Hansard at The Lyttleton

A critic on a Radio 4 Arts programme when asked to give her views on Hansard, the first play by the actor Simon Woods, started by criticising The National Theatre.  How was it that a first-time playwright and an Old Etonian to boot, was able to stage his play with two top actors in the large Lyttleton Theatre?  After all, our great theatrical institution is supposed to be operating a policy of diversity and Hansard, with its cast of two middle-class white actors, is most surely aimed at white middle-aged, middle-class Caucasians. 

I took exception to this because as far as I am aware The National, under the auspices of Rufus Norris, has certainly not abandoned their plan to produce plays to appeal to the whole of our society.  But in so doing, wouldn’t it be wrong for them to suddenly preclude anything that might relate to the audience this person criticised for enjoying the play on the night she went? 

Having got that little gripe off my chest, I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed Hansard, thanks in no small measure to the performances by Lindsay Duncan and Alex Jennings.  Their verbal jousting is timed and executed to perfection, and what is essentially a barrage of sarcasm is turned into brilliantly witty remarks.  It is 1988 and the couple’s bickering starts on Robin Hesketh’s return home from taking part in Any Questions the night before.  Diana, his wife of thirty years, is still in her dressing gown in their Aga filled Oxfordshire country home and metaphorically armed and ready for letting him know her thoughts on the programme and the fact that he is all for Section 28, the controversial part of that year’s Local Government Act that prohibited local authorities from ‘promoting’ homosexuality.  What doesn’t help his cause is that this suave, yes, you’ve guessed it, Old Etonian Tory MP, has married a Labour voter.  And her anger at his stance on said Section 28 is exacerbated by her suspicion that he is having an affair. Added to this arsenal is her scorn for her husband’s privileged background, admiration for Maggie Thatcher and lack of any artistic temperament.

Meanwhile Robin criticises his wife’s drinking habits, laziness and left-wing sensibilities.  Does she not remember that he has asked friends over for lunch to celebrate his birthday?  One wonders why they ever married in the first place.  Except that underneath all the scathing banter is the hint that there was and maybe still is love between them.  The problem is that there is a gigantic elephant in the room, concerning their son, which has affected them both so very deeply. They share their own unspoken guilt regarding his death and it’s only once this is aired that any latent fondness is allowed to creep back into their relationship.

Such is the depth of Duncan and Jennings’s acting ability that they’re both able to make their seemingly unlikeable characters eventually sympathetic.  Underneath Robin’s air of superiority and misogynistic entitlement lies a vulnerable, emotionally flawed man.  Whilst Diana, following the loss of her son, has spent too much time alone, brooding, drinking and pouring out all her frustrations at her husband when he eventually returns home. 

The final moments of the play when the grief they share is unlocked is devastating and in such sharp contrast to the earlier caustic hilarity.

It’s true that there are a few structural flaws in Hansard, but that has also been the case in certain other productions by more experienced playwrights that have been shown at The National.  And, despite the odd criticism, Simon Woods has penned 90 minutes worth of entertaining drama, using two actors at the top of their game who give superb performances under the expert direction of Simon Godwin.

A Very Expensive Poison at The Old Vic

There’s no doubting Lucy Prebble’s capacity for weaving something very different out of a story.  She did it with Enron and has now brought her interpretation of the poisoning of Russian émigré Alexander Litvinenko to The Old Vic stage.  Not for her a straight forward narrative, instead A Very Expensive Poison (also the title of Luke Harding’s book on which the play is based) has more than its fair share of black humour, singing, dancing ….. and puppetry!  Bearing in mind the terrible consequences of dying from a dose of polonium 210 planted in a cup of tea, it’s no bad thing that she’s highlighted the bungling nature of those responsible and has Vladimir Putin (or as he's billed in the programme President and played by the excellent Reece Shearsmith) as the unreliable narrator in the second half.  Without this, the story would be very depressing indeed.  And the different tones she uses to explain what happened enhances rather than diminishes Britain’s shoddy political stance.  Keen not to upset the apple cart with regard to our Russian ties, it took more than eight years for the story to come to light and a public enquiry to be conducted.

The first half is mostly seen through the eyes of Marina Litvinenko, Alexander’s wife, and brings us up to speed on the background of how her husband, a former detective with Russia’s FSB, died in a London hospital in 2006.  The pair of them had fled to Britain following Alexander’s expose of the links between organised crime and the Russian government, but, as we all know, that particular country eventually catches up with those who dare to criticise.  The play highlights the love the couple had for one another and Marina’s tireless determination to make the truth known about his untimely death.

The entire cast are excellent.  None more so than MyAnna Buring as Marina and Tom Brooke as Alexander.  Their touching relationship contrasts sharply with the disingenuous Russian leader who demands revenge at all costs, his incompetent assassins and the attempt at a cover-up by the British.  Whilst the play, because of all the various techniques used, is rather lacking in dramatic force, there are some sit up and take notice moments, not least when we’re played a recording of Theresa May, our then Home Secretary.  She couldn’t have been more evasive if she tried.  Most of the Russian characters are brash, none more so than Peter Polycarpou’s Boris Berezovsky.  He makes Boris Johnson look shy and retiring.  Always the swaggerer, the oligarch even breaks into song in a swanky Mayfair restaurant and struts his stuff on the dance floor.

Prebble’s genre busting play is brilliantly brought to life by the skill and imagination of Designer Tom Scutt.  His complex set smoothly transforms from hospital room to the Litvinenko’s Russian apartment, airport check in to laboratory.  Meanwhile Director John Crowley manages to turn the multiple locations and characters into a cohesive whole.  At 2hrs 40 min, the play is a little lengthy and didn’t always hold my attention, but I applaud the young playwright’s ingenuity.

Appropriate at The Donmar

Appropriate, now running at The Donmar, poses quite a logistical nightmare for the Stage Management team in general and the Props person in particular, for the stage is literally knee deep in paraphernalia when the play opens.  The piles of furniture, boxes and general detritus belong to the dead patriarch of the feuding Lafayette family, who have gathered together to try and sort it all out.  So, just another American family drama?  Actually, no, because black American playwright, Branden Jacobs-Jenkin’s bitterly funny play, cast entirely with white actors, has racism at its heart.

The family’s late, reclusive father has allowed the once grand mansion in Arkansas to fall into disrepair and everything has to be cleared before the mortgage company claims the property.  Bit by bit we’re privy to the fact the house sits in the middle of an old plantation and those slaves unfortunate enough to have worked there, are buried in the grounds, following various lynchings, which have been recorded in an old photo album.  Not the most pleasant of artifacts to be uncovered.  Was dear papa racist and perhaps anti Semitic into the bargain?  Or even more unsettling, a member of the Ku Klux Klan?  This extremely upsetting tome elicits differing reactions from each family member, with newly divorced and bitter Toni (the brilliant Monica Dolan in blistering formidable form) taking the defensive stance.  Her father’s views were and still are not to be questioned. Meanwhile, the young granddaughter, Cassie (Isabella Pappas) is keen to pop the pictures on Instagram, and once it emerges that they might be worth a ton of money, the majority of the family change their horror to excitement.

The remaining members of the clan comprise, Cassie’s father Bo Lafayette (the excellent Steven Mackintosh), her young brother Ainsley, Jewish mother, Rachael (Jaimi Barbakoff), Uncle Franz (Edward Hogg), his very young, ‘crystal waving’ girlfriend River (Tafline Steen) and Toni’s son Rhys (Charles Furness).  Led by Toni’s uncompromising acidic and foul tongued tirades, the siblings are continually at each other’s throats.  Bo, her middle brother is criticised for his insatiable thirst for money, whilst Franz, the youngest, is never allowed to forget his addiction problems and predilection for girls who are just that little bit too young.

Everyone plays their part perfectly and Jacobs-Jenkins, although pushing the boundaries with his dialogue, brings a subtle approach to the racism inherent in the Lafayette’s past.  Rather than labour his grievances over the black people’s treatment at the hand of white slave owners, he chooses to mock this middle-class, white family’s self-pitying greed.

Added to all this is a gothic thriller aspect, suggesting that the house is inhabited by the ghosts of the dead slaves.  Designer, Fly Davis, has not only created the perfect crumbling old homestead, but also the sense that spirits are lurking within its old walls.  Cue plenty of sound effects and jumpy moments!

This is Ola Ince’s debut as director at The Donmar and she helps to ensure that the playwright’s sly humour is never underplayed, we occasionally get the impression we’ve stepped into a ghost story and, importantly, enjoy a play that entertains and imparts a strong message.  I’m sure this is the first of many Donmar productions to have her name in the programme.

Tree at The Young Vic

Tree, currently playing at The Young Vic, elicited a lot of excitement when it was first advertised, not least because it is a collaboration between Idris Elba and the now Artistic Director of the theatre, Kwame Kwei-Armah.  In 2013, Elba returned to South Africa and created the album ‘me Mandela’ inspired by his time in the country playing Mandela and as a dedication to his late father.  His long-time friend, Kwame, inspired by the music, decided to collaborate with him to make a story about the ambition to heal, and to tell it through a combination of movement, music and drama. Following on from the initial buzz, the project then had a bout of negative publicity when Sarah Henley and Tori Allen-Martin made a claim that they conceived the project and were consequently removed from it.  And so it was that I expected much from my latest trip to The Young Vic.

Whilst there is much to be admired about Tree, it doesn’t quite live up to my expectations.  Certainly, it’s a very exciting experience, with Director Kwame Kwei-Armah and Designer Jon Bausor, turning the space into a pulsating disco, with the majority of the audience standing (or should I say dancing, at least at the start) around a large protruding stage.  For the remainder of the play, the actors effortlessly weave in and out of the audience and often seek their help with various props, helping to make the play a truly immersive piece of theatre.  As a result, the two men’s vision of creating a different kind of theatrical experience works a treat.  What it lacks, at least for me, is a strong dramatic narrative and the presence of the ushers, directing the crowd, whilst necessary, is rather distracting.

The story is based around Kaelo (the excellent Alfred Enoch), a Londoner born to an Afrikaner mother and black father.  On the death of his mother Cezanne (Lucy Briggs-Owen) Kaelo decides to visit South Africa (the land of her birth) to scatter her ashes, discover his roots and learn the truth about his father.  He stays with his tough Afrikaner grand-mother (Sinead Cusack at her belligerent best), meets up with his ferocious half-sister, Ofentse (a very sparky Joan Iyiola) and finds out how he, as a mixed-race man is viewed in a country that has known much violence and many divisions.

What helps to make the piece very affecting is the excellence of the choreography by Gregory Maqoma, the visuals by Projection Designer Duncan McLean and the attendant music by Michael ‘Mikey’ J’ Asante.  And the final flourish of the erection of the symbolic tree is spot on.  It’s just a shame that there isn’t even more music and that the script doesn’t quite match the visuals.  One wonders about the quality of the two beleaguered women’s narrative …..

The End of History at The Royal Court

The majority of us have some kind of issue over our parents and their parenting, but it’s another matter entirely to write a play based on them and admit to doing so.  Jack Thorne, the very successful playwright and script writer has done just that with The End of History at The Royal Court.  Alongside his frequent collaborator, Director John Tiffany, Thorne has produced a very intimate play, the title of which is taken from Francis Fukuyama, the political theorist who coined the phrase in 1989.

David Morrissey and Lesley Sharp play David and Sal, parents to Polly (Kate O’Flynn), Carl (Sam Swainsbury) and Tom (Laurie Davidson) and the action takes place in their overcrowded kitchen in Newbury.  The nonconformist, very left-wing couple’s raison d’etre has always been equality.  Their kids are now adult and so they feel their work with regard to passing on their values, is now accomplished. The utter conviction that their beliefs are the right ones and how this has shaped their family is brought under the microscope in three acts (no interval) at ten-year (1997 to 2007 to 2017) intervals.

Morrissey and Sharp are excellent at radiating the couple’s commitment, imbuing David and Sal with great gusts of passion and humour.  Sharp, in particular, is very funny, especially when discussing anything sexual. As far as she (well actually both of them) is concerned anything goes; there is no filter.  This directness isn’t moderated even when son Carl introduces the family to new, rather smart and rich, girlfriend, Harriet, (well played by Zoe Boyle).  This isn’t to say that Sal is at ease with the visitor and the fidgety Sharp is able to convey a mother’s nerves that perhaps this time she’s overstepped the mark. Underneath the bravado she has become anxious as to what her children think of her.

As with most, if not all, families, each child is different.  The always excellent Kate O’Flynn gives the Cambridge educated Polly an ungainly air and shows her inability to disguise any uncharitable thoughts she may be harbouring.  Laurie Davidson as Tom is superb as the gay, waggish younger son, who is a little too fond of dope and is inclined to give into suicidal thoughts.  Meanwhile, Sam Swainsbury as Carl, portrays a shy, rather depressed older son, all too aware (as are his siblings) that his parent’s judgement of him is not altogether favourable.

Taken as a whole, David and Sal come out as rather daunting parents with a capital D.  Not that we don’t get the sense that, despite the criticism they heap on their children and their strange decision with regard to leaving their inheritance to charity, this Leftie pair do love their brood.  Sal isn’t afraid to show it from the offset, and at the end of the play we get a glimpse of a gentler, less judgemental David as he quietly sits upstage reading a very poignant letter.

It may seem that not much happens in The End of History, and nothing does really.  Just round the table truth telling and sweary banter.  But there is much humour, John Tiffany stages the whole thing with aplomb and he and Movement Director, Steven Hoggett ensure that the ongoing domestic life between the three scenes is beautifully realised.

Perhaps not one of Jack Thorne’s best works but an interesting insight into his background and an homage to his parents, Mike & Maggie who he describes as, ‘ They’re tricky, amazing and brilliant.  I want to shake them sometimes, but I love them very much’.

Peter Gynt at The Olivier

Henrik Ibsen’s play, Peer Gynt was published in November 1867 to divided opinion, with Clemens Petersen, a theatre and literary critic of the time, saying ‘Not real poetry …. full of untenable ideas …. and riddles so empty that there is no real answer to them …. A piece of polemical journalism’.  Not an auspicious start and opinion has been divided ever since.  It’s even mentioned in Noel Coward’s Present Laughter when Liz Essendine says to husband Garry ‘We stopped you in the nick of time from playing Peer Gynt’.  It requires an outstanding actor to portray Gynt and staging it is notoriously difficult.  Oh, and let’s not forget that it is inordinately long.

However, the version currently playing in The Olivier has been re-written by David Hare and Gynt (here named Peter) is played by James McArdle, who was so, so good in Hare’s adaption of Chekhov’s Platonov and in Angels in America, both staged at The National.  There is therefore much to be applauded in this latest production, although it’s not all gold stars. 

Although much of Ibsen’s text still shines through and Hare adheres to its original structure, much has been radically changed so it fits in with today’s world.  There are many references to modern living, such as Peter, here a young Scottish soldier, pointing out that ‘people don’t have lives any more – they have stories’.  Stories that are improvised and where we favour material riches over and above wisdom.  Hence Peter’s default mode of creating his own legend by pinching bits and pieces from the various war movies he has seen; a serial fantasist who eventually adopts many varied personalities from successful capitalist to would be spiritualist via false prophet.  It’s only when he returns home to Dunoon that he realises he is in fact mediocre and his tall tales are just that.

The staging of the play by Director Jonathan Kent and Designer Richard Hudson is very adroitly done and they’re helped by having the enormous Olivier stage at their disposal.  It’s used to the max and Peter’s journey from Scotland (undertaken following his abduction of a young bride and desertion of the doting Sabine, a young immigrant) to far flung corners of the globe is cleverly realised; especially his time on a storm lashed ship.  A sticky problem when putting on Peer Gynt is the depiction of the terrifying trolls, headed by the Troll King, played here by an excellent Jonathan Coy.  Jonathan Kent has the trolls all wearing large pig snouts and their kingdom is presented as a dimly lit, steeply inclined high table, as if this is some kind of nightmarish dream. 

Hare’s script is amusing and his decision not to alter two defining moments in Ibsen’s version, namely when Peter returns home to comfort his dying mother and when he is finally confronted by the The Button Moulder (Oliver Ford Davies), is the right one.  McArdle imbues the default self-obsessed Peter with a tenderness and warmth whilst cradling his mother in his arms and a true contriteness on hearing Ford Davies’s quiet explanation of the difference between self-discovery and self-improvement.

The production may be long, too long, but its saving grace is McArdle’s limitless energy and the excellent support from the large cast.  Where it lets itself down is in some of the gimmicky scenes, aka dancing cowgirls, and the attendant music which, for me doesn’t work.  Give me Grieg’s original score every time!

Bitter Wheat at The Garrick Theatre

When I saw that John Malkovich was to appear in a brand-new David Mamet play in the West End, there was no question that I would buy a ticket.  But then the “proverbial hit the fan” when it became obvious to whom Barney Fein (the main character) alluded.  A Twitter storm ensued with supporters of the #MeToo Movement strongly criticising the fact that a middle-aged successful man had the temerity to write “their” story.  Whilst having a certain amount of sympathy for their argument, I wasn’t prepared to make judgement until after seeing the production and certainly had no intention of boycotting it.

And I’m really glad I did go as it was quite an honour to see an actor of Malkovich’s calibre transform himself into a monster.  And there is no doubt that Barney Fein is a monster of the highest order.  In the programme is a statement saying that “This is a work of fiction.  Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.  Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental”.  Whilst they would say that, wouldn’t they, it would need a theatre goer who has spent many years living in a cave not to link Fein with the film producer Harvey Weinstein.

John Malkovich, complete with fat suit, portrays an egotistical, bullying and extremely nasty movie mogul, with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.  As he shuffles, walrus like, around his penthouse office (designed by Christopher Oram) sarcastically bringing down everyone within a metre radius, we wait for a chink in his relentless nastiness, but none appears.  His doctor (a very weirdly bearded Teddy Kempner) panders to his every request for illegal pills for his ailing mother and pills and injections to aid his sexual drive, whilst his P.A. (a brilliant Doon Mackichan) although obviously disdainful of her boss, does nothing to prevent a young, rising actress, Yung Kim Li (Ionna Kimbook) falling prey to his molestations.

The play opens with Fein lambasting a screenwriter, refusing to pay him his dues because the work he’s done is “a piece of shit”.  On threatening to report the mogul to the Writers’ Guild, the response he gets is “The Writers’ Guild would drink a beaker of my mucus if I asked them to”. 

We then move onto his lascivious nature when he arranges to meet Yung Kim Li, the young Korean who has just arrived on a flight from her home in Kent.  If you’re not repulsed by Fein’s bullying nature, the scene with Yung Kim Li will definitely do the trick.  Any laughter from Mamet’s uncompromising and usual coruscating wit, dies during this scene in an hotel room, to be replaced by a very uncomfortable silence as we will her to get the hell out of there.  The crude dialogue is imbued with a little lightness when the wheedling Fein, uses a seduction technique of promising the girl a role in a Korean Gone With The Wind or a gay version of Anne Frank.  When she doesn’t immediately fall for his “charms”, the mogul resorts to whining that the only reason he’s being rejected is because he is fat.  That old chestnut is also resurrected following the young girl’s complaint to the police about his behaviour, when he laments that “the overweight get no sympathy”.

Mamet ensures that Fein gets his just deserts with the mogul’s career and life imploding following the police intervention, but what is strange is the sub plot he devises concerning a Syrian with a gun.  Odd?  Very.

But, despite these reservations and the relentless hideous nature of Fein’s personality, I am more than happy to have seen Bitter Wheat.  The cast are excellent and you can’t help but applaud John Malkovich for agreeing to portray such an unsympathetic character and David Mamet for his thick skin in penning one, even though this particular play is not his best work.