Rules For Living at The Dorfman

We all develop ways of coping with the stresses and strains of modern life but most of us don’t adhere to them as fanatically as the family depicted in Rules for Living, a new play by Sam Holcroft, currently playing in rep at The Dorfman.

An article at the front of the programme describes the whys and wherefores of CBT (Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy), which, I’m guessing, was the starting point for this cleverly devised comedy.  The goal of CBT is to make “patients” recognise their various emotional traps and ultimately help them discontinue the coping strategies (Rules for Living) they have devised.  In a nutshell it ultimately makes them feel better and more confident.

The problem is that the family gathered for Christmas in Rules For Living seem unaware that they are in need of a dose of CBT.  Indeed the therapy is only mentioned as a possible course of action to combat the negative attitude of Emma, the teenager who spends most of the play off stage.

As Alan Ayckbourn brilliantly portrayed in Seasons Greetings, Christmas is often the catalyst for family tensions and so it is with this play. Edith, the mother, who is hosting Christmas lunch, plans everything with a military precision, is desperate for everything to run like clockwork and for everyone to have the best time ever.  The trouble is that her two sons, Matthew and Adam, have unresolved issues with one another, Adam and his wife, Sheena are in the throes of splitting up and Matthew’s girlfriend, Carrie feels inadequate and, as a consequence, is embarrassingly loud.  Add to this the fact that her domineering husband, Francis, has a few hours respite from hospital and her nerves are as highly strung as a Stradivarius.

How does she cope?  Well, displayed on a games board above the stage is “Edith must clean to keep calm”.  And she’s not the only one.  The other members of the family have similar strategies relayed for all to see.  Matthew “must sit to tell a lie”, Carrie “must stand to tell a joke” and so on and so forth.  As a result we’re totally aware of what is to come and thus the humour is intensified, especially when later on their rituals become even more involved.  We soon realise the problems each character faces and the descent into chaos for each is inevitable, especially when we are forewarned with the playing of a board game entitled Bedlam.

Marianne Elliott’s direction is spot on, whilst Chloe Lamford’s open plan kitchen, complete with Aga, is a joy.  The performances, too, are exemplary.  The excellent Stephen Mangan as Adam, the failed would-be cricketer, is brilliant at hiding his self loathing behind a quick, sardonic wit.  His wife, Sheena, played by Claudie Blakley, excellently portrays her disappointment with life in general and succour in the odd drink or four in particular.  Miles Jupp’s Matthew turns insincerity into an art form, whilst Deborah Findlay’s Edna, is a mother we all recognise.  My daughter certainly did when Adam was handed a coaster for his mug so that a mark wasn’t left on the table;  I received a hefty dig in the ribs as acknowledgement!

Rules for Living will have its detractors, but I’m not one of them.

Closer at The Donmar

The Donmar Warehouse is one of London’s little gems and paying my yearly membership is money well spent.   I’m usually lucky enough to secure a downstairs seat, but not for their latest production, unfortunately.  The size of the Donmar means that there are really no bad seats, but an intimate play such as Closer is so much better viewed at “closer” quarters. There is no question that Patrick Marber’s play deserved the accolades it received back in 1997 and this first revival at the Donmar is, I am sure just as good.  It is a great play, which really does capture the havoc that sex and infidelity can produce and the four actors involved deliver good performances. So why wasn’t I totally convinced?   Probably because sitting side on, upstairs, means little nuances and facial expressions are lost and total involvement is somewhat impaired.

Closer is the story of two men, Dan and Larry and two women, Alice and Anna.  Their lives intertwine, the common denominator being sex.  Dan, an obituarist meets Alice after she’s been run over by a taxi.  He takes her to hospital where she is examined by dermatologist Larry.  Dan and Alice become an item.  Following the publication of his first book based on Anna’s experiences he meets Alice, a photographer.  He is immediately smitten and his persistence eventually pays off.  Another conquest.  In the meantime, Larry, via an internet chat room, has been lured to meet Alice, having been wrongly under the impression that she’s keen to indulge in whatever sexual ideas he can come up with.  I say wrongly, because he’s actually chatting to Dan!  So, Larry and Anna meet and eventually marry.  And so it goes on.  Ring-a-ring-a-couples.

The content is explicit and “in your face”.  The sexual dialogue that takes place over the internet is shown on a large screen and Act Two opens in a strip club.  Neither is supposedly as shocking nowadays as it would have been when the play was first performed, but a handful of the audience obviously thought so, as they didn’t return after the interval.  But then Patrick Marber obviously expects a strong reaction.  He pulls no punches in showing the two men’s preoccupation with sex and feels no compulsion to portray them in a good light.  It’s a very honest insight into certain men’s phsyche and the pursuit of sex and love by both sexes.  Closer is as much a play about lying (or at least concealing the truth) as anything else.  Alice’s whole existence is based on fiction, Dan pretends to be Anna and Larry hides the fact that he isn’t averse to using the internet to pick up a woman for casual sex.  And when they’re not lying, their unburdening of the truth to their prospective partners wounds, even fatally in one instance.

This may sound too depressing for words, but David Leveaux gives Patrick Marber’s play a lightness of touch that highlights the playwright’s great way with words.  It is a very original piece with some great dialogue and laugh out loud moments and Bunny Christie’s neutral set reconfigures well into whatever location is needed.

The four actors deliver assured performances, if not always producing the fizzling sexual chemistry in their relationships with one another.  Rufus Sewell  is the handsome Larry, at times cruelly calculating, at others seemingly insecure.  Rachel Redford imbues Alice with the right amount of needy vulnerabilityy on the one hand and a superficial steely confidence on the other, whilst Nancy Carroll is predictably good as the manipulative and sensual Anna.  The least convincing is the usually excellent Oliver Chris, who fails to produce much sex appeal.

Closer, located in an area north of St Pauls where Patrick Marber lives, is a play I wish I’d seen first time round, or at least seen it in my normal downstairs seat.

A View From The Bridge At Wyndhams Theatre

Second time around and this superlative production still manges to enthral.  The venue is different but the quality remains, although The Young Vic staging was slightly more effective than the proscenium stage here at The Wyndhams Theatre.  I only say this because sitting in Row B, the faces of the actors, whilst seated, are sometimes obscured by the three sided glass “boxing ring”.  Plus, the director, Ivo Van Hove has decided not to break the tension of this taut, powerful production by having an interval.  An inconsiderate decision by two front row audience members to pay the loo a visit half way through nearly undermined this. The Young Vic audience on the other hand were much more involved.  One could hear a pin drop during the entire two hours.

The review I did in June last year still stands and is re-produced below.

Praise has already been heaped upon Belgian director Ivo Van Hove’s production of Arthur Miller’s A View From The Bridge at The Young Vic and luckily I managed to get to see it before the run ended last night.  I can’t think of enough superlatives to describe how good a production this is and as practically the whole theatre stood to applaud at the end, they obviously agree with me.

In a three sided, see through empty box, akin to a boxing ring, the barefooted actors pad around and encircle one another often with Faure’s Requiem playing in the background.  There are practical reasons for Jan Versweyveld’s bare staging, all of which are revealed at the end of the mesmerising two hours, when the cast, enveloped in a rugger type scrum get rained upon by a torrent of red “blood”.  Such is the racked-up tension by director Ivo Van Hove that we all know (even those not familiar with Miller’s take on a Greek tragedy) that the denouement won’t be pretty.  And such is the brilliance of the whole cast, that we are caught up, carried along and left exhausted, emotionally spent and elated when the die is cast.

A View From The Bridge centres around Eddie Carbone, inhabited here by the magnificent Mark Strong, who works as a longshoreman in 1950’s Brooklyn.  He and his wife, Beatrice, the equally brilliant Nicola Walker, have brought up her orphaned niece, Catherine since childhood.  Now seventeen, Catherine is ready to spread her wings, but Eddie is not so keen.  Still treating her like the child she often appears to be, we realise that his is a suffocating, all consuming, unhealthy love.  A love which bothers his long suffering wife, Bea and also eventually threatens to alienate the doting niece.  Eddie’s jealousy knows no bounds when Bea’s two Sicilian cousins arrive to stay with them, unleashing a series of events that have terrible consequences.  For Catherine falls in the love with Rodolpho, the younger brother, the love is reciprocated and Eddie is unable to come to terms with it.  Add the fact that the cousins have entered the States illegally and you have a tinder box situation where betrayal, seething resentment and ultimately violence is the outcome.  We, the audience watch appalled as the tragedy unfolds, as does the lawyer who is narrating the story.

There are outstanding performances from the whole cast.  Mark Strong captures the pain and emotional breakdown of Eddie with such raw emotion that we feel for him whilst at the same time despairing of his actions.    Nicola Walker’s despair at what her husband is doing to the family is heartbreaking to watch, whilst Phoebe Fox manages to portray Catherine’s childishness whilst at the same time highlighting her metamorphosis into a young woman.  Michael Gould as Alfieri the anguished lawyer helps to build the tension and there is also excellent work from Luke Norris as Rudolpho and Emun Elliot as his brother Marco.  Marco’s lifting of the chair in order to show his muscular superiority over Eddie is so threatening that the spine tingles. 

Ivo van Hove has surely produced a superlative piece of theatre and I left the Young Vic feeling I had witnessed something very special indeed.

Man and Superman at The Lyttleton

There are two overriding factors regarding this revival of Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman; it is extremely long and Ralph Fiennes is a brilliant John Tanner.  Written in 1903, this play is rarely revived, which is not surprising seeing its running time of three hours, forty minutes (the uncut version a whopping five hours) and the fact that there is very little action by the characters who all talk too much.  It is a preachy tome, which ultimately highlights Shaw’s disinterest in romance and obsession with putting forward his own philosophical views.  Only an actor of the calibre of Mr. Fiennes could begin to make this play not only watchable, but extremely funny.  And my oh my how difficult the script must have been to learn, for John Tanner spews forth endless swathes of repetitive dialogue. 

In a nutshell, the main plot of the story is that a wily woman gets her man in the end, despite him being a commitment phobe and totally opposed to the idea of being in love.  Tanner, the object of her affection, spends the play highlighting the reasons for this objection in the form of contradictory speeches.  Boring?  Mostly no, for Ralph Fiennes injects the part with so much light and shade and humour that really the only somewhat tedious bit is that which is often omitted from productions of this play.  This being the act that sees Fiennes’s Tanner turning into Don Juan and arguing with the Devil in Hell about willpower and idealism.  Strange?  Very.

The woman in question is Ann Whitefield (Indira Varma) who, on the death of her father, inherits two guardians.  One is the wealthy Tanner, author of The Revolutionist’s Handbook, whilst the other is Roebuck Ramsden (Nicholas Le Provost).  Ramsden, is a conservative, boring old hypocrite, totally disapproving of Tanner and his ideals.  On realising that his ward is out to “nab” him, Tanner and his chauffeur (Elliot Barnes-Worrell) escape to Spain, where they are captured by bandits, the leader of whom is the lovelorn Mendoza (Tim McMullan).  Needless to say, Ann catches up with them in Granada in the final act.

The Director, Simon Godwin, has set the play in modern day and his opening really makes one sit up and take notice, for the first words we hear spoken are by Kirsty Young.  She is introducing her castaway, the “provocateur protagonist and author of a handbook designed to “set a new direction” for society.  The strains of Mozart’s Don Giovanni then burst forth, this being Jack Tanner’s first choice on his Desert Island Discs.  The brilliant Designer Christopher Oram lives up to his high standard with an evocative set and there is excellent work from the large cast.

Particular mention must go to Indira Varma, who not only brings a strength of character to the role of Ana, but also a sexual frisson, so no-one is at all surprised when Mr. Tanner finally capitulates.  Tim McMullan is also excellent playing an exceptionally funny brigand and debonair Devil.  What a captivating voice this actor has.

This production may be a tad too long and yet another one I didn’t always totally understand (some of the speeches went totally over my head), but it is really worth seeing, not just for the perfomances mentioned, but to see Mr. Fiennes manoeuvre a superb white Jaguar soft top off the huge Lyttleton stage.  On the night I saw it, he very nearly took out part of Christopher Oram’s set.  Now that would have been interesting!