London in the January of 1594 was a dark place. Two years of cold weather and small harvests had left the poor anxious and restless. The ageing Gloriana, who refused to even think about who might follow her, sowed political anxiety among the great and the good – heads tended to roll around succession crises. The national euphoria of the defeat of the Armada seemed a distant memory. Plague threatened, and would soon close the theatres.

The Globe’s new production of Titus Andronicus — a play as gloomy, and gory, as any Shakespeare produced — plays up those elements. The theatre is closed in, almost suffocated with black wrappings that extend across the sky, blocking out the spring evening sunshine and producing a gloom that must have been close to a January afternoon of 1594. Incence redolent of blood sacrifice chokes this closed-in space. It is indeed a dismal a day as ere I saw.

Yet this is also a production that has something of the feel of a modern horror movie. Every one of the many bloody scenes of Titus Andronicus is played for full dramatic, gut-wrenching effect. Yet what is amazing about this is that nothing is electronic – all of the sounds are produced by using more or less natural materials. The composer Django Bates says that a range of traditional horns (many of which are displayed to the audience), “lumps of metal, metres of birch-wrapped tubing, circular pots with long wire tails, a saw, some bendy sticks, metal files” are his instruments.

This could all too easily, for an audience reared on animatronics and fancy 3D, have been an embarrassingly amateurish disaster, but instead the gory scenes are this production’s triumph. I fear the sight of Demetrius and Chiron being treated like the animals in an abbatoir – strung up by the heels, then their throats almost casually cut, to the accompaniment of blood-chilling sounds — will remain in my head for some time. Were these characters with which we had any sympathy it would be almost unbearable (and indeed for some perhaps it was – there were a few green faces around me), but Shakespeare has of course made sure by this point that these two – who raped and hideously mutilated Lavinia – will not be mourned.
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by Jonathan Grant

Life. One minute it’s going fabulously, and the next, without warning, it’s falling apart in front of your eyes and you’re both powerless to stop it and oblivious to it until it’s too late. That’s the situation Drew McKay finds himself in in Jackie Kane’s compassionate drama This to This, now playing at the Union Theatre.

Drew (Scott Ainslie) has more blessings than most; a good job and a happy home life. Until, that is, his girlfriend’s mother Peggy (played with a compassionate grace by Rosalie Jorda) is struck with dementia. Unable to fend for herself any more, her daughter Jen (Jackie Kane) dutifully quits her job to look after her. However, the emotional burden this puts on her and her relationship with Drew, and the financial burden of having to live as a single-income family, soon begin to show.

What unfolds is a sad and touching portrayal of one couple’s walk down a rocky path to break-up when circumstances get in the way. More than that, Drew and Jen, supported by the sexy Rachel (Melanie Gray), Drew’s good friend and boss Phil Brooks (Simon Anderson), and his wife Nicky (Chandrika Chevli), are an allegory. In This to This they begin as the couple mastering life. But it soon becomes obvious that all the “big” decisions they thought they were making, about life, work, kids, even their own relationship, were being made for them by coincidence, chance and habit.

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by Jonathan Grant

Silverland is set in the near future, in a time of global warming and impending apocalypse. London is in anarchy and the realisation of its Olympic dream is about to turn into a nightmare. Benjamin Davies charts the tales of some of those affected by this forthcoming doom, and does so over the course of five ever-changing seasons, culminating in a final, frost-bitten, spring.

Five stories, of two comic ravers, one stockbroker complete with feisty prostitute, one crazed scientist, one lonely and depressed fisherman’s wife, and a photographer and his architect girlfriend, make up the entirety of this play. Unfortunately, no intelligent or interesting storylines, no charm, and no real wit can be included in that rather unique mix; this play fizzles out long before our ravers are done dancing to their “phat choons”.

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Aeschylus’s The Persians is commonly described as “the world’s oldest surviving play”. Here we have a group of councillors and wives of warriors, waiting anxiously for news about a great empire’s foreign adventure against a minor border enemy – a pesky little bunch of Hellenes that the ruler was sure could be crushed once and for all, thus avenging a surprise defeat suffered by his father.

This script from 472BC could, in 2006, hardly be more topical. (It is set even in the same part of the world as George Bush’s Iraq adventure.) Yet George Eugeniou’s production at the Theatro Technis in Camden resists the temptation to draw direct parallels.

Instead here we have a classically presented production, with slow, stylised dance, simple but highly effective music (by Gillian Spragg) and many lines of chanting choruses. It reminded me of the recent Gardzienice Centre for Theatre Practices production of Metamorphoses & Elektra.

On alternating nights, as on the press opening last night, Queen Atossa is played by Tania Batzouglou, speaking the original ancient Greek. This is one of those choices that might badly backfire, but instead it works beautifully. I can’t speak for the quality of the Ancient Greek, but Batzouglou sounds like someone speaking in her native tongue, and the exaggerated gestures and gushing emotion mean there’s never any doubt about her meaning and feelings.

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Plays don’t come any more topical than Speechless, now on a late-night run at the Etcetera Theatre in Camden. The scene is set: the Prime Minister, only a year out from an election triumph, is in deep trouble, pressured by the media, and many of his colleagues, including a restive Chancellor, to leave his office. Lest any particularly dense member of the audience should miss the parallels, the walls of the office in which all of the action is set is decorated with cuttings from the latest scandals.

Speechless begins with the government’s star speechwriter, Myra MacDonald (Suzanne Harbison), being given the job of drafting a speech for a desperate, surprise move, a snap election, by her putative boss, the slimy Charles Bannerman (Paul Cassidy).

Unlike his real-life (now shipped off to Brussels) parallel, Bannerman is definitely heterosexual, in a shirt-unbuttoned-to-show-chest-hair way. But it is not his sleaziness, or the fact that his pass is an obvious attempt to respond a taunt that his wife is sleeping with the Chancellor, that causes Myra to reject his advances. Any classy, high-powered woman like her would. But, it soon emerges, she has more reason than that.

It is a promising scenario, and the play benefits from Harbison’s strong stage presence. She powerfully conveys the depths of her disillusionment with the souring of the Labour dream, and conveys the further reason for her reluctance to respond to her boss’s clumsy pass — that she has been sleeping with the PM — in a subtle, classy way, long before the script reveals the fact.
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Shakespeare’s Caius Martius Coriolanus is a difficult character for most modern western audiences. He might go down well on a US Marine base in Iraq, but his bull-headed pursuit of military glory and frenzied defence of his own extraordinarily developed sense of personal honour sit rather oddly in modern London. The Jacobean audience might have seen nobility, if of a flawed kind; we see only dangerous, self-regarding ego.

Coriolanus is thus a huge challenge for the first production of the new director of Shakespeare’s Globe, Dominic Dromgoole. When the first night crowd applauded as the gates of the city closed on Rome’s expelled military hero in Act Four, I wondered if Dromgoole was up to the challenge.

Up to this point Jonathan Cake’s military hero is all dash, muscle and buzzing charisma. Even his words can scarcely keep up with him; too many are lost in the rushing air. On the odd moment he is standing still, his petulant jutting jaw and tantrum-stamping feet are too reminiscent of a three-year-old to be taken seriously as a national figure, even of the most Homeric type.

Sympathy, as reflected in the applause, rests with the plebian forces driving him from Rome in response to his would-be-tyrannical scorn, even though Shakespeare clearly means even an audience like this to have no sympathy with the two unctuous tribunes (Frank McCusker as Sicinius Velutus and John Dougall as Junius Brutus) orchestrating their revolt.

In the second act, however, Cake slows down, and Coriolanus develops into a figure of some depth, some feeling. In this newly opened space, other characters also flower, from his driven mother Volumnia (a virtuoso performance from Margot Leicester) to Robin Soans’ well-meaning but limited patrician Menenius Agrippa, who just wants to be friends with everyone and enjoy peace and a comfortable life.
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