By Teresa Merrigan

When Jimmy Porter first burst on to the stage in Look Back in Anger, his ranting and railing against the harshness and contradictions of life in 1950s England proved impossible to ignore. The angry young man created by John Osborne was credited with ushering in a new era not just in the arts but in attitudes to authority and youth. The shock at the presence on stage of an ironing board – which kept Jimmy’s meek, middle-class wife busy – illustrates how far art was removed from reality.

Five decades on, in a neat role-reversal, it is the husband who fusses over the ironing board in Lie Back in Anger, while the wife holds forth on the injustices and impossibilities of life. But does this angry young woman force us to consider uncomfortable truths about ourselves and our society? Well, she certainly deserves a hearing, but ultimately Jimmy Porter’s 21st-century female alter-ego commands not so much attention as irritation.

Bridget O’Donnell was inspired by the 50th anniversary of Osborne’s play to examine whether a modern woman can be as uncompromising as Jimmy and whether the allegedly revolutionary decades that followed the original have brought genuine change. The problem with her play lies perhaps with the successors to the kitchen-sink drama: the soap opera and reality TV show. In both the participants, real and imagined, examine their lives in minute, sometimes painful, often tediously repetitive, detail. Jenny, O’Donnell’s anti-heroine, while keenly observed, rarely rises about this level.
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There are some interesting characters in 15 Minutes, which has just opened at the Arcola Theatre. Maggie (Moira Brooker) is a veteran television documentary-maker battling to come to terms with the “reality TV” age. Her married (to someone else) boyfriend Robin (Tim Block), is a cynical old Fleet Street hack – a type I recognise all too well. Maggie’s “subject” is Toni (Carly Hillman), a rebellious youngster who after a stretch in Holloway is trying, sort of, to get her life into line, not helped by her angry young man Mason (Ashley Rolfe).

These are familiar – perhaps too familiar – characters, but a combination of solid writing and excellent acting take them beyond the stereotypes. The problem with the play is clear, however, in its title. 15 Minutes refers – the programme explains – to the Andy Warhol quote about fame, something that has gone beyond cliche to the point of joke. The story here is of the exploitative and partial nature of “reality” TV. Yes? And it is about how subjects can sometimes turn the tables and become (for their “managers”) all too active agents. Yes?
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by Jonathan Grant & Nirmal Grewal

This is a play about the pimp, the poet and the paradox. Charles Baudelaire (Will Tosh) is the heir to a handsome fortune and has fashionable society at his beckoning in 19th-century Paris. Yet, in true intelligentsia style, and au fait with the times, he rebels against conventionality and takes a mistress, a muse for his poetry, choosing one who is an ex-prostitute of Creole origin at that.

Baudelaire is a poet, aspiring yet failing, and The Pimp, now at Kennington’s White Bear Theatre, is, prima facie, the story of his struggles to publish his works – considered obscene for the age. Yet his liaison dangerous, with the self-destructive Jeanne (Lara Agar-Stoby), and the actions and reactions of Paris’ opulent classes, provides the interesting and substantive part of this story.

Superbly written, full of Wilde-like witticisms and aphorisms that are sharp enough to peel words back to contextual reality, the dialogues between the cast, also including Caroline Aupick (Anna Lindup), Charles despairing mother, and the aptly named Narcisse Desire Ancelle (Timothy Dodd) are well delivered, with a delightful depth of intelligence. The frustrated poet himself, who, with each desperate attempt to cut loose from the privileged class he belongs merely serves to tighten that bond on which he depends so heavily, clearly understands his position.
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Fear is on the prowl in Zimbabwe – in, sadly, the real Zimbabwe, and in the Zimbabwe of Fraser Grace’s Breakfast with Mugabe, the RSC New Work production now at the Soho Theatre. The beast first unleashed, perhaps, when a group of Australopithicenes turned first on a sabre-toothed tiger and made themselves not prey but predator, the beast of revenge, of the anger born of suffering, is here. It was reined-in, controlled, soothed, managed – so miraculously – in South Africa by Nelson Mandela, but not in Zimbabwe.

So it is appropriate that Grace should build his play around a psychiatrist – a white, liberal psychiatrist who’s spent his life studying the intersection of western thought on the brain and African spirituality – called in to treat the problems of President Robert Mugabe (Christopher Obi), who’s being tormented by a ngozi, the angry spirit of a former comrade-in-arms. The psychiatrist, Andrew Perric (David Rintoul) – in appearance and voice all bluff, red-faced classic settler type – is patently aware of the dangers of his position, but determined to turn the President into “Robert”, the patient. Although his motives might just extend beyond a doctor’s desire to heal.
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The basic story of the Salem witchcraft trials is well known. At its centre was a group of young women who made increasingly wild accusations about spirits, demonic possession, and malevolent attacks. It is these young women, led by the spiteful, slighted Abigail (Elaine Cassidy) who open Arthur Miller’s powerful exploration of the story, The Crucible.

The Royal Shakespeare Company’s version – its first Miller production – has just transferred to the Gielgud in London. This is a powerful, classy effort (as you’d expect), with a highly topical theme. Miller wrote the play in the Fifties, when McCarthyism was at its height, and today, with restrictive new laws forbidding “glorification of terrorism” coming into effect today, and a scent of panic in the air, it is again all too relevant.

The three hours never drag, as a small Puritan town gradually implodes into a frenzy of wild allegation. Miller presents, and the production magnifies, one potential slant of the conflict, as a class and generational war that sees the poorer, younger women finally getting their revenge against the older women and men who’ve used their labour and heavily disciplined their lives.

The production makes particular effective use of the pregnant pause, the long heavy silence, its actors arrayed in carefully composed tableaus that are almost picture-perfect, within stone-grey wallls that hold – just – the threat of nature, or sexuality, of change, without.
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Reviewed by Jonathan Grant and Philippa Stewart

There comes a time in a man’s life when he begins to question what it was all for, what his legacy will be, and whether he will go down in his family’s folklore as a great man or another name on the genealogical tree. That this time came to Da, (played wonderfully by Frankie McCafferty), as his son was about to celebrate “having a 100 years upon him”, and that the answer, Da thought, was the felling of said tree, are the comic spur to the enormously witty Trad, now at The Bush Theatre.

In the fast-paced opening dialogue, poor put-upon son Thomas (the brilliant Peter Gowen), browbeaten by his father’s angst, reluctantly admits to having a son some 70 years previous to “a girl da – a girl! a human lady”, and thus continuing the family line. So, with that, and the connecting of Da’s wooden leg to his shell-like bones, the journey begins and Da and son shuffle a geriatric Irish jig, to the fiddler music, across the open grave set that they so convincingly have one foot inside already.

Set in Ireland, at some time in the present, the two, known to the villagers as “one of (them) who was the other one’s father”, trample across Irish bog, stealing apples and pelting them at trains with the use of a hurley stick and getting into other mischief along the way. Their task is a difficult one, for “the child had no name, and the mother had no family name”. Indeed, the only information they have is that the mother’s name was Mary, and the child would have been born some 70 years hence that month. But in true Last of the Summer Wine-cross-Father Ted fashion, and with the aid of shopkeeper Sal (David Pearse) and the drunk and cantankerous Father Rice (Pearse again), they go about their task diligently until they have a name; Thomas… after his father.
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