plays, when comedy and song take prominence; O'Connor's opening ukulele number about the physiology of fear being the highlight. It's no prediction, though. This limp collection leaves your adrenaline glands untaxed.

Review: Lucy and the Hawk, Ovalhouse

Written for Culture Wars

In science, dissociation involves splitting molecules into their component parts: an individual object blasted apart. In life, it’s a state of disconnection. It can be mild – a nagging aloofness – or extremely debilitating and psychologically paralysing. Dissociative individuals can seem to stand outside of themselves; onlookers on their own lives.

Phil Ormrod’s interwoven diptych suggests this to be a fairly standard condition of modern life. Its protagonists live exploded and fragmentary lives, almost cubist existences of components stitched together or seen from all angles at once. Their thoughts exist on one plane and their actions on another. And the world itself has all but disappeared.

All this is carried through form more than narrative. Lucy (Abigail Moffatt), as glazed as a donut, livens the brain-death of her call-centre job with Amelie-esque flights of fancy. She’s tripped into a Kafkaesque tailspin when her own phone starts ringing ceaselessly. On the other end is a man seeking someone else who refuses to take no for an answer, and her sense of self begins to slide.

Her opposite number is an unnamed wood-worker (Tom Walton) obsessed with flight after catching sight of a hawk. Like some latterday, lesser Leonardo da Vinci, he’s constantly totting up the optimum dimensions for the perfect kite to match his aerial rival.

Ormrod plays these scenes so that they seem dislocated. The majority of the action is mimed – or at least sparsely furnished – while the other performer concocts appropriate sound effects offstage using foley techniques. When a bird flutters into the scene, for example, a rubber glove is shaken offstage; it’s fingers ruffling like feathers. The central characters’ thoughts – a dense tangle of text (I hate the word, but some would call it pretentious), half-mechanical, half-maniacal, is spoken with a self-help tone – drift in through a microphone. It’s always in the second person, as if the ghost in the machine is somehow using voice-activation technology to control the self. Cecilia Carey’s angular, sloping set, in front of a backdrop like cracked ice, furthers that jagged cubist quality.

The effect is to split one’s concentration. You’re constantly trying to decode the mimed actions or the sound effects, to add them into a whole for a sense of narrative. It’s too cacophonous and restless to be taken in all together, so that our out flitting attention matches the distraction and preoccupation of both characters. That’s furthered by the sense that the performance’s own rules – it mixes live and recorded sound, for example – aren’t quite consistent. And yet, when it distils or settles, it’s capable of genuinely affecting little moments.

Yet, there’s always a sense that you’re missing something central, something crucial, that it would all fall into place, if only you could unlock it. Tonally, largely thanks to Nick Williams' soft soundtrack (think the xx covering Yann Tierson), you start with an expectation of kooky romance; that the two oddballs will somehow meet. Yet it never quite becomes clear where we’re going.

Understanding a play is a process of sifting, of panning through a mass of signs and information to identify meaningful or connecting threads. It’s a bit like tapping Jenga blocks to see what gives. Here, it felt like something was slipping through the sieve, like some block wasn’t moving; that there must have been something more – or more precise – than this sensation of disorientation. Are the two connected? Do their stories reveal one another or just echo? On the whole, for all that sensation cleverly matches subject cleverly, I found Lucy and the Hawk a rather frustrating watch.

Photograph: 

Review: Desire Under the Elms, Lyric Hammersmith

Written for Culture Wars

Drama hates waste. Or rather, it hates extraneity. Maybe all stories do, the idea being that anything superfluous to the core plot is redundant and so needs cutting.

Personally, I’m not so sure. I think drama’s a bit like alcohol in this respect. You want it strong enough to have an affect, even to cause a pleasurable shudder, but served up too pure, it can prove seriously debilitating, even deadly.

Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms is not just neat, it’s distilled to a coma-inducing level. Take out the assorted townsfolk, who do little but interject, and the first scene, which serves to introduce a character via reportage and, in fairness, allow a final twist, and you’re left with a perfectly-constructed, robust love-triangle.

Ephraim Cabot, a 76 year-old farm-owner in New England, has married a woman half his age, Abbie Putnam. She starts an affair with his son Eben, who has bought his brothers’ share of the inheritance. Determined to secure ownership herself, Abbie gets herself pregnant by Eben, passing the child off as Ephraim’s. It’s a powder keg ready to blow. All it takes is for Ephraim to discover the truth, not difficult to manufacture given Eben’s resentment of his father. (Besides, the whole town already knows what Ephraim doesn’t.)

It’s a perfectly volatile combination; a Schwartz triangle that can’t be sustained. Tendency towards entropy dictates that something will give and so – if you don’t want to know the result, look away now – Abbie kills the child to prove her love for Eben. The play was O’Neill’s first attempt at a contemporary Greek tragedy and places great stock in the inevitability of that downfall. It’s a taut sinew of a play – as appealing as a mouthful of gristle.

Beyond the play’s clockwork mechanism of plot, what else do we get? A little sense of place, with a thick hillbilly dialect and, in Sean Holmes’ production, the lethargic twangings of a country guitar. O’Neill himself chucks in a few abstract ideas – here and now against the distant promise of elsewhere, hard graft versus procured fortune – but these hover vaguely above the play’s crux, swirling in and out without really proving definitive.

O’Neill’s setting, for example, is telling. He shuts out the world with his titular Elm trees. “They bend their trailing branches down over the roof,” he writes in the play’s foreword, ‘They appear to protect and at the same time subdue.”

Designer Ian MacNeil has almost entirely done away with them. Instead, he places the Cabot farm in another vacuum; the void. Even the sky has retreated; a white screen lit in various sun states seems to be sneaking off stage right. Outdoors scenes take place on a huge empty stage – a walkway through the auditorium allowing greater distance – and give the appearance of countryside so deep it could be another planet. If there is a tree, it is a cubist version, hanging upside down, more like a kitchen ventilation unit than anything else. Even the house itself is blank; its walls are different shades of blue, as if waiting for CGI backgrounds. MacNeil’s is not a whole, but isolated rooms wheeled on and off for different scenes. At all times, the world beyond is emphatically absent.

Otherwise, Sean Holmes production is pretty faithful to the piece, played for emotional truth rather than any searching commentary. Watching it, there’s almost nothing to read; no physical ticks that send your braining tripping into metaphor. It’s naught but story; just three figures locked in an impossible tangle. Finbar Lynch is flint as Ephraim, compact and sharp. Morgan Watkins brings an opposite density to Eben, a hollow-headed dolt, while Denise Gough purges without particularity. In fact, only Lynch manages legible specificity. Watkins and Gough remain in the realm of gesticulation rather than gesture.

It leaves the play bald; too bald for me and, judging from the titters that increase throughout the second half, I wasn’t alone. This wasn’t laughter of discomfort, but of disbelief; one of ridicule in the face of contrivance. Take the moment, after we’ve seen her kill the child, when Abbie bursts into the kitchen, where Eben is sitting stock-still and far-off. “I done it, Eben! I told ye I’d do it! I’ve proved I love ye – better’n everythin’ – so’s ye can’t never doubt me no more!” When she announces having “killed him,” Eben, quite understandably, think she means Ephraim. By having the scene played out before us, we can’t make the mistake alongside him and both the awkward glitch in the scene and the simplicity of the alternative solution undermine the play.

This is O’Neill manipulating his characters, as Michael Billington has pointed out, but it’s also designed with only drama in mind. It is a moment that could only take place on the stage. It is completely unfettered by logical thinking or the world beyond the elms and, as such can have no real bearing on either. It means the best one can do with Desire Under the Elms is admire the artistry of O’Neill’s dramatic construction and that seems an awful waste.

Photograph: Keith Pattison

Review: I, Malvolio, Unicorn Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Malvolio, a fictional character no less, has made me feel genuine remorse. That’s curious. It’s like grieving for Bambi’s mother or falling in love with Superman. It’s one thing to have an emotion stirred by a story – to feel sad about something, say, or elated by it – but these are passive attitudes, not active emotions. To sow the latter from a fiction, as Tim Crouch does in I Malvolio, takes extraordinary skill.

Six days earlier, I had stood in the Globe’s groundling pit and laughed as Stephen Fry’s Stephen-Fryish Malvolio was tripped into humiliation by Toby Belch, Maria and co. I – we – spurred them on in their forgery, eagerly anticipating Fry's smiling appearance in cross-gartered yellow stockings, until he was caged below the stage, protesting of being “most notoriously abused.” Pah. Stuff and nonsense, you bumptious prig. Get over yourself.

It takes a killer Malvolio to really land that final cry of revenge. Fry doesn’t. He merely blusters off muttering. I’ve only seen one actor really manage it: Simon Russell Beale in Sam Mendes’ curtain call at the Donmar Warehouse. Russell Beale waded on slowly, as if sodden and pneumonic, faced the entire company and hacked up a sour, gritty snarl: “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you.” It was quiet but deadly serious – totally composed – and his appearance punctured the play’s jollity like a burst beachball.

Crouch achieves exactly the same and more. Did Russell Beale turn to face us with his final line? I can’t entirely remember. Crouch certainly does. He includes us in the confederacy against him, so that our laughter is as reproachable as the actual perpetration.

Like Russell Beale, Crouch allows Malvolio to regain his wits and composure. In fact, he pretty much plays the whole thing in reverse, like a road safety advert in which dead bodies fly back through an unbreaking windscreen. He starts demonstrably mad, in spite of his clucked protests otherwise, wearing a piss-stained full-body stocking, horns and a sign that reads ‘Turkey Cock.’ Flies on wires hover about his head, ridiculously. Gradually, he gets himself dressed, applying make-up, heaving himself into a male corset and suiting himself up in puritan black.

The more he talks, the more rational he seems. If madness is simply being out of step with the majority, then, yes, Malvolio is mad. But what if it is the majority that are themselves mad? This is how Crouch positions Malvolio; a man stood alone at the top of a slippery slope down which everyone else has tumbled.

He retells the original plot, lingering on details that are easily glossed over or over-familiar and so taken for granted, to show us the play’s world as it seems to Malvolio. After the death of his master and, then his master’s son and heir, order in Ilyria starts to disintegrate. Olivia goes into mourning, refusing the company of men, and yet she invites – no, implores – this “young boy-man-boy” Cesario to return time and again. Meanwhile, her wayward uncle Toby is running riot downstairs, abusing the wine cellar and “trampling my lady’s grief.” Orsino won’t take no for an answer. Cesario turns out to be a woman and her brother Sebastian marries Olivia in an instant, despite the bizarre instantaneity of her advances. Masters, have you forgot yourselves, indeed?

Crouch’s Malvolio doesn’t ask much, merely that standards be maintained; that litter be picked up, food be put back in the fridge and a little common decency be shown. Also that theatres be shut down, drunkenness be scorned and god be praised.

Oh. Hang about. Just as you’re starting to see him as a priggish irritant that nonetheless deserves toleration not humiliation, this Malvolio swells into a snobbish intolerance of his own. One has sympathy for the man at his lowest, but as he revives and restores his original appearance, that sympathy all but dries up. He barks at audience members: do this, do that. Never a nice please or thank you. The superiority that sneaks up on you is repulsive and forces you to re-evaluate your instinctive sympathy.

It takes a maker who knows their craft inside-out to confront an audience thus, and Crouch lands his punches with precision and force. I Malvolio is far, far more than a fiction. It’s an ethical and aesthetical treatise. With jokes.

Photograph: Matthew Andrews

Review: Hot Mikado, Landor Theatre

Written for Time Out

Gilbert and Sullivan catch a serious case of the jitterbug in David H. Bell and Rob Bowman’s 1986 adaptation of their classic comic operetta. Following two jazzy '30’s versions, it basically just sets the original to a different beat. Dainty, tinkling pianos are out; somersaulting drums and double bases, in.

Updated to 1940’s Japan but twisted with Americana, Gilbert's plot nevertheless remains in tact. Delaying his own death sentence by playing executioner, Ian Mowat's puffed-up fusspot Ko-Ko cuts a deal with Nanki-Poo (Mark Daley), ardent admirer of Ko-Ko's intended, Yum-Yum (Victoria Farley). Nanki-Poo can marry her for a month - but then he must die, to keep the hit rate up and the Mikado happy.

Musically, it’s inspired; totally toe-tapping. Sullivan’s melodies survive intact, but scat and doo-wap make perfect sense of fiddily operatic trills. Three Little Maids becomes an Andrews Sisters close-harmony number and the cast Swing a Merry Madrigal.

Director Robert Mcwhir frames the whole as a radio play to little avail, but stages an explosion of entertainment that’s hoochier than a bathtub of gin. Thank Mandi Symonds for that; her vampish Katisha puts the Etta into operetta as she stalks Nanki-Po. Meanwhile, Robbie O’Reilly’s choreography has you itching to jive and Lindy hop along.

Review: Fireface, Young Vic

Written for Time Out

The titular anti-heroes of Max Frisch's well-known 1958 play, The Fire Raisers, are destructive strangers, who turn up and torch a town. Kurt and Olga, the teenage arsonists in Fireface, are rather more homegrown terrorists - tyro pyros who scorch the society that would mould them into shape.

Marius von Mayenburg's 1997 play makes for a volatile mix of puberty and petty bourgeoisie. Mum and Dad 'decide what's normal'. The kids are 'half-finished adults' who rear up and rebel, first through incest, then with violence.

When his sister's new biker boyfriend is warmly embraced into the family fold, a jealous Kurt (Rupert Simonian) graduates from flambéing the odd blackbird to taking a match to his school. He burns his face off, obliterating any remaining hope of 'normality'.

Yet Kurt recovers his looks in JMK Award-winning director Sam Pritchard's misfiring production, which seeks to explode the play but hasn't the ideas to do so, instead flattening it into literalism.

Style wins out over substance, while the five actors perform in mismatched styles. It's left to Amanda Stoodley's rigidly compartmentalised set design, to supply meaning. In failing to critique teenage destruction as well as the parental regime, Pritchard gives a rash thumbs-up to rebellion of all shades.

Review: Enquirer, Barbican Centre off-site

Written for Culture Wars

“In my experience the newspapers are a combination of what people never meant, combined with what people never said. Verbatim [theatre] does what journalism fails to do. The world is changing, complicated things are happening. Journalism is failing us because it is not adequately representing these things.”

Loathe as I am to start with David Hare, his words in Will Hammond and Dan Steward’s Verbatim Verbatim sum up Enquirer’s ambitions pretty well. With journalism frequently declaring itself in crisis, what better way to examine it than turning its own techniques in on itself?

Unlike journalism, theatre doesn’t need singularity. It can accept several sides of an argument and allow them to rub against one another without taking an editorial line. It can stand back and let us make up our own minds. So can journalism, of course, but it’s usually much more interested in making a case. As Andrew O’Hagan, Enquirer’s co-editor, writes in his program note: “In the right hands, the theatre is much better at managing uncertainty, mobilizing darkness and light…”

O’Hagan again: “A theatre is not a blank page for editorial; it is not a soapbox or a tannoy system: it is a conscience that wakes with what is happening in the space, and wakes further still in response to what people are making of it.”

Equirer’s script is a compilation of 43 interviews with journalists, all conducted by journalists. It’s open about that process at the start and, on several occasions, shows us both questioner and subject. Elsewhere it presents the interviews as individual vox-pops – monologues, in the theatrical vernacular – or else stitches them together to make a group discussion, several of which take place around the editorial board table, allowing the vague overarching structure of a working day.

Basically, Enquirer shows us journalists talking shop. They do so with authority and, quite often, with verve and wit. It’s never less than engaging and entertaining. Topics are wide-ranging – Leveson and its surrounding ethical questions crop up repeatedly, but there’s plenty about the culture beyond, from social media to showbiz journalism, the Wapping dispute to dwindling circulation figures and hit-chasing. It can look back nostalgically at the same time as looking forward optimistically, without forgetting that some things never change. Certainly, you get a real sense of the buzz and bitterness of the newsroom, though more from what’s said than shown.

John Tiffany and Vicky Featherstone’s handsome production never really justifies its proclaimed site-specificity. Yes, it takes place in an office space, but that is refurbished and repurposed as a gallery space. Handsome though Lisa Bertellotti and Chloe Lamford’s designs and Lizzie Powell’s lighting are, Enquirer gains nothing but proximity from its form. It loses fluency and, worse, sacrifices its integrity.

Because there is a major, major problem here. Enquirer involves six actors, speaking the words of 43 journalists, right? Yet, the piece only identifies five of its sources: Owen Jones, Roger Alton, Ros Wynne-Jones, Jack Irvine and Deborah Orr – one of the interviewers. (I may have missed one or two due to not taking notes – it’s a promenade production – but the principle stands.) The rest are name-checked in the programme and include figures as diverse as Roy Greenslade and Joyce MacMillan, Nick Davies and Martin Gilfeather, as well as Fleet Street Fox and a further 11 anonymous participants.

Enquirer conflates 43 individuals into six figures or, broadly speaking, six ‘characters': old Murdoch Empire hack (Billy Riddoch), astute nostalgic reporter (Hywel Simons), good-intentioned newshound (Maureen Beattie), foppish cultural correspondant/editor figure (John Bett), naïve but net-savvy youngster (James Anthony Pearson) and frazzled female journalist (Gabriel Quigley).

As I see it, this fatally undermines Enquirer as verbatim theatre. Either it’s only showing us a tiny selection of its interviewees (those named), in which case it’s withholding a fuller picture. Or else – far more likely and far worse – it lumps 43 interviews together into a single pool of words and opinions, then divvies them up to suit its own purposes. Why? For neatness’ sake? For drama’s sake?

For goodness’ sake. Enquirer’s content is absolutely detached from context. At the most simple level, we’ve no way of knowing who said what. With all due respect, media specialist Roy Greenslade’s opinions on the subject carry a very different weight to those of the Radio Times soap opera critic. Beyond that, though, we’ve no idea whether one interviewee’s words have been split between different actors or whether a single actor is, at any given time, speaking the words of a single source or a conflation of several. We can’t even see the quotation marks, let alone the questions that prompted the statement.

Verbatim theatre always loses some context – the editor’s hand is always invisible – but Enquirer goes far beyond that. Imagine a news report that anonymised and amalgamated its quotations likewise. It’s unthinkable. Protecting your sources is one thing. Melding cherry-picked statements into a singular voice is another entirely. It is inexcusably poor practice and a gross over-simplification that, given Enquirer’s stated aims, amounts to outright hypocrisy. This is verbatim theatre that fails to do what journalism does.

Photograph: Manuel Harlan

Review: Lungs, Roundabout Season

Written for Culture Wars

After Cock, comes Lungs. Duncan Macmillan’s cleverly intricate two-hander shares more than just a corporeal title with Mike Bartlett’s 2009 play. At its heart is the same indecision, the to-ing and fro-ing over a life-changer, and, as in Cock, its characters – both in their late-20s, early-30s – are designated M and W according to their gender. (They can’t be the same people, incidentally: Barlett’s M was decidedly gay – Andrew Scott, not Ben Whishaw.)

What’s more, in Paines Plough’s flat-pack theatre -in-the-round auditorium – an elegantly makeshift Lucy Osborne creation – Richard Wilson’s production employs the same non-natural approach to blocking as James MacDonald did. Its minimal, chess-piece choreography similarly ignores setting for mood and dynamic. Personally, I’d have like it to go the whole hog and completely detach itself from reality’s trappings. By this point, there’s no need to lie down to show that the characters are ‘in bed,’ for example; it’s enough that they speak to each other in a certain way.

Anyway.

Lungs is smart. Real smart.

It manages to be a climate change play, a state-of-a-generation play and a dented rom-com all at once.

It starts with a question – “A baby?” – and doesn’t so much follow a sequence of events as a chain of thoughts. It’s as if Macmillan has zoomed out and plucked only those moments in this couple’s life that can be filed under ‘baby.’ He fast-forwards the irrelevant passages of time, so ‘Goodnight’ is followed by ‘Morning.’ The single conversation seems to dominate their lives, and time seems to expand and contract, much as we actually experience it. Traumas take twice as long.

They’re in IKEA.

When that first question is asked.

They’re in IKEA.

Buying furniture, presumably.

Temporary, affordable, identikit furniture.

Put like that, it sounds the very opposite of a child. But how much is having a child like buying a sofa? In some ways, it’s just another lifestyle accessory to be acquired. One that needs putting together at home. But without an instruction manual – no matter how hard to follow.

M has posed the question. W is taken aback. Her first thought is of the planet. She’s happy to buy some slotted wood – or whatever – shipped over from Sweden, but a baby? That’s another matter. That’s like flying to New York every day for seven years – speaking purely in terms of Carbon footprints: 10,000 tonnes of C02. “That’s the weight of the Eiffel Tower. I’d be giving birth to the Eiffel Tower.”

Plus children have children have children have children.

“Fuck recycling or electric cars, fuck energy efficient fucking light bulbs…”

They’ve just had the hottest summer and the coldest winter.

The planet is fucked.

W’s a smoker. She might not have been. It would have made no difference to the play’s action; in terms of what happens to her or to M or to them. Macmillan’s title, however, works magic. It makes her smoking, not central, but attention-grabbing, as if it’s always in your periphery vision. And it’s there you find the central metaphor for climate change. W’s lungs undergo the same pollution by accumulation as the planet. One cigarette isn’t going to kill you. One cigarette 20 times a day for 20 years likely will. (Note to self: Stop smoking.)

She says ‘OK’ a lot, W. Kate O’Flynn – who is fantastic, by the way, but I’ll come back to that – says OK rather like Beverley in Abigail’s party. This little rhetorical question. Oh-kay? Or else, it’s decisive: O.K. Never yes. Never no. Certainly not perfect. Never even great. Ok? Ok.

Macmillan shows life to be a process of longshore drift; one that moves bit by bit, carried by currents rather than controlled. That’s what makes his chosen form so clever; he shows us the same conversation on a loop. It’s both inconsequential – in that big leaps of thought are rare – but always leaves a residue that somehow shifts the process on. The rhythm goes this way and that, back and forth like shifting weight between two feet, suspended in a single step.

His diagnosis, really, is of a lack of commitment. They dither and flip-flop. W can’t even commit to her vocabulary, spraying synonyms through single, stuttering sentences. At one point, she can’t decide whether to laugh or cry. Why? Because their reasoning is entirely teleological. There’s the whole climate change thing – in which a baby is calculated in terms of its carbon footprint. Then there are the effects of pregnancy on her body, of a baby on their lifestyle and of being born on the child’s life. It’s one thing to take control of your own life, another to commit someone else to something. Especially something as enormous as life. There are a thousand ‘what ifs’ ahead. “They don’t stay small,” says W, “they grow up and become people.”

M and, in particular, W seem terrified of any possible effect, of actively altering the future, and so end up in stasis. The text, which often uses startling language that’s laced with harshness, makes a clever distinction between terrorism and natural disasters. M and W avoid responsibility at all costs. They treat the world as a set of circumstances to be navigated. Macmillan’s smart enough to give us a glimpse into why. (Spoiler alert) W miscarries and, having allowed themselves to imagine and buy into a future, all that evaporates in an afternoon. It’s moments like this that trigger this hell-with-the-future attitude. Better safe than sorry.

As for decisions, there’s heart and there’s head; feeling and reason run throughout Macmillan’s language. Reason calculates the reasons not to have a child, where gut feeling says go ahead. “Fuck, if you thought about it,” W frets, “if you really properly thought about it before actually doing it then you’d never ever actually fucking do it…”

And we’re back to smoking. And we’re back to the environment. And we’re back to the lingering effects of the things that feel great. Babies, they’re just another thing.

If I’ve a complaint about Lungs, it’s that I think it veers towards being a male fantasy. Which is odd, given that it’s about babies and gives W much more room for thinking aloud and feelings. But, that’s also it: M’s a bit of a blank canvas: inoffensive, flawed but generally pretty ordinary. I’ve barely mentioned him in all of the above. Yet, W is funny and goofy and angry and all those other things that ‘real women in films’ are like, as antidotes to the perfect foils of usual romantic leads. And ultimately, they get together in the end, and, despite M’s typically masculine slip, he ends up looking like the good guy.

Nonetheless, Kate O’Flynn is fantastic, superb, as W. She has a knack of managing to make everything she does fit the text at a jaunty angle. So she mulls the question of a baby as if brainstorming product names on The Apprentice. She does a double-fist pump on “Let’s do it,” like someone agreeing to a charity bungee jump. This distortion carries on into – or rather out of – Macmillan’s language, which regular takes you by surprise; the vocabulary is just as jaunty; it makes you sit up and listen again. Alistair Cope is sympathetic – if a little self-pitying – as M.

But yeah, go. Lungs is great; one of the best new plays I’ve seen in the last few years.

Photograph: Paines Plough

Review: Charley’s Aunt, Menier Chocolate Factory

Written for Whatsonstage.com

With Union Jacks still billowing around the country, the Menier Chocolate Factory has exploited the current vogue for patriotism and revived Brandon Thomas' cross-dressing comedy. Charley's Aunt is perfectly, anachronistically English. Like a soggy cucumber sandwich.

A record-breaking box office smash in 1892, Thomas's farce shows two hard-up, loved-up Oxford undergraduates – dreaming sighers, perhaps – in a bit of a pickle. Having arranged a double-date under the chaperonage of a wealthy, widowed aunt, Jack Chesney and Charley Wykeham (Dominic Tighe and Benjamin Askew, with shades of a young Cameron/Johnson tag-team) receive a telegram announcing her delay.

Step forward Lord Fancourt Babberley, a fellow student preparing to play an old lady in a college production, who is promptly thrust into the role of Donna Lucia D'Alvadorez, Charley's Aunt.

Written as a star vehicle, Thomas's play largely depends on that central drag performance for its laughs. Mathew Horne, got up like Whistler’s Mother, wastes the opportunity. He lets the dress do all the work, hardly distinguishing between 'Babs' and Donna Lucia, and so loses the comedy of keeping up appearances. Babs' flustered panic is always obvious, where it needs to switch on and off, and he remains feminine even when unobserved.

Handsomely designed and costumed by Paul Farnsworth, Ian Talbot's production is nonetheless content to assume that passé poshness only found onstage (“Gee-ack, shell we hairve a lunch-spotty?”). Tighe, such a spick Algernon at Regent's Park three years ago, once again proves himself well-suited to the style, but others succumb to its mealy-mouthedness. Jane Asher's actual aunt is rather stilted at first, though softens when gently toying with her impersonator. Only Steven Pacey, all military bluster as Jack’s father, surpasses it to manage genuine laughs.

Farce has come a long way in 120 years and Thomas's looks too straightforward and sluggish: like Wilde without the wit. These days, Charley’s Aunt is a drab act.