Divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived — this is a mantra that few English school students could have avoided learning at some point. They might have even enjoyed finding out about Henry VIII and the frisson of sex and danger that surrounded him; so different to the monarch they know, in her sensible shoes and frumpy hats.

But it can be a bit hard keeping those Cs and Ks straight, so the writers of Divorced Beheaded Died, which premiered last night at the Jermyn Street Theatre, have kept it simple, only putting the first three on stage. Catherine of Aragon (Melanie Dagg), Anne Boleyn (Stephanie Fastre) and Jane Seymour (Frederica Dunstan) are in some sort of heavenly waiting room; you might call it Limbo, but we never get to that level of theological sophistication.

They are the caricatures you remember from high school history: Catherine’s the solemn, humorless one with a strong foreign (if rather indeterminate) accent; Anne’s all sex and temper; Jane’s all simper and stupidity. They think it is 1536, but suddenly Mary Boleyn — Anne’s sister — joins them in this curious room, and they learn it is 1543.

There’s news to catch up on. So for an hour there’s a potted history lesson, with multiple flashbacks to the earlier years of Henry’s reign. It is more or less a comedy, if of the rather obvious kind, with many of the jokes coming from the use of contemporary slang and putdowns by women in Tudor dress. In such a production “What century are you living in?” is a dead cert for a laugh, but not exactly an original one.
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by Jon Grant and Tom Warren

How to Pick Up Girls by Tim Briffa is a sausage-fest of a Battle-of-the-Sexes in the Two Pints of Lager…. mould. It is neither head-scratchingly deep, nor rip-roaringly funny, but does occasionally come to life in flashes of entertaining observations. Adam, Vince, and Nick are twenty-somethings who buy into the “lad culture” of porn magazines and one-night stands, until they see old mother time ticking by. This is the story of their early forays into the serious adult world of relationships and women problems.

However, what follows is neither clever nor insightful. The plot struggles to develop beyond the superficial level of “boys on the pull”, and this is in part due to the often flat performances of the cast, who struggle to develop any chemistry with one another. Largely though, it is because the storyline is too base, neither developing the plot nor the characters enough, to give the actors an anchor in their roles.
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The experts agree that Shakespeare wrote As You Like It in 1599, about the same time as The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado About Nothing and Twelfth Night, all of which have challenging, central parts for women, roles that would of course have been played by a boy actor. It seems likely a particularly talented child inspired these parts and even today, it is the performance of these that largely determines the success or failure of a production.

No need to worry – in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of As You Like It, which has just opened at the revamped Novello Theatre in London (the old Strand), Lia Williams is entirely up to the challenge of Rosalind. In long-limbed awkward youthfulness she’s believable enough to spend much of the play in boy’s disguise without being ridiculous, yet her emotions are always close enough to the surface that this is far from mere masquerade.

Yet she’s matched and balanced by Amanda Harris’s expressive Celia — played for laughs rather than deep feeling, but they are great laughs — and Barnaby Kay’s suitably leading man-sexy Orlando. I saw today’s matinee production, and the teenage girls in the audience definitely approved of the latter.

But you didn’t need to be seduced by youthful appeal to enjoy this show. To the purse-lipped elderly woman in front of me who complained I was laughing too loud (and she later accused the woman in front of her of wearing earrings that were “too sparkly”) – yes, this is a comedy. You are meant to laugh, and it is something you can be sure to do in this production.
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There are several ways of getting a political message across in a stage production. You can go for the worthy, straight approach, such as is seen now in The Exonerated, or you can make it an exciting, entertaining evening so delightful that the audience swallows the polemical medicine with glee and sits begging for more.

The latter is the approach taken in David Farr’s production of The Odyssey: A Trip Based on Homer’s Epic at the Lyric Hammersmith. This is a magic realist Odyssey, set in part in the present day — the gods deliver the great king Odysseus into the not-so-tender hands of a British immigration detention centre. There, to justify himself and his seeking asylum (although really all he wants is to go home), he has to tell his tale, which takes us on a cheerful romp through ancient myth and theatrical tradition, from the hippie island of the Lotus-Eaters, to the Indonesian shadow puppet-style of the seductress Circe, to the Dr Who style encounter with the lumbering giant Cyclops.

The word “trip” in the title is no accident, for this is a seductively psychedelic production. Sometimes this is direct: the intoxicating lotus flower produces in the immigration centre such gems as “the strip lights, they are wicked, man”, but often this is wrapped into the insanity of everyday life. The inhabitants of the centre sing increasingly tall tales of the disasters that brought them there, such as “a giant fish took my sister away”, before explaining the sad hyperbole, still in song, “no one believes me whatever I say…”

It is easy to keep piling on the adjectives of praise; for an evening of pure entertainment — with added thought — in London tonight, I can’t think of anything to better it. The acting, the staging, the profusion of ideas and images, the changes of mood and balance of ideas, all come together in near-perfection.
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By Jon Grant

In the First World War more than 290 soldiers of the British and Commonwealth armies were executed by firing squad, some for desertion and cowardice, two for simply sleeping at their posts. Many of these men we now know were suffering from shell-shock; they deserved treatment, not punishment.

Their fate, and a drive for them to be granted posthumous pardons, is the subject of an ongoing campaign. It is also an obvious subject for drama, but not, perhaps, for a children’s book, which is how the script for Private Peaceful, which has just opened at the Trafalgar Studios, originated. (The book, by the Children’s Laureate, Michael Morpurgo, has been glowingly reviewed.)

The story is about just one of these soldiers, Private Tommo Peaceful, aged 16. (He lied about his age to join up.) His life snakes through time like the trenches snaked the fields of the Somme.

Alexander Campbell, who is Tommo in this one-man show does, as far as it goes, a fantastic job. In the main, he performs the trick of playing multiple, believable, characters so well that the audience feels there was a cast much bigger than the actual number — one.
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I would really like to be able to recommend The Exonerated, a new production of which has just opened at The Riverside Studios in Hammersmith. Its politics are exemplary, the stories – told in their own words – of the six Americans who spent between two and 20 years on death row for crimes they were subsequently proven not to have committed, are appropriately harrowing and uplifting. As an evening of politics, it can’t be faulted.

As an evening at the theatre, however, it has a number of problems. Chief among these is the fact that here in Britain, this is a production that will cater chiefly to the already converted. Few if any of the audience members are like to be in favour of the use of the death penalty; few will be unaware that large parts of the American legal system are corrupt, racist and utterly untrustworthy. It has little new to tell them.

Particularly egregious examples of abuses — the account of the man who has just found his parents murdered, their throats slit, being forced to look at graphic photos of their bodies, or of the obviously intellectually limited 18-year-old black man browbeaten into confessing to taking part in an armed robbery that led to the death of a policeman, on the expectation of then being allowed to go home — might produce gasps from the audience, but this is a story that anyone who reads British quality newspapers is entirely familiar with.

The actors present a script derived entirely from interviews with the victims of the US “justice” system and from legal transcripts. Supporting this format, they are apparently reading their lines, or at least flicking over the pages, an action that is both distracting and annoying. The sound effects – slamming prison doors, buzzing electric chairs – are also heavy- handed and unsubtle. If we are hearing transcripts of words, they also make little sense.

While this method of “writing” has been used to good effect in several recent productions, here it runs into a serious obstacle. The convicted innocents are — inevitably in a system that relies heavily on money to determine guilt or innocence — the very poor, the ill-educated and those of limited intelligence. They do not always make their own best advocates.
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