Review: The Effect, National Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Anyone writing drama about cutting-edge scientific research has a problem; namely, us. The idiots watching. For most of us, phrases like “dopaminergic pathways” or “amygdala activity” might as well be in Ewokese. Mention a Jacksonian March and we’ll assume you mean the moonwalk, not a – quote-unquote – contiguous spread of electrical discharges through the superficial cortex. Whatever that is.

If we’re to understand, dramatists need to simplify. Only by doing so, by using layman’s terms and analogy, they inevitably stretch credibility. There can’t be many clinical psychologists researching anti-depressants that need to define depression to one another, as Lucy Prebble’s do here. You half expect the actors to snap-turn outwards, sexily flick the hair out of their faces and purr, “Here comes the sciencey bit.”

It goes beyond explanation in The Effect, though. Prebble’s play, her first since the international success of Enron, centres on a drug trial with ten participants – one of whom is a control, nine of whom are men. Two of the participants sneak an expressly forbidden fag and an even more off-limits fuck. One discovers he’s on a placebo, yet still the white coats plough on. Even by the dubious standards of pharmaceutical giant Rauschen, which Prebble is admittedly out to skewer, that’s a pretty blasé approach to scientific rigour. Given that lethal side-effects can occur in, what, one in a thousand cases, any findings will be only marginally more conclusive than the geography coursework I based on 300 self-penned shopping questionnaires.

Perhaps, though, we should take Prebble’s word. She did, after all, sign up for just such a clinical trial by way of research, which is some Daniel Day-Lewis shit right there, given the play was inspired by a previous trial that led to organ failure in several volunteers.

Besides, such conveniences are mere niggles in the grand scheme of The Effect and they serve to clear a path for the main event; the two volunteers, Tristan and Connie (Jonjo O’Neill and Billie Piper), that spark up a relationship during the four week trial.

The crux of this is whether their respective feelings are entirely natural or due, in some way, to the drug under trial. As Dr Toby Sealey (Tom Goodman-Hill) puts it, “They’re in a constant state of neural excitement ever since they met, what’s the brain going to conclude?” So far, so standard-issue prod at determinism. “Everything’s just physical in the end isn’t it,” says Dr Lorna James (Anastasia Hille).

In time, that turns into a game of guess who’s on placebo. Now, speaking in terms of dramatic satisfaction, the problem with Tristan and Connie’s relationship is that, well, Tristan’s just a bit of a dick. The thing about Billie Piper, with her mile-wide smile and ski-jump nose, is that you can’t help think how chuffed your parents would be if you brought her home. For her to fall for a hyperactive, irritating waster like Tristan is, for straight men everywhere, a bitter pill to swallow. You just can’t will them to get together. If anything you’re hoping she’ll come to her senses. However, it underlines the possibility that the drugs are to blame, which makes her eventual entrapment all the more poignant. (Though the problem of not knowing what’s just the drugs talking and what’s character or motivation is an interesting one in terms of naturalistic drama.)

Because, as the play goes on, Prebble develops the question of determinism into one of responsibility. While the mirrors between the triallists’ relationship and that of the doctors is a touch pat – actually, in a four-hander, it’s just a bit nakedly exposed – the implication is that we’re pretty crap at taking responsibility, both for ourselves and each other. Connie’s decision to live with the consequences of her actions – whether it be through sheer guilt or some tinge of nobility – is rather excruciating to watch; a delicately-handled Groundhog day that grinds its way towards infinity. It allows Rupert Goold his deftest directorial touch in the final moments, as Tristan and Connie walk, arm in arm, in silent circles.

The Effect works best in the swirl of ideas and questions beneath the surface. Yes, Prebble’s surface scepticism about both corporate greed and depression is sharp, but the secondary questions are more interesting. The territory is vaguer, wispier: the need for and impossibility of control, the elevation of happiness and the issue of responsibility, of committing to our consequences. Every cause has its effects. Rather than nullifying them, burying them under a sedated smile, Prebble demands we face them down.

Review: Medea, Richmond Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Why does Medea go postal? Is it a) because her husband has eloped with a younger model and the resulting jealousy has eaten out her insides, b) because, even now, women are tied down in a way that men aren’t or c) because of the demands of a consumer-capitalist society underpinned by fear and competition?

In Mike Bartlett’s contemporised version of Euripides’ tragedy, it’s all of the above and it rather impinges on the momentum required for the tragic tumble. He’s so careful to knit her into the modern world that she’s too tied down to really freefall. It muddies the simple purity of her vengeance.

Today’s Medea lives in an identikit new-build estate in an unnamed provincial suburb, pretty much a single-mother with a mute son. Her ex-husband Jason is getting remarried imminently and she’s about to be kicked out of the home they once shared – with its schizophrenic pea-green and blood red décor, each room pristinely compartmentalised and cut off. She’s off work and in trackie-bums. Her head’s a mess and her hair’s in an even worse state. No wonder that prying neighbours and colleagues keep popping over to check up on her; Rachel Stirling looks like she’s shortcircuiting and set to blow.

Her decisions are snap and haphazardly impulsive. Going through the motions of dinner – fish fingers in the oven, peas on the hob – her hand suddenly, inexplicably, plunges into the saucepan of boiling water to scoop out the veg. Shit, you think. You can see the bubbles rising in the pan. Fuck. There’s an urge to leap up, put an arm around her shoulder and led her slowly away. Both from the pan and from her son, who sits watching, as inert as Argon.

That, my friends, is how you resurrect the spirit and scale of Greek tragedy; by subverting banal routine into jaw-dropping, stomach-clenching horrors. Poisoned dresses and axes-wielding rampages don’t work so well. (Oh, this? It’s just your average 21st Century poison gown. Kate Moss at Topshop, actually. £59.99.)

Basically, Bartlett falls between two (Smallbone kitchen) stools. He wants to honour the original, sticking rather strictly to its structure, but also to bring it bang up to date. The intention was always to clear the grandiosity and ground the abstract, which it certainly does, but the end result is half-banal, half-overblown. Wailing from the rooftop, bloodied and axe aloft, Bartlett’s Medea cries out that her son will “always be remember for his maths test…and for coming second in the egg and spoon race.” It’s a long way from convincing, which Ruari Murchison’s Brecht-meets-The-Sims design with its photographed house-front and gridded floor acknowledges, but doesn’t excuse. To really modernise a Greek tragedy, you have to start afresh, as Thomas Ostermeier did with his gun-totting Nora in A Doll’s House, then stand and fall by your interpretation.

Ironic, then, that clean slates run throughout Bartlett’s version, both for Medea and Jason personally and on a wider socio-economic level. I’m not convinced that he grounds those accusations firmly or precisely enough, though. It reads as a list of symptoms – identikit lives and toyworld choices, aspirational neurosis and inhumane egocentricity – without searching for a root cause and, as such, looks both generic and voguishly wagon-jumping (despite Bartlett’s impressively critical track-record in the area.)

As with Caroline Bird’s Trojan Women at the Gate, there’s admirable ambition, but by not thinking big or bold enough, Bartlett ends up with a Meh-dea.

Photograph: Manuel Harlan

Review: The Promise, Donmar @ Trafalgar Studios

Written for Culture Wars

Leningrad, 1942. A city under siege, so starved that household pets and dead bodies will do for food. In a small flat, 16 year-old Lika looks up with every shell that bursts nearby, shaking dust down from the ceiling. She is rigid with cold; arthritic before her time. All the furniture has gone – burned for an hour’s extra warmth – except for one chewed mattress.

With her is Marat – a year older, a soldier, the flat’s owner – and, huddled so tight together on the mattress that they seem to be climbing into one another, they form an allegiance that bristles into love. Then a third figure, Leondik, bursts in: shivering, speechless, barely there.

In desperation, the three coexist. More than that, their continued existence depends on that collaboration. Come peacetime, however, and what was equilateral slips out of joint; a impossible Schwarz triangle. Marat leaves, despite his love, and Leondik and Lika marry. However, he hovers over the staid relationship: a motif of forbidden topics – death and food during that bleak 1942 winter, then Marat and, finally, the siege itself – suggest that life only functions through repression. A question hovers: how do we learn from those things we bury?

At one level, Aleksei Arbusov’s 1965 play – in a new version by Penelope Skinner – looks heavy on tropes today, both in its love triangle and its symptoms of war that veer a little close to history syllabus territory. Leondik returns with a drinking problem instead of a left arm. Yet, at another, this is an intricate study of three people that eschews message for hazier observations. Lika’s detachment from the events of that winter grows until she curtails her emotions and dreams, dissociating from life.

And that’s where Alex Sims’s production thrives. It lives in the details of its three tremendous performances. Joanna Vanderham neatly captures the words stuck in Lika’s throat. “I’m perfectly happy to stay here,” she says to Gwilym Lee’s dishevelling Leondik, but a look betrays her. You can see the bile rising in her throat.

Max Bennett’s Marat is best of all, though. He should be parachuted into Pinter immediately after this run, such is the concealed menace beneath the handsome exterior. His jaw muscles clench as he chews over his options. Watch his left hand – the one his opposite number is missing – and it every move is pointed. It rests on the table or drops gracefully on the back of a chair. Everything is calculated and conniving, yet Bennett deftly keeps villainy at bay. In spite of his nastier, manipulative arrogance, you still want Marat and Lika’s love to come to fruition.

What’s missing? Well, emotion and, at the end, credibility. Leondik’s grand gesture, a self-imposed exile to clear the path, is just too bloated and Skinner cannot avoid its lumpen ‘here’s the message’ build-up. Still, there’s plenty to enjoy in this chipped curiosity.

Photograph: Simon Kane

Review: As The Flames Rose, We Danced to the Sirens, the Sirens, Barbican Centre

Written for Culture Wars

She swoons. On the video tape, she swoons. In black and white, she swoons. Her eyelids slide shut and she rocks back on her heels and she teeters towards the floor. A man rushes into shot to catch her and does so with some force. He swoops in and snatches her. Her face is first startled, instinctively terrified, then it softens into a meek, woozy look up, past his chin and into his eyes. She breathes in his scent and melts into his chest.

This scene repeats and repeats on a jagged loop, as if it contains some crucial evidential detail. It does: that dance as old as time – damsel and her saviour. This is the crux of Sleepwalk Collective’s razor-sharp meditation on the gender politics of pop culture, in which women are frail delicacies, ripe for the fucking. Even their names are pure allure: Greta Garbo, Bridget Bardot, Marilyn Monroe. The same vowels slip out of your lips with a silent kiss.

Sensuality – sometimes spoofishly overblown – is all here. Iara Solano Arana stands in the spotlight, under a cropped blonde wig, and speaks into the microphone. “The blonde in the black dress;” she is all shoulders and collar bone. Her voice is deep and lush and wispy, though Spanish clicks snick the back of her throat. Her words are like satin, like a spritz of perfume. They are kissed rather than spoken. Saliva clicks in her mouth. Meaning is carried by sensation as much as anything else.

Arana starts by placing a microphone against her ankle. There is an hot foreign country, where crickets chirrup ceaselessly, in her legs; a kennel in her crotch; a seascape in her navel and a storm in her chest. The body is a world in and of itself. The body speaks. It’s means something. Everything perhaps.

“If you want me to drink it,” Arana smooches, nonchalantly tipping some wine into a glass, “like a man trying to have sex with a woman…” And she does: slumping in her chair, legs wide, making eyes at some unseen floozie. She repeats the action as a woman newly in love and as other tropes with no counterpoint in reality. All of which exist though, adopted as shorthand for some fixed fiction dreamt up, no doubt, by men.

No wonder that these brittle waifs, these tender ingenues, die over and over again: tied to the train tracks, hollering out for a hero. They cut themselves down the middle, sawing themselves in half like glamourous assistants. Inside, not guts, but a moonlit lagoon; paradise, perfectly non-existent. “I will cry till your clothes are soaked through and then you call and tell me… ‘Darling, it’s ok. You’re safe now.”

This is a tingle of a show. One that purrs into your ear and brushes the hairs on your arm, that runs fingers through your hair and down the back of your neck, that traces its tongue over your lips and lets its scent run up you nostrils. It winks and turns away and it doesn’t look back. It never looks back. It is truly a siren.

And, like every siren, it’s a hollow construct. An illusion. Alluring, yes, but unreal.

Photograph: Alex Brenner

Review: Chewing Gum Dreams, Bush Theatre

To dream of chewing gum supposedly signifies an inability to express oneself. Hackney teenager Tracey Gordon has all the words and a fair few ideas, but no one’s really listening, let alone taking her seriously. Such, suggests fledgling playwright Michaela Coel in this peppery one-woman show, is the teenager’s lot: the pressure is to fit in – with one’s peers, with imposed expectations, with the wider system – and the process of self-discovery is as much about repression as revelation.

To classify Tracey as a teenager isn’t enough, though; she’s more particular than that. Black, female and based in one of London’s poorest areas, Tracey’s voice barely registers at all. Nor, it seems, is there much hope for change; university doesn’t factor in her ambitions or others’ expectations of her and, as she says, “I ain’t smart enough to be somebody, but I’m smart enough to know I’m nobody.”

All that means tuts in pharmacy queues and unsolicited gropes in plain view. It means standing on a doorstep and being shooed away by your white boyfriend’s mother. It means being unfairly singled out in a “colour-coded class”.

Yet, that’s not to dub this a downbeat portrait of social injustice. Coel absolutely captures the onrush of adolescence, where all too adult experiences, both positive and negative, career into the carefree existence of childhood. One moment Tracey’s out of her depth, treading water against a friend’s pregnancy; the next she’s in the dreamy, head-swimming haze of a teenage crush just starting to kindle. Sometimes it’s concrete, as bruises surface on a friend’s cheek, and sometimes it’s all fireworks, when, on the number 67 bus, you find a hand on your knee.

Coel’s also a vivid caricaturist – both in writing and performance. You really get a sense of those around Tracey: Fat Lisa, with her bag of contraband contraceptives; Aaron the brickwall that won’t take no for an answer, and her horizontal classmate with all the latest about inceptive conceptions.

This is a sparky debut, as made by the plosive writing as by the witty performance in Che Walker’s production. Coel can really handle a room, flicking flirtatious eye contact our way, then railing at us for injustices suffered. Also, what a pleasure to see an audience literally bopping in their seats pre-show to the burst of garage. For Coel to extend that communal conviviality into the show itself, largely with a snappy sense of humour, deserves real credit. She’s certainly one to watch; no chewing gum dreams for her.

Review: The River, Royal Court

The maxim behind Jez Butterworth’s new play might as well have been ‘Next year, as far from Jerusalem as possible.’ Following the unruly and rambunctious epic that capped the last decade, Butterworth returns with an intricate, elegiac miniature that’s perhaps even more enticing. To throw off the title, one might say its still waters run very deep indeed.

The River exists deep in Butterworth County, a place that ranks alongside Philip Ridley’s East End, even Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, for its completeness and its otherness. Like those writers, Butterworth is a worldmaker. Properly equipped, you could probably hike from the log cabin onstage here, to which Dominic West’s Man retreats, shackled with fishing tackle, to the decrepit cottage of The Winterling or Rooster Byron’s woodland clearing in Jerusalem.

That cabin, detailed and atmospheric, is once again left to the panoramic designer Ultz, but Butterworth paints a landscape beyond its wooden walls that’s every bit as vivid. You can see the way the moon must catch the dew-laced grass late at night and the bleached rocks that surely line the riverbanks. You picture the cliffs, the pools, the paths, the precise sunset: “Blood red as far as the headland turning to lilac blue wisps above the bluff. Trails of apricot, feathering out through blue, dark blue, and aquamarine to an iris ring of obsidian and above that the Evening Star.”

But it is to another worldmaker, Harold Pinter, that The River owes its biggest debt. Ostensibly a three-hander, it has all the slipperiness of Old Times and tinkers with temporality as well as Betrayal. No, better, heretical though that might seem, because it bucks that play’s schematicism.

Butterworth ensures that we’re never quite sure where we are in time, what comes first and what follows. West’s Man arrives at the cabin with a new girlfriend (Miranda Raison), intent on taking her trout fishing, to experience the thrill of the catch . (“Like a million sunsets rolled into a ball and shot straight into your veins.”) Then suddenly, another woman, The Other Woman (Laura Donnelly), steps into the room in her place and what seemed romantic becomes routine, any spontaneity dissolving into something altogether sinister.

First and foremost, Butterworth has written a great story; one that hooks you in with the narrative momentum of a thriller in isolation. Cut off from ordinary law and order, anything could happen. Chuck in Butterworth’s characteristic mystical tint, his ability to invoke some deep-rooted natural power, and that anticipation only intensifies.

It’s a story that also sets you backpedalling, scrambling for some mysterious motivation behind the Man’s actions. The routine eventually reveals its roots in some elusive search to rekindle a past relationship, but what relationship? With whom and why? And when? Butterworth leaves all blank and the near-total ambiguity is tantalising, almost to the point of infuriation.

That totally extends into any sense of meaning. It’s elusive stuff. About time, perhaps, and the impossibility of recapturing the past, the ones that get away, be they lost loves or first fishes. Transient and escapist, time runs away. The river is never the same. But it does throw up enticing echoes along the way and everything in Butterworth’s play has its double, its photonegative. Mirror images recur, in the surfaces of water, in line drawings. Even fish flip-flop when caught; one side, then the other.

Deeply engrossed in the story, yet always aware it’s an oblique fable of sorts, you’re left trying to catch its wisps, grasping at smoke, and there’s little more satisfying than this sort of mystery. All the better that Ian Rickson’s entrancing production is played with a dry inscrutability by Dominic West and plenty of allure from Miranda Raison and Laura Donnelly as the two women in his life.

Photograph: John Haynes

Review: 55 Days, Hampstead Theatre

Written for the Financial Times

Howard Brenton has long raided history for its present-tense parallels and in England’s 17th-century civil war, he finds a nation intent on purging itself of elite corruption. In the end, however, the figurehead falls – quite literally when Charles I’s bonce drops from the block – but the culture itself survives into Oliver Cromwell’s own tyrannical reign.

With Charles’s cavaliers defeated, Cromwell’s army enters Parliament to overturn its vote against bringing the king to trial, swung by Presbyterian MPs who have cut him a deal. The Roundhead leader forces the issue and enlists a radically Puritan court to ensure his – and, he insists, God’s – preferred outcome, even scheduling the execution before a plea has been entered.

Yet Cromwell must contend with Charles’s refusal to recognise the court’s authority and, in its second half, Brenton’s play turns tense legal drama. Charles, reclining louchely in his chair, repeatedly undercuts proceedings and plays to the gallery, eventually forcing Cromwell to concoct new legislation to get God’s way. Brenton remains faithful to history – if sometimes bogged down by its details – and includes John Lilburne’s radical agitation and the resignation of army chief Thomas Fairfax.

However, director Howard Davies keeps things crisply current with canny use of modern dress. In a Vandyke collar and cane, Mark Gatiss’s Charles is at odds with the starched black suits around him that lend Ballardian overtones to the fervent middle-class revolt. Indeed, it’s hard to ignore shades of Julian Assange in Douglas Henshall’s resolute Cromwell, while the filing cabinets that line Ashley Martin-Davis’s traverse stage suggest our own rifling through records to right past wrongs. In court, as Tom Vaughan-Lawlor’s quivering prosecutor John Cooke reads charges absolving the people of all blame, Charles seems as much a scapegoated despot as Simon Stephens’s Pa Ubu did here in January.

But Brenton’s trick is to bind King and Lord Protector tight together like superhero and villain. As Charles, Gatiss is commanding throughout – quietly meditative at first, then robust in his own defence – but Henshall is superlative. His utterly humourless Cromwell grows indignant and febrile as the king maintains dignity. Stillness becomes quaking gesticulation and he seems every bit as dictatorial as the accused, finally bursting into giggles as he signs the death warrant.

Absorbing and rich, 55 Days is a rewarding warning against revolutions that turn 360 degrees.

Review: Happy Birthday Wanda June, Old Red Lion

Written for Time Out

Wanda June herself scarcely appears in Kurt Vonnegut’s first play. Run over by an ice-cream van on her 10th birthday, she’s in heaven. Playing shuffleboard with a Nazi major.

Instead, her uncollected birthday cake turns up at a celebration in honour of Second World War hero Harold Ryan (Vincent Jerome). Missing presumed dead, he returns to his prissy suburban family after eight years in the jungle - balls swinging like a Newton's Cradle - to wrench his wife (Alix Dunmore) from her hippyish new fiancé and drill his sap of a son into shape.

Loosely based on the story of Odysseus's homecoming and set in '60s America, Vonnegut's 1970 play regards unchecked masculinity with characteristic disdain. The cross-gender casting of this rare revival perhaps overcooks the sexual politics, but it instils a cartoonish vigour into Ant Stones's production. The net effect is something like A Doll's House after botched hormonal therapy and a fistful of valium.

Still, Vonnegut remains too much a novelist. Character leads where action ought and there's too little dramatic impetus to build a head of steam. His scorched sardonic humour, however, remains as gratifying as ever and it's clearly relished by an animated cast. Particular treats are Emma-Jane Martin's finicky vacuum cleaner salesman and Marcus Powell's dopey ex-airman, fresh from Nagasaki and full of regret.