“I loved his willy. I really loved his willy.” This is not the sort of audience reaction you expect to hear outside a staging of an ancient Greek play, but the new show at the Arcola Theatre is Aristophanes, and Lysistrata, and a Lysistrata far closer in intent to the original than the po-faced American translation (Douglass Parker’s) sitting on my shelf in which the introduction proclaims the play is about “Love Achieved”.

Of course it is not about love, but sex, and women exercising the power of their bodies to achieve the highest of goals, peace. So the four-foot-long flourescent tubes rising, and rising, and rising, from the groins of the magistrate, the Spartan ambassador and Kinesias are entirely explicit in their meaning, and the actors, and the text, have no problems with that.

To an ancient Greek audience this was ludicrous fooling, but today it has a more serious meaning. The young women in the audience were cheering on Lysistrata (a powerful performance by Tanya Moodie) all of the way, as she dominated the play, and the men – this is girl power for the Naughties, and a far more admirable model than that offered by the Spice Girls in the 1990s.
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Soho now is the haunt of gaggles of tourists and theatre day-trippers, swanning advertising executives and swooping shoppers. But it was not always thus. For centuries this area was home to some of the poorest and most desperate people in London and it was a measure of increasing civilisation that in 1931 what are now known as the Marshall Street Baths were opened to “improve the health and wellbeing of the local people”. There were two swimming pools, slipper baths for those without facilities at home, a public laundry and a child welfare centre.

It is no praise to our age that this wonderful facility, built to the highest of artistic and structural standards, has stood derelict since 1997, its fate undecided. But that has provided an opportunity for its use for a unique performance, Deep End, by Corridor, a group that specialises in site-specific events.

The visit begins with a “health and safety” briefing from an officious clipboarded man in a reflective vest, who tells you, in a patronising tone, how developers plan to again make this structure great – mostly with (no doubt astonishingly expensive) apartments, and with one small part restored for public use.

Then you plunge into the building’s past, for an experience that covers all of its history, and seduces all of your senses. At the top of the gorgeously sculpted, gold-railed staircase, you listen as far below, water drips slowing into a galvanised bath that sits in the foundations of the workhouse that occupied this site in 1854 when John Snow in nearby Broadwick Street identified the well that caused a disastrous cholera outbreak.
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As the Queen of Scots walks to her execution in Schiller’s Mary Stuart, she breaks off to confront the Earl of Leicester, the man who has vacillated in his affections and allegiance between her and Queen Elizabeth. Mary spits at Leicester: “You chose the hard heart, not the tender one.”

That might sum up the central conflict in the play, which pits two visions of womanhood, and queenhood, against each other, and the world of men in which they must operate.

Phyllida Lloyd ‘s production, transferred from the Donmar to the Apollo, makes the most of this magnificent conflict, putting the women in period dress and the men in modern bureaucrat uniform of suit and briefcase. The women are at centre stage, literally in the spotlight, but they are buffetted by waves of men seeking through flattery, through blackmail, through trickery and even sometimes force, to turn them into mere puppets.
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The account of the awful family Christmas has become a cultural staple – to be heard in every office, school and cafe in the land – so to really make an impact you either have to tell it really well, or make the tales really extreme.

With The Super Slash Naughty XXXmas Story, Russell Barr has gone for the second option. I’m not going to tell the worst of them, for you might be eating, and they are certainly enough to turn any stomach. Audience reaction was distinctive – the nervous guffaw, followed by the sharply indrawn breath that says: “Really, they’re not … Oh my God, they are.”

Which is a bit of a pity, since behind the stunts is a rather fine, well-drawn comedy. The gay nephew Doddie (played by Barr), has been forced to come home for Christmas with his utterly un-PC, weird and self-centred Aunt Shona. (She’s wonderfully played by Joanna Scanlan, and it is worth the price of the ticket just to see her performance.) Also in the party is the Delia Smith-quoting child Alistair, beautifully hammed up, in the best possible sense, by Lisa Hammond.
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At the start of On Ego, the audience treated to a mini-lecture on the workings of the brain and the nature of consciousness, complete with slideshow, albeit a rather flasher one to be found in any university, and without (mercifully) a Powerpoint list in sight. It is delivered by Alex (Elliot Levey) who looks the classic young lecturer, from his not-quite-matching-brown corduroy “uniform” to his anxious, eager-to-please smile and over-rehearsed jokes.

And his subject is interesting stuff, enlivened by a direction that must read something like “brain called Richard, enters stage left”. We learn that in “bundle theory”:

“Each life is just a long series of interconnected sensations and thoughts. And the mental processes underlying our sense of self- feelings, thoughts, memories – are scattered through different zones of the brain. There is no special points of convergence. No central core. We come together in a work of fiction. Our brain is a story-telling machine. And the ‘self’ is the story.”

But it is just at the point when the audience starts to shift on their buttocks, wondering “is this all?”, when the tone suddenly changes. You are asked: ‘If you believe this theory, would you mind being teleported, which involves the complete destruction of our current body, and its perfect recreation at the destination point?’ Alex is going to show that he does believe his own lecture by demonstrating. Continue reading

We begin with a tomb – a woman’s body lies in a crypt, shrouded. Juliet comes to mind. Three men come in, one by one, and find with shock that there’s no sign of life.

They then step up into the classic monuments that surround this scene, becoming part of the stream of history as they place their faces into the slots provided – just like at novelty photographers at the seaside.

But soon, the “corpse” wakes up, cooly removes her paper shroud, and has the men dancing for her, like marionettes at that very same seaside.

If you like to know “what’s happening”, “why are they doing that?” then Irreversible, the new production at the Camden People’s Theatre, by Song Theatre, is going to leave you seriously puzzled.
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