By Robert Bain

Christmas entertainment can be pretty iffy. There are so many people to please and boxes to tick that the music, TV and theatre we’re served up at this “most wonderful time of the year” often ends up either as dull as a brussels sprout or as annoying as a coffee mug that plays “Jingle Bells”. Anthony Neilson and his crew have done well then, in just six months, to come up with a new play that knocks the stockings of most festive offerings.

God in Ruins was commissioned by the RSC and developed by Neilson with a cast of eleven male actors from the RSC’s ensemble. Its slightly odd form reflects the way it came about – by a bunch of blokes messing around for a while. It’s something of a hodgepodge, but it works rather well.

The starting point is A Christmas Carol, and the play begins where Dickens left off, with Bob Cratchit trying to avoid the reformed Scrooge, who has become unbearably jolly. We are then introduced to a modern-day Scrooge in the shape of Brian (played by Brian Doherty – one of several actors using his real first name), an alcoholic whose ex-wife won’t let him see his daughter on Christmas Eve.

From this point on the scenes change quickly and it’s not always totally clear if what we’re seeing is supposed to be real, a dream, a play within a play… Not that it ever matters because the whole thing is so much fun, and the overarching themes hold it all together just enough. With the help of a tiresomely upbeat Scrooge, Brian embarks on a bizarre journey to find his daughter and redeem himself, revisiting memories and confronting ghosts, Christmas Carol-style.
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By Natalie Bennett

A couple have gone for a cultural trip come “weekend of decision about their future”, but one of them has deliberately complicated matters — perhaps with the aim of putting off the moment of decision — by inviting one each of their respectively divorced parents. It could be the set-up for a romantic comedy, with plenty of light innuendo, a few unfortunate misunderstandings, and a happily-ever-after ending.

It is the starting scenario of The Lightning Field, the new play by David Ozanich that has just had its European premiere at the Oval House Theatre in South London, in a Banner New York production. And there are plenty of laughs in this fast-moving one act production, but “light” it certainly isn’t – as you might expect from a production associated with the Shamelessboyz Theatre Company in London, which has previously presented work on some pretty confrontational topics.

The couple are Sam, a New York veterinarian who’s plunged into the depths of the gay scene, and Andy, his much younger partner who has to decide how he’s going to respond when the question is popped. And so there are plenty of “social issues” questions in the air for Gerrit, Sam’s country club-frequenting, hard-drinking father, and Lori, Andry’s ex-teen bride, now bitter divorcee, mother.

But Ozanich doesn’t fall for the obvious ploy of making this pair, who are getting perilously close to becoming a couple themselves, homophobic. Each seems entirely adjusted to their son’s homosexuality. What’s hanging over them, and their sons, are the scars of their own previously failed, traumatic relationships. Whatever the sexuality, it seems the problems are almost the same.
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by Robert Bain

If you’re looking for a group to make fun of, there aren’t many easier targets than trainspotters. Most of the work has already been done for you: we all know spotters are dull, obsessive, socially inept men who carry thermos flasks and, of course, sport the obligatory anorak.

Stephen Dinsdale’s one-man play Anorak of Fire wants to be a comedy about someone we all know. But the spotter, Gus Gascoigne, is familiar not because he exists in real life, but because he’s a caricature we’ve already seen mocked a thousand times. Just like we all poke fun at ‘chavs’ today, the ‘anorak’ stereotype emerged as everybody’s favourite punchbag in the 90s, appearing in sketch shows, adverts and snide conversations behind people’s backs. It wasn’t all that big or clever back then, but at least it was fresh.

Fourteen years on from the play’s debut, the joke is feeling very old. With Gus, played by Stephen Glover, Dinsdale has done little to flesh out this all-too-familiar character, so the play’s humour and story hold few surprises. Details that ought to bring it to life – like the obligatory anecdote about a failed sexual encounter – prove just as predictable.

Dinsdale’s script and Glover’s portrayal of Gus are both needlessly over-the-top – a shame, because there’s really no need to resort to silliness like this to derive humour from weirdos. The world is full of hilarious real-life geeks, obsessive oddballs and social outcasts, indeed we can all see aspects of these characters in ourselves. But Gascoigne bears little relation to any I’ve ever come across. Instead he’s like a cartoon Jarvis Cocker – all sneering and nasal with an exaggerated northern accent.
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by Natalie Bennett

If you look down the range of credits of the cast of The Curse of the Werewolf they make a curious mix. Sarah Whitlock has appeared in The Mousetrap and multiple pantomimes. Hugh Futcher has been in “seven of the Carry On films”, James Horne in Me and My Girl. So what on earth are they doing in a werewolf drama underneath the arches in Southwark, deep in the London fringe?

Well what they are doing is using the skills they’ve already displayed in the earlier shows – a fine soft-shoe shuffle, a trilling verse, comic delivery of a very old line – in an affectionate parody of the traditional British stage, blended with a dose of Hammer horror. It could be dreadful – but it’s actually great fun. The key to successful parody, if its not scathing satire, is that it has to be well done – and this is remarkably well done: the ice-skating scene is quite the neatest bit of low-budget stagecraft I’ve seen in a good while.

The story is established in the opening scene: we’re a graveyard at midnight in 1890 and the baroness is being buried under dubious circumstances, complete with gusts of dry ice. That sets the scene into which arrive the entire stereotypical English family – jolly well-meaning hen-pecked Dr Bancroft (Futcher), the stout, domineering, resolutely unimaginative Mrs Bancroft (Whitlock) and their flirty, empty-headed daughter Kitty (Alexi Caley) – who’s after a husband with the highest title that she can snare. What she doesn’t know is that the “butler”, D’Arcy (Gareth ap Watkins) is more than he seems.

We’re set for the classic English farce on this side, while the locals provide the Hammer darkness – the dark and mysterious Baron von Heilman (Daniel Brocklebank), the mad professor, Steiner (James Horne) obsessed with the idea of lycanthropy (werewolfism), attended by the strange nurse/attendant Frau Gessler (Kirstie Senior). She’s stereotypically, German in irritating ways – the least effectively written and staged part of the production.
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by Natalie Bennett

For Shakespeare, all the world was a stage, and the men and women merely players. But he took that only to the level of observation. It took a Spaniard, Pedro Calderon de la Barca, to take that to the fullest possible lengths, in The Great Theatre of the World, written in 1635. It is a short, action-packed play in which entire lifespans of a society – from king to beggar, rich merchant to peasant, are explored.

God here is the omnipotent director, who appoints his stage manager, “The World”, and selects his players and their roles (not individuals, but archetypes). Then, in line with the doctrine of free will, he pushes them on stage. From the cradle to the grave, they’re free to chart their own choices; only then will the Supreme Being intervene again to decide their ultimate fates.

The similarities to medieval mystery plays are obvious, and played up here in set and staging, but what does this say to a 21st-century secular Britain? The adaptor of the production that opened last night at the Arcola Theatre in east London, Adrian Mitchell, says that although he’s an atheist, he felt that there was a truth in the play that transcended religion, and a wit that translated to the modern age.

Of wit there’s certainly plenty, particularly in such Falstaffian scenes as that in which the actor appointed to play the peasant, Kristian Dawson, tries to get out of the role with a string of excuses, including that he’s “scared of cows”. The verse is turned, effectively, to rhyming slapstick at such moments – to ask God “to leave me out would be thought rude,/ by a director of your magnitude”.
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By Jonathan Grant

A pair of clowns, forlorn and silent, wander across the stage. Slowly, and then suddenly, to and fro, chairs in hand, they scuttle back and forth in agitated aggression – desperate to have these quadrupeds for themselves and deprive their jester foe. Strobe lights flicker, wood clatters and heavy metal blares. This is a Bloody Mess.

Finally our comic chums, make-up smeared all over their faces, order these seats and an audience take their places to watch us. Or are we watching them? Atypical for this type of performance theatre, our audience / our cast introduce themselves. In confusing, contrasting couplets, we become familiar with Richard, our “Romantic Hero”, and Robin who claims to be the same – only better, more virile and more suave. We have our clowns, obviously, and our sex sirens, some roadies and more buzz words float around the stage in deadpan fashion as all ten cast members compete to be the “real stars of the show”. Symbolic, enigmatic, indefatigable, dynamic….

Flick to next skit, and the next and the next, a Bloody Mess is just that; high-energy, pokerfaced, farcical and whimsical. Delinquent cheerleaders, crazed gorillas, naked men holding stars, women running, screaming, pouring water over themselves and the stage. Each cast member plays their own role, seemingly not interacting with one another. None of these stories are connected. Why should they be? This is life. This is a bloody mess. And yet this is the point.
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