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.

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.

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