Review: Privates on Parade, Noel Coward Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Seven years ago, Schiller was all over Shaftesbury Avenue. Not once, but twice, thanks to Phyllida Lloyd’s Mary Stuart, originally at the Donmar, and Michael Grandage’s Don Carlos, down from the Sheffield Crucible. I’ll not get golden-ageist about it – though having just read Michael Codron’s biography, it’s tempting – but that’s borderline unimaginable today. The West End has shrivelled into its shell.

Sure, we had the short-lived farce free-for-all and a handful of musicals that have worked to conceal the overwhelming mediocrity of its dramatic output, but what, really, has the habitual theatregoer had to chew on in the West End? Long Day’s Journey Into Night and transfers from the Royal Court and Chichester excepted, only stodgy Trevor Nunn revivals and classic plays with the safety catch secured.

Alright, alright; Peter Nicholls is a world away from Schiller and his 1977 semi-autobiographical comedy Privates on Parade has its fair share of quaint sentiment and outmoded moments, but at least Michael Grandage’s production, the first of a fourteen month West End season, fully goes for it.

First among equals on that front is Simon Russell Beale as Acting Captain Terri Dennis. He’s the actor-manager star of the Song and Dance Unit South East Asia (SADUSEA), a ramshackle bunch with their castonets fixed. Here, he’s tarted up for a Marilyn Detriech routine; there, a fruity Carmen Miranda number and still elsewhere, slickened for a diction-testing ditty a la Noel Coward. To see Russell-Beale and his toffee-apple frame vivaciously sending himself up is always a delight. There’s a glint of mischief in his eyes, almost flirtatious, and his throwaways are second to none. He’s always cheekily undermining the plucky amateurism of these shows with a knowingly half-hearted gesture and  savouring every double-entendre, no matter how spurious.

But it’s off-stage and out-of-corset that Russell Beale is at his best. Sure, he sidles up to SADUSEA’s newest recruit, preppy Private Flowers (Joseph Timms), but his Dennis is a tender heart in a regimented world. The way he puts his arm around Sophiya Haque’s Slyvia, pregnant and paid off by Flowers, and guides her offstage with gentle indignation is quietly devastating.

Because, for all that Grandage delivers a slightly nostalgic hoot, this is a production with firm foundations. It smartly conveys the political edge, picking at the scab of extant British imperialism in all its pomposity, largely through Angus Wright’s blustery Major Flack. Grandage’s most significant touch comes at the end, when the two pointedly silent Malaysians, co-opted into service, finally shake hands in front of a towering, beaconing Singapore skyline.

Grandage is a king of restraint; never over-stressing a point. That quality brings out the empathy in Nicholls’ play. Harry Hepple and John Marquez as Corporals Bishop and Bonny have a duet as a married couple – an echo of their own demure, private relationship. Grandage has them trot tiny steps across the stage, arm on shoulder. Before the end of the show, ambushed by native rebels, only one will remain alive. It’s an unshowy, dignified and absolutely pinpoint piece of direction.

That spirit runs throughout Privates on Parade – from Christopher Oram’s characteristically atmospheric set to Paule Constable’s superbly textured lighting – and it’s this refusal to compromise for the commercial sector that sets it apart from so much in the West End.

Photograph: Johan Persson

Review: Hero, Royal Court

Written for Culture Wars

E.V. Crowe’s Hero is more conflicted than its sexually-confused protagonist Jamie, a married man who seems to be repressing both homosexuality and homophobia. You sense a young playwright trying – and ultimately failing – to wrestle intricate ideas into a serviceable narrative. Every time she seems to have it pinned down, something wriggles out of her grip. More’s the pity, because this is almost great.

Jamie’s a primary school teacher, but first and foremost, he’s a bumbler who can’t help but put his foot in it. His colleague Danny, on the other hand, can do no wrong.

The difference is one of presentation. Affronted by a playground snipe – a child calls him gay – Jamie confronts the kid heavy-handedly. He’s a born bungler; he blusters into Danny’s home in mismatched patterns and a too-small cycle helmet and later, finds himself the victim of a homophobic attack – a hate crime, he calls it, pointedly – after blurting out that he and Danny were partners to a gaggle of youths. His letterbox is stuffed with misspelt abusive notes. Daniel Mays, with his bulbous, bashed-in features, nails a mealy-mouthed man who speaks without thinking.

Liam Garrigan’s Danny, by contrast, is perfectly presentable: enthusiastic, considered and as smooth-faced as either Dick or Dom. From their perfectly ordered kithen (Jamie’s is chaos), he and his partner Joe (Tim Steed) are trying to adopt.

This proves the source of Jamie’s turmoil, his “panic attack in slow motion.” On one level, he’s uncomfortable with that idea, yet the admiration – even envy – he feels towards Danny is muddled up with sexual attraction that, in itself, collides with received opinions about masculinity; the inbuilt assumption that, much like his dad, men should be men.

To tie all this together, though, Crowe rather resorts to standard-issue determinism; arguing that we’re dealt the cards from the off. Jamie’s appearance and prejudices are as set as Danny’s sexuality. There will always be winners like Danny and losers like Jamie, whose wife invokes fate on a regular basis. That perhaps explains Mike Britton’s gym-hall design, with its various coloured touchlines; everyone’s playing their own game, the rules aren’t the same.

There’s a nuanced position, one that’s admirably aware of its own inner-contradictions, in this. Crowe implies that Danny is always running – the word repeats and repeats like a car alarm and Garrigan always stands ready to sprint a quick 100m – while Jamie, flat-footed though he is, at least stands and faces up to life. Deep down who’s the better man? Who’s flaws run deeper? That’s why reverting to determinism seems a cop-out. Crowe can’t quite coax out the delicate position and so resorts to bludgeoning it with a blunt instrument.

It’s a real shame, because Hero’s got a nifty structure, cleverly deployed – like a cut deck shuffled together, we see one side to chronological events, then the other. Unfortunately, there’s just too much that doesn’t ring true. Would Jamie really tell his attackers that yes, he was gay and going out with Danny, for instance? Too many lines drop like fresh-minted kernels of wit or wisdom and, surely – surely – everyone can tell that Jamie’s repressing his true sexuality. A valiant effort, but not quite a heroic one.

Photograph: Johan Persson

Review: Sight is the Sense That Dying People Lose First, Battersea Arts Centre

Written for Culture Wars

Tim Etchells is a man who could bore for Britain. Boring is not always a bad thing. Jim Fletcher could make the shipping forecast fascinating. Sight is the Sense that Dying People Lose First is a list of formulaic sentences – some factual, some less so, all presented in the same flat tone – written by Etchells and recited, from memory, by Fletcher.

The audience is a group of people that sits alongside and drifts in and out. An hour is both an age and no time at all. The critic is a member of the audience, who sometimes chuckles and sometimes doodles little pictures of Jim Fletcher in his notebook, while quietly musing on the nature of truth and knowledge for the duration.

*****

Etchells’ string of sentences is – or, rather, replicates – the mode of free association. Sometimes sentences follow on from the one before, perhaps clarifying or picking up some loose end. Elsewhere, they hop, like a skipping CD, into completely new territory. “Pornography is not an art. No man is an island,” Fletcher rattles off.

Actually, maybe there’s more of a connection there than there seemed in the moment; the latter somehow justifies the former. Connections are an inherent part of the form; by invoking free association, the swirling undercurrent of the subconscious mind, you’re always looking for threads, for associations, for the synaptic sparks that might have born these ideas in this order.

There’s also an interesting paradoxical quality to the act of performance. It is memorised, fixed in consciousness, and almost the exact opposite to the writing process (as it pertains to be). This is, at base, fakery, yet Fletcher’s reaching to remember a sequence stands in for lulls in a creative process. It’s no mean feat, which probably explains the evident nerves. (“An elephant never forgets,” comes twice. Very Etchells that gag. Very Etchells indeed.) Elsewhere, though, more reflective pauses, more deliberated and calm, seem to suggest a level of conscious selection that runs equally opposite to the flow of free association.

Fletcher, an Easter Island statue of a man, plays Gatsby in Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz. Tonight, his right leg is shaking like a pneumatic drill. Why should this be so exposing? He has nothing but memory to disappear into and only a list to hide behind. The risk of failure, of a mid-motorway breakdown, is ever-present.

Bald and facially stolid, Fletcher could totally play a Hollywood general. He is straightfaced, almost stern, and the whole takes on the feeling of a military briefing for a group about to intermingle with an alien race. It is, in other words, serious. It’s stand-up, without the niceties. But also a sermon. Also without the niceties. (Beneath everything, though, it’s just a musical score made of words.) There is a curious mix of the institutional – in the seriousness of the pursuit of knowledge – and the playground – in the simplicity of the terms used.

*****

The sentences are all presented in the same manner, as definitive statements. They sound like facts and indeed many are, particularly early on. Then, value judgements start to creep in. “Life is not fair,” Fletcher deadpan, or “The human brain is not really like a computer.” Sometimes metaphors get mangled into literalism: “Silence is golden” comes later.

In the mix are two definitions of a lie – one is “an untruth,” another “when you say something that’s not truth.” Others might pop in a third, invoking the intention to deceive. For under the first two definitions, all of what Fletcher says is a lie. The simplicity of the statements, the amount they leave out, means that one’s mind immediately looks for an exception.

He tells us that the skin on the back of our neck is very soft and, around the auditorium, hands immediately reach to check. We attempt to falsify what he’s saying and, because words can’t paint the full picture, they always fall short, everything he says is susceptible to being disproved. It follows then that, actually, even those that look like facts are no more solid than those that look like opinion or nonsense.

And what a pleasure it is to mull such vagaries in Fletcher’s company. He has an extraordinary capacity to engage, doling out eye contact around an audience in such a way that makes you feel certain statements are intended for you alone, sometimes accusatory, sometimes almost a gift. He deadpans like nobody else and his natural expression – right eyebrow slightly higher than his left – lends him an air of puzzlement, as he figures out the world with this litaneutical lull.