There’s a lot to praise about 412 Letters, the inaugural production of the play by Matthew Wilkie that opened tonight at the Union Theatre in Southwark.

There’s an affectionate, sparky chemistry between its two actresses, Emma Field-Rayner, who plays Ros, the uptight, respectably middle-class, high-flying PR executive, and Louise Kempton, who’s Charlotte, the working class, mixed-up but determined would-be writer.

The script is beautifully structured around the letters the two have exchanged – letters written primarily by Ros, that Charlotte has appropriated for her latest attempt to write the Great British Novel. We jump back and forth through time, as the carefully catalogued sheets reveal how the two met – Charlotte was the drummer in a band booed off-stage, who typically decided to take on the whole abusive audience with her fists, and came out worst from the deal – and how their relationship developed, then imploded.
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Plastic Zion, which has just opened at the White Bear, was written in 1982, and is very much an artefact of that time, featuring a representative subset of the angry, disillusioned youth of Thatcher’s Britain, and their music.

At the centre of this discordant little group, transplanted by some unfortunate attempt to experience kulture to an abandoned cafe in backwoods France, is the working-class lad made rock star hero Clem (Nigel Croft-Adams) and his middle-class rebel, self-mutilating, self-hating, girlfriend Josephine (Caroline O’Hara).

Their “groupie” pack – much depleted from Clem’s glory days – consists of his longterm and faithful schoolfriend Yak (Ben Richardson), who’s been unable to imagine a life of his own, and two spongers, the transvestite Carly (Tim McFarland), a petulant, camp imp, and the dim but assertive Dagmar (Minouche Kaftel).

Over the course of a moderately drunken evening they squabble, make-up, and act out all of their anxieties and problems. Yet at the end of it, with the exception of one, perhaps shattering, revelation, they are at the same point as they started.

This is a play that is both better, and worse, than that description suggests. A sketch of the characters suggest stereotypes, and yet the playwright, Chris Ward, makes each of these come alive as real, suffering human beings.
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By Jeannine Inglis-Hall

What if no one had the legal right to refuse any person’s request for any sexual act? Would this new law produce a new breed of equality? These are the questions at the centre of Gaudeamus, the new play by Peter Morris, set on a Vermont campus where students make and enforce their own laws. Written chiefly as a series of monologues by three characters, we are invited to leave prejudice aside and watch this play with an open mind to the possibilities.

The audience enter as Lynette (Chipo Chung) pauses between pillars to read a book, self-consciously and unconvincingly. In only a few moments she will come forward to talk directly to us, introducing herself and the audience as strangers “because that’s what we are”. Lynette is intended, according to Morris’s script, to come across as “confident, charismatic and breathtakingly intelligent” but instead she seemed twitchy and immature. The pace at which Chung delivers her monologues seems set in the first few sentences and her character is equally unmoving. She is the force behind the social experiment, but starts out, and remains, ignorant of the darker effects of her new “law”.

Had Chung played the role with less enthusiastic naivety, the plot would have been a little more believable. Brad (Travis Oliver) and Helen(Kika Markham) achieved noticeably stronger performances. Brad is a golden retriever-esque college kid, straight out of the American teen college movie, obsessed with sex and completely self-absorbed. Helen, although a 68-year-old virgin with an apparently liberal background, was played in a way that this bizarre sexual anomaly didn’t distract from the composed Professor of Classics who enjoys conjugating verbs in bed.
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by Jonathan Grant and Nirmal Grewal

When George Orwell wrote his satirical masterpiece Animal Farm, I doubt very much that he had in mind anything like the theatrical adaptation by Ian Woodridge that has just opened at the Courtyard in Kings Cross. Yet, while this piece firmly has its origins in that great work, it is to the credit of Woodridge, the director Freda O’Byrne, and the rest of the cast and crew that this mix of narration, performance drama, and gospel choir provides an original contribution to Orwell’s already substantial legacy.

Walking into the Courtyard, one is immediately transported into an agricultural age. Flanked by a cast of a dozen or so, wearing workman-like blue dungarees who, without a feather or piece of fur in sight, represent the revolution-aspiring animals of Manor Farm, we nod approvingly at Old Major’s (Julia Eve) dying words of liberty and equality.

Likewise, when the animals defeat Mr Jones et al at the Battle of the Cowshed, to run the farm on egalitarian lines and effectively take charge of their own destinies, we rejoice. And, in parallel to the Russian revolution, when the pigs, corrupted by power, establish a new tyranny under the impressive Napoleon (Justin Melican) and persuasive Squealer (played by the superb David Ajala), we despair and question how it could have gone so wrong.

For this, Woodridge offers an interesting deviation from many versions of this modern-day classic, which tend to present the story from what is essentially a socialist viewpoint; that the system is good, but that individuals are corruptible. Instead, in Woodridge’s version, the cast portray a subtle revisionist distinction; that it is not the fault of the ruling classes for wanting and taking more luxury, but rather it is the fault of the uneducated and blindly trusting classes, represented by the hard-working Boxer (Dennis Ducane), for allowing themselves to be oppressed.
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In a production of Shakepeare that gets the delivery right, the language itself is magical, fantasmagorical. As a member of the audience you can just sit and let the flow of words reach deep inside, to tug at the core of your being.

That’s what you expect when you go to see a production by the Royal Shakespeare Company, and that’s what you get with Trade, one of the plays of its “New Work” season, which has just arrived at the Soho Theatre in London. It is just that the topic — women sex tourists — might be not quite what you are expecting.

This is the dialogue of a rap song, turned to blank verse. The characters pick up each others’ words and bounce them off each other in a rapid-fire song that is music without tune. The writer, Debbie Tucker Green, will definitely be someone to watch.

The scene is a stretch of perfect white sand – just like the brochures – and it opens with three bored women – the kind of “massage, hair-breading, jewelry-sellers” you’ve seen on beaches from Vietnam to The Gambia. Jets roar overhead, money jingles, but none of it is going to them.
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If, to form a relationship with a play, you demand to be wooed with perfect red roses, entertained by fireworks, and seduced by the image of a perfect life, then The Leningrad Siege is not for you. Jose Sanchis Sinisterra’s creation, making its English-language debut at Wilton’s Music Hall, instead sidles up to you, laughs crazily, wobbles, then drifts around in a haze, penetrating yet indeterminate, like an old lady’s lavender water.

Yet if you relax, hold out your hand, and allow yourself to be led into this story of two old ladies living out a confused, often fantastical, “reality” in an old theatre that’s falling apart around them – you’ll find you’re exploring the whole of 20th-century European history from an intelligent, if oddly tilted, perspective. Continue reading